I don’t usually link directly to articles on other sites, because they’re usually written and researched much better than mine and they give me inadequacy issues.
This, however, is worth linking just because it gets its point across so very well in, like, five screenshots and a handful of words.
I vaguely remember seeing a preview of the PSP game they show; my reaction went along the lines of “huh, a western-developed dating sim, that might be neat. Wait, it’s a high school dating sim. It’s probably going to be loaded with all kinds of social events and parties and football games and, basically, all the things I hated when I was actually IN high school, why would I play a simulated version of hell?”
I just used Capcom’s ÅŒkami as the primary source material for my first 300-level college paper, in a class that is currently focused on Japanese literature of the Heian period.
I wouldn’t have tried this sort of thing at my previous college; there it would have been graded by actual professors. Here, it’s being graded by a 20-something GTF who has probably either played the game or at least heard of it.
We’ll see what happens. It’s only 5% of my final grade, so even if it flops like a dead salmon it won’t hurt me too much.
So, back in the 90s, I didn’t really get in to any of Nintendo’s big franchise games. I tried a bit during the N64 years – I bought the Mario game and the Zelda game – but, to be perfectly honest, I used the SNES mostly to play RPGs and the N64 to play Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and Doom 64.
Wait, I did have F-Zero for the N64, and that was hella fun, so I guess I liked one of their franchises.
Anyway, point is, I had never played any of the Star Fox games until a few years ago, and the first one I tried made me really quite vexed.
See, I was in a store that had a Gamecube demo machine set up, and the demo they had running was Star Fox Adventures. I gave it a try, and quite liked it; the main character was a cute blue fox-girl, you were flying around on a pterodactyl of some sort shooting at a big enemy ship in a manner that reminded me of the Panzer Dragoon games, and then you had a sort of puzzle solving bit where you ran around an ancient temple throwing explosive barrels at stuff and solving puzzles.
I played it for about 10 minutes, just long enough to – and this is the crucial bit – ALMOST finish the first level, and then dropped $50 on my very own copy to take home and play.
See, when you finish the first level, the blue fox-girl character gets trapped in some sort of energy prism thing, and then the REAL game starts, the one where you’re playing as Fox McCloud and his cadre of Annoying Woodland Pals, where the gameplay changes to a Zeldaesque series of fetch quests. I’ve tried playing this game several times.
I always get to a point – about an hour in – where I have to win a hoverbike race to progress, repeatedly fail, and turn off the machine in disgust.
I still think Rare owes me $50 for that one. Hey, it can be $45, I am comfortable with the idea that the first level might have been worth $5.
I still, somehow, wound up with a copy of Star Fox Assault. I think I was in a bit of a state of denial about how much I really disliked Adventures, I was in a “well, someday I’ll get back to it and finish it and then I’ll be glad to have the sequel” sort of mood.
Is it any wonder I have 300+ games in my backlog?
Anyway, I tried Adventures again recently, got to the same point, got stuck, and promptly dropped the game onto my stack of “sell these to Toys B We the next chance I get”
Then I went back to the Gamecube shelf, grabbed Assault, and dropped it on to the same stack.
Then I took it off the stack, and went looking for reviews. There were plenty, mostly filled with incoherent nerd rage about how awful of a game it was compared to the older Star Fox games and how it was too short and too easy.
I like my games short and easy, and didn’t have any fond memories of earlier games, so I saved it from the “sell this” pile for two days while I finished it.
It was pretty neat. It still had the Godawful Annoying Woodland Pals problem, but you could skip through their dialogue most of the time and the actual levels consisted of shooting everything in sight, either on foot or in an X-wing Arwing. The last level was annoying as all get out, inasmuch as you spend most of it flying your X-wing Arwing through narrow tunnels at high speed and then having to fight an Annoying Multi-Stage Boss, but I enjoyed the game as a whole.
I also played through the Beatles: Rock Band story mode, though I really can’t count that as working on my backlog; I was visiting a friend who’d purchased it and there were two guitars handy and one thing lead to another and we wound up playing every single damn song.
I can’t really complain, though, because they had a bunch of pretty good songs, including plenty of songs that I recognized but didn’t realize they’d been the artists on. My excuse for that is that they apparently switched lead vocalists a lot, and, well, I’ve never owned any of their albums so I didn’t realize that they changed their sound quite often.
My friend, by contrast, has bought every Beatles album approximately eighteen times, knows the history of the band back to front, and was able to quote album name, side, and track number for every track in the game. To his credit, he was quite patient with me during the whole process; and gave me a name for my pain as it related to certain long guitar solos that I originally blamed on some malevolent and sadistic fiend.
Turns out it was just George Harrison.
Anyway, not a bad game. 45 tracks seems a bit light for $60, but the detail put into the stages and background visuals kind of make up for that; they put a lot of effort into this one and it shows.
So, I’m trying to get a bit of a headstart on my plans for October – that is, I’d planned to play through as many horror-themed games as I could during the month – and I figured I could cross it with my other goal, which is to completely eliminate my Dreamcast backlog before the 11th anniversary of the console’s US launch.
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.
Well, I started D2 on the Dreamcast this evening, and am actually really enjoying it. I haven’t seen much of the, you know, horror bits, but I’m finding that sniping bunnies is way more fun than I expected. It’s a little weird going from Blue Stinger with free roaming 3D motion to a game with Resident-Evil-style tank controls for the main character, but I’m adapting.
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:Â I found satisfaction in the feeling of delivering fast food from the confines of a rubbish bin.
So school starts Tuesday, a turn of events for which I am more or less prepared. It’s probably a good idea for me to keep up with my Japanese review, but at this point I may just have to hit class on day 1 and see where I am.
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.
OK, so the actual talk about Doujin games happens a fair bit down this post; I had lots of lead-up. Sorry about that.
So, back in August, I switched over to a new computer – a shiny new 13″ Macbook Pro – went on vacation, finally broke a six-week long moratorium on game buying, and started some new projects. Hence, a 3 week gap between substantial posts here, not that anyone other than my regular readers – both of them – will have noticed.
Getting used to a laptop as my main PC hasn’t been that bad. It’s a move that my wife made about a year ago, but I’ve been a bit hesitant – to be blunt, I like tinkering with the guts of my PC, and that’s something you really can’t do on a laptop. I replaced the pitiful 160GB drive Apple puts in their laptops with a 500GB drive the same night I got it home, but that – and, I suppose, a RAM upgrade – is about all you can do with one of these.
Still, since my ultimate goal here is to be able to fit into a smaller space, laptop it is. I’ll just have to deal with letting my Newegg account go fallow.
In the last few weeks, I’ve gone through a bunch of games. Unfortunately I also bought, like, seven new ones when I broke my moratorium, but what the hell.
When we went on vacation, I took The World Ends With You along. I’ve heard it described as a JRPG for people who don’t like JRPGs, and I think that’s a fair description. In my case, it’s a JRPG for people who actually DO like JRPGs but who also don’t have 80 hours to spend playing through one.
I really can’t praise it highly enough. It throws a lot of fairly complex mechanics at the player, but it’s kind enough to let most of them be optional; you CAN spend hours on picky character customization and getting used to the game’s weird two-characters-at-once combat system, or you can ignore most of the customization and let the AI handle your support character. I went with that path, and was happier for it.
Yeah, the story veers a little into the hopelessly emo now and again, but I never found myself groaning too hard; it had some good twists and shocks in it and I enjoyed the whole thing.
The soundtrack is also highly recommended; I felt compelled to drop 10 bucks on iTunes to score myself a copy and I’ve been listening to it a lot over the last couple of days.
After finishing that, I tackled Plants Vs Zombies, feeling a little dirty in the process. After all, what sort of Real Gamer plays PopCap titles?
Then I remembered that I’m actually pretty lousy and pretty far from being a Real Gamer, so I got down to the, uh, planting.
Playing through the main game took two fairly long sittings, and the only reason I broke it into two was because it was starting to cause me physical pain. I think the last big click fest I played was The Witcher, but there were enough breaks in the action that I was able to recover. PvZ is pretty much non-stop.
I don’t have much to say about the game that hasn’t been said before; it’s really fun and straddles the border of casual fare and more serious stuff neatly.
It was also the first attempt at gaming on the Macbook. I felt a little silly booting into Windows to play it, since it’s also available for the Mac, but it’s $20 for the Mac version at retail or from PopCap’s site and $10 for the PC version off Steam. Basic economics won out.
Since I’d already loaded boot camp and installed one game, I decided to go all out with the huge stash of doujin games I brought back from Japan in 2007.
The great thing about doujin soft… Ok, that’s needlessly limiting and will wind up being all Spanish-Inquisitiony, so let’s jump to “among the many great things about doujin soft…”
…are:
They’re usually pretty cheap. I think most of them were between Y500 and Y2000.
The system requirements tend to be extremely reasonable. Most of them could be played on a 10 year old machine.
Most of them have a limited number of continues and lives, etc, so you can’t see the end on the first play-through. This is both a plus and a minus; some of them are way too hard for me, and I have to face that I’ll never beat them, but it improves the ones that hit my sweet spot for difficulty level. There’s a tremendous motivation to try “just one more game” that really tickles the old pleasure center.
The bullet-hell-style shooter is well represented, and while I AM crap at bullet hell shooters, I love playing them.
They frequently parody other games & anime, so they can be funny as all get out.
Oh, and there’s an awful lot of naughty mahjong games, which, again, I’m a big fan of the jubblies genre.
So anyway, I bought a ton of various doujin games a couple of years ago and now I’ve gotten around to trying some of them. I’ve been kind of focused on sorting them into “worth trying to get good at” and “I really wish I could get good enough to beat this game, but it’s just not going to happen” and “not worth even regretting the fact that I’ll never play this one again”
Honestly, the only one so far that’s hit the last category was a dodgeball game that had Kanon and Air characters. It was cute and all that, but it was, well, a dodgeball game and one that I didn’t really understand how to play.
The Big Name Developer in the doujin bullet hell shooter genre is Team Shanghai Alice, or Zun, or Touhou or, well, I’ve never been straight on how exactly to refer to the guy – he’s a one man developer / art / music team who’s amazingly popular and so on and so forth.
His games are, well, they’re pretty hard. He’s fond of painting most of the screen with fairly slow-moving projectiles and it gets quite tough to dodge them.
Fortunately, he has an “easy” setting and allows you to continue a few times, so I played through two of them:
Imperishable Night
The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
Now, obviously, when I say “played through”, I don’t mean played through in the sense of actually being any good; more in the sense of jamming the bomb button whenever it looked like I’d get hit and using continues. They’re pretty cool games, but they would require actual commitment to get any good at and I wasn’t drawn in enough to decide to put in the time.
I had rather a better time with Gensou Shoujo, a Clannad-themed bullet-hell cute-em-up from tenkuu dokei.
I couldn’t find any convenient video links, unfortunately, but the developer does make a free demo available. I haven’t managed to clear this one yet, but it’s a) cute as all hell, being that you’re mostly fighting dango and carved wooden starfishes and violins and teddy bears and the like, and b) just hard enough to present a challenge but not hard enough to make me give up. So far I’ve managed to get to stage 4 without using a continue, and to the end of stage 5 – the final stage – with using the two continues provided. I WILL beat this one. 🙂
I also played through a Haruhi-themed mahjong game from LooseWords.
Yes, it’s as naughty as it looks. That was about the most work-safe picture I could steal from their pages.
It’s very much simplified mahjong. You have a nine tile hand instead of 14 and there’s no concept of “chi” or any advanced hands; your only goal is to collect three “pons”, with an ultimate goal of running one of your three opponents out of points, at which point they have to ditch a bit of school uniform and the process starts all over again. Since everyone starts with a good sized bankroll and it’s a four-player game, this can take some while.
It was pretty fun. It doesn’t feel like the developers spent much time on the AI, which is probably why it’s such a simplified version of mahjong, but there’s a lot of conversation between the characters and the art is good. The game ends when any one of your opponents runs completely out of school uniform, so in theory it would take three passes to play through – I played through it once and called it beaten; I may go back to it at some point.
Those four were the ones that didn’t immediately crush my spirit; I tried a bunch of others but honestly this post is rambling on long enough.
If you think back to the mid-90s console wars, you’ll remember that Sony found itself lacking in one department: They didn’t have a “mascot” character, the sort of character you can base toy lines and saturday morning cartoons and breakfast cereals around.
The solution was Crash Bandicoot, a character who was The Big Hotness at the time, but which has thankfully faded into relative obscurity. I’m not sure whether there ever was a “Crash Bandicoot” cereal, but I don’t think that there’s a big market anymore.
That is to say, they’re still making “Crash” games, but the original developers aren’t involved any more, and they’re not specific to Sony consoles, and, well, it’s sort of like the Sonic situation, except people still care enough about Sonic to bitch when a bad Sonic game is released.
Anyway. Back in the day, I wrote Crash off as a bad case of trying too hard, so I’ve never played any of the titles in the series. I understand they feature an awful lot of collecting various bits and pieces and, uh, jungle themed levels.
The “Crash” people, after wringing as much money out of the property as possible and then selling it off to the highest bidder, went on to develop the “Jak & Daxter” series for the PS2, which became one of the Big Three mascot/platform games for the PS2, and after playing through the first Sly Cooper and Ratchet & Clank games over the last couple of years, I figured I should try out Jak.
Also, I have “Daxter” for the PSP, which I’ve heard is excellent, but I figured I should probably know who the main character is before I start playing that.
Anyway, back to Jak & Daxter, which was OK. It got a tremendous amount of good press when it was released, it doesn’t hold up QUITE as well today but that’s to be expected, and I found myself quite appreciative of the game’s relaxed attitude to death; there’s no such thing as “lives” and dying usually means simply starting anew from a nearby checkpoint – and you retain any progress you’ve made even if you happened to grab, say, x or y widget on your way off a cliff to your death.
I also deeply appreciated the last boss; they put in a nasty tricky platforming bit just BEFORE the last boss fight, but the actual boss fight is pretty easy and avoids the “Am I just going to pack it in right now and give up after getting this far?” question that I was very much faced with in Sly Cooper and a little less concerned with in Ratchet & Clank.
If I had to rank the three series, I’d put them in Ratchet –> Sly –> Jak order, but that’s a bit misleading. There’s a long way between Jak and, say, the Bubsy or Bug! games.
Baud Attitude 