Transformers: Mystery of Convoy

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Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers: Mystery of Convoy
Ignore the racist logo in the corner!
戦え! 超ロボット生命体トランスフォーマー　コンボイの謎 (Tatakae! Chō Robot Seimei Tai Transformer Convoy no Nazo)
Developer	ISCO
Publisher	Takara
Platform	Family Computer, Virtual Console
Release date	5 December 1986 (Family Computer) 10 June 2008 (Virtual Console)
Rating	CERO: A

Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers: Mystery of Convoy is a video game developed by ISCO and distributed by Takara for the Nintendo Famicom. The player controls Ultra Magnus on his mission to find the whereabouts of the missing Optimus Prime. Along his quest, Ultra Magnus faces various Decepticon threats including Seeker-type infantry, floating Decepticon insignias, the Nemesis, the combiners Menasor and Bruticus, Megatron and a final battle against Trypticon.

The game was followed by The Headmasters.

In 2008, Mystery of Convoy was made available on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console service in Japan, up until the service was sunset in 2019. It cost 500 Wii points, or five dollars in Human money.

Gameplay

As a licensed game early in the lifespan of the Famicom, Mystery of Convoy's gameplay is... let's politely call it unrefined.

Ultra Magnus tries not to get his ass kicked by the first enemy.

The game is a simple 2D platformer with the player making their way through ten levels, while under constant attack from various enemies. Killing enemies earns the player points and occasionally various power-ups such as extra defense or temporary flight. At every 20,000 points the player is awarded with an extra life. Many of the levels are simple horizontal fields where Magnus must go from left to right until the level stops scrolling, while the various "Time Tunnel" levels are vertical, and one of those is a frustrating labyrinth where escape depends on a very specific route through the level or else it will loop back in upon itself. At the end of each level is a boss which must be repeatedly shot in a small glowing weak point to be defeated; most cases the boss simply floats up and down on the right side of the screen while randomly firing projectiles at the player, who must navigate floating platforms to reach said weak point.

Ultra Magnus fights with a rapid-fire horizontal shooty-gun, which he can improve by grabbing the "P" power-up from certain defeated enemies, which adds a second diagonal shot. He can also transform into truck mode, which makes him fire directly upwards (he retains the second diagonal shot if he has the power-up) and makes him harder to hit, but his ability to jump is replaced with a downward-arcing forward shot (severely reducing his shot range on flat surfaces) with a very low fire rate. Naturally, this makes it a lot harder to avoid attacks, and oh boy is that a problem. Unless he's got the "B" power-up, Magnus will die from a single hit of any kind, whereas the majority of enemies require multiple hits to be destroyed.

There are also a few secrets in the game, such as special red jet enemies that appear in certain stages. If Ultra Magnus manages to kill these, Bumblebee appears and lets him skip a few levels. Another secret is the seven hidden letters that spell out "RODIMUS", which are obtained by killing specific enemies. If the player collects all seven letters by the end of the game, they are given the option of playing through the game again, this time as Rodimus Prime. Rodimus Prime has a new vehicle mode sprite, but his in-play robot mode is simply a recolored Ultra Magnus (which does look snazzy we admit), and the gameplay remains exactly the same as during the Magnus run.

This game is notorious for being extremely difficult to the point of frustration, thanks to sluggish, slippery controls and dodgy hit mechanics, in addition to the small size of Magnus's projectiles requiring very accurate aiming, as well as the copious amount of enemies who can kill you in one hit, and the color choices making it exceptionally difficult to discern important objects like enemy shots or even whole enemies from massive background elements like brightly colored mountains (seriously, look at the screenshot to the left), and there are "D" power-ups, which are easy to mistake for the others, that actually remove your other power-ups. On top of everything, there are no apparent continues; there is a hidden continue code, but you have only seconds to put it in or right back to the title screen you go. And for some extra salt, the difficulty gets cranked up with each subsequent playthrough, first by increasing the speed of enemies and projectiles, then by decreasing the player's acceleration. Yeah. This game is a pretty perfect example of "Nintendo hard".

Also the short looping music which rarely changes between stages will eventually break you. Enjoy!

Stages

Characters

Cheat codes

Trust us, you're going to want these.

Strategy guide

Main article: Transformers (Mystery of Convoy)

Notes

• The English title on the package of the game is mistakenly labeled as "Mystery of Comvoy".
• Despite his Japanese name being in the title of the game, Optimus Prime only appears in-game twice. First during the start screen, when his head explodes and reassembles as the player's sprite, and later his head reappears colored gray right at the end of level 7.
• The Alternity story, "To Die Game!", retcons this game as being part of a cross-dimensional game between the hyper-dimensional guardian Optimus Prime and the equally powerful Megatron, wherein Optimus had to choose one avatar (Ultra Magnus) to fight endless hordes of Decepticons empowered by Megatron.
• The events of this game were adapted into manga form twice. First by Ikuo Miyazoe in a special titled "Famicom How-to Manga: Transformers: Mystery of Convoy" and published in the December 1986 issue of Comic BomBom. Then again, in a far more truncated strip format by Akira Tanizaki for the Transformers (Mystery of Convoy) strategy guide in the Comic BomBom Winter Vacation Special: Family Computer Certain Victory Dojo Vol. 12, in January 1987.
• In 2014 TakaraTomy released Q-Transformers: Mystery of Convoy Returns, a mobile game based on Mystery of Convoy, to tie in with their Q-Transformers toyline. It was accompanied by a cartoon in which the characters often discuss the difficulty and peculiarities of the original Famicom game.
• The Bee Team plays this game at the end of the 2015 Robots in Disguise comic book's first issue.
• This game uses a strobe effect popular in Japan at the time. Such effects have become controversial due to concern over people with photosensitive epilepsy, and fell out of use altogether following the infamous "Electric Soldier Porygon" incident in 1997. This effect was reduced for the Virtual Console re-release.
• When the game was released on Virtual Console, TakaraTomy put out an official blog post talking about the game's legendary status and warning that "just because you're an adult now doesn't mean you'll be any better at it than you were as a kid. Please be careful to avoid being traumatized." Yes, really.^[2]
• Upon starting the game, a cover of the opening melody to the Transformers 2010 theme plays.
• Ultra Magnus's robot mode sprite appears to be based on the original box art (or directly on the early deco on which said box art was based) with the white chestplate rather than the final blue.
• The game's first ending hints that the way to unlock Rodimus Prime is to "retrieve Rodimus's Energon Cube". ...Okay.^[3]
• While the game's credits are largely unknown, it was allegedly programmed by Hiroshi Okamoto, who would go on to found Locomotive Corporation.^[4]
• There are seven enemy sprites that weren't used in the final game. There was a red and orange Laserbeak that fired bullets while flying at the player, a red eyeball-spider that moved vertically and fired four diagonal bullets, and a spinning bladewheel that fired bullets at the player. The latter two were meant to only appear on boss screens. The other unused enemies didn't have routines programmed.

References

1. ↑ Transformers: Convoy no Nazo (J) - NES - Codes - GSHI
2. ↑ "＜使用上のご注意＞大人になったからといって子供のときより上手にできるとは限りません！トラウマを重ねないよう細心の気構えをもってプレイしてごください。"—TakaraTomy, TakaraTomy blog, "『トランスフォーマー・コンボイの謎』でレッツトラウマ", 2008/06/06 (archive link)
3. ↑ All 3 Weird Endings in the Notorious "Transformers" Famicom Game — Legends of Localization
4. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20140828202915/http://animex.jp/?p=6210

External links

• Perhaps the most comprehensive Convoy no Nazo site online, with screencaps, hints, and .ROM files.
• Convoy no Nazo commercial on YouTube
• Takara's promotional video for the game (using an unfinished build with cheats running)
• Angry Video Game Nerd's review at YouTube
• Strategy Wiki
• Game Genie codes
• Translations of the game's endings
• Rom de-compilation and editing project