Lemon Angel (jp. レモンエンジェル) is the name of a Japanese idol group. The group itself was made to release music relating to a spin-off of an OVA series called Cream Lemon. The spin-off, also named Lemon Angel, was a short series about both the group and their animated alter-egos who are thrown into bizarre and often sexual situations. Cream Lemon itself was much more wild from the looks of it, but I haven't seen either of them, and am not sure if I plan to. The OVA series ran from 1984 to 1993, with Lemon Angel lasting from 1987 to about 1990. It seems that the group's original members are very difficult to contact, and the 2006 anime based off the group appears to not include any of the original members (or their cartoon alter egos).
Lemon Angel: Tomo Sakurai's SPEED GAME (jp. レモンエンジェル「桜井智のＳＰＥＥＤＧＡＭＥ」) is very likely the first game ever produced by M.I.N, releasing in 1990 and potentially predating Réserve. In 1995, the group would make another Lemon Angel game (this one titled simply Lemon Angel) under the name C-Class, which followed the more bizarre plots of the OVA. As suggested by the title, this 1990 Lemon Angel game stars Tomo Sakurai, who progressively takes more and more clothes off as you beat her in games of Speed.
This game has no CPU cap, so it's important to make sure your emulator's settings are pretty barebones if you want to keep up with the computer player. The game also has no sounds outside of some bleeps and bloops, and is only one floppy disk. I was curious to know if this was written in BASIC, but it appears the file type isn't something editdisk recognizes.
The game's controls are interesting, since they don't quite follow any other game by M.I.N or its later iterations. In keyboard mode, the numpad are your navigation, and Z and X are your buttons (Z for the left stack, X for the right). In mouse mode, which is activated by pressing M on the title screen, left-clicking corresponds to the left stack, and right-clicking corresponds to the right. This wouldn't be much of a problem if I didn't have a finicky trackpad and no numpad because I have a laptop. If you're in a similar situation to me, you may need to use a virtual keyboard or numpad emulator.
The whole game itself lasts about five rounds. There are two stacks of cards on the table, and the game is played almost like competitive Tripeaks solitaire. You may only place a card down if the card you've selected is one number higher or lower than the card currently on the stack, and stacking multiple cards of the same value is forbidden. The only time you can place a card that doesn't follow this pattern is if it's impossible to make any more moves (for you or the computer), in which case it prompts you to select any card and both players place a card down.
If you lose a round, it will take you back to the previous stage. If you're at the first stage and there's nothing to go back to, you'll get a game-over. Luckily, the game will just restart after that, and you don't have to reset the emulator or anything. There's also absolutely zero Japanese text you need to understand to play it, unless you're dumb like me and forget about mouse mode.
Despite being a strip-speed game, she's already basically naked by the end of the second round. The game also doesn't have any real difficulty spike to it outside of human error and bad luck. However, its lack of CPU cap means you can beef up your emulator settings a little to challenge yourself. At some point, though, it gets impossible...
When the game ends, you'll see Tomo Sakurai with absolutely no clothes on. Pressing a key will bring you to the credits screen, which shows the anime versions of Lemon Angel with no clothes on, along with a few details about who made the game and when.
If you want to play the game again after this, you're going to have to reset. It's the same thing for all early M.I.N games.
There are zero resources for this game, however I've uploaded a playthrough to YouTube.
M.I.N is probably one of their lesser-known areas (at least, by people who aren't super into PC-98 games. You may know M.I.N better as Sogna, one of the names they published under.
If that still doesn't ring a bell, here are a few games this group is responsible for:
Many of these games saw releases outside of the PC-98 platform, at least in part. Vision was also released on the Sharp-X68000.
