Baud Attitude

I try not to have multiple games going at the same time, but my wife and I started Kingdom Hearts this weekend.  It makes a nice “together” game in the way that Half Life 2 does not make a nice together game.  I don’t play FPS games in a way that’s watchable by anyone who doesn’t want to get motion sickness.

I fervently believe that you can be a full-blooded 100% male and still enjoy Kingdom Hearts.  Running around Disney-themed worlds collecting dalmatian puppies with Donald and Goofy as your traveling companions is Not Really That Questionable, especially as you, uh, you, uh, you’re a kid with a big damn key as your weapon and a relationship with your best friend that has no doubt featured in a thousand doujinshi…

You know, I give up.  I can’t really justify this one from a manliness standpoint, but it’s a good couples game.

I usually try to come up with clever post titles, but how on earth do I out-clever a game title like that?

Anyway: The Maid Uniform and Machinegun, #105 in the “Simple 2000” series.

Do I NEED to say this is a Japan-only release?

Awesome title aside, It’s actually kind of a fun premise.  You’re a maid robot who’s been sent back in time to protect the child-self of the guy sending you back in time.  You point out that there’s a bit of a time paradox there, but it doesn’t matter – you get sent back anyway.

In blatant violation of the Rules of Time Travel as set down by the “Terminator” movies, you arrive fully dressed.  It’s Not That Kind Of Game.

You arrive with a basic maid outfit, a basic sword, a basic handgun, a basic sniper rifle and a basic assault rifle.  If this sounds familiar to you… it’s sort of like HoiHoi-san.  Same idea; you run around, do missions, win them and get points, use the points to buy upgrades.

Now, if it were me sending a maid robot back to protect my child self, and I was rich enough to afford maid robots and time machines, I would kit my maid robot out with some pretty nasty futuristic weapons and not make her scrounge up the cash to buy them herself.  But I digress.

It’s not like HoiHoi-san in that HoiHoi-san actually has, well, production values.  This game, on the other hand, is a Simple 2000 game, which means that you’re not really getting 2000 yen worth out of it, but it’s so cheap and has such a bizarre concept that you can’t keep yourself from buying it.

So: with your basic set of weapons, you set about trashing a bunch of vicious little doll robot thingies.  After a couple levels of that, you get to pull out the sniper rifle and snipe at rocket-propelled doll robot thingies and Ominous Black Cars from a balcony.

After each of these levels, you get scored based upon your performance.  You get better marks for using your sword instead of a gun, for doing combo attacks, for avoiding damage, that sort of thing.  I was racking up the points fairly well and starting to look forward to upgrading my basic assault rifle…

And then I hit level 4.

In level 4, you fight through a bunch of little doll robots and mecha piloted by little doll robots and then meet the Other Maid Robot, because of course you need an antagonist.

She’s blond, by the way, I guess blondes are evil?

Anyway, the Other Maid Robot wiped the floor with me about a half-dozen times.

Now, to be fair, you DO get some points after you get the Game Over screen, and in theory I could save up these points and keep playing through the level up to the point where I get into the boss fight and lose… eventually I’d have enough points to seriously kit-out my robot maid self.

…But.

It would be a lot of replaying the same level over and over again in order to afford upgrades, and even with them I’m not sure I’d stand a chance.

So I’m giving up for now.   Time spent replaying level 4 of this game is time better spent playing, well, just about anything else.

My introduction to bullet-hell style shooters came a few years ago in the form of a brutally localized game called “Mobile Light Force 2”

It is a translation, and I use the term quite loosely, of Shikigami no Shiro.  I could get deeper into the details of the damages done to the title in localization, but others have done it far better then I could ever hope to.

Anyway, even with the bastardizations done to the title in the name of making it more palatable to domestic tastes, I quite liked the game, so I made sure to hunt down the original title when I was in Japan last August.  After doing so, of course, I let it sit on a shelf for the last seven months.

I decided I’d sit down last night and give it a go, expecting to be blown away by getting to play it As It Was Intended.  Because, well, when you’re an obsessive purist, you like to think that you’re obsessive about Things That Matter.
In retrospect, I should not have set my sights so high.  Yeah, it was nice to have the original title screen and interstage art, and also nice to have the original voices, but it wasn’t like playing an entirely different game – it wasn’t like the “Street Combat” localization of the first Super Famicom Ranma  1/2 game.  Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that the original title featured cinemas and voiceovers that had been hacked out of the game, and, well, it didn’t.

Either way you play it, it’s still an excellent shooter and features a cute witch with glasses, so you really can’t lose.