Monthly Archives: April 2003

Are you a Bad enough Dude to clear Kunio’s name?

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Anyone out there a fan of Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari? (If you aren’t, then why are you reading my journal?!)

Go throw this string into Google:

“Tachi no Banka” translation

After spending some decent time with it, I can easily say that Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio Tachi no Banka is pretty much the best game in the main Nekketsu series, all Downtown matters aside. And there’s a decent translation patch for it.

So. Go for it.

To say more would be foolish.

The timing explains the cowboys.

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The story of Root Beer.

Did you note the bit about the carcinogenic qualities of sassafras? Here’s more on the matter!

SPECIAL QUOTE:

“Oil of Sassafras is chiefly used for flavouring purposes, particularly to conceal the flavour of opium when given to children. In the United States of America it is employed for flavouring effervescing drinks.”

Because you know how hard it is to get the kids to take their opium!

Damned kids.

Break on through to the other side

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Sega claims that SA:DX (now named, in full, “Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut“) has five hours of new gameplay in addition to all of the other additions.

A “mission mode” has been added, for COLLECTING JOY. This is where one unlocks “exclusive items”, “secrets”, and the Gamegear games. Whether this mode is what constitutes the five purported hours of new gameplay, I don’t know.

Personally, I don’t think that the emblem-hunting in the Sonic Adventure games counts as real gameplay. The story mode is the actual game. Being forced to go back in and perform inane stunts under arbitrary limitations just seems like a waste of time and energy to me.

I suppose it’s better that the emblems actually do something now, though. Or maybe it’s not. At least I knew I wasn’t missing anything by not bothering with a number of the more annoying ones.

My patience is really starting to wear thin with such thinly-veiled time sponges; tasks which have no substantial reason to exist, other than so as to keep the player glued to the game for an unnaturally, unhealthfully long time. As far as game design goes, it’s manipulative, lazy, and not at all intriguing. Worse, it’s becoming so omnipresent — even where it just doesn’t belong.

It’s… starting to make me dislike videogames in general, at least as they are at present.

I feel not unlike how I felt a decade ago. My levels of disgust and apathy are being strained.

I don’t intend to give up. That’d be too easy. I did it once before, and in the process, I missed most of a generation. Yet, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to care about a lot of what’s out there today.

The industry is entering a rut just as pathetic as the one of ten years ago. Not as damning as the one of 1984, but…

…

there’s a pattern here.

I’m starting to think that there really needs to be a shakedown.

For a while, I’ve been watching its approach. The old guard, as it were, is going to have to either get with the picture soon or it’s going to fall apart. The trouble has already long since begun, spreading the fallout of an industry’s greed and ineptitude as wide as possible so as not to choke the largest perpetrators in their own filth. Meanwhile, a new generation seems to be quietly, humbly (for the moment) emerging — far enough away that the garbage isn’t nearly as much of a problem.

The established head of the industry is flat out of ideas. It’s just going through the motions, without any real understanding anymore for why it does what it does. (Sort of like KoF2002, or any contemporary RPG you might choose to pick up.) There’s no foundation anymore. The old-world elite have been doing what they’ve been doing for so long that they don’t even remember why they’re doing it.

The benefit about new blood, from a separate world, is that it doesn’t have these problems; assuming that the newcomers understand where they are to begin with, and that they know what they’re doing, the ground is always still within reach. They can easily trace down to see how things stand. It isn’t so hard to retrace and start over if need be. They’re informed by the ideas of the older generation, but those ideas are adapted in such a way that is relevent to the newcomers in the context which they know most well.

This is, I think, the difference between the two things that Nintendo’s been doing lately.

The way that the apprenticeship thing seems to be going at the moment is that the methods are being taught by rote, for their own sake — rather than as possible answers to more fundamental questions.

But on the other hand, Nintendo is also supporting developers like Silicon Knights and Retro; contributing funding, polish, and advice — but allowing the newer houses to find their own direction.

It’s the difference between following a religion and being informed by its philosophy. Following in the footsteps of your forebears, or being inspired to do your own work by building upon what came before.

Mrrn.

I can see Eiji Aonuma presenting his game before Miyamoto. “This is how it goes, right?”

Yes, technically…

But… no.

Kinko’s — the cereal with extra leather

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I wonder if my toothpaste protects against demons. It doesn’t specifically claim anything on the package, so I’m tempted to think otherwise.

Finis.

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g’gnahrnnndje…

Okay. It’s over with.

It’s almost random that I actually beat Ganondorf in his final form; all of my fairies were gone, I only had a few hearts left, and I just happened to hit the right button at the right time — a button I didn’t even intend to press.

Worth noting: There is a second quest of sorts in this game. There are a number of obvious changes that I’ve noted so far, although they’re mostly cosmetic. Some of them were on my wishlist the first time through the game, so — well, good.

I’m not sure how substantially the game is altered, however.

I’ve got… about a quarter of my review written. It should be done reasonably soon.

And…

yes.

Those a’ nae the jaws of which I speak, lass.

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I still taste the bread from a submarine sandwich that I ate over twelve hours ago. Talk about value for your dollar!

My toy symphony, as it were, is beginning to find some kind of direction for itself. I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that I need a good sample or two which comfortably sit in the bass range. As one might anticipate, were one to pay attention to such spectral issues, all of these dinky instruments and knicknacks tend to be pretty strong on the high end, but they generally cut off somewhere within the midrange.

Maybe I can fudge a bit by introducing a couple of pure waves; square and triangle, say. They’ll sound cheesy, and yet honest and warm enough that they might not clash as an overly synthetic addition.

Plus, they can be cleanly downsampled as much as I care to do so.

I really am not fond of square waves when used in the mid-range; I’ve known this for a long while. They just sound hollow. But my word, do they make good bass patches. They even have some neat uses in the higher registers, as a chirpy kind of seasoning.

Wind Waker is sitting in my Gamecube, very close to completion (as it has been for a few days) — but I return to it joylessly at this point. I suppose I might as well just get the darned thing over with. If I didn’t have a review to write, I don’t think I’d have the motivation to finish.

Today has been a day of crankiness. Perhaps repeating another three or four boss battles is just the cap that I need.

Dated, stiff, and often grotesque

  • Reading time:11 mins read

Shinkirou’s characters look like mannequins. They have no motion or life to them.

Further, they remind me of the art one used to see on the back of cereal boxes in the 1980s.

It’s dated, stiff, and often grotesque.

Shinkirou obviously has technical talent as an artist, but his art just doesn’t seem appropriate to something as vibrant as a fighting game.

Nona’s art has been controversial ever since his work on KoF2001. It’s often strange — but it has life to it. It’s often dark. It’s often a little disturbing. It’s gritty, and yet stylized.

Like it or not, Nona’s work has personality. And on that basis, I’d take it over Shinkirou any day.

I don’t know why Playmore chose to go with Nona for as high a profile game as this, however; I’d have thought that Hiroaki (the Bukiri-One artist, who most recently did the art for KoFEX2 for the GBA) would be more appropriate.

But whatever. I like Nona, if for nothing else than the fact that he’s different. And that so many people complain about his art without much of an attempt to understand it.

Nona’s fine, but yeah — it’s a little weird that Playmore doesn’t seem to be sticking with someone a little less controversial.

From what I’ve read elsewhere (such as The Stinger Report) Capcom doesn’t want much to do with this game. They’re annoyed that Playmore is even going through with it, and perhaps the only reason that they’re allowing Playmore to go forward with it is that Capcom is soon to be leaving the arcade business. Therefore, the game won’t be much competition for any of their upcoming projects.

Furthermore, Playmore doesn’t have a huge reservoir of money. So it makes sense to me that they’d stick with the artists they have on-hand.

However, of the artists that I know they have left — why Nona? I, personally, am very fond of Nona’s art. But I know that I’m in the minority. His art is often not very easy to understand.

I know that Hiroaki (Bukiri-One, KoF2000) is still with Playmore, and I believe that Tonko (Mark of the Wolves, Last Blade) is still around somewhere (given that Nona did the art for Metal Slug 4). Both of them are fantastic artists, and both are immediately appealing to just about any audience.

Plus, Hiroaki’s style is a little reminiscent of Akiman’s — Capcom’s main illustrator ever since Street Fighter 2. Personally, I think Hiroaki is far more talented than Akiman — but they work in a similar manner.

He’d seem perfect for a game like SVC CHAOS.

And who knows — maybe Playmore is using Hiroaki for the in-game art. All we’ve got now is a small handful of character sketches.

If you remember, Nona did the character illustrations to KoF2002 but Hiroaki did most of the in-game portraits and whatnot. I thought that this was a perfect balance.

For all we know so far, it’s entirely possible that they’re doing the same thing here — Nona on the outside illustrations and someone like Hiroaki or Tonko on the in-game art.

Probably best just to hold out and see how things go over the next few weeks.

If nothing else, the logo is very well-done.

* * *

Regarding The King of Fighters 2002 DC:

Buyrite is renowned for just plain false information, but there’s been discussion before about whether Playmore will bother with the extra chracters.

Just about everyone has expressed some consternation about the original MVS roster. King is my favourite character overall, so it figures they’d choose to ditch her (even though she’s been in every other KoF since the series began). Why they chose not to bring back Jhun, where Shingo went off to, and why we’ve got Rugal again (rather than, say, an enhanced Krizalid), I can’t really fathom.

Furthermore, why does 2002 — a dream match — have fewer characters than 2001? 2001 was a standard plot chapter. 2002 is supposed to be a no-holds-barred, over-the-top celebration of all that is KoF. With the game’s wimpy and unrepresentative cast list, it’s kind of difficult to get as excited as Playmore intends.

Basically, they had to cut corners somewhere. After all of the complaints about the backgrounds and music in 2001, Playmore devoted more time and cartridge space to that aspect of the presentation. Personally, I’d take the characters over the backgrounds — though I appreciate the effort (even if I feel it’s misguided).

With the Dreamcast, though, Playmore doesn’t have these space limitations. They can do whatever the heck they want to, really. This is the perfect chance to fix the game (or finish it, depending on how you look at things), and quiet their audience’s moans; to show that they’re really listening.

So there’s the obvious and immediate potential, right off the bat.

There’s a bit more, though, to raise a person’s hopes.

First, this is the kind of thing that SNK and Playmore have done with all of the Dreamcast ports so far.

’98 got a snazzy new anime intro, a 3D background, and other assorted bonuses;

’99 got better 3D backgrounds, a shop system, extra strikers (including Seth and Vanessa from 2000), and a really nice presentation overall;

2000 got a surprisingly-entertaining sliding puzzle and extra backgrounds and music;

2001 got even more levels (including “fixed” versions of all of the original 2001 levels), and a well-designed puzzle battle mode.

So there’s a history of some decent additions, most of which do a good job to fix some of the shortcomings of the games in question (although 2001 really could have used some added music).

It seems highly probable that Playmore will add something worth mentioning to 2002. The only question is what that might be.

The other factor which is getting at least my hopes up is how long the game seems to be taking. 2000 and 2001 were each ported pretty quickly, and released mere months apart from each other. 2002, however, was announced way back in the middle of December — and it’s not to be released until some untold time, this coming summer.

Part of the delay, I imagine, is so as not to interfere with sales of the Neo-Geo cartridge. But the fact is, this is a pretty long wait for what should otherwise be a simple Dreamcast port. Playmore’s got lots of experience with the DC. They know how to do this by now.

So what’s Playmore doing with all of this extra time, then?

It sounds kind of suspicious to me.

On the other hand, this is all speculation.

As for the complete cast for the DC version — all that’s been announced beyond the original MVS release is Shingo.

For the full cast of the MVS version, look under the Neo-Geo FAQs section.

It is my understanding that Shingo was originally intended as a character within KoF2002 (thus the rumors of him popping up in the early public tests), but that Eolith and Brezza removed him in the final version (for whatever reason).

This would make some sense, as his sprite doesn’t appear to be in any of the backgrounds. Just about every other major KoF-universe character makes an appearance, so it seems odd that Shingo isn’t even referenced.

With luck, we’ll see some more characters added back in. It seems absurd to me that a “dream match” game like 2002 has fewer characters than a standard plot chapter. (There are 40 characters + 2 bosses in 2001; 39 characters + 1 boss in 2002.)

Further, it seems pretty ludicrous that the cast manages to be such an awful compromise that it isn’t representative of anything in particular. One of the most long-standing and representative characters (King) is omitted. One of the bigger recent fan favourites (Shingo) is left out. And few of the remaining characters have much of anything to do with each other.

In ’98, most characters had a large number of special introductions and/or endings. It was a reasonably tight group. The characters had reason to joke with each other, to taunt or threaten each other. There was a lot of personality going around.

Now… well, what is this? We’ve just got a bunch of random characters thrown together, with no context at all. It’s so cold.

What’s even weirder is that even amongst the characters who have some obvious connections — their interactions are omitted!

Kyo versus Iori? Nothing.
Mai versus Andy? Nothing.
Terry versus Billy? Nothing.
Terry versus Yamazaki? Nothing.

And the list goes on.

There still are a few random intros in there (Kensou versus Athena), but — well, you get the picture.

This game needs a lot of work — and I’m hoping that Playmore does a decent job at finishing it for the DC release.

The inclusion of Shingo is a good step. It’s very encouraging. We’ll see what else they polish up.

Akaimizu: That’s true, with the alternate characters; I don’t really count them any more than I count the alternate characters in ’98, but it does depend on how you want to look at things.

If that’s the way one is going to measure the game, however, I can’t help but wonder where all of the other alternate characters are which were present in ’98. We’ve gone through two whole eras at this point. You’d think there’d be a lot of history to cover and to try to encapsulate in a Dream Match like this.

But no.

As for that other person:

No, this game is far from perfect.

This has nothing to do with the details, specifically; I bring them up only to illustrate a point.

KoF2002 is by far the least coherent game in the entire series. It is arbitrary; it has no reason to exist, in the form that it has been executed.

It has potential, and certain elements are individually executed very well. The backgrounds are nice. The character portraits are pretty. Some of the characters’ new moves are nice. It’s nice that some of the older characters have finally seen some new frames of animation.

But compared to the direction the series was going in with 2001, it’s a pretty huge step backwards into irrelevancy. This is unfortunate.

I fully intend to pick it up, for the sake of posterity and because I want to support Playmore. But I’m still disappointed on a number of levels.

You would be as well, if you were to pay more attention.

Let’s see if anyone can anyone answer me this:

What is the point of KoF2002, as it currently exists? What does the game accomplish?

Why did this game need to be made?

I can quickly tell you the answer for every single other game in the series, from ’94 up through 2001. For 2002, it’s not so easy.

Try as I might — and believe me, I want to like this game — I can’t understand what its purpose is, beyond simply pumping out another KoF game for the year 2002.

Anything it might feign to hold up as a tangible goal, it fails in — aside from being generally prettier than 2001 in most of the obvious aspects.

There’s no reason for a Dream Match right now; we’ve still got some plot threads unresolved from 2001. But okay, it’ll make Eolith a bunch of money before they hand the development back to Playmore at the end of their contract. So whatever. Let’s make this a blast to remember, as we did four years ago!

In ’98, every character save the Boss Team, Eiji, and Kasumi returned. Okay, and the post-Rugal bosses. But we got Saisyu as a playable character and we got alternate versions (pre-’96; ’96-and-on) of most of the major characters. We got a ton of interaction amongst the characters.

The game had a general air of fun; one big party, where everyone is invited. One big storyline is over with. Now we’ll make the KoF to end all KoFs; the one game which, above all else, is representative of the heart and the history of the series.

We could have had another one of those. That would have been neat. But what did we get?

What is 2002, exactly?

Why do we need it?
I’d like someone to explain it to me. Because I don’t understand.

What does a genius need with pants?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

The Metroid 2 score really gets a bad rap. Actually, Metroid 2 seems to be the whipping child of the series in general.

I think it’s worth pointing out that when the music is good, it’s really good in this game. The main tunnel theme, the Metroid battle theme, the revamped Samus and Item themes.

Where it begins to get a little controversial is in the various ruins. Once the player wanders out of the central tunnel and into any of the larger playfields, the music switches to an atmospheric pattern of bleeps. Not a lot of melody. Not a lot of rhythm in particular.

If you’re looking for Hip Tanaka’s tuneful power-ballads, I can see how it should be easy to feel let down. But the music serves a different purpose here.

Metroid 2 is by far the creepiest, most clautrophobic game in the series. It’s lonely, unnerving, frustrating, almost trance-inducing. It has a tangible atmosphere which I think is wholly fitting to the game’s setting and general purpose. (This atmosphere is most obvious when the game is played in full black-and-white, as originally intended, rather than with the upgraded Gameboy Color palette.)

The music is an important element of that formula. It exists to create and sustain a particular mood. I feel it was composed very deliberately; Ryohji Yoshitomi could have written anything, after all. But he chose to go the avant garde route.

There is a method to the music, as you can tell if you listen closely enough. It’s not random, and it’s not careless. It’s an attempt at an unsettling ambient soundscape.

The problem that Yoshitomi faces in this instance is the limited sound capacity of the original Gameboy. Melodic fare is easy. More experimental music is a bit tricker to pull off convincingly with only a few triangle and square waves at a person’s disposal.

Whether Yoshitomi succeeds in his goal or not is up to the listener. But for what it is, I think his score works very well.

Combined with the excellent quality of the more melodic portions of the soundtrack, I’d easily rank the Metroid 2 score up there amongst my favourite original Gameboy soundtracks — somewhere in the neighborhood of Gargoyle’s Quest.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that Yoshitomi was never asked back for the future games.

The music in Prime does something odd to my head.

It all began with the theme which plays behind the game-select screen. For whatever reason it might be, that theme moves me pretty strongly.

The last time I felt this way about a videogame theme was in 1986, when I first slotted my copy of Legend of Zelda into my NES. At the time, I was struck with a profound awe and wonder. I knew that I was seeing and hearing something important. And my whole body reacted.

The Metroid Prime theme (from it’s use later in the game, I’m assuming that this is intended as the main theme to the game) has a similar, if somewhat more muted, effect on me. And the deeper I crawl into the game proper, the more impressed I am with the music in general.

In the case of the main theme, I think a large part of it is the uncommonly synchopated rhythmic pattern. Short-long, short-long, long, long, long. Another part of it is the weird, theramin-like lead instrument. But it’s just the overall weight of decisions made in the tune’s composition, arrangement, and production that make it so strange and so captivating to me.

The rest of the score seems a bit more tame — although there are more touches of experimentation, the deeper I crawl.

In my view, Kenji Yamamoto makes some very tasteful and wise decisions in terms of references to earlier themes. I particularly like his restructured Metroid and Brinstar themes.

Some of the earlier, more traditional soundtrack fare (particularly during the pre-Tallon introduction sequence) isn’t altogether interesting. And the planet-side music does take a while to build up to anything. But I’m beginning to sense a sort of a method behind the score’s evolution.

If it keeps going where it looks to me like it’s headed, this is going to be a pretty darned sensitive and impressive work. I don’t really know that it has much comparison in terms of what else is out there at the moment.

The Prime soundtrack is, so far, perhaps the most original and generally satisfying one for my tastes.

However: as for the soundtrack which I find the most memorable, well-written for its time, and which I personally enjoy the most — I’d have to go with Hip Tanaka’s original Metroid soundtrack.

There’s not a dud in the bunch. It consists of some of the best themes ever written for any videogame. And it made the game far more interesting to play than it really should have been.

I do quite like the Metroid 2 score, for what it is. Super Metroid’s music was… functional, to my mind. It was very Metroidy. To my mind Yamamoto has improved greatly since 1994, however. I don’t have much comment on the Fusion score. It, too, was Metroidy — though in a way which fit Fusion.

Return of Samus is really what comes to mind when I think of Metroid.

The first game was a bit of a fluke; the elements which make up the game don’t really cohere as well as they might. There doesn’t seem to be much of an overall vision. It was done on a pretty low budget. It seems rather random to me that it turned out to be as memorable as it was.

Metroid II was the first game where all of the elements really came together. Samus was retooled to look more or less as she does now. Her ship was introduced. The game upped the creepiness level several notches, along with a deep sense of disorientation and paranoia.

It’s perhaps the loneliest game in the series. The grainiest. And also the most wonderful.

More so than in any of the recent games, there is a sense of nigh-unlimited possibility in Return of Samus. You just don’t know what’s out there. Anything could be important. Anything could be a threat or a relief. You just don’t know where a new item will turn up. Or where the end is. Or where you’ll unexpectedly blunder into another Metroid.

I think the most important factor in so establishing RoS in my mind has to be the spider ball. The way it’s been retooled in Prime is interesting, but the item was far more flexible in RoS. (It was also probably a nightmare for the level designers, so I can see why it’s mostly been left out since then.) The way it was implemented in that game opened up a wealth of possibilities for exploration.

Super Metroid was certainly enjoyable. But it was a bit over-polished and conservative for my tastes. It was engineered to please as wide an audience as possible, while feeding fans exactly what they wanted (rather than what they didn’t *know* they wanted). Sort of like Phantasy Star: End of the Millennium. It didn’t really do very much new; all it did was take the best of the first two games and make it all a lot more palatable.

Basically — the first game establishes the concept of Metroid. The second game begins with that template, and then goes on an introspective search for identity. The third game takes most of the new ground blazed in the second game, combines it with the charm and trappings of the first game, and puts as much shine on it as the SNES can muster.

Fusion tries to be a very different kind of a game, and I respect it for that. What’s more, I think it succeeds quite well in its attempts to reinvent Metroid as a tense action-oriented game. I feel the level design is severely lacking, though; I’m not all that fond of some of its lazy logistical constructs. The game comes off almost feeling like Super Mario World in terms of how special moves and blocks are used.

Prime, I really like a lot so far. I didn’t honestly expect it to be as good as it is. I can’t comment very well on it until I’ve finished the game, though — as it seems there’s still a lot of odd stuff coming up that could effect my evaluation.

I think it could be interesting if the next game were set somewhere after Fusion. That game sets up a ton of change for the Metroid universe, and it would be intersting to see how Retro might follow through on it.

On the other hand, I tend to see the main linear series as Intelligent Systems’ duty. If there’s to be an out-and-out Metroid 5, it would make more sense to me if it came from the original Metroid team.

What seems to be Retro’s duty is to fill in the cracks and to attempt to explain all of the peculiarities introduced in the main series. To dig deeper into the groundwork set by Intelligent Systems.

And on that note, I think a Metroid Zero of sorts (as someone mentioned above) would make a lot of sense.

In early interviews, it was suggested that Prime was going to be set before the original Metroid. I think they chose wisely, in their decision to instead make it a direct follow-up to the first game — but that still leaves the backstory concept to fulfill.

In terms of bonuses, I agree that it would be keen to include Super Metroid — and for exactly this reason:

That way, every single Metroid game would be playable on the Gamecube.

Metroid 1 is included with Prime.
Metroid 2, you can play with the Gamecube Gameboy Player.
Metroid 3 would be included with this sequel to Prime.
Metroid 4 would again work with the Gameboy Player.

Kind of keen to have everything in one place, y’know?

I would also like to see the ability to turn power-ups on and off, as in Super Metroid.

Honestly, I’d just like to be able to take the Varia suit off every now and then. Those oversized shoulderpads just keey getting more ridiculous with every game; I much prefer how her raw Power Suit looks.

Also, it would be nice to be able to combine the various beam weapons (as in the third and fourth games).

I’d like to see young Samus, somehow. As a child, in a flashback, perhaps.

I want those Chozo statues back again, for holding power-ups.

And I want Retro to feel free to try out some more radical, experimental ideas that I would probably never think of on my own. I want to be surprised, above all else.

* * *

Regarding the spiky, butch hairdo from the concept art: Yes. That impressed the hell out of me. And it seems to match my interpretation of Samus’ personality, really well.

And honestly, doesn’t it make a lot more sense to have short hair if you’re going to be wearing a suit like that? Imagine it getting caught in the helmet. Yowtch.