My wife and I have been going through a bit of a crazed organization phase recently, which has been helping enrich our local Ikea and Container Store to no end but which has also been making our apartment into a more livable cave.
This last weekend was a particularly good time for it; we had a couple of rooms that had become basically clutter heaps, but now have clear floors. Many books shelved, loose papers filed, homeless random crap given homes… We sat back after the weekend and felt like we’d DONE something.
Also I was in extreme pain for two days, but this morning I woke up and didn’t immediately go for Tylenol, so that’s an improvement.
On the other hand, there’s a point where you know you’ve gotten a LOT accomplished, and you think there’s probably a bunch to do, but you’ve gotten so many of the big tasks done that you look at your apartment and you think “Well, it’s a lot better, I don’t really see how it could be improved.”
Yesterday, I had the bright idea to wander the newly-organized apartment with a digital camera and just take photos of rooms, shelves, etc, from all sorts of angles and perspectives, and then browse through them when I was out of the apartment.
It’s amazing what you see when you look at your living space that way; you start saying things like “Wait, why do we have the boxes, carefully stored away, for the wireless router? And why haven’t I given that 2MP digital camera, again with the carefully stored away box, to Goodwill yet? And why do I have a bunch of gachapon figures tossed into a cardboard box, when at the same time I have a completely empty Milk & Cheese lunchbox stuck in a closet that should be on display and could co-incidentally hold all the loose gachapon figures?
I won’t go through the whole list of “Wait, why do I…?” because it had something like 30 entries. None of them are particularly huge things, which is how they escaped notice during what I’ll call the “macro” organization, but combined, taking care of them has already started to make a notable difference in clutter levels.
I very nearly started Final Fantasy III – it was in the DS, even – but I decided that maybe a long RPG wasn’t a great idea.
Then I realized that I had been playing a disturbing number of Nintendo products lately, and that I was in danger of losing my credentials as a Sega fanboy.
So, the obvious answer was to go back a couple of generations and play Sonic the Hedgehog 3. It’s one of those games that got released at a time when I was flat broke, and with one thing and another I’d never gotten around to going back and playing it.
Decision made, I carefully made sure to have my copy of the Sega Genesis Collection in my manpurse, along with a PSP on which to play it, for the next time I had a few spare minutes to devote to a portable game.
I don’t know if it’s quite serious enough to fall under the category of “the universe hates me” or not, but it was more than a little annoying, when that time happened to come, to boot up the PSP, load up the Genesis Collection, and find out that it only has Sonic 1 and 2.
I DO have it on the Gamecube Sonic Collection, but that’s less than portable.
In desperation, I fell back to the shelf of GBA games that have accumulated in our apartment, and wound up with Super Mario Brothers 3. Apparently I’m destined to be Shiggy’s bitch.
It is, by the way, kicking my arse.
When playing through New Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario World, I never actually saw the “Game Over” screen. I suspect both games HAVE Game Over screens, because they must have, but it was so easy to stockpile extra lives in both that I never wound up at it.
I’ve only just made it to the third world in SMB3, and I have been abusing the hell out of the unlimited continues. It took me well over twenty lives to get through ONE of the stages in world two, and by the time I was done I was shaking with barely controlled Nerd Rage.
I may just have to hunt up a NES cart and see if it was this difficult in the original version – because, if it was, I have newfound respect for any kid in the 80s who put up with the pain.
Oh, and whoever made the decision to add voice samples whenever Mario gets a powerup or dies, with no option to disable the voice, can just… they can just, well, go on with whatever they were going to do anyway, but I’m thinking unkind thoughts in their general direction.
Edit: I went and looked up reviews, and was glad to find out that, yes, it’s supposed to be nasty hard.
It’s my assertation that titling your game “Densetsu no Starfy 3” (“The Legend of Starfy 3”) sets certain, possibly unrealistic expectations for your main character, particularly when he’s, well, a starfish.
Not to say that there aren’t legendary starfish.
Starro comes to mind,
and I can’t help but give Fuuko a little page space here.
However, echinoderms in general are not typically the stuff of legend, not even those obscure legends that get trotted out occasionally by anthropologists trying to write a thesis that nobody’s done yet.
That being said, I am given to understand that the Starfy series, while perhaps not of legendary status, is quite popular in Japan. It hasn’t been released in the US – either Nintendo thinks we’re just not ready for it, or perhaps they really don’t want to translate all the text.
Because, well, this is an awfully talky game for a platformer. Pretty much every level opens with a conversation between the main characters as they discuss the obstacles ahead and how they’re going to overcome them. Being the third game in the series, you also run into lots of characters from previous games. Not having played any of the previous games, the assorted cameoes were more-or-less lost on me, but that’s what you get when you start with a “3”
The plot, even not really knowing anything about our for-the-sake-of-argument-Legendary hero and his past conquests, didn’t take much going over. The game opens with your Arch Nemesis escaping from the – brittle, ceramic – prison in which you sealed him, presumably LAST game, and flying off to wreak havoc, after which you take control of the plucky young starfish who’s going to go bring him back.
I would add something about maybe trying to find a better place to stick your Arch Nemesis between games, but honestly, good guys are dumb.
In this quest, you are accompanied by a sort of grouchy clam thing who will serve as your mentor.
Also accompanying you, and new to Starfy 3 is Starfy’s kid sister, Starpi.
Not being familiar with the Starfy-verse, I wouldn’t have known that she was a new character if I hadn’t found the TV commerical for the game on Youtube.
It features Perfume, everyone’s favorite all-girl band that will be dropped like a hot rock as soon as the next set of idols come along.
I don’t say this to disparage them, I’m a fan. I have several of their albums and one of their performance DVDs.
Honestly, though, idols have a lifespan measured in mayfly years.
Getting back to Starpi, she’s the “Tails” of this game; a slightly-cuter character thrown in to complement the main character.
Because she needs more of a hook than just “the girl starfish”, she speaks Osaka-ben, fairly rudely.
This is actually kind of fun.
Anyway.
I have called this a “platformer” and the creators would take issue with this. Nintendo officially calls this a “Marine Action” game, which is really just a platformer in which you spend far more time than usual swimming.
The Starfy games have a solid reputation for being colorful, charming, cutesy, and above all easy.
Here’s the box art for Starfy. If you’re a bit sketchy on understanding the crazy moon-man language they speak in the land of Legendary Starfish, the bit of text in the upper left proudly proclaims that it comes with a “big, sparkly” sticker enclosed. That should pretty much nail the target age group for you.
Oh, and it should pretty well describe the average state of used games in Japan to note that the sticker was still present when I bought it for a whopping Y1000, five years after release.
I’m considering sticking the sticker on my laptop; it could use a big, sparkly sticker.
I like easy games. Honestly, I LOVE easy games. Sometimes, when I want a crazy challenge level, I’ll start a game and set the difficulty to “Normal” just to make myself sweat a bit before I laugh at my own foolishness and ratchet it back down to a level I have a hope in hell of defeating.
Starfy’s not just easy because your enemies have predictable patterns and don’t move too terribly fast, it’s also easy because the game itself is one of the best-designed games I’ve played this year.
Both characters you play during the course of Starfy have special moves. Jumps, double-jumps, glides, crawls, wall springs, floor slams, dashes, spins… You have different move sets for underwater and out of water, and you switch back and forth between land and water frequently during a level.
You’re controlling a pair of pretty talented and agile starfish here, is the point I’m trying to make, and the move sequences you can do with them are quite complex.
Even with all the things you can, and are expected to do, this game deftly avoids the Heavenly Sword frustration factor, a term which I will now define having just made it up.
Fair warning: I’m about to leap off on a major tangent here.
Your character in Heavenly Sword – well, your main character, the one on the box and all that – has several moves revolving around hacking, slicing, and chopping her enemies into oblivion.
To do these, you just mash buttons.
I’m good at mashin’ buttons.
She can also reflect enemy attacks back towards them. This is a little more complicated than just jamming the button for “hit guys with my swords”. It takes careful timing and attention to the sort of attack you’re being hit with, and you don’t actually ever NEED to reflect any enemy attacks during the course of the game so it’s something you can pretty much ignore after you do it the requisite one time in the tutorial.
Well, until you get to the very final boss fight, where all of a sudden, you can’t finish the game unless you’ve learned the proper timing for attack reflection.
It is perhaps unfair to single out Heavenly Sword in this regard, but it came to mind and it’s not like anyone is about to jump to its defense, unless of course you work for Ninja Theory, in which case you should stop reading blogs and get back to work on Heavenly Sword 2: In Which You Play The Entire Game As The Crazy Chick With The Bow.
Getting back to Starfy, Starfy’s not like that.
Well, it’s entirely unlike Heavenly Sword in almost every possible way. Nariko doesn’t speak Osaka-ben, for instance, and Starpi doesn’t have six-foot-long red hair. Also, Nariko wears SOME clothes, while Starpi is comfortable naked.
I just threw that last sentence in there to get more page hits.
But in addition to all the other ways in which the two games are complete opposites, they have a different philosophy to learning the moves of your characters.
Starfy’s made up of 10 “worlds” of four levels each, and every world comes with a new move or a new vehicle that you need to learn to get through the world.
Each and every one of these moves will be used, almost as soon as you get it, in a very low pressure environment, before you are able to progress any further in the level.
Shortly after that, you’ll have to use it again, but a little trickier this time, and then again a little trickier.
By the time you get to whatever boss you needed the special move to defeat, you’ll have used it enough times that it’ll be second nature – the game forces you to practice it, over and over again, so you don’t ever hit the wall.
You’ll also get periodic reinforcement of moves you learned in previous worlds. There’s no “you need to learn a wall spring to get through this world, and you’ll never use it again.”
Put simply, you’re never cursing the screen because you never needed to learn how to reflect attacks and you only actually did it like 5 hours ago when the game made you do it successfully once before it would let you out of the damn tutorial level and get on with hacking up hordes of minions.
So, to sum up, it’s cute, well designed, not frustrating, and generally entertaining.
So, of course, it also has a downside.
Remember Sonic the Hedgehog? Where you’d beat the game and then you’d get the annoying little screen where Robotnik was juggling Chaos Emeralds because you hadn’t Caught Them All ?
Well, when you finish Starfy, you find out that the only way to REALLY beat the game is to go back to all the worlds you’ve ALREADY been through, but this time you need to collect “Evil Crystals” from each one.
Even so, you still get a very flashy congratulations message about how you’ve cleared all the levels, and the end credits scroll, so the whole tedious fetch quest is completely optional.
For example, when I was first introduced to anime back in 1990 or so, I had a 13″ Thomson monitor, with a composite input, that I had a Sega Genesis hooked up to, and I had the audio out from the Genesis going through an all-in-one record player / dual cassette deck / AM/FM tuner unit. I also had a CD player. That was the extent of my home entertainment center.
I was content.
Then came the start of the anime habit, and I realized very quickly that borrowing or renting VCRs was just not going to cut it. Also, I got some VERY odd looks at work when I’d use the TV/VCR in the break area.
So I bought my first VCR in the summer of 1991. It was somewhere around $250 for a mono 4-head Samsung VCR, and it had problems playing back certain brands of tape, but damnit, it was mine and I could now watch anime in the privacy of my own home.
Of course, once I had a VCR, I started accumulating videotapes.
Then, a year or so later – after banks had been foolish enough to issue me credit cards – I bought a laserdisc player, and I started collecting laserdiscs. This wasn’t the best idea ever, really, but they were the best thing going at the time.
The problems with having a whole lot of videotapes and LDs around are many. They’re bulky. They’re prone to degradation, they’re sensitive to heat and – for videotapes – magnetic fields, and it’s kind of annoying to have to keep players around for them.
So, several years ago, I set myself a goal of getting everything converted to, or replaced with, digital versions.
The majority of the tapes and LDs had been reissued in DVD format. Those weren’t too bad. Expensive, sure, but not too hard to replace.
The remaining analog media presented a bit of a problem. Even getting as much as I could on DVD, I still had over 200 tapes and LDs that I couldn’t easily replace.
I bought an Adaptec VideOH! capture board, and very quickly learned some of the hassles of video capturing and format conversion and transcoding and compression and blah blah blah and on and on.
Honestly, it’s been a pain in the arse, and I’ve put it aside on several occasions because it’s been such a huge project to get through.
I finished converting the laserdiscs last August, but the tapes were just not getting done, so a few months ago, I decided I needed a way to set myself a deadline.
I get cold very easily, so I took all the remaining videotapes and stacked them up on the heater in the computer room.
Then I taped the heater control in the “off” position so I couldn’t accidentally turn it on.
And I shivered a whole bunch in the first few months of the year.
But, it did the trick. Faced with an impending return to Fall weather, I finally managed to get myself back on task, and today I encoded the last bloody tape to MPEG-2 format and the last batch of MPEG-2 to divx conversions is running as I type this.
When I haven’t been sucked into Everquest, I’ve been playing a GBA platformer I brought back on my last trip to Japan. The game, “Densetsu no Stafi 3”, is part of what I’m told is a very popular series in Japan, but one which hasn’t yet been localized for whatever reason.
It does have an awful lot of text for a platformer, which might be part of it.
Anyway, I’m not done with it, I’ll talk more about the game proper once I finish it.
I don’t know how soon that will be, to be honest. Right around the time I was working through World 5, I was thinking to myself that the game wouldn’t end until – since I’d already played through an ice level and a jungle level – at least until I hit the lava level.
World six was, by the way, the lava level.
So now I’m on world 7, lava level behind me, and feeling like the game COULD end at any moment.
But, I’m betting it stretches to an 8th level. I will go one step further and say that I will fight the guy who I THINK is the ultimate enemy in world 8-4, and then fight the REAL ultimate enemy in world 8-5.
I confess, I have in the past looked at “Create your own character” options in fighting games as, well, fluff.
I’d rather choose a fighting game based on its having strong characters created by, well, professional artists.
I have to choose fighting games based on their characters because, being crap at them, it’s not like I can choose a fighting game based on depth or strategy or anything like that.
At this point I will admit to owning Dead or Alive 1, 2, 3, 4 and both volleyball games.
So I appear to equate “strong characters” with huge jubblies.
But basically I like a fighting game where I can mash buttons and watch my onscreen avatar get beat around until the CPU relents and lets me win a match.
Anyway, back to character creation options, and specifically Soul Calibur IV, which I purchased yesterday after a friend brought over his copy to show me.
I bought the “It’s got Yoda in it!” version, because I didn’t see any real advantage to either and most of my friends have 360s and very few of them have PS3s.
Also I bought the deluxe version in the tin and, uh, the strategy guide. So, even with Game Crazy’s “20% off the strategy guide!” thing, I still dropped $104 on this game.
But.
I can make a custom character that looks like this.
And after I have created a pink-haired glasses-wearing pleated-skirted fighter, I can face her off against a goth-loli dojikko.
And somehow, it all seems worth it.
On a less “creepy guy drooling over virtual women” note, this game also features my favorite Soul Calibur character of all time, that being Lizardman.
Yes, I actually DO occasionally like characters who don’t feature huge jubblies. Lizardman’s cool, OK?
I’m not usually an ice cream snob; I like cookies & cream and mint chocolate chip, and I like pumpkin ice cream when I can get it, which is unfortunately only a couple months of the year. All of these flavors are available in quite inexpensive versions from Dreyer’s and the like. I don’t ever feel the urge to explore the less… pedestrian brands, which are sold in smaller tubs with higher price tags. Cheap has been good enough for me up until now.
But, I was in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago and noticed that Ben & Jerry’s has a “Crème brûlée” ice cream.
This I had to try, and upon trying it, it was very good, and well worth the premium cost.
If you like, you know, custard and caramelized sugar, it is way yummy.
The little tub of Crème brûlée ice cream lasted me about a week, and when I went back to the grocery store today, I found myself drawn once again to the once-forbidden premium ice creams.
I was shuffling through the mixed-up tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, with every intention of purchasing another one, when I ran across a flavor, the contents of which I do not know because they are not important.
What was important was the name.
It was called “Chubby Hubby.”
It made me stop, and think a second, and say to myself, “On second thought, I really don’t NEED to buy another tub of Crème brûlée ice cream. Maybe I’ll just take my other groceries and be on my way.”
So, whatever marketing genius came up with “Chubby Hubby”, my waistline thanks you for the reminder that, if I want to maintain my weight in the “healthy” category, NOT buying your products would be a good thing to do.
Amazon’s wish list feature is an awfully handy thing.
I don’t really use it for its intended purpose, though – I’m not pimping it around to friends and relatives as a “gosh, if you ever needed a gift idea”.
What I mostly use it for, instead, is watching stuff that I’d like to buy but don’t really want to pay full price for – I don’t pretend to understand how Amazon’s pricing and inventory work, but they DO have a tendency to occasionally discount something heavily for a day or two and then put it back up to full price.
One of the things on my wish list was a DS game called Ontamarama, which I’d seen in the stores last fall and filed under the “music based puzzle game with cute characters; I will probably like it” category.
But it WAS thirty bucks, and for some reason it didn’t seem like a $30 game.
It stayed at full price for several months, and then for some reason Amazon priced it down to $10.04. I saw that as a sign.
Not, you know, a really IMPRESSIVE sign. We’re not talking meteor showers, ethereal voices telling me to take my family to high ground, burning bush kinds of signs. Just, you know, a sign that I should probably buy the dang thing so I could see if it was as cute as the case implied.
And yeah, it’s pretty cute. It’s got a plot which can charitably be described as wafer-thin: there’s a Bad Guy who’s collecting helpless innocent creatures to use their energy to become the Ultimate Bad Guy, and you’re the plucky young pigtailed schoolgirl who’s got to stop him.
Oh, there’s a guy character too. If they’d put HIM in a plaid skirt, I might have played through his story.
But probably not.
It is MOST regrettable that you cannot play as the third of the main characters, that being the music instructor who helps you through the training levels; she’s got the quiet-type-with-glasses thing going on and I’m completely helpless in the face of a cute girl with glasses.
Leaving the main characters aside, there’s a handful of enemies to battle on your quest to defeat the Bad Guy and free all the helpless innocent creatures. Most of them are either under the Evil Mind Control of the Bad Guy, or fighting you because they mistakenly think that you are, in fact, working FOR the Bad Guy.
The enemy character designs are pretty decent. None of them wear glasses, though.
Considering that your opponents are mostly innocents, it’s a good thing that you’re not actually subjecting them to any harm. You meet them, you have a short conversation which consists of either 1) your character denying any culpability in the Evil Events Unfolding, or 2) your character telling them that she won’t let them get away with their evil plans, and then you have a musical battle.
Afterwards, you either make up (if they were being controlled, have mistaken you for a bad guy, etc) or they tell you that you were stronger than they expected but it doesn’t matter because the Bad Guy is INVINCIBLE Muha ha haha ahaha hah ahah ah…
hah?
So, summing up: Nice character designs, not much plot, uh, I’m missing something.
Oh, yes.
How it plays.
If you can run your left and right hands out of sync – the pat your head, rub your belly thing – you can play this game. You use one hand to burst bubbles on the touch pad, you use the other hand to select notes from a scrolling bar as they pass a particular point. While you’re doing this, your character and your opponent engage in a cute animated battle which you won’t be able to watch because you’re basically focusing all your attention on the upper left 1/16th of the DS’s bottom screen.
This is Ontamarama’s biggest flaw, in my view; there’s stuff going on that you would love to see because you can tell that it’s probably funny to watch, but at the same time you can’t watch it because you have to be ready for the next note. Ouendan has the same problem, but at least it includes a replay mode so you CAN watch all the animations after a song ends.
Another complaint, less important, is that because the two actions you have to perform – bubble popping and note selection – aren’t really synced up, there’s not a feeling of playing along WITH the music, like you get in Ouendan or, say, Guitar Hero. It doesn’t really feel like a rhythm game when all is said and done, despite all its musical trappings.
After you play through the story mode, which takes an hour or so, you unlock the ability to buy new songs, play in harder difficulty levels, play 2-player vs games, blah blah blah. If you feel the need to squeeze more life out of the game, they give you plenty of ways to do it.
Final verdict: I like cute games with lots of charm, and this has that going for it. I don’t regret having picked this one up cheap. If I’d paid full price or it, I think I’d have been a bit disappointed.
So yeah, Sony sucked me back into Everquest; I should change the about page to remove the “recovering addict” part.
In fairness, they did a good job of coming back from a very bad situation.
From an outsider’s point of view, the game was rapidly heading towards collapse: They’d already had to shut down half the servers, and a good portion of the remaining player base was hoping they’d shut down half of the ones they still had running, just to consolidate people a little more.
There’s not a lot of point in a massively multiplayer game where there’s nobody to play with, after all. Everquest has always been designed to strongly discourage solo play – while most classes can do it, to some extent, it’s generally a tedious affair consisting of carefully picking your fights and then suffering significant downtime between the fights, where you get to watch your character sit in one place and not move.
There’s also the problem that items in Everquest are hideously important to your success – the majority of your in-game persona’s power comes from the gear they’re wearing, and the power difference between a character with average gear and a character with top-tier gear is exponential.
Of course, you can’t get better gear by yourself – you need to loot it from enemies who are designed to require more than one player to defeat.
So, to sum up: To get most stuff done, you need other people, or you need to be playing multiple characters, at $15 a month apiece.
Of course, this leads to a perception that, in order to progress, you NEED to have multiple accounts and play multiple characters at once. This tends to make people who can’t afford to go down that path – or who don’t want to – simply quit, which means less people to play with, and so the cycle continues.
There was, of course, a small percentage of the population that swore that nothing was going wrong, that the game was perfectly healthy, that there were plenty of people to play with, and that they were only running six accounts at once because they didn’t want to inconvenience anyone else.
So, in a remarkable display of Getting It, Sony started backing down from some of their long-standing design philosophies. They made it easier for people to solo and they made it much easier to obtain gear – they didn’t hand out top-tier gear, mind you, but they raised the “average” level to the point where a player in average gear was maybe one-fourth as effective as someone in top-tier gear, as opposed to one-tenth as effective. They made leveling faster, so people who were behind the curve had a chance to catch up, and they eliminated a lot of the sitting around that used to exist in the game.
They also unlocked a lot of content that used to require raiding to access. This made a certain percentage of the playerbase – think of them as the grumpy old guys who had to walk uphill both ways to school – complain. So, they unlocked some more just to make their point.
Oh, and then they gave it away for two months, free, to anyone who’d ever played in the past, and made a point of advertising this.
The end result: Lots of people who’d stopped playing years ago logged in to say hello again, and the existing player base realized that, hey, having more people around wasn’t such a bad thing.
The free promotion period ends later this week, so it’s up in the air what the long term effect might be, but it’s just possible that Sony may have given their game a little more time to live.
It’s good to be married to a woman who understands your basic needs for things like weird Japanese puzzle games.
A couple of weeks ago, she was visiting family in San Jose when she went into an import computer parts & video games shop. Of her own volition, I will point out.
Apparently, they had some import DS games on clearance, because she brought me home an odd little puzzle game called Kuru Kuru Chameleon.
It’s a interesting twist on the whole “match colors” genre – basically, it’s a versus game where you’re facing off against an opponent across a playfield made up of hexagons, each of which can be any of seven colors. You start off controlling one piece, and whenever it’s your turn, you can select from five of the seven colors to change it to – you can’t change to your current color, and you can’t change to your opponent’s color. Knowing this, you can deny your opponent moves by changing to a particular color.
After you’ve changed color, any uncontrolled pieces adjacent to yours that are the same color as your new color become part of your territory. You can also enclose spaces, which changes all the pieces you enclose to one color and incorporates them into your territory.
There are also some blocking hexes on the board – you can’t control them, but you can use them as barriers. Some of the characters have the ability to destroy or add blocking pieces, which adds to the strategy.
The game very quickly becomes a mix of trying to control the board and at the same time deny your opponent moves. It’s kept fresh by having random objectives – sometimes you just need to get 50% of the board under your control, sometimes you need to capture a particular hex to win, sometimes you need to enclose specific oversized pieces.
It’s pretty challenging; the CPU opponents don’t cut you a lot of slack, and the final boss can bust out some special attacks that will leave you frothing.
The downside is that, while this is decidely in the category of “color based puzzle games with cute characters”, they kind of skimped on the actual characters. You get a ditzy pink-haired girl, a violent-but-amply-chested jungle woman, and two boy characters who are so shotacon that it made me cringe to play through the game as them. If you like ’em young and weepy, though, this is the game for you.
Oh, and there’s a boss, who’s your standard ojou-sama type with a chameleon hat.
I guess I’m mostly annoyed by the characters because I don’t feel like I’m being pandered to enough. The developers didn’t even have the decency to put in a maid, or anything.
Because there are only four characters, playing through the story mode consists of selecting one of the four characters, meeting the other three, and finding reasons to challenge them to matches. After beating the other three characters, you fight the boss, lose a few times, swear mightily and eventually get a congratulations screen. Matches are pretty fast-paced, so even if you get stuck for a while the whole procedure shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.
On clearance, it was 10 bucks and well worth it. Its characters don’t manage to have any particular charms, but the game itself is fun.
Also, you can turn off the annoying little-boy voices from the options menu, and that is a good thing.
Note: After writing this, I did some searching, and apparently this has been released in the US as “Chameleon” on the PSP, with the cutesy boy characters getting a quick gender swap. Either that, or I’m drastically misinterpreting the characters in the original.
Neither option is all that appealing – on one hand, you have cute boy characters with exaggerated feminine traits who pout and cry a lot, on the other you have slightly boyish girls who pout and cry a lot.
Baud Attitude 