XP Arcade: Mappy

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Namco’s arcade run in the late-70s and early-80s, as has been discussed in this space and plenty of others many, many times, is basically nonstop historically important bangers. It seems like everything they made had some larger cultural importance that debuted or refined some new technological marvel, moved its genre forward, or straight-up created one. From 1979 through 1984, Namco released Galaxian (true RGB colors, animated sprites, scrolling), (New) Rally-X (continuous music, bonus rounds), Pac-Man (it’s Pac-Man), Galaga, Dig Dug, Pole Position and Pole Position II, Xevious, The Tower of Druaga, Pac-Land (scrolling platformer predating Super Mario Bros.), and Dragon Buster. If Namco had never done anything else, they’d still be one of the most important companies in the history of the industry for this run alone.

These weren’t the only games released by Namco in this five-year period, though. There were others, and those were plenty good, too, even if they aren’t as significant, historically, for one reason or another. Mappy is one such game. Mappy didn’t create an entirely new genre, or set the terms for what a genre was going to be basically forever. Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima haven’t given interviews where they talk about how important Mappy is to their work. But Mappy is still tons of fun despite this, and despite the fact that you play as a cop.

What’s the most unrealistic thing about Mappy? Is it that you travel almost exclusively by trampoline? That a cat is a crime boss? That a mouse is a cop? That the mouse doesn’t use the billy club he’s wielding the entire time on any of the perpetrators of the crimes he’s investigating? No, it’s that the police are trying to recover and return some stolen goods instead of standing around in front of your apartment nine hours after it was broken into, shrugging their shoulders. I will leave it to you, dear reader, to determine if ACAB includes Mappy. He does end up leaving the force at some point, if that helps you in your decision.

Mappy's gameplay is pretty simple to get the hang of, at least at a basic level. You run, you bounce on trampolines. You open doors, you close doors. You avoid the cats that are running around, and do so via the aforementioned bouncing on trampolines, or by closing a door on them, or by opening up a flashing, colorful door that will then attack them with a sound wave that pushes them off screen. Normal stuff.

You have a stick for movement in the arcade version, or a D-pad if you're playing something like the Famicom port, and one button to press. The movement is side to side, and vertical via trampoline, with you able to move left or right to new platforms off of a bounce, but not while falling back down. That button opens doors or closes them, depending on the status of the door. There's no dash button, no jumping, no attacks with that baton. You're using these doors and trampolines to maneuver through six floors of a mansion, picking up stolen goods before the cats who stole these things can catch you. Simple enough!

It's the depth of Mappy that makes it, though, as the complexity of the game's scoring system is what will push you to complete its 16 (repeating) levels. Each of the stolen items you pick up has a counterpart, and it will begin to flash when you've acquired its twin. So, scoop up the art, and art elsewhere in the stage will flash, alerting you to an opportunity for a scoring bonus. If you pick up all of the goods without any sense of order, you'll get the minimum points for doing so. If you pick them up in structured pairs, you'll get scoring bonuses ranging from 2x to 6x, as each pairing increases the multiplier. You can also pick up some extra points from an item if Nyamko/Goro is hiding behind it, but the risk there is that he pops out just before you grab it, and is then able to harm you.

The five types of stolen items have their own point totals, as well. The radio is worth 100 points, the TV 200, the computer 300, the art 400, and the safe 500. Which means, given the multipliers, you want to try to pick them up in ascending order, so that the first radio gives you 100 points, but the bonus awarded for picking up the second one immediately after gives you 200 points. Then you’d get 200 points for the first TV, but 600 — 200 with an 3x bonus — for the second. Do it this way, then you get 500 for the safe but 3,000 for the second safe if it’s the final pairing with the top bonus. Very difficult, for reasons that should be obvious, but also absolutely worth the risks involved: you can pick up 8,500 points in a round by picking everything up this way, compared to just grabbing whatever in any order, which would net you 3,000 points, instead. Or, as much as just the second safe alone gets you when you’re strategic about your plan.

The other way to score points is by temporarily defeating the cats — the smaller “Meowkies” as well as the boss cat, known as Nyamco in Japan and Goro internationally, with “Nyamco” being a portmanteau of the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat’s meow and Namco — with those sound waves that come out of the flashing doors. They catch up any cats they bump into and push them across the screen until they hit the wall, dropping the cats off of the floor and into the nothingness below. The cats do come back, and reenter from the attic, but not before you score some points. Here, the more cats you catch in the sound wave at once, the more points you score: one cat is 200 points, but two are 400, three 800, and so on up to 10, which awards 6,000 points. If Nyamco/Goro is caught, as well, he both counts as one of the 10 and doubles your score, meaning, you can nab 12,000 points for catching the maximum number of cats. This… is far more difficult to pull off than picking up the loot strategically, since you need all of the cats either following you closely or to be where the sound waves are when they hit, and the longer you take the faster and more aggressive the cats get — hell, to have 10 cats on screen, you already need to have hit the “Hurry!” portion of things where this happens — but it is possible, is the thing. It’s the true high-level scoring play, but also one that most people aren’t going to bother with or even know exists.

Besides these methods, the other major scoring event is in the bonus rounds. In these, there are no enemies, besides time your and own fingers. There are balloons to pop, and if you can manage to pop them all before time runs out — time counted off by the song that’s playing — then you pick up a whopping 5,000-point bonus, on top of the points for the balloons themselves and 2,000 for popping the final Goro balloon.

This might sound like a lot of ways to score points, but it feels like a lot less when you realize the only way to gain extra lives in Mappy is through points, and also you instantly die whenever a cat touches you, unless it’s while bouncing on a trampoline. Mappy starts out simple enough in its gameplay and in its difficulty, but after each bonus round, there’s a new gameplay wrinkle added, and an increase in the number of cats that a level starts with. So, two levels and then a bonus, with the next level going from two Meowkies and Nyamko to three and Nyamko, then another bonus for level 7, followed by five Meowkies and the addition of bells, which, when bounced into from a trampoline below, can fall down and incapacitate any cats they hit on the way down. Another bonus level at 11, then trap doors are introduced, which disappear when stepped on, causing you to fall if you don’t get off of it fast enough, and for any cats to also fall through, stunning them when they land. Stage 15 is the final bonus, then stage 16 has seven Meowkies plus Nyamco at the start, along with the bells and trap doors. Good luck.

The levels repeat after 16, now permanently with seven Meowkies in them, and the “Hurry!” period begins sooner, as well. As said, when you hit the “Hurry!” time, two more Meowkies enter the stage, but in addition, they all also move faster — faster than Mappy does, meaning you can’t just run away from the cats in a straight line. They will catch you. There’s also the “Gosenzo” that inevitably shows up when you’ve somehow survived the “Hurry!” portion for too long: this rolls around the screen, can open doors just like Mappy and the cats, and oh, can kill you if it touches you even when you’re bouncing on a trampoline. You don’t ever want to see the Gosenzo. What good is extra points for an extend if you have to burn an extend to get them, you know?

Which is part of why the way to play Mappy is to score as many points as possible while they’re easier to get, and then focus more on survival over scoring the deeper into the game you get. It’s not that you can’t prioritize scoring ever, it’s just that, when the Meowkies are speeding up earlier and earlier, and simply making it out alive is difficult enough as it is, being strategic about which item when and corralling all the cats together for a massive sound wave elimination is going to be tough, and probably get you killed.

Mappy succeeded in the arcades — at least in Japan’s, anyway — but not to the degree of so many other of its Namco contemporaries. It ended up ported around pretty regularly in Japan — to the MSX, the Famicom, the Sharp X1, the Super Cassette Vision, Game Gear, Game Boy, FM-7, MZ-700 and MZ-1500, PC-88, and X68000 — but not so much overseas. Mappy has been regularly included in Namco Museum releases, at least — it was in Vol. 2 of the Playstation’s Namco Museum series, Namco Museum 50th Anniversary for GameCube, Playstation 2, Xbox, and Windows, Namco Museum DS, Namco Museum Remix and its expanded Megamix release on the Wii, Namco Museum Virtual Arcade on the Xbox 360, the Evercade’s Namco Museum Collection, and, in its Famicom form, in Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 on the Switch, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. So it’s not as if it was never playable at home outside of Japan. It just took a little longer for that to happen. It’s available through Arcade Archives, as well, if you’re looking for the original arcade edition on a modern platform.

That Famicom port is excellent, though, much more difficult than the arcade edition for one reason: there are just five floors in the mansion instead of the usual six, and this condenses things enough that you are just going to die if you start a level by heading left. There will be a Meowkie waiting for you, and you won’t have the time to change direction, because then there will be another coming at you from the right. So, start to the right, stand on a trampoline — but not for too long, as they break with overuse — and wait for an opening to escape the swarm. Everything else proceeds as normal and like the arcade game from there, other than there being fewer places for you to run and hide.

Mappy’s board was actually modified from Super Pac-Man’s, to allow for horizontal scrolling. Which is how Namco ended up with a vertically-oriented side-scrolling platformer when that seems like an odd choice, given it obscures how much of the mansion you can see at any time. The story of Mappy’s board goes further than this, however. As Hardcore Gaming 101 pointed out, Mappy did succeed in Japan, but still modestly enough that there was plenty of hardware for the game leftover. It didn’t meet Namco’s expectations, basically, so there were Mappy boards just sitting around waiting for somewhere to go and something to do, as the belief had been that, given its quality, it would catch on more and for longer than it ended up doing. To alleviate this, the modified Mappy board was used for The Tower of Druaga in 1984.

Somehow, a Druaga-related fact didn’t convince me to give Mappy a go despite my attachment to that game, so shout out to HG101’s Kurt Kalata for making me want to try Mappy out in the first place. A thing I was finally able to do on an actual arcade cabinet earlier this year before diving into the various Namco Museum releases I already had sitting at home. There are a lot of video games out there, alright? And ignoring Mappy in favor of other Namco games is just keeping with tradition.

Skipping out on Mappy is a mistake, however. It might not have the cultural cache or importance of its Namco peers, but it’s killer. It’s widely available in the present, too, and while you might think “16 levels for $8?” about the Arcade Archives release, remember: it’s the depth of scoring that makes Mappy special. It might take you 15 minutes to get through those 16 levels when you know what you’re doing, sure, but they repeat with added difficulty, and posting a score that will get you high up on the leaderboards is going to take a whole lot more than a few 15-minute runs. A score-attack classic, in that sense, with the kind of golden touch for this sort of thing that Namco established very early on, even if fewer people noticed than did for Galaga and the like.

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