Beeping Tom: A Tale of Two Power Shovels

Painstakingly master the controls of the machine so you can SAVE THE TURTLES!

Beeping Tom is a Little Bo Beep column that spies with its little eye those games which fell through the cracks of time.

The Year of Type-Zero

In 1999, Taito’s new Type-Zero hardware made its way to arcades around the globe, extending their tradition of massive, elaborately-customized cabinets designed around specialized simulation games. These monsters had their own detailed seats and all kinds of custom controls, depending on the heavy machinery being simulated.  You’ve almost certainly had the experience of admiring one, seeing how much it cost for a single play (usually a dollar or more), and continuing past to the ghetto section of old 25-cent-play cabinets like 1943 and R-Type where you had to stand on your feet like a shnook.

Many companies made these “deluxe” cabinets, but not all were created equal; many were just gimmicks, letting you rock back and forth on a fake Sea-Doo or drift around in the latest OutRun clone. But not Taito’s Type-Zero machines — these were different creatures. Take for instance Landing High Japan, a notoriously unforgiving passenger jet landing simulator — just the landing part, mind you — with an intimidating cockpit overflowing with complex controls and a secondary screen. Or Taito’s two train sims, Ganbare Untenshi!! and Densha de GO! 3, focusing on light and heavy rail respectively.  That’s right — separate sims for light and heavy commuter rail, finally allowing the common man to experience the thrill of adhering to a timetable to the threat of mild reprimand.

Taito’s Type-Zero games let players fork out major yen in exchange for a reliably unembellished simulacrum of what someone somewhere is getting paid to grudgingly do.  They offered all the stress and monotony without that bothersome health insurance and income.

Power Shovel: For the Adult in You

One of the more unusual Type-Zero cabinets was Power Shovel ni Norou!! (which makes 5 exclamation marks between 3 games; well, the more mundane a game’s premise, the louder you gotta yell to get people to play it). Just as Landing High Japan furnished the joy of NOT killing people, and Densha de GO! provided the elation of punctuality, Power Shovel introduced us to the bliss of being careful not to spill dirt.

Heavy manufacturing concern Komatsu worked with Taito to develop the game, and the result is a challenging, utterly entertaining sim which required intense coordination to wrangle the multiple articulations of the excavator vehicles.  While playing, you really felt the incredible weight of the machines you were controlling, and came to appreciate the delicate touch necessary to operate them, as well as the dire consequences of even a single mistake.

The 2000 PlayStation version does a workmanlike job in emulating the immersive arcade cabinet, pushing the DualShock to its limit (a special dual-stick controller was available in Japan for a hair over $100).  The 4 triggers control each tread’s forward and reverse gears, while the 4 main buttons — in concert with the D-pad — control the shovel arm’s various articulating joints, and spin the Komatsu around its main axis.

It’s a lot to keep track of!  As you can see, the game holds your hand to start off, acquainting you with each button’s function and giving you a glimpse of the challenges ahead.  The clock is your enemy, and you quickly realize that you can’t afford to use just one button at a time; it’s necessary to combine as many as five buttons simultaneously into one complex, economic motion.  Make more than one or two mistaken or wasted movements, and you may as well start over.

Power Shovel: For the Japanese in You

As you complete jobs, you earn cash which you can spend on various booby prizes such as CG images and additional in-game voices (although the default voice is pretty hilarious).  The more challenging stages are unlocked by completing licensing tests which start out doable but quickly progress to insane, and eventually to Japanese.  Power Shovel recognizes its own difficulty, and lets you blow off steam by destroying cars and demolishing sheds, but even these tasks prove surprisingly difficult, since you still need to coordinate that giant shovel arm with over 9000 points of articulation.

Where the game really begins to stray into “only-in-Japan” territory is the mini-games.  Instead of wanton acts of destruction, you must also relocate turtles from one pool to another (and seriously, to hell with the gold ones, they can relocate themselves):

And of course, you will need to use your power shovel to pour 200 liters of curry over huge mountains of rice.

Power Shovel is like two games in one; the first a complex heavy machinery simulator, and the second an almost Wii-esque collection of dopey party games that never fail to bring a laugh.  And it is worth nothing that Power Shovel, along with Taito’s other Type-Zero games, supports the viewpoint that murder simulators aren’t the only sim game in town … not when there are turtles to be saved.