http://catchynamenews.tumblr.com/

Everything is explained in detail there (sort of), and as a bonus, it contains 10 minutes of Colossus using his mutant power from the 1991 X-Men arcade game. If that’s not enough to get you to go there, NOTHING IS.

Well, there are several reasons, but among the most important ones is that I’ve been doing so many different things creatively. In the past year, I’ve written a script, part of a book, a bunch of skits, and an absolutely ungodly number of raw ideas, as well as two exhaustive studies of games I love (Chrono Trigger and Yume Nikki)… and that’s to say nothing of the game I’m working on. I’ve had an enormously creative year, and I’ve enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, I just happened to lose my voice for this site in the meantime. I hated it, and it made me feel bad, but I couldn’t force something that wasn’t there.

That said, it’s been coming back to me… and I think I’m gonna be a lot better at it now. I’ve learned a lot in doing all this writing, and one of the big things is how to be a bit more…. diplomatic, shall we say. I’m proud of the writing in this site’s past, but I’m the first to admit it’s been overly negative, and in fact, downright codgery. I’ve never been a very negative person, but I HAVE been a very negative writer, and I think a lot of that comes from having developed my sense of humor as a sort of defense mechanism; I learned that I could use wit like a blade to cut someone down, and as such, I wanted to use it to attack things I didn’t like, in this site’s case, trends in video games I didn’t like. I still stand by most of the things I said I didn’t like (pretentious arthouse games, MMOs, both Gears AND God of War, the Protomen), and I still feel as though I have rational, reasoned arguments against them. But the thing about negative articles is that, unless you agree with the opinion expressed (and sometimes even if you DO agree with it), you’re not going to enjoy them.

Now, none of this means I’m not still gonna be kinda snarky and sarcastic; that’s just core to my being. I’m just not going to dwell so much on things I hate. I mean, you have to admit, that’s a pretty weird thing to do anyway.

Anyway, I’m gonna get started on my first article in almost a year. Hopefully it won’t be awful.

So what have I been doing in all this time?

• I’ve put in a metric shit-ton of work on my game. I’ve been writing an update on it off and on, but I haven’t finished it yet. This has been the most progress I’ve made on it since I’ve started, and I’m getting really excited about it. I also found an artist who is ridiculously talented, and that’s helped a lot. You’ll see some of her work in the next update (hopefully).
• I’ve also been writing a ton of comedy sketches, which may or may not get used with something for this site. Sneak preview: one involves a man who finds out his girlfriend was just a bunch of dogs in a people-shaped suit, and yes, they’re ALL that good.
• Supposedly a podcast is coming soon. I know I’ve been promising that for like 2 years, but seriously this time (assuming I can get the people involved to, you know, be involved like they promised).
• And, naturally, I’ve been playing a lot of games in what little spare time I have, primarily Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?, Sonic 4, Goldeneye: Source, and Twilight Princess, and yes, you read right, some of those games are recent.

So that’s why this hasn’t been updated in so long. I promise I haven’t forgotten about it though; CNN fans (if any) can look forward to updates and probably some reviews coming up. I’ve been working on something for Goldeneye: Source and Sonic 4, so if that interests you, make sure to stick around.

Peace out.

Ever heard of Urban Champion?

Probably not.

Well, Urban Champion was one of Nintendo’s early NES games (you know, the ones that had little categories that indicated the genre). While Nintendo is now known for the awe-inspiring whimsy of games like Zelda and Mario, when the NES first came out, they emphasized creating straightforward simulations of sports just as much, and Urban Champion falls into this category. What sport is it simulating?

Street fighting. And I’m not talking hadokens and flash kicks. I’m talking about hardcore, American-style, brutal, “you just stole my last crack rock, I’m gonna smear your face in broken glass and leave your bleeding, mutilated corpse under the overpass” street fighting.

Well.. I mean, it’s not that gory in-game. But I’m sure it would have been if they had the capability to do so.

There’s really not much to Urban Champion. The objective of the game is to facefuck your opponent with your fist until he ends up falling into a sewer. That sounds like a pretty bad fate, and punching someone into a sewer is a pretty good way to win a moral victory. But this isn’t Revenge of the Nerds. Your guy doesn’t give a shit about humiliating a jock. He cares about beating his green haired twin to death as brutally as possible. Trust me, he’s better off in the sewer. If that sewer wasn’t there, you would simply beat him until he ends up a twitching, bloody mass with severe brain damage.

Or, you would, if the goddamn 5-0 wasn’t always on your ass. If you stay in front of one store for too long, the owners will call the cops. When this happens, you drop your chunk of cinderblock and act like you just happen to be standing on the opposite end of the block from your exact double. Fortunately, you apparently live in Detroit, because the cops just drive on by, assuming that two conspicuous, brutally beaten guys who match the description phoned in by dispatch have just fallen down a flight of stairs, presumably into a pile of razor wire. They will, however, come back when your charge goes from “assault and battery” to “1st degree murder”; right before you can deliver the finishing blow, a police car pulls up and hauls your opponent away. This is a rough town, and it’s survival of the fittest out there. If you can’t survive a brutal, unprovoked beating, your ass is safer in jail.

Score: 5/10

Ehhhh.

Urban Champion is decently fun for a little while, but it winds up feeling more like a minigame than anything else. It’s probably the most shallow game available for the NES, and considering the competition for that title, that’s a pretty bold statement. In this age of free online games, Urban Champion could probably be fairly successful, especially if Nintendo applied a little more of its shine and wax service to it. But in the way it was presented, at the time it was presented, and most importantly at the price it was presented, there’s no way to call Urban Champion anything but a ripoff.

But, since I’m trying to review it in a current context, I can’t call it abysmal. When you aren’t paying for it, it’s pretty fun, albeit for just a little while. In particular, the 2-player mode can be pretty entertaining. Just don’t expect more than 5-10 minutes of fun out of it. And don’t be surprised if, upon losing, you end up murdering your best friend over a half-empty can of beer that’s been sitting in a trash can for 4 days. After all, life imitates art. Just ask Jack Thompson.

But, I swear I’ve been working! Just not on here. Most of what I’ve been writing is for another project that has been brewing in my head for a while. God only knows if I’ll be able to actually follow through with it, but if so, I think you guys will really enjoy it.

Anyway, I’m gonna start writing an article for here soon. As in, after I finish this. With any luck it will be up in the next 24 hours.

Rotating the Control Stick in Mario Party

Mario Party was fucking awesome. There are still few games that can compare to the simple fun of getting a bunch of your friends together and playing minigames for coins. And then, in the end, you end up screaming “GODDAMMIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS A HAPPENING STAR?!? I HAD 8 FUCKING STARS AND I STILL LOST?!?” But, despite what you’d think, the most prevalent injuries weren’t from strangulation among friends or electric shock after chewing through the cartridge trying to eat Toad’s brains for giving someone who did really shitty like 10 FUCKING STARS AT THE END. No, according to this article, Nintendo received several complaints about kids who were receiving blisters and other injuries by spinning the control stick with their palms instead of their thumbs. Of course, this is the mainstream media we’re talking about, so instead of reacting to this in a normal way, by saying “Ok, well, kids aren’t doing this the way they’re intended to, but Nintendo’s fixing the problem by offering free gloves which prevent the injuries,” they freak the fuck out and make shit up. For example:

“One kid got a tetanus shot,” said Christi Pritchard, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

A tetanus shot? Jesus christ! Was the kid playing in a bucket of rusty nails? Also, note who she works for. I think if anybody needs to get a shot to stave off disease, it’s probably her.

Another great line:

“The alarming thing was how little time some of these children spent playing the game before they were injured,” Pritchard said. “One parent said their child had been playing the game for 15 to 20 minutes when they got a second-degree burn.”

Heh, they’d probably be even more shocked if they knew that the “second-degree burn” the kid supposedly received (I say supposedly because I’ve spun the control stick enough times to know there’s no way he could have caused enough friction to leave a second-degree burn unless he was some kind of cold-fusion powered robot) took place in the space of a 30-second long minigame. Those “rotate the joystick” style games didn’t come up very often, and when they did, you never had to rotate for very long.

The problem with the article is the same as with any article about video games that appears in the mainstream press: apparently, journalistic standards just go out the window when you’re writing about video games. There’s no reason to do any research whatsoever; just copy and paste whatever press release the game company releases, then talk to outraged people who are just as fucking clueless and ill-informed as you are. Why should you have to talk to people who enjoy the hobby, or, god forbid, actually play the goddammed game? You’re a journalist, your job is reporting news, not virtual game Natendos. Those will never be news-worthy!

CNET’s poor journalistic ethics aside, you could really fuck your hands up on those control sticks. I got Mario Party for my birthday, and me and 3 of my friends sat and played it all night. It took us about an hour to figure out how much faster you could rotate if you did it with your palm, and once one of us figured it out, the rest of us had to do it to keep up. So, the next day, our hands were covered in blisters. It looked like we had been jerking off the Human Torch. Our hands hurt so bad we couldn’t hold the controllers correctly. That didn’t stop us from playing, of course. Mario Party fucking rules. At least, it does until Toad gives Donkey Kong 6 fucking stars at the end. He didn’t even earn them, he’s a monkey.

Virtual Boy Migranes

This one is a little harder for me to write about, because it’s something I’ve never personally experienced. The Virtual Boy has always gotten a lot of shit because apparently looking at it for 10 minutes causes your brain to start bubbling out of your ears. Supposedly the headaches are so bad that no one can play the damn thing, except for myself, apparently. Tell me THAT shit doesn’t sound like the premise for a cyberpunk movie: a virtual reality device which is so advanced (and yet looks so primative, like all the technology in cyberpunk movies) that no one can use it… except one man: Freddie Electric. Because when you’re in a cyberpunk movie, you have to have a retarded name.

Anyway, when people played the Virtual Boy for more than a few minutes at a time, the red-and-black color scheme and lack of outside light apparently caused severe headaches and, in some cases, temporary sight problems. It really sucks, too, because the Virtual Boy was fucking awesome. Seriously, you guys have no idea what you’re missing. Everybody always likes to beat on the VB because it was so “terrible”, but really, I don’t understand what was terrible about it. Most of the games were fantastic, and, except for the headaches it caused, there was really nothing wrong with the way it looked. I think most people who use it as a point of ridicule do so simply because they think it’s an easy target, and I’d wager that most of the people who use it as an easy punchline have never even played it, or if they have, they haven’t played it for long enough to give it a fair chance. Probably because of the headaches. Stupid humans and their inability to withstand a visual assault.

Controller-spinning Frenzies

Ok, this one is a little more abstract, because it’s not really a video game injury so much as it is a result of childhood stupidity, but every gamer I know did it, so I think it deserves inclusion.

Few things hurt as much as an NES controller spun around at top speed. I know, because I got fucking hit with them all the time. Thankfully, I grew out of that really early, but I had the misfortune to have a little brother 6 years my junior who didn’t. He loved to pick up my controllers and spin them around like a fucking lasso, and 9 times out of 10 this ended up hitting me right in the teeth. It got to the point where I knew exactly how much each controller hurt. The SNES controller has a smaller surface area, but is heavy and more compact, so the hits were harder. The N64 controller was chaos because it was so large, which lead to it being really hard to follow, which means it hit you more. However, the plastic was hollow, so it didn’t hurt as much, unless you got hit with the memory card/Rumble Pak slot on the back. The worst was the PS1 Dual Shock, though, because it was big, heavy, and pointed. A hit by one of those to the temples would hurt for hours. Fortunately, as the older brother, I didn’t need controllers to fight back with, because I could just punch him in the face, which was a lot easier and more efficient.

Of course, now most controllers are wireless, so this should be a thing of the past, right? Wrong.

Motion Controller Murder

With the new wave of motion-controlled systems, games are becoming more active than ever. This means that gamers are becoming more active than ever, and this can only spell tragedy. We don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to full-body movements, and Mountain Dew and pizza do many things, but they sure as hell don’t push your body to perform at max intensity (well, they force your heart to perform at max intensity, but that’s not quite the same thing). All of this shows, too; there are fully two websites dedicated solely to pictures and stories of horrific injuries inflicted by Wiimotes, and multitudes of pictures, videos, and one-shot novelty articles dedicated to the topic. A man went for a smash in Wii Tennis only to jam his hand through a glass lamp cover, shredding his hand to pieces. One woman gave herself a huge black eye before a series of job interviews, leading to her having to explain that she is not, in fact, being abused in her home life. Another woman killed her dog. Killed it! Just flat out. How do you throw a small, light piece of plastic hard enough to kill a dog? Is there some kind of slingshot-Wiimote game? Did she get hit by a bolt of lightning as it launched from her hand? Is she fucking Mileena? Or, with the Wiimote already killing animals, and both Microsoft and Sony introducing their own wholly derivative products, should we all run for the hills and pray that our new kitty-petting simulators and pretend handball games don’t find and kill us? I, for one, favor the latter. At the very least, it will save us from how inevitably shitty Move and the Microsoft EyeToy will be.

I’m feeling better after this weekend, though. After the music article I wrote, I got invited to the OneUps Studios BBQ, and got to take a weekend off to relax, see an amazing concert, and talk to some awesome people. It was a little awkward, because I was a complete stranger to pretty much everybody there except for Mustin (who initially contacted me to invite me, and to whom I talked quite a bit before leaving) and Dale North (who I knew through an incredibly awkward apology I wrote him for something stupid I said in that same article). Still, even coming in as a complete stranger, I met some really great people, and had a lot of fun, even if I was a bit shy. Most of what happened probably wouldn’t be that interesting to anyone but myself, but I did get some (poorly shot) videos of an amazing performance by the OneUps. Keep an eye out for those, they should be up soon.

I’ll be back to writing soon, I promise. And it’ll be something good.

Black Mage

One of my biggest problems with my drawings is that no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to draw a person. I’ve never, ever, ever been able to get a regular human being’s dimensions down. So, even when I stick to video game characters, I have to draw things that have the simplest shapes possible. So drawing a Black Mage from Final Fantasy should be easy, right?

Am I ever correct about any hypothetical questions? This looks like a racist depiction of a black guy peeking out of a blue sock. Anybody who is familiar with the series will be able to tell exactly what it is, but they’ll also laugh at me and banish me from any groups they belong to. Also, check out this picture of this drawing before it was finished:

Here he looks like a sock with bodacious, if oddly angled, jugs.

Mallow

I just played through Mario RPG again, for like the 50th time. I think I may have beaten it more than any other game I own. I always feel kind of bad, because immediately upon gaining a 4th party member, I always take Mallow out of the party and he never ends up back in it again for the rest of the game. As part of this guilt, I decided to draw him.

I know he’s a fictional character, and that moreover this is a crayon drawing that I made myself, but I can’t help but feel like he knows how insulting this drawing is. It’s like, he’s smiling, but you know secretly he wishes he didn’t look like a bizarre piece of popcorn with 2 club feet and an arm that was mangled in a factory press.

Magnemite

I looooove Magnemite’s design. I like very simply drawn characters, and especially weird looking ones with one gigantic eye, and Magnemite fits the bill. Actually a lot of the Pokeymans fit that particular bill, but Magnemite probably does the best. But I’ve demonstrated in the past that I can’t seem to draw even the simplest of things. Is this in that category?

Actually, as far as my drawings go, I don’t think this one is too bad. I mean, it has its problems, but it captures the essence of the original Pokemon. Right? Maybe not, those screws on the bottom look awful. But I still like my little electric-type, poorly-drawn screws aside. He is SO going up at my desk at work.

So that’s really the best I can do. Any ideas as to what I should try to draw next?

That said, I’m not just giving in to please them or any other readers of my site. I still stand by my other fundemental problems with the band; they have nothing to do with Mega Man, and I’m still not a huge fan of their music or production (although the music isn’t really terrible, just not my cup of tea). When I’m writing late at night (which is almost all the time) I have a tendency to be a little overzealous with my own arguments. So, I want to stress that I haven’t changed my opinion of the group just because they posted a comment for me; it’s really more related to the fact that my arguments were a bit unfair and inaccurate. To any new readers of this site, I would like to promise that this isn’t the norm, mostly because my site is usually nothing but dick jokes and old video games. So, if you like dick jokes and old video games, stick around, because this party’s just getting started! By which I mean it has started 2 years ago. And also by “party” I mean largely imageless text.

There are a few truths that are generally accepted. The sky is blue, nachos are awesome, Dark Side of the Moon may be a perfect album, and licensed games suck. And yet, as universal as those truths are, they can be contradicted. The sky turns many different colors throughout the day, On the Run isn’t quite as interesting as the rest of the album outside of a historical context, and nachos can be prepared… ugh… California-style. And licensed games? Well, every once in a while a developer will make one that isn’t completely abysmal. And I’m not just talking about Goldeneye; there are great games that are based on way lamer franchises than that. Case in point:

M.C. Kids (NES, 1992, Virgin Interactive)

“A McDonalds game? They made a game based on McDonalds?”

Actually, they made two. But let’s not talk about the second one.

M.C. Kids is the story of 2 kids, one who is white, and one who is Buckwheat from the Little Rascals, who get sucked into a book they’re reading, which is apparently about McDonalds. I like to think that the kids live in a future dystopian corporatocracy, wherein all forms of entertainment are just advertising for major businesses. I like to think this, because, as depressing as that dark vision of the future is, it’s way less depressing than the idea that kids would just be reading a story about Ronald McDonald in their spare time. The kids find out that the Hamburglar has stolen Ronald McDonald’s magic bag! Fuck! Now it’s up to them to get Ronald’s magic bag back. Ronald would get it himself, but I mean, you know, he has stuff to do.

Furthermore, Ronald asks that you obtain some of his puzzle cards for him, which he has hidden throughout the levels. These are required in order to finish the worlds, but not the individual levels. In other words, Ronald has basically decided to make your quest to get his magic bag back as difficult as possible. In fact, it would probably be easier to just forgo Ronald’s requests and just go after the magic bag yourself. Why do I need to get a bunch of cards for Ronald, just so he can tell me how to get his goddamned magic bag back? If I have to work for his help in doing him a favor he can just go fuck himself. I’ll go hang out with Grimace. We’ll drink juice boxes and play on the special kids’ see-saw all day.

Score: 9/10

Yeah, the setting and story are retarded, but the game is fucking good. It’s easily one of the best and most creative platformers of its time.  It contains some puzzle aspects, and even uses a lot of physics-based platforming; for example, sometimes you see little spinners at the end of a platform. If you run over them while going fast enough, you’ll flip upside down, and gravity changes. Instead of falling to the ground, you “fall” up toward the ceiling. Often a level would have an entirely different style while you were flipped. Instead of avoiding enemies, you might be avoiding arrows that launch you all the way back to the beginning of the level, or trying to find a block you can hold on to to launch yourself even further with a trampoline, thus getting you further in the level.

The music is another high point. It’s very obviously designed by Europeans, because all European game composers insist on making the sound fidelity similar to a Commodore 64, even long after the technology could do better. Despite this, the music is extremely memorable, and is just begging to be remixed.

Graphically, the game is fairly pretty, with lots of well-contrasted colors, although the design of the characters is lacking. Your characters smile blankly, with no features other than large, dark, soulless voids for eyes. They seem almost as though they stare past you, beckoning you to come into their own personal hell, where you will be tormented by Fry Guys forever. Don’t believe me?

Look at them. They’re not reading. They’re looking at you. They’re looking past you. They’re looking through you.

They… They…

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

Jurassic Park (SNES, 1993, Ocean)

The Jurassic Park games always got a bad rap, but some of them were actually pretty good. The SNES one was the best, although the first-person segments, while genuinely frightening at times, were clunky and slow. The really weird thing about the games, though, is that they usually wouldn’t let you kill dinosaurs, which you think would be a pretty integral part of a game about killing dinosaurs. Instead, you were allowed to “stun” the dinosaurs, which looked a hell of a lot like killing them. Just look at this screenshot:

Those have to be dead. And the best part is that Dr. Grant is standing among their corpses as though to show the remaining dinosaurs who’s gonna be running this Jurassic bullshit from now on. I can’t imagine him not screaming the lyrics to a Dio song and firing his lightning gun up in the air. Dude’s gotta have a dick the size of a water slide.

Score: 7/10

Jurassic Park may not be an award-winning masterpiece, but it’s pretty entertaining for a few hours, if for no other reason than to see how many dinosaurs you can murder with lightning.

DuckTales (NES, 1990, Capcom)

FUCK. YES.

DuckTales was always one of my favorite shows as a kid. This was back in the day when the Disney Afternoon was the single greatest thing you could watch on TV. TaleSpin, Gummi Bears, Rescue Rangers, and DuckTales? Insanity. If I’m not mistaken, in the early 90s it was the longest period of time you could sit without someone trying to teach you something. And the best part is that, with the exception of Gummi Bears, those were all turned into spectacular games.

The DuckTales game,  however, was a clear cut above the rest, just like the show. Excluding first-party games, I don’t think there’s an NES game that I would rank higher than it except the Mega Man games, and it’s no wonder: they were produced by the exact same team. DuckTales perfectly captured everything that made the show fun, like the adventure, characters, and landscapes, but also managed to be a creative, involving platformer, the kind that acted as the bridge between games as entertaining diversions and games as storytelling art. It just goes to show that not only are licensed games sometimes “not shitty,” they can even sometimes be better than most non-licensed games.

Score: 10/10

I know, I hand out perfect scores like they’re Skittles and I’m the unpopular kid whose parents give him money every day to buy candy. But DuckTales really deserves it. The game is nothing short of perfect. The level design is inventive and rewards exploration (just like in the show), the gameplay and controls are tight, the graphics are some of the best of the 8-bit era, and the music is nothing short of amazing. It’s by far one of my fondest memories of the NES era.

DuckTales is very visibly designed by Capcom. In addition to their characteristically perfect controls and gameplay, as well as the easily identifiable music of Yoshihiro Sakaguchi (who I spoke about at length a while back), the graphic design looks very similar to Mega Man. Check it out:

Tell me it doesn’t look like some ducks just wandered into Mega Man 2.

Although nearly every element of this game was great, the single thing that probably stands out the most to gamers of a certain age (like myself) is the theme music for the Moon level. While I’ve written about it previously, I just can’t understate what a big deal this song is to gamers who grew up playing games in the early 90s. It encapsulates everything that has ever been great about video game music.

I’m just going to leave you with this:

Ahh, memories.