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Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire - "You're getting better!"

2010-02-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire is a bizarre arcade fighting game from 1995, featuring digitized characters a la Mortal Kombat. It's easy to play, looks utterly ridiculous to bystanders, and has three different versions of Jackie Chan in the roster. It's one of my favorite fighting games, and it received the honor of having an impromptu tournament thrown for it at the big fighting game showdown we had down here in Denver the other day.

Fists of Fire is pure footsies. Jumps are hilariously floaty, but also dangerous. Getting hit in mid-air leads to knockdowns. Getting knocked down leads to you getting kicked repeatedly, or worse. By comparison, dashes are super fast and super safe, and can be ended at any time. The result: Jackie Chan Giga Footsies.

If it didn't look so absolutely ridiculous, I'd put this up there as one of the best beginner-level fighting games. Heck, let's do it anyway. Combos in this game are as simple as they get. You can chain 4 jabs together, end it with a special or super, kick the other guy three times while he's down and take off half a lifebar. If you can do a fireball in Street Fighter II, you can play this game.

The degree of visual incongruity is probably the best part, though. A roster consisting of three Jackie Chans, five random Mortal Kombat-kinda people in body paint and cheap costume, and Mysterious Dragon? FMV explosions that fill the screen at the end of a round? Throws that send people spinning end over end like a propeller? It's this close to being a pirate romhack, but... Oh, shit, nearly forgot: If the match is between two of the non-Jackie characters, there's gratuitous bloodshed and fatalities. As soon as Jackie enters the ring, though, the game turns PG. This is his game, after all. You think you're gonna tear Jackie's torso in half? Make him bleed? Aw hell naw. He's a great sport, though. Beat him (or, uh, lose as him) and he responds with a thumbs up every time.

Fists of Fire is MAME-only right now, which means it isn't supported by GGPO or Supercade. Considering the hype this game is building, however, something tells me that's bound to change.

'Perfect Nightmare' is Damn Right!

2010-01-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

This time around, Jamaal checks out the demo for a new Western-developed visual novel, and finds that... yeah, it's not so good. Buckle up.

I had one helluva treat today. The kind of treat-- in this case a snack-- that your friend gives you, and they're SO eager for you to try it that you can't help but be suspicious. They hold out their hand to you, and in their palm is the treat of promised goodness. They smile grandly at you, but it's awkward... it's the kind of smile one has when holding back laughter. You're suspicious; you know something is wrong... but they're your friend, and you're theirs! And since we're all friends here, everything is all right... right?

So by whatever logic that lies dormant in our bodies to go through with stupid, obviously bad ideas, you partake of the treat your friend has offered you. You're a damn fool for doing as such, and your friend is smirking and laughing at your agony as this ass-flavored thing sits in your mouth. At this point, you can either spit out the so-called treat your friend gave you, or you can swallow your pride, and swallow it down (heh). Considering that I'm both a masochist and bursting with pride, one can assume my mouth is now filled with a flavor I can't wash out.

The treat my friend sent me this morning had attempts at appeal, and nothing but ass-flavor by the end. She links me to a forum thread that she had gotten from someone's Deviant-Art page. The information inside pertains to the creation of a visual novel called Perfect Nightmare: Overkill. One woman is taking it upon herself to make this happen: from the story, to the art, to the everything. It's all her.

Quite frankly, when I got to the characters section of the opening post, about half a screen worth of scrolling down, my brain was instantly deep fried in pure bullshit.

There's something wrong with all three of these characters!

These characters were created in some kind of trans-hallucinogenic trip. Crazy colored eyes, super tie-dye hair, broken knees. You name it, they have it. You need a special kind of mind for "uniqueness" to create these abominations of man and woman! It's like driving past a high school when the kids are let out. All the variety in random BS fashion you'll see on those kids looks and feels a lot like these characters. Random... in an attempt to be one-of-a-kind.

"Well shit!" I think to myself. "I'm in too deep now." I stand from my computer chair and stretch, because I know I have to see what my friend is trying to Tom Fool down my throat. I'm a Visual Novel virgin, and I have a feeling I'm about to get raped. So against my better judgment, I download the demo of meager size, click to unzip, and launch that junk up.

As I mentioned, I've never actually played (would that be the proper term?) [Oh no you di'int! -Ed] a Visual Novel of any kind. I know of a few, but that's only because I've played their fighting game counterparts, like Fate/Unlimited Codes, based off of Fate/Stay Night, and Melty Blood, based off Tsukihime, just to name a few. So my thoughts and opinions may be brash, simple-minded, lacking in knowledge and overall ignorant. Frankly, I don't care, because it was all hella BS!

This is the first of the three main characters. This is also the first of three main characters I can't bring myself to care about. Getting done watching the news, The Mastermind pops her leg up, showing off her amazing (see: awful) frilly fashion. She is, as the name 'Mastermind' puts it, the supposedly super-smart head honcho of the group the game focuses on: the Night's Gale Guild.

And the guy conversing with her now is The Proxy (I'm reminded of Read or Die's code names here), a robot with Tourette's. Tourette's, a not-so-bad checkered shirt accompanied with a horrible purple turtleneck, and hair that Skittles would love to use for their advertisements. [I watched Demolition Man on laser disc over the holidays, and The Proxy is dressed just like 1996-era Wesley Snipes -Ed.]

Between these two characters, there is a recurring joke in which The Mastermind calls The Proxy "whore," and The Proxy calls The Mastermind "slut." It's not funny; I didn't even smirk or give it my usual "What the hell... Seriously?" response. It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bad you want to slam your head into the nearest solid object.

Actually, The Proxy doesn't actually have tourettes, but he might as well. He just fits 'fuck' into the most awkward and unnecessary moments. Like, check this situation out:

The game introduces this blonde gal, Female Marionette #2, the third main character. She is plagued with amnesia, and therefore a lot of mystery like every other character in this game. She's gonna be the character you're identifying with the most, I figure, as she knows as much as you do about anything going on in this damn world.

Still, The Mastermind asks the blonde gal to tell her what she's doing there, arguing with her amnesia, an argument fit only for a genius like her. But The Proxy shows back up, and not a moment too soon. "I thought you had work to do?!" asks the Mastermind, to which he responds:

Classy! I mean, fuckin' classy!

And his awesome dialogue doesn't stop there. He just slams the word in wherever he wants, whatever the sentence! It feels like the writer is going for the "I don't give a damn" character, but cussing as spontaneously as he does accomplishes nothing.

That, and a lot of the dialogue feels unnecessary and not relevant to anything. Not humor, not character development. Just filler to pretend the game has more depth than it actually does. A 6 ft. depth sign in a 3 ft. depth pool sends you diving headfirst into a floor of concrete.

Yeah you guys! Stop! I don't give a damn about the arguing; I give a damn about the unnecessary dialogue!

So Female Marionette #2 is a traniee. The Mastermind doesn't know why they need her, because they already have two other marionettes. Well, because they're 'bloody troublemakers' as The Proxy puts it. "Good call," The Mastermind responds, the idea obviously never occurring to her. Despite being a "mastermind" of some kind, she has very little going for her. Both as a genius and as a character. She's done nothing important, or even interesting, up to this point besides unnecessary bitching.

Eventually you get a chance to ask some questions. Sadly, the answers barely make you give a damn. For a game so focused on story and development, there are less hooks than a goddamn fishing rod. Still, as a "reward," this gives The Proxy many opportunities to randomly insert "fuck" into his sentences.

Seriously. Here's a sample dialogue tree:

What does the Night's Gale guild do?
"We're just a bunch of really fucking bored people trying to find something to do in our free time."

How does the ranking system work?
"The Mastermind is Rank 1. That means he does nothing and is still our fucking boss."

Who exactly is the Mastermind?
"It'll be okay. Just don't look him in the eye for too long. It's going to fucking kill you, amiga."

Am I really dead?
"...To us, you're totally alive. To the people on Earth, you're pretty much fucking dead."

Now that you've gotten over the fuck-topia that comes out of The Proxy's mouth, re-read that section of quotes again. There's something else strange and unusual in there...

OKAY, WHAT? THE MASTERMIND IS A GUY? MORE LIKE MASTER-MAN. Maybe I'm just slow and I don't remember what males look like. No, screw that. He looks exactly like a girl!

Still... THE TWO CHARACTERS DON'T ACT LIKE THERE WASN'T ANY SORT OF POSSIBLE CONFUSION WITH THAT! I...just don't know... I feel dumb now... for reasons I can't even explain, honestly... Maybe it's an "I should have known" thing. Maybe I'd shaken and smacked my head so many times that brain damage occurred. Maybe it's just fucking stupid. Yeah, I agree: It's a mix of the last two.

Sigh... Playing-- or reading-- this game is work. Not like reading something informative, like a text book, where you get a return on your time investment. It feels like I have to force myself to continue reading after every word I lay my eyes on, just because it's that mind-numbing to me. And because this is a demo, or maybe because it's a Visual Novel, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. This 'game' is tiring out my brain. I wanna quit so badly, but...!

nah foo' u jus' some straight frontin' punk ass bitch.

This red-haired boy who has come under attack by ghosts seems to be the first side character. Obviously, he's helpless, and you get to choose to help him or not. Neither option seems to affect much in the game. Same with any of the other limited choices given to you in this demo. There goes what little excitement there could have been for the demo ... and probably the game.

I hate to admit it after struggling through the rest of the demo, but he might be the first character I have a chance of caring for... at least until the game is voiced-over'd as the creator has promised ("Oh god..." I know). His name is The Stellate, and he's a terrible, horrible wigga who won't think twice about pullin' no trigga. He even solidifies his position by saying he's a real gansta himself. He's teleports bitches and he's bad for your health!

...Unfortunately, he doesn't freestyle like that consistently.

So the modus operandi for the game, and the guild's next mission is now revealed, about twenty minutes into the demo, and less than five minutes from the end: To destroy the Earth! Even The Mastermind is taken aback by news of this! ...Though it's odd that he didn't know about it already. In fact, I realized something: In the text of the second image with The Proxy, he says The Mastermind should talk to the others about the task at hand. Yet, only now do they mention anything of a task, 25 minutes into the demo. What is up with the weird inconsistencies in this game?

Still, they can't possibly destroy the Earth! "They have cheese for fuck's sake!!" quoth The Mastermind. Ugh, really? This game demo is like 20 of the most unnecessary ways to use the word "fuck," followed by another "Slut", "Whore" moment, and there's been about four of these up to now so far. I haven't smiled in the slightest once, as the placement of the joke is extremely forced after the second time.

Of course, what creation by a female fan of anime wouldn't be complete without some girly men loving on each other? As Anime World Order's Daryl Surat put it in a recent episode, "maybe they're gay" remains a winning formula in manga and beyond. Despite being short-lived, it's still a selectable option, and there's probably plenty more to come.

To be fair, this is a demo. At its core, it's not at all a complete game. Sure, the last screen leaves you with a "To be continued...." but for me, there's very little to look forward to. Sure, it could turn out to be extremely awesome and creative for all that I know. It could have a juicy story with a shocking climax, and maybe even a lot of well-written dialogue! (Pffft...)

Despite being a demo, my first visual novel, and my ability to stay fair with all situations, I still remain extremely doubtful this is going anywhere. Regardless of what I think, most people on the forum seem to be genuinely interested in the game. Who am I to tell them they're wrong? Maybe they enjoy their weird characters, bad dialogue, and the fucked up use of curse words...

...They're lying to themselves, though. Hah!

Moses at the Movies: HOUSE

2009-12-20T23:04:00.001-07:00

The credits had rolled. The lights had come up. We left the theater, turned to each other, and said roughly the same thing in chorus: "Holy fucking shit."

House, the 1977 film debut of Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, defies every possible expectation. It spits in the face of rational thought and eschews easy categorization. It left my friends and I (who had attended a screening of the film at the Starz FilmCenter) in a stupor, and probably changed our lives forever.

The plot of the movie is simple enough-- a group of high-school girls and their professor visit a house in the countryside, which happens to be haunted/possessed by a ghostly aunt and the Cat From Hell.

Thing is, from the first scene of this movie on, you know Obayashi is using a different playbook. The cadre of girls have names like "Gorgeous," "Fantasy," "Kung Fu," (she knows kung fu) "Mac," (she's fat) and "Professor" (yup). The absurdly up-beat soundtrack-- by the legendary GODIEGO-- drowns out the character dialogue. Gorgeous slams a door to the sound of a nuclear explosion. Screen wipes I've never seen before. Cartoonish, pastel backgrounds. Sudden shifts to stop-motion. And this eventually becomes a horror film!

Maybe. Again, different playbook. Things just keep escalating. You think your mind can't be blown any more, and then the next scene hits. By the end, I was practically desensitized, numbed to the sheer madness on the screen. House is hilarious, yes. But it's also filled with bizarre, nightmarish imagery that you can't unsee. The tonal shift between the first two thirds and the last can only be fully internalized afterwards. Actually, probably not. Did they put tabs of acid on the ticket stubs? Am I going to just wake up the next day and say "Nahhh, that movie didn't happen"? Why was there that bear in the fucking truck with the ramen? All questions we found ourselves asking each other long after leaving the theater.

House has long been unavailable in the West in an easily-obtainable form, but it's getting a DVD release from Criterion sometime next year. I am buying this shit, and you owe it to yourself to at least check it out from Netflix or something. Show it to your friends. They'll thank you for it. Or write something like this, I dunno. Either way.

The arguably unrepresentative trailer:

Something I keep forgetting to mention that the trailer reminded me of is that Obayashi was mostly a director of TV commercials prior to making House. What kind of commercials? Shit like this:

Yes, I think that should just about do it.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Chip 'n Dales! M.M.O.R.P.G.

2009-12-13T01:45:00.001-07:00

After a slightly spur of the moment decision, I decided to ask some friends of mine to contribute to this blog. First up is Jamaal Graves, whose anecdote of forgotten viral videos spiraled out of control, taking him on a journey into the heart of madness itself. Enjoy!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Chip 'n Dales! With Extreme PvP!

You might be wondering why I'm quoting an old as hell flash movie. And if you're not, well... you should be! That video is why I'm writing this blog post. It's why I spent a day seeking adventure, seeing new worlds and new things with my buddy Tim, who accompanied me on this epic quest.

It all started yesterday (Friday) night when I remembered the old flash video "Chip 'n Dales M.M.O.R.P.G." Wanting to re-live the amusement of the song and video, I Google'd it up. Of course, it was my first find. The same one uploaded on AlbinoBlackSheep. Old School.

But what's this site Google searched up right below the flash video? No... you have to be kidding me!

"Chip and Dales" is one thing that can be taken the wrong way if found in your search history.

AN ACTUAL CHIP 'N DALES MMORPG

I admit, my curiosity spilled over like a boiling pot of soup. I had to see what this was about. I couldn't ASK questions, I just had to jump right in! But I knew I couldn't do this alone. I had to have someone with me, someone to experience what I experienced, so that others would believe what we saw.

My buddy Tim happened to be on, and therefore, I invited him to join me for some Chip 'n Dale chipmunk-y fun. The date was set: Saturday morning.

We register, select our characters (which actually spans over many characters, not just the chipmunk duo), and log in. There's no client to download; only a flash to load. Who knew what to expect at this point besides platforming madness? We go through the, deceptively, easygoing Tutorial. At least it doesn't seem too shabby... for a Flash game, at least.

Tim and I meet up outside the tutorial. I'm Dale, but only because you gotta unlock Chip. =/ Furthermore, the names between Chip and Dale are reversed in this game. Great editing fellas! Tim picks Kirby, one of his all-time favorite characters. There seems to be no difference in the characters' abilities, only the sprites themselves, with Dale getting his sprite from the NES C'nD game, and Kirby getting the one from Kirby Super Star. All right. On the first screen, we are given about, literally, 12 different options as to where to go, at least according to the arrows.

With no direct suggestion from the game itself at all, outside of a sign we both fail to read, we decide to go left.

We get a jet pack in the form of giant demon wings and we're off to fly across this ledge... kinda. My wings fail me at first flap as I launch myself off the cliff, expecting to fly like an eagle. Instead, I plummet at the horrible frame rate this game runs at, and I die instantly by pitfall. Tim gets a pretty good laugh as I try again, successfully making it across.

We find a portal and activate it. After a 5 second countdown we're teleported to the Jungle.... which is apparently World 12?

We go right, and we're given a choice between holes to fall in. My gamer instinct kicks in and I know it's the hole that's farther away. I'm sure Tim knew too, but he missed the jump and landed in the first hole, dying, and now giving me a good laugh. On the next screen, we are now in a pool of what seems to be LCL.

What if that's NOT LCL?

We continue right, now in some "random shapes" zone, for lack of better way of explaining it. Each of the (seemingly randomly picked) yellow shapes, which look like they were made by some kid in MSPaint, is a spring. You jump on them, they make the "BOING" noise from Super Mario World, used mostly by the football enemies, and you go bouncing up... I wish I could say I was kidding.

Assuming down means death, like in most platformers, we clumsily bounce our way up to the top of the screen where the crates are. These crates are power-ups; weapons to use against enemies. I figure we'll need them, meaning there must be enemies going forward. With trying to go down seeming like a bad option, we just make a wild jump to the left. This leads to Purgatory.

There're no enemies, no platforms, no nothing. All you got is yourself, massive DI and nowhere to go while you fall for about 10 seconds. Doesn't matter if you go left or right with that super DI. There's nothing there but wait until you eventually die. The game returns you back to your last save point after death: in this case, the little tree hut at the beginning of the jungle.

Well fuck going right, we're gonna go left! We're greeted with four platforms. One higher than the next, going left. Well we can totally make that. I mean, seriously, look at the maximum jumping height, and the height of the platform!

I can totally make that, right?

FUCK!

Tim also jumps, but no such luck. Also, the game announces to, what I assume is, the whole playerbase when someone dies. At the very least, everyone in the same world gets to see you fail constantly.

At this point, we're just Mexican Jumping Beans, popping up as much as we possibly can, but accomplishing nothing but minimal heights, spamming ourselves with "Ryyudo has died!" and "Timotee has died!"

Tim makes it to the first platform and waits for me. I falter and fail many a time. Tim then goes for the third, and fourth, making it just fine (screw you Tim). He mentions that a running start somehow gives you a few pixels more height of jump, or something. So I get some running start, and these jumps are still out of my reach.

I finally make it to the second platform, only to die while trying to get up to the 3rd. Fuck! After about a good 5 minutes of error after error, I make it up to the last platform, and the next area.

I died this much AFTER getting a knack for the game and going back to take pictures for this entry.

There's a tractor beam heading upward, and some arbitrary enemies below the platform we're on. I jump and get beamed up. Tim, on the other hand, decides to pass it up, or maybe missed his jump since the game doesn't track other players' movement very well. Either way, Tim heads downward. He then dies trying to get back up on top (I assume), since I only see the message from where I'm at. Tim has to go back to before the crazy high jumps. So I wait for him in the most dismal place so far. Ganondarf's Castle.

Ganondarf is probably a pretty nice guy.

I assume it was an intentional typo... right? Tim makes it to the entrance of Ganondarf's Castle. We save in the house save point and begin to make our way up the tower by heading left.

The jumps on the first screen are pretty easy, and we climb up the tower with ease. But we get to the second screen, and the 3rd jump on the screen is out of reach. No matter how much of a running start we get (or anything else, for that matter) we can't make this jump!

Actually, after I took this picture, I somehow managed to clip my guy up there for a split second.

Then I get an idea! Tim had killed me earlier by lifting me up and throwing me into a pit (fucker) and I figured, if I lift Tim up, I can throw him up top to the platform. Now we're thinking with portals!

Tim gets on that platform. From there he's able to make the next two jumps, then jumps up to the next map and dies almost instantly to a monster up there. We do this a few more times before Tim tosses me up to let me try. I then get another weird idea: I try to grab Tim while he jumps on top of the 2nd platform, which works! Now we're both up on these platforms!

At this point, some other guy in the game (and from what it seemed, the only other guy in the game, at the time.) Started talking to us, though he's in a different world. He seems like he's 13 or 14, speaking with extreme emotes @_@ <_< r_r (I dunno what that last one is supposed to be, but he used it) and "cutesy" words, like 'bish' and 'plz.'

He asks us to invite him to where we are. We do, and he makes it up to where we are with extreme ease. He's some kind of Pokemon (my Poke-knowledge is rusty,) and has like 10 jumps or something. Tim and I semi-ignore him and continue ascending the tower at our own pace, and I finally make it up top next. Then this guy jumps up, kidnaps me, and throws me into a monster. Obviously, I die. His goal becomes all too apparent: To sabotage and grief us as annoyingly (and as much) as possible.

So without any sort of sarcasm, bias, or anything, we can officially say that 1/3rd of the game's population are DICKS.

This guy flies/jumps away, types '*grabs sword*' and flies back to the screen Tim and I are still struggling with. The sword swings around his Pokemon like he was Mewtwo from Super Smash Bros. Melee, circling about him in some kind of unwieldy manner, stunning us every time we get hit with it (although while stunned, you can STILL pick up other players.) We're barely able to progress as this kid sits on top of the topmost platform saying "bring it on bish <_<"

Tim and I decide via Google Talk that we need to go to a different world. We warp away using a "/home" command that brings you back to the beginning of the game. The kid, on the other hand, still taunting us to come up "if we dare..." I say something to along the lines of "Do it!", although it's directed at Tim. The kid apparently takes that as a challenge, as his taunts continued. Hoo hoo hoo!

This time around, we go right from the very first screen. We pass the first screen with ease and reach the second screen, where there's a random boss by the name of Gargantio.

Tim gracefully jumps over the boss, whereas I gracefully put my furry nuts on the boss's face and die because of it. Tim jumps up to the top, and then jumps left onto of the logs, grabs the crate of acorns (what?) jumps back down, and defeats the boss like a complete badass. I grab the trophy the boss drops, which was rightfully Tim's, and we make our way right to the next screen. Another teleporter, another 5 second countdown, and we're in some sort of beach land. World 11 now...

We jump over Bomberman (he's an enemy for whatever reason,) and make our way through random stuff, jumping over some more Bombermans and finally arriving at another save point that's UNDER THA' SEA! Although the way I made it there was through a weird glitch where I fell into the water while standing on a piece of dry land. There was a random save point where I landed, even though it didn't seem like I was supposed to be there...

I was able to get back down there. Honestly, all the land-pillars weren't down here earlier today. They completely revamped this world, for the better, throughout the day. Also, it seems OTHER people are playing this game. Seriously?

Tim and I meet up at the next save point, and continue right. The next part was... a strange test of physics and patience. Mostly patience as there seemed to be little physics to be found.

Earlier today, the grey blocks weren't there. They were just randomly floating yellow balls.

I could not, for the fucking life of me, figure out the physics (assuming there's any) behind these yellow bouncers. And neither could Tim. We bounced and bounced but the 4th one always fucked us over. We couldn't get enough height on a consistent basis to turn and make it to the 5th circle. I made it once. ONCE! And died from a random enemy when I reached the top and headed into the next screen.

Finally, Tim messages me on Gtalk:

Tim:no, this game sucks

Jamaal: Hilariously bad

Tim:I'm not gonna pretend it doesn't anymore

Bless Tim for his strength of mind. We stopped soon after, our mentalities unable to take any more abuse at the hands of this pre-alpha test game. The game has constant advertisements telling you to join the discussion on the board, and to add this game to your favorites if you enjoy it. Tim and I both agreed:

There is NOTHING to enjoy here.

We'll just stick to the Flash Video, thanks. A minute long, and 20 times the entertainment.

Konami Sure Seems To Hate You, Pop'n Music Fans

2009-11-22T11:07:00.007-07:00

Being a fan of Konami's music games outside of Japanese arcades means engaging in a bipolar relationship with a monstrous corporation that probably hates you (this is ignoring the act of playing the games themselves, which is perhaps just as devastating). Ain't no better example of what I'm talking about than the plight Pop'n Music fans have had to endure over the past few years.

Yes, Pop'n Music. Think of it as Beatmania IIDX's slightly less hateful, significantly more colorful sibling, with a broader taste in music and a learning curve that assumes you haven't already been playing the game for 10 years (note: you might want to read that article I wrote about IIDX a year ago; the terminology in there gets reused a lot). There's a guy on youtube who uploads autoplay videos of easy songs, too? Well, there you go. Here's a video of one of the hardest songs in the game, just to even things out.

The big difference between Pop'n Music and IIDX is, as you've probably guessed, the method of input. IIDX is played with that bizarre turntable-piano-monster thing, while Pop'n has an array of 9 gigantic UFO-catcher giga buttons, each capable of generating a sound louder than a violently convulsing washing machine. There's no way to adjust the scroll speed of the notes on a per-pixel basis like in IIDX, and there are far more excruciating mindfuck songs with insane speed changes, so folks tend to play at even faster Hi-Speeds than in IIDX. S-Random is a lot more popular than Random for whatever reason, and it's here that you actually end up having to use your arms and elbows to hit certain crazy note combinations that only show up when everything gets thrown in the blender.

There are also ojama (literal translation: annoying bullshit) which range from scoring goals to bizarre, Mario Kart-style disruptions of gameplay where your notes fall at the wrong speed, spin violently, or become blocked out completely by god knows what. These are all optional, and can be turned on before any song at your discretion. The harder/more insane the ojama, the more "challenge points" you earn. More challenge points means a greater chance of getting the extra stage in the arcades. Really, though, most people just turn 'em on for fun.

Obviously, I could write an article about this game all day. I shouldn't, though. This is supposed to be about how Konami keeps screwing over Pop'n Music's console audience. So let's talk about that!

Exhibit A: Konami has released 17 mainline arcade installments of the game, with the most recent being Pop'n Music 17 THE MOVIE (like IIDX, the "theme" of each game has almost zero bearing on the actual music in the game, outside of one or two songs). The latest version of the game on console? Pop'n Music 14 FEVER. Initially, folks just assumed Konami was biding their time before releasing the best console port ever, but after nearly 3 years it's all but assumed that Konami's never doing another one of these games on the PS2. This was already a pretty big slap in the face to people who had shelled out crazy money for an arcade-style pop'n controller. It gets worse, though!

Exhibit B: Beat'n Groovy. Oh my god. What do I even say about this thing? It stems from the same proud tradition that brought us the North American release of beatmania and Rock Revolution. It's an Xbox Live Arcade game, which means that in addition to the embarrassing graphic design and busted play mechanics, there are also only nine songs in the game. Based on the online leaderboards, about 7,000 people bought the game. I can never figure out why Konami keeps making stuff like this, but everyone involved should probably be ashamed. Thankfully, it doesn't really get worse from here. Sorta.

Exhibit C: Pop'n Music Wii. A standalone "reboot" of the franchise which replaces the game's original extremely satisfying visceral button-smashing controls with awful wiimote gestures. It bombed in Japan. In North America, it just got a stealthy release with no fanfare. We're talkin' so stealthy that not even bemanistyle knew it was coming out. When your obsessed, hardcore target audience doesn't even know your game is out, something is wrong.

Clearly, Konami doesn't really seem to give a shit. Unfortunately, they recently announced Exhibit D, Pop'n Music Portable, in which they reveal, horrifyingly, that they kinda do. Here, at last, is the port of Pop'n Music Adventure that fans were clamoring for, but it's on the PSP. The control scheme looks unplayable: you can play Pop'n on a dualshock, sure, but that thing's got four shoulder buttons to the PSP's two. Who are they making this game for? It looks like they put some effort into it. Why not just release a PS2 version? Has that ship sailed? Gosh, it all feels so inexplicable!

In conclusion: yeah, hey, whatever you want Konami. We'll see when it comes out.

The Name Was Originally Going to Be "Masturbearding"

2009-11-19T22:22:00.007-07:00

Occasionally terrifying but often interesting video game forum selectbutton now has a podcast! Every episode is edited by a professional audio engineer, so it sounds pretty decent for a show conducted via Ventrilo, of all things.

I was in episode 2, which covered fighting games in a less-accessible way than I would have liked (there is some irony in there, I'm sure), and episode 3, which was marred by technical difficulties and a questionable choice of topic.

Episode 4 (subject: the treatment of video games in other media) features the guy who made the smmooooothest Let's Play video ever made as host, along with a really well-researched and coherent discussion from all the guests. Good place to start listenin', I'd say.

The show's also on itunes, and I'll be sure to make a post or two here when I show up in future episodes.

Boy, Nintendo never cared about Virtual Console, huh

2009-10-27T23:40:00.009-06:00

I've been retranslating the credits for Super Robot Wars J this past evening (one of the side effects of having a Brazilian non-native English/Japanese speaker translate a game: he gets lots of things wrong that you have to correct later. The credits are just one element of many - and yeah I plan on writing more about the game at some point, sit tight). As a result, I've been stumblin' onto all sorts 'o wacky web pages for subcontractors involved in the game's development at some level or another.

Qwintet, for example. Who are these guys? I thought they were Quintet at first. They were apparently responsible for SRWJ's loathsome sound design.

And Ancient! I don't pay much attention to what those guys are up to these days, but they've got a link to Streets of Rage 2 on their page, at least. That's reassuring. The link is actually to Sega's Japanese Virtual Console page, which is pretty dang remarkable. Every game has its own video, along with detailed information, character artwork and so on. I'm a little blown away at how nice this site is, actually.

Point is, the videos they made for these games are really something compared to the equivalent videos on Nintendo of America's Virtual Console page. Check out the one for Shinobi III! Shit, that is some classy video editing. Sync's up with the music from the intro, and it shows off everything cool about the game in about a minute or two.

Compare that to Nintendo of America's version. I think it speaks for itself. NOA clearly never gave a shit and whoever's handling Sega's Japanese VC page clearly does, but yeah, this is all pretty obvious. I mostly just wanted an excuse to link to Sega's classy virtual console page, maybe inspire somebody to go out there and play some awesome Genesis games. With that in mind, some favorites:

Alien Soldier's video smartly doubles as a tutorial on how to beat the game's towering, gently pulsating mountain of gross boss monsters. That is to say: make sure you're at full health, and then do that awesome zero dash thing that does like a million damage. You're a pro already! It also has a clip of the game's most important moment. See if you can spot it. I played through this game recently with some friends just to see it, so you're saving some time here (HINT: it might remind you a little of Altered Beast).
Shadow Dancer is apparently still not available for purchase from the US virtual console. I want to say that it's because of the twin towers on the title screen, but Vigilante has those too, so I'm gonna shrug my shoulders on this one. Shadow Dancer has really chunky, heavy music that goes down like a big bowl of soup, ninjas jumping down from scaffolding on the Statue of Liberty, a dog you can sic on enemies, one-hit deaths, and a bonus stage where you jump off a building because that's what ninjas do and throw shuriken at dudes on the way down. It's the Genesis' Ninja Spirit equivalent, and you should ninja get it.
This is going to put me in the unfortunate company of the slightly insane Dave Halverson, but I fucking love Dynamite Headdy. Like, a lot. The backgrounds alone, man! Headdy's driving concept is that it takes place in a puppet theatre, which means that everything's a prop, and the whole place is barely holding together under the workmanship of a very hardworking and tired group of (entirely unseen) human beings. You're never explicitly told any of this by the game, but the game pulls off its aesthetic vision with such confidence that you can't not figure it out. The game slingshots from one idea to the next with Treasure's usual ebullience, enough to almost make you not care about what a giant punch in the face the final boss is.
I've written about Toe Jam & Earl before, but it bears repeating.
Musha Aleste (known in the west as M.U.S.H.A.) sums up Compile's design ethos in one game. 8-minute long stages. Power-ups that render you as a god. Enemies barely capable of firing at you. On default settings, Musha Aleste has a breezy quality to it that folks weened on modern arcade shooting games might find quaint or hilarious. That's just the way console shooting games were back then! Hudson Soft was king of the pack, and shooting things without fear of reprisal under the stern guidance of Master Takahashi's violently vibrating index finger was the de facto design standard. And of course: the noisy FM metal soundtrack and steampunk-meets-sengoku era setting. Can't forget those.

Well, that's another entry that got away from me. Until next time!

Moses at the Movies: Streets of Fire

2009-10-18T17:22:00.005-06:00

Streets of Fire is a rad movie. Oh it's got problems, baby. Problems like you wouldn't believe. But that doesn't stop it from being rad, oh no.

Directed by Walter Hill back in 1984 (shortly after writing 48 Hrs. and The Warriors), Streets of Fire seeks to combine Cool Things from the '50s with Cool Things from the '80s, and I must carefully dance around the fact that I probably don't have enough cachet in '50s pop culture to properly analyze this movie. That's okay! Analysis is not what Streets of Fire is all about.

What it is about is pretty cut and dry. Willem Dafoe, who wears inconsistently ridiculous-looking clothes throughout the movie and runs a biker gang, decides to kidnap the lead singer of the coolest band on the block: "Ellen Aim and The Attackers" Much like the rest of the movie, they look '50s but sound '80s. Big time. They consist primarily of members from new wave group Face to Face. That explains it.

Shortly after his hazy, smoke-filled reveal, Willem Dafoe grabs poor ol' Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) and runs off on a motorcycle. One can only assume that she was dizzy, the result of flailing around at the end of the above musical number. Her manager, played by Rick Moranis, gets punched off the stage almost immediately. The twist is that he is also a money-grubbing jerk, I guess!

After that, we get introduced to ex-soldier Tom Cody, played by the fairly career-dead Michael Paré. He's back in town at the request of his sister, who runs a diner. We also find out that he is ripped in a decidedly old-school, pre-steroids way, and capable of beating up entire gangs by throwing them through windows. About a minute after that, he runs into McCoy (Amy Madigan), a tomboyish ex-soldier who "ran out of wars" and wants to help him stick it to Willem Dafoe on his own turf. Oh yeah, Tom Cody used to be Ellen Aim's girlfriend, and begrudgingly agrees to bring Rick Moranis along for the Big Showdown down in The Battery.

Streets of Fire being what it is, the Big Showdown happens twenty minutes into the film. Tom Cody rescues Ellen Aim, blows up a lot of motorcycles, and exchanges deadpan one-liners with Willem Dafoe on a flaming street. Then everybody hightails it outta there, and the movie forgets what it's doing for about 45 minutes. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the whole shebang nearly falls apart on itself by the halfway mark.

Thankfully, the last 15 minutes of this movie manage to right the vessel in time for a climactic showdown with an important lesson to impart on the viewer: Don't bring guns to a sledgehammer fight. Yes, you have to watch this for yourself, I'm afraid. It'll do you good.

The dialogue in this film is incredible: It wouldn't surprise me to find out the screenplay was written entirely without the use of commas. Ebert's review sums it up nicely:

"The language is strange, too: It's tough, but not with 1984 toughness. It sounds like the way really mean guys would have talked in the late 1950s, only with a few words different, as if this world evolved a slightly different language."

There's an enthusiastic messiness to the proceedings that reminds me a lot of charming '80s OAVs, which this movie may or may not have inspired. Characters do nonsensical shit on a regular basis just because it's awesome. More than half the named cast in the movie is worthless and seem to exist by accident, as if Hill and Larry Gross forgot to hastily whiteout their lines from the screenplay and just kinda rolled with it. And the style in this movie! Every damn street in the city seems to exist beneath L Train tracks. There are two cops policing the entire city, both corrupt. And the music - of course - which is so prominent as to almost dominate the proceedings entirely. Tonight is what it means to be young, and you better not forget it.

The original DVD release that I watched has a smearily awful sub-VHS transfer, but the first thing I looked up after the credits rolled was the HD DVD release: it may be a dead format, but it looks like it's the only way to watch this movie the way it was intended. That's... oddly fitting.

A Poignant Realization

2009-08-15T16:01:00.004-06:00

(from a presentation Erik Svedang gave at the recent Assembly '09, entitled "The Creation of Blueberry Garden – how to get away with bad design choices (sort of)" - The above image is one of the more insightful moments from the talk, in which Svedang talks about the intentional "bad" design choices he made when designing Blueberry Garden. I think he sells himself and his game a little short, myself. You can download the presentation from this link, watch a video of Blueberry Garden here, or purchase the game itself on Steam.)

BeatBlox: The game I keep forgetting to talk about

2009-08-13T14:30:00.004-06:00

BeatBlox is an Xbox Live Indie Game from former IIDX forum moderator and all-around nice guy Aaron Ramsey, which attempts to mix Tetris Attack-ish tile matching with rhythm game elements. The two ingredients don't blend together too well, but it's totally playable, only costs a dollar, and oh my gosh guys check out this song I contributed to it:
Pretty simple premise, really. There's a big ol' randomly generated grid of colored tiles, which you can slide around with the face buttons on your xbox controller. Every once in a while, these grey "Beat Blocks" (now mysteriously spelled correctly) will drop onto the grid in time with the music. Beat Blocks count down and eventually explode, destroying all the tiles connected to it.

There's also this lifebar thing, which constantly drains away to nothing; the only way to stay alive is to constantly make huge explosions. The problem is that the bar is always draining, while the Beat Blocks only explode occasionally. This results in a lot of extremely frustrating situations where the lifebar is near death, a Beat Block is about to explode and refill the lifebar, but... the bar drains before the block explodes, and now you're just dead. It's a pretty unfortunate situation to put the player in, and it happens a lot.

Still, it's better than most of the other games I've played on the service. Crescendo Symphony, for example. Don't buy that game, okay? I've seen too many people make that mistake already.

YOU WA SHOCK ALL OVER AGAIN: Fist of the North Star is now on Hulu.

2009-08-10T14:53:00.004-06:00

Well holy shit. Fist of the North Star is, in fact, on Hulu. You ain't got no excuses for not checkin' this show out now! Well, okay, you probably do, but whatever. Besides watching the first episode, I can also vouch for episode 18 ("Life or Death!? Beyond the Wasteland Lies the First Avenue of Hell!"), since it's a filler episode where Kenshiro punches a tank so much it explodes.

Okay, I guess he kicks it a bunch, too. Point stands.

SEMI-BREAKING NEWS: Guitar Freaks and Drummania GET WIT' IT

2009-08-09T16:53:00.004-06:00

You may be vaguely aware of Guitar Freaks/Drummania, Konami's extremely long-running arcade music game franchise (hereby referred to as GFDM), which has historically never really gotten a domestic release outside of Japan. Specifically, you may know that they've hilariously fucked up every opportunity to bring the games to America, only getting more hilarious when Guitar Hero and Rock Band exploded a couple of years back. Thankfully, the following news doesn't have anything to do with that. In fact, it sounds pretty awesome.
This past weekend, Konami had a location test for the newest installment of the franchise, entitled "Guitar Freaks/Drummania XG," and it looks like they're finally seriously renovating a pair of games that have desperately needed it for a while now. Guitar Freaks is easily the most laughable music game that Konami still releases new versions of on a regular basis. The controller only has 3 fret buttons, which means that most songs tend to look something like this:
RANTING ABOUT GUITAR FREAKS STARTS NOW
Goddamn, Guitar Freaks is retarded. Every solo in every song tends to look something like what you see in the above video. Harmonix had the good sense to try to transfer some semblence of actual guitar technique into Guitar Hero's play mechanics in the form of hammer-ons, pull-offs, and note charts that at least look like something other than utterly random conflagrations of notes thrown into a spreadsheet at the last minute. How Guitar Freaks lasted sixteen iterations is beyond me.

The only rational explanation is that sessioning with Drummania (read: Guitar Freaks and Drummania machine gets hooked together, allowing players to form a "full band") kept the game afloat despite its inherent awfulness. That's the only rational explanation because Drummania is rad as hell, and does a lot of things better than Rock Band's drum mode, I think. You don't get penalized if you freestyle and insert notes that aren't actually part of the song, and you have far more options for adjusting the scrolling speed of the notes on the screen, just like every other music game Konami makes these days. Little things that I really wish Harmonix would implement into Rock Band, y'know? It also has a more realistic setup, with actual electronic drum cymbal pads and the like; if you buy the PS2 versions of GFDM, you can just plug a retail electronic drum kit into your PS2 and bam! You're playing with effectively the same hardware as the arcade. It's all pretty dang great.

...Whoever's overseeing development of GFDM must've felt like something was up, though, because Guitar Freaks/Drummania GX is a total overhaul of both games. Not only do both games have gorgeous ne w cabinets with widescreen displays and the like, but they're also upgrading the input. Guitar Freaks finally gets 5 fret buttons and sustain/long notes, while Drummania goes out of control and gets a hi-hat pedal, another cymbal, and a floor tom. The original DM setup already had a hi-hat, cymbal, snare, two toms and a kick pedal, which was enough to accommodate hundreds of songs worth of unique note patterns. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do with the expanded design space they've afforded themselves.

These location tests are usually incredibly anal about folks recording video of their unfinished game, but some undercover gentlemen managed to snag video of the game and put it on Nico Nico Douga. Check it out if you've got an account. I'm a little concerned about the readability of 9 note lanes in Drummania (I had a hard enough time parsing the kick pedal lane in the original DM), but that's a sacrifice you gotta make, I guess.

Those muffins...

2009-08-07T15:46:00.006-06:00

...turned out pretty good, I think. A little inconsistent in terms of size, though. Gotta work on that. The recipe called for the following:

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 teaspoons backing powder
1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 large ripe bananas, mashed well
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup milk
1/4 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

The recipe said I would end up with 12 muffins, but closer to 18 resulted. I am not complaining! Thanks to Bob Bakes for inspiring me in the first place.

ADDENDUM: I brought these over to a good friend's house last night, had a lot of people eat them. Response was delightfully positive; this morning I received a phone message from Daniel Hood stating that "That muffin was fiiiiiine" - Mission accomplished, baby.

Yup. This blog has officially turned a corner. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson circa 1993... "Hold on to your butts."

Following Up

2009-08-06T14:42:00.004-06:00

A number of readers have mentioned to me that the previous post is confusing. My mistake! I intended to flesh it out a little more at the time. Things got away, as they often do, so let's go ahead and fix that.

The screenshot you see in the previous post is from the 1984 TV broadcast of Fist of the North Star, one of the most iconic and gloriously schlocky manga and anime series of all time. You can stream it for free (all 109 episodes!) over at Funimation's video site, along with a variety of other shows. I recommend checking out Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999 while you have the chance; neither show has been officially released within the US before, and are enormously influential and important examples of Leiji Matsumoto kickin' ass.

Lemme reign myself in. If you've never heard of Fist of the North Star, or if you're familiar with the concept but have never seen the original, you might as well go watch the first episode. You should know pretty quickly if you love it or hate it, I think, and from there it should be easy to judge whether or not you want to continue. At the very least, you should have some other options if you decide to peruse the rest of Funimation's streaming site.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go bake some Banana Muffins. Pictures forthcoming.

Censorship

2009-07-31T12:25:00.002-06:00

A Return to Bloggin' - SRWJ

2009-07-07T16:48:00.008-06:00

Well, hello again! It's been a while, so lemme tell you what I've been up to over the past six months or so, vidja-game wise.

Mostly, I've been working on editing (read: rewriting) the script for an English-language romhack of Super Robot Wars Judgment for the Game Boy Advance, a ridiculously awesome game about robots punching other robots in half, as demonstrated by the following screenshot:
Super Robot Wars is a really, really long-running franchise of strategical role-playin'-game-a-ma-phones that smush the characters and plotlines of a whole bunch of different robot anime together. This means hundreds of characters, most of the plotlines from their respective shows, and a lot of dialogue.

In the case of this romhack, said dialogue was translated by a non-native English speaker, and needed a lot of rewriting. I saw the project page for the game over at romhacking.net back in January, shot the project lead a PM asking if he needed any editing help, and got sent the dialogue for the game's first scenario. I spent a couple of hours polishing the thing up, sent it back to the project lead, and got a whole bunch of new scenario scripts in return. And so it went for about 5 months. Working on this thing was, I found, a lot of fun. I ended up skipping on Persona 4 in favor of rewriting goofy Super Robot Wars dialogue. Plus, y'know, last semester in college. Priorities (sorta).

For the record, I'm not a member of any kind of fan community devoted to these games, and I'd never even seen half of the shows featured in the game prior to starting work on the project. The franchise in its modern form is consistently breezy, silly fun that generally treats the player's time with respect, and I really dug working on it. When the translation patch gets released in a few months, I suspect you'll dig it too.

Still, I'm not quite done yet. The massive script has been edited, sure, but I still need to go back and see everything in context, proofread, find stuff I missed, and rewrite some more. I was originally thinking about turning this into a kind of "Let's Play" thing, akin to David Cabrera's old blog playthrough of the Super Robot Wars 2 remake from a few years ago, but decided against it at the last second. People are waiting for this dang translation patch, y'know? If I started talking about this game you can't play every day for a month or two, I would eventually start feeling like a pretty legit asshole, as opposed to a guy who was merely accused of being one by crazy robot fans.

So instead, I'm changing this thing from a vidja-game blog to an all-purpose one. I've been meaning to do it for a while, but this time it's fo' real. Consider this fair warning.

Book Review: Arcade Mania!

2009-01-17T16:38:00.016-07:00

Arcade Mania! is a new book from Kotaku editor Brian Ashcraft about Japanese arcades, the games inside and the people who play them. That might sound like a fairly narrow focus, but Ashcraft smartly chooses to center not just on traditional joystick-based video games (played primarily by dudes with rich parents for 6 hours a day), but on UFO Catchers, sticker machines, and the amazingly sophisticated network-based Mahjongg and card-based arcade games that are both insanely popular and also nearly totally unknown in the West.

He's also made an interesting structural choice - the chapters of the book are organized the same way that the average Japanese game center is, with UFO Catchers up front, followed by music/fighting/shooting games, dedicated cabinet games, and so on.

Each chapter is a snapshot of the history of arcade games. Yu Suzuki and Hang-On are the lynchpin of the dedicated cabinet chapter, but it's not just about the 80s and 90s - the chapter also gives us a glimpse into the history of the non-video amusement games that eventually inspired Suzuki and others to put plastic motorcycles and Ferraris in game centers. The shooting game chapter covers the Space Invaders boom and Xevious, leading us right up to the present. There's even an interview with Minoru Ikeda, the guy who runs superplay DVD publisher INH, including an attempt to explain why he thought "Insanity Naked Hunter" would be a good name for a DVD publisher.

There's more fun reading in here - the fighting game section has interviews with Daigo Umehara, of course, but it also has chit-chat with Arc System's Daisuke Ishiwatari, SNK producer Shinya Kimoto (choice advice to future game designers: "Punching is important. That, and the sound effects of smacking someone."), and Virtua Fighter 5 director Daichi Katagiri. There's nothing earth-shattering in here for people who have been paying attention to these games for a while (You wa Shock from SNK exec Soichiro Hosoya: "We have to release our fighting games in arcades. If we didn't, no one would buy the console versions."), but Jean Snow's page layouts are clean and Ashcraft's newspapery-prose is consistently engaging and informative.

Even for people who already think they know everything about Japanese arcade games, though, the chapters on mahjong and card-based arcade games are pretty dang interesting. If you've used MAME at all in the past few years, chances are that you've noticed the enormous back-archive of utterly bewildering strip-mahjong games, and have since written off the concept of arcade mahjong as pandering bullshit devoid of any value whatsoever. Arcade Mania! is here to prove you wrong, son. Specifically: man, Sega's Network Taisen Mahjong and Konami's Mahjong Fight Club series are ridiculously sophisticated networked, touch-screen affairs with IP-card tracking and everything. Hell, Sega and Konami even have their own competing rosters of real-life pro mahjong players who are basically paid to play their respective arcade games all the time - the chance for regular players to run into pros is a big draw.

The one sorta-weak link in the book is the chapter on Retro Games, which consists primarily of an interview with Goichi Suda in which he talks about "maybe opening a retro game center" across the street from Grasshopper Manufacture, and some quotes from Toshiyuki Kanbayashi, the owner of Shibuya Kaikan Monaco, a fairly popular retro game center. It feels weirdly under-researched, and Suda is practically the only source quoted in the entire chapter. Oh, and the other weak link: Ashcraft fucks up during the music game chapter when describing DDR's double mode, which is expressly designed for one person to play with what appears to be two players' worth of inputs - he makes the rookie mistake of thinking that his interview subject is rad enough to be playing the normal game, designed for one player, on both the one and two-player side... actually, considering how confusing that last sentence is, his mistake was totally understandable.

Besides that, though? I dug the hell out of this book, and I bet you will too. It's about $15 or so over at amazon, and comes in the adorably-compact-by-western-standards A4 size. People walking by your bookshelf will be practically magnetized to the damn thing. Oh baby.

Grab bag update #2

2009-01-13T17:24:00.005-07:00

In lieu of providing new content, here are a couple of links that deserve your attention:

First up is a Gamasutra interview with Arc System Works, the awesome men and woman behind the Guilty Gear series, the thoroughly under-appreciated Battle Fantasia, and a slew of other 2D fighting games, including the recently released BlazBlue. There's a lot of interesting information in here, most of which has handily been digested by David Cabrera (protip: if you don't read his blog on a regular basis, you totally should be), but I was most amused by BlazBlue director Toshimichi Mori's issue with the way Capcom has been presenting Street Fighter IV:

Toshimichi Mori: I'm not trying to pick a fight with Capcom or anything, but with Street Fighter IV, they made a big deal about how the game was designed to be accessible to people new to the genre.
I remember when I first read that in an interview, I was like, "What? How can they say that?!" I thought maybe I was seeing things. I think they need to take a second look at the list of moves for that game before they make a claim like that.

Sure, people like us who work with games, or fans of fighting games can do a hadouken or a shoryuken without thinking much about it, but for somebody just getting started? Those moves are pretty tough! You can't expect new players to just whip those moves out every time.

To fill your game with moves like that and then emphasize how simple it was for beginners to pick up seemed irresponsible to me. Street Fighter IV is not a game geared toward people who've never played fighters before. If they were really interested in making a beginner-friendly game, they should've made included a few impressive moves a player could do with the press of a button.

That is some curly-mustache-grade irony, right there.

Second - while 1up is sorta dead, their Retronauts blog, which boasts the talents of Jeremy Parish and Ray Barnholt, among others, is rockin' harder than ever.

Case in point: their recent interview with Famicom-era Konami musician Hidenori Maezawa. This guy is one of the mystery heroes behind the memorable music of many Konami games. Best part is by far this factoid on the Parodius soundtrack:

Maegawa: "When I was working on Parodius, we had a very short time with the game, so I wasn't able to compose a new soundtrack for it. But you know, classical music is public domain -- once the composer has died, 50 years later we're free to use it however we wish and the music belongs to the public....that's why we used classical music for the game. We only had one month to create the Parodius' soundtrack!"

There's lots of other cool stuff on the Retronauts blog besides this interview, anyway. I recommend checking it out.

Semi-Capsule Review: Ketsui Death Label (DS)

2009-01-09T15:15:00.011-07:00

Ketsui Death Label is a DS port of the arcade shooting game from which this blog's title is uneasily derived. The original game (developed by the genre-defnining Cave) has practically taken on the status of myth among shooting game fans - it's never been ported to a home console, you can't emulate it, and the arcade board itself sells for something like a thousand bucks last time I checked. It's also purportedly really good, with a scoring system that rewards getting up close to the enemies. Plus, there are lots of mesmerizing, colorful bullet patterns and excellent music courtesy of Manabu Namiki. And helicopters. Awww yeah.
Death Label, developed by those Tetris Grand Masters over at Arika, is the most glorified boss rush ever made. Instead of a set number of stages like in the arcade game, the DS version consists of different courses, each one sending you up against different bosses from the arcade version of the game in a row. The play mechanics have been reappropriated a little bit for the small screens, but the end result still requires you to stay as close to the boss as long as you can without getting killed.

Interestingly, you also get a ton of points for carefully using up all of your bombs at each boss encounter, turning all of the bullets onscreen into big multiplier point items with each use. That's a scoring mechanic that doesn't show up very much in these kinds of games, which usually reward you for bombing as little as possible. Unfortunately, it also means that in a lot of cases you end up spending most of your time shooting the boss until near-dead, then waiting around until a particularly big bullet pattern comes out, bombing, and then waiting around some more.

Besides the steadily harder set of courses, the game also has an Extra Mode which replicates the fifth stage of the arcade game on the DS with a pretty absurd level of difficulty. There's also Doom Mode, in which you fight the true last boss of the arcade game over and over, with the difficulty ramping up each time.

The game has an art gallery that unlocks as you complete the equivalent of achievements ("destroy this boss," "destroy that boss," "don't bomb," etc.), which in turn unlocks a bizarre little side mode called "Oshiete IKD-san!" in which Cave head-honcho Tsuneki Ikeda instructs various characters from Ketsui itself on the game's play mechanics. There are also mini-superplay videos and assorted meta-weirdness from the development staff of the DS game. Most of it is beyond my rudimentary Japanese ability, but it, along with the included superplay DVD of the arcade version, show that Arika wasn't willing to just push this thing out the door. Sorta. It feels apologetic, like "hey, sorry we couldn't make a real game for the DS. Here's a bunch of unnecessary stuff for you to peruse as compensation." That's the kind of vibe I get, anyway.

Second opinion: here's a video review of the game by shmups forum member Rob, who lives in the great state of Alaska. You may find that he is pretty picky about these kinds of games (and maybe a little insane), but he is an important voice, nonetheless.

Special Round's 2008 Games I Liked a Lot (in no particular order)

2008-12-26T00:10:00.026-07:00

It's the end of the year, my friends. That means it's also time for a big list. It's my obligation as a blogger to write lists. And I am trying to oblige.

So here's a list of the best games I played this year (trying very hard to stick to games that came out in 2008), in no particular order. I'm not too big a fan of ordered lists. I will include bullet points, though! It's the least I can do.

Mother 3 is a rarity. Superbly written, endlessly clever and imaginative, thematically rich in ways that make the vast majority of story-driven video games look like they're from some kind of other, more primitive dimension. It's also emotionally brutal, pulling only one punch in the course of its narrative. The 250-track score is undeniably one of the best in a game ever, and the way it's married to the thoroughly Dragon Questy battle system is perfectly restrained. Probably the only JRPG anyone needs to play, really.
Geometry Wars 2 fixes almost all the mistakes of its predecessor. The first game was an enormously flawed arena shooter (best way to get a big score: fly around the arena in circles for multiple days in a row) that inexplicably became the critical darling of both whoever metacritic tracks in addition to the large sub-target audience of pothead programmers with large TVs (I say this with the utmost respect!). With the sequel, we see Bizarre Creations' Stephen Cakebread learning how to make a good arcade game. A long game is minutes long, instead of hours and hours. The Deadline game mode, which lasts 3 minutes and requires a lot of interesting techniques in order to score well, features a complex rank system akin to those of arcade shooting games that adjusts its difficulty to the player's ability. And the way the upper-right corner of the screen shows your friends' scores at all times, updating as you get better? Great idea!
Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is video game satire done exactly right. It treads into the theater of the absurd, plays a couple games of b-ball and leaves after a few hours. Better than the games it's lampooning, Barkley is careful to not overstay its welcome and to keep a straight face, no matter how stupid it gets. That people who don't get the joke took the game at face value as a "serious rpg" is all that needs to be said. If you can't play Mother 3 for whatever reason, play this instead.
Braid was pretty great. Especially if you drink and you get drunk or if you smoke weed and you get high.
The World Ends With You was... shit, that's another JRPG. Uh oh. TWEWY is a game that reminded me of a time when Square was not quite the relatively boring developer that it is now. Lots of progressive ideas that make numbers going up considerably more fun than normal, coherent, well-produced aesthetics, a loving and gutsy localization, and an unbelievably insane battle system thing. Oh yeah! It also had some funky music. Inexplicably good game.
Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is the DS port of the super charming Super Famicom roguelike that has warmed the hearts of millions. What? It's only sold a a few thousand copies in the US? Son of a bitch. Don't let cult-hit unpopularity stop you from playing this game, which plays a little like Nethack with a lot more personality and less absurd bullshit for you deal with. Even better, the game actually teaches you how to play it. I think that's a benchmark for any difficult game, these days: why make the player look outside of the game itself in order to attain basic proficiency? The obvious answer is because youtube and niconico douga make it easier than ever for players to share information, but it's the thought that counts, guys. Shiren gives a shit. Will you?

Honorable mention goes to the following almost great games...

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for being a great game that is also terribly, terribly buggy, crashing the 360 outright every other time I start the game up. Backbone Entertainment, you are an awful developer. Not awful enough to ruin Super Turbo, but almost!
No More Heroes, you are almost a fantastic game! So, so close. Let us focus on the good things, like the superb writing, voice acting and cutscene direction. The boss fights are also really good. Let us focus less on the bad things that are debatably "the point," like the barren cityscape and kinda monotonous combat and stuff like that. I'm sure the sequel will be awesome.
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is, finally, a modern Castlevania with some thought evident in its construction. Occasionally hard as hell, lighter on the OCD, and the bosses are mostly great. The amount of graphic reuse during some of the outdoor areas is bewildering and unfortunate, but the game leaves you with a good last impression, and that's important: these games haven't been able to do that for years. There are still obvious things wrong with this game (the villagers and their retarded fetch-quests, especially), but considering the brainless nature of its predecessors, it's still deserving of some high-fives. Or are they almost high-fives? Yeah, pretty sure they're real.

That wraps it up for this year. I'm sure I forgot at least a couple great games from this year, but I gotta wrap this thing up. Thanks for reading, and have a rockin' new year, ok?

Capsule Review - Lost Odyssey

2008-12-22T19:40:00.010-07:00

First Blue Dragon, now Lost Odyssey, the other big-name Xbox 360 project from Mistwalker, a studio that seems incapable of making a good game.

Lost Odyssey's premise seems tailored specifically to make hack japanese role-playing game designers weep. The protagonist, a man named Kaim Argonar, is immortal. The game, however, is a remarkably traditional JRPG. How did the designers reconcile this? Well, if an immortal character falls in battle, they get back up a couple turns later with a percentage of their HP. If everyone gets KO'd, then it's game over as usual.

At the beginning of the game, we see Kaim get crushed beneath a meteor. Everyone in a hundred mile radius appears to be dead, buried beneath molten magma. Kaim's A-OK. Later, in another battle, he and another immortal character get hit by a gust of wind generated by the wings of some kind of large bird. They both take mortal damage and die. "GAME OVER" appears on the screen. There is a problem here!

Pacing problems abound. Here's a summary of the Things You Do in the first disc (10 hours) of the game, in order:

Nearly impossible-to-lose series of introductory battles. Both paralyizingly boring and pretty cool looking.
Long stroll through capital city. Jab the A button repeatedly while walking along every single wall in order to find Important Hidden Items (actually not important at all). Compared to the city folk with nothing interesting to say and the backtracking between areas, pressing the A button repeatedly is actually the most interesting part.
Finally leave the city for obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest.
Hardest first boss in a modern JRPG ever.
Slightly shorter version of 2.
Slightly shorter version of 3 and 4.
Segment where you're trapped in prison and must walk around in circles until the game decides it is time for you to leave.
Awful stealth section.
Even longer version of 2.
Ominous foreshadowing.
Funeral minigame! First run around through a massive area and pick up 10 flowers by pressing the A button. Then do it again as another character, this time picking up twigs. Then a torch-waving minigame. Start crying.
Obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest, followed by a dungeon that looks like a dungeon.
Save your game before inserting Disc 2.

On the upside, the English voice acting is pretty good!

The home version of IIDX 15 is completely absurd

2008-12-17T19:57:00.013-07:00

beatmania IIDX is probably the hardest video game ever made. It was already the oldest and most stoically difficult music game out there, but the recently released Playstation 2 port of the 15th(!) arcade installment, the absurdly themed DJ TROOPERS, has a few new additions that push things right over the top.

IIDX is a hard game. I often describe it to people who are only familiar with Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the like as "Everything Hero." On the hardest difficulty (called "Another," for nebulous reasons), you play every part of the song, or close. It's far more like real-time sequencing than DJ'ing, really. Here, as an example, is autoplay of a song from the home version of DJ Troopers with an uncharacteristically Japanese title called "Child's Sketchbook." The tune's originally from Drummania/Guitar Freaks, another Konami music game series. Folks refer to songs that jump from game to game like this as "transplant songs."

Man, isn't that ridiculous? Especially 0:48! This is, actually, kind of the norm for hard songs in this game. Not necessarily in terms of sheer numbers - there are still lots of easy, or at least, easier songs - but there are more memorably virtuosic songs out there with every new version. It's hard for them not to dominate your impression of the series as a whole.

Now for some attempts at providing context: IIDX has always been about catering towards the fairly small group of people that obsessively play the game in Japanese arcades, or wish they could. In the arcade, you buy a card that keeps track of your scores. The card also allows you to set other players as your rivals, comparing your scores with other players in minute detail - you can play "against" other players' scores as ghosts, like in a racing game, with a little +/- number keeping track of where you are scorewise with an opponents' best score on a song, and a score graph that lets you easily compare your performance with others and yourself. There's even a database included in each of the home versions with score data for every player registered in Konami's system from a certain date before the game's home release, giving everyone a shot at something resembling live competition.

Another concept that I feel is integral to understanding the people who play this game is that there's almost no memorization involved. Guitar Hero and Rock Band have convinced quite a few people I know that music games are all about memorizing the note patterns for the super hard songs and practicing them over and over again until muscle memory takes over. IIDX can be played like that, sure, but the vast majority of players opt to focus on honing their reaction time to a razor's edge.
There are a number of options, adjustable before and during ever y song, to let you do this. The first is "Hi-Speed," (adjustable from 0.5 up to 5) which spaces the notes out and makes them scroll faster. If you've played Rock Band with the "Breakneck Speed" option turned on, it's a little like that. The difference is that it's totally controllable. Hold down the start button in the middle of a song to bring up a list of the available hi-speeds (seen above). Press the top row of buttons on the controller to increase the hi-speed, and press the bottom row of buttons to lower it. It's pretty dang handy.

The other helpful feature is called "Sudden+," which causes a square pane to appear over the area where the notes appear (seen above). Hold down the start button and spin the turntable up and down to adjust how much of your view is obstructed. Combined with Hi-Speed, you can make the notes scroll at any speed you like, depending on personal preference, the song's BPM, etc. The result of all this is that you eventually learn to read notes that scream from the top of the screen at speeds that seem, initially, to be entirely unreadable.

There's a second phase to all of this madness, and it's called "Random." Like Hi-Speed, it's turned on before you start a song. Do so, and the default note patterns of the song (a big reference list can be found here) get randomized. Any note that normally appears in the 3rd column gets swapped over to a random other column, and so on for every other note in the song. In the above picture, the left side player has random turned off, and the right side player has random turned on.

The result is that every song can remain surprising for many, many plays. More importantly, you get to play a huge number of different patterns that don't necessarily exist in any song by default (I'm not even going to start talking about "s-random," which randomizes every single note, as opposed to just swapping the note columns around). A common topic of conversation among beatmania players is the notion of songs having "good randoms" or "bad randoms," or being more prone to either. It's a fascinating extra layer of gameyness.

Ok! Why's the home version of IIDX 15 so especially nuts? The reason is: they added a new, harder difficulty for around 20 songs, one of which was already one of the hardest songs in the game.

Let's compare. Below is a video of Mendes, which was already the "boss song" of IIDX15. On the left side of the screen is the Another difficulty setting (previously the highest, above Hyper and Normal difficulty). It has 2000 notes in the span of 2 minutes. On the right side of the screen is the new difficulty they added for the home version, which no one's really sure what to call yet ("Danger" difficulty and "black another" are frontrunners). It has 2626 notes in the span of 2 minutes, and is the closest thing yet in this game to a challenge that is genuinely physically impossible. As of this writing, there are an estimated 5 people in the world capable of clearing it. I think it's a good place to stop at, really:

Capsule Review - Blue Dragon (XBOX 360)

2008-12-03T11:45:00.015-07:00

Playing lots of games that aren't obscure Japanese playstation games means... quick little capsule reviews! Although yeah, I've been playing some genuinely terrible obscure Japanese Playstation games, too. Don't play Touki Denshou Angel Eyes. It's not worth it.

An attempt to recapture the collaborative magic that resulted in Chrono Trigger, Blue Dragon is a charmless mishmash of Stuff We've Seen Before stapled to a plot that goes nowhere interesting. Akira Toriyama's character designs are his most boring ever. It's easy enough to assume that he was fed up with being associated with fictional works containing the word "Dragon" in their titles, and provided the willfully schlocky and unimaginative character designs in this game as a form of protest. The big bad guy, a geriatric named Nene (see below image) who flies around the world in his futuristic airship tormenting people (because he's just that kind of guy), is the most obvious offender. He has absurd horn-rimmed glasses, and floats around in a flying chair while wearing what appears to be a cozy blanket around his waist. It doesn't help that none of the protagonists appear to be over the age of 15. Or that I can't remember their names despite playing the game for many hours before calling it quits.Blue Dragon, being the brainchild of Final Fantasy Man Hironobu Sakaguchi, cribs Final Fantasy V's compelling job system and Final Fantasy X's compelling battle system, and removes everything that made either of them good. Characters switch between various incredibly boring classes (Black Mage! Barrier Mage! Generalist!), with no visual change other than an icon at the bottom of the screen. Instead of unlocking progressively weirder and tenuously useful job classes as you progress, Blue Dragon opts to let you slowly unlock classes from a small, unchanging list as your characters level up. The game's Xbox 360 achievements, of course, involve reaching level 99 with all of your characters, and then doing it for all of your characters' job classes. The easiest way to do this is to level a barrier mage until he learns a spell that lets you run into enemies in order to automatically defeat them for job points, and then run around, smashing into said enemies over and over for hours, occasionally visiting an Inn to replenish your mp. There are people out there who genuinely enjoy this.

The soundtrack, composed by Final Fantasy's Nobuo Uematsu, is nearly totally forgettable. Except for the boss music, which works a lot better when it's ironic. What the hell happened with this game?

Romhacks: Their Finest Hour?!

2008-10-17T21:38:00.002-06:00

This week saw the release of two long-awaited romhacking projects. The first was an English translation of Persona 2: Innocent Sin, a Playstation game about a couple of high school kids who totally rock Hitler's face. I'm not sure if I'm going to get around to playing this one right away. It has a tendency to randomly crash when running on a PSP, according to the patch's readme. That's not reassuring! Still, I assume I'll check it out eventually. It seems a little too interesting for me to skip out.

The other big finished project is Mother 3, the sequel to the cult classic Super Nintendo RPG that Westerners know as Earthbound. I played it in Japanese with the aid of a (pretty shitty) dialogue translation after play-asia had a sale on the game near the beginning of the year, and I was blown away. It's easily one of the best games I've ever played.

Shigesato Itoi

Moreso than any other game I can think of, the Mother series has always had the guiding hand of esteemed copywriter and essayist Shigesato Itoi behind it. He's not just a semi-famous name added for the sake of grafting meaningless clout onto the game. He's actually responsible for writing all of the game's dialogue. And conceiving the story and characters. Since Japanese RPGs are typically focused on story, characters and dialogue frequently written by computer science majors, Itoi's influence is immediately obvious. His games are warm, charming. They're humanistic.

In Earthbound, a common status ailment was homesickness. As a young boy thrust into a terrifying adventure, it's to be expected. The cure for homesickness? Visiting home, or calling your mother on the phone. That kind of charming thoughtfulness is Itoi personified. Frankly, though, after playing Mother 3, I think Itoi is probably just a genius. We need more people like him working on video games.

Something else worth mentioning: Mother 3 has the most amazing soundtrack I've ever heard in a video game. It was composed entirely by Shogo Sakai, who you may know as the composer of Super Smash Bros. Melee. It is 250-something tracks long. There are something like 50-60 battle themes (which fits in nicely with the game's wonderfully transparent rhythm-focused battles). All of those tracks are astonishingly good. In fact, let's go ahead and make this claim: Mother 3 has the best video games soundtrack ever. I am writing this mostly because I genuinely feel this way, and mostly because I want you to go and check this game out, even if you had no prior interest. Yes.

Here's the English-language trailer. Go play this game. There are detailed how-tos on the official web site.

Fantasy Zone II Remake & Mega Man 9

2008-10-10T13:50:00.011-06:00

First: yes, the Fantasy Zone II Remake in the recently released Fantasy Zone Complete Collection is pretty dang fantastic. Kurt Kalata's got a writeup over at HG101, and there's a youtube video you can watch here - it's got a link to a demo of the Windows version, too!

Mega Man 9, too, is pretty great. It's a lot less interesting to me at face value, just because hey - it's Mega Man 9, y'know? This franchise has had its time in the sun, and while People Who Played Video Games In the Nineties really dig Mega Man, the fact of the matter is that, uh, getting the chance to play another installment with intentionally anachronistic graphic design doesn't quite instill me with giddy excitement.

That said, they did a good job with the game. The level design is excellent, and occasionally a little sadistic. Sometimes it feels like there aren't enough mid-stage checkpoints (there's only one per stage, besides the one before each boss). It's a tough game. And yet, while you may initially struggle through a stage the first couple of times, a second attempt after finishing it will often reveal that hey, this game's not that hard after all. I think that's a good thing.

Most stages are built around setpieces or build on interesting new play mechanics that haven't been seen in a Mega Man Game before. One stage introduces swinging pendulums, which react to your movement while standing on top of one. The first time you run into them, they're spaced pretty reasonably over a bottomless pit, allowing you to come to grips with their behavior. The second time is similar, but this time there are spikes positioned just so, forcing you to swing the platform precisely through the gap and in to saftey. The third time you run into one of these things, it's suspended halfway up a room lined all the way around with spikes. The only exit is through a 2-tile-wide hold in the bottom of the room. That's some gutsy shit.
There's also a downloadable Endless mode, which Capcom is charging $3 for. Kind of a shame, because it's really neat and should be included with the game by default, I think. The way it works is, you start at the beginning of a randomly chosen 10-screen long stage. There's a warp at the end. Reach it, and you'll be warped to another randomly chosen 10-screen long stage. A lot of these stages are modeled after famous stages from Mega Man history, including that damned disappearing block section in Heat Man's stage from Mega Man 2. Every 30 screens, you get to fight a boss. Die, and the game records the number of rooms travelled as your best score. It's pretty dang clever!

Conclusion: You did a pretty good job, guys. Please do not make a Mega Man 10. I don't care how well this game sells. Don't do it.

Fantasy Zone Complete Collection - M2's Final Battle?!

2008-08-11T22:04:00.011-06:00

Fantasy Zone Complete Collection is the 33rd entry in the Sega Ages 2500 series, which you may know as the best old game compilation series ever. I wrote about the 32nd entry, Phantasy Star Complete Collection, back in April. While other developers tend to view compilations as shovelware at worst and a quick buck at best (the distinction is tenuous), developer M2 has always gone out of their way to present old games in the best light possible.

Fantasy Zone Complete Collection, sadly, looks like it's going to be the last Sega Ages entry ever. Unfortunate, to be sure, but worry not! M2 is clearly bringing their A-game to this loving tribute to one of Sega's most underappreciated franchises.

Along with Outrun and Space Harrier, Fantasy Zone is the Sega game that seems to best represent the often romanticized design attitudes of the nearly-dead game giant. It's Defender with gorgeous graphics and FM samba on the soundtrack, a two-way scrolling shooting game with a joyous sense of creativity and a slowly creeping tinge of the bizarre. How else do you explain the series protagonist, Opa-Opa, a pastel-colored creature with cherubic wings and tiny bootsies protruding from his underbelly (the wikipedia entry describes him as a "sentient spaceship")? The answer frequently offered up by the collective consciousness of People Who Play Video Games is "drugs, dude," but who can say for sure what the mysterious pseudonyms representing the Japanese men responsible for crafting '80s arcade games did in their spare time? I'm not going there.

So what's M2 offering up in this collection? In their Phantasy Star Complete Collection, they let you adjust the game difficulty for all of the games on the collection, offered options to increase walking speed and a turbo button for speeding through battles. Those features, in addition to the lavish display options and archival materials that have become a Sega Ages standard, made a bunch of beloved-but-crusty RPGs playable in a reasonable amount of time, and appreciable to a modern audience.

Fantasy Zone Complete Collection is a lot more ambitious. After releasing Fantasy Zone to the arcades on their workhorse System 16 board in 1986, Sega followed up with a sequel for their decidedly non-workhorse Mark III console, entitled "Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa," eventually porting it to the Mark III-based System E arcade hardware. What M2 is doing is slightly insane, and mostly incredible: they've developed a new System 16-based version of Fantasy Zone II, the version that should have existed but never was. In 2008!

It looks wonderful. The remake's official homepage as part of the Complete Collection can be found here, with screenshots and information aplenty. The other relevant piece of info about the game is that cult-favorite game composer Manabu Namiki (Trauma Center 2, various Cave shooting games) will be handling the sound design for the remake. And, y'know, it'll be $30 at Play-Asia. I'm psyched!

An Update for a Rainy Day

2008-08-06T17:57:00.006-06:00

Note: I started writing this at about 5 p.m. earlier today. Blogger was going through maintenance around then, and the end result was that I lost about half of this entry. As a good friend of mine pointed out, "I put all my chickens in the chicken box."

I'm sitting in the library, waiting for a sizable thunderstorm to pass on by. Colorado Weather Rules dictate that this will be within the next thirty minutes or so, which means it's time for me to link you to fun stories from around the internet. Pretty much what I usually do here, these days.

-Actionbutton.net, the Palatial Estate of Tim Rogers (formerly held by largeprimenumbers and insertcredit, in that order), is currently in the throes of the "Action Button Dot Net Manifesto." It's billed as the "twenty-five best games of all time," with Tim Rogers writing twenty-five monstrously long reviews, uploaded three-at-a-time every Wednesday. The criteria for making it on the list?

The choices on this list — save for one — are not made with the intention of riling anybody up. We have chosen simply and mathematically and scientifically. The criteria for a game’s inclusion — well, the criteria are actually pretty dodgy and antisocial, though let’s just pretend that we picked games that we really love — a lot — and that possess a clean aesthetic, self-assured graphical and sonic presentation, streamlined mechanics, and common-sensical level design.

As with all things written by Tim Rogers, you should probably not take him especially seriously, because if you do then you will probably say something stupid in a Kotaku comment section or worse. My advice is to read all the articles out loud, angrily, preferably in the company of friends. Every review so far mentions Godhand in some way, with the reservation that it is not in the list. I wonder.

-Braid came out on the Xbox Live Arcade today. I've only played it for about an hour so far. While not confident enough to emphatically recommend a purchase right now, I would strongly advise checking the trial out, if you get the chance. If you figure out how to get all the puzzle pieces in the first world, I think you'll be sold. Jonathan Blow, the game's designer, put up a walkthrough for the game over here, whose contents say more than I can about the game at this point, really.

-Edge has a pretty fantastic interview with Thunder Force VI director Tez Okano about his work on Segagaga, which you can read here. The anecdotes are fucking great:

"I was involved in every aspect of the game. I designed the game but also supervised the program, the sound, the graphics – everything. I was director, producer – everything from just one being: me! I was also in charge of promoting the game. You have to understand that we – no, I – had just about ¥30,000 (£142) to promote this title! I used ¥20,000 (£94) to get a mask made that I could use to go and promote the game everywhere! This mask was made by a true professional pro-wrestler. In many ways, the game established some industry firsts in terms of budgets alone!"

Also, I have to link the final shooting game segment, which is mentioned a couple times in the interview. Hearing about it is one thing, but seeing it? Yeah, you pretty much have to.

The Bionic Commando remake's Japanese trailer is staggering

2008-07-28T18:12:00.009-06:00

Seriously. Have you seen this thing yet? Dayummmn. (also fuck you gametrailers for exploding out of my blog's margins, ok?)

I was already looking forward to the game, which promises to render Hitler's exploding head in Vibrant 3D Turbographics, but this pretty much sent the Frothometer off the charts. I'm most impressed by the way that it takes footage from a western-european-developed game and, through careful use of the Japanese-provided art assets (from Shinkiro, no less) and the creation of a faux-70s super robot theme song, manages to create the convincing impression that Capcom totally made the game on their own. Also: why does the game have a CERO B (ages 12+) rating in Japan and an M FOR MATURE rating in the US? Censorship of Hitler's exploding head? I sure hope not!

Also awesome: the game comes out on the Xbox Live Arcade in two weeks, after contentious art-game-thing Braid and before Potential Shooting Game of 2008 Galaga Legions. It's part of some promotional thing that Microsoft is doing, where they release all the really good looking games on their service one after the other, and then presumably it's right back to sudoku.

Oh, and Sub, if you're reading this... do you recognize the vocalist in the trailer? I trust your knowledge on this kind of thing.
EDIT: Ok, I found this Capcom blog entry about the comic-con Bionic Commando panel.

...one of the things he wanted to do show us was what Capcom was doing for promotion for the Japanese version of BCR, witch is a total nastalga trip feturing a new theme sung by Anime singer Ichiro Mizuki (Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, GoLion) only done in Japan.

So yes, confirmation on that front.

Also, my good friend Lee Slone pointed out that you can download the entire soundtrack for the Bionic Commando remake on itunes. I thought you could download the song from the above video, titled "Go Go Bionic," but based on the song length and preview I get the impression that it's just a joke song or something. Bummerrr.

Besides that, there's also this recent trailer for Thunder Force VI, which I was adamantly dismissing as vaporware right up until a few weeks ago.

This should pretty much sum up my thoughts on the subject. Official site's over here. Helllll yeah.

supabonk.mid + youtube

2008-07-25T14:38:00.006-06:00

You may know Jacob Kaufman (pseudonym "virt") as the composer for games like Shantae, Contra 4, and a whole bunch of schlocky and semi-schlocky licensed games with disproportionately excellent music. Also: a few incredible side projects. Assuming nothing has changed since his blog last updated, he is currently employed as a sound designer for game developer Volition. What you may not know is that he recently started uploading a video series to youtube and it is going to change your life forever.

Failing that, I think you may laugh. Plenty of further contact info in the video itself!

Special E3 News Digest

2008-07-11T15:36:00.013-06:00

Alternate title: Making the Best of Irrelevance -First, as a follow-up to the Game Center CX article from a few days ago, Gamasutra recently reported that XSEED Games is localizing the Game Center CX DS game for release this Winter. It's gonna be called "Retro Game Challenge," and I'm expecting stupendous things. Frankly, so should you. Jeremy Parish does a good job of explaining what's so cool about the game over at his 1UP preview: In effect, it chronicles the history of 8-bit gaming, perfectly capturing its fairly humble and simple beginnings with basic platformers and shooters as well as the sophisticated titles that characterized the NES' twilight years. The eight imaginary titles in Retro Game Challenge are, quite frankly, strong enough to have been legitimate releases on the NES -- which makes this an excellent classic-game compilation whose only real drawback is that the titles collected never actually existed. But even that's not so bad, since it contains a number of convincing (but fake) magazines to help contextualize its imaginary catalog of releases -- even going so far as to offer hints, cheats, and teasers for upcoming releases.
Also stupendous is XSEED's announcement that they'll be bringing the Korg DS-10 Synthesizer to the US. This actually comes out in Japan next week, and it sounds phenomenal - it's a full-featured synthesizer, an actual piece of music software developed by people with a long track-record of making funtastic music doodads like the Kaossilator.

The big difference is that the Kaossilator and other similar devices have less functionality than the DS-10 due to the lack of dual touch screens, and actually cost far more - the DS-10 is going to cost about $50 in Japan, probably $30 in the US, while the Kaossilator retails for about $200.

If you need further convincing, this clip from 1UP is slightly unintentionally hilarious in addition to being an excellent overview of the software. Beyond that, there are a bunch of demonstration videos on youtube, including one in which game music composer Nobuyoshi Sano (Ridge Racer, Drakengard) uses 4 DS' at once using the software's built-in wifi link-up feature. Hell, I might as well just embed it right here.

-Second, Nintendo officially announced Rhythm Tengoku Gold for US release on the DS later this year. It's gonna be called "Rhythm Heaven" - no surprises there, thankfully. There's been a rather unfortunate lack of coverage of the game so far, which is a shame, because it looks like it'll be a wonderful follow-up to one of the best music games ever. Video below!

If you never played the original game, the pithy phrase that people tend to throw out when describing it is "Warioware + music game." That's accurate in respect to the game's charming sense of personality, but it doesn't do the genius of the game's design justice. Each of the game's stages is a short, 2 minute long contextualized challenge using only the A button for control. The first stage, for example, has you punching soccer balls and light bulbs in time to some jammin' music. Every few stages is a remix, which mixes the previous few stages together in wonderful and inventive ways. And then there are the obligatory extra games, including an hilariously full-featured GBA drum simulator.

The DS version looks like it has similar gameplay with a stylus-driven interface, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the rest of the hardware, y'know?

That was E3. David Cabrera archived an extensive collection of fan umbrage to the FFXIII 360 announcement, too. Go check that out, and have a good day!

Game Center CX tidbits

2008-07-10T23:48:00.008-06:00

Have I ever mentioned how much Game Center CX rules? I don't think I have, so let me defer this explanation to David Cabrera, who said it better than I could ever hope to without resorting to borderline plagiarism:

It's a TV show where they put a man in a room with a videogame and they don't let him out until he's won. This is a more entertaining prospect than you'd think! "Retro Game Master" is either sarcastic or a misnomer, as the whole point of the show is that Arino is an likable, average guy and he's not very good at videogames. This show is about chuckling along with Arino's many failures and the cruelty of 8-bit games, rooting for him as he presses on, sticks cold compresses on his forehead, and hits the "a-ha" moments where he figures out how the game works. In the endgame you feel a real vicarious sense of accomplishment for the guy, in a situation where he may or may not win.

Right, so. Why bring up the show at a time like this? Two reasons!

First, the show was recently picked up for possible US distribution by Japanese production company Stylejam, and two episodes of the show were screened at the New York Asian Film Festival last week. The show's localized name for the US market is "Retro Game Master," and it looks like there's a decent chance that the show will get a DVD release or even cable TV exposure. Quite a few blogs covered the screenings in detail, including Matthew Hawkins' Cinema Pixeldiso column, Wired's Game Life blog, and - again - David Cabrera's Subatomic Brainfreeze (personal fan favorite). If G4 picked this show up, I'm pretty sure I would actually maybe watch the channel occasionally, or at the very least un-delete it from my TV.

Arino proves that this is not a practice limited to the US.

Besides the above news, TV-Nihon recently fansubbed most of the first season of the show. I say "most" because while the "challenge" segments are always included, in which host Shinya Arino dukes it out with various games of indeterminate age and origin, the rest of each hour-long episode is not, in most cases. Some of these segments are pretty rad, and usually involve interviews with famous game directors and visits to game centers. I'm pretty sure their omission is because of the way the show was repackaged for Japanese DVD release, but it's still kind of a bummer.

That said, the Ultra Man and Ultra Seven episodes on TV Nihon's tracker are both full-length episodes with all of the show's segments included, so I'd advise checking those out first. And as always, Crunk Games' Game Center CX episode guide is still the best repository of information related to the show available. And before I forget, the DS game is ridiculously wonderful.

Man, I need to get back into the swing of things. I finished Persona 3 last week, so maybe I'll talk about that next? Hmmmm!

YOU WA SHOCK - The World Ends With You is good?!

2008-05-20T20:44:00.007-06:00

At a glance, The World Ends With You looks like another one of those inane Square-Enix games with angry Tetsuya Nomura teenagers running around doing generic JRPG jibba-jabba. Actually playing it, though? That's when you realize that it's probably one of the best, most focused games they've ever made. It's also one of the best games available for the DS.

Unfortunately, a few people I know have been turned off by the game's aesthetics and storyline within the first 20 minutes, which is a bummer. Yes, the protagonist, Neku Sakuraba, is initially an angst-ridden amnesiac with character design by Tetsuya Nomura. He wakes up in Shibuya and finds that he's trapped, forced to compete in a bizarre Battle Royale for seven days, or die. The story works, surprisingly, because it's incredibly fast-paced, and Neku develops into a fairly likeable character within a couple of hours.

I'm going to resist talking about the story, though, because The World Ends With You is a landmark of RPG game design that will probably end up being ignored completely. It's absurd how many stupid, endemic RPG design problems this game fixes in one fell swoop, especially considering that the game's directors were all graphic designers from Kingdom Hearts II.

There are so many good ideas here. Combat is entirely voluntary in nearly all situations, which is an incredibly good decision considering the open-world feel of the game. The way it works is - there's an icon in the bottom right corner of the screen when you're running around Shibuya. Tap it, and you'll "scan" the area, allowing you to read the thoughts of the omnipresent passers-by, and see "noise," which are angry-looking grafitti symbols that represent groups of enemies.

The thoughts of others are represented by blue thought bubbles, which you can tap to get the equivalent of a generic villager's conversation in any other RPG. You don't get to be privy to the secret hatreds and fetishes of an entire city, unfortunately (or fortunately? man, whatever) but the developers still had some fun with the concept. The oddest thought that I've run into was one written entirely in Japanese, which serves as one of many examples of the localization team's gold-plated balls.

Similarly, tapping on any of the noise symbols floating around a general area will start battlin'. You have a roughly two second period to tap up to four noise symbols, which will create a multiple-battle chain. The more enemies you chain together, the higher the difficulty, experience and drop rate of each progressive battle will be. There's even an item you can buy in the post-game that lets you chain up to sixteen battles together, at which point the risk-reward ratio becomes positively insane.

There's more! At any time, you can go to the items/equipment/save menu and drag a little slider around to adjust your level. Even if you've accumulated 60 levels' worth of experience, you can drop yourself tp levels 1-59 just by dragging the slider around. What's the point of crippling yourself like that? Well, the lower your level, the higher the enemy drop rate becomes. The best way to get really insane loot drops is to play skillfully at a really low level, where death is but a moment away.

Orrrr you can fudge the numbers a little bit. The only thing level determines is your HP. You can improve all of your base stats permanently by ingesting any of a huge number of food items from shops scattered throughout Shibuya. And man, this part is fucking great, too! The way this works is, both Neku and his partners can eat 24 "bytes" of food per day in real time, which represent the process of digestion. Every battle you fight digests one byte of food. A soda only takes 2 bytes to run through your system, and will only slightly cure your hunger pangs (affinity with your partner, basically), while a bowl of the ultra-rare Shadow Steak Ramen will take a full 24 bytes to digest, and permanently raise your base drop rate a little bit once finished. There are also a plethora of drugs, herbal supplements, donuts, soups and salads, mexican hot dogs etc. which all have various effects on your system and a charming description to round everything out.

Right, so: how does combat work? It's nuts, is what it is, taking place on both screens of the DS simultaneously. Neku appears on the bottom screen, his partner (dictated by the story) appears on the top, the same enemy group appears on both screens, and you get to fight them simultaneously on both screens while they do the same to you.

You control your partner with the d-pad. Tapping left and right starts a combo attack against an enemy in the specified direction, pressing up jumps, and down either blocks or sidesteps enemy attack. Neku, in the meantime, uses a variety of stylus-based inputs to attack enemies. These come in the form of equippable "pins," of which there are several hundred, each granting a different attack (all pins can be levelled up and "mastered," as well, and some even evolve into new pins, so there's that, too). Some cause Neku to slash an enemy when you swipe an enemy with the stylus, some let you drop boulders or fire lightning bolts by tapping enemies, and there are even a few that let you blow or yell into the microphone to attack the entire area with a huge shockwave. The game's official page actually has a bunch of excellent videos showing the battle system in ation, and I emphatically advise you to check it out if this sounds interesting. Or confusing.

The whole thing verges very close to total chaos in terms of how much visual stimulus the game expects you to pay attention to (it's been pointed out by others that combat mirrors the info overload present in a dense urban center like Shibuya), but more smart design choices alleviate most of the initial frustration. You can set your partner to act automatically either after a set period of inactivity, or all the time. You can adjust the game's difficulty, too, and even retry a battle on the easiest difficulty setting after getting a game over if you'd like. It'll even return to the difficulty you were at originally once you finish the battle. How incredibly courteous!

The game is rife with little courtesies. Every time you turn the game on, your equipped pins gain experience equal to the amount of time elapsed since the last time you played. Turn the game off for a couple days, and you'll come back to find all of your pins either levelled up or mastered. The bestiary allows you to easily see the effects of reducing your level on item drop percentages, by toggling back and forth between "adjusted" and "default." There's a crazy mini-game called "Tin Pin Slammer" that lets you use all of the pins you've found to play what can only be described as a cross between pogs, Street Fighter II and Motos. You can play it with up to four players via wi-fi, even!

If you've tried The World Ends With You out and found yourself put off by the initially groan-inducing jRPG goofiness, you oughts to give it another shot. If you've never heard of this shit before, go check it out. It's the best game Square's made in nearly a decade.

PC Engine Season - Galaga '88

2008-05-14T19:43:00.003-06:00

Near the end of last year, a friend of mine sold me his PC Engine - that's the adorable console from the late '80s that was way ahead of its time and mangled pretty horribly when brought to the US as the Turbografx-16. In its native land, the PC Engine was an insanely small and smartly designed console, a joint effort between iconic game developer Hu dson Soft and electronics manufacturer NEC.

Besides the small form factor, the PC Engine also eschewed cartridge storage in favor of a proprietary format known as Hucards (and eventually CDs), which looked like this (the case is exactly the same size as a CD jewel case, for size comparisons):

Kind of like little game trading cards, really.

Over its nearly decade-long lifespan, the console received a huge number of hardware revisions, which you can read about here. In my case, I ended up with the CD-Rom "briefcase unit," which combines the original console with the CD-rom attachment in one easily transported and slightly ridiculous Vidja Game Bungalow.
After owning the console for a few months, I decided that it was high time to start writing about the games that make the PC Engine what it is - stupendous. So let's kick things off with a look at Galaga '88, a good port of a great arcade game, and one of the signature games of the PC Engine, in my opinion.

Galaga '88 is something of a remake of the original Galaga, one of the best single-screen shooting games ever made. In thinking about what makes the original such a classic game, I concluded that it's the personable, charming touches that elevated it above being just another Space Invaders clone. The immediately recognizable sound design, iconic alien designs and wealth of secrets. Stuff like that.

So what did Galaga '88 bring to the table? Somehow, further boatloads of charm. The "challenging stages" of Galaga, with their hypnotic patterns of pacifist alien craft, are now synchronized to chunky FM big band music, and introduced with "THAT'S GALACTIC DANCIN'". I get the impression that the developers were proud of these stages, because opting to kick back at the bottom of the screen without firing - simply watching the aliens dance around - rewards you with a fairly decent Special Bonus.

The enemy patterns outside of the challenging stages are much the same as the original game, but the enemies are significantly more interesting. There are rainbow-hued invaders who explode in a display of fireworks. There are extra large creatures of various shapes and sizes who require several shots to defeat, but reward an appropriately large bonus. There are shelled space beasts who are impervious to fire except when in a certain vulnerable state.

Nearly all of these guys have little nuances to their behaviors - some will merge into even larger versions of themselves when given enough time, and will reward a huge amount of points if defeated. Scoring well is about knowing when to shoot. Managing the waves of enemies for survival in addition to eliciting their secret behaviors is essential.

Also essential is not getting hit. Like Galaga, you can get your current ship captured, then defeat the enemy that stole it away and merge back together for double the firepower. Even better, you can start the game with the combined two ships' worth of power at the expense of losing one of your extra lives. Even better than that - you can get your double-ship captured, then take it back for three ships of firepower. Same width as two ships, too!

The issue that results is that, in an average game, it's very easy to be cruisin' along with the triple-ship, comfortable. Then you'll get hit once or twice and end up losing control, plummeting into a death spiral of lost lives. Since you effectively have three lives in one with the triple-ship, you can sometimes go from doing pretty decently to Game Over in the span of a few seconds. It's brutal when it happens, but considering the sheer power of the triple ship, it's also a pretty good case of risk-reward at work. The game's fairly generous with extra lives, which evens things out a little bit, but considering how powerful the triple ship is, it's often in your best interest to keep yourself at full power whenever possible. Tough call!

Galaga '88 has a finite length of 29 stages, divided into different "dimensions." You can think of dimensions as being a representation of the overall game difficulty - you go through all 29 stages no matter what, in the same order, but you gotta do a little work in order to jump between dimensions.

So, right. You start out in dimension 1. Fair 'nuff. Defeating certain enemies or destroying the debris that often appears at the beginning of a stage will cause a blue canister to drop - grabbing it will grant a brief period of invincibility, and collecting two will prompt a shift to the next dimension at the next challenging stage, along with a steadily increasing bonus.
You can jump all the way up to dimension 5 (or 4 in the PC Engine version), with shifts occurring every 3 stages or so. Each dimension brings different enemies and a steady increase in difficulty. Dimension 5 is quite fucking hard - by about level 15 onward, the enemies tend to rush onscreen, fire a huge barrage of shots and then kamikaze you. A lot like high level Galaga, but with a much higher difficulty curve. The game forces you to bump up to dimension 2 near the beginning of the game, even if you abstain from picking up blue capsules, but it's still considerably easier than the alternatives.

Of course, enemies at higher dimensions are worth more points, the challenging stages are different, and there are 4 possible endings (all of which are pretty great!) depending on which dimension you finish the game at. The final boss gives you a huge bonus multiplied by the number of your current dimension, too. I think? Pretty sure.

Anyway, the main differences between the PCE and arcade version are about what you'd expect. The arcade game runs on a vertically-oriented monitor, the PCE version runs at 4:3. The arcade version has a lot of interstitial animations between challenging stages in which random aliens bellow at you in Galaganese, while the PCE version does not. The highest dimension in the arcade version is 5, while it's 4 in the PCE version. Most importantly, the arcade version is pretty fuckin' hard, while the PCE version is... a lot easier! Especially if you use the built-in autofire of the PC Engine controller! Dunno if that's shunned or not, but if it is, maybe they shouldn't have built it into the controller, huh?

Anyway, Galaga '88 rules, and the slightly delayed US version, Galaga '90, is available on the Wii Virtual Console. Same game, $6, go check it out if you get the chance! Oh, and for comparison's sake, here are videos of both the arcade and PCE versions of the game, from the youtube:
PC Engine and Arcade.

(before I forget, there's a port of this game on the Sharp X68000, but I haven't had a chance to actually try it out, I'm afraid. Based on my prior experiences with X68k ports, though, it's probably arcade perfect.)

Pinball Week Episode 2.5 - Williams Promo Videos

2008-05-07T22:04:00.005-06:00

This week refuses to die, huh? Seems fitting. A youtube user going by the name of CaptainPinball uploaded a huge number of promotional videos for Williams pinball games of the mid '90s. After stumbling across his account last night, I had to link you guys to some of these. Yes, they were uploaded more than a year ago. Considering that they're all firmly entrenched in the hilarious early '90s Video Toaster Editing School, that hardly seems to matter now.

First up is a promo for Twilight Zone, which was designed by Pat Lawlor immediately following his work on Addams Family, the best selling pinball machine of all time. An astonishingly bad Rod Serling impersonator narrates for its entire duration.

Next is a video hocking Demolition Man. Where do I even begin?

Finally, here's the promo video for Party Zone, in which the design team embarrasses itself for the sake of countless future generations.

The rest of the videos, which you can view over at CaptainPinball's youtube page, are also generally awesome. I especially like this one for Road Show, in which Pat Lawlor basically admits that the game is intentionally designed for people to credit feed as much as they possibly can in a desperate attempt to salvage the fortunes of the pinball industry.

Sometime later this week, I'll be writing the first of many entries about the PC Engine. It's gonna be awesome!

BARKLEY, SHUT UP AND ROGUELIKE

2008-04-29T14:49:00.003-06:00

Tales of Game's Studios, who you may recall as the people responsible for Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, have released their second game. It is, of course, a roguelike starring the Wu-Tang Clan.

It doesn't have randomly generated levels, but it does have the arguably cooler feature of letting you open up all the level data in notepad and edit it yourself (this, by the way, reminded me a lot of another recent game that I forgot to mention here - Tiny Hawk). It's also probably the easiest roguelike I've ever played - I won the first time I played after choosing Inspectah Deck, who takes no damage from traps, automatically identifies items, finds hidden doors and opens all locked doors without a key. I imagine that the other characters are much harder to win with. It's not quite compelling enough to play through twice, but it's worth checking out, at the very least!

You can download The Sewer Goblet - The Wu-Tang Cland and the Wu-Tang Baby, from here.

(credit goes to kthorjensen of the selectbutton forums for this entry's title)

Pinball Week Episode 2 - Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection

2008-04-25T14:07:00.014-06:00

Williams. A legend in the American coin-op industry. In video game circles they're often heralded for revolutionary arcade games like Defender and Robotron, but it's their pinball output from around the same era that I think shines brightest.

Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection (released a few months ago for the Wii, PS2 and PSP and impossible to find in retail as far as I can tell) is a fairly faithful video recreation of 10 Williams pinball tables spanning around 20 years, focusing mainly on the 1980s. It's mostly really good. Yes, mostly. Ain't that always the case?

The selection of tables does a good job of representing Williams' popularity and design sensibilities. Nearly all of the games are important for one reason or another, be it for technical firsts, fan favoritism or simply strong art design. More importantly, nearly all the games in the collection stand well on their own.

Firepower is one of the earliest solid-state games (read: microchips controlling the rules as opposed to electromechanical components) on the collection, hailing from 1980. It's got a big ol' open playfield, sound effects straight outta Robotron (Eugen e Jarvis was responsible for the sound programming), and 3-ball multiballlll. It was also the first game to introduce "lane-changing," which is the feature that lets you move the multiplier lane lights at the top of the table around by hitting the right flipper button. It's a staple of pinball design, the kind of thing so ubiquitous that you don't even realize it was a "first" at one point.

The collection's other game from 1980 is Black Knight, a legendary game with a two-level playfield and "magna-save" - after completing certain requirements, you can press a button when the ball is near the right outlane to freeze it in place with a magnet and drop it safely back towards the flippers. I think it's earned its reputation as a classic, and its presence is welcome.

There are also two Pat Lawlor games on the collection. Lawlor developed The Addams Family in 1992, which went on to become the best-selling pinball game of all time, and Twilight Zone shortly thereafter, which is a close runner-up.

Addams Family and Twilight Zone aren't on the collection due to licensing issues, but the two Lawlor games that are included are Whirlwind and Funhouse, both excellent games. Whirlwind's the one with the spinning circles in the center of the playfield that disrupt where your ball goes, and Funhouse is the one with the big talking puppet head. You may have seen both at some point - I know that Washington's in downtown Fort Collins had Funhouse at one point, anyway.

There's also Taxi, Pin*Bot, Gorgar, Sorcerer, Space Shuttle and Jive Time, the last of which is the only electromechanical game on the collection. I'm not mentioning them in detail because, uh, hey - I've barely played them in real life, and I'm never going to finish writing this thing at this rate. Oh, what the hell. Lemme give it a shot, anyway.

Pin*Bot's got outlanes from hell (the lanes on the bottom-left and right sides of nearly all pinball machines which lead straight to the drain if your ball happens to roll into one), and was ported to the NES by Rare back in the day. How bad are the outlanes? A commenter on the Internet Pinball Database had this to say:

"Pin*Bot *could* be a good game. But I find it to be an unforgiving and sadistic drain monster that is way more frustrating than any pinball machine should be. Yes, I've played my fair share of pinball and I know how to nudge. I know how to set-up a machine with the proper pitch and am meticulous in this regard. With Pin*Bot, it didn't matter. Even with the posts on the most liberal setting, the magnetic outlanes drove me so crazy that I had no choice but to either sell the machine or set it ablaze."

Pin*Bot doesn't quite deserve immolation in my opinion, but there you go.

I like the rest of the games on the collection without reservation. Taxi is a pretty ridiculously charming table that has you picking up fares like Dracula, Gorbachev, and, in a typical Williams bout of cross-promotion, Pin*Bot. Gorgar almost matches the lurid themes that competitor Bally really flaunted during the early '80s (for comparison, check out Centaur, Embryon and Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom). Sorcerer is solid despite having an incredibly generic theme and artwork. Space Shuttle's USA rollover lanes and helpful defensive features (including a stopper for the center drain and an extremely forgiving right outlane) might just give you diabetes. Jive Time is the one electromechanical game on the collection, and has a spinner on the backglass that gives out random bonuses.

Solid games all around! There are just a couple of nagging little problems with the collection's presentation thereof that rubs me the wrong way.

First, the collection defaults to having insanely obnoxious cock rock background music overlaid on top of insanely obnoxious Fake Arcade Ambience overlaid on top of the actual sounds of whatever pinball game you're playing. This is even more retarded than it sounds, but they let you mute all of it right from the get-go, so I'll just wonder what they were thinking instead of complaining about it.

Second, the PSP version of the game lets you rotate your PSP sideways to play with a vertical screen orientation to see more of the table at a given time, but doesn't let you remap the buttons and maps nudging the table to the analog stick. The X and triangle buttons control the flippers, meaning that this mode is nearly impossible to play comfortably. Bummer.

The other odd thing about the game is the ball physics - I've gotten the ball to clip inside the flippers on a couple of occasions, leading to an instant drain. What the heck?
And yeah, the graphics aren't nearly good enough to do most of the tables justice. Funhouse and Whirlwind are both busy and nearly incomprehensible blobs of indistinct polygons (I might be a little harsh, there - the above screenshot is a pretty good example, so judge for yourself). The table textures are generally too blurry and indistinct to do their explosively colorful source material justice. Still, I would say that every table is totally playable! And uh, not in a "well I guess this is ok" kind of way.

There are some good ideas here, too! There are two sets of table goals for each game - the first batch usually just requires you to complete most of the basic scoring mechanics on the table and get a decent score. Finishing all of the default rules unlocks a set of "wizard goals," which are pretty damn tough, requiring you to really plumb the depths of each table.

The developers have also seen fit to add the usual unlockables - some of the games start out on freeplay, but others require that you pay virtual credits for each play. Finishing all the table goals unlocks freeplay for any of the locked games on the collection. It's... unoffensive, in practice.

If you like pinball at all, you'll probably dig this one. Go check it out!

Pinball Week Episode 1 - Necronomicon

2008-04-23T23:07:00.009-06:00

The Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown is this weekend, and I've been cooking up some pinball articles this week. Holding back the plunger on some pinball articles, with the threat of imminently launching them straight towards the gaudy and animated-gif-infested playfield that is the internet? I'm not liking these pinball metaphors as much as I expected to.
Anyway, I've uploaded a few videos of Digital Pinball - Necronomicon, a Japanese Sega Saturn game which mixes the aesthetics of all things related to wailing guitars with pinball. It's an awesome game! I wrote a little article about it back when I had a blog on the web site of my humble college newspaper, but everyone blogging for that place got laid off after the editor-in-chief got a little too brusque in the editorial section. That said, here's the original article that I wrote about the game, with youtube videos of the game's three tables after the jump. Enjoy!

PROGROCK PINBALL

Necronomicon is a video pinball game developed by now-defunct KaZe Co. Ltd. and released for the Japanese Sega Saturn back in 1996. Ridiculously, ridiculously obscure. Of course, it only takes one guy to get the word out, and that guy was Lawrence Wright of NFG Games and his review of Necronomicon. I disagree with some of the points made in the review now, but it made me aware of the game in the first place, and that's what counts, y'know?

Compared to the real thing, Necronomicon's simulation of pinball physics is fairly unrealistic. You can effortlessly make the same shot from the same flipper over and over and over again, and the ball often travels across the play field in what almost appear to be preset arcs. Shots that would normally be incredibly easy to make on a real table, like shooting the ball towards the near-center of the play field, are strangely difficult to do in Necronomicon. Pinball is about dealing with the little, random nuances of real-world physics and their terrifying implications for the suicidal silver ball in play. Necronomicon fails to capture this, but that's ok! It's a charmer.
Take, for example, the game's announcer. Actually, he's less of an announcer and more of an omnipresent, borderline incomprehensible poet. "Far away a temple stands," he mutters. "Far away... in the dreamlands." His emphasis, not mine! He doesn't actually comment on the state of the game, but he will often trail off on wild tangents while you're trying to manage a wild six-ball multiball. The resulting aesthetic effect is one of endearing insanity.

The game's soundtrack (with intro and ending music provided by John Petrucci of famous progressive rock group Dream Theater), is marked by its wildly over-the-top production values. It's also gloriously cheesy - starting multiball on any of the tables means bombastic, wailing guitars and screeching vocals. Williams' pinball division in the mid-90s was famous for its excellent sound design on games like Medieval Madness, and Necronomicon captures the energy and enthusiasm of those games in a way that no other video pinball game I've ever played has managed to do.

Even the table designs, which are kind of simplistic when compared to real pinball tables, have a hard-edged, creepy feel to them. There's a grainy, photo-realistic eye staring out from the center of the Arkham Asylum table. A fake instruction card present on all the tables' bottom-right corners states that the game is "For mortals only." There are lots of little details like that, adding up to a strangely personable and endearing experience.

That, really, is what's so great about Necronomicon - it simulates the mechanics of real pinball imperfectly, but it gets the intangibles just right.

Youtube videos: Arkham Asylum demonstration, Cult of the Bloody Tongue demonstration, Dreamlands multiball (above).

Grab bag update #1?

2008-04-18T20:42:00.006-06:00

I'm updating from my parents' house this weekend, and I didn't really have anything waiting in the back wings for an update, so here are a few things that I felt were worth mentioning.

-Joakim Sandberg has released Noitu Love 2, which you can buy for $20 from his web site. I'm definitely going to have to pick it up eventually. I mean, how awesome does this game look?

Yeah, pretty sure I gotta support this monetarily. And write about it. Go play Chalk, too, if you haven't already. It's free!-Made in Wired takes the rapid fire structure of Warioware (Made in Wario is the Japanese title, in case you were wondering) and stuffs it full of arcade shooting game motifs. It's just a little bit like Rom Check Fail. It comes courtesy of dong over at Engrish Games, who translated the (originally non-English) 2006 game and re-released it today. Here's what he has to say about it:

Do you know Junpei Isshiki?
He's a professional shmup programmer and an indie game developer.

He makes really cool shmups,
but sometimes he forgots to publish his games :(
How unselfish!

How unselfish indeed! You can download Made in Wired here.

-There's no way that Mortal Kombat is still relevant. Is there? I must not hang out with the right people, I guess! Sub Zero, though, he's always cool. Also, here's BBH's awesome MKII glitches page. Aaand here's this unintentionally hilarious ending from MK4! And this thing.

That's about it for now. Next week is a theme week!

Crisis Core - Dreck and Schlock are best buds until...

2008-04-14T23:22:00.017-06:00

I recently finished FFVII Crisis Core, Square Enix's latest (and hopefully last) attempt to squeeze money out of thirteen-year old kids who still think Final Fantasy VII is the coolest game ever. That's kind of mean, because I remember thinking that Final Fantasy VII was the coolest game ever too, back when it came out. I still kind of do! It's got a lot of guts, that game.

Crisis Core, though. Man. In FFVII, there's a fairly infamous hour-long cutscene near the beginning of the game. In it, the protagonist, Professor emeritus Cloud Strife of MIT, tells his fellow party members about what happened four fateful years ago in his hometown of Nibelheim...

Cloud's hero, Sephiroth, went crazy, burned Nibelheim to the ground and killed everybody. Later in the game, it turns out that Cloud is actually pretty nuts, too, and that he was comatose for most of the incident. The guy he really looked up to, a man named Zack, went and fought Sephiroth. Of course, this is all presented in extremely confusing flashbacks in FFVII.

The game's battle system: "DING DING DING THREE SEPHIROTHS"

Crisis Core, then, is Square's attempt to fill in the blanks. It's a high-budget PSP game that tells Zack's story up until his inevitable death, and it makes an already confusing story that I thought I already kinda knew into a borderline incomprehensible new one! I guess I have scenario writer Kazushige Nojima to thank for that.

Nojima was also the douchebag responsible for the story mode in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and that sure was stupid. Playing Crisis Core, I think I've figured out what makes his work so consistently awful: in all the games for which he's been responsible for the story, I always feel like there's some other game I was supposed to have played which filled in the backstory. In FFVII, that was part of the charm.

The problem with Crisis Core's narrative is that, as the game I was supposed to have played before playing FFVII, it doesn't make much sense on its own. Hell, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Crisis Core has one of the dumbest video game stories I've seen in a long time. It's not just dumb because the plot events are contrived, ridiculous and poorly explained - the game itself often sullies or outright breaks the narrative.

There are numerous moments when the game presents you with a pressing situation, and immediately cheapens it with a "mini-game moment." Missiles are heading straight towards the hometown of Zack's mentor, Angeal! The one person left in town is Angeal's elderly mother! Quick, Zack, you gotta do something!

"Like play this stupid minigame!" the game says. "Press the X button with the right timing to cut the missiles out of the sky! If you miss, it's not a big deal, but shouldn't a member of SOLDIER be able to handle this kind of thing?" I'm paraphrasing here, but just barely. Each time you press the X button at the right time, Zack performs a stilted canned attack animation as pixelated explosions erupt around him. It's supposed to look like he's destroying the missiles with his sword, but it looks a little too cheap and clumsy for that. The game keeps track of your "combo," too, and tells you that you're "awesome!!", "superb!!" and "amazing!!"

After you press the X button twelve times, the game gives you an item you don't need based on how many missiles you intercepted successfully. I imagine that there are guys out there who replayed this segment over and over again, making sure to intercept all the missiles in order to get the best item and satisfy their complex OCD.

Immediately after this missile-downing segment comes a cutscene: "Angeal's mother is still in the village! Hurry and save her!"

"But be sure to run around and pick up all the items in the area before time runs out!" the game interrupts, stupidly. You then run around the deserted village square, hastily picking up items before the time limit runs out. Eventually, if you let the time limit run out, even though there's supposed to be an airstrike on the way, the game reveals that it doesn't matter. The items just disappear. It's like nothing even happened.

Every time the story tries to convince you of its gravitas, the game lurches in from offscreen, drunk as hell, and shoots both itself and the story in the foot while juggling colorful and distracting balls, dropping most of them on the floor. Not that it matters, really. If the game is drunk, then the story is retarded.

"I don't make allowances for old men!"

There is a moment near the end of the story when Zack and Cloud are escaping from Nibelheim on motorbike. The game's villain, Genesis, appears suddenly. His motivation for most of the game has been that... whoops! I actually have no idea! He's never given tangible motivation, outside of "revenge" and "Gackt really wanted to voice a character in the game." He spends a lot of time reading lines from his favorite play, LOVELESS, and asking Zack if he understands what he's talking about ("No."). He's also "degrading," because like Sephiroth, he's a mutant supersoldier, too!

Genesis tells Zack, after stopping his bike on a bridge in the middle of nowhere, that Zack's greasy black hair is the secret to preventing him from "degrading," and he proves this by having one of his clone cronies eat his hair. Genesis then flies off as the clone shrieks, is enveloped in a multicolored geyser of light, and transforms into a giant Tetsuya Nomura zipper-beast. This plot development is never mentioned again. As far as I can tell, it's only there to make sure that a boss can appear at that very moment.

One last thing: the game has an optional mission (one of several hundred, all nearly identical) where you fight god, who has 10 million hit points. The only way to win is by maxing Zack's stats out to 255, getting 99,999 HP etc. The ending of the game, even if Zack is totally iller than god, is that Zack gets killed by helicopters and the same stock soldiers that have proven no threat to him for the entire game, in a sequence that Gamespot's Kevin VanOrd says "brilliantly mingles gameplay with narrative in one of the most incredible and moving moments in role-playing history."

Man, I bet.

"You will F(L)aiL"

2008-04-08T00:19:00.007-06:00

Matt Thorson's Flail is the best game ever made on the subject of leaping repeatedly into walls full of spikes, possibly at high speed. It pretty much has to be. Thorson's previous games, Jumper and Jumper Two (not to be confused with the feature film) explored similarly sadistic platform game territory, but Flail is far more clever, less initially frustrating, and occasionally something of a mindfuck. It's a real step up!

At its core, Flail is about moving a green stick figure from the starting point to the goal, which is represented by a floor enshrouded in a beam of red light. Initially, the level designs are simple enough that you can accomplish this by simply running forward and jumping, but as the game introduces more play mechanics, it also begins to take the gloves off.

The core play mechanic of Flail, besides jumping, is "flight" - press the jump button, and you jump. Press and hold the fly button, and you immediately freeze in place, regardless of whether you're standing still or exactly 1 pixel above a pit of spikes. At this point, you have about half a second to hold one of the eight cardinal directions. After that half-second, you are violently shot in whatever direction you're holding at the time. This creates a lot of interesting new ways to move around, but you can't do it indefinitely - you have to land on solid ground before being able to fly again.
Besides the fly button, there's also a very simple wall-climbing mechanic. If you touch a wall right below its lip (assuming that it has one), you'll hang on. Any lower than that, though, and you'll fall, presumably to somewhere extremely unpleasant.
This is where Thorson starts messing with the rules a little bit, of course. There's an anti-gravity item, which immediately causes gravity to reverse after you touch it. There are levels that require you to flip gravity several times in wonderfully brain-bending ways, with goal platforms suspended upside down, sometimes directly above the starting point.

There's an item which lets you fly again after picking it up, allowing for stage designs that require you to fly carefully through a maze of razorblades suspended in mid-air while never touching the ground once.

There are also yellow, green and blue "fields," which are basically just different color tiles drawn over the backgrounds of certain stages. Green fields cause you to slow down when passing through them, yellow fields prevent you from flying, and blue fields cause gravity to reverse if you press the fly button when inside of one.
The ramifications for the last one are brutal. There's a stage in zone 5 (out of 8!) that requires you to carefully fly through another maze of floating razorblades, like several previous stages. The difference is that you also have to reverse gravity when flying through the tiny squares of blue scattered throughout, nearly flying off of the top of the stage at one point. And this is only a little more than halfway through the game, here! I'm trembling in fear at the thought of what future levels are going to look like.

There's also a level editor, which you unlock after clearing the first couple of zones - it lets you put stages together without any restrictions that I can see, other than that you can't compile stages into groups the way the actual game does. There's certainly a lot of design space to play around with, though, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

According to Flail's in-game statistics page, I've played the game for a little over an hour so far, and have died 474 times. That says it all, right there.

Download Flail from Matt Thorson's games page.

Phantasy Star Complete Collection OR: M2 does a wonderful job

2008-04-03T00:43:00.022-06:00

Phantasy Star Complete Collection is the latest (unfortunately Japan-only) entry in the Sega Ages 2500 Series, which started out as a bunch of low-budget remakes of Sega's classic game franchises, but has since evolved into some of the most lovingly assembled collections of old games currently available for any platform. PS Complete Collection assembles the 4 games (including the English-language versions) from Sega's groundbreaking console role-playing series, and makes most of them a lot more playable with a few new features specific to this collection.

The last time the series was compiled in the United States was in 2002, with a fairly terrible compilation for the Gameboy Advance, and in 2006 on the slightly better Sega Genesis Collection, both courtesy of the lazy guys at Digital Eclipse. This series deserves better!

Phantasy Star (seen at right) was the first console role-playing game ever released in the United States (arriving in 1988, a year before Dragon Warrior) but it remains relatively unheralded because of its appearance on the unpopular Sega Master System. It borrowed liberally from other games of the time period, taking first-person dungeon crawling from Wizardry and its ilk, and creating a fairly original setting by borrowing from fantasy and sci-fi pop-culture whenever possible. Besides that, it's one of the first games with a strong female protagonist, in addition to being a technical marvel for its time period - Final Fantasy was released two days before Phantasy Star in Japan, and it looks genuinely embarrassing by comparison.

Phantasy Star II, which appeared about two years later on the Megadrive/Genesis, is also widely regarded as a classic. It had a large cast of characters, an epic storyline spanning multiple planets, and a fairly modern-lookin' battle system. I also have a really, really hard time playing it, these days!

Like many really old RPGs, most of your time spent in PSI & II consists of walking around in circles just outside of towns, fighting monsters over and over again until you accumulate enough money and experience to move on to the next segment of the game, which usually involves looking for an item, person or dungeon in the middle of nowhere. It's really hard for me to enjoy these games, because making numbers go up as slowly and tediously as possible is... not fun! At all!

Thankfully, M2, the compilation's developers and all-around great guys, saw fit to add several new features to make playing the earlier games less tedious and horrible. Besides including the English-language versions of all the games on the disc, you can play both games with sped-up combat and walking speeds, and every game on the compilation lets you adjust the difficulty a little bit - "Normal" is the default setting, identical to the original game, while "Easy" and "Very Easy" increase the amount of experience and money that monsters drop when defeated, effectively tripling the speed of each game. Here's a video I uploaded demonstrating some of these new features:

Thanks to these additions, it's a lot easier to go back and appreciate the good things about these games, as opposed to just wallowing in tedium. That's important, because there's a lot of good here. Eric-jon Rössel Waugh's review of the first three games in the series from back in 2002 makes this clear:

"Phantasy Star II is the first truly great videogame epic, and one of the few tragedies attempted within the medium. It is the ultimate coming-of-age game. It is the Lord of the Rings of videogaming (especially when compared to The Hobbit of Phantasy Star 1). To be sure, at times it can be just as inaccessible as Tolkien's rambling saga. And yet, for those with persistence, it offers a chillingly poignant experience that can haunt you for the rest of your life."

I don't quite agree, but goddamn. Clearly, this is an emotionally powerful series of games - even if I've never quite felt the same way about them, I can't just dismiss them as technically interesting exercises in level-grinding.

Anyway, beyond the first two games, the compilation also includes Phantasy Star III, which was developed by a completely different team than the other games, rushed to market and is kind of hilariously bad at times. Phantasy Star IV ties up the story from the I & II in a really satisfying way, and doesn't require hours of grinding out levels. It's a really good game!

Sega also developed a series of text adventure games that helped flesh out the back story for the characters in PSII, and they're on the disc, too! Unfortunately, they were only available on some kind of satellite game service that Sega or somebody offered, and as such they were never officially translated into English. The absurdly professional MIJET romhacking group went ahead and translated three of the games into English unofficially, though, so if you want to check a few of them out, there you go!

So yeah, hey. This is a really nice package for $30, even if you gotta go through play-asia and whatnot. Maybe Sega will decide to localize some of the more recent Sega Ages entries for the western market? I'm not banking on it!

(as a side note, many of the early budget remakes in the Sega Ages 2500 Series were thrown on a disc and released in the United States as Sega Classics Collection so there's still hope, sorta. Also, Kurt Kalata has written a pretty decent page covering every entry in the series, which you can read here)

UPDATE: Since I put this post up, the game's official site has been updated with information on how to unlock Phantasy Star Gaiden and Phantasy Star Adventure, two Japan-only spin-off games for the Game Gear. The prior is a console RPG like the other games, but on a slightly smaller scale, and the latter is a text adventure game. Both have been translated into English, unofficially.

Anyway, the method for unlocking both of the games in Complete Collection is pretty simple: just hold down right on the d-pad at the title screen and press start. Both games have an extensive gallery collection like every other game on the disc, as well. What'd I say about M2 being great?

Captain McGrandpa saves April Fools

2008-04-01T12:18:00.012-06:00

It's April Fools, which means plenty of jerks out there are twirling their fingers around, cackling in front of their Dell Inspirons, and thinking about how much their hilarious Internet Meme Prank Thing is totally great.

They're wrong, though. Well, except for Gametap staff member Frank Cifaldi (formerly of Gamasutra and Lost Levels) , who has decided to use his powers of April Foolery for good, with a little exercise in communal self-entertainment called "Captain McGrandpa - Memory of the Forgotten". Here's the PR statement:

"The latest GameTap Originals production, Captain McGrandpa – Memory of the Forgotten is the first truly multiplayer adventure game. Using brand new technology developed at GameTap HQ, an unlimited number of players will be able to shape the world and story around them, in real time, with limitless possibilities. Only as a community can we help Captain McGrandpa find his way. "

Basically, Cifaldi started a thread on the Gametap forums in the guise of a classic text adventure prompt. Black background, second-person narrative, point and move totals in the upper right corner. After that, actual Gametap forum users simply posted what they wanted to do, and Cifaldi responded accordingly. The results err disturbingly close to genius.
(go outside) As you make your way toward The Outside World, The Mean Lady You Don't Like waves and wishes you a pleasant day. The Outside World It's cold and frightening out here and you don't like it. To the East is A Place You Don't Want To Go, to the West is A Place You Don't Want To Go, and to the North is The Idle Springs Retirement Home. There is a Taxi Cab parked haphazardly on the curb.You have to register for the Gametap forums if you want to participate, but I'm just watching the thread as it develops, something which requires no registration. Go check it out, it's seriously great.

Lookin' back - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Playstation)

2008-03-27T01:09:00.017-06:00

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is an incredibly long-running man ga series written and illustrated by one Hirohiko Araki. How long-running? How's twenty-one years sound?

I've only read the first three story-arcs (there are currently seven), but it concerns petty revenge between two college students in late 19th-century England for about 100 pages. After that, it suddenly switches gears and turns into crazy fight manga, with vampires and supernatural Mayan archeology just to spice things up a bit.

In the late 90s, Capcom made a pretty sharp fighting game out of the JoJo IP, using the third story-arc of the series (core themes: fighting! in Egypt!) as source material. Released to the arcades on their CPS3 hardware (the same horsepower used by perennial favorite Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike), the game is another great example of Capcom's uncanny ability to turn nearly any licensed property into a great video game.

The arcade game and its sequel was eventually ported to the Dreamcast and Playstation, the latter of which I'll be talking about today. Like Street Fighter III and its sequels, the Dreamcast was the only console at the time advanced enough to run a good port of a CPS3 game - the huge amount of 2D animation in both games requires a lot of RAM, something which the Playstation doesn't have.
The tack Capcom took towards porting the game resulted in a clever new "Super Story" mode that takes the shortcomings of the Playstation and makes them... mostly irrelevant. In the arcade game (which is still present in the port as a separate mode), there's a story, sure, but it's a mangled version of the manga's plotline condensed down into short cutscenes between stages.

"Super Story Mode," as a counterpoint, takes a ridiculously overblown approach - there are 35 stages, each corresponding to an important plot event from the manga. They don't all use the fighting game engine from the arcade game, either! There's a horizontal-scrolling shooting-game segment, a game of rigged poker, and a Dragon's Lair-esque quick-reaction story segment or two.

Of course, every segment seems to involve a fight with some asshole in the employ of Dio Brando, the story's vampiric, time-stoppin' (steamroller-droppin') villain, but what was tiresome in the manga is a little more palatable in the game's bite-sized story chunks.

The only regrettable thing about the story mode is the evaluation given at the end of each story segment: you're given a ranking from S to E based on your performance in a given segment, and the criteria feel arbitrary and unnecessary, especially considering that you can't easily replay segments afterwards. Even worse, though, is the "secret factor" available on each stage, which can only be obtained by reading the game developers' minds.
Ok, that's kind of an exaggeration, but here's an example: the game's very first segment introduces us to Jotaro Kujo, an otherwise normal hot-blooded fighting manga high-school student, who has locked himself in the local prison because he thinks he's possessed. His mother is in anguish, so she calls Jotaro's grandfather, Joseph Joestar, in from America. He was the protagonist of the previous volume of the manga, and he looks like a cowboy in his old age.

Joestar is accompanied by a close friend, Mohammed Avdol, who explains to Jotaro that the evil spirit he thinks he's possessed by is actually a manifestation of his soul, which Avdol refers to as a "stand."

Stands are actually the core mechanic of the arcade game, and the one really interesting thing that it brings to the fighting game genre besides the characters and setting. Calling out your character's stand allows you to improve your attack and defense, and you can also "program" it to act on its own for a brief period while you do your own thing, which opens up a lot of strategic possibilities. I also assume that it allows for totally game-breaking combos and the like, but I have no idea, really - I'm just assuming based on prior experience, here.

Anyway, in the game's first story segment, it's Jotaro vs. Avdol. In the manga, Jotaro doesn't actually harm Avdol - he's merely led out of the jail cell after days of self-induced captivity. In the game, you're given a typical story mode, Street Fighter II-esque battle straight out of the arcade game, and let loose to do whatever you want.
If you manage to push Avdol all the way to the right side of the stage (which is the inside of Jotaro's cell), and then defeat him without using your stand, then you get a "secret factor" afterwards. What the heck is that? Points that go towards unlocking new game features, basically.

Yeah, ok. Not a big deal. But for people who have never read the manga before (which is to say: nearly everyone in the United States at the time of the game's release nine years ago), these things are impossible to figure out without just lucking into them. Kind of weird!

That said, even without knowledge of the source material, JoJo is a pretty wicked cool game. It just exudes love, because Capcom really didn't need to go out of their way to make the Super Story Mode, but they did anyway. Really shows you that they care, y'know?

On a similar note, Tuesday will see a feature on the just released Sega Ages 2500 Series Volume 32 - Phantasy Star Complete Collection. It's the closest thing we have to a Criterion Collection for video games, right now. I hope my video capture box holds out!

ROM CHECK FAIL

2008-03-25T12:29:00.010-06:00

oh my god what

Rom Check Fail is a relentlessly clever little Windows game developed by the fine Video Gentlemen (or gentleman?) of farbs.org, who have proven more than capable in the past of taking an odd idea and developing a really interesting small game out of it. What's the odd idea, in this case? Farbs provides a brief synopsis:

Some games are born great.
Other games have greatness thrust upon them.
ROM CHECK FAIL takes great games and thrusts them upon each other.

When you first start a game of Rom Check Fail, everything looks like the first level of Super Mario Bros. - Mario is on the left, goombas are on the right, there's a cute general midi version of the game's theme music playing in the background, and nothing seems especially remiss about the situation. The goal is simple: hop on top of the goombas and you clear the stage. Simple enough.

After a few seconds, though, the sound effects shriek and distort, the graphics shift menacingly, and in the next moment, the goombas are now space invaders, Mario is now the car from Spy Hunter, and the whole level looks like a Pac-Man maze. The game continues like this, changing everything up every five seconds or so. It's totally great, and the ramifications of each change are startling. That it also manages to play on my innate love of old arcade games is emotionally irresistible.

Some of the randomly generated combinations can be a little unfair, as you suddenly find yourself transformed into the space invaders ship, unable to move up and down. Even better is when the graphics start to garble and stay that way, instead of transitioning normally. Strangely, the full-bore insanity of the game's premise and presentation makes this work in its favor, somehow!

It's also pretty forgiving - you get an extra life at the end of each stage if you have less than the 3-life maximum, and it's short: finishing a game doesn't take more than about 10 minutes. I won't spoil the ending, outside of saying that it fits the theme of the rest of the game!

Farbs developed the game for a competition hosted over at The Independent Gaming Forums, which required contestants to use "The Video Game Name Generator!" to come up with absurd new game ideas and develop accordingly. "Rom Check Fail" didn't actually come up in the name generator:

(from Rom Check Fail's TIGForum thread)
Originally this game was going to use player and enemy types inspired by the [Video Game Name Generator]. The idea was that the game would spit out games with names that can be generated by VGNG. Unfortunately the artist I wanted to work with couldn't commit the time, but instead he suggested using existing games for all the components. I think it made the game a little less VGNG but a lot more awesome.

Proof that good ideas can arise from imperfect circumstances.

Welcome to Special Console - Toe Jam & Earl

2008-03-13T12:03:00.013-06:00

I've been meaning to make an obligatory post about the Wii's Virtual Console service for some time. What in the jibba-jabba's a virtual console? Let's genuflect in Wikipedia's general direction!

Virtual Console (PC)
In some operating systems such as UnixWare, Linux and BSD, a virtual console (VC, sometimes virtual terminal, VT) is a conceptual combination of the keyboard and the display for a...

Oops! Wrong virtual console! I meant this one:

Virtual Console
Virtual Console, sometimes abbreviated as VC, is a specialized section of the Wii Shop Channel, an online service that allows players to purchase and download games and other software for the Wii gaming console. The Virtual Console lineup consists of titles originally released on now defunct past consoles. These titles are run in their original forms through software emulation. The library of past games currently consists of titles originating from the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Nintendo 64, as well as Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis, NEC's TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx-CD, and SNK's Neo Geo AES.

Basically, you can pay $5-10 to download and play old games on the Wii, bringing my reasoning for quoting wikipedia into question along the way. But what games should you buy?!

I'm trying not to overstep my bounds, and I really hate lists, so let's compromise: I'll write about a game I really like on the service every once in a while, and you'll get a much better, fuller article instead of a bunch of unenthusiastic, poorly researched ones strung together. Let's get to it!

Toe Jam & Earl - Platform: Sega Genesis

My goodness, this game is fantastic. The titular heroes are two guys from a planet that looooves funky music. They crash on Earth, which is filled with over 20 randomly generated levels of insane dentists, hula girls, obese stay-at-home mothers, and phantom ice cream trucks. Somewhere in there are the many pieces of their exploded (and extremely funky) spaceship. Do they have what it takes to survive?

That's what I'd write on the back of the box. Yes, this is a great premise, but mostly it's just an excuse to take early 80s mainframe computer classic Rogue and funkify it.

Rogue had randomly generated levels, and so does Toe Jam & Earl. What's interesting, though, is that while Rogue and its ilk typically involve duking it out with increasingly ferocious fantasy monsters, Toe Jam & Earl are both nearly pacifists! Indeed, the only way to survive a game of TJ&E is by avoiding the numerous caricatures of American society that dot the randomly generated landscape, while searching desperately for loot.

"Loot," in this case, means gift-wrapped presents. They're everywhere, and at the beginning of the game their contents are completely unknown. In one game, the polka-dot package might contain a pair of invaluable hi-top shoes, allowing a speedy getaway from danger. In another game, however, that same package might contain a "Total Bummer," which outright docks one life from whoever opens it. A lot of the strategy in a game of TJ&E comes from careful identification of the 25 items in the game world, while even more carefully avoiding the deadly ones.

There's a character who shows up every couple o' floors - the Carrot Wise Man (no, I don't know either) - who you can pay to identify any mystery items you may have. He's a lone island of sanity in a sea of madness, and the only way to take advantage of his services is to use up some "bucks," which are fairly sparse. Beyond that, though, you're on your own.

TJ&E is not an especially interesting game playing by yourself. Toe Jam & Earl both move pretty slowly (which is half the point, considering how essential avoiding enemies is to the flow of the game), and it's easy to dismiss the game as being a little unnecessarily clunky and goofy for its own good.

What makes TJ&E a great game is its cooperative mode. Playing with someone else opens up a lot of avenues for interaction that aren't present when playing alone. Pooling information on presents together, arguing about the best route to the exit in a given stage, yelling obscenities when one player gets sucked into a tornado and dropped to a lower level.

Better than that, even, is that playing with someone else allows you to give the other player a high five (in the game, natch) in order to equalize both players' lifebars. If Earl gets pretty beat up, all it takes to get him back up to speed is a high five. Best play mechanic ever? It's up there.

Also fantastic is the game's crunchy FM funk soundtrack, which the below Youtube video will demonstrate far better than my attempts to replicate a fake slap bass with combinations of random syllables.

That should just about wrap it up. It's $8 (or 800 wii points, I guess) on the Virtual Console, which is totally worth it. Listen to some George Clinton in advance.

Gettin' Smashed (again(for the last time))

2008-03-11T00:42:00.012-06:00

Let's get this out of the way, first: Super Smash Bros. Brawl is marvelous. I always thought that Melee felt a little uncontrollably fast and broken, and Brawl thankfully steps away from that. The speed of individual characters has been slowed down across the board, but that's cool, because the rest of the game has been improved enormously.

All of the new characters are interesting and fun to play as. Ike is ridiculously powerful and has excellent range and recovery! Pokemon Trainer is three characters in one! Metaknight sounds vaguely like Darth Vader! Even Olimar, who looks useless at first glance, has enough tools to prove devastating in the right hands.

Probably the best of the new play mechanics in the game is the Smash Ball (seen at right), a seizure-inducing item which appears at least once or twice a game, assuming that items are turned on. When it shows up, the screen changes colors subtly for a few seconds, letting everyone know to stop what they're doing and go nuts.

Hitting the ball once doesn't do anything. Like a pinata, it requires a little bludgeoning before it gives up the goods. Whoever deals the finishing blow to the smash ball is bestowed with a horrible, multicolored aura, and the entire screen goes dark for extra drama, while everyone else yells angrily.

At this point, the victorious player can press the B button to perform a "Final Smash," an extremely powerful, character specific special move that will almost always turn the tide of battle in their favor, or end it outright if they're already ahead. Mario blows everyone away with a giant fireball. Captain Falcon runs you over with his space car. Luigi does... something. It's awesome. Of course, if you're a hardcore smash player and hate the idea that your game could be ruined at a moment's notice by something like this, you can, as always, just turn them off. Smash is cool like that.

In conclusion, Brawl done play wicked good. I can't remember the last time a multiplayer video game resulted in more mutual enjoyment for everyone involved, although for the sake of transparency, I have to admit that the last time I played Halo with anyone, it consisted of me losing 25 to 0 for about four games in a row.

There're actually so many game modes, doodads, options, music and so on to think about in this one game that I question whether I'll even be able to internalize it all for a long time. It's actually a little scary, just thinking about all of the slightly goopy, caramalized game stuff in here!

Also scary: the idea that Kazushige Nojima, the scenario writer responsible for apocalypse-class dreck like Kingdom Hearts and its sequel (and uh, more of the same), was actually paid to pen Brawl's single-player story mode, which plays a lot like the SNES classic Kirby Superstar if they forced out most of the charm with a shovel.

Which means that it's still really enjoyable if you play with a friend. But... goodness. The last area of the story mode is a massive maze consisting of previous areas from the first half of the game connected together randomly via doors. Nearly every one of said doors has a fairly sloppily designed boss fight in it! Fantastic!

That's about as much criticism as I can level at this game, other than that the manual is written entirely in comic sans. And that it's (intentionally) so absurdly fetishistic. But that's cool. It's not like it has any pretensions of being anything but.
What wasn't cool was the big midnight release of the game at the Foothills Fashion Mall Gamestop. A friend of mine had pre-ordered the game there, and we showed up at around 9:45. He had planned on playing in the planned release tournament that Gamestop had planned, but after seeing the mass of black hoodies seen in the above photo, we decided that it would be in our better interest to not spend the next two hours in the company of people we would probably want to elbow repeatedly.

So we didn't! We left, and returned 10 minutes before midnight. The crowd had more than tripled in size by then, and now included future KCSU station manager and fellow blogger Justin Weber in its ranks. He had shown up for similar reasons, and also had a friend who wanted to play in the Gamestop tournament, which was ruined by inefficiency.

"I thought it was going to start at 10, but it didn't start until 11, so I ended up having to wait around for an hour. The Gamestop employees actually started playing an hour earlier, at around 10, and a bunch of kids waiting outside the store just pushed their faces up against the glass."

Two stores away from Gamestop is Game On, a LAN center boasting two enormous TVs and a wii, but the Gamestop tournament forced players to use their tiny wii demo kiosk, which was barely visible from the crowd. There was probably a lot of red tape and stubbornness preventing Game On from working with Gamestop on this one, but Weber and I were nonetheless disappointed by the unwatchable tournament conditions.

"I went in hoping to experience something akin to The Wizard, but that wasn't the case at all."

Also a bummer were the rules, which forced all 32 players to play 1-minutes matches 1v1 with no items. It was in the interest of time, sure, but talk about boring. Also, none of the unlockable characters were available for play. Double bummer.

Thankfully, my friend who pre-ordered the game managed to get a copy at midnight in about 5 minutes. Considering the massive line, which Weber guessed to be around 300 people long, I couldn't have been more pleased. How did we show up 5 minutes beforehand and walk out earlier than people who had been waiting there for 4 hours? I have no idea!

Weber didn't have as much luck, but was he bitter about the whole experience?

"I don't regret it, because I got Smash, but there were definitely better options available, like Wal-Mart."

Another friend did take the Wal-Mart route, and walked out with a copy in 15 minutes. Even better would be to, I dunno, wait until the next day and buy a copy then. But hey, whatever. Good game!

Post your friend codes in the comments or something! Mine is 1762-2351-3558!

Gettin' Smashed (again)

2008-03-06T11:23:00.006-07:00

Man what the heck is even going on, here

About a month ago, I wrote an entry about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, in which I concluded that it was... probably going to be a pretty good game! Now, here we are a month later, three days before the game's release in the United States, and the unnerving quality of the game's hype machine is beginning to get to me.

Let's forget about smashbros.com, which I assume I mentioned last time. That thing was pretty insidious! I'm talking about stuff like Gamestop's BIGGEST TOURNAMENT EVER, which is being held at what looks to be every Gamestop store in the US of A. I have to question whether there are enough interested Smash players in the United States to make this work, but who knows!

I've since spoken to the one sorta kinda tournament-level smash player who I know in Fort Collins. I asked him if he would be interested in playing in the Fort Collins tournament while I stand in the background and take pictures of kids with mullets and Star Fox Adventures t-shirts. It would be a real journalistic endeavor. Turns out that the event has first-come-first-serve entry rules, and my friend was thoroughly psyched about the whole thing. Oh baby.

Look forward to a report of bedlam at the Fort Collins Fashion Mall, started by a bunch of guys borderline obsessed with punching Luigi in the face. I'll be there, hopefully taking photos. We'll see how it turns out. I'm gonna close out for the time being with the below youtube video, which was linked to me by another friend of mine. The first 30 seconds are pretty great!

BDSM Meets MBJ

2008-03-03T17:38:00.011-07:00

Mighty Jill Off is an adorable little game from dessgeega which answers the question of "why do the protagonists of 8-bit video games seem so eager to go through a relentless barrage of bodily and mental harm" with a head-smackingly obvious answer: "because they're masochists, duh!"

Indeed, the game is most easily described as a BDSM-infused homage to Mighty Bomb Jack (from pre-Itagaki Tecmo) and its ilk.

BDSM? Mmm hmmm. The game's story concerns Jill, who is probably the first submissive character to demand the creation of some kind of plush toy. She's in a real boot-licker of a relationship with The Queen, who lives at the top of a spooky, trap filled tower. Of course, after getting booted down to the very bottom, Jill must leap all the way to the top in order to meet her Queen's welcome demands.

This is all conveyed to the player through a few charming stills at the beginning and end of the game, courtesy of aspiring artist James Harvey. The music, courtesy of Andrew Toups, was produced using a Moog Rogue synthesizer. It's the kind of music you can really twirl your mustache to, if you have one.

So, hey, that's all great, but what's it play like? Dessgeega herself stated over at the game's development thread (hosted at The Gamer's Quarter forum) that:

"for a while i've been complaining about the lack of adequate exploration of vertical space in platformers. so it's natural that my first platform game be pretty high-minded (despite its mind being in the gutter). "

On a basic level, Jill controls a lot like Bomb Jack - pressing the Z button results in a really ridiculously high jump, but you can tap the Z button at any time during that jump to immediately cue a descent. Once Jill starts falling, you can tap the Z button rapidly to slow her fall according to the situation.

There's a really wonderful focus of design evident throughout - the screen scrolls up the whole time, there's only one type of enemy, and two kinds of blocks: those that are dangerous and those that aren't. Dessgeega explores this limited design space thoroughly, however, and takes care not to overstay her welcome. I finished the entire game in about 12 minutes the first time through (the game displays your time for posterity after you finish), but the included readme file challenges you to finish in under 8.

Fun fact: the game was developed over a period of 7 weeks in Dessgeega's spare time - she's currently enrolled as a student at The Guildhall at SMU, a game design school more interested in teaching students how to be cogs in a huge machine than independent thinkers and artists. Of course, that just ended up fostering an even greater urge to create something unique:

(again from The Gamer's Quarter forum)
" i've been working on mighty jill off for the past two months in between my classes and classwork. this is as good as any a place to point out that this game was created entirely without input or resources from my school. i just sit through lectures about 200-person game teams and it makes me want to go and make a game with three people. "

Now that's indie! I've already linked to the game's homepage twice, but three ain't gonna kill me: download the game from here, it was made in Game Maker, and have a nice day.

Indie Ethics

2008-02-28T08:44:00.008-07:00

Boy, those indiependent games have just been taking off, lately! Jonathan Mak's (depicted above) Everyday Shooter got picked up for distribution on Sony's Playstation Network service last year, 2D Boy's World of Goo is apparently getting distribution via Nintendo's upcoming Wiiware service, and millions of people have played Desktop Tower Defense - I count two people in Morgan Library playing it right now! Come on, guys. Don't you have papers to write or something? Geez.

Alex Pham of the LA Times wrote a piece about the recent success of indie game developers, entitled "Indies start to make their mark" - it compares development frameworks like Microsoft XNA to ding-dang youtube, which is gutsy, I'd say.

Much as YouTube is giving unknown video auteurs a chance to find audiences, the video-game industry is opening its doors to upstart developers. Major companies including Microsoft and Sony Corp. are starting to snap up and promote games by amateurs and indie developers as an antidote to the soaring budgets of mainstream games.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo Co. have built online stores where millions of players can buy and download games via Internet-connected consoles, bypassing traditional retailers that refuse to stock anything but blockbuster titles.

Those new distribution methods, like Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, strike me as being especially promising for future independent development, especially when games like Metanet Software's N+ ended up as the #1 game on the service last week. Heeere's hopin'!

Jonathan Mak gives sound advice

In a wonderfully tangential turn of events, 1up's got a pretty neat series of interviews with Jonathan Mak and a few other independent developers. I was goofing around with Game Maker on Tuesday night, and there's a lot of good advice in there for aspiring game designers (possible alternate term: "game goofballs"):

"If you have a turd and you try to add stuff on top of a turd, it's still going to be a turd," says Mak. First, focus on the initial interaction and what makes it cool. "If you look at [Metanet Software's ninja-themed puzzler] N, just moving the ninja around, just doing the wall jumps, is already fun. It's not fun to the point where you're like, "Aw, I can't wait to move the ninja,' but it's already really interesting."

My favorite piece of advice ties back to my earlier experience with the Game Maker tutorial, something I'll get to in a minute:

1UP: You have this inspiration for a game, for a core interaction. What is your process for taking it from this "may be fun" to the prototype stage, and how does this develop into a full-fledged idea?

JM:Before I answer this question, I want to append something to the first question. I don't exactly remember what it was, but don't make a design doc. Forget the design docing. Whatever the way Ubisoft does it, don't do it. Just don't do it. There's no need to do that. They need to do it because they have to make money, or else people lose jobs. You don't have to that. You always have a job. You employ yourself.

Right, so I was working through the initial Game Maker tutorial, and the first thing it has you do is write some design documents. You know those banner ads that implore you to "SHOOT OSAMA BIN LADEN TO WIN A FREE IPOD!" or all manner of similar objectives? This game they want you to write a design document for is pretty much that game.

(From the Game Maker tutorial) The second step in creating a game is to write a more precise design document. You are recommended to always do this before making your game, even if it is very simple. Here is our design document for Catch the Clown.

Catch the Clown design document
Game objects: There will be just two game objects: the clown and the wall. The wall object has a square like image. The wall surrounding the playing area is made out of these objects. The wall object does nothing. It just sits there to stop the clown from moving out of the area. The clown object has the image of a clown face. It moves with a fixed speed. Whenever it hits a wall object it bounces. When the player clicks on the clown with the mouse the score is raised with 10 points. The clown jumps to a random place and the speed is increased with a small amount.

This is... probably how genocidal dictatorships get started, on some level. Some guy unquestioningly writes the design document for the Final Solution and awayyyy they go! So, yes. Good advice, Mak. Eschew that corporate jibba-jabba. Mmmm hmmm.

The most complex game ever made

On the opposite end of the indie games spectrum is Dwarf Fortress (see image), an independent game developed by two guys, Tarn and Zach Adams, who now depend on donations to make a living (they're developing the game full-time). It helps that they have a cult following - Dwarf Fortress is probably the most complicated game ever made, and it runs entirely in textmode! No actual graphics to speak of!

Gamasutra has an interview with the Adams', and they do a pretty good job of summing up the game's staggering scope in the first couple of paragraphs:

The scope of the game defies belief: it contains an extensive world generator, a three-dimensional cellular automata system for simulating fluids, naming languages for all major races, an economics simulation, and even a complete Adventure Mode in which the player can explore abandoned fortresses. It's so detailed that large web communities have sprung up around the game, both on the developer's forums and Something Awful, where players trade stories about what happened in their games. Some of these stories have even become popular outside the game's community.

Most of the interview consists of elaboration on the game's technical side, but the Adams' make sure to discuss their basic inspiration for the game's "generic fantasy setting":

Tarn Adams: What's left to answer is why'd we be so into doing a fantasy game. That's probably the same as everybody else: Tolkien, D&D, myths, and of course, the movie Beastmaster. (We like the part where the evil priest is like, "You'll be sacrificed to 'The God of AAaa,'" like they didn't even bother thinking of a name, just powering through on the power of their badassedness.)

Awesome.

I think that's about it for now. Have a good weekend!

Tomonobu Itagaki is Kind of Insane

2008-02-25T22:35:00.005-07:00

Tomonobu Itagaki (depicted above), the director of fabulously successful and schlockrageous franchises like Dead or Alive (no, not the Takashi Miike film! Nor the adaptation) and Ninja Gaiden, is probably insane. I say this after reading a story in the Daily Telegraph, in which Nick Cowen describes him as a "celebrity in Japan," moments after mentioning the abjunct failure of his games outside of the western market.

This put my brain close to explosion, because nothing about this guy, outside of the fact that he wears his sunglasses at night and has a couple of katana mounted behind his desk, seems to indicate that he's a celebrity. My gut reaction is that Nick Cowen got duped. Or... something. I mean, I can't take the article seriously in the first place because of paragraphs like this:

"In Japan, games producers enjoy celebrity status, while their Western counterparts are considered - at best -successful nerds and- at worst - juvenile delinquents. There, video games are regarded as an art form in their own right; one that sparks fierce debate on internet forums between the occasional and obsessive players."

Yes, Cowen is trying to convince us that angry internet forum arguments are a good way to gauge the cultural importance of video games in Japan, even though there is almost no legitimate evidence to back up his claims. I'm getting sidetracked here. The above article is dumb, but Itagaki is insane.

Take, for example, this 2002 interview with Itagaki from now-defunct XBN magazine, in which the man comes across as some kind of lecherous cyber-pimp:

XBN: A lot of men will buy [Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball] because of the attractive chicks. What is the most risque element you've included in Beach Volleyball?
Itagaki: You'd be surprised, but this is not really a sex game. The girls are beautiful, but I think of them like daughters. They're my babies!

The tone of the review is treacherously maladroit throughout, but the best quote, to me, is near the end.

XBN: Do you consider it normal practice to slag off your competitors?
Itagaki: Okay, let me tell you the real story with that. Back when the original DOA came out, Namco aired a radio commercial insulting the series. As the father of DOA, I will never forget an insult to my family. I will get them back with nuclear missiles more than 100 times for that. I will never forget it.

"I will get them back with nuclear missiles more than 100 times for that" is probably a mistranslation, but is it safe to say that Itagaki's original intent was one of near-total insanity? I'm banking on yes. Bonus points to whoever angrily uses "I will get you back with nuclear missiles over 100 times for that!" in an argument.

Of course, there were also those allegations of sexual harassment back in 2006, but talk about unsurprising.

I'm going to wrap things up with a video from Stephen Totilo's MTV Multiplayer blog, in which Itagaki himself commands us to stop mispronouncing his name, moments after mangling the title of his upcoming DS game "Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword." Enjoy!

Professor Layton - A Man With a Top Hat

2008-02-20T21:46:00.010-07:00

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a recently-released game for the Nintendo DS from developer Level 5 that attempts to combine a big book full of logic puzzles with a gorgeous adventure game motif. It strays dangerously close to being artificial, hollow and stupid, but it manages to keep all of its wheels on the ground long enough for the whole endeavor to end up being pretty wonderful.

So, hey: most immediately striking to me was the game's art style, which, as a few friends of mine noted, strongly resembles that of The Triplets of Belleville. It's an immediately appealing aesthetic choice, especially considering how eagerly other developers seem to be gravitating towards horrible schlock when it comes to these kinds of things - that's a topic for another day, I think.

Our two protagonists are Professor Layton, who is a man with a top hat, and his ward, Luke. Layton isn't some kind of crime-fighting genius. He's just a smart guy with a reputation. Both he and Luke are big fans of puzzles, which is the important part, because the game takes place in St. Mystere - a town where everyone is obsessed with puzzles.

It's kind of a stupid conceit, because the result is that everyone in town is just a construct, serving only to relay another puzzle to Layton.

"Why not celebrate this fine weather with a puzzle?" says one of the fairly deformed inhabitants of St. Mystere, a man responsible for taking care of the town's long-abandoned amusement park. "Let me tell you one of my favorites."

You are then taken to a completely different screen, where you are told the number of the puzzle (No. 088 in this case), its name, and how many points it's worth when solved. This is the core problem of the game, but also, strangely, why it works so damn well. Even if the adventure game portion ends up being nothing more than window-dressing, the puzzles themselves work so well on their own that you accept the set-up voluntarily. As an example, here's No. 088 itself:

"A tennis ball has rolled its way down into a hole. This particular hole is extremely deep and has a sharp bend in the middle, making the ball impossible to retrieve by hand. To make matters worse, the ground around the hole is made of hard clay, so digging the ball out isn't an option.

However, you have something incredibly commonplace on hand that you can use to get the ball out. What do you use to get the ball out? Answer in five letters."

Feel free to answer in the comments if you think you know the answer!

In-game, you can ask for a hint if you get stuck - each problem has up to 3 that you can use as a last resort, but each hint requires that you use up a "hint coin." Unfortunately, the only way to find hint coins entails tapping every possible point on each screen with your stylus until you randomly find them. Oh, sure, they tried making this fairly reasonable, putting coins in the most visually interesting parts of each screen, but then there are the ones that are hidden in random pixels of floor tiling, and you groan. Even so, the fact that you have to pixel-hunt for objects which have no major influence on the rest of the game means that, even in its failures, Professor Layton and the Curious Village still manages to solve a cardinal flaw in point-and-click adventure games, which frequently required clicking all over a screen for objects required to advance.

Would this game work better as an unadorned series of puzzles? I'm not sure. The huge variety of puzzles (over 130, with a new downloadable puzzle every week) is staggering, and I have a feeling that it would be a little overwhelming without the adventure-game context to keep things moving along. It's flawed, sure, but there's no question that it makes the game significantly more compelling just by being there. Does that make any sense? This is a great game just by the nature of the puzzles themselves. That Level 5 bothered developing a gorgeous adventure game instead of lazily shoehorning all the puzzles into a menu and slapping Professor Emeritus Akira Tago's face on the cover (which, apparently, they were planning on doing originally) is kind of great.

Anyway, even if the characters who give you these puzzles are ridiculous and transparent, Level 5 founder Akihiro Hino promises in this Gametap interview that they totally realized it was retarded and tried to fix it in the sequel, which is already out in Japan and coming out here eventually. Unless the first game bombs miserably in the US, which won't happen because you are running out and buying it right now. If you aren't convinced, you can even go and play a flash demo over at the game's US web site! Yes! Please do this more often, developers!

Lookin' back - Mr. Driller G

2008-02-17T22:40:00.026-07:00

Mr. Driller G is the third game in a Namco-developed puzzle game series that seems to have dropped off the face of the map around 2004 or so. The first game in the series, released back in 1999, bombed miserably in the US despite a pretty big push from Namco, but was popular enough in Japan to foster several sequels, only a few of which made it to American shores. Mr. Driller G was not one of those games (it was released for the Japanese Playstation in 2001), but I decided to take a look at it anyway. I'm... regretting it now, but here goes!

The original Mr. Driller's core play mechanics have remained nearly unchanged through the many iterations of the series: starting from the surface, drill through the fruitcake-like depths of the earth to reach a certain depth. Like-colored blocks will stick together and can be drilled away at once, while the brown "x" blocks require more drilling to remove and will also drain your supply of oxygen. Besides these basic rules, the flow of the game consists of rushing to the bottom without being "crushed like a frickin' omelette", while also making sure to pick up oxygen capsules to prevent a case of Surprisingly Adorable Asphyxiation.

Unfortunately for me, Mr. Driller G is a lot like its sequels on the Gamecube, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, which means I don't have a lot to talk about! There's Mission Driller mode, where you start at one of several different cities with the aim of drilling to a specific depth. There's Time Attack Driller, which is pretty self-explanatory. Finally, there's Scenario Driller, which is... pretty boring.

Well, that's not entirely fair! It's got some things going for it, aesthetically. Structurally, it's set up to look like a series of episodes in a hypothetical Mr. Driller cartoon show. What's odd is that it takes some of its stylistic cues from Clutch Cargo, or any cheaply produced work of American television animation from the 50s and 60s, instead of from Japanese animation of the same time frame. They only went halfway, with the voice acting and dialogue being entirely Japanese, but it's an interesting choice, regardless.

Anyway, that's the interesting part. The boring part: Scenario Driller eschews the speed and skill-focused play mechanics of the other game modes. Normally, your oxygen supply decreases at a constant rate, effectively serving as a time limit. In Scenario Driller, however, your oxygen decreases by a set amount every time you drill through a block, and serves as a limit on your movement, instead.

The other big change is the inclusion of "Dristones," which appear a little more often than oxygen capsules, and have a variety of effects - destroying all like-colored blocks on the screen, changing one color block to another, refilling your oxygen, etc.

Unfortunately, their implementation is clumsy. To use a dristone, you have to open up a separate menu and make a selection, which kills any flow the game may have had. The result is stuttering and boring, in addition to being a little unnecessarily time consuming when compared to the rest of the game. Kind of a shame, but I'm sure that there are also people out there who really dig dristone mode. Hmmm.

All the modes are complemented with a really wonderful, almost over-produced soundtrack, courtesy of Go Shigo and Tomoko Tatsuya, the game's sound design guys. They really outdid themselves, to the point where they smartly decided to reuse the music from G in Drill Land, a sequel to this series released on the Gamecube in 2002. And hey, thank goodness, because while there are no videos of G on youtube, there are plenty of Drill Land. It's a very similar game, with a lot of the same music, so it should suffice as a video demonstration of what G's all about.

On Thursday: Professor Layton and the Curious Village gets a stern high-five.

Talkin' 'bout Super Mario Galaxy

2008-02-14T10:21:00.006-07:00

I have a pretty big assignment due in my magazine writing class today, so I figured I'd just sum up some of my thoughts about Super Mario Galaxy, which I borrowed from a friend of mine about 2 months ago and just recently finished. Did it live up to all of those brain-burstingly high metacritic scores?

Well, yeah. Mostly.

The biggest issue I had with the game's design is its thoughtless adherence to "lives." That is to say, every time you accidentally send Mario into a black hole or wall of spikes or some other Bad Thing, Charles Martinet screams in his faux-italian accent and "TOO BAD!" hops apologetically onscreen. This is enough, right?

The issue is that following every one of Mario's untimely demises, you get docked a "life" before getting sent back to a recent section of whatever stage you were on. This makes sense for plenty of games - the original Super Mario Bros. and its many sequels (of which Galaxy is a proud member, to some degree) all had the same concept.

Thing is, those early games were all designed around it - the original Super Mario Bros. had a scoring system, and if you ran out of lives your score was reset in addition to sending you back to the beginning of the current world.

In Super Mario Galaxy, though, there's no point - if you die, you're just going to try again, and the game gives you no reason to fear running out of lives outside of the minor inconvenience of having to see a slightly different screen after Mario bites it for the last time. The existence of lives feels so thoughtlessly implemented that I wonder if the developers even seriously considered what they were doing when they put 'em in.

It's made even worse by how generous the game is with 'em. Nearly every time you resume your game, there's a letter waiting for Mario from Princess Peach ("Dear Mario: I'm far away, but it's cool because I know you're coming to rescue me something something") with 5 extra lives inside. Every time you collect 50 star bits, you get an extra life, and I frequently found myself finishing stages with over 150 of the doodads.

Yes, that was the worst thing I could find to say about the game, which was pretty ding-dang magical for nearly its entire duration. When I realized that the other worst thing I could think of saying about the game is that it makes you press the A button too much when exiting from a stage, well.

I'm going to come back and really fix this blog entry up in a few hours, I think. After I take a nap. Yes.

Maaaannn - the new Advance Wars kind of blows

2008-02-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

I've been sloowwwly playing Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, the recently released sequel to Intelligent Systems' long-running portable strategy series. Slowly, because despite all the attempts to reinvigorate the long-running strategy franchise with streamlined play mechanics and a faster pace, the result is inexplicably more slow and ugly than any prior entry in the series.

It's also a really cynical attempt to reboot the franchise with a spookier setting and characters more likely to appeal to non-Japanese audiences. This didn't seem like a terrible idea at first glance, but the execution - goodness, it is bad.

The premise at the outset of Days of Ruin is that a world already plagued with war between massive super-powers ends up getting suddenly smacked around by meteors. Nearly everyone dies, and those who survive have to live under massive clouds of smoke and ash.

This is a sorta-interesting premise, but it simply doesn't work for Advance Wars. The core play mechanics of the series have always revolved around the capture of cities. Cities generate revenue, which you then use to produce tanks, planes and boats, and hey - in a world destroyed by meteors, how can there still be tons of cities and factories lying around ready to crank out weapons of war? It simply doesn't make sense.

You can see the game's scenario writers struggling with this obvious problem through the first few maps. Characters lament their inability to find any survivors. All the cities they find have been destroyed. The world is a pockmarked wasteland.

Then you get to the fifth map, and suddenly you done playin' some Advance Wars. All those cities and bases that you couldn't find are suddenly in ample supply - the constraints of the game's design demand it.

Of course, the post-apocalyptic setting also gave Intelligent Systems the chance to create an entirely new cast of characters, nearly all of whom are boring or obnoxious (see image, then groan). It feels like... what was the point, exactly?

Did I mention that the graphics are totally hideous, a mess of browns and purples with weirdly amateurish, overscaled unit graphics during battle animations? Yup.

Prior to the game's release, Nintendo's PR line was that the reasons for the "radical changes" to the game's tone and gameplay all stemmed from the central idea of a creating a faster turn-based strategy game. And hey, that sounded great! My biggest problem with every other game in the series is how quickly maps would degrade into a big slog, with turn after turn after turn of tedious unit management.

So imagine my surprise when Days of Ruin turned out to be even more tedious than the previous games! Yes, there's a new bike unit that can move as quickly as tanks while still being able to capture cities. And yes, battleships can now move and fire in the same turn, making them absolutely terrifying in most situations.

None of these things, as it turns out, makes the game play any faster. I remember the last map in the original Advance Wars taking something like 30 turns the first time I played it. It was an epic slog, but it felt like a fitting conclusion to the campaign.

Map 21 in Days of Ruin, however, took me 32 turns to finish. Map 22 took about 35, and by this point my brain had had enough. I was sick of putting up with the game's annoying nonsense, sitting around in the bowels of Morgan Library between classes playing a game that I frankly wasn't enjoying.

It's a shame, too, because I was hoping for better. I'm always one to give these kinds of things the benefit of the doubt, but in this case Days of Ruin is simply a case of less being less. Bummer.

Oh, and before I forget - out of the ten games I tried playing against other players online using the "play anyone" setting, eight of them cheated in some way. They either had infantry units that dealt 99 damage, or infinite funds. Oops!

"Until I f---ing die or until I am incapable of doing it anymore.” - No Country for Old Arcades is great

2008-02-06T15:49:00.003-07:00

photo credit: Oscar Chang

Geez, the arcade industry in the US is a mess. When was the last time you went to an arcade? Never? The only one left in Fort Collins is that god-forsaken Tilt in the Foothills Fashion Mall, and it's a microcosm for why arcades are dead across the country - the games are all ten years old and broken in some way, the guy at the front desk is surly and unhelpful, and the whole endeavor feels unnecessary and pointless.

So thank goodness that Jared Rea of Gametap decided to start writing No Country for Old Arcades - the first article series I've seen to cover the few remaining worthwhile arcades in the United States with professionalism and a genuine interest.

The first article covers Sunnyvale Golfland, which used to be a testing location for many of the biggest arcade game developers back in the 80s. He speaks to the current owner, Jason Kenny, along with expert fighting game player John Choi, and ends up piecing together the location's importance in video game history, along with some ideas as to why arcades in the US are in their current, sad state.

The second article, on the other hand, focuses its attention on the absolutely insane Keystone II, which is a guy's house. A house with many arcade games in it, but a house nonetheless. The owner, who is referred to only as "Albert," allows a limited number of people - all hardcore fighting game players - to come to his house via reservation on Keystone II's web site. He maintains the machines in his home on a donation basis, and his wife is eerily accepting of the endeavor.

Both articles are excellent pieces of mag writing, so go read them. Rea plans on visiting more great arcades in the coming weeks, and I'm looking forward to seeing what places he digs up and puts in the spotlight. With arcades close to dead in the US (and rapidly moving in that direction in Japan according to a recent Reuters article), they deserve all the attention they can get, y'know?

Iwata Asks, I Froth

2008-02-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

For the past eight months or so, smashbros.com has been generating a diabetes-inducing level of hype for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the just-released-in-Japan sequel to 2001's Super Smash Bros. Melee.

What is there to say about Melee, at this point? It was the Nintendo Gamecube's best selling game, and people are still playing it, casually and seriously, seven years after its release. An exceptional record, to be sure.

I remember thinking it was a wonderful game in 2001, and my appreciation for the game's wide appeal and surprisingly deep play mechanics has diminished only slightly over the past seven years.

Reading the daily updates at smashbros.com, however, put me in a strange state of malaise. Brawl looked like Melee but with more stuff. More characters, mostly boring. More doodads to thoughtlessly collect! More music from more musicians! More modes, including (seemingly crippled) online play and a level editor!

It was this last point that made me begin to think that, more likely than not, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was probably going to be ridiculously great. And yet, strangely, my apathy persisted until this previous Wednesday, when the game saw release in Japan (it doesn't come out in North America until March 9).

Spearheading the game's release was a remarkably interesting PR interview between Satoru Iwata, the current president of Nintendo, and Masahiro Sakurai, the lead director of both Smash Bros. Brawl and its two prequels.

The interview reveals the spur-of-the-moment nature of the game's development, including the surprising fact that, if Iwata hadn't mentioned the possibility of a new Smash Bros. during his speech at E3 in 2005, the game would probably never have been made.

Sakurai
Actually, I was a freelance game developer at the time and had planned to use E3 as a means to gather information on the newest hardware and software and figure out what I would work on next. And then I met up with [Iwata]. I had some other job requests already and had a hard time making up my mind. In the end though, I decided there were no other jobs with the potential that I could get people to be as happy as the Smash Bros. project. After all, it was already clear that lots of people were looking forward to it. So, I decided to accept the project. Or, accepted that I had no choice but to take it.

What's especially interesting to me about this is that Sakurai left Nintendo in 2003 because he was tired of developing sequels and rehashes (see sidebar). Was Sakurai developing this game begrudgingly? Even if he was, some of the information from later in the interview sounded too potentially insane to dismiss:

Iwata
Let’s talk about music next. The music for the previous Smash Bros. titles was truly amazing, but the music for Smash Bros. Brawl is something else entirely.

Sakurai
You think we went overboard?

Iwata
Maybe just a bit. (laughs)

Iwata
Actually, the department that handles contracts and copyrights said this game has thirty games worth of music.

Sakurai
Wow. Sorry for getting so carried away. (laughs)

I know how Sakurai feels, since I intended this blog entry to be about, I dunno, a third of the size that it is now. Let's wrap this one up with a couple of youtube videos - what really sold me on the game, in the end, were the implications of the stage editor.

Next time: A shorter entry!

Getting the b-ball rolling.

2008-01-28T20:39:00.003-07:00

Last Tuesday saw the release of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, an absurd, mock-heroic send-up of Japanese role-playing games starring former NBA superstar Charles Barkley in the role of postcyberpocalyptic world savior. It was developed by four members of the Gaming World Forums going by the collective name "Tales of Game's Studios," (incorrect punctuation intended) and if it isn't clear yet, you should not be taking this game seriously.

The first, unfinished version of Gaiden was released nearly a year ago, and was developed with RPGMaker, the favorite game development tool for high-school kids with too much time on their hands. At the time, I thought it would never be completed - part of the joke was how often these games spiraled out of control as their creators piled more and more ideas and ambition into a project they would never finish. Also, RPGMaker kind of sucks, and no matter how much work you put into subverting its limitations, you're probably going to end up with a game that's still a chore to play. This was the case with the first demo, which wasn't really fun to play, despite having such a fantastic premise. I forgot about the game, figuring it was nothing more than an elaborate joke, but every once in a while I would think back and ask "what if?"

When I saw that the game had been finished, I nearly spewed a mouthful of Mrs. T's Pierogies all over the computer screen. Not only was the game finished, but it had been rebuilt from the ground up using Game Maker - rebuilt from the ground up to not suck. The battle system is now a fun little riff on Paper Mario's schtick, and the dialogue, which was easily the best thing about the demo, maintains its tone of hilarious bathos through the full game.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is one of the most entertaining games I've played in a long time, independently developed or not. It's also free and readily available to download from the Tales of Game's Studios homepage. It requires Windows, but I imagine most computers made in the past ten years should be able to run it just fine.