parish (Notes from the ed…): Well, that was the first … M.Nicolai (Spotted in Chinat…): I still have tokens from … Lindsay Cibos (Notes from the ed…): Hahaha! Six years of doin… Anonymous (Spotted in Chinat…): Oh boy, that creepy arcad… SonicPanda (GameSpite Issue 6…): In regards to Kirby's Adv… GeoX (GameSpite Issue 6…): Also, not to be a super-b… GeoX (GameSpite Issue 6…): I enjoy the blatantness o… Lithros (GameSpite Issue 6…): Merus: The article I lin… Ilchymis (GameSpite Issue 6…): Parish - is them's Kirby… Merus (GameSpite Issue 6…): Lithros: Which Adventure?…
This is the archive, folks. The current stuff is on the main page.
Welcome back, plodder
31 March 07 | 16:38
My computer is back. It was actually supposed to be back two days ago, but DHL decided that "next day" service doesn't necessarily mean "the day after it is shipped" and didn't bother to try and deliver it Thursday. They also didn't try to deliver it yesterday, even though their tracking service said "delivery attempted." In the end, I managed to convince them to see the error of their ways, although unfortunately this involved making vaguely threatening (and wholly uncharacteristic) "let me talk to your supervisor" demands to the phone rep and sitting on hold listening to looping recordings about DHL's remarkable reliability for half an hour. Anyway, the important thing is that I'm no longer laptop-free, and however much you may personally dislike Macs you have to admit they make it ridiculously easy to restore the entire contents of a freshly-replaced hard drive.
It feels a bit like having a severed limb sewn back on. Welcome back, Mr. Right Arm. We've missed you.
I did manage to put together a podcast despite being PC-deprived, making that last post's admission of my dishonest nature all the more damning. So you can listen to us opine about matters of emulation for 80 minutes, if that's your thing. Even if not, you should probably enjoy Retronauts while you can. I just don't see the podcast lasting much longer -- the whole thing is vaguely painful to create, especially I still can't seem to make it the tight, informative program I envision in my delusional excuse for a brain. I'm (obviously) not a born radio host, the time investment required to make each episode is ridiculous, and the bulk of the target audience already has its mind made up about classic gaming topics and doesn't have any interest in listening to people with different/less informed/less passionate opinions on the topic. So really, it's an ill-advised venture by any measure and I'd kind of like to reclaim the 10 hours of my week I invest in making the thing.
The videos are ridiculously fun to create, though, so I don't anticipate putting a stop to those anytime soon.
As for emulation, it probably didn't come across very clearly in the episode, but I'm not really much of a fan. I admire it on a "That is totally an awesome trick of technology" level, and it definitely comes in handy when I need to grab footage of a given game, but I've never seen PC-based emulation as a satisfying substitute for real gaming. Not so much for moral issues, though: Pure piracy isn't cool, and kids with a profound sense of entitlement make me want to break faces; but I don't precisely appreciate the creative chilling effect that increased corporate control of intellectual properties is having, either. I just don't enjoy gaming on a computer, even if it's a console game. Case in point: I've had a hankering for Chrono Trigger lately, but can't bring myself to suffer through Final Fantasy Chronicles -- the combination of load times and SNES-resolution graphics upgraded to PS1 resolution upscaled to HD resolution makes it feel like someone is stabbing me through the eyes and into the brain -- so I grabbed a copy off eBay. That doesn't do the copyright holders any more good than me swiping a copy from RomNation, and it cost me a whole lot more than a free ROM download, but ultimately it's more satisfying to play on an Super NES than it would be on my MacBook. And what's the point of indulging yourself if it's not satisfying?
So, in conclusion, I'm anal-retentive. Nice to meet you. (Also, the podcast has to go on at least long enough for a Chrono love-in.)
I know I said we wouldn't do anymore Castlevania-oriented Retronauts creations for a while, and at first glance you'll probably think the new episode of Bonus Stage makes me a liar. But it doesn't! Castlevania is simply a jumping-off point for our usual destructive tendencies.
See? It's all good. Except Sharkey's language, which is as naughty as ever. So, uh, Mom: Don't click the play button. Especially if you don't want to know about our mad scheme to create free-form platform-based porn games.
The episode finale is dedicated to the forum kids. It also means that anyone caught spouting Symphony of the Night dialogue from now on will be ruthlessly culled from the herd.
Last week's efforts to de-hose my hard drive were, alas, in vain. I'm getting the same old problems, so my cranky little MacBook Pro is off to the Apple Store for a replacement drive tomorrow (squeaking in under the one-year warranty deadline by a whopping four days). That means I'll probably be off the grid for a few days, so no updates here, no Retronauts, no love or joy or happiness. I dunno, unless I update from my phone, which is possible if not entirely pleasant.
Possible for the blog, I mean. I don't think I can do the podcast editing that way.
Anyway, here's a crosspost from the Retronauts blog so that we'll all have something fresh(-ish) to read for the next week on the way to Talking Time or Sketchy.
I'm trying to get back into the habit of using Retronauts as a catch-all for random classic gaming blogs, especially since the podcast is still refusing to become anything like good no matter what kind of freakishly anal-retentive control I apply to it. So! Here's a start: a canonization of random but memorable parts of great games. In this case, a totally great battle that sticks out in my mind as one of the most gripping moments of any video game ever -- Suikoden II's epic fight with Luca Blight.
Poor Suikoden II really got short shrift back in the day, thanks almost entirely to Konami's brilliant decision to release it alongside the single most anticipated RPG ever, Final Fantasy VIII. After VII single-handedly created a mainstream RPG fanbase in America, a literal million fanboys slavered at the prospect of playing the sequel. And one of the best 32-bit RPGs ever created slipped into obscurity. Oh, sure, now you people pay $150 for a copy, but where were you back in the day? Jerks.
I realize calling something "one of the best 32-bit RPGs ever" is serious fighting words, but Suikoden II deserves the claim. And the battle with Luca Blight is precisely why.
There are few things I hate more in this world than conducting interviews and being an on-camera/on-mike host. Naturally, I've volunteered to do all the above on a weekly basis, which should be all the proof anyone needs that I should not be allowed to make decisions for myself. I don't even trust myself to tie my shoes these days; elastic laces are the future. And they only let me eat with a spoon.
But occasionally I am okay with my on-camera work, as in the case of this Penny Arcade: On the Precipice of Darkness interview. That's because it's less an interview than me and Jerry making jokes at each other while Joel from Hothead looks on in bemusement.
The one disappointment is that GameVideos trimmed the very important part where I asked if the possibility of time travel would result in Tycho facing off against his historical namesake. But I guess I can reveal here the very exclusive answer: No, and anyway it's been a few centuries so the name is public domain at this point.
This is as close as I get to journalism, which is why I'm almost certainly in the wrong line of work. This week's podcast probably won't do much to change that perception, either. I was told that our podcasts should run closer to 90 minutes in length than not, but... I think I prefer shorter, more tightly knit discussions. Oh well! Next week: Rediscovering the soul of wit.
I see stuff through the glass that I don't recognize at all
21 March 07 | 14:56
I can't decide if my Cooking Mama review is good, or completely stupid. Part of me feels like I tried a little too hard. Oh well. At least we'll always have that picture of Chairman Miyamoto.
Yes, I shamelessly cribbed the pikmin joke from the oekaki board. You guys are basically my idea farm, now.
Also probably not up to snuff this week: the latest Retronauts Bonus Stage.
I'm pretty sure tomorrow's podcast will also uphold my streak of low standards! Woo.
Edit: Sorry, I've been informed this stuff is all totally awesome and I'm a jerk for dwelling on its shortcomings, so you should bask in my glory. Go on. Bask.
It's been a while since I last checked in on my ever-growing Mii Parade; it seems to be slowing down a bit, probably because I'm running into a realistic limit on how many Miis most people want to create and put on roam. And that is okay. It's still growing at a fairly prodigious rate, as you can see:
Given the sum total to date, I guess I can say my Mii Parade is officially a successful enterprise.
I'm sorry. That was terrible.
Also! Thanks for the belated birthday wishes and whatever, but my lamentations re: my mortality memorial were not to be taken too seriously. When I'm actually upset about something, blogs are the last place I'd mention it. I know better than to trust the Internet with such fragile concepts as sincerity.
So was yesterday the lamest birthday ever or what? My girlfriend left town (she said something about going to meet her sister's new baby -- whatever), and everyone left work early so I wasn't even able to glom onto other people to do interesting things with. Instead I ended up going home alone and watching very manly movies such as Bullitt and Casino Royale while I backed up the entirety of my on-the-brink-of-failure hard drive. AWESOME.
Bullitt was especially depressing. Once I got past how nice it was to see my favorite city frozen in time and depicted in high-definition (insane film grain and all), there was the crushing realization that 1968 was nearly 40 years ago. Oh, mortality.
So in revenge for the girlfriend's abandonment of me at such a terrible time, I drew this:
...since she gets sad whenever I draw tragic things happening to ToastyFrog. As suffering is the entire point of the character, this causes no end of heartache around here. Although I guess the joke was on me, as I had to work hard to convince her that this was a brash declaration that there's only one true ToastyFrog and that no, this wasn't a twisted, passive break-up message.
Ah well. Seeing as morbidity is the state of this update, have another manga mini-review -- this time about a slightly somber and wholly affecting book.
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
Fumiyo Kouno | jaPRESS | ten bucks
Is there anything more depressing than stories about survivors of nuclear armageddon? Alas Babylon, Grave of the Fireflies, When the Wind Blows -- they all present a very clear picture of the fact that the people who die in the flash of ground zero are very, very fortunate. Because the ones who don't slowly waste away as their bodies fail over time, succumbing bit by bit to radiation poisoning.
Town of Evening Calm starts off as a story in the same vein, following the life of a young Hiroshima survivor named Minami, and how the guilt over the suffering she witnessed but couldn't prevent -- the charred bodies she stepped over as she searched for lost family members, the physical agony of the bomb's early victims -- affects her life ten years later. Eventually, though, Minami succumbs to the inevitable, and the story moves to the present day and takes on a less heartbreaking tone. (Of course, that changes as well once the present-day characters' connections to Minami become clear.)
The book's strength lies in its combination of briskness and casualness; at only 100 pages, it's actually quite short, but the story never feels rushed. At times you sort of wonder where it's going, in fact, and then suddenly you're there almost without realizing how it happened. And Kouno's artwork complements her storytelling perfectly; like the plot, the linework is loose but economical and defines the characters more effectively than you initially realize. Her style is reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki's work in Nausicaa, with a similar simplicity and uniformity of stroke and the same unusual lack of screen tone. Come to think of it, didn't Nausicaa end up getting sick from the God Warrior's radioactive nature as well? Well then.
Town is a small, quiet tale, but it's the sort of thing that makes you get all pissed off when someone sniffs disdainfully at the prospect of graphic novels being real literature -- there's a beautiful story here, and it's artfully told, with all the gravity and emotion of a novel twice its length. Sometimes things just work better without a bunch of clumsy words mucking it up.
GameSpite's official oekaki board (a place to doodle and share images via self-contained web-based tools, for those fortunate enough not to have been corrupted by constant exposure to Japanese geek concepts) is off to a lovely start. Lovely, of course, in the sense that it's already going the way of all oekaki: Full of amateurish, ridiculously, nerdy doodles. I'm so proud of you all.
Please note that even if you are completely incapable of drawing anything ever you are still invited to join the oekaki! Every art post deserves its share of insightful (or not) comments. (Not to be mistaken for actual encouragement.) So even if you cannot draw, I am fairly certain that, as a reader of this site, you are more than capable of making some sort of glib and/or snarkastic remark about someone else's work.
Also, you may have noticed I've redesigned the site, slightly. In fact, the new layout was designed to look good on my mobile phone, and to have a fairly muted/neutral color scheme that will allow posted artwork to stand out more dramatically. Isn't that great? Yeah.
So based on the amazing response to yesterday's post -- fewest comments ever! -- I have to conclude that no one understands the simple-mindedly violent genius of Golgo 13. Sometimes I don't even know you people. So today it's link dump mania. Noisy children, see what you get!
Oekaki, it's gonna get rocky: It's probably a bad idea, but I've installed my very own Oekaki board. Or rather, our very own. It's for everyone! (Except people who like to draw genitals.) Please register and draw stuff. I'm sure you will provide fabulous collective entertainment for a few weeks until interest drops off as it has with the forums. But man, those few weeks are gonna be rad. P.S., never mind the registration mailer error message -- I'll make manual confirmations a few times each day.
Ghouls 'N Ghosts 'N Humiliation: Speaking of the forums, this week's 1CC project is Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts. How many points can you earn without continuing? My guess: Not very damn many. I will be participating, too, although I've left my twitch gaming skills in my other pants. The ones I burned in celebration after finishing Battletoads.
Retronauts is also a blog (again): Remember when Retronauts was just a bunch of video game musings, and you didn't have to hear my grating voice and halting attempts at spoken communication every time you wanted commentary on classic games? Yeah, well, I'm doing that again, beginning with a write-up on the completely fantastic Monster World Collection edition of Sega Ages. The weekly Retro Roundup series will also have a convenient hub page at some point today, so tell your friends. Between that and the blog and the podcast and the video thing I fully anticipate expanding to devour the entire 1UP network by 2009.
Just one last entry for that manga week thing I was doing, even though it was kind of, uh, more than half a month ago. Eh heh, heh.
Golgo 13 Vol. 7: Eye of God
Takao Saito | Viz | ten bucks
Nothing says vintage manga like Golgo 13! Even the new episodes published in the past year look like they were ripped straight from 1969. You kind of have to wonder what kind of careers the Saito Pro ghost artists could possibly go on to. "Well, for the past five years you've drawn Golgo 13 and have perfected imitating Takao Saito's stiff, dated, macho linework. So I'm not really sure that you're the right choice for our Yubisaki Milk Tea spin-off."
But you don't read Golgo 13 for its modern worldview (it's very much grounded in '20s pulp fiction). You don't read it for its great characterization (the main character is practically a non-character whose personality must be deduced by inference, and every episode features a fresh cast of incidentals). Or for the mystery of its outcome. Golgo 13 always wins the day, even when he kind of maybe shouldn't.
No, you go into Golgo 13 knowing that someone is going to die, and it's not going to be Duke Togo. Each episode is 100 pages of T. Saito and his pawns reminding you that their heartless anti-hero is way awesome. "How awesome?" you may occasionally wonder. And they answer, "Totally, totally awesome." And then someone's head snaps back, eyes wide with shock, a thin stream of blood marking the trajectory of their skull from where the M-16 bullet impacted.
In this chapter: A crazy but accomplished satellite analyst blackmails President Clinton. Golgo 13 does not care! Then the crazy scientist attempts to blackmail Golgo 13. Suddenly, he cares very much and the analyst freaks out, begging to be taken into protective custody. Because he knows. He knows that Golgo 13 is way awesome, and that his life is forfeit. Then his head snaps back, but his eyes are not wide with shock! That is because Golgo 13 has placed a bullet through them, like the high-velocity jacketed slug rendition of Oedipus Rex. This is because the analyst fancied himself "the eye of God," and also he was a creepy pervert voyeur. It is heavy-handed, symbolic, moralistic murder at its finest.
The second half of the book takes place 20 years earlier, back when Golgo 13 actually appeared in his own stories for more than a page or two per episode. In a novel twist, he is hired not to kill but rather to nearly kill a woman, just to scare some sense into her. But someone screws things up and kills the lady, framing Golgo 13. I don't want to spoil the ending or anything, but there's a pretty good chance the perpetrator dies.
Also: Cromartie High School Vol. 9 arrived. It's not technically vintage but it definitely fakes an old-school "Crying Freeman" kind of look. Except in a high school setting. Unlike pretty much any other high school manga ever, it does not involve a single fuku-clad girl. At this point Cromartie's schtick is pretty formulaic, but it's an amusing formula. So that's alright.
Today's Battle of the Box Art dares to ask: Which design is more meta? The holistic (and wholesale) approach of Konami's new "greatest hits" line for DS? Or Sega's classic "what you see is what you get" Sega Card box design? Let the battle of literal self-referentialism begin!
So, this week? Pretty busy. Everyone here at the office is spending inordinate amounts of time over at the Moscone Center, trying to write about Game Developers Conference 2007 without being spat upon by said developers, who basically skulk about looking for an excuse to punch anyone wearing that white PRESS ribbon. We gave their work a bad review, once, and now it's personal.
Between dodging black eyes and broken limbs, I've been writing. A lot! We're supposed to keep our event write-ups brief, but. Ah ha, ha. Yeah. It's me. I have an allergic reaction to not being thorough. But hey, whatever -- it means everyone who didn't get to see Koji Kondo's impressive talk on interactive music in games still has a pretty good idea of what he talked about. And I'm okay with that. The Sakaguchi/Molyneux/Canadian Dude panel on RPGs was interesting in a different way, although my write-up for that comes off as pretty dry because the reasons for which it was interesting are mostly editorial in nature, and news stories ill need opinions such as those.
And then there was the Experimental Gameplay Session, which is closer to the core values of GDC than just about anything else and therefore has gone almost entirely ignored by both media and readers. Yes, we all suck. All of us. And there's no "us" without "u." I don't know how you can live with yourself.
Today: Final Fantasy XII postmortem, which will probably not be very interesting at all because Square Enix is a Japanese publisher and therefore vets every last bit of information. Seriously, I hear they go over presenter speeches in advance and cross out entire lines, like a bad parody of Catch-22. Which brings to mind the only way the post-mortem could be interesting: I find myself comforting a dying Matsuno ("There, there") as he bleeds out in my arms, and the press conference ends in comical chaos when Kawazu's whore bursts through the door, screaming, and tries to kill me. But! Probably not.
Oh, yeah, and I wrote up something on Super Paper Mario. I was a little bummed not to end up on the EGM/1UP review of the game, but in retrospect it's probably for the best. The judges always throw out the high score anyway, and I have trouble imagining myself giving it anything less than a WOWOWOW/10. Like FFXII, it's pretty much a game designed for my specific sensibilities: Creatively retro-styled art, fairly open-ended gameplay, classic platform jumping. And most of all, it plays hell with ingrained preconceptions about 2D gaming, something I've long wanted to see in a game.
Every time I get stuck in a Castlevania game and find myself staring at all the decorative doors in the background, I wonder "Why is Soma too stupid to break out of the 2D plane and go through one of those?" Every time I try to envision a game like GTA as a side-scroller, I wonder why someone doesn't create a 2D game that allows the world to be rotated by 90-degree turns, essentially placing players on a grid that can be explored on either its x or y axes. Every time I play Klonoa and chuck an enemy into the background, I wonder why I can't just hop over there myself. And so forth. And Super Paper Mario lets you do that, to some degree, and that makes it completely awesome. The fact that it's probably another wonderfully solidly-made work of excellence by Intelligent Systems is pretty much gravy (the kind that's not bad for your arteries).
In any case, it will definitely be better than Wario: Master of Disguise! I apologize for anyone whose hopes I inspired last month when I said it wasn't too terrible. I hadn't played the rest of the game yet, you see. Nintendo really needs to start protecting its properties from this kind of disaster. The last thing it needs is a stable full of Sonic the Hedgehogs.
Such is the madness surrounding GDC that I was unable to pimp the latest Retronauts Bonus Stage yesterday. Trés horrifique! But better late than never, I 'spect. Warning: May contain disturbing themes, including terrible video games, frank discussions of the human reproductive cycle and child molestation. That last one wasn't our idea, though. Blame Namco.
And just to clear up a tragic misperception about this video, we're not calling all the games in this episode terrible. In fact, only the last few are. Zelda II? Pretty okay. Fire Emblem? Right jolly. Shin Megami Tensei? Inscrutible and completely unsuited for American bible morality, but who could hate a Megaten? No, our vituperation is reserved for Ikki, Ninja Jajamaru-kun and Wonder Momo. They are, in the parlance of our times, not very good.
Bonus Stage is the most enjoyable thing I've done with my job in several years, by the way, so I'm very open to feedback. Feedback = better show = more popular show = I get to justify spending more of my time on it. So really, it's in your best interests to offer suggestions for improvement. You could also Digg it or subscribe to its iTunes feed. Once Bonus Stage becomes a certifiable hit, I turn into a real boy.
Holy crap, earthquake. That's the first time I've felt one in the comfort of my own home. Usually I get to enjoy them from the comfort of the office where, eight stories in the air in a building designed to dissipate kinetic energy slowly, it's a bit like riding a Six Flags ride made of half a block of concrete, steel and glass. Or on the train, where it feels like the brakes have suddenly ceased to exist. This time, I just sort of felt the apartment shear sideways and groan a bit with stress. I can't decide which sensation is the most nauseating.
Anyway! Time for more reviewery. Oh, but first, go download and listen to the new Retronauts. It's boss.
Man, I sure do love me some old manga! Drifting Classroom 4 wasn't the only venerable book released last week; also on sale (and of much greater interest) was the first volume of To Terra, which rolls '70s-style shoujo comics and '70s-style sci-fi comics into one nuggety ball of happiness. Happiness for me, I mean. The characters are more about the Angst, of course.
The story is nothing spectacular, your typical '70s fare. There's a dire warning about mankind failing to love mother earth, the requisite cold-hearted government that treats its citizens like assembly line products for some nebulous "greater good," and lots of hand-wringing about persecuted minorities. In this case, the minority group is the Mu, a mutant splinter of humanity gifted with telepathy (a gift which is all too frequently offset by various crippling handicaps). You can pencil in the name of any minority group you want here, really: Jewish, black, female, gay, Rush fan, whatever. Unsurprisingly, humanity hates and fears the Mu, who are systematically murdered when their latent skills awaken. Usually at puberty. This is much to Senator Kelly's delight, no doubt.
Much like the Hulk, Mu just want to be left alone, so they band together deep underground in a buried starship called Zion and shield themselves telepathically from humanity's scanners. Their leader is a man named Soldier Blue, who wants to lead the Mu back to the source of human life, Terra. You know, Earth. Apparently the planet that humanity's government calls Terra isn't actually the real Earth, and Soldier Blue figures the best place for Mu to find some peace and quiet is to go back to the real Terra, now deserted.
I guess. The story isn't really clear on this point, and honestly it doesn't matter, because the story is the least remarkable element of To Terra. Far more compelling is the artwork, a beautiful and delicate pastiche of the Osamu Tezuka/Ribbon Knight template with a flavor uniquely its own. Takemiya's work alternates between concretely narrative and enigmatically abstract. Standard storytelling sequences frequently branch into swirling full-page explorations of space, time, darkness and the subconscious mind, with fairly minimal use of screentone; instead, Takemiya creates fluid, organic greys with crosshatching and other pen techniques largely abandoned by modern manga.
Of course, it's a shoujo book, so everyone is impossibly beautiful, bordering on androgynous, with large eyes and lush lashes and lanky frames. But even so, the art takes bold visual risks, pushing beyond the limits of genre to be its own thing. As a result, the book has a distinctly '70s look but avoids feeling dated; unlike The Drifting Classroom, the art is never stiff, never cramped. Just as with the original Star Wars, the visuals elevate a fairly standard period sci-fi tale -- one that would feel perfectly at home in a yellowed paperback with a worn cover and "25˘" penciled in at the top of the title page -- into something far more enjoyable. It's a few dollars more expensive than the usual $10 going rate for manga, but offers a larger format and a higher page count to justify the price. So I guess what I'm saying is buy this now.
Is there anything more depressing than stories about survivors of nuclear armageddon? Alas Babylon, Grave of the Fireflies, When the Wind Blows -- they all present a very clear picture of the fact that the people who die in the flash of ground zero are very, very fortunate. Because the ones who don't slowly waste away as their bodies fail over time, succumbing bit by bit to radiation poisoning.
Nothing says vintage manga like Golgo 13! Even the new episodes published in the past year look like they were ripped straight from 1969. You kind of have to wonder what kind of careers the Saito Pro ghost artists could possibly go on to. "Well, for the past five years you've drawn Golgo 13 and have perfected imitating Takao Saito's stiff, dated, macho linework. So I'm not really sure that you're the right choice for our Yubisaki Milk Tea spin-off."
Man, I sure do love me some old manga! Drifting Classroom 4 wasn't the only venerable book released last week; also on sale (and of much greater interest) was the first volume of To Terra, which rolls '70s-style shoujo comics and '70s-style sci-fi comics into one nuggety ball of happiness. Happiness for me, I mean. The characters are more about the Angst, of course.