Important Milestones.

Posted on April 30, 2008 by baudattitude

I reached an important, nay, critical moment in PS3 ownership this week.

Our local “Fred Meyer’s” had the collector’s edition of “Stranglehold” on clearance for $24.95, with all clearance items being discounted an additional 20%.

So now I own my first PS3 game, and after only four months of console ownership!

Hopefully it will wipe the horrible painful memories of trying to get the PC version to work out of my head.

Another way to look at it:  I’ve now purchased the movie “Hard Boiled” for the third time.

This last week also saw the purchases of Kingdom Hearts II, because, well, I’d like to see the rest of the story even if I’ve heard horror stories about the Atlantea level in this one, Patapon for the PSP because everyone is raving about it and the poor PSP has been somewhat neglected lately, Persona 3 FES because I needed another 70 hr RPG to not play and to feel guilty about, and Heavenly Guardian because it looked cute and I liked the Pocky & Rocky games on the SNES.

I’m really not good at clearing out a backlog.

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Curse you, Penguin-hugging girl.

Posted on April 28, 2008 by baudattitude

I can’t figure out how to unlock Miyuri in the free battle mode in Suchie Pai III Remix for the DS.

Apart from that, I’ve beaten the game with every character and gotten their “good” ending, so I think I can consider this game finished.

As far as mahjong games go, the Suchie Pai series have always been very forgiving of people who aren’t very good at mahjong.  It’s actually very easy to win matches without running your opponent out of points, because they usually have a little concentration game that you can play after you win a hand.  You make matches to get power ups.  If you clear the board in the concentration game, you win the match no matter how many points your opponent has, so you’re usually going into the next opponent with a handful of power ups collected.

Suchie Pai III remix makes the concentration game a little more essential.  See, you play six matches, and in the concentration game for each match are hidden two pieces of a medallion.

If you complete five medallions throughout the first six matches, you get to fight the secret boss, and then you get the character’s best ending, whoever you’re playing as.

If you manage to run your opponent out of points before you find the medallions, or if you get lucky and hit a “panel clear” (instant win) power up, you wind up not getting the medallions for the match.  So if you win TOO quickly, you wind up not getting the best endings.

This leads to some situations where you need to take a deliberate loss in order to let your opponent build up their points a little bit more so you have more time at the concentration game.  It’s an interesting bit of strategy.

The over-the-top power up-based story mode is nicely supplanted by a free battle mode where you can pick various characters from earlier Suchie Pai games and play one-on-one mahjong with them.  No power ups, no concentration game, just a straight-up mahjong game where both sides start with 30000 points and you go back and forth until one of you wins.

Oh, and being a DS game, there’s no nudity, so you don’t have to feel too ashamed playing this one.  You’re still a bit of a perv, but at least you can justify it as “It’s just mahjong!  Look!  No jubblies!”

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We hope you’ve enjoyed our game. We’ll wrap it up in the sequel.

Posted on April 27, 2008 by baudattitude

I finished Kingdom Hearts yesterday, and it was quite an enjoyable ride.  There was no Psychonauts-style Insane Difficulty Jump at the end, the Disney-themed villain in the last world was a really nice surprise, and even the Patented Square Multi Stage Final Boss Fight wasn’t too painful.  Like pretty much every other encounter in the game, it boiled down to “How well can you heal?”

Not having the story, well, finish or anything is a minor quibble and one barely worth mentioning.

That’s a little harsh; you do get some closure and sense of accomplishment.  You’ve thwarted a nasty villain and saved lots of innocent people, reunited friends, restored hope, so on and so forth.  You’ve Done Good.  It’s just that all that is stuff you’ve done along the way, as kind of side benefits of your actual goal, and in the end you’re not really all that much closer to the goal your character started the game with.

The Super Secret Ending, while a little hard to understand, gets some significant Cool Points.  It was worth doing a little dog hunting to see.

A final word on the hated Gummi ship:

I went into the game knowing that something called a “Gummi ship” was going to be painful, which prepared me a bit for it when it happened.  I didn’t know that it meant that there was a jammed-in 3rd person shooting game every once in a while.  I also didn’t know that there was a whole meta-game revolving around collecting parts for new Gummi ships and building and customizing Gummi ships.  I went into the Gummi ship garage a total of ONCE, got trapped in a godawful tutorial, and turned off the console in order to escape.

When I rebooted, I stayed the heck out of the Gummi ship building section, pretended it didn’t exist, and finished the game using the same Gummi ship I started with, no customization needed.  If you are thinking about playing this game, I strongly recommend you do the same.

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All cooked out

Posted on April 23, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m not very good at predictions.

For instance, several months ago when I first saw “Cooking Mama” on a shelf, I had the following thoughts:

1) Wow, that is a weird concept for a game.

2) I like weird games.

3) Weird games don’t seem to sell well.

4) I should buy that now, because it’s going to be impossible to find in a couple of months.

I am given to understand that it has, in fact, sold well over a million copies and generated at least two sequels.

So, predicting the future: Not my strong point.

Anyway, I played it a little after I bought it, but I got a little tired of the whole rapid-fire-minigame thing and put it aside after I’d unlocked a few recipes.  I was right about it being darn weird, though, they didn’t really bother much with the localization or change the recipes to be American food or anything like that.

After finishing Bomberman Land Touch, though, I was a little more open to the minigame-collection-concept, so I went back to Cooking Mama, started taking my potato peeling and squid frying SERIOUSLY, and burned through all 76 recipes with at least silver medals.  I wasn’t about to repeat them until I’d gotten 100% gold, or anything, that would be insane, but I wasn’t going to let myself slide with any copper medals.

Anyway, another game down.  I was quite disappointed in not getting any kind of fanfare, or ending credits, or anything like that, but at least I got to play a videogame simulation of making Katsudon, and that’s good enough for me.

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Claims to manliness.

Posted on April 19, 2008 by baudattitude

I have mentioned that one of the games on my far-too-neglected backlog is Kingdom Hearts, the Square-Disney collaboration that has launched a thousand disturbing doujinshi.

I think I am approaching the end of the game.  At least, I’m currently in a place called “End of the World” and that sounds pretty damn final.

Before getting here, though, my lovely and patient wife, who has sat by my side and watched me hack and slash my way through the many Disney worlds present in the game, said to me, “You know, you get a better ending if you collect all the dalmatians and finish the Hades cup.”

Well, who am I to skip hours of tedious searching for dogs in the hope of seeing a better ending?

After we found the last damn dalmatian, the next step was obviously to tackle the Hades cup tournament.  She looked this up in a guide and found that it recommended being level 60 before you even tried it.

I was level 51.  It was pretty obvious that I needed some leveling up.

So we figured that the best way to do this leveling up would be to enter the Hades cup, and just look at it as a way to get experience so we wouldn’t be too crushed when I was humiliated.

It turned out to be a great way to get experience.  By the time I beat it, which I will now point out was on the very first attempt, I was level 55.

It was a damn triumphant feeling. 🙂

Now to press on to the end.

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Musical moments, slightly embarassing:

Posted on April 17, 2008 by baudattitude

So I keep hearing a song when I’m driving home from school, and it’s rather catchy, and so I finally went and looked it up on Google.

It’s apparently by the actress/singer who plays “Hannah Montana”, which is apparently all the rage with the slumber-parties-and-giggling-about-boys crowd.

From now on, I think I’ll keep the radio on the classic rock station.  Much less risk of me winding up in a record store trying to convince the clerk that “It’s not for me, it’s for my, uh, niece”

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Spin-offs, bad and good.

Posted on April 16, 2008 by baudattitude

OK, so back in the dark days when domestic laserdiscs had completely died and DVD hadn’t quite taken off yet, my wife and I used to buy an awful lot of import laserdiscs.

Oh, and by the way? Buying import laserdiscs? Stupid, stupid, stupid. I have several hundred LDs still, which I can’t bear to dispose of because of what they cost, and yet they’re taking up far too much room AND they have virtually zero resale value.

Anyway, continuing that theme, one of the series we were collecting on laserdisc was Bubblegum Crisis 2040, a spin-off of the… can I say “seminal” without the kids in the back giggling? OK, then, seminal it is… seminal mid 80’s mecha, girls, and rock n’ roll OVA series.

So, we bought this, actually we bought the first twelve laserdiscs out of thirteen – and it wasn’t that we suddenly came to our senses, or anything, it’s just that we moved away from our favorite laserdisc dealer – for about sixty bucks a disc.

So that’s well over $700, particularly counting tax. Then we bought the whole series again on domestic DVDs when it came out, at $30 a disc, so let’s call it $900 in total spent on this series.

And, well, we finally watched it, and while the first half of the series is REALLY good, the second half drags like, uh, a very draggy thing.

Put simply: Watching the first half of the show, every time the end credits started, it was a bit of a shock, the kind that yanks you out of a trance – it couldn’t POSSIBLY be the end of the show YET!

Watching the second half, and particularly the last four or five episodes, every time the eyecatch popped in, it was a welcome indicator that some time had, in fact, passed, and that the episode would, in fact, end.

So that was a Bad Spin-off Experience, made even more painful by the financial outlay needed to experience it. I understand you can now get the whole damn series for something like $40, and if you did that and pretended it stops about halfway through with an unresolved ending it would actually be a decent deal.

Good Spin-off Experience, on the other hand, came with watching the Please Twins! set that I picked up a few months ago. It has all the elements of a Painful Teen Soap Opera – Boy meets Girl! Boy meets other Girl! Both Girls Like Boy! Boy Likes Both Girls! Boy Doesn’t Know Which One Is His Sister! – but it turned out to be really enjoyable, with only one kind of draggy episode to bring it down.

Being a spin-off of Please Teacher!, one of the better boy-meets-alien shows, didn’t hurt either. It had just enough of the familiar characters – particularly Morino Ichigo, a personal favorite – to make me feel comfortable, but they never took over the screen to the point of overwhelming the new characters and story.

Oh, and if, at the end, you’re unhappy with the resolution of the love triangle, apparently the novel version of the story is almost exactly the same… but the Who Winds Up With Who is reversed at the end. So watch the series, and if you don’t like it, buy the book, too. Not a bad way to suck a few more dollars out of fanboy pockets, sirs. Well played, well played indeed.

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Nostalgia hits hard

Posted on April 13, 2008 by baudattitude

Our local Fred Meyers had a DVD sale, a few months back, where they took a bunch of movies they’d overstocked on and put them all out at $5.00 each.

This is how we came to own Ghost Rider on DVD, which we’d missed on the weekend it was in theaters. We finally got around to watching it Friday, and, well, uh, it had good effects and was well worth the $5.00.

I’d put it a little below “Daredevil” when it comes to Marvel movies.

Anyway, when it was over, it reminded me that, even though I wasn’t really a Marvel fan in my childhood, I’d had at least one comic with Ghost Rider in it, and so I went to see if I could figure out what it was. I knew it’d had him and Iceman and Angel in it.

It turned out that it was an issue of “The Champions”, a Marvel series from the 70s that featured the superheroic exploits of Ghost Rider, Hercules, The Black Widow, and yes, Iceman and Angel.

It also wasn’t too hard to find the series to read. Turns out that I’d had issue 14, which had been the first half of a two-part story, so I got to read issue 15 for the first time and find out how The Champions beat The Swarm. The Swarm being, let me get this straight, a Nazi who’d escaped prosecution at the end of WWII and moved to South America, where he was studying killer bees and wound up melding with a hive of super-intelligent killer bees and becoming a supervillain.

OK, so it wasn’t exactly a Great Work of Literature, but what the heck.

Then I made the mistake of saying to myself, hey, I have the whole series here, let’s read it from the start.

Don’t do this. It hurt me, people, it Hurt Me Bad. The Swarm turned out to be the sole redeeming factor of the entire series, and I honestly don’t know whether that’s because those issues were actually any better than the rest or if the nostalgia factor is just kicking in and helping me ignore the pain.

I’m kind of tempted now to seek out the Defenders, possibly the only super hero group with a weirder line-up (“Silver Surfer! The Hulk! Dr. Strange! The Sub-Mariner!”) and see how it compares.

That’s a kind of masochism there, it is.

Posted in movies & tv, random | 3 Comments

Cute Tanuki Girls… That’s different.

Posted on April 12, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m quite the fan of mahjong games, or at least the sorts of mahjong games you get on consoles, which are generally two-player versions of mahjong where you get to play against cute anime-style girls in skimpy outfits. Not really “proper” mahjong at all, but I like it.

The console mahjong scene has gotten pretty quiet since the glory days of the Saturn -I don’t think it’s so much that the market for scantily clad anime-style girls has gotten any smaller in the intervening years, it’s more that the big mahjong franchises have moved to the PC where there’s less censorship.

So, modern games are pretty few and far between, but I do see the occasional release, and that brings me, in a rather awkward way, to the rather awkwardly named Chu~Kana Janshi Tenho Painyan Remix.

This is a remake of a PS2 game from a couple of years back, which I think is related to the Suchie Pai series somehow. It’s got the Kenichi Sonoda character designs, it’s got Kanai Mika doing the voice of the main character, I don’t know if it actually fits in to the Suchie Pai universe anywhere but it’s at least a spiritual sequel.

The plot, as best as I can interpret it, involves a rather bratty mahjong master who wants to collect a bunch of mystical stones for the purpose of defending the world from a menace, the nature of which may or may not be specified, but there’s an awful lot of kanji I don’t recognize and really it’s not that important.

You meet people, who are almost all cute, young, and busty, you have a conversation, you play mahjong with them, and when you win you unleash an energy attack that co-incidentally blows most of their clothing to shreds so you can properly search them for these mystical stones.

No naughty bits are exposed, this being a DS game and all that.

Then you explain WHY you had take their mystical stone, they see the light, team up with you and you go off to search for more of the mystical stones together.

Like I said, the plot’s really not that important. It’s mahjong with a dose of cheesecake and Suchie-pai-style over-the-top special attacks and powerups.

Oh, and there’s a Tanuki girl and a seven-tailed-fox-girl in it, which aren’t exactly common moe’ style characters, so it gets some points there.

On the other hand, there’s really no reason to play through it more than once, because there seems to only be one path through the story, and the power-ups and special attacks kind of detract from the actual playing mahjong, so I can’t really recommend it unless you’re a big Kenichi Sonoda fan or you’re enough of a mahjong fanboy that you’ll try anything.

Unfortunately, that describes me pretty well.

Update:  This post gets an awful lot of hits for “Tanuki Girls” and “Cute Tanuki”, so, for those of you who came here looking for that, here’s a scan of Tanuko’s character page from the manual.  Knock yerself out.

Posted in mahjong, nds, nekomimi, videogames | Leave a comment

It is, it is, a glorious thing

Posted on April 9, 2008 by baudattitude

A couple of Christmases ago, I was gifted a copy of Bomberman Land Touch.  And I was mightily perplexed when I put it into my DS and was greeted with, well, something rather different than I expected.

I know Bomberman.  I deeply enjoy Bomberman.  I have spent many happy hours with friends playing Bomberman, and I had certain preconceptions as to what a game called “Bomberman”-anything ought to contain.

This involves running around a maze, picking up powerups, and trying to blow your friends up.  Bizarre and incoherent trash-talking is a side benefit.  I once had a friend shout, in the throes of battle, that he was “On me, like a bag of chips.”

I have never understood this.

Bomberman Land Touch has none of that, at least not in the single player mode.  What it has instead is a collection of bomb-themed mini games and a not-terribly-deep story to give you a reason to play through all the mini games.  You’re a visitor to a pirate-themed amusement park, with the ultimate goal being to defeat the pirate lord and be crowned the Pirate King.  Hence the Gilbert & Sullivan reference above.

It’s taken me this long to play through, because the game drags at first.  Of course you can’t just start at mini game 1, beat it, move on to mini game 2, and continue to mini game 36.  That would be far too easy.  Instead, you collect assorted chits and doohickies that you get by beating the mini games, running errands for the residents of the park, and solving assorted adventure-game style puzzles.

By which I mean, you have an inventory that slowly fills with assorted outfits and bombs and you’ll wind up using each and every one of them at some point or another in order to solve a puzzle.

It never gets all Roberta Williams on you, though – there aren’t any really obtuse leaps of illogic to make.  Major points in that regard.

As your chits accumulate, you can unlock gates in the park that let you get to more attractions and new areas and meet more park residents who need errands run, and this is much more satisfying than I’m making it sound.

At any rate, I managed to achieve my goal tonight, and I was crowned the Pirate King, and I got a good laugh out of the end credits when they suggested I try the whole thing over again, this time in Hard Mode.

I don’t know the meaning of the term “Hard Mode”

But I do know that I’m glad to have another game finished.

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