Monthly Archives: November 2001

Socking on the new day

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Last night I played Capcom vs SNK and Panzer Dragoon until nearly dawn. I suppose I could have been doing something more constructive, but I’ve got a lot of groove points in the former case, now — almost enough to purchase EX Iori. And it keeps me focused on something, at least.

Headhunter is out in Europe now, and I’ve only seen a single review for it so far — and I don’t believe I’ve seen a more generic, content-less, undescriptive review for a game in my life. Still, it does look interesting — and I think I trust a Scandinavian game developer much more than I would most Western ones. And Shenmue II should be out in Europe soon, meaning my order should be filled in a couple of weeks.

I only today noticed where Mai stores her endless supply of fans. Yes, it’s exactly where you’d imagine. I’ll have to check some other games with her in them, now, and see if that was just Capcom’s addition or not…

Thanksgaming

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  • Luigi’s Mansion, as I’ve commented before, is a lot more fun than it looks to be. I actually really dig it at this point.
  • I’ve not played with Wave Race at all since getting back here
  • Mars Matrix isn’t the best overhead shooter ever (that’s Fire Shark for me; Radiant Silvergun for the people who’ve actually played it), but it’s solid, it has a heck of a lot of replay value, and it’s actually a two-player co-op game! One red ship; one blue! Amazing!
  • Capcom vs SNK is… okay. It’s got nice new sprites for the SNK characters. Okay music. Nice interface. A lot of extra features. But it’s hard as hell, the SNK characters have been (as reported) stripped down appallingly (leaving Terry as one of the few who can actually still be used properly — he’s okay!), there aren’t enough stages, and I’ve serious issue with the groove point system. In theory it’s nice, but it makes it hard to get anywhere, especially when combined with the ridiculous difficulty of the game. When Ryu is the character in the first round of the first fight, I can consistently be defeated by him when I choose any SNK character other than Terry, for the most part (though I’ve now gotten more used to how cheap the AI is). This is a big problem.

Out of everything, I’ll probably be going back to Mars Matrix the most.

So much to find.

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All these fighting games I have, now. Recently I’ve been studying KoF98, and have noticed a bunch of details and subtleties that had gone completely passed me by. And then earlier today I decided to pull out Vampire Chronicle For Matching Service; something new I noticed — besides that I don’t seem to have actually played in arcade mode with a lot of the characters (any who aren’t amongst my favourites I guess I tend to just fiddle with in training) is that the details in the background vary considerably depending on which “mode” one chooses (Vampire, Hunter, Savior).

When I played the Saturn version of Savior I had wondered about a couple of the stages, particularly Brazil and the one on the side of the skyscraper. There seemed to be many more things going on in the background in the Saturn version than in my copy of the game, including a lizard being chomped on in the former and helicopters and coloured lights in the latter. Also, many levels of scrolling seemed to be missing in my version. I thought it was a little cheap that Capcom left some of these elements out of the game, as Chronicle was supposed to be a compilation and combination of all of the previous games, into one. As it ends up, though, it all relies on what one sets the game to emulate.

I suppose I’ve mostly been playing in “Vampire” mode, making it play the most like the first game in the series. I just earlier set it to “Savior”, and the backdrops were suddenly quite alive. Also, the music was different (and in places more appropriate).

This is very interesting…