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

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.

BeatBlox: The game I keep forgetting to talk about

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.

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

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 new 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.

Semi-Capsule Review: Ketsui Death Label (DS)

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)

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...

1. 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!
   
2. 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.
3. 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

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:

1. Nearly impossible-to-lose series of introductory battles. Both paralyizingly boring and pretty cool looking.
2. 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.
   
3. Finally leave the city for obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest.
4. Hardest first boss in a modern JRPG ever.
5. Slightly shorter version of 2.
6. Slightly shorter version of 3 and 4.
7. Segment where you're trapped in prison and must walk around in circles until the game decides it is time for you to leave.
8. Awful stealth section.
9. Even longer version of 2.
10. Ominous foreshadowing.
11. 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.
    
12. Obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest, followed by a dungeon that looks like a dungeon.
13. 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

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 every 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)

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?

The Bionic Commando remake's Japanese trailer is staggering

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.

Special E3 News Digest

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!

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

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.

BARKLEY, SHUT UP AND ROGUELIKE

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

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 (Eugene 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!

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

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.

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

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)

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!