Boy, Nintendo never cared about Virtual Console, huh

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!

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

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!

Game Center CX tidbits

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!

PC Engine Season - Galaga '88

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 Hudson 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.)

Phantasy Star Complete Collection OR: M2 does a wonderful job

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?

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

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is an incredibly long-running manga 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!

Welcome to Special Console - Toe Jam & Earl

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.

Lookin' back - Mr. Driller G

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.