Rodland

User Summary (details from Japanese Wikipedia):

In Japan called "Fairy Tale Rod Land": 妖精物語ロッドランド (yousei monogatari roddorando)

A "defeat all enemies on screen" platform arcade game from Jaleco. The players controls small fairy girls with a magic rod each. When fired on close distance, the rods will capture enemies in a force field, and pressing the button again will have the fairy girl heave the enemy over her head and smash it into the floor. Doing so repeatedly defeats the enemy.

The fairy girls can not jump but can create ladders in order to reach higher platforms. Creating a new ladder causes the earlier one to disappear. The game consisted of 40 stages, with a boss fight at some intervals.

The arcade game saw a number of ports. In Japan the game was ported merely to Famicon (NES) and Game Boy. The Famicon port, which was a graphically pretty stripped down version, was in turn ported to Playstation (Jaleco Collection vol. 1). But there were also ports to European home computer systems: Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga. Of these, the Atari/Amiga ports are by far the most arcade faithful both graphically and game-play wise.

There were a number of differences between the ports. In the Famicon port, there were options to turn on or off the ability to jump, and the ability to throw away the other player using the wand. In many of the ports to european home computer systems, neither jumps or throws were possible, but smashing an enemy into the head of the partner would cause the partner to die. Whether this was possible in the arcade is unsure. The arcade version also featured extra stages, that could be accessed from the title screen using a specific trick.

(Release date information is fetched from various sites. The Wiki entry claims 1990 as the arcade release year, yet the home system boxes claim 1989.)

Source: Wikipedia, "ロッドランド," available under the CC-BY-SA License.

Microbadges

• Rodland fan - Rit
• Rodland fan - Tam