There are a lot of things from the classic resident evil formula that are frustrating – deliberately limited inventory space, fixed camera angles, and movement controls that feel like you’re constantly fighting with your on-screen avatar to get them to move in the right direction, but I think that the least forgivable is the limited ability to save. Having to scrimp and save ink ribbons meant that any death meant repeating as much of a half-hour of gameplay, and that’s not something I’m going to put up with; I might have done it as a kid but as an adult I’m a lot more conscious of the difference between wasting time for fun (pretty much the definition of any time spent gaming) and having my time wasted, as in this case.

So, while I was doing all right as long as I followed the basic step of running around until I got killed, then retracing my steps knowing where the Bandersnatch was going to be this time and killing it first, I wasn’t really enjoying it.

I have one more Resi title to look at, the series-revamping Resident Evil 4 – and, if that falls down as badly, I think I’m just going to admit that the series isn’t for me.

I chose Jet Grind Radio, alternately known as “Jet Set Radio” everywhere in the civilized world, loaded up my old save from 2002 or so, noted that I’d only completed the first two levels on my old save, elected to start again from fresh, got through the same two levels, and popped it out of the Dreamcast.

It’s not going back in, ever.

I’ve got nothing bad to say about the world of Jet Grind Radio.  It’s a pretty neat place – it oozes style, the music is great, and the cel shading works really well.  It makes me want to see a lot more of the world.

Unfortunately, it’s teeth-clenchingly difficult.  The idea is basic enough; you play one of a small band of scofflaws out to save the world through the liberal application of spray paint, and to accomplish this and avoid pursuit, you do it all while wearing roller skates.  There’s lots of rail grinding and flipping and feats of dexterity that would be accompanied, in the real world, by throwing up your arms in triumph.

You might even be tempted to shout “woo!” or something similar.

Sadly, the fantasy life of an expert rollerskater / graffiti artist is somewhat hampered by a camera that seeks your death, time-limited levels that discourage experimentation and exploration, and a bewildering control scheme that maps two functions to the exact same button, leaving three buttons on the Dreamcast controller completely unused.

In addition, an awful lot of the game centers around jumping onto rails – to be fair, the rail grinding in the game IS awfully neat – but getting your on-screen avatar to jump onto a rail is really bloody annoying at times.  Most of the time, I wound up either falling short, overjumping, or jumping just slightly to one side of a rail, which meant that I lost all the momentum I’d built up and had to take several seconds to circle around for another pass.

So, getting through the first two levels took me a couple of hours, and there are sixteen levels, and I understand that the game takes a massive difficulty leap about halfway through, and if I’m struggling this hard on the early levels there’s no way I’m going to be able to stick with it once it gets “hard”.

So, hell with it.  I may give the Xbox sequel a try sometime, because I understand that it’s gotten rid of a lot of the frustrations from the original game, but I’m going to file the original game under the category of games that I wish I could play but am going to accept that I won’t.

This is, well, a version of Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai III, but it’s a bit… well, it’s a bit changed.

See, back in the mid-90s, the Sega Saturn was the go-to home console for slightly naughty videogames, and the first two games in the series had been released for the Saturn with slightly naughty bits intact.  Suchie-Pai Remix was, in fact, my first import Saturn game, and it got me hooked on mahjong for life.

By 1999, however, Sega had bowed to the mighty lobby that was the Japanese PTA and banned anything that could be seen as less-than-wholesome, so Suchie Pai III – which was originally a slightly naughty game when it was released in arcades – had to be turned into something considerably less naughty when ported to the Dreamcast.

Moreover, the name had to be changed to remove any association with the earlier entries in the series.

As an aside, there’s an amusing bit on the back of the game box where one of the characters is asking “why doesn’t the box say “Suchie-Pai” anywhere?” and another character responds “Shh, we promised not to ask about that”

So, the publisher did have a bit of a sense of humor about the whole thing, but there’s no disguising the sad truth that the game was pretty much hacked to ribbons for its home release.  You only have a choice of six characters, each path through the game is limited to four rounds of mahjong, and it only takes a few hours to burn through all of the “scenario modes”, which is the term they use for the brief stories that set up each set of mahjong contests.

Oh, and just to add that extra little bit of fail, it’s one of only two Dreamcast games I own that refuses to boot if you have a VGA box.  That probably more than anything else explains why it took me so long to get around to playing it.

After you’ve dug out an S-video cable and spent a few hours to play through the scenario modes, though, you can start the “Making Mode”. This is where you create your own character, dress her up, and go challenge people to mahjong.  Here’s where the game actually strives to get some longevity value, because you need to earn points to buy new clothes and hairstyles and such, and you can lose points just as easily as win them.  If you really want to outfit your Mahjong Idol in serious kit, it could take a very long time.  In addition, the mahjong you play during Making Mode is rather harder than the mahjong from Scenario Mode, because there’s (a) no “panel match” game to earn powerups from and (b) no powerups to use against your opponents.  You live or die by your straight-up skills with the tiles.

I played with that for a while, beat all of the available opponents once, discovered I could actually challenge my personally-created character to a contest, beat her after some consternation, unlocked a special outfit for doing that, and decided that I could probably put the game aside and still feel like I’d done it justice.

I had planned to, over the last year, finish up my Dreamcast backlog – that is, sit down with the curiously non-ergonomic controller in hand and slip GD-ROM after GD-ROM into the thing.  I actually did get off to a decent start at this when I started – I played through three DC games in the space of a couple of weeks – but I fell off the horse fairly quickly, seduced away by more modern consoles.

The biggest problem, of course, is that the games I have remaining are fairly lengthy games, not knock-out-in-a-weekend sorts of things.  As of this moment, I’m looking at having to play through all of these:

• Jet Grind Radio
• Record of Lodoss War
• Resident Evil: Code Veronica
• Shenmue II
• Skies of Arcadia
• アイドル雀士をつくっちゃおう

Six games, including two 40+ hour RPGs.

Oh, well, let’s give it another year. 

Thus I played Blue Stinger, which wasn’t particularly horrifying – turns out it’s a straightforward action title, really – and D2, which was much better on the whole horror front. Not necessarily scary, but the lack of jump-inducing moments was well compensated for by some of the most disturbing imagery I’ve seen on a console title.

I typed up a long description here of probably the weirdest scene the game had to offer, but I decided that it probably didn’t need to be posted in detail.

I’ll sum up: someone at the ESRB was asleep or bribed to let this one through with ONLY an “M” rating; I’m astounded that it saw the light of day in the United States, and it’s probably a good thing that it didn’t sell very well.

Oh, it had a pretty good story, marred by some 15-20 minute cutscenes with terrible, terrible dialogue/character mouth sync, and an ending which was both upbeat – in the video game sense – and thoroughly depressing, in a real world sense.  Not many games couple a “yay you saved the day!” with black-and-white statistics on exactly how messed up the world still is even if you may have momentarily prevented it from being outright destroyed.

Before that, though, I did me a little rolling, Beautiful Katamari style, and managed to finish all the King’s requests in, well, not very much time at all.  It’s almost a sin to go through a Katamari game with the sort of must-beat-this-and-move-on attitude I’ve been applying to games lately, so I will be going back to it at some point, I just need the massive overwhelming backlog to be a little less massive and overwhelming.

Something I won’t be going back to is, well, you remember a couple of years back when Burger King put out a line of Xbox/Xbox360 Advergames right around the holidays and every poor kid in the country was crushed to find them swelling up their stockings on Christmas morning?

Yeah. Those things.

Well, I’d heard at the time that, if it came right down to it, Sneak King was actually worth playing for a laugh, and I have to report that, having played it, I concur with that assessment.  There’s something about the concept behind the game that abrades the soul: you’re ambushing people with fatty food, and the horrible horrible fixed grin of the Burger King mascot adds to the overall creepiness level in ways that are both fundamentally wrong and – just a little – tantalizing; it’s as if someone were to release a game in which the goal was to drive 5 miles under the speed limit at all times, using the passing lane.

And yes, I worked on that last metaphor quite a bit.  I came up with several “it’s as if…” possibilities before that one, but none of them were the sort of thing I’d like my readers to think I actually fantasize about.

ANYWAY.  Back to Sneak King.  Sneak King consists of 4 levels; each one has 20 challenges; you need to complete at least 10 challenges per level to unlock the next level, so I considered that doing 10 from each level would be enough to call the game beaten.  It took a little over 3 hours to do this – so, considering that the game itself cost me 0.89, I think I got surprising value for money.

Some of the challenges on the last couple of levels are actually quite, well, challenging and I got a feeling of real accomplishment from pulling them off.

Let me emphasize that:  I found satisfaction in the feeling of delivering fast food from the confines of a rubbish bin.

I’m a little weirded out by that.

I applied for a couple of on-or-near-campus jobs but haven’t had a great deal of luck.  I suspect that they look at my resume and age and write me off as a bad fit; it is somewhat ironic that I think I’d be able to pick up a job paying $50K+ a year considerably easier than a job paying minimum wage.  I don’t NEED to work while I’m in school, but the idea was that I could pick up something part-time and we could use the proceeds to do some more travel over winter break.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to put my free time to good use while I have it; I added another four games to the “beaten” stack this last week.

I managed to finish Gensou Shoujo at last.  It took a considerable amount of practice and wasn’t a 1cc, but the only shooter I’ve ever 1cc’d was Trigger Heart Exelica anyway so I don’t feel too ashamed of having to continue a couple of times – the game only gives you two continues, anyway; it’s not like Ikaruga where the only way I managed to beat it was by playing it long enough that it unlocked unlimited continues mode.

I also finished a doujin mahjong game from Dominion Alice that I’ve had sitting around for a couple of years.  The title basic’ly translates to Maid Girl Mahjong, and it’s one of those titles that really tells you every thing you need to know.  It seemed like a really hard game – once you run out of points, you’re kicked back to the title screen without any chance to retry – and I wasn’t able to get past the third level… and then I found out that you could save the game at any point and reload it to restart on the last level you’d saved at.  I don’t know why the developers didn’t just put in a “start at the last level you were playing” option to begin with.

Anyway, it’s one of those games where you sometimes wonder if the computer player should really be THAT lucky – it did get at least one first-turn-win – but being able to periodically save and retry various opponents meant that I managed to muddle through to the end.

I’m torn between recommending it to people who want a “trainer” mahjong – it points out every time you can use an opponent’s tile in your own hand and when you can call richi – and not recommending it because it’s a little lacking in, well, personality.  You play versus four opponents: a maid whose outfit is covered with crucifixes, a maid in a uniform that’s kind of a cross between maid and family restaurant waitress, a maid whose outfit is kind of Scandinavian or Germanic, and the obligatory nekomimi maid, and that’s all you can say about them.  They don’t have names, they don’t have dialogue, you throw down tiles until one or the other of you loses, and you play the next hand.  I’m not sure I’d call it dull – I did finish the thing, after all – but it wouldn’t get anyone hooked on mahjong from scratch.

Cutesy shooters and naughty mahjong games gave way to mice and cats and mutant dinosaur zombie alien fairy things eventually; I’ve got a bit of a personal goal with regards to my Dreamcast collection that I’d like to achieve, which I will now detail:

Given that: I bought a Japanese Dreamcast in April of 1999, several months before the US release, and paid a stupid premium for the privilege,

AND that: we recently celebrated the 10 year anniversary of the US Dreamcast launch,

AND that: a friend’s recent Dreamcast purchase has somewhat rekindled my interest in the system,

I have decided that I’m going to try to finish my Dreamcast backlog – which is less than 20 titles deep – before 9/9/2010.

To that end:

I played through the 1P puzzle mode of ChuChu Rocket! – all 100 stages.  I needed to get FAQ tips for about 5 of the levels, but I don’t feel too bad about it; some of the Mania levels are very hard and rely entirely on precision timing.  I realize that by not playing it in online multiplayer mode I’m Missing The Point of the game, but I’m also pretty sure that the servers are down so meh.

It was a good puzzle game, anyway, even if it built its reputation on being a party / multiplayer game.

I also finished Blue Stinger.  I bought the game WITH my Japanese Dreamcast, when it was a Brand New Title, with all that implies, but I’d stalled out at a point that turned out to be about 2/3rds of the way through the game.

The odd thing is that I didn’t think I’d gotten anywhere near that far in the game, I thought that I’d played it for a couple of hours and put it aside, but I kept getting into new areas and realizing that, yeah, I’d played this before.

It’s a very rough game in a lot of ways.  The developers were clearly very enamored of the sheer power of the system, as it compared to earlier consoles, but didn’t necessarily have all the coding optimizations to realize their vision completely, so there’s some odd slowdown in a couple of instances.  The artistic choice to limit the game’s camera to pre-set camera angles is, honestly, annoying as all hell when you start the game and doesn’t really pay off until some really impressive sequences that take place in the last hour or so, and the player is allowed to, for example, leave a building without having pressed a button, the consequences of which aren’t seen until you’re a lot way away from the button, and where getting BACK to the button is a pain in the arse.

It was still fun to play.  It’s not really “survival horror” in the classic sense of being resource-limited and constantly harassed by monsters, because you have access to a more or less endless supply of healing items and ammo, but it does have the aforementioned mutant dinosaur alien zombie things and the mandatory Mad Scientists Meddling With Forces They Cannot Control thing going on, so it’s all good.

So anyway, two Dreamcast games down, 15 to go by next September.  Piece of cake.

See, I was under the impression that all it took was to finish the game on one credit, without using a continue, and this was wrong.  I found out for myself that this was wrong when, for the first time EVER, I managed to one-credit the game on the Xbox 360 version.

And I got the bad ending.

And I was mightily vexed.

So, I went searching and found out that, if you want to get the True Ending on the 360, you not only have to finish the game on one credit, you also need to fight Faintear at the end of levels 1 and 3.  Which means that you need to play really well on those levels, and since my winning strategy for completing the game on one credit was to pick up as few of the extra score chits as possible, I didn’t see Faintear until the end of the game.

So getting the True Ending on the Xbox 360 version is a bit beyond me, for now anyway.

On the other hand.. I have the Dreamcast version, and it has “Story Mode” as an option, which the 360 lacks.  In “Story Mode”, you fight Faintear regardless of how you play in each level.

You also get, well, more “Story”.  There’s much more conversation between Exelica and Crueltear, and it’s a lot more involving when you have more of a connection to the characters.  I know that’s a silly thing to say about a bullet hell style shooter, but I’m allowed to say silly things here.

But, even though I played the Dreamcast version quite a bit back when I got it,  I’ve never even come close to one-crediting the Dreamcast version, and it’s a bit harder to do than the 360 version because you can’t pump yourself up to 5 lives and 5 bombs per life through the option menu.  (You can do 5 lives / 3 bombs)

Still, I’d been playing an awful lot on the 360.  It was conceivable that I might have gotten a little better.

So, I hauled a 15″ VGA monitor out of storage, hooked it up to the Dreamcast, turned it firmly onto its left side so I could take advantage of the Vertical (“tate”) mode, and sat down to Do Or Die.

First try.

First bloody try.

I even had one life left over.

Sure, it doesn’t pump up my Gamerscore to beat it on the Dreamcast, but I feel mighty good about it all the same.

But.

Before this term started, I had a little extra time, so I spent it figuring out what games I owned for which systems and which I’d finished and so on. My reasoning was that, well, whenever I’m looking for something new to play, I waste so much time looking through stuff that I sometimes wind up with no time to play whatever I’ve decided on.

It came out to… mmm. I’m actually kind of embarrassed to go into numbers. Let’s leave it at this: It’s a really good thing I almost never pay anything close to full, new price for a game.

I bought a bunch of DVD and CD bins from Ikea. These are kind of cheesy cardboard affairs, but they seem like they’ll hold up and they let me do one of the more important things: Hide most of the games.

I put just about everything that would fit in to a box into a box. It came out to 18 DVD-size boxes and 12 CD-sized boxes. Lots of stuff didn’t fit into these nice Ikea boxes, unfortunately, so I need to find some kind of a home for those nice big Saturn and Sega CD boxed games.

Side effect: Bookshelves with identical storage boxes on them look better than a sea of spines. At least, they’re a change.

Then I went through the boxes and tried to pick one shelf’s worth of games that are either really highly recommended, or that I’ve always been curious about, or that I think I ought to play because they’re part of the overall language of the community, as it were, or that I just bought, darn it, and want to play them at least a little bit even though I don’t really want to, you know, try to finish them or anything.

I left portable stuff out of this, because by their nature they’re usually played outside the home.

I came out with the following shelf o’ games that serve two purposes:

1. Helps me narrow down what to play next, in the unlikely event I have any real time to devote to getting into a game anytime soon.
2. Helps remind me, when I’m in a store and something catches my eye, that I have all of these to play and I really ought to, instead of buying new ones.
3. Helps me avoid the shame associated with the sheer number of games that are NOT on this list, despite their unplayed statuses, because they’re not right in my face taunting me. I have, as an example, something like 6 Zelda games. I’ve never finished a Zelda game, or even come close to getting very far in one. I don’t need to see six Zelda games every time I look at the shelf.

The list:

• Shenmue II (Dreamcast)
• Skies of Arcadia (Dreamcast)

• Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

• Castle of Shikigami (PS2)
• Disgaea (PS2)
• Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
• Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
• Grim Grimoire (PS2)
• We (heart) Katamari Damacy (PS2)
• Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
• Odin Sphere (PS2)
• Okami (PS2)
• Sly Cooper (PS2)
• The Maid and Machine Gun (PS2)
• Xenosaga (PS2)
• Ys: The Ark of Naphishtim (PS2)

• Rayman: Raving Rabbids (Wii)
• Eternal Darkness (GCN)
• Killer 7 (GCN)
• Metroid Prime (GCN)
• Resident Evil (GCN)
• Sonic Gems : Sonic CD (GCN)
• Starfox Adventures (GCN)

• Armed and Dangerous (Xbox)
• Brute Force (Xbox)
• Conker’s : Uncut & Reloaded (Xbox)
• Fable (Xbox)
• Fatal Frame II (Xbox)
• Half-Life 2 (Xbox)
• Lego Star Wars II (Xbox)
• Metal Arms (Xbox)
• Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox)
• Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time (Xbox)
• The Chronicles of Riddick (Xbox)
• X-Men Legends (Xbox)

• Dead or Alive 4 (360)
• Dead Rising (360)
• Kameo (360)
• Phantasy Star Universe (360)
• Prey (360)
• Rumble Roses XX (360)

• Itadaki Jan-Gari-An R (PC)
• Psychonauts (PC)
• To Heart 2 (PC)
• Tomb Raider Anniversary (PC)

Yeah, that’s a list that’s going to get gone through REAL fast. All those quick-to-play knock-out-in-a-weekend RPGs, for a start…

In this case, she’s showing off how the Sega bias transcends species.

The internet: It’s for posting pictures of your cats.