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GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 10.4
31 July 09 | 07:48 | Posted by:
Wario Land II
The first Game Boy I actually owned myself was the Game Boy Color, which I bought as an import at the Japanese launch. And the first game that made me fully appreciate that Link's Awakening wasn't a fluke and that portable games could be just as meaty as the console counterparts was Wario Land II. It is what you might call a true classic, if you were the type to sling about such phrases.
GameShark
Still plugging away through this week's content, this time with a little mini-article. Is it strange for us to publish a fond retrospective about a device designed entirely for cheating? Yeah, well, that's the GameSpite difference: we're just as reprehensible as everyone else, but we're honest about it.
Someone once told me that being in Washington, D.C. in the summer is like being surrounded by the breath of a giant dog -- stinky, humid, hot -- and I've gotta say that being a little ways outside D.C. isn't much better. After weeks of being constantly cold in San Francisco's misty, windy, sub-60 temperatures, stepping off the plane in Baltimore was like suddenly being smothered beneath a sticky wet blanket. Kind of a shock!
Equally shocking is that my finacée's nephew and niece have already begun calling me "uncle Jeremy." I guess I have to start being an adult now. My first odious task: I have to figure out a way to let my new nephew down gently. He seems to think I make games rather than merely write about them and has been pumping me full of concept pitches ever since I landed. His most developed concept so far -- which is, and I quote him here, "really awesome" -- involves flying a plane trying to avoid lightning so you can collect money. Surprisingly, I can't seem to find a single game that actually uses that as its premise. I think think it might be easier to download some kind of freebie game dev engine and whip up something ridiculous for him to play than to crush his tiny heart by admitting that, sorry, your rad new uncle is actually just an uncreative hack writer.
Anyway, here's something someone else wrote. Man, I don't even do my own writing now! My life is an empty lie.
Pokémon Red & Blue
Yeah, like we were going to publish a comprehensive Game Boy retrospective without touching Pokémon. What a great idea that would have been. Maybe we could have followed it up with a piece on PlayStation that never mentions Final Fantasy or a ZX Spectrum history that ignores the existence of Ultimate Play The Game. I'm, like, so sure. Whatever.
Swan Song: Game Boy Stages a Comeback
Much as I hate to parcel out content in little driblets, that's the only way I'm going to keep our online reprints of GameSpite Quarterly 1 moving at a proper pace. Between vacation and wrapping up Quarterly 2 (and, oh yeah, my job), I'm strapped for time. Anyway, this driblet here concludes the issue's arc of historical narrative. Quite nicely, too, if I do say so. More tomorrow!
I spent the weekend hunched over my laptop, putting the wraps on the layout and such for GameSpite Quarterly 2. My eyes are swimmy and my back hurts, but by gosh the book has been uploaded and proofs have been ordered (one for me, one for the copy editor). Assuming everything goes well, I expect the final result to be available August 20. (I know, that's nearly a month from now, but it takes a couple of weeks for Blurb to print and ship the press copies.) As a special extra to make me feel doubly accomplished, I also uploaded the subscriber bonus book and ordered a proof of that.
Is it rad? YES. It is rad.
Unfortunately, since I didn't wrap all this up until after midnight last night, I wasn't able to put together this week's GameSpite online update. I hope you can forgive me.
Incidentally, about two dozen people have thrown their hats in the ring as potential authors. It's great that so many people are interested! But since I'm only looking to add a couple of contributors to the mix, now I am dreading the inevitable 20 rejection letters I will have to mail out. Something to keep me feeling nauseous while I'm on vacation, I guess. It probably wouldn't be smart for me to relax too much, anyway; I get paranoid when things seem to be going too well.
As I put the finishing touches on GameSpite Quarterly 2, my mind is already racing ahead to the next issue. Since the first two volumes have featured fairly heavy topics -- a comprehensive look at the Game Boy's history and legacy, and rather personalized write-ups of Talking Time's favorite games ever -- the next issue will be much lighter in tone. Frivolous, one might even say. The assignments for Issue 3 are already being sorted out, so I figure now would be a good time for me to put out a call for new authors. We added a couple of new voices to the publication with Issue 2, but it's always good to have more fresh blood. So, I'd like to recruit two new contributors, assuming anyone's interested. Here are my unreasonably demanding criteria:
You need to know something about games;
You need to submit evidence that you know something about writing;
You need to be able to hit a deadline.
If you're game, please send some sample links and perhaps a brief cover letter to my email. I won't lie, if you contribute to GameSpite, you're doing it because you like writing about games, not because you wanna be rich. Contributors do earn some dough for their troubles, but this is hardly what you'd call a high-profit venture.
In other news, whoever updated Wikipedia with a link to the Metroidvania page but whose citation gives the site name as "Game Sprite"? You're friggin' fired.
Edit: Well, crap! A bunch of really solid writers have thrown in their hats. Now I must equip my winnowing fork and thresh, thresh with all my might. But maybe not today. I'm about to go on vacation for a week, so I'll get back to you dudes once I return.
Pfft, what do you think? I'm totally slacking off, of course. I took a whole half-hour for lunch! I'm sure I'd be finished with three or four issues GameSpite Quarterly by now (instead of plugging away at the second) if only I weren't so lazy.
I should be working on GameSpite Quarterly 2 layouts, but I felt the need to revisit the NES ABC project just to avoid anyone thinking it's a dead project a mere three posts in! After seeing the results, though, it probably wasn't time well spent. I work better when I focus, so this particular entry's artwork is a bit lacking. Ah well. Complaints I don't want to hear: (1) A Boy and His Blob should be filed under B; (2) technically, this drawing is of a girl and a frog-thing rather than a boy and a blob; (3) this is about the NES game but uses the Wii remake's art style; (4) this is about the NES game but uses the Wii remake's art style badly. Thanks for your cooperation, citizen.
ToastyFrog's NES ABC: A Boy and His Blob - Trouble on Blobonia
David Crane/Absolute | Magical Jellybean Quest | 1989
Yuki: I really enjoyed this game when I was young. I suspect the fact that I was too young to properly understand what I was supposed to be doing contributed to my enjoyment. Instead of trying to win the game, which I have recently discovered is a frustrating and unforgiving taskmaster, I simply had fun playing around in underground caverns with a boy and his adorable, mysterious Blobby, which would transform into strange shapes when fed candy. Another thing I recently discovered is that the cute version of the game I played was not the same as its original American version, in which the boy was an awkward stick-person and Blobby was a couple of simple geometric shapes. I think is is the only instance I know of in which an NES game was reverse-localized, with the ugly being taken out for Japan instead of added for the U.S.
ToastyFrog: Don't be racist. America is land borne from a grim, hardscrabble existence. Ugly things remind us of our ancestor's hardships. In that sense, A Boy and His Blob is a true act of patriotism, 'cause man is it ugly. It can be forgiven that, though, because it's suffering an identity crisis. It's really a good game on the wrong system, you see. It's very much the successor to the Pitfall! games, which were masterpieces on Atari 2600. It has the same sense of exploration and treasure collecting and unflinching difficulty, but it also adds a strange mutant creature to the mix. If this had been a 2600 game, wow, it would have been heralded from on high. But it arrived instead a few years too late and with a look that didn't really fit the NES's general style, so the whole thing feels a little off. It's interesting and fun, if you're patient enough, but don't expect to be coddled. Something tells me the upcoming remake is going to ditch the difficulty along with the ugly, but since the NES game's difficulty mostly stems from awkward collision detection and untelegraphed, blink-and-you'll-die hazards, I think I'm OK with that.
Well, I know what I'll be eating when I go to Tokyo Game Show this fall.
And I don't even like fast food burgers! But man, how can I not have one of these. At the very least, it's gotta be better than that horrible unrefrigerated teriyaki burger I tried last year.
Edit: Apparently these are not unique to Japan, which is boring. Now I'm angry, because I have to figure out some other exotic way to give myself stomach cramps while I'm over there.
You know, no matter how dreadful the G.I. Joe movie turns out to be -- though surprisingly, early word is that it's considerably less soul-crushingly lousy than certain other summer action films, if not precisely good -- I will always admire it for giving us another truly legendary toy. Introducing: Dennis Quaid, Man of Action.
The fascinating combination of jet pack, rifle, too-large-to-be-a-briefcase luggage, and short sleeve shirt says less "elite delta force commander" and more "your neighbor's scary dad going on vacation with the intent of shooting living creatures somewhere in the woods." See, just because the movie puts everyone in muted, mostly realistic military outfits doesn't mean they're actually any less outlandish than the original toy line's Village People approach to costuming.
Our house illustrator (one Philip "Nintendo Super Squad" Armstrong) has turned in his rough for the cover of our next issue, and so I present to you: GameSpite Quarterly 2.
Obviously, this cover is yet incomplete. The finished product will have full color, see. But you get the idea. This volume devotes approximately 175 pages to the 40 greatest* games of all time (or about 215 pages to the 48 greatest* games in the deluxe edition), and as I said the other day, the articles are fantastic. I know I put a lot of myself into the pieces I wrote, and that same devotion and effort comes through in everyone else's contributions as well.
Now, you'll notice an asterisk after the word "greatest," there. That's because "greatest" is such a subjective term! Our rubric: a few months back I took an informal poll of Talking Time in which I asked everyone to rank their five favorite games of all time. I didn't say why or for what purpose so as to guarantee frank, honest answers. We tallied up the results and compiled them into a list. And then we wrote articles about all the games on that list. And the articles are very good!
Of course, you can expect the results to be somewhat shaded by the source of this poll (namely, it came from forums attached to a site that began as a personal blog and has drawn readers who largely share my own tastes), so we make no pretense of this being some definitive list. It is simply our list, and the resulting collection of thoughtful, thought-provoking writings spawned from said list. That being said, it covers a pretty wide swath of content -- yeah, a lot of console games of a Japanese nature feature, but you'll also find a ton of western-developed games, especially for PC. I didn't edit or change the results in the least, and Talking Time pulls in people who love the span of gaming. So you'll see, say, Suikoden II in here, but it's sandwiched firmly between Star Control II and StarCraft.
All but two articles (both by me) are complete and edited and placed; I just need to wrap my last contributions and put together the splash pages and indices, and once that's done (which will be this coming weekend) I'll submit it for proofing. The final piece should be up for grabs by August 15. Please look forward to it, bow, etc.
The Quiet Years: Game Boy Toils in Obscurity
We move into the penultimate chapter of GameSpite Quarterly 1 with a brief intro to an equally brief section. There's a reason for this brevity! You see, our retrospective has reached that odd span of Game Boy's lifetime in which everyone was looking ahead and no one had any idea what a Pikachu was. Game Boy will resume its usual schedule of kicking butt and chewing bubblegum next update.
Sega Game Gear
Unlike Atari's Lynx, Sega's portable contender put in a fairly respectable showing for itself in the overwhelming odds thrown up by Game Boy's towering success. No, it didn't come close to toppling Nintendo's juggernaut, even in this subdued era... but as Lumber Baron reveals, it did pretty OK for itself regardless.
Nintendo Virtual Boy
Virtual Boy might well be the biggest mistake Nintendo ever made, but I've done something strange and unusual in this look back at Game Boy's would-be successor: I've actually analyzed what the system was designed to accomplish, and how it fits into the bigger picture of Gumpei Yokoi's works. I wouldn't call this a defense, per se... but I did at least try for "even-handed."
Street Fighter II
Sure, we've all played Street Fighter II. It's one of the most successful games of all time! It revitalized the arcade! It gave Super NES its first real advantage over Genesis! It made Sega move toward a six-button controller format! And it... was also on Game Boy? Lumber Baron again delves into the dark side of classic portable gaming for the full details.
Mario's Picross
Picross is the most fun you will ever have with math. Sudoku is boring and stale, but Picross isn't simply fun -- it's artsy, too! Well, if you consider mathematically drawing pictures of Mario icons "art." (I do.) While you're waiting eagerly for the release of Picross 3D, why not stay in practice with Loki's retrospective-cum-activity page feature?
I spent yesterday working on GameSpite Quarterly 2, and all but five articles have been edited and placed in the book. After sorting through things (and confirming that the book is only about 75,000 words rather than the 300,000 BBEdit was telling me), it looks like everything will fit into a single volume! It might be slightly over the length of the last book, which means it could end up costing a dollar more, but honestly I'm willing to take that chance. This is the single best collection of game writing I've ever read, and I don't say that out of egoism; I only have a few pieces in this issue. No, the fact is that this issue's theme brought out the best in everyone -- we were all writing about topics we know intimately and have a passion for, and the results are truly exceptional.
It's a shame it'll only sell a couple hundred copies (at most), because these essays deserve a wider audience. I guess that's just the nature of the medicine we're peddling, and it's why I'm editing this publication in my spare time rather than under the auspices of a professional publisher. It's a trade-off of sorts: with great freedom comes great indifference, or some such. Ah well. At the very least, everyone who contributed can tuck one of these into their portfolio and... well, probably not find work with it, as this isn't the sort of writing that drives traffic. But at least our intentions are good!
In other news, despite having finished up with my Dragon Quest IX blogging for 1UP, I'm still plucking away at the game. This comes as a surprise to me, as I'd intended to set it aside once I'd covered the basics. But I'm kind of addicted, actually. This boils down to three things, I guess.
1. Freedom. I'm at a point where I could go and take care of some matters to advance the plot, but I went off-track a bit and opened up an entirely new continent to explore. And there is really nothing I like better in a game than exploration. DQIX has a pretty big world, too; not as vast as Dragon Quest VIII's, but still much more sizable than the worlds of the older games. And thorough exploration constantly yields places to mine alchemy ingredients, which brings us to thing two:
2. Alchemy. The ability to roll my own equipment is pretty compelling. I mean, just look at Shiva, here. She's got a Slime on her head -- well, a slime-shaped helmet, but still. Once I realized I was missing a single ingredient necessary to build this bit of gear, I couldn't put down my system last night until I had procured that last drop of Slime Jelly. And then: presto! Also, her shield and armor both resemble a turtle's carapace, so she's half slime, half ninja turtle. I love this game.
3. The Wi-Fi Shop. Every couple of days, you can log on and download new inventory for the game's wi-fi shop. So far I've seen a lot of things I couldn't otherwise buy: alchemy ingredients, naturally enough, but also much more precious things like stat-increasing seeds and even a Mini Medal. Also, for some reason, I was able to buy a birthday cake last night; I'm not sure why I'd need it, but hey. I confess: I've begun taking the time to grind for gold just so I can buy these limited-time items, despite my general disdain for that sort of obsessive behavior.
I think there's a story or something to the game, too, but who cares about that? I've got a slime armor set to complete.
I began compiling and editing the text for GameSpite Quarterly 2 yesterday. In the process, I discovered that we somehow created four times as many words as were published in the main 280-page portion of GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1, and I don't even know how many more words than were in the first Quarterly. Year One, Vol. 1 represented six months' worth of articles. This means that in the space of the past two months, we somehow penned as much text as had previously been published on this site over the course of two years.
I think we got a little carried away!
At any rate, that's good for you, because that wordiness was the result of our enthusiasm for the topic. We'll be breaking the second issue into two parts, meaning it is now the second and third issue (the latter to be published in November). This will keep the price reasonable for what is supposed to be simply a dense magazine, and it will also keep me from going insane trying to copy edit more than a quarter of a million words in the space of a weekend or two. I'm sure we can all agree this is for the best! Expect more concrete info on the second (and third, I guess) issue as we roll into August. If everything goes as planned, you will be reading your very own copy of our next quarterly journal a month from now. Or maybe reading a friend's copy, ya danged freeloader.
Also in book news: the subscriber bonus book will be submitted for proofing today, and yes, I'm already plugging away at Year One, Vol. 2. What can I say? I like print. It's so very visceral. I do have a plan in mind to make the bonus book available to interested non-subscribers; details to follow.
Edit: After thinking about it, those numbers seemed a little fishy, so I recounted. Turns out BB Edit's word count feature tends to exaggerate! The complete issue is actually closer in length to Year One, Vol. 1 than a Robert Jordan novel... more reasonable, but still too long. So, I'll sort this out and figure out what's happening by the end of the weekend.
I like reading science fiction, especially stories about alternate realities. But some theoretical realities are too frightening to even contemplate! Like the one that Taxan's 8 Eyes came from, for example. Clearly, this is the hellspawned creation of a dark alternate world where Castlevania was made by a bunch of soulless monsters who hate fun (and people who like to have fun). What a terrible world that must be.
A lot of 8-bit action games were directly inspired by Castlevania, but 8 Eyes was a lot more blatant about it than most. The whole game appears to have been traced from screenshots of Simon's Quest, and the action even revolves around visiting a series of mansions -- sound familiar? Unfortunately, the developers must never have played the game they were knocking off, because they completely failed to realize that what made Simon Belmont's adventures so fun was that he was a limited but capable hero, with a lengthy attack range and access to useful secondary weapons. The hero of 8 Eyes is merely limited, not capable. His attack is a stubby little dagger rather than a whip, and nearly every enemy in the game has a longer reach than him and can soak up multiple hits; in order to hurt foes, you have to stand within their range and soak up their retaliation. Hit-and-run tactics work from time to time, but the controls are so poor (and the foes so much speedier than the lousy protagonist) that without impossibly great timing you'll just leave yourself even more open to attack. You do have subweapons, and you can even choose from among them! But they all suck, and ammunition is beyond scarce.
The selling gimmick for 8 Eyes is that the hero is accompanied by a falcon, which is ostensibly capable of attacking foes. In my experience, though, he just flies around and take damage, even when I put him on the offensive. Supposedly 8 Eyes is slightly easier if you play it cooperatively with someone else controlling the bird, but I can't think of anyone I dislike enough to inflict this game upon. I watched some YouTube playthroughs of this game out of curiosity and discovered that the only people who can play it well are soulless robots, probably ones that came from the same grim universe as this game.
In short, 8 Eyes clearly exists to tease Castlevania fans with a game that looks terribly enticing but is actually about as fun as running a cheese grater over your eyeball. It's not often a game makes me genuinely angry, but this insult makes me want to find the portal to that other world and stuff it full of high-yield bombs so that we can destroy the demonic fiends who created it and ensure they never hurt us again.
You may have noticed that I've been writing a fair amount about Dragon Quest IX at work lately. I'm doing this ostensibly because it's a huge game... but really because it's the first game that's truly hooked me since, hmm... the Dragon Quest V remake half a year ago, I guess. Certainly I've enjoyed a handful of releases since then, but so far these have been the only two I've been unable to put down all year. So, my previews and blogs aren't really so much an effort to drive traffic, because Americans just can't seem to bring themselves to give a slap about the series no matter what. No, really I'm just trying to perform an exorcism of sorts and put to the page precisely what it is that I find so gripping about the games.
It's particularly bedeviling given that a few years ago, my feelings toward the series were more along the lines of muted disinterest. And before that, I'd say it could best be characterized as outright antagonism. (Amusingly, I've found there are still a few fans of the series who sulk whenever my name comes up. It's always so fascinating to see just how long people can nurse an Internet grudge over opinions about videogames.) It wasn't really that the series changed (because it doesn't) or that I changed (because I still hold innovation in game design in high esteem); rather, the difference is that my understanding of the series matured. I'm still trying to pin that down, and as a result just about everything I've written about the series over the past year has teetered between evangelical and confessional. Sorry, that's probably getting annoying. And I'm sure this post isn't helping matters any.
If you'd told me 20 years ago that the NES game I got for Christmas, the one in the bright yellow box, the RPG (which stood for "role-playing game" and not "rocket-powered grenade" like my G.I. Joe comics had always taught me), would be inspiring me to embark on a journey of professional soul-searching, I'd have... well, actually, I suspect I'd probably have thought it was pretty awesome. Beats accounting for a living, in any case.
Hmm, I still have some rust to knock loose, it seems. This drawing took me much longer than it should have, but the background is still kind of terrible. Please bear with me! Sooner or later I'm bound to get it right.
For the record, this NES A-Z project isn't "one title per letter" or anything that limited. Neither is it comprehensive. I'm trying to strike an interesting balance. I guess we'll see.
ToastyFrog's NES ABC: 3-D WorldRunner, (The Adventures of)
Square/Acclaim | Fakey 3D Platforming | 1987
Yuki: I have always been confused about why Americans seem to hold the Square that existed during the 8- and 16-days in such high regard. Yes, they made some very good RPGs, but also they were responsible for an ocean of trash. Before the Square name became the same as Final Fantasy, it was seen similarly to many other hated developers, most of which are long dead now. Eventually I discovered the reason America loves Square, though: mostly you only received their good games here, the Final Fantasy and Secret of Mana type games rather than the racist Tom Sawyer adventures. On top of that, the company was very devious and tricky, publishing their worst games under the names of other companies.
The Adventures of 3-D WorldRunner is one such game. It was published by Acclaim, a name that inspired no hope of quality for NES fans. Such a clever ruse! By giving this terrible game to a terrible publisher, Square made money, yet most people didn't realize the true origins of this bomb. Maybe if you were very clever, you would have recognized the stupid 3D glasses gimmick from another more popular early Square game, the racer Highway Star which was called Rad Racer over here. But because they hid behind Acclaim, Square is able to publish popular games now without having to account for their former sins. Not so in Japan! I read all of those hateful reviews of Dragon Quest IX and most of them are by people who still hold a grudge over Square's early 8-bit games. (The rest are by 2ch'ers angry that Enix hasn't made a DS sequel to Lolita Syndrome.)
So what is 3-D WorldRunner? Well, it is similar to Sega's Space Harrier in that it features a character advancing along a pseudo-3D checkered playing field, avoiding hazards. However, Square decided to remove all the good things about Space Harrier, like the music and the impressive scaling graphics and the flying and the shooting. Yes, this is a game about an unarmed man jogging across a vast checkerboard, trying not to run into things. That is all. It is not a very good premise for a game, if you want my opinion.
Like many old Square games, 3-D WorldRunner was programmed by Nasir Gebelli, the Iranian savant who could do very impressive things with humble game hardware. Unfortunately, it seems his inspiration ran out at "create a colorful false 3D game technology" and no one bothered to develop an actual game out of his impressive idea. In modern times you would call this a tech demo, but back in the old days it was deemed acceptable to box it and ship it and charge the same price as a real videogame for it. I am always amused when I look back and see the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" on NES games.
Apparently this game was popular enough to warrant a sequel, called J.J. or Jumping Jack, but I don't know if it was any better than this.
ToastyFrog: Yeah, I tried it. Was it any better than the original? Well, let's put it this way. You know how Final Fantasy got its name because it was Square's last desperate attempt to create a successful, profitable game, and if it had failed it would have spelled the end of the company? Well, J.J. was the last game Square made before Final Fantasy. In other words, it was the final straw that led them to give their RPG such a fatalistic name. J.J. was very nearly the game that was so bad it killed Square.
Yuki: Oh. Well, I suppose that answers that question.
I was listening to Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway the other day and realized, hey, I should write about this. It's the perfect occasion -- the album's 25 years old! Then I sat down to write and realized I suck at math. It's actually 35 years old. I guess that makes sense, seeing as the band was on tour in support of it right around the same time I was born. Funny the way numbers interact with one another when your brain is functional enough to process them correctly.
I'd like to assume the GameSpite readership is familiar with my predilection for overblown progressive rock and thus realizes that when I say "Genesis" I'm not usually talking about the band that gave us Phil Collins-flavored pop in the early '90s but rather the earlier incarnation of said group that produced a number of really great album-oriented rock records throughout the '70s (often with the guidance, or at least wild-eyed leadership, of Peter Gabriel) and into the '80s. But this weekend was a stern reminder the makeup of the site's reader has changed over time. So: Genesis. The pompous '70s prog version, not the sappy '80s pop version. (Although Invisible Touch has its share of fine, fine tracks.) They recorded The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, one of those most inexplicable albums I've ever loved.
Lamb is a really weird album, and it was certainly made no more accessible to me by the fact that I approached the whole thing backward. I'm old, right, so I was heavily into music long before digital files and sharing; if I wanted to sample music, I had to either know someone who owned it and would make me a tape or else just buy it on faith. And with older albums by moderately obscure bands, the former was out of the question and the latter was difficult since the CD era hadn't really begun in earnest and British prog rock cassettes weren't a high priority for record shops to stock in Lubbock, Texas. I really liked the expanded tracks I found on Genesis's '80s albums, though, so I would buy my way further backward into their catalog as I had the money and could find copies of the albums. Early on I picked up Three Sides Live, a concert album whose highlight was definitely the intense, hard-rocking, 15-minute medley called "In the Cage/The Cinema Show/The Colony of Slipperman/Afterglow." I made it my mission over the following year to track down the studio albums on which these tunes originally appeared; two of them were from Lamb, so that was a high priority.
My copy of Lamb (a two-tape release issued in one of those clunky double-width cassette cases that have long since vanished into extinction along with CD longboxes and other such unwelcome relics) arrived on Christmas morning, 1990. It was the same morning that saw Mega Man 3 enter my possession as well. And The Guardian Legend. It was a pretty good haul, in other words. But eager as I was to tear into Mega Man's latest epic, my first order of business as soon as I was excused from the family gathering was to make a beeline to the dual-tape deck my father had won in some contest or another and listen to Lamb from beginning to end -- all 95 minutes.
I was bewildered. I'd had a little exposure to the concept of album-as-narrative before, but generally it was in smaller chunks, not a full hour and a half. To make matters worse, though, I had no idea what the narrative was supposed to be about. Right, Broadway, OK, now he's talking about Lenny Bruce.... oh, hey, "In the Cage," which sounds totally weird with Peter Gabriel singing it, and... what's with these weird sound effects? He's dying? What? What on earth is a Slipperman? What the hell is going on here!?
See, in the dark and terrible days of back catalog releases on cassette, publishers didn't bother to include anything in the way of liner notes -- just a one-sided slip with the album cover art and a track listing. For the most part, that was just a minor nuisance, since it meant I had to guess at who performed on a given album and improvise my own interpretation of lyrics. For Lamb, though, it was a disaster. Not only was I denied a full listing of the lyrics, but there was also an extensive short story penned by Peter Gabriel printed on the vinyl version's gatefold sleeve, and it explained the entire album. Well, "explained." It was hardly the most lucid work (the opening line was "Keep your fingers out of my eye," if that's any indication) but at the very least it would have provided some sort of context for the music. Eventually, I picked up a used copy of Lamb on vinyl, but it was a long time coming. Like I said, I went about the whole album backward.
Yeah, Lamb is one of those albums: an hour and a half of confused, dissociative narrative. The band performed it live in its entirety for a year, complete with elaborate changes of costume for Gabriel -- most of which prevented him from actually singing. The most notorious of these was the Slipperman costume, which I guess is supposed to be symbolic of STDs or something (the album's protagonist has an amorous encounter with a trio of lamias, who die in the midst of their tryst, leaving him in this hideous state). Gabriel was usually unable to get the mike close enough to his face in this outfit for his voice to be heard; on the concert version of Lamb the band put out about ten years ago, he had to go back in and redub "The Colony of Slippermen." No wonder he got kicked out of the band... and no wonder people hate prog rock.
Despite its rather overbearing nature, though, Lamb has some downright amazing music on it. Unlike most concept albums, all but two or three tracks are solid productions that stick in your memory for being either hauntingly melancholy, blisteringly angry, or just satisfyingly meaty. The album even managed to produce an unlikely UK radio hit, "The Carpet Crawlers," which apparently managed to overcome its inaccessible lyrics and lack of a strong riff through the strength of a beautiful melody sung by Gabriel with steadily building vigor. That's kind of the album in a nutshell: a mess, but a glorious, compelling mess. The story it tells concerns Rael, a Puerto Rican kid who finds himself swept into a magical underworld beneath New York City, led astray by a blind women and left for dead, only to make out with some lamias who leave him deformed. He restores himself through the magic of castration, but a wild raven grabs the tube that contains his detached private bits and drops it into a river; as he races to retrieve it, Rael is forced to decide whether to escape back to the real New York or save his brother from drowning. He picks the latter, and his brother turns out to be Rael himself. End of album. I'm pretty sure it means something, but since I learned to say "no" from Wally Bear's gang I've never been stoned enough to understand it. Alas.
Great music, though. Truth be told, I still enjoy it more than Mega Man 3.
Since we've reached the midpoint of the GameSpite Quarterly 1 online edition (both in terms of content and in terms of the quarter itself), I've decided to take this week off from the rather time-consuming process of online prep. Instead, I used my weekend to ride herd on the deadline for next issue's content (we're just missing three articles out of fifty now, I think), to kick off a new project I've been mulling for a while, and to play Dragon Quest IX. Um. Mostly the DQIX thing, actually. But also, the new project is below, and hopefully should shed a little light on what I've been working toward for the past few days. Perhaps you will think it's dumb, but who knows! Maybe not.
ToastyFrog's NES ABC: 1943 - The Battle of Midway
Capcom | Vertical World War II Shooter | 1988
Snappy Internet pundits can't seem to resist mentioning the fact that Capcom's 194X series is a group of vertical shooters developed in Japan, and whose premise revolves entirely around one American fighter craft single-handedly striking down upon the Japanese fleet what might be the nation's single most humiliating military defeat in its entire history. Lots of people like to speculate that this speaks of some sort of collective contrition or self-effacement on behalf of the people of Japan, but I'm pretty sure that's a load of hooey. (I asked Rorita about the psychology behind this game and she kicked me and told me to leave her alone, which suggests the Japanese retain their indomitable spirit! Or at least no small measure of early-morning crankiness.)
Nah, I don't think 1943 is Japan's way of saying "We're sorry for World War II," because by many accounts the game and its predecessor (bearing the unexpected title of 1942) caused a bit of a stir upon their release many, many years ago. And any time someone mentions Dragon Quest these days, some Internet kid thinks it's the height of cleverness to post a link to articles about how DQ composer Koichi Sugiyama is a hardline nationalist at the vanguard of a movement to proclaim to the world, "Screw you guys, we were totally awesome in World War II, and we'd happily pillage the Chinese mainland again if we had to do it all over!" OK, sure, that's pretty questionable, but the dude's like, 90. His nationalism is pretty much the celebrity version of a cranky old man shouting at kids for wearing loud clothes.
So no, 1943 doesn't say anything about Japan as a whole. But it does say a lot about series creator Yoshiki Okamoto: namely, that he's a wacky sumbitch.
Anyway, you might wonder why I began this A-Z chronicle of unique NES releases with a game whose title begins with a number, and which is probably better known for its arcade incarnation. For the former, I can only say it was a pointless arbitrary decision. For the latter, however, I'll say that 1943's NES port deserves a mention for being probably the most conservative of Capcom's late '80s arcade-to-NES conversions. The company's early NES ports like 1942 and Commando were, let's be honest, kind of terrible. But starting with Section Z, someone in the publisher's dank bowels realized that Nintendo's home console just wasn't up to snuff when it came to depicting high-octane arcade releases, so they'd be better off building replay value by adding some depth rather than churning out more shallow, watered-down efforts such as Trojan. This philosophy reached its pinnacle with Bionic Commando, which took loose inspiration from a pretty wretched arcade game and made it excellent. The nadir was Strider, which... yeah.
1943 came midway (pun only slightly intended) between Bionic Commando's inspired rethinking and Strider's completely missing the point. On the surface, it looked to be a visually downgraded, if fairly faithful, rendition of the arcade game. Players controlled a P38 Lightning against endless waves of Zeros before diving to a low altitude for a strafing run on a fleet of battleships. It didn't look as pretty as the arcade version, but everything else about it was satisfyingly consistent. However! As an NES-exclusive embellishment, Capcom added a tiny touch of what modern-day PR flacks would call "RPG elements" in the ability to upgrade the P38. After every few stages, players were given the opportunity to enhance different aspects of their plane, boosting its defensive power, or the duration of its special weapon counter, and so forth. It's a modest addition, but it adds some variety and replay value to what would otherwise be an utterly straightforward shooter. So that's good.
In any case, I don't feel bad about blowing up the Japanese fleet in this game, 'cause Japan went and dredged up the Yamato to turn it into a spaceworthy vessel while in the thrall of some sort of manic, rekindled nationalism the '70s anyway.
Like ToastyFrog, Yukiko took a side job as a website mascot back in the heady days of the Internet bubble at the behest of her parents, who insisted she get some real-world experience under her belt while spending time in America as an exchange student. Much to her dismay, she was hired and immediately given the alter-ego "Sailor Rorita," purportedly as an incisive critique of Japanese culture -- but more likely, she suspects, because it required her to run around with a short skirt and bare midriff. In any case, she eventually outgrew the alias (literally) sometime in high school and decided to continue her education in the U.S. She's a child of two worlds, reared in Japan yet having matured in America, and it's made her cynical -- a pessimist by nature, she's mostly come appreciate the worst things about both cultures.
Currently, Yuki attends college with the intent to become a teacher; her rather grand self-prescribed mission in life is to guide a generation of young adults away from the follies of modern society. She thus spends a lot of time studying pop culture to better familiarize herself with its shortcomings, and it's for this reason she continues to let her former coworker freeload off her. ToastyFrog is a sort of media sponge, adroitly soaking up televised inanities, and is a sort of living case study. He gets on her nerves (albeit unintentionally) like few others, especially since he still calls her "Rorita," but even if she wanted to get rid of him she's simply too hard-wired with passive politeness to lay down the law. And so does their uneasy relationship wobble into its second decade.
As her continued penchant for bubblegum pink hair dye and nearly genetic addiction to cigarettes suggests, she's probably not as immune to society's bad habits as she'd like to think.
I haven't really mentioned it yet, but the days of multi-person blogging at GameSpite are over. There'll still be articles aplenty, but it's once again up to me to keep the front page interesting using nothing but the powers of my highly-developed mind. Perhaps not coincidentally, traffic has dipped somewhat since everyone else bowed out! There's no real reason for the change beside the fact that the blogging experiment had run its course, and it seemed to confuse a number of readers when we had a bunch of posts by me with occasional interjections by others. So, this is a simplification of sorts. It's also a chance for the other writers to focus on things they enjoy more, while I can get back to the proverbial basics... whatever that means.
For starters, I recently experienced the alarming realization that this site is read by an awful lot of people who are newly-drafted and have no idea what a ToastyFrog is. Even though a whole bunch of people still access the site through the toastyfrog.com domain! Something about that just doesn't seem right. So:
ToastyFrog (real name: Tostifer) is the former mascot of a site created to cash in on the Internet boom. When the Internet imploded at the beginning of the decade and dragged his sponsor down along with it, Toasty never really figured out what to do next. He's not lazy, and he's not stupid; he's just naive, and remarkably unambitious. This could probably be attributed to self-consciousness about the fact that he's a freakish frog-thing and doesn't really fit in with the average crowd. He's surprisingly good-natured despite his acute awareness that he's a twisted parody of humankind, but he does tend to keep to himself and hasn't made many friends. He spends most of his time playing and replaying old videogames, since they're a nearly limitless source of free (if not entirely legal) entertainment. When he does venture out in public, he always wears baggy, hooded sweatshirts that obscure his features enough to cause those around him to assume he's a kid with an unpleasant skin condition rather than a grotesque abomination of nature.
His ultimate goal in life is to do something awesome, but since he's not really sure what precisely that would entail he's content to keep whiling away his time and freeloading off his impressively tolerant "hostess."
Between bouts of wiping flecks of drool inflicted by my frothing excitement for Dragon Quest IX from my face, I took a moment to dredge up this old thing, which slightly predates the current GameSpite blog format:
I've been trying to kick off the rust that's built up on my drawing skills over the past couple years of creative inactivity. Going back through nearly a decade of cartoons and illustrations for the subscriber bonus book (which should be in the mail by month's end) has reminded me that while I've never been a great artist by any means, my work wasn't actually as terrible as I thought at the time. I suppose I've finally accepted that what I want to draw and what actually dribbles out of my pen are two completely different things, and it was pretty stupid of me to abandon something I've enjoyed doing all my life just because the quality of my work will never rise above "merely tolerable." I can't decide if this is a heartwarming self-confirmation or simply a lowering of my standards to embrace mediocrity, but whatever. I'll roll with it.
I snagged a teeny-tiny (and stunningly inexpensive) Wacom Bamboo tablet to work with and promptly set about last night drawing an illustration of Capcom's 1943 for a new project. Since I'm so painfully out of practice, this consisted of copying a reference image from Wikipedia and completely failing to do anything interesting with it!
But even if this attempt kind of sucks and is unconscionably boring to boot, it's feels nice to be doodling again. Hopefully my efforts will improve in the coming months. Soon, I too shall once again be... mediocre.
I think we can all agree that G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra is going to be a terrible movie, though no doubt the degree of its terribleness will spark endless Internet debates. But it doesn't matter; the movie is merely a commercial for the essence of G.I. Joe, which is to say "little tiny plastic mans." The Rise of Cobra toyline landed at retail outlets across America this past weekend, so I decided to brace up against my crushing sense of poverty and pick up a few. Just a few, though. I realize that the eight-dollar asking price on these things is technically precisely in line, inflation-wise, with what the equivalent versions cost when I was a kid. Three bucks in 1983 bought about the same amount of food and stuff that eight bucks will net you now, right? But man, eight bucks for a little action figure is pretty dumb.
That being said, the new figures are shockingly great. My nine 2009 American funbuxx netted me a whole lot more detail and quality than my three 1983 dollars used to buy. I'm not entirely sure about the movie's design aesthetics, but I'll be doggoned if these aren't about the most impressive 1/18-scale toys I've ever seen. Yes, yes, Microman has more posability, but Microman is featureless blank plastic. These little dudes are crammed with insane amounts of sculpted detail and articulation.
So, for instance, while I'm not sure why they gave the Neo-Viper (left) and Viper Commando (right) facemasks that make them look like the hybrid baby alien from Alien: Resurrection, I can't deny that there's some quality design happening. Their uniforms look like reinforced fabric, and their body armor has all kinds of minute texture. I'm especially impressed by the Neo-Viper's gun/backpack interface which lets you attach his rifles to either side of his field kit, Mass Effect style. And despite all the detail, they're really posable and actually have a much better range of motion than a lot of simpler-looking figures Hasbro was producing a year ago. Sure, I don't really need it (since I pretty much just line up the toys on my shelf and leave them be), but if these had been the toys available when I was a kid I'd have been in friggin' heaven. The whole reason I started buying G.I. Joe figures in the first place is because they were far more detailed and flexible than Kenner's crummy Star Wars toys, and these are a few orders of magnitude more involved and playable than the best anyone could offer way back then.
Actually, that's the other thing that impresses me about the new toy line: they're intricate enough for stupid manchildren like me, but they're crammed with enough play value to appeal to kids. It's almost like Hasbro remembered who toys are actually supposed to be for! This, of course, has made many collectors angry. I'm trying not too hard to dwell on what this says about my peer group.
Basically, it seems like every figure in the line comes with a spring-loaded rocket launcher that's inexplicably longer than the figure is tall. Silly, but the springs inside have some pretty decent power, none of this "safe for your eyeballs" nonsense like most toys are hampered by. And reportedly the launchers can attach to vehicles and playsets. My favorite of these so far is definitely Scarlett's, the yellow one: not only does the missile look like a grappling hook, it's attached on a string to a smaller grappling hook, which in turn is connected to a plastic harness that the figure can wear on her back. Basically this means Scarlett can hold a rocket launcher and fire a missile so powerful it launches her into the air. Brilliant.
If I were about, oh, eight years old (like I was in 1983), these would be the most amazing thing ever, and I'm glad Hasbro went ahead and included them despite knowing that a bunch of sweaty forum rats would mope about their existence. Being a purported adult, though, I'm just going to blog about them with a modicum of self-conscious embarrassment, then quietly line the figures up on the counter behind my desk. It's what my eight-year-old self would have wanted.
And just like that, one of the greatest threads in Talking Time history has come to a close: Brickroad and McDohl's competitive solo mage playthroughs of Final Fantasy. If you've somehow missed it these past few weeks (and shame on you if you have), each participant took either a White or Black Mage, killed off the rest of their party, and struck out to save the world from Chaos's malevolent time loop. IKA and RUGA did their best, and now each journey has come to its conclusion.
Or has it? Perhaps there is more to be seen in this wild adventure. In any case, I can't recommend it enough. Please to be reading from the start so you can appreciate each and every brutal setback and soul-crushing defeat. Actually, you'd do well to start with Brickroad's standard Final Fantasy Let's Play, which inspired this whole mad ordeal to begin with.
This year at E3, Hideo Kojima announced no less than three new Metal Gear games. Or was it four? I've lost count. In any case, that is, by my reckoning, about three or four too many.
It's strange, but for the first time since I drooled over that ad for the NES game in 1988, the news of fresh Metal Gear content fills me with dismay rather than excitement. I've always loved the series, even despite its occasional (well, more than occasional) comical excesses, and I was right there on the front lines champing at the bit for Metal Gear Solid 4. Despite some very severe flaws and about 200% too much taking itself too seriously, I really enjoyed MGS4... once. But once I tried to replay it, I discovered that there's nothing I want less than to spend any more time in the Metal Gear universe. As far as I'm concerned, MGS4 is the final word on the series; as I've suggested before, there's too much baggage attached to the name now. MGS4 was 10 hours of brilliant game design and 10 hours of jaw-flapping verbosity about fussy plot points that ultimately didn't matter. Kojima Pro would be well served to take the great game mechanics and concepts that made the first half of MGS4 so enjoyable and spin them into something new.
That, it seems, is precisely the opposite of what's actually going to happen. By all impressions, Metal Gear Rising will feature a different play style -- probably something more melee-oriented and less about stealth and precision -- but it'll almost certainly be bogged down in Metal Gear "lore." Meanwhile, I'd really like to be excited about Peace Walker, because (1) Big Boss is awesome and (2) the name suggests it should come with a pedometer that links with the game and grants you special "peace points" based on your step count or something. Unfortunately, Peace Walker is a PSP game, which doesn't give me much confidence.
There's certainly nothing wrong with the PSP as a platform (at least technically -- Sony's idiocy is another matter entirely), but after all this time you'd hope a developer as high-profile as Kojima would understand how to work within a system's limitations. But if that were the case, Peace Walker would be designed around the PSP's lack of dual analog inputs and stick to the old-school top-down Metal Gear point of view. Alas, from what I can tell, Kojima's going for a post-Subsistence third-person camera style -- very modern and progressive, but also rather dependent on having proper camera controls. So it'll be Portable Ops all over again. Count me out, thanks.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but after seeing more and more classic series dredged up or dragged out only to be regurgitated in far less satisfying modern incarnations, I'm increasingly of the mind that most franchises have a shelf life that should be respected. Better to develop new concepts than capitalize on familiarity and ruin the goodwill of its fans. Metal Gear looks to be about a year beyond its sell-by date now, and things get pretty rotten when they've had a year to spoil.
Kirby's Dream Land
Ah, Kirby's Dream Land. That tenuous first step into the world of Kirby, before powers... and before pink. It's always weird to look at the box art and see the hero looking more like a ghost than like cotton candy, but that sort of creative uncertainty is precisely what makes this game so gosh-darned charming.
Bionic Commando
Hey, so you may have noticed I really like Bionic Commando a lot. And, you know, this Game Boy port is a near-perfect rendition of the NES game, with a few embellishments and additions. I can save you a click and a couple of minutes right now by saying, simply, so dang good. There, now you know the gist of the article.
Final Fantasy Legend III
Kirin puts the wraps on the Game Boy SaGa games with a brief look at the weirdly un-weird Final Fantasy Legend III. You know a series is pretty screwy when the "odd" chapter is the one that's most like a normal RPG. But this is the only SaGa game that wasn't helmed by Akitoshi Kawazu, this its black -- er, white -- sheep status.
Donkey Kong '94
Someone on Talking Time referred to this article as "The Donkey Kong '94 of Donkey Kong '94 articles." That's high praise indeed! And if you'd ever played DK '94 you'd understand precisely why. If not... well, it's never too late, even though Nintendo seems to have abandoned this masterpiece in favor of Lemmings-like offshoots. So it goes.
You know, what the world needs more of is rock music that flips the bird to that most boring of instruments, the electric guitar. Who needs it? The electric bass is the greatest lead instrument ever, but no one seems to realize it. Chris Squire's Fish Out of Water remains one of the best albums I've ever heard -- oh, sure, it's practically unbearable on first listen, but it's totally great, honest. I just wish its super-dense sound weren't such a rarity.
There's always Magma, I guess. They didn't necessarily can the regular guitars, but the instrument is almost always mixed so far down as to be little more than an accent. For instance, "The Last Seven Minutes" from Attahk is a blistering work built around a thick lead bass line (just wait out the 40-second drum intro):
The obvious problem being, of course, that Magma is completely insane, a French band singing about extraterrestrial exile in a completely invented alien language. It's like Scientology: The Band, except not a cynical ploy to bilk gullible celebrities of their life earnings (because I doubt Magma ever sold enough albums for its members to upgrade from a subsistence diet). But somewhere out in the world, there's gotta be someone sane who recognizes the genius of the lead bass, right? Please, enlighten me, humans.
Long-time readers of the site will be pleased to know that I continued my long-standing tradition (since 2003) of eating sushi, aka Freedom Fish, to commemorate the 4th of July this year. (This is what you come to the site to read about, right?) It was a rather more muted observance than usual, though, since I was supposed to be at a family reunion I couldn't afford tickets to, and my fiancée is currently somewhere in the midwest on assignment until September. Still, it's hard to feel too lousy about life while eating good food and gazing out the window at a serene Japanese garden.
Oh, yeah. All the sake I drank probably helped, too.
I live a few blocks from the offices of Marx Realty, which has long amused me. You know, the irony of using the name Marx for a business predicated on selling people property. It's funny! I mean, not hilarious or anything, but worth a wry, I-still-remember-Social-Studies-class chuckle.
It took on much more significance this past weekend while I was in Orange County, though. While en route to the airport, I passed a billboard for Adam Smith Realtors.
If that doesn't encapsulate the differences between San Francisco and Los Angeles, I don't know what does.
Things I didn't expect to see on my way to work, Vol. 73
02 July 09 | 11:00 | Posted by:
"Are you lost, little girl? Do your mommy or daddy know where you are? Let me go see if I can find a nice policeman who will help you get back-- s, stop it. Stop looking at me. Stop staring into me with those dead, black eyes of yours! NOOOOO I WON'T LET YOU EAT MY SOUL"
Something I've always liked about G.I. Joe (as I mentioned yesterday) is that it took a progressive approach to things like race and gender, considering it was a toy about the military with its roots in the '60s and '80s. Granted, some aspects of the franchise were more progressive than others; the cartoon was content to throw in a few stereotypical caricatures and call it a day. (Roadblock no doubt doth protest: "Ain't no crime/to make black people rhyme!") But really, the first couple years of the toyline alone were impressively diverse, all things being equal:
The team kicked off with an experienced black Vietnam vet, a female counter-intelligence agent, and a Hispanic rocket specialist. The following year saw the addition of a second black character (a medical doctor), a Navajo paratrooper, a second female (who drove a frigging missile tank), and a native Hawaiian S.E.A.L. Not bad! No doubt much of this can be attributed to the fact that Larry Hama, a Japanese-American writer who himself served in Vietnam, wasn't just responsible for the Joe comic but also for penning the bio cards that defined the characters' names, backgrounds, and personalities. Aryan nation poster child Duke -- the main dude in every cartoon incarnation of the franchise as well as the upcoming movie, and the guy invariably attached romantically to Scarlett (the redhead seen above, left) -- barely registered in the comic, where Scarlett had the hots for the mute and grotesquely mutilated Snake-Eyes instead. Because he was a sensitive soul, you see, and also a totally awesome American ninja.
Bear in mind that the G.I. Joe '80s "A Real American Hero" relaunch happened in 1982, the same year that Michael Jackson released Thriller. As everyone has reminded us repeatedly over the past week, Thriller was a landmark because it was the first time MTV allowed blacks on the network. I know America is hardly the apotheosis of unity, but relatively speaking we're a big, open, loving society these days compared to the way things were just 25 years ago. And while they occasionally ran the risk of looking a bit much like The Village People, the characters of G.I. Joe made a positive impression on kids by subtly telling us that race and gender have no bearing on one's abilility to shoot lasers non-lethally at terrorists.
Or so I'd like to think. But I made the tragic mistake of reading some G.I. Joe-related forums where I discovered that the lesson didn't actually take very well. See, the upcoming movie features one of the Wayans (Marlon, I think, but the family's downright Baldwinesque and difficult to keep track of) as Ripcord, a character who, in plastic, was a red-headed Irish-looking kid. This made many people quite unhappy. I can understand people reacting badly to the prospect of suffering Marlon Wayans for two hours, but so far as I can tell the complaint among G.I. Joe fans isn't "oh no Marlon Wayans" but "how dare they turn Ripcord into a black guy!" I'm positive that if the movie were to include the Bongo the Balloon Bear subplot, the word "miscegenation" would come into play sooner or later. It was kind of depressing to watch, honestly.
I blame Sunbow, personally. If only they'd made a PSA about racial harmony, none of this would have happened.
"Remember, kids, people can still be awesome even if they're a different color than you."
"Wow, next time I see someone who isn't white, I won't instinctively burn him in effigy! Thanks, Flint, now I know!"
"And knowing is half the battle."
Although I guess the problem might have something to do with the kinds of people who are instinctively drawn to violent fantasy cartoons about American military superiority? Nah, couldn't be.
Wario Land II
GameShark
Pokémon Red & Blue
Swan Song: Game Boy Stages a Comeback
Yuki: I really enjoyed this game when I was young. I suspect the fact that I was too young to properly understand what I was supposed to be doing contributed to my enjoyment. Instead of trying to win the game, which I have recently discovered is a frustrating and unforgiving taskmaster, I simply had fun playing around in underground caverns with a boy and his adorable, mysterious Blobby, which would transform into strange shapes when fed candy. Another thing I recently discovered is that the cute version of the game I played was not the same as its original American version, in which the boy was an awkward stick-person and Blobby was a couple of simple geometric shapes. I think is is the only instance I know of in which an NES game was reverse-localized, with the ugly being taken out for Japan instead of added for the U.S. 
ToastyFrog: Don't be racist. America is land borne from a grim, hardscrabble existence. Ugly things remind us of our ancestor's hardships. In that sense, A Boy and His Blob is a true act of patriotism, 'cause man is it ugly. It can be forgiven that, though, because it's suffering an identity crisis. It's really a good game on the wrong system, you see. It's very much the successor to the Pitfall! games, which were masterpieces on Atari 2600. It has the same sense of exploration and treasure collecting and unflinching difficulty, but it also adds a strange mutant creature to the mix. If this had been a 2600 game, wow, it would have been heralded from on high. But it arrived instead a few years too late and with a look that didn't really fit the NES's general style, so the whole thing feels a little off. It's interesting and fun, if you're patient enough, but don't expect to be coddled. Something tells me the upcoming remake is going to ditch the difficulty along with the ugly, but since the NES game's difficulty mostly stems from awkward collision detection and untelegraphed, blink-and-you'll-die hazards, I think I'm OK with that.
Obviously, this cover is yet incomplete. The finished product will have full color, see. But you get the idea. This volume devotes approximately 175 pages to the 40 greatest* games of all time (or about 215 pages to the 48 greatest* games in the deluxe edition), and as I said the other day, the articles are fantastic. I know I put a lot of myself into the pieces I wrote, and that same devotion and effort comes through in everyone else's contributions as well.
The Quiet Years: Game Boy Toils in Obscurity
Sega Game Gear
Nintendo Virtual Boy
Street Fighter II
Mario's Picross
1. Freedom. I'm at a point where I could go and take care of some matters to advance the plot, but I went off-track a bit and opened up an entirely new continent to explore. And there is really nothing I like better in a game than exploration. DQIX has a pretty big world, too; not as vast as Dragon Quest VIII's, but still much more sizable than the worlds of the older games. And thorough exploration constantly yields places to mine alchemy ingredients, which brings us to thing two:
Yeah, Lamb is one of those albums: an hour and a half of confused, dissociative narrative. The band performed it live in its entirety for a year, complete with elaborate changes of costume for Gabriel -- most of which prevented him from actually singing. The most notorious of these was the Slipperman costume, which I guess is supposed to be symbolic of STDs or something (the album's protagonist has an amorous encounter with a trio of lamias, who die in the midst of their tryst, leaving him in this hideous state). Gabriel was usually unable to get the mike close enough to his face in this outfit for his voice to be heard; on the concert version of Lamb the band put out about ten years ago, he had to go back in and redub "The Colony of Slippermen." No wonder he got kicked out of the band... and no wonder people hate prog rock.
Kirby's Dream Land
Bionic Commando
Final Fantasy Legend III
Donkey Kong '94
