FilesFound!Super Dog World
Posted on 27/05/24
While this isn't something I've found physically, Super Dog World is a game I ran across while looking through a digital library of PC-98 games, and it was too fun a find not to write a little about here.
The title screen from the opening cutscene for Super Dog World, with an added English subtitle
This is the library I was looking through over on archive.org - you can browse a ton of PC-98 games by company name:
I randomly went through this list and looked for something that stood out to me... That's when I saw Super Dog World by Koei:
Since I haven't covered anything PC-98 related on FilesFound! yet (and I'll probably talk about more PC-98 finds in the future), let's quickly summarise the PC-98!
A Brief Summary of the PC-98
The PC-98 (or PC-9800 series) is a line of Japanese PCs that were launched in the 1980s. While games weren't the computer's intended purpose, it has a fairly big game library that features high quality pixel art and music, a lot of it being impressive even now. You might have seen screenshots like this before:
A screenshot of Virgin Angel for the PC-98
A screenshot of Romance wa Tsurugi no Kagayaki Last Crusade for the PC-98
Or maybe you've even heard music like this included in game music playlists and such:
Different World 1 - Yu No
Bad Apple!! - Lotus Land Story
That's the PC-98!
There's something else unique about the PC-98 game's library... It is heavily composed of adult games. So if you're going to browse through randomly, keep that in mind.
(In fact, if you want to just sample the visual aesthetic of the PC-98 while keeping it SFW, the Twitter account PC98_bot is great and worth a follow).
Alright, let's get back to Super Dog World!
I knew that Super Dog World was going to be special when this was what the setup menu looked and sounded like:
That tiled dog background... The fun little song... The line of dancing dogs that act as a progress bar...! I had no idea what Super Dog World was going to be like when I randomly picked it to play, so I was really excited at this point to see how promising it was looking...
It might be worth explaining a bit about what I'm doing in that video. Super Dog World has three floppy disks, and you launch the game into this starting menu by using Disk A. Then, before you can actually start a new game for the first time, you have to have another blank floppy disk to hand to create a User Disk.
There's a whole process of swapping out Disk A for Disk B in drive one and putting the blank floppy in drive two to transfer data over, then swapping to Disk C after that to watch the intro cutscene... Lots of floppy disk management!
Speaking of the intro cutscene, it was the main reason I wanted to write about this game in the first place! Here's the FilesFound! Youtube upload, with added English subtitles:
Wow! Did this really happen? I feel like I didn't learn about this at school... Games can teach you so much about the world.
Isn't all the art so cute and nice? So many good dog sprites...
And you can only imagine how happy I was to see the blimp slowly scroll in from the right with the giant title Super Dog World at the end there, too...
Playing Super Dog World is actually... Really complicated!
I still had my save data from when I first found and played this game over a year ago, and I had no idea what I'd been doing...
To try and briefly explain the gameplay of Super Dog World - it's a simulation game where you play as a dog who's training to compete in the Bow Wow Cup, which is basically the Dog Olympics.
You have various stats that you have to raise over the days of each month. If you've ever played a game like Monster Rancher, Princess Maker of Derby Stallion, it's like that. But dogs.
To save me stumbling around the game again to record a bunch of footage, I'm going to instead link this YouTube upload of the first 30 minutes of the game by a user named kou kou, and then I'll talk about it some more:
In the video, you can see that after they make their own character we get another cutscene. There are some good things to be seen here, so I recommend watching it even without English subtitles.
In this cutscene, more of the story is revealed. An American dog named Lewis won three gold medals in the last Bow Wow Cup and was chosen as the first King of Dogs!
In comparison, Japan didn't win any medals at all... So, in retaliation, the representatives of Japan (this includes you) and all the other countries are going to work hard to defeat Lewis and win their own golds at the next Bow Wow Cup, four years from now.
If it wasn't already clear, all the characters of this game are dogs. There's no human trainer, it's dogs all the way down. You go to dog school for your morning announcements with the other dog students, and you're taught by a dog teacher named Hachibei, a descendant of the famous dog Hachiko (a lot of the named dogs seem to be references to either real life Olympic athletes or other famous people from history).
There's a mechanic where you can choose different ways of responding to different dogs, either politely or rudely, and it changes how they react and their opinion of you. There's another mechanic where you need to go to the (dog) hospital every 6 months to be vaccinated against rabies. You can do part time jobs to make more money. NPCs randomly wander between different parts of the map and say different things depending on where they are.
...There's a lot! And that's before we even try to raise any of our stats!!
I don't intend to do a full write up or a review of Super Dog World, at least not today. For now, I just want to share that this game is real.
Isn't it nice that a game called Super Dog World exists out there in the world?
If you'd like to train for the Bow Wow Cup yourself, you can download Super Dog World from the previously mentioned PC-98 game library list on archive.org here..
Edit: 28/05/24: Thanks to Quinn in the comments for pointing out a translation error!
There's something else unique about the PC-98 game's library... It is heavily composed of adult games. So if you're going to browse through randomly, keep that in mind.
(In fact, if you want to just sample the visual aesthetic of the PC-98 while keeping it SFW, the Twitter account PC98_bot is great and worth a follow).
Alright, let's get back to Super Dog World!
Launching the Game
I knew that Super Dog World was going to be special when this was what the setup menu looked and sounded like:
The opening menu screen for Super Dog World with English subtitles edited in
That tiled dog background... The fun little song... The line of dancing dogs that act as a progress bar...! I had no idea what Super Dog World was going to be like when I randomly picked it to play, so I was really excited at this point to see how promising it was looking...
It might be worth explaining a bit about what I'm doing in that video. Super Dog World has three floppy disks, and you launch the game into this starting menu by using Disk A. Then, before you can actually start a new game for the first time, you have to have another blank floppy disk to hand to create a User Disk.
There's a whole process of swapping out Disk A for Disk B in drive one and putting the blank floppy in drive two to transfer data over, then swapping to Disk C after that to watch the intro cutscene... Lots of floppy disk management!
Speaking of the intro cutscene, it was the main reason I wanted to write about this game in the first place! Here's the FilesFound! Youtube upload, with added English subtitles:
Wow! Did this really happen? I feel like I didn't learn about this at school... Games can teach you so much about the world.
Isn't all the art so cute and nice? So many good dog sprites...
And you can only imagine how happy I was to see the blimp slowly scroll in from the right with the giant title Super Dog World at the end there, too...
Super Dog World Gameplay
Playing Super Dog World is actually... Really complicated!
I still had my save data from when I first found and played this game over a year ago, and I had no idea what I'd been doing...
To try and briefly explain the gameplay of Super Dog World - it's a simulation game where you play as a dog who's training to compete in the Bow Wow Cup, which is basically the Dog Olympics.
You have various stats that you have to raise over the days of each month. If you've ever played a game like Monster Rancher, Princess Maker of Derby Stallion, it's like that. But dogs.
To save me stumbling around the game again to record a bunch of footage, I'm going to instead link this YouTube upload of the first 30 minutes of the game by a user named kou kou, and then I'll talk about it some more:
In the video, you can see that after they make their own character we get another cutscene. There are some good things to be seen here, so I recommend watching it even without English subtitles.
In this cutscene, more of the story is revealed. An American dog named Lewis won three gold medals in the last Bow Wow Cup and was chosen as the first King of Dogs!
In comparison, Japan didn't win any medals at all... So, in retaliation, the representatives of Japan (this includes you) and all the other countries are going to work hard to defeat Lewis and win their own golds at the next Bow Wow Cup, four years from now.
If it wasn't already clear, all the characters of this game are dogs. There's no human trainer, it's dogs all the way down. You go to dog school for your morning announcements with the other dog students, and you're taught by a dog teacher named Hachibei, a descendant of the famous dog Hachiko (a lot of the named dogs seem to be references to either real life Olympic athletes or other famous people from history).
There's a mechanic where you can choose different ways of responding to different dogs, either politely or rudely, and it changes how they react and their opinion of you. There's another mechanic where you need to go to the (dog) hospital every 6 months to be vaccinated against rabies. You can do part time jobs to make more money. NPCs randomly wander between different parts of the map and say different things depending on where they are.
...There's a lot! And that's before we even try to raise any of our stats!!
I don't intend to do a full write up or a review of Super Dog World, at least not today. For now, I just want to share that this game is real.
Isn't it nice that a game called Super Dog World exists out there in the world?
If you'd like to train for the Bow Wow Cup yourself, you can download Super Dog World from the previously mentioned PC-98 game library list on archive.org here..
Edit: 28/05/24: Thanks to Quinn in the comments for pointing out a translation error!
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