Jeremy Parish

Segaiden #019: Doki Doki Penguin Land & Drol

Added 2021-11-03 12:42:39 +0000 UTC

Yes, it's ANOTHER Brøderbund PC-to-console conversion this week. That band of brothers... so shameless when it came to pimpin' out games. However, it's not Drol that deserves special attention this week but rather Doki Doki Penguin Land, which might be Sega's first truly great console creation. The best games we've seen to this point on SG-1000 debuted in arcades, e.g. Flicky, but Penguin Land appeared on SG-1000 first (and I guess MSX?) and would go on to be a fairly consistent series across Sega's 8-bit releases. It even put in appearances on Mega Drive and (gasp!) Game Boy. It has far more nuance and precision than was the usual standard for SG-1000 software and speaks to some of the good stuff waiting in the wings, as we'll see in the coming episodes.

Also of note on the production side: Beginning this episode, I'll be doing my best to keep the running length of each video at 10-12 minutes. That string of episodes I produced over the summer and early fall, where most episodes were coming in close to 20 minutes long, just about killed me. (They've also sucked up all my production time and have caused me to miss the past two months' Famiconversations podcasts.) Since I would like to be alive and making shorter videos plus podcasts rather than dead and making no videos and podcasts, I think you can appreciate the strategic wisdom in play here. Don't worry, though; when things like Zelda II, Bionic Commando, or Phantasy Star come along, I'll still be giving those classics the air time they deserve.