Mars II (NAGI-P Soft 1990)
March 20, 2025
| Platform | MSX1 |
| Developer | NAGI-P Soft (1990) |
| Played on | Sony HB-F1XV MSX2+ |
NAGI-P Soft is a developer of online software since August 3, 1998. It says so, right on their website. But way before that, in 1989, they published Mars, a horizontal space shooter that used only a tiny portion of the screen. In the following year, they produced Mars II, which is a completely different game.
Mars II titlescreen
All screenshots in this blog post are produced by my Sony MSX2+ and send to my PC using a procedure described here.
In Mars II, you control a small craft that glides over surfaces and can make jumps onto higher surfaces. It can't fly horizontally, so when the ground vanishes, it falls down. The scene scrolls along horizontally to the left, but does so in a two-layered parallax where the platforms move faster than the background. When you start a stage or bump into a wall, your craft moves slowly at first but after a few seconds it will pick up speed, which is when the game really starts to flow fast, especially on a 60Hz Japanese MSX. Mars II has perhaps the smoothest parallax scrolling I’ve ever seen on MSX1.
Stage one
While you are finding your way speeding over and jumping between the platforms, you have to take care not to bump into asteroids that also move to the right but at a lower speed than yours. If you do, you lose a life and have to start over the stage. Some of them, especially the green ones, are going almost as fast as you, so they stay with you for a long time. And while you have to avoid bumping into walls, they go right through.
Stage cleared
You can shoot the asteroids, but your cannon, which is the only one you have and for which there are no upgrades, only shoots horizontally. If an asteroid is above you, you can shoot it by jumping, but if there's a platform between you and it, there’s nothing you can do. Even worse, when they have the same colour as the platforms, they can hide while going along with you to suddenly become visible when you have to jump or fall to another platform. The asteroids are generated at random, so each time you play a stage, it is different.
Falling toward my inevitable demise
The trick, of course, is to stay on the lowest platform possible. You can control going up but you can't control going down.
Mars II looks quite good, for an MSX1 game, that is. Of course, most 1990 games looked much better so one does wonder why Nagi-P limited themselves to MSX1. I did reach out to them but never recieved a response, so I can only theorise that perhaps part of Nagi-P's market segment was still using MSX1 and later MSX generations could play Mars II just as well. Or was it a bit of retro-coding? After all, consumer technology moved much faster in the eighties than it does now and six years was a long time then.
Each of the seven stages has its own detailed platforms and background design. The first stage looks like a desolate moon and subsequent stages feature trees, Greek-like arcades and scenery that looks like the inside of a giant machine. The upbeat and cheerful music is in style with the rest of the game, but becomes repetitive quickly because there’s just one in-game song. The only other music is playing at the screen that congratulates the player on finishing the game.
Jump!
At the start of the game, you get three lives, which isn’t a lot, considering there is no way to increase that amount. The game over screen does allow you to continue at the last stage, though. You also get a limited time to complete each stage, as shown by a count-down timer at the top of the screen. When that time runs out, you lose a life as well. Especially stage six has lots of walls that slow you down so I had to practise this level at a lower speed using the speed control slider on my MSX before being able to play it at full speed.
Stage seven
Mars II is an uncomplicated, elegant and fast game, but it can be a tad unfair at times. It is mostly a game of skill, where you need to get better at shooting at and avoiding asteroids while remembering maze-like structures of platforms and tunnels. The randomly generated asteroids however can often make it literally impossible to get through, so even when you don’t make a single mistake, you can still lose a life and have to redo the stage. This wouldn't be a problem if there was a bonus life to be won after every 10,000 points or so, but as it stands, this somewhat lowers the addictiveness of an otherwise fun game.