Gamecenter CX Episode #73 (Season 10): Lemmings (Super Famicom)
by K1
Posted on Monday, December 29, 2008
シーズン10 #73 引率できるか？「レミングス」Episode Summary at Crunk Games
Credit goes to Crunk Games and GameCenter CX Musou
(This episode was intense. I think the episodes where you played the game as a kid are just as exciting as ones where you have no idea what's going to happen.)
Rise from your grave
by alzabo
Posted on Monday, February 11, 2008
A decade ago,
Adventure Games died.
A good place to look for examples of the genre's death this is LucasArts. After Grim Fandango performed poorly in 1998, the lackluster sales of Escape from Monkey Island caused LucasArts to abandon every project that didn’t have “Star Wars” in the title. Other companies were having the similar problems, Westwood Studio’s Blade Runner did poorly the previous year and Sierra Entertainment had stopped producing adventure games. In a round of layoffs Sierra fired a quarter of their workforce; including Al Lowe and Scott Murphy, who created Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest respectively. It was a sad time to be a PC adventure game enthusiast, some say 3D games in general and the proliferation of First Person Shooters specifically killed the adventure game genre. There are other theories about what killed the genre, but I’m not writing this to mark the 10th anniversary of Adventure Gaming’s death, I’m celebrating its return.
The Nintendo DS has become the new home for this timeless Genre. The first time I realized this was when I picked up Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in the Fall of 2005, the game is a classic point & click adventure that gained popularity via word of mouth and has had multiple repressing by Capcom. Phoenix Wright’s two sequels in 2006 and 2007 did equally well and I can say that the ending of the 3rd game ties all three together into a fun and memorable trilogy that I enjoyed more than most adventure games I played on PC. Even though Phoenix Wright is an adventure game with some mature themes (almost all the cases revolve around murders that are somewhat grisly), the game has an “animu” flavor that is impossible to ignore. Luckly, there are alternatives made by the developer Cing.
After Cing’s first forgettable DS adventure game Trace Memory they developed the mesmerizing Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Hotel Dusk has the gameplay of a adventure game, a classic point & click interface with a FPS navigation twist, visuals that are mature and seem fitting (I love the whole “Take On Me” look) and a story that is right up there with the best PC games of yester-year. When I started playing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing Icom’s Déjà Vu. The atmosphere of Hotel Dusk is so spectacular that I want to go back and play it for the first time all over again. I cannot stress the following enough: If you love adventure games you need to play Hotel Dusk.
Most people probably never expected Adventure games to make a comeback, the best part of all of this is that most of the people picking up these new games have never played a Adventure game before. It’s unlikely that they’ll go dig up old PC games to play on their PC, but the classics are available to them via another channel. One of the programs available to people who choose to hack their Nintendo DS handheld is ScummVM, a emulator designed to play adventure games by LucasArts, Sierra and other developers.
The reason I’m writing this today is because I finished Phoenix Wright 3 last night to clear up some of my game back-log to make room for both Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (a.k.a. Phoenix Wright 4) and Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village. While I know exactly what PW4 is going to be, I approach Prof. Layton with high expectations, the game is very popular in Japan and spawned two sequels. The visuals of Prof. Layton reminds me of the excellent 2003 French animated film The Triplets of Belleville. I’m quite excited about these new Adventure games, their arrival is another sign of the Adventure genre’s return to popularity.
Sea fish are fat in the belly; river fish are fat in the back.
by alzabo
Posted on Friday, December 14, 2007
I’ve got a surprise for you. You’ll never guess what’s getting ported to the PSP. . . Umihara Kawase!
Hey, why are you walking away! This is really cool! I know it’s anime, but it’s not crap. . . I promise.
Gamecenter CX has been discussed previously on this blog, but the article failed to mention how the show can raise a persons interest in titles that they may never have heard of before. This happened to me with Umihara Kawase.
Umihara Kawase shares game mechanics with Solomon’s Key and Bionic Commando. The player must navigate a series of enemy filled puzzles to reach the goal by using a bungie cord to fling themselves across gaps and defeat enemies. The game is quite impressive to watch and play, with branching paths that increase replay value and level design that may cause you to have an embolism.
The setting of the game is truly strange, a small, cute Japanese school girl must face hoards of sea creatures that have mutated (and grown human legs in some cases). The game’s artwork is detailed but the sprites have only have a handful of different animations, the backgrounds consist of low resolution photographs that’ve had their color palate reduced to make them look even more grainy. When looked at as a cohesive whole, the graphics of Umihara Kawase are not impressive, and screen grabs make the game look like countless other platformers of the era.
I recently discussed this game with fellow supple thinker Zen and he alerted me to the huge speed running community surrounding this game. Apparently the tool assisted runs are mind blowing.
Unfortunately Umihara Kawase was never released outside Japan, so most people have been forced to play it on an emulator. Piracy issues aside, it feels awkward because the imperfect nature of emulation screws up the timing for some of the jumps and makes the bungie cord physics faster and less smooth than they are on a real Super Famicom.
Lucky for us, there is no region hardware lockout on PSP games, so we’ll be able to play the PSP version that comes out in 2008. It’s not a port of the Super Famicom game, but rather the Playstation sequel Umihara Kawase Shun (example). The games are essentially the same, the Playstation version has less bungie slowdown and a vastly improved color palette. While I am excited about finally being able to play this game properly, I am worried that this game will not be brought out in the US. Puzzle/Exploration games are popular in the US, games like Exit and Loco Roco sold well. I feel that the weirdness of the game and entirely 2d nature of the game may kill the games chances. Let’s cross our fingers for a 2008 US release of this, along with Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaikida. Article Permalink
Nintendo’s New Holiday
by alzabo
Posted on Saturday, September 15, 2007Until now I had no real reason to talk about the Nintendo’s Virtual Console service for the Wii, but their recent announcements for the European and Australian VC have forced my hand. This month is the “Hanabi Festival.”
The Hanabi Festival is a chance for Nintendo to release a smattering of games that previously had not been available to EU and AU customers through normal channels. The games offered initally are Super Mario Bros. 2 (Famicom), Mario’s Super Picross (Super Famicom), with other unreleased games like the incredible N64 title Sin & Punishment becoming available for download at later this month. 
While I applaud Nintendo’s decision to release some Japan only titles in the west, I must admit that I’m kind of upset with the way in which they’re releasing them. Nintendo is brazen enough to ask for an extra $1 for the games offered during the “Hanabi Festival.” Oh, and games like Mario 2 will only be offered during the festival. Yeah, not only do you have to pony up more for the game, you have to buy it before the end of September (I guess that’s one way to insure strong VC sales).
In addition to the insult of having to pay more for these games, Nintendo is even cutting back on localization for these special limited time VC releases. Mario’s Super Picross doesn’t even have a
English title screen. I guess that’s what Nintendo meant when they called it a “Hanabi Festival,” Hanabi must be some 27+ stroke kanji that roughly translates to: “pay extra for a game that isn’t localized.” I guess this is all just a test by Nintendo to see just how deeply they can stick their thumb in our eye before we collectively close our wallets.
"Drilling is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
by K1
Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007
"The driller becomes all the poorer the more depth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The driller becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Drilling produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the driller as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally." - Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
"The exchange value of a commodity estimated in blocks is called its price. Fresh air therefore is only a special name for the price of drilling-power, and is usually called the price of drilling; it is the special name for the price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other repository than human flesh and blood."
"The existence of a class which possess nothing but the ability to drill is a necessary presupposition of capital.It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized drilling over immediate living drilling that stamps the accumulated drilling with the character of capital."
"To say that "the driller has an interest in the rapid growth of air", means only this: that the more speedily the driller augments the fresh air of the capitalist, the larger will be the blocks which fall to him, the greater will be the number of drillers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon fresh air be increased."
"The colored blocks, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “air”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Arcade Mode. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
Article Permalink