Power Dolls

You've got five girls in steel suits and a mission that simply must be completed. Power Dolls — so Japanese mecha, piloted by young female pilots in a tactical strategy with a top-down perspective. Getting them home alive is your duty; it would be a surprise if you just didn't care.

It's a grid-based strategy where you move units across the map, shoot enemies, and collect ammo. Each pilot has her own stats, each mecha has its own weapons. Before battle, you prepare your squad, during battle you wait for your turn, then decide who goes where and what to shoot at. It's nothing crazy — these kinds of games worked the same way back in the eighties and nineties across Asian computers.

The controls are simple, because computers from the days when Windows couldn't compete with DOS didn't have room for anything complicated. You click, get your options, press a key and you're done. The graphics look more like a paper board game than something that would brag about being three-dimensional. Color-wise, it's pastels on a gray background — a Japanese office desk from the nineties in portable form. The music quietly does what it can, and after a while you don't even hear it.

Power Dolls had readers and fans in Japan, they knew what they were getting — tactics without unnecessary gimmicks, units get equipped and sent to work. In the Czech Republic, the game never appeared in any store with a cover printed in Czech. That's why everyone forgot about it completely, because nobody talked about it and nobody owned it. It wasn't the prettiest strategy game in the world or the fastest, but it was functional and had content for fifty hours of play without a tedious filler story.

Today you can play it in your browser if you're curious what Japanese tactical strategy looked like in a Connectix DOS emulator. It's not an experience that will keep you glued to your seat for five hours straight, but if you remember those days when a computer was just a gaming machine for its faithful believers, you'll recognize in it a world that won't come back.