Anyway, Sonic games. Yeah yeah, I know. sonic has been REALLY bad lately. And it hurts me deep… but there are good ones. Lemme show yah what ones.

Starting with a newer game:

Sonic and the Black Knight

No, really. I’m not kidding. The concept for this game was HORRIBLE, but the execution is pretty damn good. Sonic is summoned to the land of King Arthur by a cute loli version of Merlin named (surprise!) Merlina and after some delicious chili dog eating, Sonic gets a magic talking sword named “Caliburn”. The action is fast, and the sword allows you to obliterate most enemies without a care in the world. Now, like Secret Rings, there are a few slowdowns. There are points where you have to give villagers rings and there are large enemies that don’t go down in one hit, but everything else in the game is a pretty damn good time. I don’t really recommend it for someone who doesn’t like Sonic, but it’s worth a try even if  you don’t.

Sonic Rush

This is the game where Blaze the Cat was introduced. The story for this game is something like Blaze comes from the negaverse and there are funky Chaos Emerald style gems there as well and Blaze is looking for them… It doesn’t matter much, it’s really not important. This game also introduced something I think all Sonic games need: A boost meter. You can use it to get to speed with a small burst or use it to destroy everything in your path for a short time. It’s filled by rings, doing mid-air tricks or defeating enemies. It’s awesome and EVERY SINGLE SONIC GAME SHOULD HAVE IT FOREVER.

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE BEST

Sonic CD

Oh god, this is one of the best Sonic games in my opinion. It brings together some of the best parts of the first three Sonic games, but it adds in cool shit like time travel and some of the most fucking amazing music ever. The level design is amazing, the bosses are challenging and the time travel mechanic gives each level a wonderfully fresh feel. The game has good replayability and looks totally amazing. It’s for the Sega CD, PC and is an unlockable in the Sonic Mega Collection.

And, finally…

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

What happens if you take one of the most critically acclaimed Sonic games, then add the functionality to play as FUCKING KNUCKLES? You get one of the coolest things ever. Ever. This is seriously one of the best things that 16 bits has to offer. Climb shit, swim in the water, get around… You can do it all. You can do it with Sonic 2 as well.

That wraps up this stuff. Sorry about being gone so long, personal shit…

Anyway, I hope that soon I will be able to contribute regularly again!

Till next time!

Jumpluff~

What do you do when you’re faced with a major loss? Some people go for the extreme “solution” and commit suicide. Others attempt to drown out their sorrows with alcohol. Me, I fixate on video games.

This was especially true during the first half of 2007. During that year, two people were diagnosed with cancer.  One was the father of a friend of mine. The other one was my mother.

To make a long story short, my friend’s father pulled through. My mother didn’t.

I’d already played a bit of Trauma Center: Second Opinion before she died. After her passing, I went all out. I rented the Nintendo Wii at my friend’s Internet Cafe.  I played almost non-stop everyday from the time it opened till the time it closed its doors before dawn. At the time, it seemed to be one of my main forms of coping with the stages of Kubler-Ross’ model.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Dr. Kubler-Ross model, allow me to explain. There are supposedly five stages that people go through when they’re faced with traumatic loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It’s a highly contested model, as the stages aren’t exactly set in stone.

For some reason, I skipped the denial and bargaining stages entirely and went straight to anger and depression, flitting back and forth between the two as I played Trauma Center with a vengeance.

Was it escapism? Definitely. I needed to forget my problems, if only for a little while. Dr. Derek Stiles, the main character of the game, possessed superhuman healing powers that helped me do just that.

Whenever I extracted a tumor from my virtual patient in the game, I imagined I was extracting the tumors from my mother’s body. Whenever I had Dr. Stiles activate his Healing Touch, I played make-believe and envisioned him operating on my mother and saving her life.

Of course, I only had so much time to do that. When the shop eventually closed, I was right back where I started: grieving, hurting, and absolutely clueless as to what to do next.

I’ve often likened my gaming habits at the time to going deep-sea diving. Sometimes, divers may be tempted not to return to the surface because it’s so beautiful down in the ocean depths. They can stay in their fantasy world and forget about all their problems…until they run out of oxygen.

At some point, I moved on. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it–I just decided to do it, and I did it.

Perhaps I’d gotten tired of grieving. Perhaps I’d told myself that getting on with my life was what my mother would’ve wanted. Perhaps I realized that failing to move on would have been a grave dishonor to her memory. Perhaps it’s because I’d finished Trauma Center’s story mode.

In any case, I picked up Trauma Center: New Blood months later. There was one big difference this time: I didn’t play it to forget; I played it to have fun.

It’s been two years since Mom passed away. I’d like to think that she’s looking down at me from Heaven and smiling. Perhaps I’ll invest in a Nintendo DS and try out Trauma Center 2 as well.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’ll see you, Grandma Mai, Grandma Zeny and Grandpa Pai again someday.

Now I don’t mean bad endings as in “You didn’t complete a mission objective – bad end” sorta bad endings, but ones that are just highly disappointing and brief or offer little closure.

This may become a weekly thing, I’m not too sure, but today we cover four from the days of my childhood.

#4 – Bad Dudes :

Internet memes aside, really what the hell, a solid beat’em up on the NES where President Ronnie takes the Bad Dudes out for Hamburger after they beat up a legion of ninjas who kidnapped him. I mean really think about that. That’s it? I’d feel kinda pissed off if I was them. Also, what the hell did the ninjas kidnap the president for? Was this part of a larger global plot? What were their demands? Also – why the hell weren’t these guys part of the President’s elite personal security to begin with if they’re such Bad Dudes?

Screw you man, saving your ass is only worth a Burger?

#3 – Kid niki: Radical Ninja :

Marginally ahead of Bad Dudes is Kid Niki, another game published by Data east (who apparently have a fetish for using terms like BAD and RADICAL and AWESOME in their game titles.) In kid Niki it’s a little platformer a la Mystical Ninja. If you haven’t played it, don’t It’s relatively bad, the controls are clunky and the ending is down right horrible. After smacking around a boss who is not hard as much as he is time consuming (wait for him to finish attacks that make him untouchable, hit him, get your sword back, repeat) he falls off the castle roof and you jump down to pose on top of his fallen body. You are then praised by a quick narrative about your AWESOME NINJA SKILLS and told that you are one RAD DUDE then a giant flying THE END wooshes onto the screen.

Dear god it’s an attack of the Michael Jacksons!

WOAH hold the hell on there a second, I’m the RADDEST NINJA WITH AWESOME SKILLS of all time, and I’m still KID?? Seriously? How degrading! Why not “Mystical Ninja Niki” or “Supreme Master Niki” Sorry that this kid just whooped the hell out of a million ninjas attacking our castle while nobody else could and defeated a supreme mystical martial arts master – maybe I should go back to playing with my toys.                               Ingrates

#2 – Adventure of Lolo :

BEFORE YOU SEND ME HATE MAIL – I am by no means saying this is a bad game. In fact it’s probably in my top 100 favorite games of all time. Man those puzzles were freakin hard and the game was charming in all it’s various features. The little monsters creeped me out, the puzzles were challenging but made sense, and once you got a feel for it all it was really freakin fun. But seriously – he just kicks in the door and blasts his lady’s keeper with a bubble and that’s all it took? I mean seriously. I expected some sort of epic confrontation, instead – PEW PEW yay the day is saved. I mean for Pete’s sake the random baddies were harder than that.

I mean really, the look of despair in his eyes does not belay how lame that bad guy is.

And # 1 – Legacy of the Wizard :

Like seriously, what an epic game. Tons of items to get that change your stats, different characters/classes to chose from, a HUGE sprawling game world that you can get literally lost in for hours without remember how the hell to get back to your house to save. One of the earliest password/save systems that I can think of so you didn’t have to waste hours of work. What a sweet game.

Then you kill the dragon, teleport back to the surface, meet up with the family and wave goodbye.

Thats it.

I am glad to see they are grateful for us controlling their pathetic lives. God knows what they’d do without us.

I’m sorry, why did we just slay a dragon? What now? Apparently that dragon’s been hanging out there for ages, are all the monsters gonna disappear now? Will the entire under-city that was the maze crumble and the world fall apart? Seriously, what now?

Also, what’s with that huge ass castle off to the left of the entrance to the maze? Who lives there? why are there not knights helping you kick monster ass and take names? SERIOUSLY LETS GO EXPLORE THAT CASTLE OR SOMETHING. No, lets just wave goodbye. Solid.

Well that’s about it for this edition of Highly Disappointing Endings – I suppose next time I’ll move to a different system, maybe that can be the theme. Each week I’ll review the bad endings of a particular console.

What about you guys, do you feel the same way I do about these? Got a particular NES game that you thought had a horrible ending that I should have talked about instead? Lemmie know.

Follow me now on twitter – http://twitter.com/TheReverendLei

Keep up to date with games I’m checking out, import or otherwise and learn about whats new.

Would you wait nine years before you bought a console of your own?

I’d like to think that the universe sends you signs when the time for something is right. For example, I noticed certain hints in the past few weeks, and all of them had at least one common denominator.

Sign Number One: a friend of mine who owns an Internet cafe (the very same cafe where I’ve been renting his PS2 per hour) said “maybe you should get your own console.”

Sign Number Two: I received a little news item when I logged on to Windows Live Messenger. Sony had apparently slashed the price of the PlayStation 2 down to US$100.

Sign Number Three: An ad on the Internet mentioned that someone was selling her PS2 for a little over US$50.

I figured these three signals were enough for me to go around. It was time.

I sent an SMS to the seller and made a new friend that day. We chatted online and I interrogated her about the details of the unit she was selling. Turns out it was an old, bulky, dusty SCPH-30001 model PlayStation 2.  The package came with a memory card and a few games like Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2 and TMNT.

The not-so-nice part was that it came with no AC or A/V cables and no controller. She claimed it still worked fine, but given the fact that she lived a few thousand kilometers away, I wouldn’t have been able to test her claims until the unit arrived. If she was up to any hanky-panky, it would’ve been too late by then.

I’m normally not inclined to taking risks like that, but for some reason, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I deposited the payment in her bank account and eagerly awaited the unit’s arrival.  The seller had it delivered to my doorstep, free of charge.

I thought I’d be able to play once I got the cables and the controller. Boy, was I wrong. The unit was still functional, but the lens no longer read discs very well, so it had to be replaced.

I visited the tech people at three or four different shops,  all of whom gave me either a shrug or a grim diagnosis.  It was only the adventurous technicians at the third shop who took on the challenge of acquiring and installing the right lens.

I liked their attitude, so I left the unit and my phone number with them. They got back to me the very next day and asked me to help test out the replacement lens they’d found.

The new lens worked, but not perfectly; it still needed a bit of coaxing from time to time. Besides, it read my Persona 4 disc just fine. That sealed the deal.

As I type this article out, I’m reminded of the words of Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata. He claimed that Japanese get tired of new entertainment more quickly than overseas gamers. And there I was, getting all excited over a console which is several years old.

Is it any real surprise, though? Given the fact that the Japanese have the means to churn out the games quickly,  it follows that they tend to tire of those games just as quickly. After all, they didn’t have to wait nine long years to get a PS2 of their own.

Perhaps that character from the old TV show The West Wing was right after all (I paraphrase):  “We esteem lightly that which we acquire easily.” With respect to that, I suspect it’ll be a while before I tire of this PS2. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be another nine years before I upgrade to this year’s next-gen consoles.

When I was a kid, there was a game series  that EVERYONE played, or else they were stupid.  Even the local Sega fans begrudgingly picked up a SNES, or borrowed one from a friend, for just one game.  If you’re in the know, and read the title of this article, you’ve probably guessed that the series in question is The Legend of Zelda.  If you didn’t guess that, you probably owned (Or still own) an XBox.

Now, I bring this up because I’ve been playing The Wind Waker again, because I just got my GameCube back, and unfortunately, my favourite games, Metroid Prime 1&2, were destroyed.  So I pulled out my next favourite, and it’s definitely worthwhile to play through.

I won’t recap the story or something, this isn’t a review of the game.  This is me stating the reasons why I love Toon Link, and why you’re a jerk if you don’t.

1. Toon Link is much more similar in style to the Links of olde than the Heroes of Time and Twilight.  Think about it:  Zelda has been very cartoony ever since I can remember.  It was a game for kids!  There were even childrens’ books based on the series.  Admittedly, it’s a step past the oldschool level of cartoony-ness, but it feels like a much more natural progression than the GRIMDARK of Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Zelda fangirl through and through, and I love those games as well.  Hell, I’d even call Majora’s Mask one of my favourite games ever.  But compare the imagery for a moment.  The middle, A Link to the Past, has a brightly coloured, cartoony character, comically disproportionate characters, and PINK HAIR.  I chose that screenshot because that’s as GRIMDARK as the game gets:  A dark tunnel with an old man asking for directions.  There wasn’t a ‘new style’ in The Windwaker, only a progression of the old style.
2. Link’s face (And to a lesser extent, the other characters) have incredibly expressive faces and body language.  The big heads allowed for a very clear view of what the characters were thinking and feeling.  When Link yelped in terror, his eyes went wide and he gritted his teeth.  When he was sad, his mouth curled down into a frown and his entire body slumped over.  When he was happy, his mouth dropped open into the goofiest grin imaginable and he jumped for effing joy.  Exaggerated, yes, silly, yes, but the series is about a young boy saving a sad princess from an evil middle-eastern dude who turns into a gigantic anthropomorphic pig when he gets angry.
3. ZELDA ISN’T A PUSSY.  Usually, anyway.  She’s a badass smacktalking pirate who calls Link on his shit whenever he does something retarded.  The only time she wimps out is when she’s in shock from finding out that she’s the princess of a dead nation, and then she comes back and SHOOTS GANON IN THE FACE, because he’s such a skilled swordsman that he’s invincible in a duel.  Let me say that again, SHE SHOOTS AN INVINCIBLE PSYCHOPATH IN THE FACE TO MAKE SURE LINK CAN BEAT HIM.
4. With the introduction of counterattacks, and improvement to swordplay in general, it allows for a final boss who is not only fun to fight (Something that most Zelda games don’t have) but for a death scene which will forever live on in memory as one of the most painful, awesome things to watch in the history of Nintendo, right up there with the blood-soaked, spinning, disembodied eyeball at the end of Kirby’s Deam Land 3.
5. Yes, it’s a kiddy, cartoony, even childish looking style of animation.  Half of you watch anime, with its idealized 2 dimensional love stories and people yelling out the names of their ’special attacks’ anyways, so why does that bother you?  If you’re willing to pass up because it looks childish, even though it’s part of a series you had up-to-then enjoyed, I got some bad news for you, it’s not the game that’s being childish.

Yes, there are low-points to the game.  It’s very clearly not finished, and I hope for a Director’s Cut version one day.  It is artificially extended by necessary fetch-quests.  I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for it at release for those reasons (I got it as a gift, in fact, and my mother got it for free).  But  now I see it up at used game stores for $10-$15.  Hell, there’s a copy on ebay right at this time for $6.00.  If you passed it up, and you love Zelda, you’ll be doing yourself a favour.  The comic imagery at times is priceless, and the story, standard Zelda fare, leaves nothing to be desired for a fan of the series.

Peace.

Presenting…

…The Top Five Signs That a DLC Should Have Just Been Free

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it finally April and you have to love how easy it is to open an article with the lines “so it’s finally whatever month we’re in right now”. It’s time for the next step in my great journey to earn money through a video game blog. Now I know you might be wondering “I thought you had billions! Were you lying to me?” The answer is of course, no. Stupid. Why would I make something like that up? But the difference between that money and the money I’ll earn on this site is I actually had to do work to earn it, unlike my corporation where I really don’t do any work at all. I can show all my friend “yeah this is the ten dollars I earned THROUGH WORK!” and if they say that they also have a job and have made more money, I’ll pull out my emergency one million dollars that I always keep stashed in my pants and laugh at them, probably while rubbing the money all over myself.

Now I’m sure that everyone reading this right now loves to hear all the stories that end with me rubbing money all over myself (and there are a lot of them) but now is neither the time, nor the place for me to describe my achievements to the world. Mainly because I think that might blow my secret identity and also I don’t think anyone would let me post an article called “The Top Five Ways to Rub Money All Over Yourself Like a Pro”. Instead I’m going to write about some game related phenomena, but only because I have to.

That brings me to my greatest problem: what the hell am I going to write about? There aren’t any games coming out these days (according to me) and writing about one specific past game has been done by everyone and their grandma. At first I was thinking “Heroes of Might and Magic 2, everyone will love to hear about that!” before moving to and idea about specific overrated games. Then one night I was staying up late to try to perfect the insertion of a giant blade into my fedora. Some might call that an oddjob rip off, but those same people might find it hard to speak when, say, a razor-bladed hat cuts their entire mouth off. Anyway it was around 6 am that I decided “screw it I’m too tired to think up a new idea” and settled for this one.

Now if you’re like me (and you’re not at all like me) then you too have expressed frustration at some of the worst excuses for DLC (downloadable content if you somehow made it to this point in the article without knowing what that is) ever made. That’s not to say that all DLC is bad and that it should all be free because there are small amounts of DLC that actually seem to have been worked hard on and deserve some sort of monetary reimbursement (the shivering isles for Oblivion is the first thing that comes to mind). Of course for every shivering isles there are hundreds of “screw you, give me all your money” DLCs or as I like to affectionately call them “dog shit”. I’m sure that this isn’t just at 360 problem, it’s probably also a problem with the PS3 but I wouldn’t know now would I? So here are the signs to identify if the dog shit you just bought should have been free.

Number 5: When the DLC is Free Anyway

Example: Call of Duty 4: Variety Map Pack

This is probably the one that isn’t about dog shit (I’m very much hoping the editor doesn’t take offense to that word being used over and over again). This is one of the cases where the DLC might actually be good but in any case it isn’t free even when say, THEY OFFER IT FOR FREE ANYWAY!

Take the above example for instance. The Call of Duty 4 map pack was offered for free via a code in the Game of the Year Edition. The cost of the Game of the Year Edition is exactly the same as the original game so you’d think they’d start offering the map pack for free, right? Wrong (as always)! I’m not exactly sure why they’d do this (other than the obvious “I want more money” approach) yet it seems like around the time they started offering free map packs they’d just go ahead and put it out for free on the marketplace anyway. There’s only one possible explanation: to piss off hat-based crime fighters.

Hell, that reminds me; before I go on I’d like to tell a little story about my experience with these “free” maps. It started like any other day, random death hurricanes mixed with volcanoes and a zombie apocalypse, you know, nothing special. So I decided that I’d go and get Call of Duty 4 because I was in a crime fighting slump (only because I imprisoned all my enemies) and so I decided to blow off some steam by mercilessly killing people on the internet. I picked out my game and brought it to the Gamestop counter where the cashier was like “I’ll give you the game of the year edition, it doesn’t cost anymore and it gives you free maps.” So I was like “sweet free maps, thanks you pimply faced bastard, I’ll be sure not to violently attack you in the future over game prices.” So as I got back home I opened the box… nothing. There was a game and an instruction booklet but that pimply faced sonofabitch lied to me! There wasn’t any map code at all! Now my first reaction was to don my fedora and jacket/trench coat (have to protect my secret identity) and go back to that store to kick all kinds of ass. But I’m a detective too and my detective-like instincts told me that it probably wasn’t that pimply faced bastard’s fault. Using my fedora-shaped super computer I quickly got confirmation that this had happened to many other people as well. In the end, after a brief bout with tech support that should have just began and ended with the word “bastard” I never got my maps. I’m just waiting for the time that they become free, WHICH THEY NEVER WILL!

Number 4: When the Game in Question has a Sequel

Example: Call of Duty 4: Variety Map Pack

Call of Duty again? Really? Well that’s just an example; there are many games like this. Again this isn’t necessarily dog shit but I promise that the next one will be about dog shit, you dog shit enthusiast you. Anyway the reason I claim that the DLC (which may or may not be dog shit to appease all you crazy people) should be free once a sequel comes out because sales probably drop rapidly over time once the sequel hits stores. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works, but don’t take my word on it, it’s not like I know a lot about business (although I do run a multi-billion dollar business in my free time). I don’t think anyone is rushing out to go buy Halo 2, or Mario Party 3 (despite how awesome Mario Party 3 was) so I’ve taken this rule and applied it to damn near any other game. Maybe I can understand not immediately making it free but in the above example Call of Duty 5 (or Call of Duty: whatever the hell they’re calling it these days) has been out for nearly half a year and I doubt that the Call of Duty 4 will have those free maps in another four or five months time. Granted the two were made by different developers but that’s beside the point. Give me the free maps! I demand it!

Number 3: When the DLC Doesn’t Add Anything Special to the Game

Example: Bomberman Live: Bomb-Up Packs

So NOW we’re talking about dog shit. Again I’m hoping the editor doesn’t come to my house and challenge me to a fist fight for using that so often. In any case I could talk about this in depth but the name says it all. The dog shit doesn’t add a whole lot to the game so it should be free on the grounds that I don’t want to pay you to add pretty much nothing to the overall gameplay.

Take my above example… for example (does that even work?) Bomberman’s bomb-up packs should definitely have been free or just included it in the original game. With the pack comes a bunch of gametypes and maps no one online plays anyway (we’re all too busy playing on the good starting maps with the non-stupid game variants to care). It’s like opening a gift on Christmas to get a playstation 2, a gamecube, or an xbox when you already have the better console. But gosh there’s really not more to say about it, maybe I’m complaining too much or maybe… just maybe… you’re not complaining enough.

Number 2: When the DLC is Just a Little Polish to an Otherwise Bland Turd Sandwich

Example: Crackdown (whatever that weapon pack is called)

I wanted to research what the dog shit was called here to retain my journalistic and genius vigilante integrity but I honestly didn’t care. Now let me set one thing straight, whereas Number 3 on the list (the one you just read if you read like a normal human being or super being) was about something that should be free based on the fact that it added little to a good game, this one is about DLC which could be good or bad that adds little to a horrible game. That’s right; I beat the system by having ALMOST identical but still slightly different types of DLC on display. Wooh!

Anyway I’m sure you (yes you, the guy in the red baseball cap) can think of a ton of DLC and games like this, but let’s go with my example because I already took the time to write it down. Now Crackdown wasn’t THAT bad of a game… okay yeah it was. The whole game was GTA or Saints Row with a ton of collection and not a lot of anything else. Shooting civilians was a power-up losing crime too, so there goes all the random slaughtering fun. The goal of the game is to collect orbs and kill a bunch of bad guys. You’re basically like Super Man except with a gun (or a slightly more athletic Fedora Man, with super powers, a gun, and no awesome hat). So after the fun of jumping around rooftops and shooting people wears off about six hours into the game what’s left to do? Well Realtime Worlds (the developers) has the answer in the form of a content pack sure to add a couple more hours of fun to the game. You get a weapon like the harpoon gun which is cool in that you can fire harpoons at people and stick them to cars and buildings and trees and other people. Where was the downside again? Oh right the fact that there’s a fuggin’ price tag associated with it. What the hell?! I paid sixty dollars for your game! There is no way in hell I’m going to spend six to ten dollars more to make your game NOT suck as much. You may think I’m being a little frustrated this time, because if there’s anything Fedora Man is known for its definitely not violent outbursts of vigilante justice. But that’s what happens when you stay up too late and you keep slicing off your fingers with your stupid razor-blade lined hat that STILL DOESN’T WORK!

But hey let’s look on the bright side. I’d like to take this time to get away from all the anger and pessimism and quickly point out Left 4 Dead. It’s a decent game, not too bad, not too good. But it appears that they’re coming out with DLC soon to make the game better. You know what I like the most about it without even having to look up gameplay videos on youtube? The fact that valve decided to not be a bunch of assholes and release the DLC free. So there, at least I tried to make this article slightly happier with a contrast between dog shit and decent DLC, as well as decent business practices in general.

Number 1: When the DLC in Question Sucks

Example: Too many to count

Damn even the example is a little depressing. There’s like a sea of dog shit out there (not literally you creep) and you know a DLC should be free when the DLC itself sucks. Really, this one ties into every other group category. By now you must be wondering “is there some kind of evil video game-themed villain out there causing all the DLC in the world to suck?” Well no, there was once, but he died in 1983 when the video game crash happened. It was weird and sad because the one thing he was trying to destroy was the only thing keeping him alive. Once the games became bad enough the crash happened and he died. It’s tragic, which is why I’m writing a play about it. I’m thinking of starring the lead role to Adam West and maybe get Jackie Chan in there somehow; we’ll have to see how it turns out.

Anyway there’s really not much more to say but hell I have time to kill in between creating my razor-bladed fedora and fighting demons from beyond time and space. So I’ll start with a little known game called Halo 2 (does anyone remember this game?). Halo 2 had four or five map packs, with the last one having two levels “Desolation” and “turd sandwich” or… something like that, I can’t remember (and I refuse to look it up). Anyway both were remakes and both were TERRIBLE. Although I’m not ashamed to own the Halo series, I am deeply ashamed to have put any money down toward this map pack. Turd sandwich was a terrible level and desolation was… also terrible (cut me some slack I’m tired AND I saved the world yesterday, shut up). Look I’ll give you another example: Halo 3. Halo 3 (and I use the halo series because of its general accessibility so people know what I’m talking about) had the “Heroic map pack” which was so bloody awful that I had to think twice before ever purchasing any kind of map pack EVER AGAIN! It was like they had a staff meeting but only three people showed up and they left after five minutes after someone said “but think about the customers” and someone else responded with “screw the customers!”

I’ll give you one more you might not have thought about: gamer pictures. Yeah those things, you actually have to pay for them. I think I’ll leave it at that instead of pointing out the crippling stupidity in paying for tiny pictures rather than picking up a fedora to hide your identity and going out to vigilante the shit out of the gaming industry.

If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.  There are a bunch of cute little animals you could adopt in a variety of colours and designs, with whom you can play games (Which are more often than not cutely redecorated clones of Apple IIe 5 1/4in floppy titles reprogrammed in Flash), train at various schools to raise their stats, and of course, have the viciously beat the hell out of each other.

The site was initially started by two Welsh people in California, named Adam Powell and Donna Williams.  It was essentially a website full of games for college students to pass the time.  Of course, the cutesy look attracted more and more players, mostly young kids like myself, and the whole thing began to take off.  The site grew, the staff grew, and eventually they realized that they were losing ridiculous amounts of money.  They tried to make it up without advertising on the site:  Merchandise was the way to go.  Limited Too, Hot Topic, Claire’s Boutique and others began carrying stuffed animals, t-shirts, jewelry and action figures, and admittedly, it was pretty cool.

Obviously, it didn’t work for long.  And along with adding small ads to the site, service started to slip: Reports of accounts being banned by mistake, rude responses by customer service personnel, and just an overall feeling of ‘what happened’ plagued the site.  I would later find out that it had been owned by a group of investors, as a publicly traded company, for quite some time.

And it was still losing money.

I quit, for a long time.  It happens, I guess:  It was an addiction I just outgrew, unlike heroin (There are no 12-step programs for Neopets to my knowledge).  I went on to other things, better games, communities with an average age higher than 12.  That was a long time ago.

Recently though, I saw my foster-sister playing something vaguely familiar.  I cocked an eyebrow and asked ‘Is that Neopets?’  She responded that it was, and was surprised I knew about it, after all I’m almost 7 years older than her.  I started to wonder if my old account was still there.  It was.  But it was buried in a mountain of obnoxious flash ads, a cash store for additional content, and many, many ‘updated’ games.

Much of the site now centered around ‘Neocash,’ the game’s RMT currency, with spotlights for the pets who have had the most of mom’s hard-earned cash spent to make the look tacky.  Many years-old promises have not been fulfilled, like finishing old plot arcs, and making the collectible clothes already in existence wearable by your pets.

Worst of all, the flash games are either drawn at such a high resolution, or just so poorly coded, that it takes a modern computer to run them.  Read that again:  IT TAKES A MODERN COMPUTER TO RUN A FLASH GAME THAT TAKES A MAXIMUM OF 3 MINUTES TO PLAY.

I really don’t know what else to say.  Humanity is doomed?  Everything has to evolve and change, but this feels more than a little sick.  I guess there’s not much else to it though:  It’s a publicly traded company, so it exists to make a profit.  Even so, fighting as a Cybunny soldier in the great Sloth wars is one of the few fuzzy memories of my early-mid teens.

I remember Eliv Thade, the great Lord of Anagrams.  I remember the Lab Ray which could perform unwanted Sexual Reassignment Surgery in seconds flat.  I remember my pets who fought valiantly against the evil Dr. Sloth, lord of all things slow and lazy.

I miss Neopets.  As casual-market video games go, it was tops.  Seriously.

Grandia is a game I played over and over when I was younger, and now, nearly eight years down the line, I decided to give it another go for nostalgia’s sake.  Many of the flaws escaped my notice when I was just a wide-eyed kid, new to the RPG genre and still fascinated by the idea of a storyline in a video game, but what I loved about the game- the fun battles, the colorful characters, the sheer sense of fun and adventure- have all aged like a fine wine.

Grandia is a traditional RPG developed by Game Arts, the creators of the Lunar series, initially for the Sega Saturn in 1997.  The first North American release came to the Playstation in 1999, right in the middle of what many consider a golden age for Japanese RPGs, or at best a highly competitive market for the genre on the PS1.  It released mere months after the likes of Suikoden II, Final Fantasy VIII and Game Arts’ own remake, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. That it managed to stand out enough to spawn a successful series is remarkable, but it was easy to understand why once I sat down with the game again.

For starters, the presentation is still solid after all these years.  The graphics consist of 2D sprites on fully rotatable 3D backgrounds, similar to games like Xenogears and Breath of Fire IV.  The sprites are colorful and represent the characters quite well.  The animations can be a tad on the choppy side, but they’re expressive, fun, and there are a lot of them.  As with many PS1 games, the 3D hasn’t held up well, but it’s still far from laughable.  The graphics overall are nicely done, with no major holes or any need for the player to pretend something is happening- everything unfolds as you see it.

The voice acting ranges from average to bad (usually bad), and although the translation is well done and the voices fit the characters well, it’s always awkwardly timed and sounds like it was recorded by a high school theater club.  The dialogue scenes actually play much better without the voice acting, due to each character having a plethora of character portraits conveying every possible emotion to go along with the scenes.  They switch in and out constantly as the character speaks, and sometimes even specific situations (such as Leen being soaking wet or Justin waking up with bedhead) have their own portraits that are unique to that one scene.  That attention to detail goes a long way toward establishing the character’s personalities and giving life to the dialogue.

The narrative itself bears many similarities to Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky, and like the film there’s a sharp contrast between the two halves of the story.  In the beginning we’re introduced to the main character, Justin.  He’s a troublemaker living in the port town of Parm who dreams of following in his father’s footsteps, discovering the lost civilization of Angelou and becoming the world’s greatest adventurer.  He fits the “determined to be the best [blank] ever” archetype perfectly, being so determined that nothing can shake his determination, and often inspiring others with his determined determination.  Despite the cliche, he’s a likable character and his enthusiasm really permeates the entire game.  After the spirit stone his father left him leads him to an encounter with a mysterious priestess who tells him to travel east to the lost capitol of Angelou, it’s time for Justin to cross the ocean to the New World and begin his adventure.  But because he has the spirit stone, he’s often forced to tangle with the sometimes intimidating, often hilariously incompetent Garlyle Forces- the military force that’s excavating ruins for some mysterious goal, and who provide the game’s chief antagonists at this point.

After a surprisingly poignant parting scene between Justin and his mother, Justin crosses the ocean and meets the other principle character, Feena.  She’s a confident and competent ally- never a nag, a designated healer, nor a damsel in distress- and the romance that springs up between the two is refreshing in its lack of needless, tacked-on drama.  They don’t hate each other at first, but then suddenly fall in love.  Rather, Feena progresses naturally from companion, to friends and finally love interest as they adventure together.  In fact, nearly the entire first disc is similarly lighthearted and innocent, even humorous at times, as Justin continues to surprise people with his resourcefulness and refusal to back down from impossible tasks.  The game often pauses admire the scenery or bask in a new discovery, most memorably when Justin and company become the first people to climb the huge wall known as the End of the World and see what lies on the other side.  The bombastic soundtrack really sells these scenes, which give a sense of accomplishment simply for progressing through the game and establish Grandia’s world as truly vast and unexplored.

Then, at the start of the second disc, the plot finally decides to show up and cause a complete 180.  The sense of adventure gradually dissipates to make room for the “epic” story.  Justin goes from likable kid to chosen one, and immediately begins spewing idealist philosophies at anyone who’ll listen.  He is, of course, always wrong, and only manages to survive and make fools of the more intelligent and reasonable characters through the magnitude of his plot armor.  Feena becomes whiny and feeble, crushed under the weight of her sudden “mysterious power”, causing her to bicker with Justin and then need to be rescued by him.  The Garlyle forces, as it turns out, were enacting a plan by General Baal to resurrect the ancient evil that destroyed Angelou (presumably just because) using the power of the spirit stone.  There are big CG cutscenes of towns being destroyed and a predictable ending, but by this point I was invested enough in the characters and the game in general to see the 40-hour quest to its conclusion.

The game’s battle system is one of, if not the best in the genre.  The flow is similar to the active-time battles of the Final Fantasy series or Chrono Trigger, but with several additions and modifications that add strategy and depth to every encounter.  If you’ll look in the lower-right corner of the blurry screenshot above, you’ll see the IP bar shared by all characters and enemies.  The first 80% is where characters wait for their turn, and the player inputs the commands once they reach the last segment.  The final 20% is the wait to execute the command, which could be anywhere from five seconds to instantaneous.  Simple commands like Combo (the standard attack, hits twice), Critical (a more powerful single strike, not as strong as both hits of a combo but containing some special properties I’ll explain later), or Guard will come out instantly, whereas special moves and spells can take time to charge depending on the character’s proficiency with the move.  The combatants are not locked in place, either.  They move around the battlefield and stay wherever they end up, not unlike the Lunar series, which lends to some extra strategy with area-affecting spells.

What really sets the battle system apart, however, is that aside from command input and execution of special moves or spells, it all plays out in real-time- meaning every character and every enemy is moving and acting simultaneously.  This allows for some unique strategies that are both intuitive and easy to pick up.  Combatants are momentarily stunned when attacked, which can be used to stall an enemy until a specific character’s turn comes up.  Hitting an enemy with a Critical will set them back about 50% of the IP bar, or if they’re waiting to execute a move, potentially cancel it altogether, sending them to nearly the beginning of the bar.  Hitting an enemy who’s currently attacking counts as a counter and does extra damage.  These same rules apply to the characters, of course, which forces the player to strategize on the fly with attack and defense timing, as well as target priority.  Everything adds up to create an deep, intuitive, lightning fast and unpredictable battle system that I never got tired of, and often had me actually wandering around looking for battles.

Part of the reason why is the skill system the game utilizes for learning abilities and spells.  Each character has a skill level for each type of weapon they can use and for each of the four types of magic you can teach them.  Points are gained through use, and a level up brings minor stat boosts and better proficiency.  Once certain requirements are met across one or multiple skills, the character will learn a new ability.  The game keeps the names and properties of the abilities a secret, but not the requirements to gain them.  So the good news is, you’ll always be working toward a new ability.  The bad news is, you will always be working toward a new ability. Because the only way to level up a skill is to use it, the strategy is almost always taken off of how to best win a battle and placed, instead, on how to spam the same moves as many times as possible.  You may find yourself limiting one character to a single useless ability (say, a spell that grants a minor defense boost or an area attack that does an irrelevant amount of damage) for two straight dungeons just to grind the skill level.  While this does provide another incentive to keep engaging in combat, it also makes the entire game feel like one big grind.  On the other hand, this may not be a bad thing, because it’s also so addictive that it may end up being the very thing that keeps the player going until the ending.

Exploration in the game is somewhat limited, which seems ironic for a game with such a heavy storyline focus on adventure and discovery.  The towns are big and well-designed, but due to the near absence of side quests and the game’s linearity never leaving the player with any question as to what to do next, there’s generally very little incentive to explore them once you’ve located the shop and the inn.  The world map is a literal map with towns and dungeons listed on it, and destinations are chosen like on a menu.  Instead of having a whole countryside to explore, locations are generally divided up by fields or mountain ranges the player must traverse like a dungeon before the next location on the map becomes available (although they very thankfully did not go the Suikoden III route with this idea- you only have to clear each one once).

This brings us to the dungeon design: one or two early dungeons got my hopes up that they’d all be full of  traps, puzzles, difficult to reach treasure chests and the like.  This concept is woefully underdeveloped, as the dungeons mostly alternate between wide-open areas and long series’ of identical corridors, very occasionally interspersed with something falling on you for minor damage (and even that’s mostly phased out by the second disc).  Enemies appear on the map along with a liberal amount of treasure chest, loose items and sacks of money.  The battle system and the skill system, along with the surprising quality of the items you can find, make it rewarding enough to explore every nook and cranny of the areas, but as the majority of the game is spent doing this, it can get tiring after a while.  Unless you’re a big fan of dungeon crawling, this isn’t likely to be a game you’ll play in particularly long sittings.

If I have one chief complaint, however, it’s that the game is just too easy.  Enemies pose no threat against even normal attacks, and there’s no reason to conserve your special moves or spells since the save points will fully heal you.  Even most bosses will only be able to attack once or twice before you completely lay them out.  This means the fantastic battle system partially goes to waste as some of the deeper strategies are largely unnecessary.  There’s a limited inventory system where each character can only carry twelve items (not counting what they have equipped), which under normal circumstances would lend to the “adventure” theme of the game by forcing the player to prepare before leaving for a dungeon and ration items once they’re there.  However, besides the very beginning of the game when there was no magic available (and maybe not even then), I never used a single item.  This was not a conscious decision, there was simply no need.  This, coupled with the linear story progression, makes for a game you’ll breeze through without trying.

However, in the end the flaws don’t manage to detract nearly enough from the overall experience to not give Grandia a strong recommendation.  Ten (or rather, twelve) years later, Grandia remains a memorable and enjoyable experience, and one of the better games on its platform or in its genre.  There’s a lot to love here- whether you’re an RPG vet or a genre newcomer (like I was when I first played it), it’s an adventure worth embarking on.

As technology grew though, it became more and more common to have soundbytes of your hero screaming and yelling, and eventually games became fully voiced.  There are ups and downs to such things that I won’t discuss here, ’cause that’s best left to an article dedicated thereto.  Here, I wanna discuss Star Fox.

Star Fox 64 is an on-rails 3d shooter, and a retelling of the events of Star FOx for the SNES.  The main highlight for many was the full voice-acting, with every character (except for that bizarre raccoon thing in the tutorial) having a voice actor.  Much of the english dialogue was parody of science fiction movies such as Star Wars, and nearly every line is incredibly memorable.

Fox was voiced by Mike West, who is a relative unknown to my knowledge, and doesn’t take his role as leader too seriously.  Bill Johns plays Falco, Issac Marshall plays Peppy, and I don’t know who plays Slippy but their voice is incredibly whiney.

The acting for every character is absolutely abbysmal, but for me, that’s a big part of the charm.

The game starts out with Fox giving instructions to the team as they enter the atmosphere.  Falco sounds calm here, and nowhere else in the game.

Memorable quotes seem to be thrown at the player one after another, though my favourite (Which was later referenced in Star Fox Assault for the GCN) is the opening to the last level before Venom on the Hard path, as Falco says, in the most obnoxious tone you can imagine, “TOO LATE!  GAME OVER PAL!”

Obviously, not every game is so successful with its voiceovers.  In fact, a majority of video game actors should probably not quit their day jobs.  Final Fantasy X was absolutely embarassing, in both English and Japanese (And don’t even try to deny it).  The Soul Reaver series took its serious nature and threw it out the window with all the phoned in, overdramatic lines spoken throughout.  And don’t even make me mention Symphony of the Night, with Richtor and Dracula’s famous dialogue.

Games with really good voice acting are rare, games with really bad voice acting are plentiful, but games where every single line is both terrible and wonderful?  Those are few and far between, and I’ll always remember Star Fox 64 for that reason.

Childhood

I did not have a pleasant childhood.  My mother had some severe psychological disorders and chemical imbalances, as did I.  My brother always seemed to be barely aware of the world around him.

I know, I know, poor me.  However, these terrible things are what led me to Ebeneezer’s, the local arcade, where I quickly became ‘Little Sister’ to the majority of the regulars.  I was not allowed to be myself at home, even as young as three or four years old, but since my mother couldn’t handle having me around, I was often dropped off at the arcade or the library.  The arcade was where I learned about various arcade hardware which lead me to working on computers later in life, and spurred my interest in digital music.  It also introduced me to the phrase ‘winners don’t do drugs,’ which popped up on the intro to nearly every game.

I didn’t have a lot of friends outside of the arcade, since I had been taken out of public schools in the first grade, but the few I did have all had SNES and Genesis consoles.  Eventually I came into possession of both a SNES and a Phillips CDi (No, seriously) which I kept in my attic hooked up to a small TV which the previous owners had left behind.  The attic was my safe haven, and I often went up there to talk to the fruit bats and play some Mario World and Final Fantasy.

In 1995, after a particularly horrible day with my biological family, I was trudging along Mission Hill, the foothill that overlooked my town, and I found a SNES cartridge just laying in the drainage run.  The sticker was missing, and some of the plasticn was cracked, and it had obviously been rained on, but I figured I’d take it home.  I snuck inside, went into my room, climbed up into the attic, and wiggled it carefully into the console.  I was immediately enthralled by the poster on the screen, depicting UFOs destroying a city.  I pressed Start and was greeted with some exceptionally cheery music and the title:  Earthbound.  I got addicted to it immediately, just wanting to know what would happen next.  And it taught me a lesson in its own way:  No matter how bad things got, I could be a brave little girl, ’cause someone, somewhere, loved me.  I’ve lived by that belief ever since.

Teenage years

Life moved on, and so did I.  When I was 11, we moved to a mountain town in the middle of nowhere.  Most of the friends I made were boys, and I didn’t like most of the much.  I was a crybaby, no doubt about that, and I didn’t learn to stand up for myself until later on, so I got picked on by girls and boys alike.  I found myself isolating much of the time.  I was thrilled when I was given a Game Boy and Final Fantasy Adventure by a friend of my brother.  It was an absolutely thrilling game for me.  I started to buy more games at the local pawn shop:  Wario Land, A Boy and His Blob, Link’s Awakening, Final Fantasy Legend II, The Gargoyle’s Quest, those were my favourites.  Around this time, too, my mother got medication for her disorders, and while she was still imperfect, much of the worse things trickled to a halt.

It was around this time that puberty should have happened, but it didn’t.  I ended up going through a series of ‘treatments’ which ultimately failed, and my Gameboy eventually became my only friend.  Sure I went over to other peoples’ houses, had sleepovers and such, but I could never seem to relate to anyone.  I felt like I was trapped inside my mind, and video games became an addiction, an escape.  Looking back, I was not a healthy child.

We eventually moved southward to the midwest.  I bought a playstation and an n64.  I had already played the consoles before, but not in any large quantity.  This more or less continued, as it became clear that my brother’s only interest at the time was in video games.  Abusive step dads, mysterious infections and my own introduction to drugs followed.

When I was high, I played video games a lot.  I don’t remember much of it, but I know I did.  I had complete files on every game I owned and many I didn’t.  Sometime after the next gen started, I bought a GameCube and my brother bought a PS2.  Soon I was introduced to Smash Bros. Melee, which I became a champ at (This was before ‘Wavedashing’ and such became mandatory).  Smash Bros introduced me to some new friends.  I became social again.

Into my adult years…

I quit using drugs with the help of a twelve step program, and started working seriously on music.  I often practice remixing video game music, true to my roots (I’m working on a Wild ARMs piano mix right now, which I will post sometime down the road).  I quit Smash Bros. when I realized that I really didn’t like seeing other people angry about losing, and would just let them win.  Plus I found out I could literally beat almost anyone with my eyes closed.

Being poor, I don’t get to play a lot of new games.  So instead I’ve been going back to old games, either for nostalgia’s sake or because I never got to play them when they were new.  I’m currently in the middle of Quest for Glory 4, and I’ve been beating the hell out of Star Fox 64, which I consider a damn-near perfect 3D rails space shooter.

All things considered, I don’t play nearly as much as I used to.  Since I became seriously handicapped, I’ve found that I value my freedom, and my God-given talents so much more than I ever did before.  I still love to play games socially, and when I’m bored, video games are the first things I’ll pick up.  I love the vidya, no doubt.  I just don’t have to depend on it to keep me sane anymore.