EDITOR'S NOTE:
First off, yes, this game didn't get released and the way it eventually got out was, well, messy to say the least. We'll go over a truncated version of that story in the article proper, but this does affect the version we play, as the only one currently available and playable is a hack that switches out the spinner controls for a joystick with an extra 'speed-up' button. Surprisingly, this works completely fine for the game which is a change from 99% of all other arcade games that use a spinner (not that it'd even help. I'll tell you a secret, the writer of Gaming Hell is actually extremely bad at this kind of game, Arkanoid makes them break out in hives) so don't let it put you off. Still, it's worth noting, and hopefully someday the original spinner version will be preserved so we can update this article. Maybe.
OOParts is a game that lives up to its name...
A type of game that might've felt a bit out of place had it actually been released.
Wait, did I say OOParts?
I meant FARTS, obviously, according to Gamest Issue 80 from November 1992 (page 133).
(Had to do it, sorry.)
Anyway, OOParts (an abbreviation of out-of-place artifacts, the concept of an artifact found where it shouldn't be, like a Norwegian coin found in Brooklyn, Maine) was in development at Success in 1992 and appears to be basically finished, with the game playable from start to finish with no obvious omissions or missing parts (complete with a credits roll, even). It also got that little bit of coverage in Gamest above, which had a section on the game on page 133 as part of their 1992 AM Show and, ahem, completely misread the title as FARTS. Just a pity they didn't look at the flyer which spells the name out in katakana, eh? They don't say much about it beyond it being a fantasy-themed Breakout-style game with pinball elements, using a spinner and making a joke about the character design being similar to Success' own Cotton games (Hideki Tamura did character design on both games, of course). After that, the game was never released, with Success' own timeline (which is where the image of the flyer above comes from) saying it never made it to production while alluding to the fact that the PCB still exists out there. It was then seemingly forgotten about completely, outside that FARTS gaff, until a certain kerfuffle in the MAME community circa 2018 revolving around SegaSonic Bros. brought OOParts back into the spotlight.
I won't dwell on it too much because it's not really my place (I'd need a bigger YouTube account and training in the art of sensationalised thumbnails for that) but it's an important part of the story so I have to cover it, so I'll keep it brief and diplomatic. SegaSonic Bros. is its own kettle of fish, but it was a cancelled Sega arcade game running on the Mega Drive-based Sega C2 board, a puzzle game designed by Fukio "MTJ" Mitsuji that has similarities to Cleopatra Fortune but isn't quite as good. This lost Sonic game was found and apparently privately dumped in 2016 by Shoutime, someone who has dumped some arcade location test games and prototypes but not all they have access to, so it was not publicly released but exhibited at a few arcade expos across 2017 and 2018, with much mystery and controversy around it, including no public dump and even supposed legal threats to those who would release it. And then The Guru, an arcade repairer and dumper, just... Released it anyway on November 28th, expecting it to be added to MAME. It was, but then it was ripped out just as quickly, but on December 2nd The Guru supplied the necessary files to recompile MAME to add it to the game list alongside another Sega C-2 game, OOParts, replacing Tant-R in the emulator.
These would remain in limbo for many years, but in 2021 both were added back into MAME properly... Mostly. 'Hacks' of the two games (plus a third cancelled Sega-C2 game, Head-On Channel) were included in MAME but, at least in the case of SegaSonic Bros., these were extracted from a multi-game board according to The Cutting Room Floor, and David Haywood's Homepage also refers to them as 'not in untouched form'. This seems to affect OOParts the most as it notes it's a joystick hack, meaning you can't play with a spinner as the flyer shows was the intention, even though the Test Mode still checks for its input (however, I think this is true of the ROM that The Guru released too, as people using the recompiled emulator with it replacing Tant-R note that it needs a second fire button to use spells, something that wouldn't happen on the spinner version because it only has one button). Even stranger, a blog post about a visit to Nostalgia Yokocho before it closed down (thanks for sending this my way, ohfivepro!) showed a real OOParts board and the blog specifically mentions it controlled with a stick and not a spinner. Still, the fact it's preserved at all is a miracle in and of itself, but this abridged version of the story which involved a lot of tongue-biting on my part goes to show that the preservation of unreleased video games is often very... OK, you can't see this but I'm gesticulating my hands wildly while sighing heavily and grimacing slightly [You can do all that and type at the same time? Bloody hell, we gotta get you on the telly. - Ed] and, well, the Gaming Hell stance on this sort of thing is dump it, preserve it, release it, it belongs in a museum. Ahem.
Onto the game at last, then!
OOParts has you take the role of one of two unnamed sorceresses with their OOParts bat-and-ball combo to.. Well, here's the intro:
I'll transcribe it for you too, that text is pretty small:
It is said that when the flux of time called up from the ancient spatial-temporal dimension elapses, each and every grain of sand clad in scorching heat will change the world into a cardinal red inferno.
The two elite female sorcerers in their effort to perpetually freeze time, attempting to release an hourglass into the yellow murkish sky by collecting the rock crystals contained in the six columns of sand monuments
- with the aid of OOParts.
The basic mechanics are mostly standard for this kind of game, but as mentioned, there's no spinner controls in this dumped version so we've just got a stick and two buttons to work with. OOParts does a lot with a little though, as we'll see. The first button speeds up your paddle but also lets you slam into the walls on either side of the arena, startling some enemies and, more importantly, altering your ball's trajectory. This is a huge boon as if you've ever played this kind of game before, you've inevitably found yourself in a position where you have one target left that you can't quite hit because you keep getting the angles wrong and you just want the stage to end. Not as big a problem here, slam into the wall and you'll slightly adjust your ball's angle in mid-air, usually in your favour- if you got a real shallow angle after bouncing it from your bat, adjusting the angle sends it back down so you can try again quickly, and if it's further up the board, a quick slam angles it a little higher. This is a really clever way of trying to tackle one of the big things you can get wrong in this genre (looking at you, Block Gal) although I don't like that if you use this very useful mechanic too often, you'll break through the wall. You'll be able to pass through to the other side which can be handy, but losing that angle-adjusting mechanic is rough, you really feel its absence. It does take a lot of hits to destroy it to be fair, but still, I'm not keen on having it taken away when it's so fun to utilise.
You've also got a few items to help you clear these stages out, both ones you grab with your bat and ones tied to your second button, the magic system. You can make dropped items appear by lighting up all the permanent lights on the board and hitting the egg that appears (more on that later) and these are mostly genre standards like making your ball blast through blocks without bouncing off them, a phantom bat that extends outwards to hit the ball if you're a bit off and a bigger bat, as well as extra magic stocks and a single booby trap that makes your bat smaller- the one disappointment here is there's no lasers or sticky paddle items that you'd expect. The magic is a bit different, as you can activate it whenever you like but while the effect you get seems random at first, it's actually tied to the magic jewel nestled in the middle of the status bar. Each of the four effects- a bird that pesters monsters, a second ball that floats around and damages targets, a flame bar that slowly moves down the screen to keep your ball bouncing off it and a single-shot flame that sets off extra shots to the left and right when it hits something- have their own colour, so wait for the jewel to change to that colour and use it when it'll be the most effective. Like the angle-changing slam, these are pretty well-considered for a game like this, as while the bird is maybe the least useful, the others have specific points you'd want to use them like the flame bar for keeping your ball in the upper section or the shot for sniping particular targets.
The structure's a little different from the norm in this genre, though. At the start of a fresh credit, you get to pick one of six worlds of two areas each, then move on in a little mini-game that picks your next destination, with a final two-area challenge waiting for you at the end of the game. Already this is a big difference from other games in the genre- these are usually long for arcade games similar to single-screen platformers, you'd be looking at over 30 stages but not so here, there's only 14 stages per playthrough. Honestly, I think this is in the game's favour though, and actually encourages repeat plays because while the first area of the six main worlds is the same, the second area can be one of three completely different designs so it's never quite the same run twice. The requirements for which area you get sent to are the one thing I wasn't quite able to figure out but it does seem tied to the amount of time you spend on an area (and the game even has a day-night cycle exclusively for those opening areas) but whatever the method, you won't see all stages on a single run, and there's a lot of variety visually between all these stages, so it never feels like a slog. I know I was happy to play through a few times to see as many of the different areas as I could!
A variety of stages is nice, but you've got to have stage designs to go with them, and here OOParts calls back somewhat to much older Breakout-style games like Namco's Cutie Q in that it adds a lot of pinball elements for variety, but I think it does it in a pretty interesting way. Every area has a specific type of block that needs destroying to satisfying the stage clear requirements (these are the ones that monsters you can take out with your ball) but there's several extra parts they all have in common- permanent light targets that spawn item eggs (that keep track of how many times you've lit them all- fill the meters for an extra life!), a multiplier that builds up by destroying drop targets in each world's first area or destroying enemies in each world's second area, and light targets that flit between red, blue, red then off that give you a barrier if you can land the ball in the magic jewel if you get all reds or take you to the Oasis bonus stage (on the first stage of each area) or the Trap punishment zone (on the second stage of each area, shown in LordBBH's playthrough at 5:07:23- if you end up here, you must replay the stage you came from!) if you get all blues. Quite a lot going on, then, so there's plenty for you to be getting on with on each stage, but what's nice is that there's only one type of block you need to destroy to progress, the ones that spawn monsters. Do this on the first area and you fight a boss (just smack 'em with your ball) and in the second area it spawns the jewel you need to clear the world. This means you don't need to completely decimate every last target on a stage to move on, which is nice and, with the ability to slightly adjust your angle by slamming the wall, you have something that goes at a bit of a quicker pace than your average paddle-and-ball game with less of those frustrating moments where you just can't quite hit the one thing you need.
I said less of those frustrating moments, but they're not all gone. The one thing here is that of course, in pinball there's more of an element of shooting skill, since all those drop targets and lights are shots you make with your mastery of lining up shots and getting the right angle, something you control more directly. Breakout-alikes give you significantly less control over the ball as once it's out there, it doesn't adhere to gravity, requiring you to try and get the right angle off your bat (less of an exact science) and then hope your calculations about what it'll bounce off of were on the money. I'm not a pinball wizard by any means mind you, but it definitely feels like 'aiming' for a specific part of the board is much easier there than in something like Arkanoid. As a result, hitting these drop and light targets on purpose is... Well, it's not something that can easily be done with purpose, I can tell you that. In particular, the roll-over lights are especially frustrating to try and get 'on purpose' because you're very much at the mercy of where the ball bounces, and I almost figured I'd have to just leave the bonus Oasis round undocumented as I absolutely could not get the blue lights all lit at the same time (after a few 'one more go' moments, I got it- you can see the bonus room in the middle screenshot above, isn't that lovely, but you'll have to look to LordBBH's playthrough for the Trap stage, I couldn't get it to show up) so it can definitely feel a bit rough in that sense. That said, with the power-ups, magic and angle-altering wall slam, a lot's done to mitigate that frustration, and being able to clear the stage more easily might, depending on what kind of player you are, be more important in the long run. I wonder if adding more pinball-like physics, maybe even a set of pinball flippers instead of a paddle to go with it might've been a good way to further alleviate this issue, but that's straying a little far from the genre, so maybe we'll put that aside.
The only other thing to mention in terms of stage design is that there's not a whole lot of 'gimmicks' on these stages outside of the bosses which you can see as a good or a bad thing. It's good that it doesn't go for anything silly or annoying like the plunger in Block Gal that sends your ball straight back down the field or something like that, although there are spinners that send your ball off-track and general obstacles that just get in the way, so it's not like the game doesn't have any spice in that regard. However, some of the second stages in each area do have blocks that eventually regenerate over time that can be a little bothersome to deal with, but they take quite a long time to do so, giving you plenty of room to work with for the most part. Some might see this as a bad thing as it can be a bit too simple, but I think this gives the game a direct appeal that's not too simple, you get to break some visually-interesting blocks for a credit or two with some little boss battles thrown in for good measure, so I think it does enough to maintain your interest.
The thing that'll stand out the most about OOParts is definitely its presentation though, this game is gorgeous! The Sega C2 board has, as pointed out by friend of the site kak2X and explained on Sega Retro, more available colours it can produce, and OOParts really seems to flaunt this hardware with its incredible presentation. It reminds me a little of Raiden of all things with very small but finely-detailed and colour-rich sprites, and there aren't many Breakout-style games with the fantasy theme of this one so it really stands out and certainly made an impression on me when I first saw it. The music is also excellent throughout, with multiple themes per world composed by Shigeharu Isoda under the pseudonym Kazumi Nasu (although OOParts isn't listed on his Video Game Music Preservation Foundation page, another arcade game by Success, RyuKyu, and this is when he was freelancing so it lines up) and they have this strange, mystic vibe to them befitting the game's theme making it feel all the more mysterious. The character design by Hideki Tamura only really show up in the between-area cutscenes (which we'll show off in full in Extended Play, they're good) so they're not as ever-present as the Cotton characters but the pixel art here is excellent, again really fitting with the otherworldly vibe of the game, something accentuated by the strange ending and stark Game Over scene. It looks and sounds great, is what I'm saying in too many words, with the one low point being that, for how long the boss fights can sometimes be, the boss theme isn't quite long enough.
As for why the game never made it to mass production... I'm not sure, but it's fun to speculate. There had been a resurgence of paddle-and-ball games in the arcade after the 1986 release of Taito's Arkanoid, and there are a few examples as late as 1991 and 1992- Capcom's 1991 release Block Block is probably the most famous, but there's also Ghox by Toaplan from 1991 and the two Thunder & Lightning games by Seta from 1990 and 1992. There was even another one on the Sega C2 board by Sega themselves, Twin Squash from 1991, although that was more focused on competition between two players. However, they start to dry up around 1992, which is when the fighting game boom was in full swing, so I can absolutely imagine no real interest in a game like this. One thing that came up when I was talking about the game with ohfivepro is that the game is a bit too easy and credits can last a bit too long for arcade operators' liking, so it's fair to assume that this may have also been a factor if the game went on location testing and fared poorly. Obviously, I'm looking at the game from a completely different context, comfortably playing in my home in 2025 with a nice cup of tea in hand, so I like that the game's a little breezy with it and more forgiving than others in the genre (but not so easy that you get bored), but when it comes to arcade games that never made it to the game centre floor, being too easy to stay on the cabinet too long is definitely a reason something can get shot down. It also looks like Sega dropped support for the title at some point (see Extended Play for more on that) so that could've been a factor too.
Whatever caused the game to be cancelled... I think it's a shame. I'm telling on myself a little here (after you've read the article, so it's too late, unless you paid attention to the Editor's Note, Ed'll like that) but I'm actually extremely bad at paddle-and-ball games. Whether with the authentic spinner control, an analogue stick or some kind of compromise, I'm just rubbish at 'em, which is a shame because a lot of them I really like in concept (like Devilish), I just don't have the right skillset for them I guess! OOParts perhaps being too easy may have played a part in it never making it to a proper release, but I think that and its other elements- the excellent presentation, the inclusion of pinball elements and boss fights to spice things up, and the wall-slamming mechanic giving you a bit more control than in others in the genre- make it more appealing to me and it really charmed me, I won't lie. It also helps that it's a bit shorter than others of its kind so it doesn't overstay its welcome too much outside of the boss fights sometimes going on for a little long, and maybe I'm just getting easier to please, but a nice and breezy bit of block-breaking like this is just perfect for a quick credit. I hope someday the spinner version gets preserved or at least simulated in some way, but for now, I'm glad we have this saved in some way so people can enjoy it, and I think you should give it a try even if you're bad at these kind of games like me.
For being , OOParts is awarded...
In a sentence, OOParts is...
A gorgeous, pleasant bit of ball-and-paddle.
And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!
For a bit of fun, here's all the between-stage art in the game.
First, the stage select screen.
All six of the 'You Got a Crystal!" scenes.
Then there's the scene before the final stage.
The two ending scenes...
... And the full staff roll.
Just one more thing, let's go back to that Gamest preview for a second, because there's something a little odd.
Here's a zoomed-in look at the title screen in that scan, compared to the one in the publicly-dumped ROM (and in the Nostalgia Yokocho blogpost).
There was originally a Sega logo on the title screen! The version that's out there just has the Success logo instead.
Both Cotton and RyuKyu were distributed by Sega in arcades, so this isn't too unusual, but maybe they had originally planned to distribute OOParts and backed out?
Something to think about regarding the game's cancellation at any right, assuming the 'hack' status of the game doesn't have anything to do with it.
As far as I can tell, the other screenshots there are the same as the public ROM.
Hopefully this convinces you to give OOParts a try, I really liked it!
It's nice to play a good video game sometimes, isn't it?
OOPARTS KICKS BLOCK BLOCK'S ASS, THIS HILL I WILL DIE ON
