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?…
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Xenoooooooooo!!
30 April 07 | 22:17
Looks like it's time for me to jump back into the manga review thing -- my copy of To Terra... Vol. 2 has arrived, and I can't wait to read it. I loved the first volume, and the second promises to be --
-- wait a minute. That's not... that's... it's....
Gah! Curse you, Pokémoooooooooon!
Man, that's almost as bad as learning that Nintendo has purchased a majority stake in Monolith, raising the distinct possibility that in their desperation to get original RPG content on the Wii they'll revive the Xeno series. There are two ways this could be acceptable: (1) KOS-MOS themed power-ups in the next Kirby game, or (2) Paper Xenogears.
---- CONTENT WHORING SECTION BEGINS HERE ----
Jeanne D'Arc looks pretty solid! It's an original tactical RPG for PSP. As in, not a port. Crazy, eh? Meanwhile, Revenant Wings is not quite as good as it should have been, but unlike some people I'm not really convinced it's a total loss. The fact that it's basically just a Final Fantasy XII facelift for Heroes of Mana is a letdown, but it's not the cakewalk that it might sound like -- the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly. And watching mobs of Final Fantasy monsters beat the crap out of one another at your bidding is pretty much awesome.
Well, okay, I wouldn't go so far as to call Final Fantasy: Anniversaryfeculent, per se, but man, it really has some issues. Rest in peace, Square. You were glorious, inventive, flawed but magnificent in your time, before the dark times. Before the merger. You done good all those years, and I can't think of a more glorious swan song than Final Fantasy XII. I'll pour a 40 of Potion on the curbside in your memory.
Because seriously, who wants to drink that crap?
My vow to swear off of Pokémon has been only moderately successful. I'm not really playing, but when I can pop open my DS lid and get a five-minute fix anytime, the clock time adds up over the course of the day. Mostly I've been dooting around with the breeding and trading mechanics. The Global Trade System is a glorious invention, and I've found that certain uncommon or version-specific creatures make for excellent bargaining chips. I have duplicates of all three starters thanks to my mad scheme to breed Combees and Heracrosses, for instance.
I do feel a little guilty about the breeding thing, honestly. Someone sends me a level 1 Piplup and the first thing I do is send it to the mating farm to start churning out babies. You hear complaints that the game encourages cockfighting, sure, but the "child sex trafficking" aspect is, in my opinion, far more vile. Nintendo, what values are you teaching our children?
One of the forum regulars compared Pokémon to Animal Crossing, a comparison that had been lurking somewhere in the bowels of my mind. More to the point, the two games share some common principles -- making Pokémon a sort of compressed take on some of Animal Crossing's mechanics. There's lots of side crap to keep you distracted, lots of daily things to juggle (the Berry Master, for example), lots of social trading, lots of things to collect obsessively. And then when you get bored of all of that you can mosey back onto the main story track.
Of course, for those who sneer at Pokémon for being repetitive kiddie fluff, there's this week's Retronauts. It's about Diablo. Which is built on a similar kind of repetition feeding obsessive-compulsion, except with devil motifs, so therefore way more mature. Or whatever.
Mnargh, I need to shake off the cobwebs and do something useful with this site. Like, I don't know, update it or something. I think I am suffering a case of blogjam after ten days of blitzing through Pokémon, which segued immediately into reviewing Final Fantasy Anniversary, which is going to take me right up to tackling Odin Sphere. And Revenant Wings is due in about three days. What is wrong with publishers that they send me all the good stuff right at once? (Uh, except FF Anniversary. It's merely... interesting.) I haven't even touched Super Paper Mario, and Intelligent Systems actually created that game specifically for me. No, it's true, I'm sure of it. I feel like such an ingrate.
I guess in lieu of actually writing something worthwhile I'll just flog my other stuff. Like how Ray and I are turning the Retronauts blog into, hopefully, something worth reading. And I'm backing it up at this site, because apparently 1UP deletes old blog entries now, or something? I'm not entirely clear on the concept, but in any case if you ever need a one-stop Retronauts blog archive stop, this is it. You should check 1UP's version first, though, so I can trick all the stat trackers into thinking I'm useful.
And of course, there's always a weekly Retro Roundup. Bonus Stage is still MIA, but for a good, encouraging reason: I've gotten my hands on Final Cut and am trying to learn it. No more filthy, useless iMovie for me, thanks.
Finally, Dewy's Adventure is so adorable I could vomit, and not strictly in a good way. And I say this as an adult male with an uncharacteristically high tolerance threshold for cuteness. The sort of person who finds it annoying that his pokémon start looking tough and angry when they evolve past their baby forms. But Dewy... Dewy goes, maybe, a little too far. Still, I really like the gameplay -- a lot -- so I guess maybe I can stifle my gag reflex for the time it'll take to finish it once it comes out.
Downtime! It has been plaguing the site lately -- and it is not my fault. No, the blame rests fully on my host, who seems to be having some widespread issues. Hopefully they're all better now. But if not, please be patient. (Because I've prepaid for about three years' hosting and I sure don't intend to move elsewhere.) Obviously the site hiccups have impacted my ability to update, but here is hoping everything is resolved.
My Pokémarathon has paid off in the form of a lovely review. (Disclaimer: May not actually be lovely.) I... am going to keep playing. I may go back and play some of the GBA games. I want to complete my pokédex. This saddens me.
Also, be sure to download this week's Retronauts. It's widely regarded as the best ever! Notably, I talked less in this episode than in any previous episode. Is there a correlation between these two facts? I don't want to make any definitive statements... but, yeah.
I have been playing too much Pokémon, I think. This is the drawback to a marathon review playthrough: Even when I am listening to music on my iPod, the game's battle themes are bouncing around the inside of my skull. But it gets worse. As I work on other things, I'm contemplating a trip back to grab that Clefairy I missed, and I want to check to see if anyone on the Global Trading Station offered the Chimchar I requested. I've even added my friend code to the requisite message board thread. And I skipped doing this week's Bonus Stage so I could chug through for my review.
What am I becoming?
Oh, right, a nerd. Nothing new, there. Carry on.
Actually, the real reason I skipped doing Bonus Stage is because I've decided that I'm tired of hating my existence. Currently, the video production cycle consists of me spending my entire weekend editing things together with my own software on my own hardware with footage of games I've bought for the purpose. I haven't actually had a weekend in more than two months. There's dedication, and then there's retardation, and I'm pretty sure I crossed the line somewhere along the way. So... until I can rein things in a bit and not have to sacrifice all my free time to create it on substandard tools, Bonus Stage is taking a break. This will prevent me from dying by June, which means I'll be able to continue creating Bonus Stage beyond June. It's victory all around.
Bonus: Serebii.net and Google's ad targeting system deserve some huge props for laying bare the deep-seated insecurities of most adult Pokémon fans in three little words:
Sharkey has, rather impolitely, called me out on a terrible character flaw. Right to my face! But it's true. I have a horrible, terrible, no good, rotten weakness for making stupid puns and pun-like jokes. I've been living in denial all these years.... even though my name is in the back of a couple of ancient Xanth books as a pun contributor.
Look, I'm sorry. I was young and stupid and lived in Texas. I didn't know from "culture" back then.
Anyway, now that I'm working on the US version of Pokémon Pearl, I realize that I'm in my punny element. (It's super effective against good taste!) It's a game about collecting hundreds of monsters and personalizing them all, which includes assigning them a name, the space for which has been bumped up from five characters in the Japanese version to ten characters in the US. And herein lies my downfall. I will be catching 'em all. But not to complete my pokédex, oh no. No, my obsessive compulsion stems from a desire to come up with as many ridiculously pun-laden names as possible. My hard-hitting starter Turtwig is now Slamfibian. And my electricity-powered Shinx is now Denba, which is shameless if you know the Japanese word for electricity and realize how much a Shinx looks like Kimba. Yes, I'm making bilingual puns with a language I don't fully understand. Yes, I realize that means I don't deserve a happy life.
I am getting one anyway, though, because Mega Man ZX Advent looks like it recaptures everything good about MMZX but fixes up all the problems. The map, for instance, is actually quite good. And the ability to become your enemies (rather than simply mimic their abilities) is delectably Jungian. I think. Anyway, it looks good.
Star Force, on the other hand, looks merely decent. But back on the first hand, our Infaune interview got off to a rocky start but turned out to be absolutely great, so you'll see that sometime or another. A few weeks from now, I'd guess.
Finally, the producer of the current Mega Man games has Zero's hair and, as Ray noted, dresses like a Battle Network character. A track jacket over a shiny, metallic, padded shirt? Good lord.
Tragically, I was not able to ask him about the picture I posted the other day; it was difficult enough to talk to him about the games over the noise of all the trapeze artists. And here you people thought the term "media circus" was just an expression.
I'm about to head over to Capcom's "gamer's day" event to learn about their stuff for the coming year. Games or whatever. Fortunately everyone was nice enough to put me on the Keiji Inafune/Mega Man 20th Anniversary interview instead of, say, the interview with the Ultimate Ghosts 'N Goblins guy. Lucky break. Although I guess it would have been interesting on a dark and painful level.
Capcom hasn't confirmed that ZX Advent is coming to the U.S., but I'm hoping it's shown today. Just so I can ask what's happening in this picture. It's very pretty but uhhhh what
Also of note: A Lost in Blue 2 review destined to annoy the easily-annoyed, and the latest Retronauts. Oddly the podcast is slightly broken so you may want to hold off on downloading it until I can get the corrected version uploaded.
Cut from this episode: tons of off-topic chatter (which may startle you, given how much I left intact), and Sharkey's horrible unintentional neologism "wopanese." I think he meant "wapanese" -- i.e. a while boy who wants to be Japanese, i.e. anyone who reads MegaTokyo -- but somehow that one letter changed it into a slur against 2/3 of the Axis Powers. Please do not alert the Reverend Al Sharpton to this fact.
I'm pretty new to this Pokémon thing, as I've mentioned repeatedly, but I've decided to play a ton of the Japanese version of Diamond in preparation for my upcoming review. I've heard that Japanese critters can be traded with the U.S. game, so here's hoping this isn't a scurrilous lie and I'll be able to import ridiculously high-level creatures and breeze through the final American game. But even if not, at least I'm learning the basics of the game!
The basics like, uh, rock-paper-scissors. I guess I have the hang of it since I managed to take down the first gym leader's three critters in four moves total. Or maybe that's just because I was wandering around lost from not speaking the local language for so long that my team seriously overleveled. Who knows!
Meanwhile, why did no one tell me that To Terra... is now an anime! Or if you did tell me, why didn't you draw more attention to yourself so that I'd notice? Honestly, what am I paying you people for?
I really hope this makes it stateside -- well, provided it's a good adaptation. Which it should be, unless they're just trying to make me sad. The producers were certainly on the right track by getting Nobuteru Yuuki to update the character designs; his figures are a great compromise between Takemiya's wispy '70s-style artwork and the cleaner, more angular look required by contemporary anime.
I don't really do the fansub thing, like, ever... but should anyone happen to come across some that happen to include To Terra.... lemme know.
If this episode of Bonus Stage seems a little weird, it's because:
1. There was a horrible tape glitch that caused a lot of the live footage to become unusable. So a pair of pretty good conversations was whittled down to a jumpy mess out of necessity.
2. I decided to try a cold reading of sorts by not doing any serious research into the topic or refreshing my memory on the SNES game so that the burden of clarity would be on the other guys' shoulders. (They acquitted themselves quite well!)
Anyway, this and the ol' Retro Roundup are up. And stuff.
Meanwhile, you should take part in this week's 1 Credit Challenge. It's Elevator Action, so it's not like we're talking a major time commitment, you know? Play it for five minutes and post with your score. Pretty easy, folks.
A long time ago, I watched an anime called They Were Eleven. Today, I finally got around to writing a... well, I don't think it can accurately be called a review. You know how I sometimes free-associate about things and kind of halfway sort of express a vague opinion but mostly get all bogged down in stupid asides so you can't really tell what the actual point is? Yeah. I wrote one of those.
Really, the point is that you should watch this movie sometime or Frol is totally gonna plug you between the eyes with her space taser.
I've been on something a previews-writing kick lately. I guess it's because I heard our previews editor recently won the lottery and I'm hoping he'll write me into his will if I do nice things for him. Sadly, this is a lie, though I certainly wouldn't complain about a vast financial windfall right about now.
Today sees a rather extensive Heroes of Mana English version hands-on write-up, which game I must say surprised me. Real-time strategy is among my least favorite genres ever, mainly because I hate feeling rushed when I'm gaming and that's entirely what the genre is about. Hurry or the zerglings will get you! But having played a bit of Heroes in English, I'm actually liking it. I guess I'm easily swayed by the ability to command a legion of Rabites and Kid Goblins.
Good thing, too, because from what I can tell Heroes of Mana is exactly the same game as Revenant Wings, and I would be so, so sad if I ended up not liking that.
Mana creator Koichi Ishii was on-hand for the demo, and I have to say he was probably the least engaged developer I've ever met. Usually people are all too eager to show off the details of their creations, but we had to drag every last nugget of information out of the man. I'll chalk it up to jetlag, because I'm a generous soul. And there were a few among those nuggets were genuinely interesting: The company reps spent a lot more time talking up the connection between Heroes and Seiken Densetsu 3 than you'd really expect considering the latter has never seen a U.S. release, which means that they're at least aware of American interest in the game even if they don't plan to publish here, like, ever. And I hadn't realized that the Mana series doesn't have a single continuity but rather consists of a number of alternate worlds and realities tied together by the Mana Tree. That's great, because it spares us the pain of fanboys trying to reconcile a bunch of plotlines that were never meant to be cohesively coherent. Here's hoping Nintendo will take the hint and do likewise with Zelda to spare us all those retarded "split timeline" theories.
Also: A Pokémon Diamond/Pearl preview which is about 40% informative and 60% me being a smartass. In a shocking jolt of synergy, it serves an editorial tie-in with this week's Retronauts, which is 20% informative and 80% smartass. I think that works out to about 30% informative by average volume.
Despite my historical disinterest in Pokématters, I am actually quite looking forward to Diamond; I've played more of that in Japanese than I have of any other game in the series in English. I can't decide if it's because it's suitably refined to the point where it finally appeals to me, or if I'm just inherently incapable of hating DS games. I probably would have even liked Xenosaga DS if Namco had brought it over!
Just kidding. Not even the DS can redeem that series.
That latest pair of previews I've cobbled together for 1UP proves that while everything old is new again, the reverse is also true.
Tomb Raider Anniversary is way better than I had expected -- it's no callow bit of shovelware but a total retrofitting of the best game in the series that keeps all the good stuff while bringing it up to current standards. You know how Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes tried doing the same thing but ended up being horribly broken because they just used levels designed for a more simplistic skill set? Anniversary's levels are completely retooled so that Lara's newfound ability to move without being constrained by a grid doesn't let you simply breeze past entire chunks of the game. And it looks nice! So thumbs up all around.
Meanwhile, Etrian Odyssey is compulsively addictive in the best old-school way, and even includes deliberate throwbacks to old PC RPGs. You have to make your own maps! It's quite charming. As is the character art. And then you venture into the dungeon proper and promptly have your sad arse handed to you by every new monster you encounter and you realize the charm is all a grim lie to lure you into a false sense of security. But it's too late because you've begun customizing your team and are addicted to the exploration and level-building. I had to beg off reviewing it since the localization was (expertly) crafted by a good friend and former roommate/coworker, which I figure probably counts as a conflict of interest, but if I were reviewing it I would give it a glowing write-up, I'm sure. Glowing through the bruises inflicted by its vicious difficulty.
Also, yesterday's Retronauts session was the best we've ever done... so for the time being I'm not feeling quite so gloomy about the venture's future. We'll see if we can sustain this quality. My guess is probably not. This is not pessimism! It is an extrapolation based on prior data.
Could this woeful tale possibly be the best blog entry of all time? It combines so many things I love: Video games, Marillion, and tracking the arc of Sony's descent. I'm not sure that it would be possible to spin a tale more capable of warming my heart.
I guess it would have been even better a few months ago when poking fun at Sony seemed more like sport and less like bullying, though. If it makes you feel better, I'm okay with picking on Nintendo, too. I've even coined a term to describe their current approach to the console market: "Waggling the dog." That is, the idea that it's wacky controller schemes rather than elegance of design that will win the day.
I absolutely believe in the grand ambition behind Wii -- expanding the console market by reaching out to new audiences, lowering barriers to interface accessibility, etc. -- but Wii game design is really getting sidetracked, hung up on the ridiculous notion that a game's interface has to be unique. Koji Igarashi has taken a lot of flack for his reluctance to develop for Wii due to his assumption that he'd have to tack motion controls onto Castlevania, but it's easy to see why he'd make that assumption when everyone else, even Nintendo, is doing the same. Super Paper Mario is a good example: An utterly genius game on so many levels, but was it really necessary to add the controller-shaking? I say thee nay.
Come on, everyone, you sorted it out on DS and no one (except Itagaki, apparently) has a problem with not forcing ill-conceived stylus controls into a game. Let's see the transitive property of common sense in action, here.
Buuuuut anyway, the moral of this story is that I spend more time playing 360 than Wii and PS3 combined these days, which is vaguely alarming to me on some deep, fundamental level. And also you should buy Marillion's new album when it comes out later this month. No, shut up, they're really good. Come to think of it, those aren't really even morals, just petty demands and useless observations. So never mind all around.
I'm fairly pleased with the way this week's Bonus Stage turned out, even if it didn't go entirely as planned. It was supposed to be an in-depth discussion of the classic Mega Man series (1 through 8 with maybe a little Mega Man & Bass for good measure) but mostly turned into us talking about how much MM2 rocked. Which I suppose is fair, because it did.
The ending credits are maybe a little over the top, though. And they're kind of abrupt, but you can blame that on the fact that I was addled on drowsy sinus medicine last night when I edited everything. It seemed okay at the time, but I guess I can't trust my judgement when I'm stoned on cold medication.
