Chee-Chai Alien (Creatures Inc.)

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Torchickens(imported)
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Dec 28, 2010 11:25 pm

Re: Chee-Chai Alien (Creatures Inc.)

Post by Torchickens(imported) »

So what is well-known about Creatures (the successor to Ape Inc.) is that it owns one third of the copyright to Pokémon with Game Freak and Nintendo, and are developers for the Pokémon Ranger and PokéPark games, but what isn't so well known is that they tried some kind of weird alien-collecting game called "Chee-Chai Alien" by themselves in 2001, however it wasn't an RPG, and you would actually use the Game Boy Color Infrared Port to grab aliens out of the darkness (supposedly) and then collect them again in game. Some more information (in Japanese) on how to collect the monsters can be found here. The game came with its own peripheral that would let you amplify the IR signal.

I read on one source that Nintendo was going to publish this game, (although they previously published Hide 'n Seek Battle Monster Tactics developed by Spiral, a game like Fire Emblem where you collect monster skins and Nintendo EAD even developed their own card-battle series with Intelligent Systems called Card Hero) but apparently, since the Game Boy Advance wasn't going to have an IR port Creatures Inc. had to publish this game by themselves. One of the composers of this game is Hirokazu Tanaka; the same person who was the composer of games like Super Mario Land, Metroid and Kid Icarus.

An interesting fact is that many of the sound effects in Chee-Chai Alien used before in Game Boy Camera, and the menus seems to use a similar engine to Game Boy Camera as well (the monsters get stored in Photo Albums similar to the ones Game Boy Camera uses) probably because the president of Creatures Inc. Hirokazu Tanaka, was also the director of Game Boy Camera. In Game Boy Camera, the credits theme is also the File Select Screen music from Earthbound/the Twinkle Elementary Theme from MOTHER, a reference to Ape Inc.

Some of the Chailiens include No. 000 "アオチャン Aochan", (Li'l Blue in Spin Six) No. 005 "バサラ" and others. Interestingly, one of the Chailiens "ヒロケチャ Hirokecha" is a man with a star for his head. Maybe Creatures Inc. were playing on the Starman from Earthbound.

The game also got a spin-off called "Nonono Puzzle Chailien" for the Game Boy Advance published by Nintendo, but it was actually a compilation of three minigames, with their own different modes called Kurukuru Range, Kurukuru Walk and Kurupachi 6. This game only featured some of the Chailiens. In Kurukuru Range, you spin an object into a hole under a time limit to cook something and it gets harder the further you get like in WarioWare. In Kurukuru Walk you're continuously walking and you have to swap tiles to move along and in Kurupachi 6, it's a game where there are tiles with numbers on and you have to match (x) of them for their numbers to increase until you spin six '6', where they disappear.

Interestingly, Kurupachi 6 made it as a DSiWare title and was even localized to North America and Europe as "Spin Six", although there's still some of the characters from the Chailien series appearing the background. edit: so they were localized in Spin Six as "Chaliens" and Nintendo doesn't even say anything about it.

Some information about the game's setting in Nonono Puzzle Chailien from someone who translated it from the Chailien website:


"The home of Chalien is called the "Petit Galaxy". Our solar system which includes the planet Earth, exists at the edge of the galaxy. Looking from Earth, the Petit Galaxy looks like a pig's nose. And in actual fact, the size of the Petit Galaxy is said to be very small. In Petit Galaxy, there are many planets in which the Chaliens live. The appearance and the personality of all Chaliens are completely different. The reason for this is that it depends on the planet and hence the environment they are born in."


Links:

The official Chailien website
Nintendo official website for Nonono Puzzle Chailien
KenjutheDenjuu(imported)
Posts: 458
Joined: Sun Dec 05, 2010 2:53 am

Re: Chee-Chai Alien (Creatures Inc.)

Post by KenjutheDenjuu(imported) »

This is one of the Japanese games i've seen about from time to time but I don't really know much about it (your description really helps!). I did consider buying it at one point, but I didn't really know what the gameplay was about enough to definitely get it. The pig nose galaxy sounds sort of cute, I always wondered what the weird shape on the box was (I think it was the galaxy?). I've seen and heard of the Nonono Puzzle Chalien game as well. I remember the box art with the pork Tonkatsu cutlets on the front. It always looked yummy to me. I think there were some food related puzzles in the game as well. Something to do with microwaves in one of them?

I'm glad to see someone that likes some of the more obscure Japanese games, they're always interesting to hear and learn about ^^
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