Retro Gaming – Page 31

You know it fees right

I’ve been playing mostly old games lately, in not only a vain attempt to save some money, but also in a terrible fit of nostalgia. Playing through Wario Land 4 on a proper GBA is infinitely more enjoyable than playing it on a PC, and I’ve discovered that maybe Final Fantasy 8 is a lot easier than I remember it. I was probably just doing it wrong before. However, my summer mission to finish Final Fantasy Tactics has ground to a halt. Turns out grinding for hours upon hours can remove the fun from even the best games.

Anyway, all the new games I’ve been playing over the past couple of months (aside from Wii Sports Resort) have been via Wii or DSiWare. The one that’s really stolen my heart though, is Art Style: PiCTOBiTS. Possibly because of my overactive nostalgia gland.

PiCTOBiTS is a falling-block puzzle game, almost like a backwards version of Tetris, where you get to move around the fallen blocks and try to make lines in the air. Of course, the term “lines” is a little too general. Any line, rectangle or square of four or more like-coloured bits will vanish off the bottom screen, and pop up to the top one, and therein lies the point of the game.

As the falling bits are vanquished from your bottom screen, they move up top, and fill in a blank slate to create a beloved classic Nintendo character (or characters, in some cases). While the round does end after the portrait is completed, it’s still very much a high-score game, keeping records of both your top time and score for each stage. Of course, there are ceilings to how high your scores and how low your times can get, but the sheer fun of the game is more than enough to keep you coming back for more.

There are 30 stages total, 15 of which you can freely play in sequential order, unlocking the next by finishing the round you’re on. The next 15 are acquired at your whim by using the coins you earn. These “Dark Stages” are notably harder, some almost completely overwhelming. I’ve only finished up to the 9th Dark Stage myself, afraid of what will happen to me if I tread any farther.

I found PiCTOBiTS less than amazing when I started playing it, but as I got better and learned to chain my lines, the game became exponentially more fun. The one-step-at-a-time renditions of classic Nintendo themes are also a great reason to come back to the over and over again. The only little quibble I have is that the stylus is not always the most accurate tool, and oftentimes (especially when you need to move fast), you’ll find yourself carrying and placing bits you never meant to pick up and/or put down, which usually spells instant doom in the harder stages.

PiCTOBiTS is easily the most worthwhile game currently available on DSiWare. Aside from the mostly great Art Style: Boxlife, nothing else on the service even comes close to piquing my interest. I’ll admit that even PiCTOBiTS and Boxlife were lucky shots in the dark that I probably would never have even tried had I not gotten the 1000 DSi Points used to purchase them for free. But alas! They are wonderful! And all should rejoice at the release of a puzzle game I can really get into!

Cleaning the Closet – A Blarticle

The other day I had some free time, and I started going through all my video games and picking out ones I no longer liked or was sure that I’d never play again. Honestly, it was very hard. I’m a pack rat by nature, and it’s incredibly hard to look at a game and admit to myself that I’ll never actually play it again. God knows that most of the ones I kept will only continue to collect dust until my girlfriend (or possibly even my mom, she would love to clean my room) gets rid of them, but I ended up with some incredibly large piles. 32 games ended up on the chopping block, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she recommended I hit my Nintendo Power collection next.

While I’ve stopped getting them over the last couple years, I had subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine for at least ten years, and had a nice collection of really old ones from my uncle. They were eating up a sizeable portion of my closet, and I decided it was time to free up that space. Issues 92 (Shadows of the Empire, and coincidentally, the number of this article) through 198 were lined up neatly on a shelf and were an easy purge. It was just a matter of grabbing a handful and tossing them in the recycling bin. Everything I owned that came before #92 was a little more complicated. These issues were left in a milk crate in the corner of my closet, and due to their poor location, were mostly torn and ripped far past the point of me feeling they were worth keeping. A small stack of these ones is pictured below.

Getting rid of all these magazines was a terribly nostalgic ordeal. The shelf issues were in such pristine condition that I could barely bear to part with them, and looking at just the covers was like a trip backwards through my entire life. In retrospect, it’s perhaps a little distressing that I could take any point in my life and define it with an issue of Nintendo Power. Every time I grabbed a new stack, my heartstrings tugged a little harder as I remembered all those games and all the good times I had. I have at least one story (short and trivial though some may be) to go with every issue, but that’s not why I’m writing today.

What’s truly interesting was the crate pile. Or moreover, what was mixed into the crate pile. Among the torn, raggedy, old relic magazines was all sorts of neat junk that inspired just as much (if not more in some instances) nostalgia as the Nintendo Powers themselves. Old drawings, writing, other kinds of literature, and even a bunch of exclusive promotional junk that came into my possession through my subscription to Nintendo Power. This may be a terribly boring article to most, not unlike my tribute to the cottage (which is yet to receive its due second part), but to me it’s a wellspring of memories and cuddly feelings of simpler days gone by. This is my tribute to what basically amounts to a pile of junk.

The first (excluding the small forest’s worth of magazines) thing I noticed was this wonderful little booklet of looseleaf. It’s entitles “The Guinness Book of Freaks” and is essentially a time capsule of how broken my sense of humour was nearing the end of grade seven. Things were so hard back then, I still had no idea who I was as a person, I was trying so hard to fit in with anybody, and my usual material (stick men being killed in decreasingly creative ways) was starting to dry out. So I guess it was time to parody a record book? Isn’t that the logical next step? I don’t know.

Looking back at this “book” of about 3 pages, I start to wonder exactly what went through my head back in those days. I mean, yes, gross and weird. I get it, just like most young boys. But this book is really bad. And I don’t mean disturbing or anything like that, but rather that it just shows a complete lack of imagination or originality. The best entries held within include “World’s Fattest Man” and “World’s Hairiest Woman”. I’m fairly confident that at that age I still had an imagination, so I have no idea what happened to it here. Guess it was just a stinker. Those happened every once in a while. It’s not even finished, with more than half the book’s pages completely untouched.

And no, I’m not scanning any of the pages. The mere description should be more than enough. It’s just really bad material, though fairly interesting in that it’s not often that I find something I did almost a decade ago and don’t look at it with even a bit of nostalgic fondness. This just sucks. F minus minus.

Now this bunch of old drawings, I was very happy to find. It’s not nearly as old as the Book of Freaks, but it’s at least a billionty times better. Most of this pile is comprised of the original pencil drawings for Coozy For Hire comics. A good portion of them come from the time before the tablet, some even from before I started colouring them in! We’ve only been running CFH for three and a half years, but already I look at these like they’re some kind of long-lost relics.

Even better than old rough comics, is that there’s a veritable wealth of unused material stashed away in here! And it comes in all kinds: unused comic ideas (albeit they were never used because they’re terrible), hordes of doodles, character galleries, etc etc etc. Granted, most of it will never see the light of day as anything more than filler, but I love that it’s there to be filler. The well was runnin’ dry, you see, and now I’m good to shirk off my comicing duties for ages to come! (But not really.)

Also hidden inside this slimy little pile is a script for a short play (possibly short enough to be referred to as a “skit”) that I co-wrote for grade 10 drama class. Yeah. If you hadn’t heard, I took drama class in grade 10. It was cool. Anyway, it’s a story about… well, I won’t say too much about it, because I may turn it into a feature-length comic one day (as inapproprite for that medium as the story is), but I like it. It was fun to write my character, and actually doing the play was a gas too. Second best play I’ve ever been in, hands down. The best one only wins out because I got to drop my pants in it.

Hmmm. Seems I owe junior high a shitty holocaust book.

Grade eight, I believe. English class, we were doing the inevitable yearly holocaust/WW2 unit (seriously, do they have to teach it every goddamn year from 6-12? I got the friggin’ point after two years; Hitler bad, Vandals good.) It’s a terribly generic story about a girl who gets magically transported from her passover supper or whatever to a concentration camp and then has to survive to get back. I don’t remember the details, but I don’t care. I’ll probably burn this book for being a smack in the face to all the people who had to suffer through that horror.

Ah, this one is great. Sort of. It’s great for what it represents, not so much the finished product. Of course I use the word “finished” very lightly, as what is contained in the notebook pictured above is an unpublished article. I find it amazing that at one point in time I actually loved writing for this website so much that I would take a notebook places and work on articles in my away-from-the-computer spare time. Of course, this is the only one I ever actually completed writing, but it’s not the only one I ever worked on.

And what is the lost article about? Well, actually, it’s about porn. Yeah. One of two articles about adult-related media that never got published because I didn’t really want to smut up the site like that. This one was actually about my dissatisfaction with pornography on the whole, though it focused more on film than anything else. It’s not worth typing out and putting up, because it’s short and crappy (er, crappier than my usual crap anyway), and I really don’t like it. I guess I probably didn’t like it by the time I got around to typing it up, because it never came to fruition.

The other porn-related article I was going to write was about a game called 3D Striptease that, after a little searching, no longer exists outside a demo. The article then, obviously, was a review of that demo, as the full game was still in development at the time and I wasn’t going to pay money for something so garbage anyway. It was opposite the article in the book, however, as I had all the pictures and article structure ready, I just needed to sit down and write the thing. The game was supposed to be released in summer 2004, so I’m assuming the article in the notebook is at least as old if not older. Maybe someday I’ll dig up the demo and then write about the greatest stripper FPS that never was.

This notebook is only marginally more interesting. The first page is a continuation of the Spare! comics I wrote throughout high school. Only high school was over so I had no more material, since Spare! was based on actual events. I actually coloured and posted the first strip on this page on the blog many years back. It’s much better than the other two, which at best serve to set up the “I’m not in high school anymore so no more reality-based comics” premise of what I assume would have been called “New Spare!”.

I never made another attempt at new Spare! comics in either high school or after high school format. The only other use this book has served over time is as a stand-in for our old printer that never worked. In it, I copied down every single alchemy recipe for Dragon Quest VIII. I was pretty into that game, and of course I would have to complete the alchemy book. I’m obsessive-compulsive like that. Ironically, I never beat the game proper, as the last boss is too Goddamn hard and I totally fucked myself by putting skill points in all weapon types for my characters, rather than focusing on one or two.

There’s also a map to every hidden Sorcerer’s Scanner item in Tales of Legendia, which I did collect all of in the end, but really, Legendia wasn’t that good. And that’s coming from a pretty loyal Tales fan. Maybe I just need to play it again? I dunno. I’d rather just play Tales of Vesperia a fourth time.

Here’s a pile of Nintendo Power-related goodies, the one which I’m most excited about being the Nintendo Power Club challenge cards. See, back when NP was awesome and I read every single page (even about games I’d never care about in a million years), they put in little punch-out cars in the back of the mag that you could collect. I had tons of them, and I thought they’d been lost to the ether many, many years ago. But alas! It seems that there were a couple issues from which I did not remove the cards, and forsooth, I have a small number of them in my possession. Kinda shitty when you have a collectible that you can no longer collect though.

There’s more to these cards though! While they may seem like cheap eye candy or collector fodder at best, the back sides also have a couple challenges for each game. The MegaMan X card, for example, challenges you to beat certain stages using only the X-Buster. This is a joke because today I can finish the entire game with only the X-Buster, while asleep! But they were hard back in the day! They also give a short summary of the games’ plots, and some practical data, such as genre, number of players, and the date the game was released. You may also notice that the cards are color-coded; purple cards are Game Boy games, red are NES games, and green are Super NES – the same color-coding Nintendo Power used for page themes.

There are a couple Nintendo Power Supplies catalogues in here, but I definitely want to review those separately, and the big “confidential information” file folder look-alike is a promotional brochure for Goldeneye 007. I haven’t leafed through it very thoroughly, but I’m thinking it’s also worthy of its own article, so I’ll let it sit and collect dust for a few more years before I get around to it. Plus, it’ll be way more retro by then. Hopefully retro will still be cool.

I’ve always loved super heroes and comics. Every Saturday morning for most of the 90’s I would get up early and watch FOX’s morning cartoon line-up, which included X-Men, Spider-Man, and… well, I can’t remember what else. But I watched the shit out of X-Men and Spider-Man. Ask any male and they’ll tell you that those were some awesome shows. Hulk’s cartoon was nowhere near as popular and was never in the Saturday morning lineup, but he managed to make himself my favourite super hero with his pure awesomeness. I’ve been interested in super heroes as long as I can remember, I’ve read up a ton on them, and when I was younger, even had most of the toys.

I’ve also always been a huge fan of comics. Admittedly, they only had Archie and ALF (with a few Heathcliffs and Richie Riches thrown in for good measure), but my grandparents had a magnificent stack of old comics at the cottage, and over many years, I read them all. My fondest memories involve ads where Batman is selling twinkies. And these days (though admittedly less often than usual) I read at least five webcomics, and I even draw my own comic! It’s amazing! You’d think this obsession with comics would equate to me having a good collection of my own.

Not the case. Pictured above is every single comic book that I own. Yeah. Just over twenty. There’s a pretty wide variety, from Batman to Spider-Man to KISS to Star Wars, but it’s still a bit tiny and embarrassing. Though there is a Marvel art book in there called “Marvel Masterpieces 2” which is amazing and has some truly fantastic portraits in it. It’s the gem of my collection and is the only one in pristine condition. The rest range from okay to have-the-cover-ripped-off. It’s actually probably the only one I’m going to keep. I may not have many comics, but I’ve read them over many times each, so I don’t really feel much sorrow parting with them. It was fun, but I guess when it comes down to it, I’m just not a comic person.

This is just a bunch of window decals that I took from work before the Wii launch. It was a great time to work at TRU, because there was so much promotional Wii crap that I could swipe and enjoy for myself. Other than that, I’d say it’s no more enjoyable than most other jobs. Friendly crew, but that’s about it.

I would love to type “Ahh, the piece de resistance” at this point, but as cool as this book is, it’s not some kind of amazing article-finisher. It’s just a standard unlicensed Nintendo strategy guide. In pocket book form.

Edwin gave this to me a few years back. I forget where he found it, but I believe there was some sort of intent to see it on the website. Maybe not, I don’t know. It was ages (three years) ago. All I can think of when I look at this book is that I know I’ve read it before, but a glance at the index of games covered assures me that I have not. I’m certain that the book I read covered Monster Party, Friday the 13th and maybe a Choplifter game. But that was all the way back in grade five, so I may be off on a couple titles. Googling it, I couldn’t find a game index for any of the three follow-up books, but I’m pretty sure it was one of them. The cover just looks so familiar.

On the other hand, I looked up Jeff Rovin on Wikipedia, and while he’s a pretty prolific novelist and biographer, he’s also pretty big on movie novelizations. Which is not too bad, since he’s done a ton of original work, which makes up for the movie novelization’s inherent lack of imagination, but he novelized Mortal Kombat. Why? Why would you bother? “Read the book based on the mediocre movie based on the crappy game!” That would be the pitch. What a terrible idea…

And that’s about that. I should mention that while the article is titled “Cleaning the Closet”, we’re only talking about approximately 5% of the closet’s space, so it’s a little misleading. If I were to dig out all the old nostalgic junk from the entirety of my closet, this article would never end. And that would be more than even I could take.

Valhalla, I am coming!

So I guess 2009 hasn’t been a much better year for blogging, has it? Two months, three posts apiece. Sounds about up to par. Oh well. Consider it a concession to that nagging voice in my head that’s yelling at me for not blogging about anything interesting.

But ho! Have I got something interesting to talk about today! If you look at video game news at all, you should know that there’s a little gem of a DS game going around called Retro Game Challenge. It’s packed full of NES games that never existed, and it’s an absolutely essential play for anyone with fond memories of gaming in the 80’s. Parish and his cronies won’t shut up about Guadia Quest, the RPG of the bunch, but there is so much more to enjoy here! Me, I love me some Robot Ninja Haggleman!

Robot Ninja Haggleman is a simple action game, sort of a strange mash-up between Super Mario Bros and… Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle maybe? I’m not sure, really. The whole “map full of doors” reminds me of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. The game is simple, requiring you, as Haggleman, to rid the room of enemies and then defeat the boss that appears. The twist is that each room has a plethora of doors, which serve many purposes. First, Haggleman can hide behind doors to avoid enemies, and a swinging door will stun/kill any bad guys that are too close. Entering a door also swings the doors of every like-coloured door, so you can set up combo kills by switching door colours. There are also items hidden behind certain doors, and the boss character can be flushed out before the peons are all dead by opening the door he’s hiding behind. It’s a pretty easy game, since Haggleman is not only able to kill enemies with doors and by stomping on them, but he’s also got ninja stars which stun baddies and there are powerups that make him even faster and stronger. Not to mention that it’s only 16 stages long, which is not bad by early NES standards. It’s super fun though.

The sequel, Robot Ninja Haggleman 2, as you may expect is even better. It’s the same basic game, but with many little improvements that add up to a lot. The title screen and cutscenes now have backgrounds, but otherwise the graphics are all the same. Gameplay tweaks like vertically scrolling stages (the original game’s stages only move horizontally) and the ability to delay your special attacks seem tiny but add a lot more to the game. It’s also noticeably more difficult, with smarter minor enemies and tougher bosses (they now take three hits to kill, as opposed to one in the first Robot Ninja Haggleman). It’s really all you could ever want from a sequel: the exact same game with a ton more polish and some nice gameplay additions.

Haggleman 3, however, is where the series really shines. It is entirely different from the previous games, and is probably the best NES game that was never made. It’s the last game in Retro Game Challenge and is truly a smashing finish to the game. Taking Metroid-style exploration and upgrading and putting a Ninja Gaiden mask over top of it is genius. It’s even got annoying bird that fly out of nowhere and knock you into bottomless pits! The game’s look is entirely different, with large, dramatic-looking sprites as opposed to the cartoony style of the previous installments, and the gameplay follows suit. It’s awesome. I don’t know how many times I’m gonna say that.

Seriously, Haggleman 3 is the apex of 8-bit gaming. The controls are fluid, and the stages are huge. Haggleman tosses ninja stars by default, but getting in close to enemies will get him to start swinging his sword. Stages are no longer a big series of halls and doors, they’re now huge areas with tons of different paths and secrets everywhere. Doors now lead only to hints and stores. In the stores, Haggleman can buy life, special weapons, and gears. The gears can be installed to give Haggleman increases abilities, like stronger attacks or higher jumps, but only three can be equipped at any time and they have to be under a certain power limit, so that gives it a slight puzzle element in having to know what gears to have equipped at the right time.

I really can’t continue and keep pretending that this is interesting for anyone but me, so I’ll stop here, but let it be known that Robot Ninja Haggleman is my new hero. Truly, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Retro Game Challenge if you own a DS and love 8-bit gaming (who doesn’t?). What’s even better is that the sequel just hit store shelves in Japan. It’s not a huge deal yet because the first game took almost a year and a half to be localized, but maybe the mass of hype around it will speed up that process for the sequel. Early fall release, maybe? Please?

Wished ever after would be like this

Okay, Monday is whatever I want it to be, right? Well today I choose to do a sort of Part 2 to yesterday’s post. And by that, I mean I have posted a new article; the 2008 Virtual Console Wishlist. It’s all about Super Nintendo games! And it actually falls closer to the intent of this “24 Days of Materialism” feature than yesterday’s rant, because it’s a loving tribute to things I would like to pay money for, whereas usually I talk about things I’ve already paid for.

So go read that maybe. It’s pretty one-sided, but I’m sure you’ll agree with me on at least the last game. If you don’t you’re a heartless monster and you shouldn’t be allowed to play video games.

Virtual Console Wishlist 2008 – The Super NES Edition

Here we are again, at the end of another year. Only this time it’s 2008. And since it’s a different year, I guess I get the luxury of running the same article I did last December without the guilt of using the same idea twice in a year. So like I did back then, I’m going to make a short list of games that I would personally love to see on the Wii’s Virtual Console service. It’ll be a little bit harder this year, because I used my most wanted in 2007, but coming up with seven more wasn’t too hard. And I even have a gimmick this time!

For 2008’s VC Wishlist, I’ve decided that I’m only going to pick games that appeared on the Super Nintendo (or Super Famicom, in some cases). Why? I dunno. I was just picking games and once I had it down to a relatively short list I realized that the ones I wanted the most were on the SNES. Sure, there are some NES games that I would love to play again, but none more than G.I. Joe or Nightshade. The only thing I’ve craved on the N64 lately has inexplicably been Pokémon Stadium, but that’s not super important. And like last year, I really couldn’t give a crap what happens with the Sega and Hudson machines. Or even the Neo Geo. I can’t even think of all the systems they’ve got on there now. All I had as a kid were the Nintendo machines, so we’re gonna stick to those.

#1 – Soul Blazer

Chances are you’ve never played Soul Blazer before. It’s only slightly less likely that you’ve never even heard of the game before now. Or maybe it was huge and I just missed it because I was afraid of RPGs back in my SNESing days. Imagine my surprise when I opened the ROM file a couple years ago and learned that it wasn’t really that much of an RPG at all!

No, Soul Blazer has more in common with the Zelda series that it would with any Final Fantasy. It’s one of those top-down action RPGs that I love so much. Wish I had known that back in the day! Yes, that would have been good, because I really don’t think Soul Blazer has held up all that well over time. The graphics aren’t horrible, but do reek of bland. It looks almost like a dressed-up Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Or at least that’s what I can best liken it to. Not to mention that the gameplay could use a little sprucing up. I’ll give in to the fact that it’s an earlier SNES game, but it could still work a little better. The point is, at the tie I would have thought the games was great. At present, it’s a little outdated. Or a lot.

So If I’m being so hard on the game, why do I want it on the Virtual Console soooo bad? for one, because if you look past its age, it’s not a terrible game. A little clunky and rough around the edges, but entirely playable. I do like it, but there’s not use pretending it’s better than it. The main reason I want to see it is because I’ve never played all the way through. I’ve only spent about two hours at most with the game, just more than enough to form an opinion of a SNES title. And I want to play it because I’ve been itching to go through Illusion of Gaia again, but my misguided sense of fairness is forcing me to play this one again. And if it lived on my Wii, that would make it that much more appealing to actually load up and play.

I can’t truly rate Soul Blazer at this point, because I’ve only barely gotten into it, but then again, I’ve only finished two of the games on this list, so it’s really more of a “I want to truly experience these for the first time list”. Mostly, anyway. If I did have to place a final judgement on it right now though, I could tell you that I’ve easily downloaded games of lower quality than this. The TG-16’s Neutopia, for example. And that’s essentially the first Legend of Zelda game with a facelift. So yeah, I would buy this one as soon as it showed up in the Wii Shop. Might not play it right away, but it would give me peace of mind to at least know that it’s there waiting for me.

#2 – Illusion of Gaia

Illusion of Gaia is the sequel to Soul Blazer, and the second game in the trilogy. It’s also the only one I’ve finished. Of all three games, I think this one would be the most likely Virtual Console candidate, if only because Soul Blazer (as far as I know) was never hugely publicized and the sequel never made it to North America.

Illusion of Gaia is a huge step up from its predecessor. It’s still a top-down Zelda wannabe, but it’s much more polished and the story is actually really interesting. Or, at least, it was many years ago when I played it through. I think it would probably still hold up pretty well these days.

The plot of the game follows a young boy named Will on a quest to save the world from a doomsday comet. It’s pretty standard stuff, but the part that I love about it, and indeed what drew me to the game in the first place, is that most of the game locations take place in real-world locations like the Nazca lines and the Great Wall of China. It’s officially a fantasy world, but there are so many analogues to real human history and mysteries, and I think that adds an incredibly interesting facet to the game. I know it sounds horrible, but I kind of wish the game gave even more real information about these things. It would be the first truly entertaining edutainment title.

Plot and locations aside, I still think Illusion of Gaia is a solid title. It’s still sort of a lo-fi Zelda, but it has its own charm that I find very few other games possess. Maybe I’m just looking at it through rosy nostalgia glasses, but I’ve been itching to play through it again. The only reason I haven’t is that I have so many other games in progress that I couldn’t possibly start playing a game I’ve already seen through to completion. Also, I want to play and beat Soul Blazer first, if just for that minor sense of completion. Of all the games featured here, I think this is the one that I have the strongest craving to play.

#3 – Terranigma

The last in the series, Terranigma is also the finest. Well, probably. I’ve only been through roughly a tenth of the game, but that was much more recently than the other two, and I remember thinking that it was really quite awesome. My friends even agreed with me when I showed it to them. Though to be fair, it was still early in our career of playing ROMs, and it was mind-blowing to play pretty much any SNES game on our computers for free.

Terranigma, as far as I remember, is more of a “preserve the world and nature” themed game than simply saving the world. Or at least, that’s the impression I got from the first couple hours of it. A quick check on Wikipedia confirms that it’s a wee bit more complex than that. The game takes place in a world where the Earth is hollow and the overworld is dominated by good, and the underworld interior by evil. There’s more to it than it seems though, because the hero of the game… is from the underworld!

I honestly can’t remember a lot about this game other than the fact that it plays pretty closely to Illusion of Gaia and that it was a ton of fun. Not sure why I never finished this one, because whenever I think about it, I can only remember it being pure bliss. I’m sure it wasn’t that good, but I’m willing to stake my reputation (not that that’s a huge gamble) on the fact that it is a top tier SNES game. In fact, while it was only released in Japan and Europe, the main (only?) reason we never saw it is because Enix’s North American branch closed down before they could get it out. the only thing I’m not into about this game is that because of my misguided sense of obligation, I have to finish the other two games before I’ll let myself start this one! Aargh! Well, if by some impossible stroke of luck we see this on the Virtual Console first, I suppose I’ll have a loophole.

#4 – Robotrek

While not a sequel to any of the aforementioned games, Robotrek comes to us from the same development studio as the Soul Blazer trilogy, Quintet. Over the years, I have come to really respect their work, and the fact that most (if not all) of their SNES titles were published by Enix made them must-plays for me. See, I’m willing to give anything with the Enix name a shot because they had so much wonderful product in the 16-bit era, and Robotrek is no exception.

I have actually tried playing Robotrek twice, neither time making it very far into the game. This saddens me, because it’s exactly the type of game I want to play. For one, it’s an Enix RPG, and much more of a standard RPG than the last three games I just talked about. For two, it has a large collection/synthesis/customization aspect to it, and that I absolutely adore.

The game is about robots, obviously, and I have no idea what the plot was about, but you play as a young boy who uses robots to battle. It’s essentially Pokémon a year before Pokémon existed. Not only can you build new robots, but you can customize them to your liking, adding new parts and weapons, and even make your own new parts by combining old ones. Like I said, it’s exactly the kind of game I want to play. It’s almost like if Custom Robo were a standard JRPG.

So yeah, I think I’ve made it clear exactly why I want to be playing this on my Wii as soon as possible. I think the reason I put it down in the past is maybe because the completionist in me became too obsessed and I was too interested in beefing up my robots than actually playing through the story. That sounds about right. I do, after all, usually have Butterfree and Wartortle before even reaching Brock.

#5 – Umihara Kawase

Nintendo very rarely uses their infinite power to infuse the Virtual Console’s lineup with games that were never released in whatever particular region you may be in. Sin and Punishment would be the big one for us here in North America, but there are tons of lesser known games that never made it over here that I would love to see make it over in digital form. Umihara Kawase would be somewhere around the top of that list.

The thing that makes Umihara Kawase a good candidate is that Nintendo could put it up with very little extra effort going into it. The game is a platform puzzler, and one of the best. You play as a small girl tasked with reaching a door on the other side of the stage, and your only ability is to use a fishing line as a grappling hook. The trick is that the hook responds to all sorts of physics, and the game can get very complicated, but once you get good (good luck ever mastering it!), it’s insanely entertaining. And that’s why it’s easy. The game needs no instructions. The only thing you have to learn is how your hook is going to respond to how you use it. Any story sequences I may have forgotten about are irrelevant, and the game is simple enough that you don’t need the tutorial.

So if Nintendo could put it up so easily and it’s so great, why isn’t it available yet? Sadly, it’s likely because the franchise then moved to the Playstation and recently somebody decided it would be a good idea to make another sequel on the PSP. I hear it’s a pretty sad interpretation of the SNES game, and that’s why I’d love to see the original swing into our lives via Wii. Will it happen? I don’t think it’s too likely. In fact, I’d wager that the Playstation game ends up on PSN before the SNES edition hits Virtual Console. Yes, that’s how bad it’s gotten on Nintendo’s digital distribution system.

#6 – Mario’s Super Picross

Of all games never released on American shores, I would think that Mario’s Super Picross is one of those with the best chance to end up as a Virtual Console candidate. Why? Because it’s already been released in Japan and the PAL territories, and also because Nintendo loves Picross. They’ve made a few puzzles from this game available as free DLC for Picross DS, so why not let us have the entire game for a few bucks?

I think I’ve made my love of picross obvious over the lifespan of this website, but if you hadn’t heard, I heart picross. It’s a fairly simple puzzle game wherein you’re given a grid and a set of numbers for each row and column. You have to deduce from that set of numbers which spaces on the grid in that row or column need to be filled in. It sounds unbearably easy, and for someone who’s spent a few hours solving picross puzzles, it usually is. The main mode in Mario’s Super Picross gives you a time limit in which to solve each puzzle, and you’re deducted time for each mistake you make, so it’s very much a thinking game. Fortunately, like sudoku, event though it involves numbers and heavy thought, there is no math involved. If there were, I wouldn’t love it.

It gets harder in the second set of puzzles, hosted by Wario, in which you have unlimited time, but the game won’t tell you if you make a mistake. It can take much longer to figure these ones out, but I’ve never taken much more than half an hour to get any of them done. It’s also much more satisfying to solve one of these puzzles, like when you beat a game of mahjong without any hints.

I stand firmly in my belief that Mario’s Super Picross will eventually be available to me as a Virtual Console title, because the Japanese and Europeans already have it, so it has to show up here sooner or later. Only now since Chris Kohler has become disillusioned with the VC, we don’t have anyone to badger Nintendo for equality anymore.

#7 – Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Alright, Nintendo. Honestly, where is this? We have all the other Mario platformers, and even Yoshi’s Story. I think we’ve waited more than long enough for this one. We deserve Yoshi’s Island.

Yeah, I totally saved the best for last. As much as I like any of the other games on this list, none of them could even hold a candle to the majesty Yoshi’s Island. It is platforming perfection, a mecca that may never be reached again. How Nintendo could have slapped Yoshi’s Story on the VC list without Yoshi’s Island to reinforce Yoshi’s reputation is a mystery that may never be solved.

I honestly don’t think I should have to describe this game or why I love it. I mean, I don’t know why you would even be on this website if you’re the kind of person who would have skipped over this gem. Unless you’re my girlfriend, but that’s really the only acceptable case. So really, if you haven’t experienced the wonder that is Yoshi’s Island, I highly recommend you stop reading this right now and go find yourself the ROM and an emulator. Or at the very least, the GBA port. Just play it. And that recommendation goes double if you’re my girlfriend, as there may be hope for you liking video games that don’t require plastic guitars after all if you try this out.

So yes. That’s my list. It’s taken a lot of beer and Danish butter cookies to struggle through, but I’ve done it. Unlike last year, wherein I posted this in early November, I’m just making this one up on the second-to-last Monday of the year. Hence, this time we won’t think of these of games that I want to see before 2008 is up, but rather a list that I would like to see show up sometime in the year 2009. And don’t fret; unless some giant change in my life takes place that makes me unable to webmaster anymore, there will totally be a 2009 edition. It’s just too easy.

Yeah yeah yeah

Between now and that last post, I’ve got my PC’s audio working! Huzzah! Turns out I haven’t completely forgotten everything I used to know about computers. It’s just hidden under many layers of dust and dates I now have to remember.

Many months ago Nintendo released some screenshots for a new Kirby game on the DS. They didn’t put a title to it, but I could tell right away that it was a remake Kirby Super Star. I was ecstatic. Sure, ports are generally frowned upon, but KSS is the best Kirby game ever, and given the generally tepid quality of Kirby Squeak Squad, there’s no guarantee a new game would have been better.

When I was a young ‘un, I first saw Kirby Super Star in an issue of Nintendo Power and knew it had to be mine. I owned and loved every Kirby game up until that point (minus Kirby’s Dream Course), and ran as fast as I could to tell my parents that I needed it or I would die. I had used this excuse before (Chrono Trigger, Earthbound), and it had been unsuccessful. Fortunately, my birthday was right around the corner, and what did I receive? Oh yeah. Kirby.

I played that fucking game so much that I’m surprised the cartridge never died out. I played alone, I played with my brothers, I played with friends. I played through all the games in Kirby Super Star upwards of twenty times (it took a lot longer back then!), and never got bored of it.

So naturally I grabbed the port. I had blazed through a ROM version of the original game in a single sitting not six months earlier, but was anxious to get my hands on this prettier version. And it was so much more! There are nearly twice as many games to play in this new version, and most of the new ones are really hard! Revenge of the King is a sweet “dark world” take on Spring Breeze, and Meta Knightmare has you burn through most of the original game as Meta Knight. Helper to Hero and The True Arena are great variations on the classic The Arena, and make it hard again. I used to get so frustrated with The Arena back in the day, but lately I can breeze through it without more than a couple nicks, and the new games just prove that while I’ve mastered what the original game threw at me, I’ve still got a lot of work before I can say I’ve truly conquered the fresh material.

In the end, Kirby Super Star Ultra is exactly what I’d hoped it would be: a prettier version of a game that I dearly loved in my youth. And then it’s more too, with all the extra games! Of course, it’s a Kirby game, so for the most part it’s super-easy, but Kirby games are always fun, even that unusually lame Nintendo 64 entry. Do I recommend? Hells yeah! Just make sure you have someone else to play with: half the fun of Kirby Super Star is playing God with player 2. Also stealing all the food from your dying friend.

Shooo-ryuken!

If you aren’t exactly in the loop, Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe was released not long ago, and it’s pretty much been the talk of guys at work. I’m actually really surprised at how much people have been talking about it. I never thought Mortal Kombat was very good. At all. If I ever played it, it was just to rebel againt my parents who didn’t want me playing anything with blood in it.

What I am interested in though, is the new Street Fighter! No no, not 4. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix!

Okay, long name. But it’s great! It’s almost exactly like SSF2T as you remember it, but pretty! And rebalanced, and with more options, and with online play, and some other stuff. The point is that it still plays exactly like Street Fighter should, and that’s why I love it. Despite the fact that I am complete crap at it.

Yeah. I tried playing the remixed mode on easy, which supposedly, was really easy. It wasn’t. Not for me. I made it about four guys before I got to Cammy and I just could not defeat her. I know that I suck at fighters, but I just had to get in on this action. And you know what? Despite the fact that I couldn’t even get halfway through the fighter roster, I’m having fun with it. It’s Street Fighter! How could it not be fun?

The only qualm I have with the game is that it shows you how to execute every character’s special move, but only with an arrow. Sometimes those arrows are very twisted, and I cannot make out for the life of me what they’re trying to communicate to me. I wouldn’t mind if it said B-BD-D-FD-F+X. That is completely understandable to me. But trying to understand an arrow that goes across them twists in on itself is like trying to read a completely foreign language. Just too hard. Also I could never do the Dragon Punch even when I knew the combination so that’s not helping. In the end though, great game. But that much was obvious 15 years ago.

Doodly ding-dong tick-tock

On Sunday, I will review games from the various download services on current generation video game consoles. Today is Sunday! Here’s one of my favourite games that recently appeared on the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Don’t recognise it? It’s Super Dodgeball! One of the greatest NES games ever made. I really don’t feel like making a huge post out of this, mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s a really simple game. It’s just fucking dodgeball. But it’s so damn fun! So yeah, if you’re really interested in knowing more, go find a NES emulator and the ROM. I swear you’re in for a wondeful time.

Autumn vacation

The days are getting shorter, the weather colder, and the job annoying…er. What does this mean? Vacation time! Well, not really, but I am heading out to Grand Forks this weekend to enjoy one last moment of happiness before the Christmas season explodes and turns my life into a retail nightmare. For the third time. Why am I still at this stupid job?

Anyway, Secret of Mana is finally on the Virtual Console, which is fantastic. It wasn’t exaclty at the top of my wish list, but it’s a step in the right direction. As far as I can tell, most people consider it to be one of the greatest games on the SNES, though a recent playthrough with the guys has left me asking if it was really that great. Of course, I still love it and will now play it over and over and over ad infinitum, but it just seems like it could benefit from a few tweaks. A less broken battle system would be nice (maybe nerf magic a little bit so cheesing over bosses isn’t as viable a strategy), and some improved hit detection would make a world of difference too. Oh, also a new translation. Square-Enix has gotten so much better at that lately, and Mana is one of those oldies that would most definitely benefit from a rewrite. Still, it’s plenty of fun, and I’m pretty sure that it’s the only game where you get to beat the snot out of Santa Claus.

SNES games be damned though! I haven’t shared my opinion of it yet, but the DSi does deserve a couple words here. All in all, I think it’s cool, but I’m still technically undecided about it. I mean, I know once it launches I’ll be one of the first in line to get one, but for now I’m taking the relaxingly uncommitted “on the fence” stance. I suppose that if the whole DS Ware thing means I can download Game Boy classics, it’s a must-have, but the camera and media player don’t really do much for me. I’m in love with the idea of a built-in internet browser though; as long as it’s more functional than the PSP’s, that is. And if it has the ability to search for a word on a page, I’ll pay double for the damn thing. If there is one thing the Wii internet browser could benefit from, it’s a ctrl+F function.

Two lovers in love, we was lovin’ a lot

Not as though I’d be doing too much blogging anyhow, but for the next couple days we’re heading down to Fargo to celebrate… well, not working for like four days? I dunno. Going down to the States to celebrate Canada Day seems a little dumb, but there really isn’t any other occasion. I suppose it’s just for the sake of shopping and getting away. Yeah.

So how about that Mega Man 9 news? Pretty damn awesome, I’d say. This is exactly what digital distribution is all about. I suppose that means that Capcom will finally be putting all the old Mega Man games on the Virtual Console then? I have the Anniversary Collection, so I wouldn’t be buying them, but it would be nice to know that they’re there.