Hardcore Gaming 101 - Blog

Recettear on Steam

2010-09-02T07:46:00.002-04:00

I normally don't like reprinting press releases (I did far too much of that when I worked on a commercial games magazine), but Carpe Fulgar emailed me more info on Recettear, which I'm finding rather enjoyable.

Basically they say it's going to be put on Valve's Steam service. I don't use Steam, so I've no idea what popular consensus is on this.

"We are happy - almost to the point of delirium, really - to be on Steam," said Andrew Dice, Project Director for Recettear at Carpe Fulgur. "This is the first time an independently-made game from Japan has appeared on the Steam service. This will allow the game to reach an audience of millions that otherwise would've been closed to it, and we have high hopes that Steam users will enjoy the game for the unique gem that it is."

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is currently available for pre-purchase on Steam with a 10% discount and will be available to play on September 10th, 2010.

We at HG101 though have an early copy, and will be doing the usual in-depth HG101 feature with character write-ups shortly.

Haiku Quest – the MAKING OF

2010-09-02T07:17:00.005-04:00

For the record, no that sadly wasn’t Christopher Walken’s voice in Haiku Quest. I had thought this would be obvious, but it says a lot about the internet that for a time it was regarded as fact. For a full explanation on how Haiku Quest came to be, read on! (heading image from Zen Albatross on Motherboard)
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My motivation for creating Haiku Quest was mainly to give people the experience of the haiku minigames from Boku no Natsuyasumi 3 in English. As several pointed out it’s actually very similar to the insult sword-fighting in Monkey Island, though I personally didn’t make this connection at the time. I also wanted to experiment with QB64’s sound playing options, and I really wanted to have an entry on TIGSource, since I love the website and the whole indie community. As I’ve said before, I regard myself as the Ed Wood of indie games development, and getting people to take notice of anything I make is nigh on impossible. But my haiku RPG idea had just enough merit, and was just within my abilities, to actually appear worthwhile.

My initial idea was a grand multi-screen RPG, where verses of haiku could be acquired for doing tasks and could be used like equipment. Haiku are meant to be seasonal, so imagine sticking winter verses on your armour to keep cool when fighting a fire-breathing dragon. Maybe boss battles could take the form of haiku stand-offs similar to the rap battles in 8 Mile, and you’d absorb the haiku verses of defeated poets, to then find and take on more powerful haiku poets. Stuff like that. It was within my abilities if I could set up an array to handle all the verse combinations, but I knew I’d get bored before completion. So I scaled it down to 4 screens, and replicated the BnN3 minigame exactly, except I used 5 poems and it used 10.

In the end I decided rather to create a proof of concept game, something you could finish in 10 minutes, but which might encourage other indie game makers to do something similar. I also went with ASCII in the end since despite creating an animated sprite, the amount of work needed to create perfect collision detection was rather daunting, since I’d need to cater from the start X and Y points, and the ending X and Y points for not only the main character, but anything he touched. So 8 variables, as opposed to only 4 axis positions with ASCII.

Of course my decision to claim that the legendary Christopher Walken had lent his voice to the game ignited some internet rage – though it serves you all right, since most sites didn’t even take the time to check the WAV files before posting a news story. 1UP actually had the best, and most intelligent coverage of this, and I’ll be discussing all of these in a moment. But first, a list of all the places I found that spoke about this:

GameSetWatch
1UP
Colony of Gamers
NeoGAF
Reddit
RPGcodex
Metafilter
Motherboard
French website
HG101

CALCULATED DESIGN

One of the biggest surprises regarding the game is how many people posted online saying they didn’t know how to play it. I have a great dislike for long-winded tutorials, and I thought that the basic mechanics of the game would be fool-proof in their simplicity. There are 4 screens, only 2 which contain anything. You visit Haiku Man, he recites a poem and asks you to grade him (your grade to a degree affects what grade he gives your lower level poems), and then all that’s left is visiting the village.

The daylight meter at the bottom continuously goes down, and I thought it would be obvious that if the inn keeper says it’s too early for bed, you need the bar to be a little smaller. It needs to be around 20 pixels long I think, and it decreases 1 pixel with each step. So when the inn-keeper boots you out, I made sure that even if the bar was at 21 (the lowest it would go without letting you sleep), you’d still have enough time to walk AGAIN from the village entrance to the inn without it reaching sunset – by which time it would OK to sleep. Calculated design that was, people. Also, the more expensive sleeping option is redundant. A lot of games feature utterly redundant options, and this is my homage to them. Stay in the cheap room!

After sleeping the bar refills and you need to spend the rest of your money increasing your supplies bar. I decided that in so many RPGs, winning came down to having enough gold to buy the most health restore items, plus the best equipment and weapons. No one intentionally buys anything less than the best they can afford, so I streamlined it. Imagine a thousand useless variations on items and equipment, and assume that based on your current money, you will always buy the best you can afford. So your bar fills up, representing armour integrity, health potion numbers, HP and so on. I was reminded that in Final Fantasy 7, the majority of boss battles came down to how many Mega Elixirs I had, since this restored the entire party. The only tricky bosses were the Ultima Weapon bosses, which were my favourite, since they required genuine strategy to clock, involving complex things like W-Materia and clever use of material in dual weapon slots, plus the need for underwater material so you could breath, and instant-revive set-ups for when the entire party was wiped out. Most other battles though, like most RPGs, came down to buying the best sword before a big boss, and buying as many restore items as you could. Then it was a case of hitting attack or magic until it died, while regularly using said items.

NPC IRONY

Also, I thought it rather clever that the game’s only NPC (assuming Haiku Man is the game’s only boss) says only “...” to you. That well known JRPG cliche of the ellipses, which says and does nothing other than waste time. But actually, Ojisan is extremely important. If you enter town and it’s too early sleep, rather than run left or right, he acts as a wall you can run into to decrease the daylight bar more quickly. In short: he exists purely to waste/pass time. How many times did you play Shenmue and wish there was a quick way to make the time pass? Deadly Premonition had the clever idea of cigarettes, where smoking would cause time to pass. Ojisan falls into this category.

STEALING AND MUSASHI’S WIFE

I had to laugh at how several people online claimed the game was unfinished. A guy on Reddit said: “A lot of the game is not even really implemented or just put in to look like there is more when there isn't like menu options that aren't selectable.” He was referring to Musashi’s inn where there’s the option to “sleep with Musashi’s wife” but the cursor won’t go there, and in Takashi’s store there’s the option to steal from Takashi, but again you can’t select it/

This wasn’t really an attempt to make it seem like the game contained more – it was a kind of post-modern, abstract dig at all those jerkoff Western developers who are claiming JRPGs aren’t really RPGs, because you haven’t got the freedom to kill anyone, or rob from anyone, or do totally pointless shit like decide what your character looks like. For these narrow-minded idiots, the lack of freedom do irrelevant things means JRPGs don’t deserve to be called RPGs. I disagree. It is a crazy idea for games to allow total freedom outside the context of what they are. I think it was EDGE magazine that once complained about Metal Gear Solid, that while Snake had a packet of cigarettes, it was unrealistic that he couldn’t kill himself by smoking the entire pack at once. How absurd is that? So with all this in my mind, I added 2 options which no one can ever select. I suppose if this were a Bethesda game, you could kill the storeowner and steal all his goods, or if it were Fable you could sleep with whoever you choose.

Actually, the stealing the from the store bit reminded of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the GB, where you could steal the bow, which was a seminal moment in gaming for me. Since the only penalty was your name changing to THIEF and you losing a life. Which was a small price to pay for saying 980 rupees. But yeah, the inaccessible menu options are part of this game’s modus operandi – messing with your mind.

INSTANT-TIME BATTLES

This bullet point, along with the claim of a massive overworld, should have sent bells ringing that most of this was satirical. I had recently completed Dragon Knight 3 (aka Knights of Xentar) for DOS, and what I liked most about it was that all the battles were automatic. Random battles in almost all RPGs fall to you repeatedly hitting attack or magic, over and over, and if you’re lucky the bosses prove more challenging. But Knights of Xentar streamlined this, resulting in automatic damage to yourself and enemies, with your only input being occasionally hitting the items button to give a health potion. It was great, since what is the point of going through the motions of your standard JRPG battle? It also reminded me of Earthbound, where after getting to a high level, touching an enemy results in their instant defeat. People have compared it to Roguelikes, but I have never, in my life, played a Roguelike. So I can’t comment on this. Mainly it was inspired by Knights of Xentar.

Speaking of battles, my idea was for a very avante guarde art style, with the game entirely in black and white. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the monster names were in colour? No one has commented on the fact that you inhabit a world where the only source of colour is its monsters – the things which kill you. I also chose names which would sound foreign, rather than crap like orc and elf. Wyvern is common in Europe, but babayaga (witch) isn’t, and neither is gorbunok (a flying horse from Russian legend).

THE POETRY

I wrote these first. As an accomplished writer, and author, I could probably write some decent haiku. I quite like the Game Over haiku I did, even though they lacked any kind of seasonal theme or “cutting word” at the end. Regardless, I decided to make my job easier, and make this appeal to game geeks, but basing them entirely on games. First I wrote the 5 perfect haiku (each inspired by a certain classic series), and then I tweaked them so that the different verses would work when you mixed them up.

Darius:
The small ship flies / A huge enemy approaches / Smell of dead fish

Street Fighter or Streets of Rage:
Two men in the street / Ancient bare knuckle technique / Fierce burning is felt

Mario:
In and out, again, again / Glade of green pipes stretching forth / Princess in a castle

Tetris:
From the sky they fall / Moulding the body’s position / Conformists vanish

Metal Gear
In a box hiding / Rigid serpent in warm places / Father’s legacy

I’m a little disappointed that David Wolinsky of 1UP, despite “getting” the game better than anyone else, assumed the haiku were all filthy and about masturbation. The Mario themed one makes sense, since he goes in and out of green pipes which stretch to the horizon. And the reason? Princess in a castle. The Rigid Serpent verse is obviously “Solid Snake”, and the fact that most of his games are in a hot climate (MG, MG2SS, Snake’s Revenge, Ghost Babel, MGS3, MGS4, Portable Ops, etc). Dead fish? Come on, that has to be the aquatically themed Darius. And as for fierce burning, that’s obviously a hadoken from Street Fighter.

The only really abstract one I’m disappointed with in hindsight, is the Tetris one. I always picture Tetris as a metaphor for communist Russia. They fall from the sky represents the blocks, but moulding the body’s position is me thinking of George Orwell’s 1984, and how the state moulded you inside the Ministry of Truth, which eerily mirrors what the communists did to dissenters. Conformists vanish means that once you conformed, you vanished from the Ministry of Truth and room 101 – in effect let free. And in Tetris, if you conform to a single clean line, you also vanish. I imagine people are the blocks being moulded by the state, and as they form the imposed ideal, they are allowed to leave.

There are 3 columns of 5 verses, allowing for 125 poem combinations. Only 5 will give you a red haiku diamond to complete the game, and about 30 other specific combinations will net you above 70 points. The rest are likely to be nonsense poems which only allow for a maximum of 65 points, depending on what scores you gave Haiku Man and a few other factors.

THE ENDING and SECRET

Someone described this as the prank of a 7th grader doing his first coding project. I like to think of the ending as being as cool as the ending in Monkey Island 2. And based on how people fell for my Walken hoax, I’m sure one or two probably got a little frightened seeing the ending. Just push enter 5 times to quit. With the above perfect haiku answers, you can see it for yourself.

As for the secret, if you go to the upper right screen, right into the corner, you’ll get a special message showing the names of the Haiku Gods. The first 3 are actually game names/characters backwards, which I had hoped would give a clue as to deciphering the poems: Darius, Street Fighting, and Jump Man. The last 2 are Dave Hayter, voice actor in the MGS games, and Alexei Pajitnov, the guy behind Tetris. In hindsight, putting a clue in a such an out of the way place made it rather redundant.

CODING IT

I coded it up in about 10 hours over two days, and then posted a couple of topics on a forum asking for “sexy voices” – I wanted a silky smooth leading male and female voice for the game. Something which sounded fantastic, to elevate it from a proof of concept game to something with artistic merit. Hal Binderman and Topher Florence I actually knew from some podcasts I participated in, so I contacted them directly and they graciously agreed, without knowing how deranged my plans would become.

And then.... nothing. No female leads. Those I contacted directly declined, and only a couple showed a slight interest before promptly ignoring further forum messages. Perhaps the quite obviously sexual innuendos put them off. After about 3-4 days I was sitting on a nearly complete project and then thought, in my quintessentially Cockney lilt, bugger this for a lark. I’d waited long enough and wanted it out there. So I’d have to use my own voice I realised. So, against my initial plans, I’d have to use an all-male cast. And my voice isn’t actually Cockney, that would have been cool. In reality it’s a horrid, screechy blend of Afrikaans, British and East European. Well, with no other options, maybe I could milk the comedy angle and make the game sound awful on purpose.

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN

Then I watched Larry King, sometime last week probably, and he was interviewing a comedian who spoke about Christopher Walken. The comedian said that some everyone in comedy can do a Walken impression, and that Walken loves to DANCE. He’s also one of my all-time favourite actors. I mean, the guy is incredibly skilled, charismatic, funny or frightening depending on the role, with an incredible voice/persona, not to mention everyone who works with him says what a great guy he is personally. I have bought and watched mediocre films for no other reason than because Walken was in it. In fact I think Walken should have his own radio show, or podcast, just Walken, talking for an hour, about whatever the hell he wants. No set agendas or script, just Walken, discussing his thoughts.

I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for Walken - who is deservedly regarded as legendary.

I decided if I was forced to act in my own game, I’d try to salvage it by doing a Walken impression. Except my impression was terrible. But what was I going to do after 4 days of waiting and not even a cursory interest? So, with nothing to lose, I decided I’d say I got the real Walken to do it. Many have commented on how he loves acting and won’t turn down something he finds interesting – so it was certainly within the realm of possibility. I even tried to look for his agent’s contact details, but couldn’t find any.

My belief was people would download the 4.5mb file, instantly realise it wasn’t Walken, and chuckle to themselves at how ridiculous my attempted impression was. If Conan O’Brian can have Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions, with the moving lips, and people realise it’s fake, they’d sure as hell realise this was a lie. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why I’m not even remotely sorry for what I did. I have absolutely no shame regarding such a half-arsed hoax. Maybe, if I’d gone to the effort and got one of the many skilled people on youtube who do Walken impressions, and created a genuinely convincing set-up, I might feel guilty. But this was the equivalent of doing a doodle in MS paint and calling it a Da Vinci. Maybe I’d fool you until you actually saw it, but after that it should be obvious. And yet, incredibly, people continued to believe, and several who obviously wanted it to be real, argued why it must be.

This fiasco did reveal something very interesting about the internet though.

No one who initially reported on it even downloaded it, since the WAV files are right there to be listened to. WAVs A1-C5 were those meant to be Walken’s and it’s quite clear they’re a (very bad) impersonation. Even if you couldn’t load it on your Mac computers, you could listen to the WAVs. This was partly GameSetWatch’s fault, who reported on it first and wrote the story in a way that made you think it had to be true and that they'd checked this. And they fooled a lot of people who later quoted them as a source.

The best write up was David Wolinsky’s on 1UP, and I’m naming him not only because his was the most intelligent reporting on this, but because he has a Polish surname and there can never be too many of us Poles taking the internet limelight. As he wrote:
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[...] a new freeware game with its claim that Christopher Walken, that cowbell-loving star of stage and screen, took “five minutes” to record voice acting for it on someone’s laptop. If you’re gullible enough to believe that, then you’re going to hate Haiku Quest.

Or if you choose to believe the lie, then you’ll appreciate the short JRPG-inspired game’s charm.
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I think he missed out a word, and meant to say either “you’re NOT gullible enough” or in the next paragraph “choose NOT to believe the lie”, since at the moment each sentence basically says the same thing. But regardless, he’s right on the money. If you realised it was obviously a joke on my part, I’d hope you’d enjoy it for what it is: a 5 minute diversion which should make you think, “hey, this is kinda neat. It’s a great concept for a more fleshed out RPG.”

That’s all I wanted, really.

If I had any regrets (and I don’t) it’s that the main website of HG101 might receive some negativity because of this. Let the record show that I am only a contributor. Articles on the main site are checked by Kurt before going live, whereas with the blog I have total unchecked freedom to run amok should I choose.

Several people, some of whom I know and respect, have said they come to HG101 for serious article. And yes, the main site is a place for serious examination, but the blog should be seen as more light-hearted and fun. All I did was, at worst, waste 5 minutes of your life. And it was fun while it lasted, because my utter disbelief at how the internet ran with this made me laugh like a drain for hours.

I suppose this stunt detracted from whatever genuine merit the game originally had, and made people dislike it as a result, but I'm not really concerned since this was never going to make a huge splash. At least this has made Google searching for results even easier.

Haiku Quest was a 100% calculated and planned project, and up until the 3-4 days that I waited with no interest from anyone wanting to do the female voices, was not going to involve the Walken spoof. I didn’t do it to upset people, I did it out of frustration because no one got back to me and I needed this finished, and to amuse myself. And to quote Joey in that chocolate eating scene: I’m not even sorry!

T2 does not always refer to Judgment Day.

2010-09-02T00:17:00.008-04:00

Sometimes it can refer to a Japanese illustrator who goes by the name of Tony Taka. Now for those of you who know him, this blog post is absolutely worksafe, so don't hit that Back button on your browser if you were expecting that. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the man, the best one-sentence description I can give to you is that he is a modern-day Satoshi Urushihara. And like Satoshi Urushihara, Tony is also well-known for the female designs of a particular JRPG series, except substitute Langrisser with most of the post-Sega console Shining "(Insert Noun Here)" games.

So the reason why I bring up this particular artist during Hardcore Gaming 101's Vocaloid Week is because he did an illustration of Miku for Comic Market 77, which was last winter:

What's really amusing for me about this illustration though is that this is actually the most non-sexually provocative pose of a female character I've seen this guy make. And for good reason: Sega told him to draw that for Comiket 77 because they wanted to not scare away Vocaloid fans from their booth since they used that illustration to sell a CD called White and Shadow, which contained two tracks that were composed by Hiroki Kikuta (Seiken Densetsu 2 and 3, Romancing Saga). The sad part is I haven't listened to that CD yet either. Woe is me.

Oh yeah, there's a figure of this illustration up for preorder, but you already knew that before you read this, didn't you?

So Today's Miku's 3rd year anniversary...

2010-08-31T21:51:00.009-04:00

... And all I have to show for it is a picture:

Of her about to eat ice cream like you weren't expecting THAT to happen

And a sound clip of her saying the name of this website.

Haiku Quest – an RPG featuring haiku poetry and Christopher Walken

2010-08-30T05:19:00.007-04:00

It’s taken me a long while to finish my latest game, Haiku Quest. Mainly I had trouble recruiting voice actors to play the parts (as in very few volunteered when I asked, my request topic was mysteriously deleted, and even less replied after I’d sent them the innuendo laden script). But, on a whim which I never expected to work, I emailed Christopher’s agent and, intrigued by the idea of a non-profit independent game based on Japanese poetry, he took five minutes from his schedule to record the lines on someone’s laptop and emailed me a giant WAV file to cut up. If his voice sounds a little off, it’s because he was pressed for time (he apologises) and it wasn’t done in any kind of sound booth. I did my best to clean it up though.
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The game was inspired my experiences with the haiku mini-game in Boku no Natsuyasumi 3. This was in Japanese though, and I wanted something analogous in English for western players to appreciate.

The poems are generally free-form, but I tried to adhere to most of the rules for writing English haiku. Since only fellow game players are likely to take an interest, all the poems were based on well-known videogames. I suppose the great failing of this endeavour is that you need a background in games to understand them. Christopher mentioned he only got a couple of the references.

The game features:
* A JRPG style of design
* A large overworld to explore
* Villages to visit
* NPCs to speak with
* Stores and inns to stop by
* Unique “instant-time” battle system
* Five different monsters to fight
* Streamlined inventory system
* 125 different poems to compose
* 5 true haiku to decipher
* A special "hidden secret" from the gods of haiku
* An incredible ending which will leave you floored
* The voice work of Christopher Walken

Download it here!

TIP: When playing, please do NOT hold down the arrow keys, rather tap them, since otherwise it may skip certain poetry sections.

And if you like it, be sure to spread it around.

Now all I hope is that someone tips off those lovely chaps TIGSource and this gets some kind of news entry. Heck, email Kotaku too, while you're at it.

And the winner of the HG101 3D Dot Heroes Competition is....

2010-08-28T16:25:00.000-04:00

...Shantae, from the 2002 Game Boy Color game of the same name! It looks cool, shows some design prowess, and references one of the only portable games to fetch a going price in the triple digits. Congrats to hiryu64 for the great job, and he should be expecting a copy of the 3D Dot Heroes Original Soundtrack in the mail soon. You, reader, can also download his entry here.

There should be an actual update coming real soon, where you can see the rest for yourself too!

Old German game mags (2)

2010-08-25T15:44:00.015-04:00

The Video Games was Germany's first game magazine dedicated to consoles in the modern sense, with reviews, previews, etc. It started in early 1991 as a special issue of the home computer & PC magazine Power Play, which itself originated in the not games focused Happy Computer, but like it's mother mag, soon evolved into an independent publication, first quarterly, but from 1992 onwards monthly.

Hurray, in fall 1992, we Germans finally officially got the SNES.

A look at the editorial staff in early 1992. Replace Stephan Englhardt with Heinrich Lenhard and you got all the big names for the early years of German games journalism on one page. Compared to today, there was almost kind of a personal cult around some of those. Imagine a games magazine that advertises its writers with their pictures on the cover, as the first few issues of the magazine PC Player did:

"Games competence by Lenhard & Schneider"

Some of those pioneers are still well known today. Winnie Forster founded Gameplan and publishes encyclopedic books (I think only the Encyclopedia of Game Machines is available in English, but there's also a volume entirely dedicated to game controllers and a company/developer encyclopedia in German). The first book went to its third edition by now.

Boris Schneider (now Boris Schneider-Johne) is also responsible for what might be the first fan translation ever, with his German hack of the C64 adventure Murder on the Mississippi (now there's a bit of trivia to update your translation article with, Sketcz). Afterwards he got hired by Lucasfilm games for their early games (from Maniac Mansion to Fate of Atlantis). Today he's the Xbox product manager for Microsoft Germany.

Julian Eggebrecht of course is (was? I'm not up-do-date what happened after the US "branch" went out of business) one of the leading figures at Factor 5, Heinrich Lenhard founded about half of Germany's computer game magazines in the 80's and early 90's, and later also moved to the US and became correspondent for some of them.

When working with Korean game magazines during the first half of this year, I often chuckled at the many typos for English game titles, but revisiting my early Video Games issues, I was put into perspective quickly. Behold the review of Sol-Deace (EDIT: Oh, turns out the Genesis version of Sol-Feace was actually really titled as such. But the other examples below are still legit and not the only ones).

In another issue I thought for a moment that I had found a mention of a forgotten unreleased game called "Makros", until after a few lines later they wrote the full title "Makros 2036". But worst was "Twinckle Tales", directly below the big, fat logo showing the correct spelling.

Looking back, some of the review verdicts are also hard to comprehend nowadays. Many titles now widely acknowledged as timeless classics got fairly low scores, sometimes with pretty weird reasoning. Interesting was their three-component genre categorization, though. So as you can see below, Quantum Fighter is an Action Platformer with more weight on the platforming (the actual category was "dexterity games", though, so it wasn't necessary for any platforming to be involved).

Sprite of the Month. It might seem now that I'm obscessing with Chun Li, but really, my sources are.

What's that? Didn't remember this ad at all.

Neither did I remember Hudson's 32 bit console prototype. Btw., the mag dedicated a news page to every console manufacturer, titling each of them with an alliteration ("Engine Events", "Sega Special", "Nintendo News", etc.)

Ad for Laguna, a big-ish independent German publisher of Nintendo games. Of the SNES games I own, Breath of Fire II, Soul Blazer, Lord of the Rings and Shadowrun are Laguna published. I remember calling Nintendo's game help hotline and not getting any help with Breath of Fire II. ("That game doesn't exist.")

WTF!? Comic strip in a feature about adult themes in games, originally from Famitsu ('twas Famicom Tsushin back then, right?).

Afterwards I kinda lost sight of the Video Games and only started buying it again regularly at Dreamcast times, when it looked like this:

Video Games was then discontinued in early 2001 (the millenium years 1999-2001 weren't very good to germany's old game mags overall. IIRC, the only early 90's-mag that survived this period was the Man!ac, now renamed just M!)

Before closing this post, I've two questions about games I've rediscovered here:

The caption identifies this game as "Chakan". The Chakan I know is very different, which game is actually shown on the screenshot?

Then there was a preview about Plugsy, Psygnosis' would-be first console only title. I couldn't find any references whatsoever about this game on the web. Is it unreleased, or did it end up with another title?

I should also link to Kultpower.de, a great ressource for many of the old German mags, even with full scans of some issues.

Obscure Video Game Controversies - Hard Hat Mack

2010-08-20T18:19:00.000-04:00

My dad was digging through the closet and found some old Atari 400 games from my childhood, which spurred me to rediscover some of the stuff I used to play when I was really young. Please forgive me if the next few entries rely on such self-indulgence.

One of these games was an Electronic Arts game called Hard Hat Mack. It's clearly inspired by Donkey Kong, in that it takes a single screen arcade-style platformer that takes place on a construction site. Instead of simply reaching the top of the screen, each level has its own unique goal. In the first screen, you need to grab girders spread throughout the screen, place them them in the gaps of the structure, then grab the jackhammer that's mysteriously floating the around the screen to solidfy their place. In the meantime, there's some guy causing trouble running around, along with rivets that are shot from the top of the screen and bounce down.

In the second screen...well, I never beat it when I was a kid, and even with the benefit of save states and twenty five years of gaming experience, I still can't. It seems to be a factory and apparently you need to gather all of the lunch boxes somehow, but some of the obstacles require such pixel perfect jumping that it's practically impossible. There is a third level, apparently.

It's an alright little game. Like Dig Dug, the music stops and goes as you move your character, playing a short little ditty that becomes remarkly catchy despite maybe being four seconds long. But the most interesting aspect is the title screen, which shows all of the characters.

Now, if you were gaming at a young age, you probably picked up some vocabulary from whatever you were playing. (Zillion for the Master System taught me the meaning of "suicide". It was an awkward moment for my parents.) Hard Hat Mack taught me what a vandal was. More confusing was the character labeled "Osha", which I just thought was a weird name, and my dad didn't know either. Twenty-some years later, I realized it was actually OSHA, which stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the governmental division that strives to ensure safe working conditions. I was googling around, then, and found this interesting story from a 1983 issue of the computer magazine Infoworld:

Earlier this month, Electronic Arts, a home-software publisher based in San Mateo, California, found itself in hot water with the state government. Hard Hat Mack, one of the company's arcade-style games, was banned from at least one Emporium-Capwell store after a California legislator objected to one of Mack's enemies, a white-shirted good name OSHA.

In Hard Hat Mack, OSHA runs around the game screen, clipboard in hand, trying to squash Mack, a blue-collar construction worker...California state senator Dan McCorquodale took offense to Electronic Arts' comic portray of OSHA as a video-game villain and dashed off a latter of complaint to the Emporium store in Santa Clara, California. Hard Hat Mack was anti-worker, he said, and it gave the children playing video games the wrong idea about their friendly federal government. Six days later, the store pulled the video game.

The last laugh may be on Mr. McCorquodale. All of this publicity will probably spur sales of Hard Hat Mack. It's rare to find a game that is part fun and part humorous social commentary.

In the long-run, obviously this didn't affect much of anything. No one really remembers the game nowadays, and since it's not violent in the way Death Race was, it hasn't exactly made a mark on history. Still amusing, though.

Catherine: Atlus finally arrive at the next-gen party

2010-08-19T12:59:00.006-04:00

So it sure took Atlus long enough, but they're ready to step up to the HD plate, and they're coming out swinging.

Catherine is a survival-horror-esque Action RPG from the creative minds behind Persona 3 and 4; Shoji Meguro, Shigenori Soejima, Katsura Hoshino, etc.

Vincent is a 32 year old salaryman with no ambition.

Lately he's been having nightmarish dreams of sheep, falling, and falling sheep.

If he can't reach the top of a tower by the time he awakens, his fate is the same as theirs.

Reality isn't much better, as he keeps encountering a strange woman named Catherine.

Slated for a Winter 2010 release, here's a trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VteHd2AoGvw

Looks like a very improved version of the Persona 4 engine. A taste of things to come for Persona? We can only hope.

Ys Seven is Out and You Should Buy It Now

2010-08-18T18:50:00.000-04:00

Ys Seven came out in the US yesterday, and it's absolutely imperative that you buy it. I could write paragraphs and paragraphs on how awesome it is, but in the interest of keeping it brief, I'll point to the Official Sony US blog, which should do an excellent job of hyping you up, and I can confirm that it's not the usual PR speak either. The game hasn't been covered in the Ys article proper, just because I hadn't gotten enough time that I was happy to fully review it. I got about eight hours in and got distracted, but don't let my video game ADD put you off - those were eight damn good hours. Plus after I'd heard it was being released in English, I held off playing any further so I could actually enjoy the story.

I love Ys, because I truly believe the Action-RPG is The Best Genre. Despite their proliferation and popularity in the 16-bit era - Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Beyond Oasis, Landstalker, Crusader of Centy, and even Zelda, if you want to argue that way (I would) - it's sorted of dried up over the past decade. Well....maybe not dried up, so much as torn apart and evolved. Outside of Zelda and its very particular type, you've got stuff like Bayonetta and God of War which weighs heavily on the action side and Champions of Norrath and Shining Force EX/Neo whatever leaning on the RPG side. Most of these don't really hit the sweet spot I'm looking for, although NIER is probably one of the best recent ones. You could probably stick in stuff like Odin Sphere and Muramasa, which are decent, although in different ways.

Ys though? Man. Ys was a series I really liked when I was introduced to it - Ys III is the best worst game ever made - but it really became super awesome with Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, which replaced its fun-by-wonky battle system with something far more gratifying. Then it got ridiculously mega awesome with Oath in Felghana, a little less awesome with Ys Origin, and graduated in some of doctorate in awesomise-tisity by the time Ys Seven rolled around last year.

In many ways, Ys is sort of a sister series to Castlevania, at least of the Symphony of the Night variety. I know that claim might put off some people, but hear me out! They are both focused on exploration, world-building, and level-building. Their controls are beautifully smooth, doubly impressive with the Ys games, since they're 3D games that play like 2D games. And they also all have amazing soundtracks.

In fact, Ys arguably does a lot of this better. It's got a beautiful tempo, as the very act of running around, hacking everything to bits, feels like a constant series of miniature rewards. It's better balanced, too. The day-to-day hacking and slashing is hardly taxing, difficulty-wise, but the bosses will test every single old-school arcade skill you've got. (And while grinding will help you out, they won't completely solve the matters either.) Admittedly, over the course of the series, the action actually started to get a little bit rusty by the time Ys Origin rolled around, but they revamped everything by adding a speedy dash button in Ys Seven, and substantially improved the battle system by adding tons of secondary skills. Altogther, Falcom impressed themselves enough with it that they took the engine and turned it into an arena-based fighting game, Ys vs Sora no Kiseki. (Which, to be honest, didn't turn out so well. It might be fun in multi-player, but single player is another story, and one for another time.)

So yeah, you shouldn't just buy this game to support XSeed and the PSP. Well, I mean, they're a brilliant company for licensing these and absolutely deserve your money, but this isn't a charity case or anything. This is one of the best games of 2010 (and of 2009 too, in fact.) I even say this as someone who doesn't particularly care for playing games on portables - I am slightly sad that Falcom abandoned a PC version, because I'd much rather play it on a 21 inch monitor with a proper controller - but it's just rad enough to overcome that inherent obstacle.

This summer really, really sucked

2010-08-18T03:50:00.008-04:00

You know how too much of a good thing is bad for you? Well, that's exactly what happened to me. And Miku too:

Anyway, to review:

1) G.Rev begins the assault with releasing the home port of Senko no Ronde DUO.

2) G.Rev calls in an assist attack from Sega by harassing me with Project Diva DLC.

3) The attack string cancels into a tag-team super move involving Blizzard Entertainment with Starcraft II and Sega releasing Project Diva 2nd WITHIN THE SAME FREAKING WEEK.

4) Comic Market 78 just happened last weekend, and there's some games that are distracting me from doing anything productive in relation to this website.

So in case some of you are wondering why I haven't posted in a while, it's a combination of all of these reasons right above. Hopefully I can scrape something together before this month is over!

Yakuza 3 reviewed by real-life Yakuza

2010-08-17T08:32:00.004-04:00

As pointed out by regular reader Zack, BoingBoing has a fascinating feature up where they get three real-life yakuza members to play Ryu ga Gotoku 3 and give their opinions.

Midoriyama is a now-retired former mid-level faction boss. Shirokawa is a high-ranking boss from a different group connected to Midoriyama through a ritual sake exchange. Kuroishi knows them both but is also from a different group.

This is an ingenious feature, and a fantastic example of proper investigative games journalism. While most print publications are happy with their annual April Fool gags, phoned-in email interviews, and outdated news, it's great to see something serious like this being attempted.

My favourite section of the interview is towards the end:
Ironically, the sections that Shirokawa seemed to enjoy the most were cut out of the US version: mahjong, the sexual massage parlor, and the hostess clubs. After I explain to him what Sega cut from the US version, he said: アメリカ版を買った奴がかわいそうだ。セガＵＳＡが最低だね.(Translation: I feel sorry for the people who bought the American version. SEGA USA sucks.)

Yes indeed, Sega USA does suck. I for one loved the mahjong in Yakuza 2.

Read the full feature HERE.

Warning a Huge Podcast – Stage 007

2010-08-13T09:58:00.005-04:00

It’s been a while, and there was some concern on my part that those involved had lost interest, but I’m pleased to see that WAHP is back!

Stage 007 clocks in at just over 2 hours, and apart from Casey Loe saying that the story in Valkyria Chronicles sucked (02:04:00), it’s a great listen. Actually, what’s annoying is not that Casey criticised it, rather he didn’t explain why – and seeing as I’ve seldom had the good fortune to play a videogame with as good or better a story than Valkyria Chronicles (which I thought in the context of gaming was perfect), I’d really like to know his reasons why he didn't like it, and get some recommendations for better storied games.

WARNING! A Huge Podcast is Approaching Fast!

A podcast covering the world of Japanese gaming, brought to you by ex-GameFan and ex-Play stars shidoshi, Casey Loe, and Nick Rox.

//Stage 007

//Now Playing: Last Ranker, Atelier Totori

//Subtopics: Capcom don’t waste no money, NIS and Image Epoch want you to punish girls, US retailers shy away from them “anime games”, Japanese Fallout 3 ad pokes fun at JRPGs, NIS cancels games, death watch: Flight Plan + Gaia + Dimple, Monolith campaigns against negative campaigns, Twitter Watch, Japanese sales, upcoming releases, and no, we aren’t dead. Honest.

Recettear release date and price announced

2010-08-13T09:54:00.002-04:00

Carpe Fulgar has just announced that it’s made a deal with Stardock for the release of Recettear, thanks in part to everyone’s positive reaction, and they’ve also announced a price and tentative release date. September 10th!
US: $20
UK: £13
EU: €15

This puts it on par with higher end PSN releases and, while I’ll reserve judgement for when I’ve played the full version, the only thing I’m as equally excited for right now is Valkyria Chronicles 2 which is getting released in the next couple of weeks. So, yes, very much looking forward to Recettear.

Chun Li Wins

2010-08-13T02:23:00.005-04:00

Blog's been quiet the last few days, so here are a few randon Street Fighter II related images and trivia.

Two pictures from the very first official Street Fighter II Tournament at the Kokugikan in 1992. Are those on the web at all (I mean, before now, in better quality)? Upon my search I only found pictures of later Tournaments at that location.

Chun Li ... smokes? Ewwww... And there's two of her? (photo from 1993)

Some later Chun Li promo cosplay for Street Fighter Zero/Alpha II

From a great Korean fan-art book I found at the public library once.

Old German Game mags (1)

2010-08-05T02:19:00.007-04:00

So I'm back in Germany for now and digging through my own old magazines. Here's what was my most favourite game mag during the mid-90's (it was published from 1993 to 2000). UK readers might recognize the name, as it was licensed from a british mag. I'm talking about the Nintendo-only mag Total! It wasn't a translated mag, though, but had its own editorial stuff and content.

The second annyversary issue was the first one I bought myself, the first two years I used to read my cousin's copies.

Early preview of Street Fighter Alpha, then with the working title Street Fighter Legends. Screenshots are of course from the arcade version, back then I couldn't believe how good the background in the lower screenshot looked.

Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5 used to be a freelancer for the mag. They also were pretty good for reports on import games, as they later got a Japanese freelancer (who was later employed at Squaresoft for localizations, I think). Only their viewpoint was a bit European-centered in hindsight, one time they called Seiken Densetsu Squaresoft's most important series (the only Final Fantasy game being released in Europe by then was Final Fantasy Mystic Quest). I think they were also among the first in Germany to include decent Anime coverage.

Review of Super Turrican 2 (not reviewed by Eggebrecht ;) ). Games were ranked in German school grades (1 being best and 6 being worst).

I think not many people have this issue. The old publishing house went bancrupt by the end of 1995, so issue 12/1995 never came out. The staff didn't give up, though, but founded their own publishing house (Xplain Verlag) after wrangling for the licensing right for a month. So everyone thought the mag was gone, and no one expected it to resurface it with issue 1/1996. I saw it by chance and of course bought it immediately. But only a few days after it came out, someone went out of their way to file a cease and desist order because of the Mortal Kombat logo on the cover. Mortal Kombat 2 was completely banned in Germany (not the regular no-advertisement and only sell to over-18 regulation, but actually criminally punishable prohibited. IIRC, MK 2 was the first game without Nazi symbols or open racism ever to be "graced" by a complete ban). No one bothered to notice that the logo was actually from the movie, which was rated 16-and-up, nor that the magazine had printed the Mortal Kombat 3 logo before without any problems. So as a result, the issue disappeared from shelves quickly, and may be the rarest next to the first issue.

They also offered newsletters via pagers. It's the 90's, baby!

The exclusive comic strip was discontinued with the change of publishing houses, sadly.

In later years with the SNES discontinued and little to report on the disappointing N64, the team found other ways to fill their pages, like with this kind of photo stories. Thanks to stuff like this, Total! is still the game mag many people in Germany have the fondest memories about.

By far the most interesting anecdote in the history of the mag has to be the Nasty Zone "scandal". Another mag had printed a non-existing game in their release schedule list, which reappeared in a Total! list. The problem was: Neither the game, nor the alleged developer "Haip" ever existed. The (already not very popular, later hated by some) editor in chief of that mag immediately blamed the Total! of copying "stealing" information from his publication, he was quoted saying "I thought the xx or the yy would fall for this, but I never imagined the Total! would be so stupid." and that he suspected "for a long time" that someone was stealing from his mag.

The would-be game was called Nasty Zone (after the mag where it first was listed, N-Zone) by the nonexistent company Haip (after the Editor in chief's name, Hans Ippisch).

The Total! made an honest apology for the fauxpas of not double-checking their research and promised to stick to reliable sources in the future, but also made fun of the whole Incident, even showing fake screenshots of the "game":

Research in 'reliable sources' is the nuts and bolts in our job. On the right picture you can see how our technically far advanced video game mag production machine (TOTAL-o-matic) processes hard facts within seconds.

(the mag on the copier is an issue of the N-Zone, below is the Total!)

Nasty Zone - Mega-Hype around stillbirth

Rarely has been made such a turmoil about a game hardly anyone even got to see a single pixel of. As usual, we have researched fiercly to present exclusively the very first images of Nasty Zone, which sadly inspire little hope for a decent title. In the interest of all honest N64-owners we convinced the development team to cease work on the project and do something more meaningful with their time.

Japanese Console Ports of Western Adventure Games

2010-08-04T21:09:00.000-04:00

The history of LucasArts/Sierra-style graphic adventures in Japan has always kinda baffled me. Their releases overseas have been sporadic - I've seen that the SCI release of Quest for Glory was ported to the PC-88, as well as Space Quest IV, of all things, and it's kinda incredible that LucasArts made a version of Zak McKracken that has vastly improved graphics and released specifically for Japan. (Although I kinda assumed they intended to release it in the US at some point, it just never happened.) The differing computers standards is probably one of the reasons why the PC versions themselves were never releases, but as the 32-bit systems start taking off, there were a number of Western PC games that were ported to the Playstation and Saturn in Japan, but never released in their home territories. This is odd in itself, although it's fascinating to see how Western properties have been redubbed or reinterpreted into Japanese.

Below are some recordings I've made of these games. They are mostly just to demonstrate how the dubbing is different, or just to marvel how these games exist.

Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity:

Released only for the PSOne. It's more or less exactly the same as the PC version, except for the dubbing. The awful lip synching is present in the emulator, I'm not sure if it's part of the actual game. I'm curious to what Beavis says to Daria when he talks - in the English version, he's doing that whole "Diarreah chachacha" thing. The subtitle rendered in Japanese is Virtual Aho Shoukougun, which, super literally, means "Virtual Idiot Syndrome" although the English name Virtual Stupidity is still used in video sequences. I can't imagine that "Virtual Stif-" joke would make any sense.

Discworld:

Discworld was released in the US for the Playstation, so the only difference here is the dubbing. I guess the guy they got for Rincewind is maybe the Japanese equivalent to Eric Idle? I actually picked this one up at the NYC Book Off awhile back, since they added some dirt cheap PSOne imports to their stock. Most of it is trash, but this one looked interesting. The artwork have a slightly more super deformed version of Rincewind, although it's not a huge stretch since his design was already pretty cartoony.

Phantasmagoria:

Shortened and renamed to "Phantasm", this Sierra title was only released on the Saturn. Why there? The system's FMV capabilities were dreadful without the MPEG add-on that barely any games supported. Since Phantasmagoria is almost entirely FMV, it looks pretty bad. The only other real draw of the game was the SVGA computer rendered graphics, whose attractiveness are lost with the lowered resolution. Anyway, the game is once again dubbed into Japanese here, which is awkward given the live actors. I think it's one of the largest CD releases for the console, given that it came on 8 CDs, one more than the PC version, probably due to video compression issues. The tarot card save/load interface is kinda neat though.

Return to Zork:

I've already covered the PSOne version of Zork I earlier on, but this multimedia sequel also has lots of FMV. Again, it's dubbed into Japanese. This one got released on several platforms, including the PSOne and PC-FX. The PC-FX version has terrible, terrible sound. The PSOne version also comes on two CDs, as opposed to one for the CD release. The load times seem really sluggish on the emulator. I played up until the infamous "WANT SOME RYE COURSE YOU DO" part. I'm also PRETTY sure that there wasn't any narration voiceover in the intro movie, which parallels the opening moments of the original Zork.

Prisoner of Ice:

This is a rather obscure followup to Shadow of the Comet, a Call of Cthulhu game. I didn't grab any videos of it because the voices were left in English, with only the text being changed into Japanese. It was released by Xing for both the PSOne and Saturn.

I'm sure there are numerous other PC releases that were ported to the PSOne/Saturn in Japan but left unreleased in its home territory. Other than the numerous Wizardry spinoffs, I know Ultima Underworld hit the PSOne in Japan, though I haven't played it.

Boku no natsuyasumi – the final entries

2010-08-02T09:37:00.006-04:00

Not actual entries, but pictures which I achieved in-game, and an explanation of why this is one of the most groundbreaking games I’ve played.
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Apart from one day (#18), I did enough interesting things to warrant a special picture for every entry. I apologise about not having an image for day 21, I forgot to photograph it and, sitting here typing, I don’t feel like hauling my stuff out for one shot (if memory serves, it was of the aunty giving Boku a bottle-cap for answering the dinner quiz correctly).
I clocked just over 20 hours and it was a great experience – one which has satiated my need to play the series, probably forever.

There were happy times, sad times, and a lot of fun. I also missed out on things, like watering grandpa’s garden and shearing the sheep. But I did find every bottle cap littering the countryside, and I caught every insect. I also caught the biggest fish in the river, which we had for dinner on the first birthday of my little cousin. Boku also showed remorse at releasing the bear cub after others commented on its mysterious disappearance.

A lot of people also moved away from the area, including Michi and the old grandmother near the lake. So too did the birds eventually leave, all five of them, after I’d spent the month diligently looking after them.

The ending was particularly poignant, since it has Boku speaking as an adult on the farm in the future, with his father (or maybe uncle) beside him, and his own son enjoying a holiday there.

As a whole Boku no Natsuyasumi is a tremendous almost-coming-of-age tale, recounting a period in one’s life before the innocence was lost. I also like the fact that this instalment is set prior to the big videogame boom in Japan – I can only assume that Boku in 1985 would have spent a lot of time playing on his Famicom.

To summarise, this is another game which makes me glad I bought a PS3. It’s an example of diversity in a medium stagnant with recycled action games. Some might feel a need to justify their playing of this, and I was a little saddened when reading Playongo’s review that he had to re-affirm that he played action games such as Halo just like the rest of us. He does state he likes it because it's refreshing, but liking Boku no Natsuyasumi shouldn't come with justification of who you are or what you like.

I’d like to think that anyone who reads this blog is comfortable enough with themselves to admit that hey, a game where I’m on a summer holiday is cool. For all the posturing that the industry does about trying to convey deep stories, and breaking away from the action game mentality (I’m thinking of David Cage’s verbiage and Heavy Rain), most games still fall into the realm of protagonist VERSUS antagonist, and Heavy Rain is no different from Gear Wars in that respect. In almost every game I see today there are the (sometimes ambiguously) defined good and bad, and there’s conflict between them. It’s such an overused archetype.

Boku no Natsuyasumi I would argue is a landmark, breakthrough game, in that it moves away from conventional ideas of game design to create something genuinely new. It stands alongside games such as Aquanaut’s Holiday, Harvest Moon, The Sims and Flower. It also has a touching, sweet little story which is subtly put across and is something everyone can relate to. It transcends the cultural boundaries of its setting.

Japanese games not covered elsewhere

2010-07-30T11:55:00.007-04:00

With the loathsome banality that is EGM, GameFAN behind schedule, EDGE too god-damned crap, GamesTM not posted to me freely, and the WAHP podcast overdue and seemingly cancelled, there's a whole bunch of Japanese games which I nearly missed out on. Here's a rundown of Japanese games which are on my mind. Several of these are my posts from forums, but it's worth seeing the screen art and making a mental not of the game.

I should warn you, there are probably at least 36 other Japanese games I've not even had time to mention here. But this will have to do.
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NEO GEO HEROES: ULTIMATE SHOOTING - PSP

Available now on UMD or Japanese PSN if you’re impatient, this is apparently a follow-up to KOF Sky Stage. I’ve had no prior experience with KOF:SS, but Neo-Geo Heroes Ultimate Shooting is ace.

The shooting system I thought was really cool. You’ve got main attack (which is different for each character, either spread out, concentrated, or homing), and secondary attack which uses up a constantly recharging triple-bar. You’ve also got 3 bombs, which for some characters seems to have limited range, and a taunt button.

The taunt adds a very interesting dynamic to the game, since activating it cancels out all enemy projectiles. Which is great in a tight spot. But subsequent enemy attacks appear to be more powerful, so you need to gear yourself up for some quick dodging afterwards. Also, activating taunt causes all enemy score drops (tiny NeoGeo logos) to increase in rank. So if an enemy normally drops a small NeoGeo score item, using taunt will increase it to a medium or big score item. After a while the taunt wears off. I’ve found it most useful to save for tight spots or just before big enemies (like the gunships on stage 1), since they’ll then haemorrhage major points. If I get in trouble during taunt, it’s time to rely on bombs or pray you’ve got some energy saved.

There’s an energy bar for each character, which might annoy some, but there’s no lives. Die and it’s Game Over, or Continue time. I’ve been playing it 1CC fashion, and the diversity of characters and stages is keeping it interesting. It’s taken the Darius route for stages, with branching paths at the end of each one.

Speaking of Darius, I thought Darius Burst on PSP was probably the worst in the series. For me it was devoid of charm and reward, and after clocking it once I wasn’t given much incentive to play again. Apparently you can unlock other modes, but I couldn’t be bothered to try again. I will concede that Darius had the better soundtrack though!

In NGHUS, there’s loads of modes available right from the get go, and the 10 characters encourage experimentation. Once a stage has been reached it can be replayed at leisure, but be warned, starting from any stage other than 1 makes the game not count any of your NeoGeo score picks-ups at the end of the stage. Which is good. Because if you’re playing for score it encourages you to start from the beginning. But if you just want to play to the end, you can pick up where you left off really easily. It’s worth noting that after each stage your health and bombs do not recharge, meaning a 1CC of the entire game is going to take some work!

It also appears there’s a unique set of dialogue depending on which character faces which boss, and it’s kinda cool to have someone like Marco Rossi act as the boss of stage 1, and call on his tank, Metal Slug, or those POWs, to aid him in battle. The fact that everyone is flying around is kinda weird, but I love it.

There’s also plenty of artwork and so on to unlock, if that’s your bag.

I’ve spent most of my time just experimenting with all the characters, but this feels like a much deeper game, with more variety, more rewards, more modes and just more of everything than Darius Burst. Admittedly it’s vertical rather than hori like Darius, but if you really want a hori shmup just change the screen settings and control it as such (I tested this briefly, and it kinda works, apart from the odd background angle).

STORY MODE – 15 stages, 10 characters
Syd III – spaceship, fast, decent main attack, secondary is shield which is great, really fun to use
Kyo Kusanagi – fast, good main, poor secondary shield which is too slow
Terry Bogard – worst character. Slow. Lousy main. Ridiculously crap secondary which leaves him wide open.
Iori Yagami -
Akari Ichijo – seemingly non-existent secondary?
Marco Rossi – difficult to use. Main attack has 100 HEAVY MACHINEGUN bullets which when depleted leaves him with only a handgun, but the machinegun will recharge. Powerful secondary. Interesting from a conceptual point of view - not seen anything quite like it in other shmups.
Athena –
Kula Diamond -
Mai Shiranui – excellent character. Great main which is semi-homing (well, the fans cover a wide area at least), strong secondary. Weak bomb.
Iroha – biggest breasts in the game, and the most powerful character. Powerful main, with homing, epic secondary that is both shield and rebound attack which absolutely drains a boss’ energy bar (so fucking cool), plus her bomb targets the boss area and is super powerful.

CHALLENGE MODE:
Subject – specific tasks earn medals. Tricky, since objectives are in Japanese. This could offer tremendous replay value. I only played the first stage, and achieved 4 of the 13 tasks, but I’ve no idea what the others are. Reckon I’ll try this once I’ve clocked main mode a few times.

Survival - basically boss rush mode.

Multiplayer – not tested.

Sky Stage – port of the arcade game? Regardless, it sucks. Why play this when you have other modes? Still, awful nice of them to include it as a bonus.

Museum – unlock artwork and music.

OPTIONS
Change the screen to be vertical or horizontal. Buttons are fully customisable (default setting sucks). I couldn’t get on with tate mode, but holding the PSP horizontal doesn’t prove too problematic.

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DARIUS BURST - PSP
I thought Darius Burst sucked. As in it was really pretty damn awful, like 4/10. And that's coming from a hardcore shmup fan. It's probably the worst in the Darius series. I spent a few hours with it, and found the whole thing repetitive and over-recycled. They re-used bosses for goodness sake!

Also, there's not much replay. I clocked it, got another ship, and thought bugger this. I never went back. It felt half-finished, whereas Neo Geo Heroes feels like a game and a half it's so substantial. Honestly I don't know what the **** Taito was thinking when it made Darius Burst. Ran out of budget? Bleurgh!

I didn't unlock any modes. Just the one ship, after a fair amount of effort and practice. I much prefer NGHUS because it provides a whole lot more to play with, and the reward/practice ratio is much more indulgent. It's instantly gratifying for a newcomer, and continues to gratify as your skills improve. Stage 1 now offers no challenge, and I'm working my way through the others. In Darius, I felt no need to improve my skill, it just wasn't in any way rewarding.

Maybe I'm lazy, maybe it's because I seldom put more than 10-20 hours on any game these days. But after a couple of hours it felt like I'd seen everything Darius had to offer. Maybe Darius Burst had some good stuff after unlocking, but that's a poor way to design a game. It's like a book that's absolutely crap until half way through. If I'm not hooked by the end of chapter 1 I put it down and read another.

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Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2010 - PS3
There's a demo of this up on the Japanese PSN, for the PS3, so you better grab it quick before they take it down!

I just grabbed it as part of my "grab everything that goes up" mentality, but having played it today, I think it's rather fun.
I haven't played a baseball game since some on the Super Famicom, though I've always liked the kind with Super Deformed characters.

The demo is extremely short, with a preset team for you and the computer, and one chance to bat and one chance to pitch. Three strikes and you're out, three outs and it's change over time. What I like about this is how casual it looks - it's really meant to be fun rather than serious baseball. I watched some videos of Konami's other more serious baseball game on PS3, and it looks pretty grim, with sweaty players all sitting in the horrific uncanny valley.

Here though, the little dudes without arms or legs look really cool.

After a few goes I really got the hang of pitching, and managed three straight outs rather quickly. Batting will probably need some practice. You need to move a virtual icon of your bat and the timing to swing it pretty difficult.
There's a whole bunch of greyed out options in the demo, implying some depth in the final game. Online sources say you can create your own player, and manage a team to stardom, so all the usual baseball stuff.

To be honest, I'd absolutely love to own the full retail copy of this, but at $70 on import, it's a bit steep. The cheapest I've seen it on eBay is £40.

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A.C.E.: Another Century's Episode R - PS3

Why have I not been hearing about this? Why has this gone under my radar despite being released on August 19th? This appears to be another Japan-exclusive action game, by the master FROM SOFTWARE, and no one is talking about it. This is what Wikipedia says:
A new dynamic shooting mode called Chase Mode has been added to the game. This mode is similar to arcade shooters wherein the player's machine moves on rails and leaves the targeting weapons for the player to control. Each chase mode section precedes a boss battle; the examples released so far include the battle against the Behemoth from Full Metal Panic! and the battle against Nora Polyansky from Macross Zero. It is currently unknown if the player can change the unit which participates in chase mode.

Man, that sounds ****ing awesome. Are you psyched? Because you should be. I'm gonna need $80 for importing... Quick, to the ebaymobile!

More to the point, why is no magazine talking about this? Why aren't there huge previews? Why aren't the import boys salivating over this? Why do I even need to talk about this, when it should be generating its own publicity?

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Super Dimensional Game Neptune - PS3

Silicon Era preview.

The game takes place in the world of Geimugyokai, which means "Game Industry" in Japanese, the world is split into four different regions namely Platetume, Rinbox, Lasidition and Ruwii which are in turn protected by four goddesses. Players take the role of Neptune, a goddess who must defend the world against the attack of the evil goddess Majikonne. In order to do so Neptune must seek out Histoire, the book that contains the secrets to the world.

More here.

So basically it's a metagame ala Segagaga set in a world based on the world of videogames, with consoles based on the current big three? Where you need to fight the 360, PS3 and Wii? How is that not an awesome concept? The only downside is it's by Idea **** as the Japanese like to call them, who have a reputation for making some fairly awful, obfuscated RPGs. Still, I like the idea enough to be interest in a localisation. Will we ever see it? Not if no one talks about it!

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END OF COVERAGE

Now, would everyone please email and pester EGM's editors for more Japanese coverage? I've got 5 subs issues which are looking less appealing with each blog post I make.

As the above wall of text proves to me: Japan is still rockin' it hot with a whole bunch of crazy awesome exciting games and concepts, but the west just doesn't want to know. Japan might as well give up on us and focus on herself, because no matter what gets announced, what she's working on, we in the west seem content with the mediocrity peddled bby triple-A studios like Activision.

In the west there appears to be a stoic defiant resistance to anything Japanese these days, and I find it frustrating. To hell with the idiots who bandy around derogatory terms for those who still like Japanese games. I will stand on this hill single handed if I have to, manning the ramparts like the last remaining knight against the barbarian Western hordes. Neo Tokyo shall not burn as long as I draw breath! Keep your Call of Duties, the only shooting I will do is in the skies. And as for RPGs, no Mass Effect, since I'm going to be taking on the virtual avatar of the 360 in a fictionalised gaming world which perhaps only exists in my mind.

Japan Ho!

GameFAN #2 vs EGM #2

2010-07-21T17:19:00.007-04:00

I now have both the second issue of GameFAN and the second issue of EGM. And personally, I prefer GameFAN. By a long way I’m afraid. Which is rather annoying since I’d subscribed to EGM. Blast! (Thanks to ‘The Glider’ on ntsc-uk for the GameFAN photo) Most photos here are of GameFAN, click for a bigger image - though I've obscured the text.
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When EGM arrived a few days ago I was rather disappointed. The features were good, but absolutely none of the game coverage interested me at all. Which isn't to say there aren't interesting games out there, just that EGM has chosen to focus on what's nauseatingly mainstream and, to me, boring as hell.

Out of roughly 86 editorial pages (ignoring covers, adverts and junk like the contents - but including art pages for each DPS), at least 40 of them I have no interest in, don't want to have an interest in, and won't be reading. I haven’t liked Mortal Kombat since 1995, but at least the feature is interesting and well written enough to warrant reading, as are the other features and columns.

But really, I couldn't care less about the game coverage: CoD, Rockband, Killzone, Assassin's Creed, LBP, Madden, Rage, CV: LoS, Bulletstorm, Final Fantasy 14, FEAR, Crackdowm, WoW, SM Galaxy, Prince of Persia, Red Dead Redemption, Alan Wake (OK, maybe I'm interested in this, only to compare it to Deadly Premonition, but DP isn't even mentioned in the copy), Skate 3, Modnation Racers, Trauma Centre, Split Second and Back Breaker. These are loathsomely boring to me.

This reminds me of the time I subscribed to EDGE without knowing what EDGE was (everyone said it was the best magazine available, when really it sanctimonious garbage). As a result I spent a year thinking that I no longer liked videogames and that there was nothing which appealed to me. I almost took up snooker as a hobby instead.

As it stands I'm only reading EGM for the features, for example on whether gaming needs to start forming labour unions, variable price structuring, faster internet protocol standards, integration of 3D technology in modern consumer products, plus psychology of human addiction and other such features. Unfortunately as you can tell, this list reads like something out of the Financial Times. It’s academia heavy. There is no real indie coverage (and by this I mean covering the plethora of games released every minute of every day - more than I could ever play), there’s no import coverage at all, there’s nothing niche or obscure.

I don’t want to say it isn’t fun, because I don’t always want fun, but it certainly isn’t pleasurable. If this continues I won’t be re-subscribing in 6 months.

Which brings me on to GameFAN.

GameFAN is like a consensual hallucinogenic illusion between yourself, Dave Halverson, and everyone else who reads the magazine. I love it as much as I can love any inanimate form of media or object. I love it for the same reason I loved PLAY before it.

They both portray the gaming world as I would want it to be, even if that’s not how it actually is. When Nick des Barres described Folklore as one of the most important games released that year, or Dave spoke about Purgatory Kabuki as if it were the perfect manga/game crossover, I wanted to believe this though I knew it wasn’t true. I loved Folklore but it was ignored by the masses and critics alike, while Purgatory Kabuki was awful. But the illusion created by the magazine was pleasurable enough to outweigh the discrepancies of reality.

Let’s examine the current issue: it features Sin and Punishment 2 on its cover. Over the years how many Treasure games have featured on magazine covers in the west? (discounting the EDGE 200 cover special, because when you fire a shotgun you’re bound to hit something good). Very few - in fact I can only think of GameFAN’s covers showing love to Treasure. Maybe other mags did too. Along with S&P2 cover is a review by Halverson which verges on poetry, followed by a 3-page love-in with Treasure themselves. The questions being as delightful as the answers they garnered - if you threw baby oil into the mix the interview would have looked like Turkish wrestling, it was so intimate. They have a reasonable amount of indie coverage compared to EGM’s none. They’ve also got a cool-as-hell Aksys poster which, on the reverse, features Kunio and other games being published by Aksys. And they've got import coverage.

They’re covering fascinating games, even if they are behind schedule. I won’t play half of these, but I sure as hell want to read about them: Nier, 3D Dot Heroes, Monster Hunter Tri, Agarest, Arc Rise Fantasia, Trinity Universe, Cave Story (with interview), Ninety Nine Nights 2, DEATHSMILES, let me say that again, DEATHSMILES (and Halvey’s review is pretty damn awesome, even if doesn’t quite grasp/explain the games technicalities - and spells shmup wrong), The Red Star, Sam and Max, What did I do to deserve this my Lord 2, Again (cool FMV-style DS detective game), Shin Megami Tensei. Oh, and Deathsmiles. I was especially pleased to see Again on DS, since this slipped by me totally.
Plus the art design is, to me, absolutely perfect. I keep reading forums where people complain about the art design, and this scares me, because right now it’s really is perfect, better than PLAY’s design even, and I really don’t want it to change. Look at all the screenshots for Afro Samurai in the Bandai interview. I have no interest in Backbreaker as a game, but Jesus that’s a beautiful DPS - they even managed to fit in a mini screen-border. I love screenshot borders, they’re like sex for the eyeballs. Mario Galaxy 2 has a montage showing how a series of events and animation play out - I thought these had died with the old GameFAN, and I am SO glad to see them return. Although I’ve little interest in SMG as a game, I can see these screens and think, huh, so that’s how it rolls. At least it saves me checking out Youtube. Cave Story is exquisite and the design respects the sprites and pixel ratios. Deathsmiles is another fantastic DPS, and the screens give me a feeling for the game. Sin and Punishment makes copious use of Suzuki’s beautiful renditions. Agarest War is bright and colourful. Whatever they’re paying their designer, it’s not enough.

If I made a magazine, it would look like this. GameFAN is a work of coffee-table beauty. Excuse the poor lighting in my photos - I’ve intentionally made the text unreadable.

If a magazine is going to show any screenshots at all, it should be to give the readers a feeling of how the game plays - to attempt some kind of arty bullshit with empty space and over large CG shots, which tells the reader nothing about what he’ll see in the game, renders your design irrelevant and pointless. You might as well leave your text on a white background with no imagery, or overlay it onto photographs of dancing pandas. Look at the EGM DPS of Castlevania. What the hell is this crap? I have no idea what it’s trying to show me, it tells me nothing about the game, and so I’ve no interest in reading the text at all. If they didn’t have gameplay shots, they might as well just say: we have no idea what the game is about, here’s a recycled press release along with some speculation on our part. Copious screenshots or die, I say to print magazines. Otherwise I’m going online to read HG101.

The fact that people seem to like useless design, and frown on GameFAN’s use of screenshots worries me. GameFAN’s design at least serves a purpose, of enticing me to read and telling me what I can expect when I play the game. EGM? Like I said, might as well put photos of dancing pandas, because they tell me nothing of the games.

As for the actual writing, I have to admit, EGM is better from a technical point of view. My profession is sub-editor (not that you’d know from my blog posts), and Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is my bible, so I understand the technicalities of the English language. And EGM does a good job of being intelligent. I wrote the GamesTM review for Agarest War, and so I was curious to read GameFAN’s. Unfortunately Valerie Dahmersdottir is a terrible writer, and the review was so vacuous as to be laughable. And yet I still prefer GameFAN, despite its warts and frat-boy writing. And I would still rather pay money for it than EGM.

EGM is like the dowdy headmaster of a private boarding school giving you a stern lecture and threatening you with the cane. Just look at the article on unionisation. It was intelligent and made an important statement about the sorry, fucked up state the industry is in. Much like their Metacritic feature from the month before. These features tell us that the industry is controlled by a few, greedy megacorporations like Activision and EA, and basically the entire show is being run by a bunch of bastardly swine which need the guillotine. As for EGM’s sycophantic Jaffe interview, it made me want to gag. The magazine makes me dislike my hobby, because it paints it in the drab hues of reality (except for Dan Hsu, who seems delusional with how great being a games journalist is - despite it absolutely sucking).

The thing is, I deal with the crappy reality of every day life, oddly enough, every day of my life. And although EGM’s unionisation article has opened my eyes, I’d rather they were closed. I don’t want to know that everything sucks and everyone is being screwed out of money. I don’t play Activision’s games anyway, so to hell with that whole crowd. I would rather choose ignorance and blindness, wrapped up in the passionate 2D rantings of Japan-loving madmen. Video games are my escape from a day job, from taxes, from laundry, from watching the news and seeing the world as a grey androgynous blob of poverty and political and economic upheaval. Games are my drug of choice, and I want my reading material to reflect this.

Reading GameFAN is like finding Dave Halverson knocking on your front door, with a pack of brewskies in one hand and a Dreamcast under his arm, saying: “Duuuude, you gotta check out this hot new import I picked up. It’s got 2D flying demon ninjas like something out of a John Woo film! And afterwards, we can play this cool doujin shmup for my PC98.” He’s a throwback to another time which only existed in a parallel dimension. And considering he writes so much copy for GameFAN, the next 65 pages is pretty much you and him shooting the breeze about how cool hand-drawn sprites are and why Treasure is king. While his buddies chatter in the background about RPGs and indie stuff and scantily clad women.

I know that Sin and Punishment 2 will never sell well, and that a lot of these high-scoring games aren’t as great as they’re made out to be (Infinite Space for me is a 4, despite the high hopes I had), and that no matter how hard Dave fights for it the 2D shooter and indeed 2D will never be popular again, and that the mainstream will always ignore indies, and that people want bland page design. But god damn, I love being in the world that exists inside Dave’s mind for those 65 pages. It’s not real, but to hell with it, I want it to be real. It’s giddy with a joy I’ve not felt for around a decade.

GameFAN is pure absolute pandering to a niche of overlooked, often ignored, underloved, old-school hardcore game nerds; a mutually accepted LSD trip with Dave as your brain-captain. It lacks the faux intellectuality that we as gamers find thrust upon us today, and as I age physically, I am drawn to and desire simpler forms of discourse which recount the happier days of my youth. And yeah, I reckon I’m going to pay another $18 next month to have someone ship it across the Atlantic for me. It’s the only way to fly, man, and it makes me feel good about what I enjoy.

Assuming they still exist... Seeing as their website is dead.

Recettear - an RPG about running an item shop now in English

2010-07-21T09:16:00.011-04:00

I’ve wanted to play Recettear ever since InsertCredit made an entry on it way back in 2007. So I’m overjoyed to find that Carpe Fulgur has not only taken on the task of localising and publishing it in English, but they’re promising to work on further such ventures.
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The object in Recettear, a Windows based doujin release from 2007, is to run an item shop as the kind you’d find in many JRPGs. You choose what to stock, where to place it, and how much to sell each item for. Placing premium items in your window attracts more people, and as your reputation goes up you’re able to haggle over prices better. Items can be obtained from the guild wholesaler, town market, or by joining an adventurer as he pillages various dungeons. People will also sell you stuff, much like in a regular RPG. As you progress you make friends with different adventurers and start to recognise shop regulars. You can also raise your shop-master level which gives new abilities, and there's also a rival shop owner who appears in the second week. Plus presumably much more!

There’s a rather substantial demo available and, to put it simply, what I’ve played so far fulfils every hope I had for the game when I first saw it - and then some. I’ve grown weary recently of technical games, and while I’m not about to abandon shmups and fighters, I find I’m really enjoying slower, menu-driven games. Which isn’t to say this is casual - because it sure as hell is bloody not! If anything it’s a lot like Princess Maker, with many layers of hidden complexity presented to you via an intuitive interface and wonderful storyline/art direction. Easy to get into but hard to master.
There’s real satisfaction to be had from scouring for Super Antivenom and a classy longsword, placing them with prominence in your window, and then demanding such high rates they never sell. Or maybe I want to fill my central display with nothing but nutbread - I can do that! Recettear so perfectly targets the part of your brain that likes tinkering - it’s the same part which makes character building in ANY GAME fun; or arranging your crops in Harvest Moon; or dungeon building in any number of games from PC to PSP. Becoming the town’s biggest supplier of cotton shirts might not win me the game, but damn, if it doesn’t make me giddy simply by fact that I can do that, IF I WANT TO.

The corresponding adventuring sections (at this early stage) would appear optional, like they were in Princess Maker, but are such fun shouldn’t be overlooked. They’re simple, with a Zelda-esque combat system, but this is all part of the charm. Controls are slick and it supports USB pads off the bat, which I always appreciate. There’s some great music in the dungeons as well. The first adventurer I found was in need of help, so I provided him with free healing items while he took me along for the ride to steal as much treasure as we could. In-game you control adventurers directly.

Backing up the gameplay is some really wonderful anime designs and expertly written dialogue. I can’t vouch for how faithful it is to the original, but I don’t care. Carpe Fulgar’s script is witty, blithe, and absolutely hilarious in places. Reading their Q+A section there’s an entry regarding the Japanese voices, almost apologetically pre-empting anyone who might complain about lack of English dialogue. This shouldn’t be a problem, since the original voices adds some real charm to the game, and anyone likely to complain isn’t the kind of person who’d be interested in buying this anyway.

Recette, your archetypical and heavily moe orphaned-yet-numbskull-young-girl, contrasts superbly with the sharp and businesslike fairy Tear. Their constant banter throughout proved a joy to read, while the in-game sprite of Recette, showing her wide-eyed and wholly incapable of grasping anything Tear tells her, raised some genuine laughs. Despite her lack of ability, she pushes onwards valiantly, shouting her catchphrase: “Capitalism Ho!”
Speaking of capitalism, this appears to be Carpe Fulgar’s first commercial venture, and I hope they make sufficient money off it to continue. Though it saddens me to think that this is such a niche game, both in concept and style, no one will take interest. Certainly I don’t foresee EDGE, GamesTM or EGM covering it. GameFAN might, if they’re still around. But the other mags? Unlikely. Once out, and assuming my PayPal account is sufficiently stocked, I hope to bring you a typically comprehensive HG101 article on this little gem.

Also, let me add: there is NO DRM. That means no bullshit involving Starforce copy protection screwing your computer, and no need to be online when playing a single player game. EA and all those other scum publishers can get bent if they think I'll purchase a game with that stuff.

One final thing which I've left until the end: I have one slightly serious complaint regarding Recettear. The game doesn’t tell you how much you paid for an item from the guild. And what you pay doesn’t match its base value - meaning after buying a whole bunch of guild items, although the game told me what its base sales value was, it didn’t tell me how much I’d actually paid for them.

I’d like some kind of listing which says NOT what the base sales price is (which is irrelevant when I’ve bought it from a wholesaler), but what its going-rate is at the guild.

I realise this probably can’t be changed now - that would require recoding of the entire engine. But it is annoying. I guess I’ll be playing with notepad open on my desktop to jot things down!

ADDENDUM:
You know what this game makes me think? How awesome would an anime-styled, Japanese developed game about running a game store be? You could decide how many plastic models to have on shelves, how many imports to stock, how much retro, how big your second-hand area is, whether to put OSTs next to their respective titles or in their own section. Do you have the radio, regular band or OST music playing inside the store? Do you stock game mags, and if so, which ones? How about a section dedicated to anime and manga and related items of interest to gamers? Oh the possibilities!

Actually, this line of thought also reminds me of that PC game, where you played a movie director, and had to deal with all the aspects of film making, and how much that game made me want a game where you made games. There’s Segagaga, and it’s slowly being fan-translated, but man, this feels like such an untapped well of ideas. Games about the world of games. Amazing. Except games journalism - a game about that would be 110% concentrated lies, with minigames involving working for no pay, get screwed over by game publishers, becoming an alcoholic (at least 2 ex-colleagues fell into this), and then the final level would be you going postal and killing absolutely everyone. Ahem. Not that I’m bitter about my time as a games journo. It was sunshine and dandelions.

Boku no natsuyasumi 3 - DAY 10-14

2010-07-21T04:25:00.008-04:00

This is the final entry in my Boku no Natsuyasumi 3 diary. I had wanted to do 30 days, but 2 weeks seems like a good run. We've not had many comments, and I've only seen one link on another website, so I'm guessing it wasn't hugely popular. Furthermore, playing with a notepad and camera by my side is counter-inducive to fully enjoying the game. My final word of advice: water grandpa's garden everyday using the tap by the side. I failed to do this and his vegetables all died on the 15th or so. Also, I've worked out that to find acorns I need to talk to Megumi on the 10th a lot, until she mentions the squirrel, so visit her at night too. Days after the 14th have been really neat. Since uncle asks Boku to say itadakimasu during meals, which kind of symbolises that he's now really part of the family.

Someone asked if this was like Harvest Moon, and really it isn't. It's more like 30 mini-adventures where you need to have as much fun as possible. I'd go as far as comparing it to the Bill Murray film Groundhog's Day, almost. Except your actions carry over. It's also nowhere near as monotonous as Harvest Moon, since monotony in your daily activities results in a dull diary entry (all of mine so far have been special event entries). While I won't write up the remaining 15 days, I will probably at some point make a blog post with all my remaining diary crayon images. If you've enjoyed these entries to this point you should enjoy playing the actual game, I've provided plenty of links to Youtube tips and a Japanese wiki which can be machine-translated
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Tuesday 10 August.

Exercise. Told family about yesterday’s adventure and aunty suggested I go again with Midori and her baby sibling, and have her introduce me to the old lady who lives there. Midori didn’t seem pleased.

Fed Cowcow. Checked sparrows. Cheated with Haiku man for a score of 95! Based on conversations with Hayato nearr the den, I think he has a crush on Midori. On the way to meet Midori I saw a massive fish. I’ve named him Chubbo Derrick, and I vow to catch him someday! Apparently some fish only like lizard tails as bait, but I don’t know where to find lizards.
I went with Midori to the new area and we sat and chatted in the grass, then visited a cliff face where we bumped into the old lady.
After introductions Midori ran off, stranding me there - the big meanie! I sat looking at the old woman, but didn’t know what to say, so ran off in the direction of the lake. Went swimming and found a drowned tanuki statue which I’m going to name Wet Derrick. I went too deep though so passed out again.
Awoke at the barn. Dinner, bath, then bed.

DAY 11

Wednesday 11 August. Another snake was harassing the sparrows so I attacked it with even greater courage this time.

Fed Cowcow. Haiku man gave me 100 points for my new poem, something about a cow trapped in the rivers of hell. He also gave me a new rank. Yay! I am now HAIKU MASTER!

Next was insect sumo. After 10 wins I had to crown him, so gave him the title BROWN MAGNUM! (technically black magnum, based on the kanji, but it’s the same kanji used for brown bread, so I thought it would be fine). I had wanted to call him BROWN THUNDER, but thunder was only in the first column, not the second column for naming. After 37 straight wins with BROWN MAGNUM there were no other challengers so I stopped playing.

Went to the lake and caught an Itou fish using crayfish as bait. He’s huge and spotted, so I’m going to name him Freckley Derrick.
Also skipped some stones, it bounced 9 times. After dinner I visited Megumi at her house, while it was dark, and she gave me a crystal drinking glass she’d made.

DAY 12
Thursday 12 August. Got an egg from the chickens and gave it to aunty who said we’d have it for breakfast tomorrow. Checked the sparrows and fed Cowcow. Next headed to the temple and found a caged bear! He’s just a cub and very cute. Slid down the big hill but missed the bottle cap near the tractor.
Afterwards met Megumi’s younger sister Harumi at the glass shop. She seems nice. I was in a hurry so then rode the conveyor belt up to the barn. I spent the rest of the day looking acorns but couldn’t find any! Aunty gave me a quiz on dinner again and I got it - soon I’ll have that bottle cap. After dinner uncle, grandpa, Megumi and Harumi sat outside by a fire. Aunty stayed inside looking after baby while Midori did homework.

DAY 13
Friday 13 August. Over breakfast I spoke about the bear cub, saying I wanted to name him Goro (this is what my physical self said - in my mind I wanted to call him Fuzzy Derrick). Fed Cowcow. Visited Goro while wearing my Goro T-shirt.
Slid down the big hill 6 times before finally getting bottle cap #49! Then I played beetle sumo and beat Hayate’s King Kabuto beetle in KING RANK. What a great end to the day.

DAY 14
Saturday 14 August. This morning everyone talked about visiting the cemetery to pay respects to our ancestors, which I agreed to. Aunty also said to leave well alone the brick outside the house - but I took it anyway to fix the wall bridge over the stream.
Fed Cowcow. Found that TWO sparrows had falled out of the next today - the silly fools. Then went and fixed the bridge. I should have fixed the next day, but I was so impatient I did it today. As a result, this evening, instead of drawing a picture of us praying, I drew it of myself on the wall. My priorities were wrong in this case.

After exploring the new area and collecting some bugs I went to the cemetery dressed in my best white T-shirt. The priest explained how in Hokkaido the spirits don’t like snow falled on their graves. After prayers I walked home.

Dinner was steak and salad.

Xenosaga III Seems to Have Been Reprinted

2010-07-18T22:06:00.002-04:00

Check out Gamestop's page on Xenosaga III and use the store locator. You may notice an abundance of copies in your areas where there haven't been before, which were apparently just shipped there. According to posts on Cheapassgamer, they seem to use the newer PS2 cases that are missing the memory card holder, while the original print used the older one, indicating that it has been reprinted. This has happened before, usually without any press release, and many seem to be courtesy of GameQuestDirect. In the past they reissued some rarer PSOne titles, like Persona 2 Eternal Punishment (which is still pretty expensive nowadays) and Rhapsody (which isn't.) Between them and (maybe?) Atlus, we've seen reprints of some scattered PS2 titles, including all three Fatal Frames, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, both Digital Devil Sagas, and the Atelier Iris trilogy. Someone may also have reprinted Tales of Vesperia, which is listed for $20 on Gamestop Canada's site, although, strangely enough, not the US site, where the price still sits at $45 for a used copy. They are both Bandai Namco titles so it's definitely possible they may have had a hand in it.

These titles have both been pretty pricey for awhile now, usually fetching between $40-$50 in the used marketplace, even though Tales of Vesperia is only two years old. (Don't even ask about the LE for Vesperia.) Like many RPGs that aren't Final Fantasy, sales for these titles aren't exactly front-loaded, and by the time word of mouth gets around, it's often difficult to find them new on store shelves. Very few titles actually go above their retail price, and even the ones that do are often reprinted (like SMT Nocturne) but it's an interesting trend in sales and one that publishers should pay more attention to. The first Xenosaga in particular sold extremely well, enough to earn a Greatest Hits title. I'm not sure about the second one, but both can be picked up pretty much anywhere for less than $10. Meanwhile, Xenosaga III went mostly ignored, perhaps because many were disappointed in the first two. It's tragic, because the third is by far the best in the series and one of the PS2's better RPGs, but so much the plot is muddled without playing the first two (and is still a bit wonky even if you have) that it's easy to see why no one bought it, at least at first. With the drought of decent console JRPGs lately, it makes sense to revisit some of the PS2's unheralded gems.

Many Nintendo produced titles on the Wii and DS also keep their price and don't really go down in value - at least, other than the ones that don't meet expectations like Battalion Wars or Elite Beat Agents. Games like Super Princess Peach and Yoshi's Island DS haven't dropped at all, and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time actually goes for more than retail. (The online price is $35 - the B&M price is $40.) But they also refuse to reprint titles or keep new ones in circulation, perhaps due to their conservative nature. (And, apparently, in the case of Tetris DS, which goes for $45 at Gamestop, a licensing issue.) In a roundabout way, it also kinda promotes piracy, but I'm sure they don't see it like that. A majority of DS games sold on eBay are also fakes, so the bootleggers are strangely meeting the demand that Nintendo does not acknowledge.

Boku no natsuyasumi 3 - DAY 8 + 9

2010-07-18T06:22:00.009-04:00

In order to give yesterday's doujin post more time at the top, I've consolidated days 8 and 9 into one. Also, I will be stopping the diary at 14 - 2 weeks in, and halfway through the game. Hopefully someone, somewhere, now has enough of an interest in the series to give it a try. Mostly, I'm finding it frustrating having to play each day with a pen and pad and my camera.

Sunday 8 August. Made it for exercise. Then breakfast. Grandpa said there’d been bear sightings in the area.
So aunty gave me a bear whistle - for emergency use only!

One of the sparrows also fell out the nest, so I put him back, poor thing.

Then I fed Cowcow. He looks gaunt - I’m worried I’m doing something wrong. Also, I found a sheep in the middle of the road. Who had left it there? I asked its name and it told me, so I’m going to call it Obaaa-chan. Personally I’d prefer the name Wormy Derrick, since it’s wool appears to be undulating as if pulsating with worms. (translation note: obachan is the word used for elderly women, like grandma, and the middle of the word sounds like a sheep’s baa sound - a localised version might make a similar pun between “maaa” and “grandmaaa”)
Got another bad score on Haiku, tomorrow I’m going to cheat by reading a Haiku book beforehand. I got a lift to the fields near the temple, and then wasted the entire day looking for that stupid bear. I couldn’t find him, but I drew a picture in my book anyway.
After dinner I decided to bath - it turns out that stinky smell has been me this whole time! I didn’t realise this, but I need to bath every day while here, otherwise I leave dirty footprints on the tatami mats. I hope Cowcow is OK.

Boku no natsuyasumi 3 - DAY 9

Monday 9 August. Exercise, breakfast, sparrows then Cowcow. He still looks gaunt. Visited Haiku man and cheated, since I found a Haiku book in aunty’s bedroom, hidden under piles of uncle’s shibari magazines. The Haiku book gave tips, which helped immensely.
Then I went and perfect Yankee Doodle clapping - slow, medium and fast! Fast was the easiest. Afterwards I found the boat owner by the pier. He’d dropped his keys over the side, so I dived in and fetched them. They glowed in the dark like they were radioactive. His name is Sendo-san, and as a reward he took me by boat to a new area. It’s so peaceful! I tried using crayfish as fishing bait but no luck.
I also found a house, but no one was home. This place has a massive lake, so I went swimming for bottle caps. I dived until it was too dark to see and found a magical special bottle cap, that filled my head with music as I swam - it was magnificent. I also found a sunken swan - I’m going to name him Majestic Derrick.

But I got carried away, dived too deep and then passed out. Woke up at the barn.

Too late to do anything else, so spoke to aunty about dinner. She gave me a quiz. If I get the quiz right five times on different days, she’ll give me a rare bottlecap. I think she’s a better cook than mom. After dinner I fed Cowcow again to be safe. A quick bath then off to bed.

Interview with TKO Soft, the doujin group behind Yugekitai ~ Saikyoshin Fukkatsu no Maki ~ 遊撃隊～最強神復活之巻～

2010-07-17T08:10:00.006-04:00

Gargatar over at Tokugawa forums took to translating Yugekitai on PC98 around June 2009, and recently he’s not only completed his fan-translation, which is available via RHDN, but he also interviewed the guys behind it. Read on!
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As Gargatar explains it, Yugekitai ~ Saikyou Kami Fukkatsu Yuki Kan ~ 遊撃隊～最強神復活之巻～ is:
“An adventure game where you control a group of 5 high school students in a rock band and their battle against a plot that could destroy humanity. It's pretty hilarious even without an English translation.”
Losing his translator early on Gargatar took to learning Japanese and translated it himself, and by March 2010 he’d made a fair amount of progress. As he put it:
“So I've finally gotten my Japanese to a level that I can translate this game myself. I've just finished translating the biggest file of game text, so I estimate that about 1/3rd of the game is in English right now.”

By June he had completed the work and the translation was at 100%.

Even more amazingly is that in July he went to Japan and was able to meet with TKO Soft. He posted his findings on Tokugawa’s forum, and I find the whole situation so fascinating that I asked his permission to repost his write up, to bring it to more people’s attention. Thanks to Gargatar for all the hard work of translating the game and contacting those behind it.

Well, had a meeting with them (TKO Soft was a team of two brothers who made doujin, one doing the programming and one who made the art), here's the information that I was able to figure out.

Early Games - The bulk of their PC88 games were simple RPG or Adventure games using whatever engine they made for Jark (Ryu system). They have physical copies of them somewhere, but they haven't dumped the images.

Graphics formats - The formats for the PC88 are a custom format that the programmer made himself. He programmed his own graphics tool in BASIC and used that to make the images. I assume that this was the standard practice for creating graphics on old Japanese computers. I believe that the PC98 graphics were hand-drawn and then scanned, but I wasn't quite sure if that's what they said. I don't know if the PC98 games had a custom format or not.

General History - I wasn't really able to get a "why" or any big names, their involvement in the scene started around 1988. They would usually sell their games at Comiket. The PC88 and PC98 doujin were able to become the most well-known because those systems were the dominant ones in businesses. They didn't make anything for any other computer systems, but they held the X68000 in very high regard. Due to its strong power, but high cost; it was a bit of a distant dream for computer-users.

Other Things
- The story for the first Yugekitai game was based off of a short film that the younger brother made with his high school classmates. As such, the games characters are based off of his real classmates, but with the names slightly changed.
- The original disk version of Yugekitai II originally took up 10 disks, fortunately it's possible to run the game from an HDI.

Gargatar has tentatively hinted that he’s thinking of translating other Yugekitai games, such as the side-story on PC88 and the sequel on PC98.

Since the game is freeware, you’re to download the translated version HERE.