Cratermaze

Cratermaze
Also known as: Doraemon: Meikyuu Daisakusen (JP) Developer: Hudson Soft Publishers: Hudson Soft (JP), NEC Home Electronics (US) Platform: TurboGrafx-16 Released in JP: October 31, 1989 Released in US: 1990 This game has unused music. This game has regional differences.

This page is rather stubbly and could use some expansion. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue this article?

Cratermaze is an overhead action puzzle game that is a blatant ripoff of Nichibutsu's arcade title Kid no Hore Hore Daisakusen, from the music right down to the title screen. Shockingly, Nichibutsu never took notice and went after Hudson Soft, but perhaps they were too busy cranking out strip mahjong games at this point to care anyways...

The Japanese version more cleverly hid its plagiarist roots behind being based on the Doraemon TV series.

Regional Differences

Title Screen

Japan	US

Intro

The Japanese title involves Doraemon going back in time to rescue his friends who were kidnapped by the main villain. The American version changes Doraemon into another human kid in a blue spacesuit, while still keeping a similar plot.

Japan	US

Japan	US

Japan	US

Japan	US

Japan	US

Japan	US

Japan	US

The Japanese intro has the text displayed vertically on the right side with the "film strip" images displayed on the left. The American release moved the caption box to the bottom of the screen and centered the film strip.

Gameplay

Japan	US

The dorayaki buns that Doraemon goes around to collect were been replaced with toolboxes in the US version.

Music

To do: Rip the soundtracks for both versions.

The soundtrack for Doraemon: Meikyuu Daisakusen was composed by Jun Chikuma and is based on the music from the anime series, as you may expect.

The Cratermaze soundtrack is completely based on that of Kid no Hore Hore Daisakusen (which had originally been composed by Kenji Yoshida and Hiroshi Funaba, neither of whom are credited anywhere in Cratermaze).

Staff Credits

To do: Put in the credits for both games here. Screenshots or just the credits themselves are fine.

• Jun Chikuma's credit is absent from the US release, most likely because that version blatantly reuses the arcade game's music (and doesn't give proper credit there, either).
• Shigeki Fujiwara, the designer and planner of the original arcade game, is credited for "Game Design" in both versions. At this point, however, he was also employed at Hudson Soft working on the Bomberman series starting with the first PC-Engine title - ironic, considering the original arcade game was inspired by Bomberman in the first place!

Unused Music

A short cover of the Doraemon theme song, used in the Japanese version for the title screen, is also present in Cratermaze (which doesn't even use a title theme to begin with; the title screen is silent). It's possible that in the conversion, the sound team missed this song and left it in accidentally; a bit odd, given that the latter has no Doraemon-related content leftover otherwise.

It can be found in the HES sound file for Cratermaze at sound code #35.