Sad consequences…
One of the things purged in last weekend’s organizational frenzy was a 24″ Toshiba TV.
It’s not that it was a particularly bad TV in any way, but it was, you know, a CRT TV, and big and heavy and all that - and since I got the Gateway monitor with all kinds of lovely analog inputs, kind of obsolete.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized the downside of getting rid of the last CRT TV in the apartment.
Virtua Cop, Virtua Cop 2, Area 51, Hakaider. All of ‘em light gun games, all of ‘em 90% useless now that I don’t have a CRT around. I mean, I could play them with the joypad, but that seems so… well, so very lame.
OK, so I really won’t miss Area 51 or Hakaider, but not being able to play Virtua Cop stings a bit. Guess I’m going to have to find an actual arcade with a Virtua Cop 3 machine to hang out in. Shame the only time I’ve actually SEEN a Virtua Cop 3 machine was on Odaiba, but I guess it’s possible that there’s one in Portland.
Super Real Mahjong P7
…Finished, or mostly finished, anyway. I can’t figure out what I’m missing to complete the gohoubi:
Obviously I’m missing two of Etsuko’s cinemas, but I’ve played through Etsuko’s scenario twice and everyone else but Yurina’s scenario at least twice. If it were just a matter of playing through the mahjong storylines, I should be done by now.
I gave the omake game a few tries, but it was just a little too much memorization, so if the final two cinemas are hidden in there somewhere, they’re hidden for good.
As much as I’m a fan of the Suchie Pai series, I have to give the Super Real Mahjong series some respect. There aren’t any little pop-up windows telling you when you can make a move, there’s no “panel match” style game… if you get a winning tile, you can cheerfully discard it and never get a warning. There aren’t any power-ups that let you snoop on your opponent’s hand, or stop them pulling a win of your discard - you have to play mahjong and win. It’s not a good beginner’s game, especially not for a westerner, which makes every win just a little more satisfying.
P7 was a fairly late release in the Saturn’s life, so it’s been censored in accordance with Sega’s newer policy on nudity. This means no naughty bits are shown, so you don’t need to feel TOO much like a dirty pervert while you play.
However, a word of caution: Should you be trying to explain to your wife or significant other that the mahjong game you are playing is completely innocent and in fact quite family-friendly (well, this is a lie), watch what terms you use while trying to explain its innocence.
I am now banned from using the term “jubblies” in conversation ever again. I will not bore you with the details.
Internet, you have failed me.
Why was I not told before now that there was a working and highly compatible Sega Saturn emulator?
One on which I can play my Mahjong games,
and my bunny-girl-with-mallet platform games,
and my post-apocalypse RPGs,
and my licensed shooters?
I have far too many Saturn games still, and I fully intend to play through some more of them, but my Saturn is 13 years old and I’ve been, you know, worried that it’s going to die soon.
Now I can relax a bit about that.
Still, this has obviously been around a while, and the Internet has failed to bring it to my attention. Bad Internet!
RIP Saturn: 5/11/1995 - 11/30/1998
Today marks the 9th anniversary of the last US-released Sega Saturn game - Magic Knight Rayearth, released 11/30/1998.
It’s tempting to rant about how many mistakes Sega made, both with the Saturn and then with the Dreamcast after it.
It’s even tempting to get a little below-the-belt jab in about the current console wars.
But, there’s no way I could do the ranting any better than the folks at UK:Resistance, so I won’t try.
On a more positive note, it’s tempting to post up a bunch of photos, or to go on and on about how great the system was.
But I realized that I don’t need to do that. If you were a Sega fan at the time, then pretty much all you need is the reminder:
Something was great, and you were a part of it, and now it’s gone.
Remember.
The internet is a powerful and terrible thing
Set the wayback machine to 1997, when the Saturn ruled the earth, crushing lesser syst…
Oh, all right, it was already obviously on the way out in the US and all English speaking countries, but some of us didn’t buy into the whole Crash Bandicoot-is-your-god hype, and for us few, Saturnworld was one of the better news sites. Their URL directs to ign.com now, I suppose that’s better than one of those “buy this domain!” sites.
One day, Saturnworld posted a very bizarre little movie to their site. It featured a bunny-eared, busty, anthropomorphic Saturn console singing about things that were white. Given bandwidth at the time, it was a 160×120 heavily compressed Quicktime movie. And, in retrospect, it wasn’t anything all that special but it was weird and funny enough to stick in my head.
Today, I had the thought - what would happen if I went up on Youtube and typed “サターン” into their search box.
Page 2 of results. Who’da thunk?:
It turns out that it originated from a Tech Saturn Magazine demo disc. I only got one issue of Tech Saturn ever - it wasn’t a really common magazine to find in Los Angeles - and it wasn’t the right issue. I found Saturn Super much more often.
Bargain gaming…
When I was sorting out papers recently, I stumbled across a receipt from 1995 for Solar Eclipse.
This was a fairly forgettable Saturn shooter, with the caveat that Claudia Christian did some acting work in the cut-scenes. Since I was hooked on Babylon 5 at the time, it makes sense that I had to have it… but apparently I dropped $59.95 + CA sales tax of 8.25% on it.
By way of contrast, I went to the localish ebgames yesterday and bought four games (yes, I know, I shouldn’t be buying games as I’m theoretically trying to finish them) : Justice League Heroes, Prince of Persia The Sands of Time (and The Warrior Within), and Viewtiful Joe. I’ve heard really good things about the Prince of Persia games and Joe, and, well, Hal Jordan is an unlockable character in JLH so I had to own that, right?
At any rate, 3 highly rated games and one that I’ve heard at least good words on, and it set me back all of…
31 bucks.
There are advantages to being a little behind the curve!
I think there are still a few games from this last generation that are “must play!” titles, and with my profound lack of willpower and attraction to shiny objects I’ll probably wind up owning them… but I’ll be spending a heck of a lot less than on Solar Eclipse. 
If you can’t beat them, set difficulty to “Monkey”
Ages and ages ago, when the SegaCD was Welcoming People to the Next Level and all that good stuff, a very peculiar game managed to slip by the “make it as American as possible!” localization people, and we got Keio Yuugekitai (Keio Flying Squadron, in the US).
I’m no good at shooters, mind you, but this game had enough weirdness about it to make up for me being dreadful. It featured a bunny-girl-outfit-wearing shrine maiden and her pet dragon fighting against a fearsome tanuki army. If you’re my kind of people, you really don’t need anything more than that to understand why it was a glorious thing.
But it was a shooter, and therefore I managed to see about 3 levels of it.
In 1996, the Japanese got a sequel of sorts : Keio Yuugekitai Katsugekihen, which kept the bunny-girl and the tanuki and mostly lost the shooter aspect. There are a few shooter stages, and a very odd roller coaster stage, but mostly it’s a platform game. I can sometimes beat platform games, so this was more my speed. Walk to the left and right, go up ladders, jump on things to defeat them… or get a giant pink mallet and smack them about more directly. Again, if you’re my kind of people, any game where you wield a giant pink mallet should have you a little misty in the eyes.
I didn’t get a copy when it was new, of course, mostly because it was never in stock at any of the import game stores in LA. It wasn’t until 2002 or so that I scored a copy off eBay, and it was pretty shortly after that that I abandoned it after never getting much past the first boss.
Just because I CAN sometimes beat platform games doesn’t mean I can do it if there’s any challenge.
I booted it up again today, with the benefit of a few more years of off-and-on Japanese learning, and took a peek in the Option screen.
The first thing I noticed was that I could set it to auto-save when I finished levels, so I could put it aside and continue later. This isn’t on by default.
The second thing I realized is that I could understand the difficulty settings now. It was set at “hito” (person)
The other options were “saru” and “tengu”, or “monkey” and “crow demon”
I decided I was a monkey.
Thus began a few happy hours of tanuki slaughter, culminating in one of the oddest boss fights I expect to ever experience, and me happily watching the ending cinematic having used up every continue and all but one extra life.
Call me a gimp if you must, but I am one happy monkey.
Linda, Linda…
OK, more like Lara, Lara. All apologies to the Blue Hearts.
Keeping up to date, today’s weight check : 194.4.
My recruiter seems to have found a couple of decent leads to throw a resume at and hope it sticks, and I’m of course sending off all manner of resumes myself, but while I remain out of work the game consoles continue to get a workout.
After Panzer Dragoon Saga, I went through the Saturn shelf a little more, and came up with Tomb Raider, possibly the most popular series nobody believes launched on the Saturn.
I’ve never finished it. I got quite far - looking at the level list on Wikipedia, I think I was about 3 levels from the end when I ran into a boss fight that I just couldn’t seem to beat. All things considered, it seemed like a pretty good choice.
But, one of the flaws with the console versions was the frequent deaths and very infrequent save points, and I don’t know if I’ve the tolerance for that anymore.
Anyway, I own the PC version, something I got in one of those “Mega Hits” collections, and I knew that had save-anywhere functionality, so I put the Saturn version aside and tried to install that. Not so much the worky. A little digging online revealed that, while it can be made to work under Windows XP, or even Vista, it takes a degree of mucking about that I wasn’t willing to do, and even if you got it running it didn’t have as good of music as the console versions. Shameful.
And… apparently they’re doing a remake of the first game ANYWAY, for the 10th 11th anniversary, and it will be a budget title, so why not wait for that?
Instead, I jumped forward two generations and picked Tomb Raider Legend off the shelf.
I played most of Tomb Raider, as I mentioned, and I played enough of Tomb Raider II on the Playstation to get to the point where running out of flares got annoying (very early), but I’d missed III, Chronicles, Angel of Darkness, whatever else was released thereafter. Comments I have heard over the years have indicated that I didn’t miss much.
Tomb Raider Legend, however, I heard good things about, so when we bought our XBox 360, it was one of the four games we picked up with it - Dead Rising, Ridge Racer 6, and Dead of Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 2 were the others, and one of these days I will actually give them some playtime.
It was rather a different game than 1996’s game. Much more shooty, for one. Far fewer animal enemies, and especially NO UNDERWATER ENEMIES. I confess that I have a serious case of the heebie jeebies that comes from fighting stuff underwater - this was a big problem back when I was playing the first game… all those crocodiles, brrr.
I think I can leave aside the oohing and aahing at graphics, etc. It’s a 360 game and in hi-def and stuff, yes, it looks good. I got a kick out of a bit where, just after I’ve finished going “wow!” at a particularly neat bit of scenery, Lara makes a crack about going into the postcard business.
Most of the time I died due to falling off things, and most of those were due to me being a bit of a klutz when it comes to playing 3rd person games. I did die an awful lot, though, and in the Nepal level it managed to get just a bit frustrating, but never enough to make me toss the controller and give up. This represents a difficulty level that anyone who’s actually good at these sorts of games will probably consider childishly easy, but for me, I was happy to be able to see the whole story.
Another one down. With 12 years worth of games to choose from, what comes off the to-play pile next is anyone’s guess.
This needed a PS: The game includes forklift content. Apparently I’m doomed to forklifts. I’m 6 hours into Beyond Good and Evil now without a forklift in sight but I have no faith in that.
5 years sitting unplayed wasn’t enough?
The last time I set out to finish a game, I made a nice list of Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube games that needed playing - and then threw it out the window and put Shenmue in the Dreamcast.
This time I went back a little further.
Let’s talk about 1998, and more specifically let’s talk about the demise of the Sega Saturn - well, at least in the US.
After 3 years of making one management mistake after another, the powers that were at Sega of America gave the few remaining fans a hell of a breakup present - four last US game releases. Burning Rangers, House of the Dead, Shining Force III, and…
Panzer Dragoon Saga.
Problem is, they made, roughly, 3 copies of each game.
That is a slight exaggeration. Wikipedia claims that a total of 30,000 copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga were produced for the North American market, and who am I to doubt their word?
3 copies or 30000, the games were not easy to find. I got lucky on Shining Force III - when I reserved it, I paid the full price up-front, and as a result the store I bought it from gave me one of the TWO copies they got in to cover something like 70 pre-orders. I played quite a bit of that but never completed it. Eventually I will forget how horrible the English dubbing was and go back to it. Eventually.
Burning Rangers I couldn’t find at all. I did eventually chance into a used copy in a game store in Tigard - $12.95, complete. One of these days IT will get played, but I’ve only had it for six years and that’s hardly any time at all, right?
With Panzer Dragoon Saga, it worked a little differently. First there was the sadness of not getting my pre-order. I didn’t pay in full that time, or it didn’t help, or something. I forget.
Then there was the mad calling around to mail order places. The only place that had it in stock refused to ship it to me because I wanted it shipped to me at work and they’d only ship to the address on the credit card statement… also they wanted $75 + shipping.
Then there was the pure dumb luck of walking into a game store in Monterey Park and seeing it on the wall, one copy, list price.
It went proudly home with me and got played up to the VERY FIRST SAVE POINT and then abandoned. For nine years I have been quite smug in the knowledge that I owned Panzer Dragoon Saga, and could play it whenever I wanted to, honest, this year for sure.
I’m quite impressed with the Saturn backup memory cartridge, by the way, that save from nine years ago was still on there.
I’ve heard complaints that it’s too short - and yes, it’s pretty short. Even with quite a bit of wandering around, I still finished it in under 18 hours played. If it had been a “EPIC 80 hours of grinding gameplay!” game, it wouldn’t have been finished at all, so let’s hear it for short RPGs.
It is also a horrifically ugly game whenever you are not on a dragon or watching a cutscene. Fortunately most of the game revolves around you riding a dragon around and occasionally watching cutscenes and you are quite rarely on foot. Even when you are on foot and trying to decide which blob is you and which is, say, a door, it still wins out in the audio category - full voice acting (subtitled! not dubbed!) and some gorgeous music.
I don’t think… actually I know for a fact that this is not the oldest unfinished game on my shelf, even limiting that to categories of games I’m capable of finishing (not shooters, for a start). I’m not going to ponder that too deeply right now, I’m happy with finally having seen it and understanding why so many people have said nice things about it.
(Yes, I have the US release of Rayearth as well. I might say unkind things about Working Designs and their definitions of “ship dates” at this point but they’re dead and gone and why beat them up any more?)
Joysticks and catgirls, oh my.
I am kind of prone to buying things that will be useful, someday… and then not doing anything with them for quite a while.
Let me back up a bit.
If you were a fan of mahjong games or Capcom fighting games or just plain weird games and imported much during the mid-late 90s, you probably owned a Sega Saturn.
If you didn’t, or if your reaction was, “No, I had a Playstation, it was better”, then you can move on to the next bit because this isn’t for you.
If you’re still with me, you may know the glory that was the Virtua Stick.
A while back, I purchased a little $12 adapter that purported to make Saturn (and PS2, and Dreamcast) controllers work as standard USB joysticks. I doubted its actual functionality, because it looked like, well, it looked like a $12 piece of electronics and it took me a while to even work up the courage to plug it in without worrying too much that it would actually fry whatever it got plugged into.
Short version: Here’s Vampire Savior 2 running on MAME with the glorious Virtua Stick connected. In this action shot, I’ve abandoned Felicia and stepped back so I could take a photo. I am such a cad. Also, here is a picture of the aforementioned USB adapter. I have thoughtfully made sure that the name is fully visible, and a moment’s work on Google will give you ample places where you may procure one should you likewise desire to do so. I give the following testimonial:
My PC did not actually explode when this thing was attached. Also, Felicia is still this fanboy’s #1 catgirl. You may quote me on both.
Added because my wife thought it might be necessary: The cleavage on the right hand side is a DOA XBV2 calendar, not a scantily clad live action woman kind of calendar. I should mention that my wife is extremely tolerant of the things I do with the deliberate motive of making her roll her eyes and sigh in sad acceptance.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
