videogames

windup; wind-down

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Have I mentioned recently how beautiful the Sega Genesis is? Truly, Sega has always had the most attractive consoles around (at least almost always…). Compare the snazzy SMS to the hideously boring NES. Compare the Genesis to any other console made. Compare the cute-yet-functional Dreamcast to any of the other three nextgen consoles. Sigh.

Yes, I’m finally dragging the things back into my room just now. I still have cords wrapped around my arms and neck like pythons with AC fangs.

I’m glad I polished these things up a while ago… now if only I could find my copies of Altered Beast, Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, Shadow Dancer, and a couple of other truant items. And if only I had full packaging (box and manual at least) for some of the used items I’ve picked up over the past few years. Hum…

It would be nice to get fully-functioning NES, Genesis, and SMS emulators for the DC so I coud simply burn discs of my complete collections for each console. Saving the Saturn (and GB and NGPC — the GG is included with the SMS in this case), this would put everything I needed in one place.

What would be sort of amusing would be if the emulator discs supported the modem and allowed peer-to-peer multiplayer for Life Force or Streets of Rage, as some Windows emulators have been doing for a while. (Well, not peer-to-peer, usually, in this case — but..)

Hm. Brain slurping around. I’ll be back later.

Breakdown

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Today I tried burning an SNES emulator for the Dreamcast. It’s not exactly an easy process, and I forgot to include a couple of things that I intended (including that Super Robot Wars Gaiden game), but I guess this is just a test run. The emulator, a version of SNES9X, runs very well, if rather slowly — and it lacks SFX chip support, so Starfox and Yoshi’s Island give my poor Dreamcast a nervous breakdown.

The Sega Pushover

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I beat NiGHTS, after nearly a year — first Claris’s game, and then Elliot’s. I see now why the game was split up into two sections like this. Wizeman wasn’t at all difficult to fight, once I was given a chance to see what he did; previously I’d only ever made it to him once, and at that time I was a bit too rattled. But… gee. One can even get hit several times and still be able to beat him without a huge problem. Just getting to him is harder…

This, though, seems to be a typical sort of a Sega style. They make it very, very hard to get to the end — and then once one has gotten there they sort of reward her by making the final encounter pretty trivial. If one has made it that far, they let her enjoy her victory. Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio, and Sonic Adventure are three other examples which pop immediately to mind here. Though — the last battle can often be tricky the first time one gets to it just because one doesn’t know how things work and one is expecting it to be much harder than it is, so one tends to be very jumpy.

Boy. I don’t think I need to use that pronoun again for another week or so.

Water effects

  • Reading time:1 mins read

This morning I had a notion to play Panzer Dragoon. Although I’ve never beaten round three, and only in fact ever gotten there twice, this time I managed to get all the way through chapter four! The fourth one is very, very impressive. Actually, it’s astounding how well this game has held up after six years. I mean, it’s obviously rough. Considering when it came out, though — as a launch title… yikes. I mean. This is pretty impressive now. How must it have seemed in 1995?

The End of the Time After the End

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I figured out the rest of where Phantasy Star Online fits into things. It obviously takes place after The End of the Millennium — perhaps a thousand years, to follow the series trend. Yet the disturbance in this game is related to PSIII, namely the piece of Dark Force that was on the ship Alisia. Unlike all the “major” manifestations of Dark Force, back in Algol, that Dark Force wasn’t destroyed. Further, at the end of the game it did supposedly vow to return in a thousand years.

What I’m thinking then is that somehow the residents of the ship must have buried him on Ragol. Then a couple of thousand years later (a thousand years after EotM), when the rest of the Algonians escaped Algol on the Pioneer ships, they just happen to take the same route as the earlier pilgrims and so find the Dark Force that was left behind by their distant relatives.

Just figured I needed to write this down where I might be able to find it again later.

Motavia and Opportunity

  • Reading time:2 mins read

In a way, Phantasy Star II was something of a loss of innocence for gaming. I think the music shows one of the attractions for the game. It was the height of a bustling civilization. Technologically adept; happy; bright; clean; optimistic. The dungeon and overworld musics both have a tone of simplicity to them. There is a childlike sense of wonder which pervades the world. Everything is safe. There are the little problems to be fixed, but then all will be right again. The world is safe. Nothing irreparably bad can really happen to our heroes. But then things begin to go very wrong… and suddenly this sense of innocence takes on a very desperate sort of tension, as if the game is trying to cope with what is going on. Like it doesn’t understand how what is happening could possibly happen, and refuses to believe it.

I don’t think there had ever really been events this portentous in a video game before… Now, of course, characters are killed left and right and worlds are destroyed without much of a thought. But a plot this complex was a real novelty at the time. As with a lot of things Sega does, it really showed the potential that games would come to have…

Addendum

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Just because I feel like it, here are my top ten most anticipated games at the moment:

  • Shenmue II
  • New Space Channel 5
  • Sonic Adventure 2
  • Eternal Arcadia 2
  • toejam & earl 3
  • Soul Reaver 2
  • Sakura Wars 3
  • gun valkyrie
  • Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
  • Bangai-O

I’m curious about Agartha and Headhunter and Hundred Swords and Farnation, and I eagerly await announcement of a DC port of Planet Harriers or word of the new Chakan game (which seems to have fallen off the face of the planet). SEGAGAGA sounds fascinating in its own strange way, but I doubt I have to worry much about it being released here. So…

Anyway. There’s that.

Rolling Over

  • Reading time:1 mins read

By next weekend, PSO and the two broadband adapters should be waiting for me. Also… just because it wasn’t very much and I needed a keyboard anyway in order to get as much out of PSO as I can, I ordered Typing of the Dead and its particular key peripheral. This will be the last DC game I can get for a long while, I think. Phew…

I still have to deal with these RPGs I grabbed up last month. Hrm.

here’s my advice: Never get a bunch of role-playing games all at once. If you get Shenmue, get Jet Set Radio as your next game. If you get Arcadia, pick up Typing of the Dead or MSR or something next. It just creates an impenetrable clog to have four or five RPGs sitting around, demanding one’s life.

Ah, well. I’m satiated for a while at least. Good thing it’ll be a few months before the flood starts up again.

Oh, as a note — Illustrator is keen. If I can figure out the proper way to combine this with Photoshop, I believe I might create some rather fascinating effects.

Welcome to the Fantasy Zone

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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.

Total Recall

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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.

Rummage

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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!

The Polygon Paradigm

  • Reading time:4 mins read

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.