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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The stepdown convertor I use to play my Japanese PC Engine in my English home got itself destroyed the other day. It was always a bit iffy, anyway - I bought it from an import games shop, as opposed to somewhere more professional (like Maplin or RS Components) because, quite frankly, I didn't have the first idea what I was supposed to be getting and just went for the first place I found that was prepared to answer my questions. Fairly sure I was ripped off - not only was it expensive, but it also showed all the signs of being a shoddy, homemade botch job. Rattled when shaken. Socket was a bit loose. One corner seemed not to be screwed in properly. That sort of thing.
Spent a few hours desperately trying to find a power supply unit for a UK console that'd fit in place of the Japanese plug. That's the one good thing about those consoles - mainly those from the 8 and 16bit days, but also the Gamecube - that have external PSUs. As long as you have access to the PSU of a UK version of the console, you can import a foreign version quite happily and use them together, without having to mess about buying a stepdown. You can even cross-breed them in certain cases - an American or Japanese Neo Geo AES console will be quite content to run off the PSU from a British Megadrive.
Unfortunately, and despite the stupid number of dusty old consoles I've got lying about, I've not got a suitable PSU anywhere. The SNES one works, but doesn't appear to be pumping enough power into the Interface Unit - I have no sound and the CD drive doesn't work. I've read on many sites that, just as with the Neo Geo, a Megadrive PSU will work with the PCE. Problem is, I've only got the PSU for a Megadrive 2, and that one doesn't fit. Made more annoying by the fact that, oddly, I own a broken Megadrive 1, but have managed to misplace the only bit of it that still functions - the PSU.
Which means that I'm now forced to buy another stepdown. A proper one this time, though, that isn't going to make me feel as though I'm risking setting the house alight every time I plug it in.
The point of this is that, while searching through the old boxes stored away in the loft, I came to the decision to dust this off and see if it all still worked:
It's something I've been thinking about doing for a few weeks now. The Megadrive's always plugged in under the television, but the MegaCD and 32X have been stored away for a few years, in both cases because of a lack of decent games. The forthcoming release of Sonic Gems on the Cube has started me thinking about Sonic CD, though, and the appearance of what looks suspiciously like Gillian's little robot assistant from Snatcher in the Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer has fired me up for another run through Kojima's earlier game.
I don't think you'll find another console that suffered such wildly varying fortunes, nor one that stirs so many different emotions. The Megadrive itself - the core part of the whole setup - is great. The quality of its software catalogue is wildly inconsistent, but it offers some dizzying gaming high points. At their best, Sega have always been about colour and brightness and one huge, upbeat, joyous rush, and when the third party Megadrive developers and publishers demonstrated that they understood that it made for some unbeatable entertainment. The Treasure games. Probotector. Sonic. Micro Machines. Shining Force.
Then there's the MegaCD. I'm not sure, but it could well be one of the most ridiculed pieces of gaming kit ever released. As seemed to be the fashion at the time, it was created with the hardware itself in mind, not what it could offer in terms of software. For proof, you only need look at most of the games. Night Trap. Road Avenger. All the other Dragon's Lair-alikes. Games that were little more than video footage, that limited their gameplay to forcing the player to watch and wait for a command to flash up on the screen, then press the relevant button on the pad. The rest of the machine's list of software was largely made up of lazy ports of existing Megadrive games with FMV intros tacked on, maybe with one (short) extra level or a CD soundtrack in place of the old chip-generated one. Hardly worth the bother of releasing, let alone buying.
And yet, it still has a few essential games. Not enough to get into double digits, but a few. Sonic CD is, despite what the doubters claim, the best game in that series by a country mile. It has the variety and depth that the others are missing, and it uses the storage space offered by the format well - four alternate versions of each level, intro and edning cartoons that feel like part of the whole and *not* just tacked on to justify it being on CD, and what remains one of the best game soundtracks. If, that is, you're playing the UK or JPN version - the joke that is the US one is well-documented.
It has Snatcher. Not only does it have Snatcher, but it has the only English language version of Snatcher, which fact alone makes it a console worth picking up. Not that getting the game itself is going to be cheap - prices have always been high, but they're probably going to start rising even more once the origin of that little robot in the Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer is revealed, either in the game or in the mainstream press. A relatively short game, especially by today's standards, but one that's easily as atmospheric and engaging as the best of modern-day releases. A heady mix of Blade Runner, Terminator and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that works far better than it should - Kojima's love of movies and narrative evident throughout.
And those are still the only two MegaCD games that I own that I'd ever recommend buying the console for. I'm always hearing great things of Robo Aleste ("almost like the Radiant Silvergun of shooters for the Sega CD," says the SHMUPS review) and there are a couple of other shooters that I'd like to get hold of (namely Keio Flying Squadron and Android Assault), but without having played them I really wouldn't like to comment. The lazy ports of good Megadrive games are still good games and there are a few other games for the machine that can be fun, but they're not worth hunting down.
So the MegaCD can be put alongside other consoles like Atari's Jaguar as one of those that only has a tiny number of essential titles, but they really, truly are absolutely essential.
Which is more than could ever be said of the 32X. If you want to be charitable, you could say that the MegaCD was simply a casualty of the times, a good idea that developers failed to take advantage of. The 32X, on the other hand, was a complete disaster from the start.
I can't remember exactly how many games were released for it before Sega realised that, uh-oh, they'd made a pretty enormous error of judgement in releasing it, but I think it was something like thirteen. Developers looked at it, looked at the Saturn - Sega's proper 32bit console - and noted that the 32X was markedly inferior. Punters looked at it and were just confused - why would anybody want to buy an add-on for a console that was fast reaching its sell-by date when there were two far superior, dedicated 32bit consoles waiting in the wings, one of which was coming from the same company as this? That question became even harder to answer when you looked at the 32X's games. Sega tried to explain away everybody else's valid concerns about whether or not the machine would still be supported by publishers when the Saturn was due out soon by claiming that the two could exist alongside each other - the Saturn was high technology, a machine that was intended for the hardcore who were willing to part with the cash for that sort of power, while the 32X was the 'budget' release, the choice for the non-hardcore. Nobody was convinced, least of all the non-hardcore. As it was forecast, so it came to pass - publishers had no intention of supporting inferior hardware that seemed to serve no useful purpose, and the 32X was dead on release.
I own all of five titles for it.
Afterburner. Why? Why release an already-ancient title and try to pass it off as next generation by saying"but it's the closest conversion of the arcade game yet!" You're only setting yourself up for a fall, especially when it's *still* not a perfect conversion.
Virtua Racing Deluxe. Alright, so this one's not so bad. Problem is, you've got Daytona lined up for release on the Saturn and Sony have Ridge Racer. It's not really going to happen, is it?
Doom. It's smooth, I'll give it that. It's also impossible to see what the fuck's going on because the screen is so bloody small. A joke of a conversion. Still better than the one on the Saturn, mind :/
Star Wars Arcade. Okay, so this is a passable title. It's seriously limited, though, with little to justify it being brought from out of the arcades in the first place. Also barely any different to play from the very first Star Wars arcade game (you remember, the wireframe one) and has since been made entirely redundant by the Cube SW games, which do much the same thing, only in a far more attractive manner.
Knuckles' Chaotix. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
The 32X, in short, possesses not a single game worth getting hold of nowadays. They were barely worth buying when they first came out. Many trace Sega's recent misfortunes back to the MegaCD, but I think it's more accurate to say the 32X was the first of the blunders to really damage them. It cost £170 over here on release. Games were, iirc, around the £60 mark.
That photo above shows a great machine, a cult classic and a total waste of space, all plugged into each other to create a lurching monstrosity. Sega are where they are now because of an inability to effectively manage their business or to understand the market. I adore my Saturn. It's a console that possesses games that will simply never feel tired. They were a truly progressive company in the Dreamcast era, releasing games and hardware that were innovative, brave and electrifying, showing up every single other hardware manufacturer - and most software developers - as retarded, cynical and dull in the process. Both consoles failed because consumers and publishers no longer trusted them after the debacle that was that mangled wreck of black plastic up there in that image.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 18:01
Friday, September 23, 2005
Friday, September 23, 2005
Oo. Not only have we got Shin Megami Tensei 3 out in what's supposed to be a classy PAL conversion, we're also due to get the Digital Devil Saga off-shoot. More smileys here --->
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 14:30
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Thursday, September 22, 2005
I've only just realised that we really are coming to the end of one home console hardware cycle and are now teetering on the brink of a new one.
Not because the new magazines are starting to hit the shelves. Not because message boards are awash with a more determined form of idiocy than normal. Nope. It's because Europe is finally getting to see some of the games that the rest of the world has been playing for months, if not years, courtesy of budget labels snapping them up in order to fill the space being left by the rapidly-retreating mainstream publishers.
It's always a bit of a joy, this point in the life of a console, because it tends to reward you for hunting around. I found out today, for example, that Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne has slipped out into UK shops (albeit with a new name). Well, it probably hasn't - it's much more likely that you'll only be able to find it online (£25 at Play.com, which is rather bargainous), but at least it's finally available to PAL PS2 owners. With, apparently, the all-important full-screen, full-speed 60Hz mode. If you want, imagine a big row of happy-face smileys just about here --->
Graffiti Kingdom's been out for a couple of months in France (in the sort of pathetically stupid twist that I'd hoped we'd seen the last of with Space Channel 5 Part 2, it's not being brought to the UK officially, despite the fact that the entire game is already translated into English - import or eBay time, then). Doubtful that it's been granted as respectful a conversion as SMT3:N - I'm expecting squishovision horizontal borders and a generally sluggish feel to the controls - but you never know.
Also, the PS2 version of Shikigami No Shiro 2 is just about to be released over here, under the Castle of Shikigami name. Again, though, you've got to be worried about the quality of the PAL conversion, especially after the abortion that was the transformation of the first game into Mobile Light Force 2 over here. That's definitely going to be a case of letting somebody else get it first, then finding out from them whether or not it's been raped in a similar fashion.
Give it a few more months, we may even see things that the US misses out on - hey, it happened with the PS1 and Puchi Carat. Fingers crossed for the new Twinkle Star Sprites, then.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 01:22
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
I bought Baten Kaitos the other day. Intrigued by the card battling system and the claims of 1,022 different cards to find throughout the adventure - a task which, apparently, takes the 60-odd hours play time if you follow the storyline through to the end and increases it by a couple of hundred more.
But there's a problem. Right from the start, it's a very uninvolving game. The backgrounds are all prerendered, flat images, but that's not the cause of it. It's the characters. They're terrible.
The thing you notice first is the voice work. This is some of the worst acting I've ever heard in a videogame. Emphasis on the wrong words. Dull, doing-it-for-the-money readings. A total lack of honest emotion. It's not helped by the terrible script - yet another videogame fantasy world full of ass-kickings, hell yeahs and that'll learn yas. I realise that we're in a period of history where American imperlialism is a big thing, but it takes the piss a little that you can't even visit an alternate universe without being accosted by people who sound like they're auditioning for the position of Dubya's speech writer.
As if that's not enough, the actual sound quality of the voices is fucking abysmal - everybody's affected by hollow, metallic reverb, which makes it impossible to believe that the voices belong to the characters when they're supposed to be in the middle of bustling village squares or lush forests. A trip to the options menu to choose Voices = Off is absolutely required, but even then it doesn't prevent them from ruining the battle sequences with unsuitable gung-ho catchphrases.
It's not just the acting, though. These characters are bland in every sense. The modelling is tired. A number of them look like the sort of personality-free puppets that were common back in the days of FMV adventures. Check the link above, then go to Story > Characters. The hand-drawn portrait work is lovely. It's fresh, a style of art that's entirely the game's own - individual, peculiar to this game. The character models, on the other hand, are terrible. Lifeless, wooden. They also look just plain odd and half-arsed - most characters look completely out of proportion, with heads that are far too big for their bodies. That'd be fine if they were supposed to be cartoonish, but they're not - they're a strained attempt at realism. Their animation is just as wooden and lacking in spark, too - there's no way that you'll ever be fooled into thinking of them as real people. They're mannequins, dead-eyed monstrosities. If God was a team of accountants, this is what humanity would look like.
What I've seen of the storyline so far is also hugely disappointing. One big cliche. You're a rebellious teenager, your family murdered by a member of an evil empire. On your path to seeking revenge, you bump into a girl with mysterious, otherworldly powers who seems to have a major part to play in righting the world's wrongs, a role foretold in that world's legends and myths. It's as if coming up with an original plot in an RPG is against the law or something.
On the plus side, the world - once you remove the people who inhabit it from the equation - is often gorgeous. Although it's not anything more than a series of flat backgrounds, it's brought to life with stunningly rich colours and plenty of animation. There are even a couple of places where the character models work quite well - a girl sitting on a tree branch, swinging her legs out in front of her, for example. These are incidental touches, though, and can't make up for the fact that the models look completely out of place against the backgrounds for the majority of the time. It's frustratingly difficult to have any idea of depth when you're walking about, for example, which leads to the old practice of repeatedly pressing A while you cautiously edge along, trying to get your character into the correct position to interact with something or someone. I've also just spent three quarters of an hour wandering about, trying to find the person I'd just run an errand for, only to discover - after having to consult GameFAQs to prevent me from throwing the controller out of the window - that he was right in front of me all the time and the only reason I couldn't see her was because she was right at the 'back' of the scene on the screen, all of four pixels tall and obscured by the foreground. One of those times when the design simply isn't practical.
The battle system is fun enough, although it's currently lacking any real bite of energy. Maybe it'll improve once I have a decent number of different cards to construct my deck from and can manipulate it so that I can play in a way that I define. I hope so - right now, it's easily the only thing in the game that I've got any real interest in. Everything else is just a mush of genre conventions.
It annoys me how so many of these problems are things that have been with us for years now. In many ways, Baten Kaitos feels like an RPG from the 16 bit days, both in terms of the good and the bad that it presents. A company like Namco, who've produced endless numbers of RPGs, really should be able to come up with something that feels more vital than this. Don't get me wrong, even with all these flaws, it's still fun. It's just that we really should be past the stage where these issues get in the way of your enjoyment of a game.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 16:35
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Ack. Having one of my infrequent spates of eBay gaming madness. Nothing too stupid - no major piece of new console hardware, no ridiculously expensive R@RE!1111!!one! L00K!!!1!!1 games - but a number of little things.
One bit of hardware - an e-Card reader for the GameBoy Advance. As usual, a cool piece of kit that us Europeans never got to see officially (big thumbs up to good old Nintendo Europe and their hatred of their own customer base). Lets you scan playing card sized, er, cards, which will then either open up some new goodies in a GBA or Cube game, or else download the code for an old NES game - Donkey Kong, Balloon Fight, that kind of thing - onto your GBA for on-the-spot play. Note that Nintendo have since dumped the latter idea in favour of re-releasing NES games on GBA cartridges. Cartridges which, in the UK, cost fifteen squids (good old Nintendo Europe).
Bunch of PC Engine games. Now, I keep meaning to talk about my love for the PC Engine, but given that this blog doesn't really ever get read by, well, anyone (hell, the only reason it's still here any more is so that I can keep the bookmarks to friends' blogs, being so fucking lazy that I can't even be bothered to add them to my browser favourites list) I've not bothered. Maybe later. Oo! Anticipation!
Anyway, bunch of PC Engine games. Two of which arrived the other day - Daisenpu and Pom Ping World. Daisenpu's a cool enough little shooter, vertically-scrolling, WWII-themed. Called Twin Hawk in America and Europe, afaik. Fun. Limited, but fun. No great excitement in the high scores stakes, no funky twists to the gameplay (too old, y'see), but a good, solid, old fashioned blast.
Pom Ping World is Pang. It's also Buster Brothers. It all depends on which part of the globe you reside in. Little safari explorer adventurer dude runs left and right at the bottom of the screen at your command. Armed with a harpoon gun, he fires at the balls bouncing about above his head - hit one and it splits into two smaller balls, hit on of those and it splits into another two balls, smaller again. There may be another split after that, but it's nearly 5AM and I'll be fucked if I'm going to turn it on just to check. Maybe tomorrow. Anticipation! But yeah, smart little game. One thing that's striking is how chunky the collision detection feels - I've been spoiled by games with pixel-perfect hit detection and shoot 'em ups with minute hit boxes in the last few years. Not a big deal - small readjustment needed, not a problem. Fun in two-player mode - never being entirely sure of which ball your partner's going for can mean you're suddenly having to avoid squillions of small ones, when all you were expecting to be heading your way were two or three big 'uns.
Other PC Engine games to come! Pac-Land. Looking forwards to that. I've only ever played ten or twenty seconds of it, despite it being considered a bit of an underground classic by those in the know. Secrets galore, they promise. It's certainly got a very... individual look - kind of hand-drawn by a five year-old - which I now find appealing, but which was exactly what put me off it in the past. Well, that and the fact that I didn't realise that you were supposed to run as fast as you could over the springboards in the game - I always figured you were just meant to manually jump at the end of them, which led to a couple of watery Pac-deaths and a determination never to play the game again. I am teh inconsistent!
Ordyne. Nice little shooty-shooty cute 'em up. Fluffy clouds. Lots of pink. Fucking brilliant animation on your tiny pilot dude as you push the plane forwards and backwards that makes his quiff (or kiss curl, maybe - it's three pixels wide, how the hell do I know which it is?) blow backwards or forwards. I like cute 'em ups, especially if they manage to be genuinely funny. Been playing this (and the others here - always pays to check them out before putting the cash down, yeah?) on a PCE emulator for a couple of hours tonight. Good stuff.
Be Ball. Odd one, this. Odd great, though. Big, chunky sprites in a tiny, single screen maze. You're a small Chun-Li lookalikey and are tasked with the job of pushing coloured balls onto the matching colour square within the maze. Enemies traversing the maze can be squished flat by a hefty wallop of any of the balls with your stubby legs. Have to think about which way you're moving beforehand so that you don't end up pulling the ball, with your back to the hedgehog bad guy who's all of an inch away from your arse. All within a time limit. Wonderful animation on the characters. One of those games that you trip over by accident while looking for something else and end up wondering how on Earth it never became recognised as something really special (answer: it probably never got a release outside of Japan, where it no doubt holds a special place in the heart of every single person in the country. Good old NEC).
Gomola Speed. Much the same as Be Ball, in that it's a game that's special and individual, yet hardly anybody's ever heard of. Top-down view. You're a snake. A section of a snake, anyway - the head. Bouncing around the level are the other sections of your body. Touch them and they join onto your arse, making you a bigger snake. The object is to collect all your snakey sections on the map and eat all the food. The eating is where the game's individuality shines through - you have to surround the food with your body, create an unbroken shape around it. The more snakey body parts you've got, the easier it is. Unfortuntealy, the more snakey body parts you've got, the easier it is to take a hit from one of the enemies wandering around, causing your body to split off again at the point where it was hit (or die, should you take one to the head). Just really, really cool to play. Looks a bit like the first level of Xenon, weirdly - bas-relief techno graphics, circa 1988.
One more. Saturn game this time. Needed to grab something else from the seller to jusitify the shipping price - was thinking about getting a full-on, big name, hardcore, console-specific, must-have shoot 'em up masterpiece (the PCE being pretty well-endowed in that department), but suddenly noticed my Saturn peeking out from under the television. And dust.
Saturn = just as richly served by shoot 'em up masterpieces as the PCE.
Problem is, choices. Choices, choices, choices. I never really made as much use of having my Saturn made region-free as I should have done - got a few games, some big name ones at release (thankfully - £40ish for Radiant Silvergun the week it came out is a *slightly* better deal than £110ish now, thenkyewverymush), but hardly enough to justify the price I paid for it, so there's a fair old selection of stuff to choose from.
And, of course, this guy has got a decent selection of them up for sale. Donpachi. Dodonpachi. Sexy Parodius. Soukyugurentai. Strikers 1945. Strikers 1945 Pt 2. All at nice, wallet-friendly prices, too - unfortunately, though, not at unemployed-Randy-wallet -friendly prices, so it's one and one only. In the end, I plump for the one I know little-to-nothing about - Soukyugurentai. Price is in the lower end of his scale, game is created to be run on a standard television (that is, you don't have to turn you TV on its side in order to have the screen be the same ratio as in the arcade [TATE mode for those of us au fait with shoot 'em up geekery] and, therefore, run the game 'properly', with everything in exact proportion, which is a good thing because I just recently got a new telly after fucking my last one up through playing Psyvariar and Ikaruga in TATE)*. Game is described on various sites as being rather fucking difficult, but never unfairly fucking difficult. This is good - I like a difficult shooter. Just hope it's "bullets fly absolutely bastard everywhere, need to keep jinking through patterns" difficult. That's the sort of difficult I want right now.
*Bracket abuse! I'm sorry, English teachers everywhere :`[
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 03:19
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Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. Fire a volley |
