I laugh to myself

I went ahead and banged out a sort of “Materialism Matrix” just now, and I have pretty much the entire month’s worth of blog posts planned out. There are a few days that could use a little more thought, or things that should probably be fleshed out into full articles, but at least I have a rough draft of what I’m going to be working on for the next twenty-odd days. Also, each day has a set “theme,” which are as follows:

  • Monday – Whatever
  • Tuesday – Video Games
  • Wednesday – Music
  • Thursday – Reading
  • Friday – Movies
  • Saturday – TV
  • Sunday – VC/WiiWare/XBLA

So then, being as it’s Tuesday, I guess we’re in store for a short review of a video games of some sort. Hmmmm… I think that today, we’ll take a look at Castelvania Judgement, a fighting game starring a host of popular CV characters.

Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me that this is a very bad idea. We all remember the diaster that was Ehrgeiz. The difference would be that the Castlevania franchise doesn’t exactly have all the retards of the gaming world by the balls like Final Fantasy VII did (and sadly, still does). But hey, with the promise of finally having a chance to reverse the roles and beat down some Belmonts with the almighty Dracula, who could refuse?

To tell the truth, Judgement does bring on flashbacks of Ehrgeiz. They’re painful, but then I realize I don’t have to suffer through any appearances by that douche Sephiroth, and I feel a little better. Also, I realize that it’s much more polished and actually playable, then I stop convulsing and start playing. That isn’t to say that Judgement is good. Oh no. It’s a half-assed game, but it’s kinda neat and has a lot of features. The main attraction being beating the snot out of randomly chosen opponents one by one like every other fighting game. The difficulty is up there, beacuse some characters are painfully cheap, but once you learn to use all the abilities the game affords you, it gets a lot more bearable. Almost easy, even.

The other main mode of play is the “Castle” mode, which I was hoping would have a little adventuring, but rather it’s a series of rooms with specific challenges. Some are just beating down a handful of zombies, some collecting a number of hearts, and some fighting another character with stat bonuses or penalties. It’s neat, and there are plenty of goodies to be won. Which brings me to a particularly fun aspect: accessories! As you progress through Castle Mode, you win junk that you can equip to your characters to make them look… well, most just make them look odd. Simon Belmont with shades? Carmilla with a pirate hat? It certainly adds a splash of humour to the game.

Perhaps the greatest part of the game is the huge stride it makes for Nintendo’s online gaming system. Every game up until now has required the use of friend codes. While Judgement still uses them, they are not mandatory to save friends. Or so I’ve heard. I haven’t actually been able to connect to another player yet. Probably because so few people are buying this game. But in any case, that’s awesome. The only thing it’s missing is WiiSpeak support, and it would be the first perfectly (ahem) executed online Wii game. Oh well! Maybe next year.

So if there’s all these great things about it, then why is it so half-assed? Well, like I said, the difficulty is pretty rough until you’ve learned to exploit all your abilities and then it gets pretty easy. Also, the controls are kinda wonky. I mean, you attack by pressing the B button, and use special moves by holding A and then pressing B. It’s totally weird. Don’t even get me started on how bad it is if you try to use the Wiimote+Nunchuck control scheme. But anyway, it’s a half-decent game, but maybe you’d rather wait until it hits the bargain bin. It’s not really that bad, but if you’re picky, you might just want to look elsewhere.

I’ve got aces in my eyes

It’s December again! Despite living in Winterpeg and working in retail, there are some things I absolutely love about the month of December. X-Entertainment’s Advent Calendar would be the obvious one. Oh, and that Christmas thing is pretty cool too, as long as you don’t mind overblown holidays. I also like the opportunity to dress up my website with little snowmen. A little snowman. Whatever. The point is snowman.

But with this change in header image comes an absolutely massive commitment: The 24 Days of Materialism. Yes. That’s right. It’s back. You may or not remember that last year I attempted to review 24 things, one a day from December 1st until December 24th. It burned out with only three days to go, but I feel good about it this year! And for someone who hasn’t made more than three blog posts a month for almost the entire year, it’s a pretty grand claim. But I can do it! And I will do it! You shouldn’t start sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’! Given that it’s a pretty big project and it’s my first day, I think I’ll start small.

Jones Soda carbonated candy has been around for ages, but I only just discovered it whence I was visiting the top of a mountain in Banff earlier this year. I then found more in the shopping district and was amazed. I ate it, and it was magical. I was swooned. When I returned home, I proudly showed off my find to my mom and youngest brother, but was quickly shot down when he said he’d been getting the stuff down at the 7-Eleven for ages. I slumped to the ground in defeat.

The Jones candy isn’t terribly special on its own. I’ve been eating little candy bottlecaps and other stuff that has the sweet fizzing effect that the Jones candy so proudly touts since I was but a wee nipper, and as far as I can remember, they all taste just as good. Or even better in some cases. I’d take a root beer bottlecap over a sour green apple “fufu berry” Jones candy any day. The cream soda is rockin’ though! The thing that really sets them apart is the sweet tin that they come in. Okay, fine, it’s not super great, but I’ve been obsessed with candy tins since like forever. I have a collection of Altoids tins in my closet that is just a small testament to my love of candy tins. In recent years, I’ve been purging my room of useless things like that bit by bit, so it’s not as apparent as it would have been back when this site was still coated in black. It physically hurt me to toss out the Jones candy tins, but I’m told that fewer people respect packrats.

If that last sentence weren’t there, I’d have a wicked awesome segue into this paragraph, but so it goes. I just wanted to mention today that it’s been a whole year since I gave Torrential Equilibrium a facelift, and I still like it. Though to its credit, I think the last layout lasted about three years, so we’ll see how I feel about this one come 2010.

It’s been too long

I don’t know if I ever told you, but in April of 2005 or so, I grew a wart on my left middle finger. I hadn’t had a wart in forever, so I was a little worried about it at first, but as time went on, I realized that it was perfectly harmless. Of course, it only lasted long enough for time to have gone on because the wart medication in the house was ancient and had clearly lost all potency. I asked for new stuff, but it never came.

A year or so later, I was looking at the wart, and decided that it was time for it to go. Probably about a week after that, I got up, went out, and bought my own damn wart remover. It was one of those neat home freezing kits that you see boasted about on TV so much. I tried it, and I thought the sensation was really cool. Two weeks after that, I realized that my little friend had retained his residence on my finger. So I used another blast of freezing, but I upped the dosage to enough to take out a heavier wart, as the manual instructed me to do. It did not work.

Time continued to move forward, and I think it must have been about a year ago, maybe a little more, that I noticed there was a second little wart growing just south of the original. Earlier this year I consulted the doctor about getting rid of them. She said that if I shaved them off with a razor and applied some new gel, they would disappear. I routinely chopped the little buggers away, but never got around to purchsing a new tube of wart gel, so they never disappeared.

It’s now been over three-and-a-half years since my first little friend made his appearance, and what exactly is the moral to this long, seemingly pointless story? I just wanted to have sufficient reason to post this picture, really. To be honest, I wanted it to be long enough that it would push the picture down beyond the main view of the page, but I just can’t drone on any more, and I’ve puffed the rest of the story as much as I can! Ah well, here’s the grossness!

It’s what’s left of the little motherfuckers after the doc burned the shit out of ’em. good riddance. I suppose if you’re still looking for a moral, it’s that you need to nip these things in the bud as fast as you can unless you’re eager to have them as a permanent fixture in your life.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts – The Redemption of a Franchise

I’ll start off saying that I’m not a huge fan of new games journalism. Sure, I read Gamespite as if it were the word of the Christ reborn, but it’s more for entertainment purposes. If I want to know if a game might interest me, it’s probably the last place I’d go. Most of the time I get no idea from their articles whether the game is worth playing or not. It’s not that I think new games journalism is bad, I just think it’s a little pretentious to take games so seriously. They’re just for fun, after all. So then the question would be, as it were, why exactly am I throwing my hat into the ring and trying it out?

For one, I think I’m probably going to do a really bad job. If I were to submit this article to Parish, he’d probably turn it down and say it’s too much like a standard review. But I have been thinking along the NGJ lines while coming up with things to say about Nuts & Bolts, and I suppose it’s worth a try, if only to keep things a smidgen fresher around this dusty old corner of the intertubes. That said, I’ve linked a few other non-standard game reviews on the “related” section of the navi bar. There’s a short description of how I feel each fits under the banner of new games journalism in the hover text. Also, the 2007 Vitrual Console Wishlist is linked, but that’s just because it features Banjo-Kazooie.

So now that I’ve already gone and broken the fourth wall and stated exactly what my intention here is, I suppose I should wrap up this introduction of sorts and get on with the article. Can you all be real good pals and forget that these last couple paragraphs happened once your eyes drift across that separator line below? Thanks. I really appreciate it. Makes the whole thing seem a little more legit.

Banjo-Kazooie is not a popular franchise by any stretch. Not with gamers anyway. I know my girlfriend likes it, but the only thing she’s played in the last God-knows-how-long that doesn’t involve a plastic guitar is Trauma Center, and she gave up on that shortly after she lost her first patient. And I mean that as in the first patient she’d ever treated. Pressing on, gamers tend to look upon Rare’s Mario clone with a burning hatred that is not totally undeserved. The first game in the series was a very basic platformer that basically just had you collect a plethora of objects. It goes without saying that the less important doodads would be laying out for anyone to see, but even the Jiggies (equivalent to Mario’s power stars) would occasionally just be lying there for even the most witless of player to scoop up with no effort (like every single dragon in Spyro).

The sequel that appeared a couple years later, Banjo-Tooie, didn’t have a much brighter light cast upon it. It abolished the Effortless Jiggy and made players work a little bit harder for that golden treasure, but at the same time at least doubled the number of trivial whatsits you needed to collect. I’m sure that at the time, people thought both games were upstanding shows in a sea of terrible Mario wannbes, but over time, that lesser-of-two-evils respect faded and people realized just what a cheap hackjob these games were. Of course I still look upon them with an air of pleasant memories, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re kinda half-assed.

To be blunt, the less said about Grunty’s Revenge, the better.

But times have changed, and it’s been nearly a decade since we’ve seen the bear and bird in anything more than retro webpages. Fortunately for all parties involved, time has been kind to Banjo and Kazooie, even though the opening of the game would lead you to believe otherwise. Which is a point of note in itself; the game is constantly poking fun at its heritage and all gaming tropes that have been called out as stale and thoughtless. Nearly every main character balks at having to collect something, and the writers took every chance they could get to rip on having to complete arbitrary tasks for seemingly worthless prizes. In fact, the first achievement you will get is titled “Pointless Collector”, after a scripted race to see who can collect more golden thingamabobs.

Since the writers are complaining about collecting, there’s obviously still a large collecting element to the game. Jiggies are still the number one goal, but each and every one has a challenge associated with it. From simple races to protecting landmarks to defeating a number of enemies, every piece of gold has its price. The widely-loathed musical notes have returned as well, but only as a simple unit of currency, making collecting them completely optional. There is still a set number on each stage, but they’re also handed out liberally for almost every task you complete, so you could theoretically make it through the entire game and buy everything without picking up a single static stage note.

Besides the Jiggies and notes, there are also Jinjo tokens to be earned. They are won exactly like Jiggies, but are, much like the notes, completely optional. They’re used at the bingo hall, where you are rewarded notes and vehicle parts for filling in rows and columns on the bingo board. Lastly are vehicle parts, and we’ll go over those later. That brings our total of collectibles up to four. Four. Three of which are entirely unnecessary. Over the limitless number of things you needed to pick up in Banjo-Tooie, I’d say that’s one Hell of an improvement.

So if the game isn’t about collecting copious amounts of knick-knacks, then what is left? Well friends and relations, that’s a question I’m glad you may have asked. This is where those vehicle parts come in. See, the game doesn’t work anything like Banjos before. There are no moves to learn, no platforming to be done. No, no. This game is all about driving. And flying. And driving, uh, boats. Boating?

This time around, Banjo can run and jump to his heart’s content, but the game was designed specifically with vehicles in mind. And the best part is that you, the player, get to create each and every one of those vehicles. This creates not only gigantice game worlds, but also very open worlds and even better, a ton of room to experiment with ways to overcome the many challenges the game puts you up against. The hub world is the only exception, since you’re only allowed to drive a basic shopping cart-like machine, but there are still opportunities to press on and get places you shouldn’t be. In the early game, there are slopes that neither Banjo on foot nor the simple cart can scale, but with some clever use of the protruding pieces of scenery (windowsills, lamps, signposts, etc), you can reach most of the available area before you even enter the first game world. If you thought sequence breaking in Metroid was exciting, you’ll most definitely get a kick out of exploring bits of Showdown Town that you aren’t yet meant to be in.

And then you’ll venture into the first level and all restrictions will melt away. Early on you won’t be able to make much more than simple car- and bike-styled vehicles, but once you find even one propeller, the worlds are yours to explore as openly as you want, and there is plenty to explore. Since the worlds are contained, it’s not exactly open-world play as in a sandbox game, but the levels are many times bigger than anything seen in previous Banjo titles. The fact that there are so many ways to see each world adds to the value as well. If you want to cruise around in a car, that’s cool. Feel like taking to the skies in a plane or helicopter? Go for it! Or maybe you’d prefer the challenge of scaling the tallest peaks on foot. Why not? The world is your oyster, and you’re truly able to to do anything you want exactly as you see fit.

Now the best part of this completely open game design is that you can also tackle the game’s many challenges however you like. The game invites you to try out some suggested ways of doing things early on by forcing you to use pre-built vehicles once in a while, but less than halfway through, they become very scarce and it’s up to the player to decide how they want to solve the problem. Most races, for instance, take place on the ground, but if you’re having trouble driving the specific course, why not take to the skies instead? Races are marked by compulsory rings to pass through, but a low-flying plane would not only soar past any competition, but also nullify any issue of minor enemies in the way and terrain becomes almost negligible. The game will never directly penalize you for using a vehicle they didn’t intend to be used in the mission, and you’ll get an extra sense of accomplishment for thinking outside the box.

But there’s got to be more than races, right? Of course! There are a wide variety of mission types, and seeing them through in your own way is as rewarding as anything else. For example, a later mission in the first world sees a statue under attack by airborne foes, with the gamer left to try to defend it for two minutes. A gamer’s first instinct would be to build a flying warship to take out the invaders, and if your contraption is built the right way and you’re skilled enough, I’d say go for it. I, on the other hand, found that there were far too many enemies to be able to complete the mission. I tried and failed many times before genius struck. I went back to the garage and tried something completely different. I figured that if I couldn’t stop the enemies from destroying the statue, then maybe taking them down was the wrong approach. So I build what could be best described as a flying house with no floor. It was two layers thick, powered by all the engines and propellers that I had available, and I flew it over to ground zero and landed it right over top of the statue. I sat there for two minutes as my assailants shot at and dive-bombed the small fortress, and laughed heartily when the time expired and my statue was left without a single scratch.

Another example is one mission where I was given the task to transport as many coconuts as I could from the top of a tower on one side of the island to the coconut farm where they would be sucked up into some kind of coconut repository. You are given three minutes. I should also mention that in this game you can pick up almost any object in the scenery, and that is basically the only thing you can accomplish on foot. At first I tried using a helicopter to winch over one nut at a time, and as you may imagine, it went very poorly. After that, I put together a large flying monstrosity composed of a giant tray and a trash bin, thinking that I could load it up with nuts and fly them over in two or three trips. Putting the nuts on and taking them off one by one was very time-consuming, and I could have passed, but just by the skin of my teeth. And then I crashed into the coconut-sucker and it detached from the rest of the machinery. I had another brainstorm, and on the next attempt, I broke of the coconut-sucker and flew it over to the tower. From there, I picked it up, and simply swept it over the area, sucking up every single nut in no time flat. I had more than two minutes to spare by the time I was done.

One final example is from one of the many Jinjo challenges. This particular Jinjo turned into a huge ball and asked me to ram into him and fling him as far as I could. He would give me a token if I made him go a predetermined distance. So I tried over and over with many different vehicles built for speed or power, trying different angles and tactics, but I could never seem to get him far enough. There would always be a hill to slow him or an obstacle to outright stop him, and to get a perfectly aimed shot was near impossible. When I did get the perfect shot, it still wasn’t sufficient. By that time I was bashing my head against an ottoman in frustration, trying to come up with a solution. It was then that I build a super fast plane with a carrying tray. I put the Jinjo-ball in the tray, took off, and while my engines cut out once I passed the allowed field of play, it still drifted far further than I needed, and I got up and did a little celebratory dance for finally finding a loophole.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a fantastic game, and that’s probably because aside from the characters, it’s nothing like the previous games in the series. It gives the player a true sense of freedom, letting them play the game however they want, building machines of their own design and then tweaking them to get the absolute perfect performance for whatever given task they may be facing. It often suggests the obvious way, holding the player’s hand for a little while to get them started, but then lets them fly free to make their own decisions on how to play. It encourages players to think outside the box by making some challenges frusrtatingly difficult (but still possible) to do though by following the most logical course of action. It’s an incredibly engaging – if at times infuriating – experience that I’m glad I didn’t skip out on. Nuts & Bolts is a game that genuinely lets the player take control, and I think that’s the kind of thing that truly defines a next-generation gaming experience. That and it’s gobs of fun.

Oh, and the music is totally solid, as to be expected, even if it is all completely recycled from previous games. The Banjoland medley? Nostalgically awesome. But we all already knew that anything Grant Kirkhope or Robin Beanland does is terrific, right?

Antisocial!

There are twelve months in a year, so I guess that means I should probably be able to find time to post at least twelve articles a year. To date, there are three with 2008 date stamps on them. And now there are four.

I’ve written a charming piece about the new Banjo-Kazooie game, and tried the whole new games journalism thing I keep hearing about so much over at Parish’s website. I don’t know how well I did it, but whatever. The sum of the review is that I love the game. It’s ironic though, because the professional reviewers say that it should have been more of the same old BK collection-platforming, but gamers tend to hate those old games. Oh well, I think it’s pretty good so yeah. I suggest you go have a read.

Oh, and I did run it though the spellchecker quickly, but it’s 2:30AM and I may have let some grammatical oopsies slip. Hell, there’s probably a boatload of typos in this post alone. I’m not gonna fucking proof it. I need to sleep!

Seeya later

Against my better judgement will to save money, I went out and bought the new Castlevaina game last weekend. To say that my regret over the unnecessary loss of $40 has been absolved would be putting it lightly. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone without slaying a new incarnation of Dracula each year, and honestly, I know I would have broken down over the issue eventually. But it’s good! Better than ever maybe!

Okay, so maybe Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (ek-lee-sha) might not quite measure up to Aria of Sorrow, my personal favourite ‘Vania game, but it’s a lot better than the other DS iterations. And I’ve only played a couple hours! Separate, selectable stages are a refreshing change from one huge castle, and work better than Portrait of Ruin‘s levels-within-a-castle setup. Being able to hop to wherever you want in an instant is just a wee bit more convenient than having to make the trek to and from warp points. It also allows for a much broader range of stage types. Personally, I was getting a little bored with the same old main hall, clock tower, and underground cave thing with different art each year. Portait was a step in the right direction (and I’ll grant that it was a lazy step), and Order of Ecclesia takes it even farther with better results.

Order of Ecclesia‘s Glyph system is really neat too. It’s like an extension of Soma’s soul-sucking powers from Dawn of Sorrow. The heroine Shanoa can absorb glyphs from various sources (statues, defeated enemies, magic-wielding enemies, etc) and use them as weapons. In fact, they’re all she has for weapons. That’s right! You don’t collect a huge amount of swords, but rather are given a sword glyph that gets stronger as you use it. Same goes for other weapon types. You can equip one for each arm too, much like Alucard could in Symphony of the Night. Magic (offensive and defensive) is also equipped in these weapon slots, so you can keep one arm for physical attacks and one for magic, go berserk with spells on both, or whatever! There’s also a back glyph that gives all the oddball powers like magnetism and summoning. The catch is that every glyph eats up MP, so even if you’re just flinging knives all over the place, you’ll have to ease off once in a while to recharge. The good part is that MP regenerates real fast.

I guess after the last six 2D games in the series that it kind of goes without saying that this is a beautiful game. The spritework is just as detailed as ever, and animations are amazingly fluid. It’s not quite as smooth as say, Wario Land: Shake It!, but hey, let’s give credit where credit is due. Once again, the environments are a lot more varied than we’ve seen in a Castlevania game for a long time, and it looks like there are a lot fewer reused enemy sprites than usual. But then again, I haven’t exactly put two games side by side to make more accurate comparisons. So enough talk, look at the pretties!

Okay, so some of the animation is lost on YouTube-quality video, but still! Oh, and you wouldn’t know it from the professionally-done run above, but the bosses are really really hard this time around. Would you believe that this is only the third? I used to think Balore was a real bitch to beat, but these guys make him their bitch. Took me at least a dozen tries and a hour to take down that stupid crab motherbuzzer.

It just takes some time

I checked my E-mail inbox on Monday evening only to find myself shouting with ecstasy over a message I had received (4 days pror, I don’t check my inbox that often). It was a note from Starmen.net that was sent to inform me that after what seems like ages of waiting, they had finally completed their translation patch for the doubtlessly stellar Mother 3.

Now, I’ve mentioned many many times before that I’m an Earthbound junkie, so you’d assume that I’ve already tracked down the ROM, applied the patch, and blazed through the game, right? Actually, I don’t even have the ROM yet. But I’m downloading it as we speak (but seriously kids, ROMs are bad. Don’t pirate video games!), and fully intend to start playing Mother 3 in glorious English… as soon as I finish some other games. Dragon Quest IV would be the obvious one, but I’m still working on Tales of Vesperia. Just goes to show you how little time I have for video games these days. So what the hell am I doing blogging? So long, losers!

Oh, and also I’ve been in a serious relationship for 6 months today. That deserves a cake. go me!

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.

‘Till the day I die

Well, I have both victories and losses under my belt today, and neither is overly surprising, but I figure I might as well share. And before I start, it was Magma Man, not Volcano Man. Oops.

As I was mentioning in the last post, Mega Man 9 is friggin’ hard. The day after I made my little blog post there, I went back to the game with a stronger resolve and a good feeling. It got me pretty far, through five more bosses in fact, but Tornado Man and Hornet Man had still eluded my iron grip. But yester day I went back and made my play for total dominance. Tornado Man’s level was a bitch, and that’s all that was holding me back from the green-plated robot master. After dying over and over at his stupid revolving lifts (see video below), I decided I’d just cheese my way through with the Rush Jet. It worked wonders, but things only got worse from there on. Somehow I was able to scrape through to the end on my last life, and I slaughtered Tornado Man with little trouble. Hornet Man was much less offensive, as his level wasn’t too bad, but there’s a mini boss that will take you the fuck out many many times before you’re able to stomp it into robo-dust. But this time, I had the Tornado Blow on my side, and it wrecked him pretty bad. Hornet Man never saw it coming after that.

Of course, I got my ass handed to me on the first Wily level, and I felt that that was enough beatings for one day. But then I went and shelled out the necessary Wii Points for the extra DLC, and I’m pretty happy with what I got. The Challenge mode is pretty cool, and I think it’ll quickly evolve into an obsession. ProtoMan more is the star that really shines though. Not only can Blues slide, charge his buster, and block shots, but the Proto Whistle plays at the beginning of each level! It’s amazing! Really, it’s not a lot easier than Mega’s game, but it is the first real Mega Man game that allows you to play as ProtoMan (for $2).

And now for something completely different: would you be surprised if I told you I didn’t own Rock Band 2? Probably pretty shocked, right? But actually it’s a lie. I went out to Wal-Mart to buy candy last night, and meandered casually into the electronics department, and guess what was sitting there, ready to break my will into tiny little bits. Yeah, I think the only reason I hadn’t picked it up is because I hadn’t seen a copy available to be purchsed until then, not because I had a strong sense of not needing it. But I broke, and it’s great. The best part? That you can make standby band memers and assign them to empty spots on your roster so you don’t have the totally lame stock characters messing up your band’s image. Also, paying $60 for 100 tracks is a sweet deal after shelling out $1-$2 each for single tracks over the last 9 months.

So far beyond the sun

A couple weeks ago, Activision or Microsoft or whoever does the Xbox Marketplace stuff released a trio of new Dragonforce tunes for Guitar Hero 3, and I promptly downloaded thems. I was completely destroyed by them even more promtly. Promptlyer. Promptlier. C:\ prompt. Anyway, one of the tunes, called “Heroes of Our Time” was from their newest CD. I assumed it was a “Saints of Los Angeles” kind of thing where they were promoting the new album before its release. Nope. Turns out it was already out. Also, I bought it.

So it’s not so much that I don’t like Ultra Beatdown, it’s not that at all. I love Dragonforce. I love the balls-to-the-wall speed metal. It’s great. I just have one complaint: the lyrics. I know for something like this you can’t expect particularly deep or meaningful lyrics, but Dragonforce has taken it past the pop level of shitty lyrics. I was reading along in the cover booklet, and that’s pretty much exactly when I realized that not one song on this album has lyrics that make any sense.

I’m not sure if it’s an epidemic that plagues all of Dragonforce’s work, but if you take a look at the words to any of the songs on Ultra Beatdown, you’ll notice that they seem very chopped up and sporadic. It’s not uncommon for a line to have absolutely nothing to do with the one that comes after it, and sometimes it seems like a single line is made of two that were chopped in half and then had one piece from each put together. I have no idea how any of the songs could even possibly be pretending to be following the same general theme, nevermind the same train of thought. It’s like whoever wrote them just put words on a page and then changed a few so that it rhymed and followed something of a rhythm pattern.

It’s not really a huge put-off, but I do have a soft spot for thoughtful and/or intelligent songwriting. Ultra Beatdown is great if you’re going to be driving fast or for using as background music while playing a video game or something, but it’s definitely not meant to just be listened to and absorbed. But then again, Dragonforce was never that kind of band to begin with, so really, I guess I’m a little surprised that I expeced more from them in that way.