Welcome to the Fantasy Zone
Hey — I got the highest Shenmue Space Harrier score in the state of Maine!
What an achievement, I know. But — well. I suppose it’s something, at least.
Eternal Arcadia indeed
Arcadia is really quite the lengthy little thing, innit? I’m still on disc 1, and over forty hours into the game. I think I might be approaching the end of this half, but before I continue on my intended way there are still several tasks I wish to accomplish. Yet it amazes me first how long this game continues to persist in being, and second how little one notices this. Evolution felt like a longer game than this, as did Soul Reaver — and yet I’ve put more progressive playtime into this game so far than I have any game in a long while. This is opposed to, say, Code Veronica, which refused to die even if I beat it with a stick.
Bergamot
Earl Grey tastes like its leaves are rinsed with turpentine.
Total Recall
After taking a shower, I realized that my towel smells like Rolling Thunder… and OutRun and Space Harrier, and Master System games just out of their shrinkwrap, new manuals open and eyes agog in a pizzeria near the toy store. And a weird, haunting song which seemed to always be playing in the background, which seemed at the time, to me, to involve a group of children singing on how they were going to die now.
OutRun was the most magical game in the world when I was eight.
Why wasn’t Rolling Thunder ever properly ported to a home console? I mean, there was the crummy Tengen adaptation for the NES, but…
Hm.
Yokosuka of the Past
I managed to finish Shenmue… sigh. At least the sequel should be coming up next year, hopefully. It feels somehow like I’ve witnessed some great historic event now, and I’m beginning to feel oddly wistful for the way things used to be (before the game had ended, that is). The ending also just sprang up and bit me — I didn’t really realize I was that far into the game. Hm. Ah, well… Now I can concentrate on JSR with fewer distractions.
dumb invention #4567456.7-1/2
“Flash Mirror”, wherein the entirety of a reflected matrix, in respect to a given point, would be saved as an image for later showing or downloading to disk.
Rummage
Okay; I’ve found the SMS, and have edited the below list to account for this. It’s still broken, but — well. All this leaves, really, now, are the Genesis, Power Base Converter, my two good joysticks, and five Genesis games… I bet I know where the cords are, but it’ll be a major hassle to dig them up if I’m correct in the matter. I might as well see, first, if they’re wherever the other articles have been hidden.
I’ve also gotten rid of ~three months’ worth of Dr Pepper cans and Arizona tea bottles, cleared off a couple of shelves, and put the various consoles’ respective cartridges on easy-access display along with my music and movies — and, of course, books.
Glub.
Oh — and, not entirely disrelatedly, I’ve located, while rummaging around over the past couple of days, a bunch of rare-ish AD&D 1st Edition books and a first pressing of Greyhawk, etcetera. This, plus my monsterous compendium (from when they still came in binders, a while ago) and a bunch of Ninja Turtle action figures. I’ve pulled out Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo character and sat him next to the Scullies I’ve wandering around my computer — they’re all actually very comparable in scale; it works out pretty darned well.
“Dear Agent Scully — I did not appriciate your lawyer’s tone…” </troy>
Sonic Misadventure
Finally got a working copy of Sonic Adventure, after several exchanges with, and no actual help from, various store employees over the past month (excepting one young lady who, for around fifteen minutes, actually did attempt to break into the display DC to let me test a (ultimately defective) copy. No good; she couldn’t get into the cabinet. And yes, the copy was again defective. Yet all is good now!
Tannin
Well, that was fun — just tried to devise my own liquid cooling system. Note to self: next time, try pouring the iced tea directly on the motherboard.
Fragility
Agh! Ah! ho, ho, ho! ooo! hah! oh, my. Yes. Oh, jeez. This is incredible. The Fragile, I mean — eek. Holy…
The downward spiral and this album are a mobius strip. The Fragile succeeds amazingly in breaking from the “nin formula” and exploring new territory, the occasional subtle reference thrown in to what has come before. It begins where TDS left off, with some gradual recovery, followed by a re-breakdown of sorts. Finally, there’s a very ominous ending, as at the end of a fatalistic movie, bringing the listener back to the beginning of TDS again.
I swear I’ve never heard anything like this. Chamber music about the nature of futility.
I’m… shivering.
The Polygon Paradigm
Well, I buried my shame and picked up a a Dreamcast — even though I don’t really deserve one. And my god — what it does nearly brings tears to my eyes. Unfortunately, I made two largeish mistakes —
- Although I checked what are supposed to be the outside tell-tale signs of the disc, the copy of Sonic Adventure I picked up is the corrupted one. I couldn’t easilly test the thing in-store, as I picked up the thing at Toys “R” Absent (what happened to all of the stuff that used to be in there? Where are the Lego?), so I just held my breath that I’d not have to take the hour drive back to Portland just to return the thing. Well. Hum.
- I decided not to read the box and assumed the system came with one of those memory card/tamagochi things. Nope. So I guess I have to grab one of them if I want to be able to save at all.
The warnings about disc scratching are because the Dreamcast games are encoded on normal old cds (insofar as their physical properties) rather than those black, indestructible PlayStation discs.
The controller’s not too bad. By fact of it being a controller, it’s starting just now to wear out my hands. But it could be a lot worse. I have no particular gripes about it, but there’s nothing to acclaim loudly, either.
From playing the demo disc version of Sonic Adventure, they seem to have given Knuckles the personality of Ryoga. Hm. And Sonic appears to have Billy West(Stimpy; Fry from Futurama)’s voice — it’s similar to his voice in the ABC cartoon, but a little less annoying. The theme song reminds me strongly of the seventh or eighth season intro to Ranma 1/2.
Since I don’t want to bother retyping it all in original, slightly more comprehensible verbiage, I’ll paste in here my initial comments made on Soul Calibur, the other game I picked up:
Soul Calibur reminds me of Tekken, from what little I saw of that. But it’s astounding.
In SC, there’s this one character — she has a sword which is divided into several horizontal segments, connected through the center by a long fiber of some sort. When she swings the sword out a certain way, the segments seperate along the fiber, making a long, barbed whip. Strange.
I like Xiangua quite a lot —
It’s interesting. The different “players” — player one and either player 2 or the opponent — use different versions of the same characters. Not just different colors, as in Street fighter. I mean, the first xiangua has short, scruffy hair, a blue bandanna, a kind of happy smirk, is wearing a white-with-yellow-fringe silk blouse-thing and blue pants. The second xiangua has long, primly-dressed, darker hair, is looking a little less “wild” in her expressions, and wears a formal red kimono with white trimmings and a yellow sash. In otherwords, a kinda’ tomboyish version versus a noble-looking one. The same kind of differences go for everyone — the extent of it, I mean, rather than the details. The first player’s “nightmare” is in shining steel armor, while the second “nightmare” is in a corroded, barbarian-ish, copper helmet and neck armor, and has a bare chest and arms. This happened in Tekken, again, but it’s still a new concept to me.
Very well put-together game.
It’s odd, though — I’m not used to “next generation”-feeling games, with very clean fade-ins and outs and so forth — like a bunch of different elements are put together. A still screen is very recognizable as a static screen. And so forth.
Dream Date
Trent Reznor appeared twice last night on Mtv — I tolerated the channel long enough to tape both performances, as well as any few Janeane Garofolo frames which popped up in between (hey, the tape was already in there) and the three or four Dreamcast commercials which aired.
The interview: Kurt Loder asked him about all of the background vocals on the album, and Trent explained that when they were working on the thing, at 12:00 at night, they’d just go across to the local bar and grab a bunch of drunk guys to yell and mumble into the microphones, creating an atonal mess.
“We assembled what I think is the most atonal group of females I’ve ever heard… I hope… they aren’t… they’re not watching this now, but they were… comically horrendous.”
David Bowie showed up, and gave quite a dignified speech. Janine Garofolo, as mentioned, was perpetually around. And the crowd was insane during Trent’s performance — just from the shouting, you’d think it’d be the Beatles playing. It was really kind of hard to hear the song, and the band weren’t entirely in sync, it seemed — like they only started practicing a week or two before. But all in all, it fell together pretty well.
The band, when they finally showed up, two and a half hours or so into the show, were introduced by Johnny Depp — though he didn’t give much of an intro. He was introduced by Chris Rock along with a mention of his appearance in the new Tim Burton movie. Immediately I guessed he was showing up to introduce nin — why else shove him out there? But all he did was stalk out on stage, say something to the effect of “here are nine inch nails,” and then immediately leave. huh.
Nin played what I presume to be “the fragile” — it didn’t sound too bad, from what I could tell. Trent seemed kinda’ nervous. Forgot the lyrics near the beginning and started laughing, but recovered, sorta’. Interesting setup, with large metal arms opening and closing around the band, zig-zags of flourescent lights affixed to their undersides. Lots of cellos and things in the background.
The Fragile (the song) is mostly a kinda’ quiet bit; about halfway through, at least in the live version, things started to get a bit tedious. I think Trent forgot the lyrics to a section altogether; he seemed to be getting a bit flustered; the music was getting softer, and the crowd was getting noisier. Plus it was an attempted live recreation — So it’s hard to tell.
These are the lyrics, to the best I can figure [and here are the correct ones]:
Spinball
Huh — Sally, Bunnie, and Rotor make cameo appearances in Sonic Spinball, in two of the three bonus stages. This is odd, as I was under the assumption that these characters didn’t exist in Sega’s personal view of the Sonic universe. Of course, looking at the credits, Spinball appears to have been an american production — probably why it’s as crummy as it is. The game was also produced at about the time Dic’s Sonic cartoon (the decent one) was running on ABC.
I guess, in light of these factors, the cameos make a bit more sense. Still, it was more than a bit unexpected.
One might note that Sally appears much closer to her early comic incarnation, actually, from before the ABC show was even aired; black hair and light maroonish (or as close as the round’s palette will allow) fur — this is in contrast with her later red-headed, brown-furred look. I’m not quite sure what this means, but there it is.
Kind of miss the cartoon; it was quite well-written, acted, and animated. The comic, from the dozen or so issues at which I’ve glanced over the past few years, is written by and for five-year-olds. A pity.
in the not-too-distant past…
Well, there ended another era. . .
sigh.
The Three of Mana
Seiken Densetsu 3 is more than keen, says me. Angela, with Hawk and Lise, are my chosen party (though renamed appropriately). It’s interesting how engaging is this game, as SD2: Secret of Mana didn’t really grab me inordinately. The GB SD game (renamed Final Fantasy Adventure over here) was playable, I suppose, but, again, didn’t do much to my brain. I’ve never seen SD1, so I can’t comment there. The fighting system in this game is a bit peculiar; a sort of liquid turn-based realtime Legend of Zelda setup. Whereas Secret of Mana and the GB game were simply a realtime Zelda-ish system, this has an added “fluid turn” system, making things a bit awkward. The character is wandering around, freely, in realtime, but is only allowed to attack once every few seconds. Hm. I imagine I’ll adjust, but it’s a bit annoying at the moment.
Nevertheless, this game grabs me. I dunno what it is. . .
Cheers to Neill Corlett, Lina`chan, Nuku-nuku, and SoM2Freak — it’d be nice to have their skills, I must say.