Subatomic Brainfreeze

What Did I Waste My Decade On? ANIME CONS?

2009-12-15T09:00:00-05:00

I can't remember when my first anime con was anymore. It was probably Big Apple Anime Fest '02, which I remember pretty faintly. They told me Tomino wasn't doing autographs, you know, but he was. I-- and everybody else who got one-- stumbled upon the guy in, I kid you not, the basement of a Virgin Megastore. I'd brought my Haro alarm clock and everything, so I was overjoyed to get it signed. The only other thing I remember was that the theater went into a full-on ovation at exactly the scene in Char's Counterattack that you'd expect such a thing to happen at. You know what I'm talking about.

I didn't really start taking in the fan culture until the next year, when I finally went to Otakon with my new otaku friends. See, if you see some weird shit in New York City you just keep walking. Just this past Thanksgiving I got to see a Thanksgiving-themed drag queen. You say "hey, nice job", and you move along. It's the same thing at New York Anime Fest: yes, there is a procession of weirdos in strange costumes moving towards the Javits Center. And? Otakon is special to me because it's an entire city possessed: there are literally more people in town for the con than, you know, people in the town. It is quite surreal, for example, sitting in a restaurant and seeing not one but several people in your immediate vicinity dressed up like Sephiroth or Goku or whoever.

Baltimore knows it's occupied, but they're quite willing to make the trade in exchange for the business we bring in. I remember one year, the crowds hadn't come out as quickly as expected: the woman at the counter at the convenience store across from the con center-- they display Sailor Moon fanart on the walls this time of year-- asked me with genuine worry in her voice, "When are the rest of you guys coming out?" I told her we'd show up eventually, and I'm sure we did.

Anyway, my first Otakon we had the brilliant idea to massively overbook the hotel rooms. Don't ever do this, guys. It is not going to be fun. I don't even remember who was in the room, just that two of them wanted to watch the History Channel all night and five of us wanted to sleep (on the floor) but they wouldn't turn the goddamn TV off anyway. So don't do that and don't get the Chinatown bus: I don't feel like telling that story again.

Where the hell was I going with this again? You'll notice that my memories have a lot more to do with things that happened to me than any actual fandom-related event I attended. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of memorable stuff-- certainly the JAM Project concert was the happiest day of my geek life-- but I don't think I go to anime cons primarily for anime. I go firstly to hang out with other fans who I don't necessarily see all the time, and secondly because really weird things tend to happen to me at them. Otakon's just my favorite because the most weird stuff happens to me there.

Of course, after a couple straight years of Otakon, I'm kind of desensitized to such things, which is why I haven't been going to anything I have to go out of my way for lately. I'll admit that I miss it, though.

But let's not get bogged down in con stories! The only thing I really noticed changing over those years was the average age of the attendee-- dropping rapidly, of course. On one hand, anime had finally found the target audience it had always been gunning for: teenage kids. On the down side, the anime industry crumbled anyway, because anime (for a variety of reasons) was never at a reasonable price point for them. On the really down side, they're probably even louder and more obnoxious than an already loud and obnoxious fandom. Probably thanks to the fact that you can commute there for cheap, New York Anime Fest feels like a daycare, except the nanny's given up and left town. So yeah, the difference is kids. Tons of them.

(My little cousin (10) loves Gaia Online, Sasuke, Kingdom Hearts and ramen. I really don't know how to feel about this. I haven't even told him cons exist.)

Oh, and the musical act! On the one hand this trend got me JAM Project, on the other, everything else. I'm not crazy about the idea of every single anime con suddenly needing a musical performance (thanks L'arc! thanks CRABS!), and I'm really not so big on the idea that said musical performance must always be visual kei. It doesn't even matter what they play or if they're any good, just get some spiked hair and eye shadow on the stage and you've got a main attraction! That "main attraction" business is my other gripe: the concert and the rave and so on are often treated as more important than, you know, anything to do with anime. I know it's what brings the crowds, but well, that just means that the crowds are awful, right?

What changed for me personally is that a couple years ago I got involved in con programming in a very small capacity: I feel like I should have given it a shot two or three years before that. Over at I-Con I've had the pleasure of running a couple panels, most of which involve me describing and then showing some absolutely crazy (and usually terrible) Japanese cartoon that the audience has never seen in their life. I didn't know what kind of response Space Thunder Kids was gonna get, but when I walked into a packed room for my first panel I knew I was gonna be alright. It's been standing-room-only alright for three years running now. It's good to know somebody out there shares my "tastes", and I'll jump at any chance to expose the masses to stuff like this. This coming year, I'll even be running an 18+ version of the panel as well as the general-audiences one: it'll be a challenge, but I think I know some cartoons that are up to the task.

All this talk kinda makes me want to go to Otakon this year (Dave is still available for employment at YOUR place of business). I better save up.

What Did I Waste My Decade On? THE ARCADE?

2009-12-13T15:47:56-05:00

My taste in videogames underwent a pretty drastic shift with the Dreamcast. I'd spent the Playstation 1 generation devouring one RPG after the other, with maybe Street Fighter on the side. When I got a Dreamcast the situation inverted, and I was mostly playing arcade games. Hard games that lasted 20 minutes were quite a departure from the three-week expeditions I was taking in the PS1 days, and they were actually much more involving to boot. It's nice not to be so committed.

I'd always loved fighting games from the Street Fighter II days, but I wanted to get deeper into them. In this genre, there's really not a lot you can do playing by yourself: the challenge posed by AI doesn't go very far, and as much as people talk about flashy combos, just learning that much doesn't actually prepare you for fighting against other players.

I was vaguely aware of this, as I sat around playing Street Fighter III Third Strike and King of Fighters 98 on my Dreamcast. The highest-level computer was a pushover-- it'd been a pushover for years now-- but I was aware that there was some kind of deep pool beneath what I was seeing playing these games alone. I also knew that I couldn't get to it unless I had like-minded people to play, and I didn't know anybody around me who was deeply interested in these games. Decent online play for the genre was still years off: I was playing Chu Chu Rocket and Phantasy Star Online on dial-up instead. So I looked for an arcade, except arcades were quite dead in America by 2000. My only option-- and I was lucky to have it-- was the famous Chinatown Fair, a spot that caters to the very niche and very hardcore gamer crowd in NYC.

The place is fire-hazard small. It's dimly lit, it's cramped, it's often full past capacity, and it stinks to hell. By all rights, CF should have closed fifteen years ago with the rest of the seedy, old-school arcades in the world. It didn't, though, because it's all that's left. If you're in the tri-state area or so, and you want live, serious competition in a popular fighting game, this is your best bet. It's not even close to the Japanese arcade-- after returning from Japan, a friend revisited CF and compared it to Borat's "America Room"-- but it's literally all we've got.

The place is a cross between an inner-city front porch (the fighting game players) and an anime convention rave (the DDR players). Naruto headbands, if not convention-wear or all-out cosplay, are occasionally present. You can still drop by any Friday night and see twenty dudes crowded outside the place screaming at the top of their lungs about Yugioh or WoW. Passers-by think there's some kind of altercation, but if you come to CF you already know it's just geeks. Every so often someone will pitch a serious nerd rage fit, maybe bang the control panel of the game they just lost at, and storm out of the place: one guy I remember screaming "I HAD SIX FRAAAAMES!" before running out. Another guy, I'm pretty sure, loathes me personally because he couldn't beat me at Arcana Heart. I don't know, man!

Like the games it houses, CF is pretty insular, unwelcoming and inaccessible at first glance: it's a problem with arcade game design, you know. Every time I visit, I see a steady stream of tourists walk in, do a full loop of the arcade, looking for something they can play, and leave, perhaps stopping at Ms. Pac-Man. It's not like they didn't try: there's just nothing there for them. If arcades want to survive, somebody needs to make something that doesn't terrify people. The first time I tried to play Third Strike at this place, I got straight-up laughed at. None of this has changed over the years.

I'm just stubborn. I've been banging my head against videogames since I've been playing them. No damn videogame was gonna beat me and no chuckling douchebag was gonna beat me either. I went home and I learned Third Strike: practiced on my inferior Dreamcast port, read up strategies on the internet, and I went to CF on my lunch hour and played, played, played. I got okay at it. I picked up the basics. And so doing, I was able to enter into that very deep pool that I had heard about before but not yet seen. I was more into the genre now than ever. Suddenly CF looked welcoming. There's been no turning back since.

The deepest I got into fighting games was probably Virtua Fighter: it's been completely abandoned in the West, but in my eyes it's still the best damn fighting game. Tekken's a solid game, but you know what? The more I learn it, the paler it gets by comparison. But this is a conversation for another day: what's important is I got deep enough to actually be active in that community.

The NYC VF scene is one of the only groups in the country that's active at all (though I'm pretty sure only a few of the guys still play), and we were damned active back in the VF4 days. The guys actually bought a VF4:Evo machine when it was only available in Japanese arcades, and we bought the Final Tuned upgrade after that. We were all so enthusiastic and so dedicated, and it was never more rewarding to play fighting games than it was back then.

I spent a lot of time and had a lot of fun with these games, but I never got overly serious: I guess it was always more about the journey and the learning process to me than just winning or losing. Plus, I don't have the kind of single-minded dedication to games-- hell, to one game-- that the successful tourney players have: it just wouldn't be worth it to me.

I'm not as passionate about arcade games and arcades now as I was a couple of years ago: I do feel like a time in my life has passed. That doesn't stop me from going to the arcade all the time, of course. I don't run out to places like the Break, the various Long Island locations a certain Beatmania machine used to sit at, or that really seedy pool hall on Grand just for the hell of it anymore. I just go to Chinatown when I get the itch. Often the bowl-of-noodles itch, the bubble tea itch, and the fighting game itch hit at the same time, so it's perfect. And I do pretty damn well at Blazblue with my Litchi. My Leo is taking shape too: maybe I'll even buy a card for Tekken soon. I'll name her Rosa Gigantor. My Virtua Fighter 4 card is still in my wallet. I should probably take that out.

The arcade business isn't doing well anywhere, you know. The whole movement of the industry is against it. One day, after all, CF's definitely going to go out of business, and once it's gone there really won't be anything left anymore. And even though a friend and I always joke about buying CF just to close it, I'll miss the place badly. Being able to play videogames with total strangers, face-to-face, is a fine thing, and a luxury that not a lot of gamers realize they've already lost.

Note: For your edification, here is a list of videogames that have, in fact, beaten me-- been so difficult, so frustrating at a certain point that I have no will to play them ever again in my life:

Beatmania IIDX
Pop'n Music
Dodonpachi Dai-Ou-Jou (I was about to put all of these games up for sale and then said NO, I CAN'T DO IT, I'LL NEVER SEE IT AGAIN)

A second note: if you're near and you feel like some Bemani, I do recommend Peter Pan Games in Bayside: I spent a lot of time at that IIDX machine and on that Pop'n.

A piece of trivia: What game was so intimidating as to actually scare off the regular denizens of Chinatown Fair, hardened gamers that they are? Senkou no Ronde. Everybody gathered around in crowds to watch it when other people played, but it was just too new, too unfamiliar. People were actually scared to play it. The game only lasted a few weeks before they put in another Third Strike setup.

What Did I Waste My Decade On? ANIME CLUB?

2009-12-12T15:47:04-05:00

Outside of a few people on the internet, I didn't really have any friends who were anime fans back in high school. Gamers, sure, but no anime fans. Probably for the better. It was especially weird to see anime and manga become a teen fad when I was in college: I hid all this shit when I was in high school!

I didn't find a club until college, when I was in engineering school for about a year. Ah, that club, that club. It was never really an anime club in the traditional sense, where we got together and watched something every week. Digital had sort of made that a non-issue: the guys went on IRC, grabbed what came out, and put it on a shared server for a short amount of time. This miraculous, mysterious "file server" allowed me to grab Japan-cartoons faster than ever, but it limited me to what the rest of the club were watching: I specifically recall grabbing the entirety of Happy Lesson when it went up one day on the server, going home, and regretting that decision for the rest of my life.

(Happy Lesson has a reset-time-so-that-none-of-this-ever-happened ending by the way)

The anime availability problem being dealt with, we just hung out in the office all day at our laptops, discussing otaku affairs. (Have you seen this Guu thing, dude? omigawd) Speaking of the office, we were shuffled back and forth between three different offices on campus. The anime club was a noise problem, see.

At first the club was in a space that was set aside for club offices, but given everybody was watching cartoons and playing videogames all the time-- there was a strong DDR contingent that probably was the noise problem-- that changed fast.

The second club location was a big, empty basement. They knew what they were doing. We had a tiny club office in the corner with room for five, tops, and a little counter out front we could hang out at. The rest of the place was a vast, carpeted expanse. In the far corner was a tiny TV set, so videogames-- either with the DDR guys or the Dreamcast guys-- all went down over there. All we had to do was yield the space for clubs when they had legit activities going on, which was fine.

However, other people soon found out we had a large, empty space down in the basement, and they LARPed. Well, I guess they larped: all we saw was people running around in circles and screaming, typically things like HIEI IS MIIIINE. It didn't take a ton of this for us to move the hell out of the corner and huddle into our office. We could play our damn Dreamcasts at home.

Fate was merciful, and we were moved again not long after. This time we were stuck way in the back of the basement of the main building, the furthest from everybody we could possibly be placed. We had another problem almost immediately: Ragnarok Online addicts. Now a lot of people, including a few in our own ranks, played Ragnarok Online. The school provided us all with laptops, RO was the best-looking game they could run, and the game was at the peak of its popularity.

In the club office, we had a huge Ethernet hub set up so that everybody could plug in at once and grab stuff off the server. Problem was, since there wasn't school-wide wireless, these Internet connections were actually quite precious. When people realized we had that many available connections, they started to join the club for one reason-- to take up permanent residence in the office and play Ragnarok all god damn day. After a few weeks we started to look like a Korean net cafe: the office was big enough that there was room for us to hang out, but we were surrounded at all hours by increasingly disheveled and smelly MMO addicts, none of whom we knew or spoke to. Eventually RO just had to be banned in the office, and all those guys left.

I left the school not long after that, abandoning engineering (and probably a lucrative future) for the humanities. The office, as far as I know, is in the same place it was back in 2003, and it looks the same too. A lot of the dudes I met at that club are still good friends today, and a couple are reading this. If you are, in fact, one of those guys-- or if you're in contact with them-- can you hook me up with all the 90's promo VHS tapes and Super Famicom games that we have in the file cabinets? Nobody'll miss them! Nobody at the club even knows what they are anymore, I guarantee it!

So, yes, for the most part, my anime club worked out just fine for me in the end. I wasn't around for too long, didn't get too deep, and I took the best I could out of it. However, for the benefit of my audience, I will offer a cautionary tale that will keep them out of anime clubs forever. Once upon a time, this girl I was hitting it off with dropped by the club to pick up something from somebody, and she saw me watching Azumanga Daioh. I said "it's funny!", she said "....", and things were just never the same after that! Hide your Japtoons, kids!

What Did I Waste My Decade On? GETTING ANIME?

2009-12-10T17:03:33-05:00

The first decade of the millennium is rapidly coming to an end, and as part of my ongoing quarter-life crisis-- a perfect storm of unemployment and restlessness-- I thought I would try and remember what the hell I did with all that time, subject by subject. This'll be tough!

At the turn of the century-- I'm going to cheat a bit and start at '99-- I was a beginner anime nerd who'd rented out the entire anime, kung-fu and Blaxploitation sections of my local Blockbuster. As my generation of anime fans knows, once you cleared out Blockbuster there was no cheap option available. My junior high had had an anime club-- I took in a lot of VHS fansub favorites here, like Combustible Campus Guardess and Kodocha-- but my high school barely even had a geek population, much less a bunch of them that got together and watched Japanese cartoons. My cousins had all of DBZ on bootleg fansubbed tape, but it never occurred to me to ask them how they got it. For further education, I was on my own.

I'd go to Suncoast at the mall and rifle through rows of VHS tapes I couldn't afford. Every so often I would pick a title out of the Rightstuf catalog: everything had a running time in minutes listed, and since I only had so much to spend, I would look for something that at least got me 90 minutes of anime for my 20 bucks and change. TV series had to be four episodes, which was considered a big value. The only exception I made was Cowboy Bebop, because of the huge hype that has surrounded it ever since it first aired.

Of course, just like with Neo-Geo games, the elusiveness and cost of the material only made it more enticing: there was this feeling that for this price, it had to be special. I had to get my money's worth, so I'd sit around and watch the first four episodes of some show over and over again. Every so often I'd pony up for a relatively good deal like a half-season of Slayers or Captain Tylor, but being a high school kid I didn't exactly have a ton of money for this stuff. I only discovered VHS fansub distros juuust before DVD hit.

When DVD rolled around, it was a gigantic step forward for home video, but I wasn't so concerned with things like video quality. I just knew videogames, and I knew this was a big enough jump that everything would go to the new format eventually. Anticipating this, I sold off all my VHS tapes (for more or less what I paid for them), invested in a DVD player, and eventually bought up the DVD equivalents of my entire VHS collection. Everything was still really expensive, but I was absolutely overjoyed to be paying only $80 for Serial Experiments Lain instead of the $120 I had put down before. I still didn't really finish many shows, but it was at least easier to get those first four episodes, and an entire TV series wasn't completely out of reach. I still have my coupon for an official Jubei-Chan T-shirt and I don't think they'd send me that anymore.

Not much later, though, I got broadband internet access and the whole thing changed. On dialup, the best I could do was go to a website that posted tiny VHS fansub rips in Realmedia, the lowest quality video possible, and download them overnight. I watched Detective Conan every week this way. Now I could download anime, you know, almost like watching TV! This was before Bit Torrent really busted the doors open for file-sharing, so I was going from one Direct Connect hub to the next and downloading anything and everything. I only had a 20-gig hard drive, so I had to watch everything I downloaded right away and burn it off to what became a very large CD-R collection.

Digital fansubbing hadn't really blown up yet, though: there was, of course, a huge Internet audience that was ready and willing to devour Japanese cartoons, but only a few groups of people were actually translating and distributing stuff. What I grabbed most often in the early DC days were rips of VHS fansubs, which were plentiful: I got in a lot of my Major Anime History this way. Video quality was still ass compared to a DVD or even a tape: online was my primary source, but not my preferred.

Early digital fansubs were, uh, pretty rough, as I recall. The shows you could get were, to put it gently, total crap. I watched the entire Love Hina franchise because it was, by a mile, the easiest thing to find online. Ah, those Love Hina fansubs. They'd be off any source the subbers could get, and since I was grabbing any fansub I could get (DC was a harsh wasteland), I would get episodes done by a different group every time: these varied wildly in quality from passable to trash. Every so often you would get episodes of shows that were book-ended by awful warez-group intros or AMVs: I recall a group with AZN in their name that subjected the viewer to a two-minute monstrosity of random anime footage with multicolored disco lights flashing over the whole thing before every episode they put out. Wish I still had that. Wish I still had the Prince of Tennis fandub, too.

The first fansub I saw that was up to today's standard was Noir. Again, I watched it all because it was so very available. I was lucky if I got a Sexy Commando episode, but Noir? You didn't even have to try to get Noir: it was just always there, every week. And holy shit, was that show bad. Who is helping Bee-Train to keep making these things? Shame! After that, the floodgates opened, BT came along and opened it further, there's really no need to talk about the rest. Getting anime, legally or not, just got easier and easier up until now. Today, you can take Japanese cartoons more for granted than ever before in human history, so watch Fist of the North Star on Hulu today!

When the anime DVD market was saturated and crashed-- which, as I recall, everybody but the distributors saw coming-- I let go of all those now-useless single DVDs I had bought (why complete the set when a series bundle costs less?) in a single Ebay lot along with a copy of Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home for the Xbox. I got 30 or 40 bucks for it, and I called myself lucky. How times have changed!

Mushihime-Sama Futari: Arrange mode is pretty easy-- OR IS IT?

2009-12-07T17:32:24-05:00

What can I say? I always get two or three posts (and hundreds of hours of wasted time) out of my videogames. I thought I'd go into detail about Arrange mode, as it's both the clear entry point for anyone who hasn't played one of these games before and an interesting design in its own right.

Arrange mode is specifically designed as a console experience. It's probably too easy to be released as an arcade game: even first-timers would sit down, put in their dollar, and win twenty minutes later. To call it the "training wheels" mode is not unfair, and it's even easier if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, the game doesn't bother explaining (arcade ports should all bother explaining), so I will.

(This is putting aside Novice mode, which is very straightforward and even easier.)

The first safety net is the reflect system: unlike the other modes, you are controlling both characters at once, and can switch between them with the tap of a button. One character fires (let's call this one Reco), and the other does the job of reflecting bullets (let's call this one Palm). In rapid fire mode (don't ignore the rapid fire button in this game, it's vital), bullets that get near you slow to a near-halt. This allows you to either leisurely fly around them or to reflect the bullets back by holding the laser button. Reflecting creates a large amount of medals that give you points, so one way to a high score is to gather a ton of bullets around you and fire them back when they're all together.

By reflecting and gathering bullets, you increase Reco's multiplier while decreasing Palm's. If Palm's score multiplier runs out, you won't be able to slow or reflect bullets. However, if you've used the reflector that much, Reco probably has a high score multiplier herself, so you would switch Palm to the front to refill him and put Reco in the back to reflect bullets. If you just play it careful, make sure to only reflect when necessary and with large groups of bullets, you can do this almost indefinitely.

Even if you do run out of reflector, Arrange mode adds auto-bombing on top of that. In a shooter, the bomb is typically used not as an offensive weapon but as a means of escape: you see the bullets, you know you can't dodge the bullets, so you toss the bomb and make them go away. With auto-bombing, you don't even need to think about that much: if you're hit by a bullet and you have a bomb, the bomb drops and you escape with your life. You are given a staggering six bombs per life-- three for each character-- and they go a long, long way. I just got done beating Arrange in all three difficulties without continuing by taking advantage of this stuff, and of the three only Ultra gave me any trouble. And I'm a pretty mediocre shooter player.

What's clever about the design is that as easy as it is to just survive, Arrange mode is also a very challenging high score game. Simple reason: using the reflector the way I used it-- or letting a single bomb go, for that matter-- really hurts your score. If you want a high score you can't lean on this stuff. Instead you want to fill up both players' multipliers to 9999 as soon as possible: firing your laser from there puts you in "fever mode" (I recommend yelling "BANGARANG" or "FUTAE NO KIWAMI AAAAH"), where you reflect everything that comes near you and your score shoots through the roof as the multipliers rapidly wind down. Eventually you're unable to reflect, and if you want to keep the jackpot going you have to dodge bullets like a normal person. You probably already know how dangerous that can be.

If the game had come without Arrange mode, I'd probably only recommend it to genre fans with a little experience under their belts. But considering that Ikeda and friends put in something so accessible, I have no problem mentioning this game in the same breath as Raiden Fighters Aces for a starter shooting game on the 360. It's certainly keeping me busy!

Mushihime-sama Futari: ARE YOU READY TO DIE OVER AND OVER AGAIN?

2009-12-06T09:00:00-05:00

A little while ago I cautiously sounded a preemptive hype alarm for the upcoming Xbox 360 port of Cave's arcade shooting game Mushihime-sama Futari. Well, I've been playing the game pretty thoroughly and I'm happy to report that all hype was warranted: this is an excellent port of a wonderful game. Absolutely nothing went wrong. If you're at all interested in Cave's work and you have a 360, I advise you buy the game right now, though the cost of importing is admittedly steep. This is a top-shelf wine kind of situation. As for the rest of you, there's a post below. It's going to be long.

If you don't know anything about this game or what the hell a Cave is or anything like that, then that's why I'm here. Cave is one of the very few developers-- and certainly the most beloved-- left making traditional 2D shooting games. The technology and scope of videogames have passed shooters by over the years: it's not exactly a dead genre, but it's damn close. The only people who still put these games together do so because they really want to.

The only people left playing 2D shooters are genre obsessives and game collectors, and as always with arcade games, those of us outside of Japan have a hard time even getting our hands on a lot of this stuff. Cave is very small and concentrates its efforts on the arcade side of things, so their arcade games don't necessarily even come out for a home console. When they do, it goes without saying that the game gets released in Japan only, for a high price and a low print run: see where these collectors come in? Most Cave home releases are out-of-print collector's items these days, and the same thing will eventually happen with Futari.

Let's fast forward the stuff about Japanese 360 games-- see the last Mushihime-sama post for the details on that-- and get to it: as far as I know, Mushihime-sama Futari (hereafter a comical English title of my own invention, such as Bug Princess And Little Boy) is the first Japan-only 360 game that will play on consoles from other regions. Cave has called it a "test run" to gauge exactly how big their international market is. I bought the game on principle, because I think other niche Japanese developers should pay attention to this, do themselves a favor, and stop pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist. I mean, I understand if you make visual novels, but shooters? Why not shooters, I say? G.Rev, please take note: I want to play Senkou no Ronde DUO and after the first one bombed here I already know it's not leaving Japan.

Luckily for me, The Girl Who Loved Bugs: Together at Last is a great game that deserves every penny (8000 pennies) I paid Cave for it. It's gorgeous, for one thing: all natural beauty and majestic critters to explode/be exploded by. This is a Blue Skies game: bright colors, smiling faces. The graphics have been redrawn in higher resolution to better suit an HD display, but you can play with the old arcade graphics: they've even supplied a number of graphical filters, two of which effectively simulate the vertical scanlines and faint glow of an arcade monitor. Hell, you can do a lot of weird stuff with the screen: they actually have a mode where you can use your big HD monitor to play the game on five screens at once, each screen running a few frames behind the last. Who would play the game like this? If you need to ask-- shut up this is so cool.

Now this game is worth the money to me, but it may not be worth the money for you. This isn't a game you finish and put away, as in "I just finished Arkham Asylum, it was quite good, and I never need to play it again": it wasn't built for that. It's only about twenty-five minutes long, from beginning to end. When games like this get reviewed, people get caught up on this, assuming that one run to be the entire time one could possibly spend with the game. This misses something essential: these games are exquisitely crafted miniatures. The point of them is not just to finish them but to play them, to explore them and to challenge yourself to do better.

Twenty-five minutes dodging a hail of bullets is a pretty heavy experience for any player. You're walking the knife's edge in a game like this, and that is exactly its appeal. Why else would shooter players insist on playing without continues? Think about the intensity that generates, that white-knuckle tension when the bullet storm is flying past you and you could lose the whole game at any moment. The fear of death can make for a very compelling game: just ask Mystery Dungeon. It's exciting, dammit: it's exciting in the most primal, essential way a game can possibly be. If you don't know what this feels like, go set up Mame and grab early Cave masterpiece Dodonpachi. You'll know right away whether or not this is for you.

On the high end, Insectress: Reunited and It Feels So Good offers what is simply one of the most difficult videogame experiences imaginable. This is not the hardest boss fight. To really "beat" this game might take years. You and I will probably never do so. Thankfully, for those of us at lower skill levels, the game has many difficulties that will accommodate any player, like the mode where you can reflect bullets and the game automatically bombs you out of trouble whenever a bullet hits you. This is in sharp contrast to the last Cave title I played at any length, Dodonpachi Daioujou: that game was absolutely uninterested in serving anybody who hadn't already been playing these games for the last fifteen years.

After you get over the training wheels stuff, the real fun begins. Original, Maniac, and Ultra modes are basically ascending difficulty settings: Original has relatively relaxed bullet patterns, things start to get crazy in Maniac, and if you pick Ultra you're greeted with a full-screen warning that if you wanna play Ultra mode, you'd better get ready to die. Ultra mode is for robots, gods, and crazy people and it killed me in about ten seconds flat. There is an achievement for beating the first level without continuing. There is also an achievement for opting out of Ultra mode at the warning. It's called "Not Suicidal."

Now these games work on two levels: merely staying alive and getting a high score. If you're not looking to get big points, you can play it pretty safe and stay alive. However, once you know the game better and can actually stay alive, you start to see the scoring opportunities. These games have really complex-- but not too complex-- scoring systems that involve doing risky stuff for points. Original is the easier mode if you're just looking to survive, but it's quite a challenge and there's a lot of high score meat to chew on there, too. Rather than getting into detail, I'm going to direct you to this much more useful strategy guide. Anybody looking for a high score in this game needs it.

All the modes have a ton of longevity, plus you have two characters and two variants of said characters to work with. If you're interested in getting this deep into the game, you're going to find that it has a huge amount to offer. This isn't even to mention the download content: the early 1.01 version of the game is included as an unlock code with first-print copies of the game (so buy it from the link I provided if you care about that: NCS still has them and that Hong Kong site screwed up all their preorders), and later this month Cave will release the ultra-rare Black Label variant, featuring GOD MODE, as paid DLC.

So yes, if you're not into 2D shooters yet, but you're curious and you're not afraid to pay up for top-shelf material, this game is for you too. Best shooter on the 360, far as I'm concerned. Buy Roach-chan 2: Hangin' With A Buddy today!

Also, the music is my personal ideal of what videogames should sound like.

Princess Family-Size and the Night of a Thousand Spankings: A study in localization

2009-12-02T09:00:00-05:00

As you may remember, I've been playing the Super Robot Wars spinoff RPG OG Saga: Endless Frontier. Its main draw-- the action-game battle system-- is alright, but the RPG that surrounds it is rather poor: between boring, uninspired dungeon design, a high encounter rate, and amateurish graphics outside of battle, the whole business feels like an afterthought. On top of that, the game drags on for at least twice as long as it should by endlessly recycling material: almost every boss in this game is fought at least three times in the story.

If not for Atlus USA's localization, I never would have had a motivation to finish the game. See, the game makes clear early on that it's not taking itself too seriously. The script is goofy: the characters can't stop talking about each other's breasts, and the hero is fond of pet names. You can imagine where this goes. Over on the Twitter (which you should follow, because I talk about a lot of things that aren't even noteworthy enough for this blog) I kept myself busy by putting down every single notable pet name or sexual innuendo I came across in the game. The tag was #ogsboobs. People on the Twits were entertained by this, so it's time for you to be too. Following is a full list of every single entry I made under #ogsboobs. This will take a while. For the record, I aim to use "Siren of the Love Ambulance" at some point in my life.

Wander Twins, Missy Mew Mew
Princess Barebelly, Princess Bounciful, Party Girl Mode
Honeydews, Princess Kaboobya, Greedy Puss
Foxy Lady and Foxy Part II for foxgirls
Blow-Up Android Girl, Princess Training Bra
"Orchestral Army" mispronounced "Whore-Chest-Real Army"
Melon-Smuggler
Bimbo-Bot, Old N' Busty Karakuri, Flotation Device
Princess Family Size, Miss Executrix, Mechakuri
Robo-Beauty, Robo-Babe, Juggmonkey
Princess Booty-Shaker, Princess Knockers, the pun "Sensei-tional"
Captain Bonanza-Brains, Splashdunce, "my busty pirate wench"
Short n' Sassy, boob-headed
"apocalyptic spanking", "I'm not a tomb raider, I don't have the figure for it."
Hot Coffee Bot, said to the dark-skinned android T-Elos
Red Hairing, Torpedo Girl
Siren of the Love Ambulance, "My little depth charge"
Surfboard Princess, Kitty in Pink, The Dark Beauty (T-Elos again)
Juicy Princess, "stupid, badly-dressed, over-boobed, fake, two-toned, fox-eared bastards"
Miss Bounciful Boobage, H-Game Dropout
"I can't help what I am, any more than the Princess here can help being so round and juicy," "lovely bunch of coconuts"
A father forgets his daughter's face, recognizes her on her curves instead
Breast Extreme Princesses, Coffee Kitty, Fake Breasts (in reference to a clone)
The technical fairy of Shinra, Princess Zipper-Lips
"don't get whatever you've got on under your dress in a bunch."
Secret Agent Man, "that princess with the ridiculous chest"
Mr. Romantic, the Night of A Thousand Spankings
"I thought the power switch for the elevator was here... but it looks like I'm the one getting turned on."
"It's a wall of boobs!", "Stop waving your asses at each other."

Finally, in the very last scene: heroine Kaguya, alone for the first time with protagonist Haken, asks him, blushing, to "turn off the lights?" He complies, of course.

I just scored a HOT DEAL off Rosenqueen

2009-11-24T15:21:52-05:00

Rosen Queen is Nippon Ichi USA's online store, so named after the Rosen Queen retailer in their flagship Disgaea series. They sell Prinny biker gang jackets, and they also sell this mysterious "bonus item", which I chose to purchase for one dollar plus five dollars shipping. Here is the letter I enclosed:

Dear gentlemen and ladies,

I was quite tickled to find that your "intersite", such as it were, sells a mysterious "Bonus Item" valued at $49.98 for the price of my choosing! Upon viewing the item I immediately retreated to the study to ponder the outstanding "test" deal before me. Having determined the proper value of the exchange, I have enclosed six American dollars and await my bonus. Thank you again, and may your numbers-- representing statistics which in turn represent your physical and mental strength-- continue to increase indefinitely!

Yours,

David Cabrera, Esquire

Yes, I actually paid. Yes, this order was processed. Will it be honored, on the other hand? There's only one way to find out!

I just watched a PARTICULARLY GOOD episode of Dirty Pair

2009-11-21T20:03:15-05:00

If you're not familiar, Dirty Pair is a perfectly formulaic series: two gun-toting girls in space bikinis are "trouble consultants" who solve problems at the cost of exploding everything in their path. It's not terribly ambitious, it's got no message, but it's simple, honest fun. Today I watched an unusually good episode. Dirty Pair episodes are usually stand-alone deals, so you can go ahead and watch episode seven without missing anything. I recommend you do so, because I'm about to spoil a very twisty and very silly plot. If you don't care about all that crap, then by all means continue.

The setup for the episode is that Kei and Yuri are sent by a space travel magnate to rescue his son Clicky, who's been kidnapped on his wedding day. The happy harem's on your left there. The kidnapper (she shoots up the wedding hall, bombs it, and escapes on a blimp) is really the young man's lover, and as it turns out they've eloped by dirigible. I'll skip the mind-controlling suitcase and the carnivorous roses and tell you that the Dirty Pair's mission was a lie: the old man just doesn't want his son with this mysterious, square-jawed Joanca character. Why, you ask? Well, as it turns out, she used to be a man.

This is pretty left-field, but what's more surprising is how unfazed and progressive the Dirty Pair are in a TV show from nearly 25 years ago. They even quote up some statistics! Fictional future space statistics, anyway. Fast-forwarding some more, dad grabs the couple himself and opts to get rid of Joanca the way the rich get rid of people: by shooting them into space. The Urashima rocket will shoot you into a full orbit of the universe, returning you 50 years into Earth's future without aging you a day. The Kei and Yuri Cavalry arrive a little late to save Joanca from this fate, so rather than waiting fifty years for her, Clicky jumps right into the next Urashima rocket (someone didn't think this out too well). In the final gag, the father can't bear to think of life without his son and hops into the last available rocket. Kei and Yuri pledge to take care of things sometime when they get old.

And that's it. Carl's talked about the idea of listing essential episodes for long-running anime series like this one, and while I haven't been all the way through Dirty Pair TV, I would still call this an "essential" Dirty Pair episode. It's got everything you could want: rampant destruction, over-the-top slapstick, and an honestly unpredictable, nonsense plot. Give it a watch! Just 25 minutes out of your life. And if you like that, proceed directly to Project Eden.

How not to do Free to Play AGAIN: Lost Saga

2009-11-19T22:15:04-05:00

Ah, boy. We've talked about free-to-play games here very recently, and I just got an email from one that opened up a few days ago. It's called Lost Saga, and let's cut to the point here: don't waste your time. I wouldn't have, but-- I'm skipping a long story here-- I have some game money tied up with the company that runs this game. They used to run Pangya, the arcade golf game I so loved, and when they shut the game down I was caught completely unaware. You can't exactly get a refund on that stuff, and the rest of OG Planet's games blow. So I was hoping this one wouldn't, that I could finally get my stolen $25 worth out of OGP.

Well, it blows, and I was able to make that judgment after playing only the tutorial. The new player experience in this game is a how-to on getting it wrong. Upon starting the game up, you immediately create a username and are given a default character. I stared around the screen here, hoping there was some button that would make this Generic Brooding Anime "Shadow Assassin" character go away and give me a choice. There wasn't. The lame-ass and I were flung into a glacial tutorial. I do not read one letter per second, game: your tutorial should never, ever speak at that speed.

The first thing that was on my mind after this tutorial was naturally ditching this Shadow Assassin punk and picking up someone cool. Guess where the many other characters were? In the shop. Up front, the game tells you these characters can be purchased with game money, not cash: then you click the character and the game pulls an instant bait-and-switch on you. Game money can be used to play as these characters, but only for two hours. Any more and it costs money: a day costs $5 and to keep the character costs a shocking $15. The game obviously lost me (and doubtless most of its other prospective players) at this screen. Do you know what you can get on Steam or XBLA or PSN for $5? $15? It's a hell of a lot more than a cowboy, I'll tell you that.

So yeah, don't do it that way if you're making a game like this. Give the player a little room before you force them into coughing up. If you want a player to pay up, you've got to give them a way to get attached.