Yep. I miss 4CR. Even though it’ll be back soon, it’s just ran out of bandwidth. It’s a darn good site that inspired me to really enjoy gaming again. I’d love to jump on the IRC channel, I bet it’d be swarming.

This is a miscellaneous post, because you can’t always have a central theme.

Kammo has had the awesomeness to include slices of my blog in his sidebar, and I’m kinda shocked. I sometimes wish for more visitors, even though I think I get pretty darn wordy from time to time (and i’m kinda self-conscious that i write too much, but this is my blog and there are many like it but this one is mine). At least one person reads me regularly, so I feel good.

Media Hussy seems to be reinvigorated, hooray! I should exchange links with mr. pr0. I love his Electroplankton theme.

Speaking of Electroplankton, I notice it didn’t show up in Nintendo’s recent release date list extravaganza, despite being pimped all over E3. This angers me! I was going to be a nice guy and wait for the proper US release to support innovation in my own market. Someone get me Nintendo on the phone, or sell me your used copy cheap.

I’m ordering a scissors bag to carry my DS and stuff around in. I used to carry it in my pocket, but there was no room for games. Then, I carried my games in a Smint case with me, until one time when I lost the case (and it turned up in the driver-side floorboard of my parents’ truck). Plus, I was limited to 3 games on hand with it. After that, I bought a GameStop Pelican case for it, which worked well for a while. When I had more than 5 games though, it wasn’t as useful. Also, the carabiner loop broke, meaning that I had to carry it around by hand, which sucks. Eventually, I bought 2 DS card cases that hold 4 each, cut out the middle part of the Pelican case, and just stored the games in cases in the case’s upper pouch. Now, I have more than 8 games, and I’m tired of carrying around the darn thing by hand. (Yeah, I take it everywhere.)

So, I think the scissors bag should do the job nicely. It has a shoulder strap and what looks like plenty of space. It’ll also have room for my mp3 player and stuff. Should be perfect for ambulating about campus. Plus, it looks mysterious and Japanese. Ooooooo…

Speaking of Japanese stuff, I think the Japanese have more of an obsession with English (and Western culture) than we have of their language and culture. This came to light as my girlfriend and I were watching Bleach earier. (Paraphrasing: TV: Bleach theme song. Her: “Why do they say stuff in English so much?” Me: “Because English sounds cool to them.”) We may have a few nuts here and there who love all things Japanese, but everyone in Japan seems to like English words and names and styles. So, I feel less dorky about being a nihonophile and occasionally saying stupid things like “bite my kintama!” Yay. ^_^

The post below about Sonic Gems Collection was totally a setup for this post. Haha, no apologies. ^^

I will, however, put it in a nifty cut, becuase it’s pretty ranty. Main idea: Game collections are starting to be awesome because they’re reflecting an era in which simplicity and complexity were, in my opinion, perfectly balanced.

(more…)

Sonic CD is one of those games that I’ve always ogled from afar: I was too poor as a kid to have a Sega CD, I couldn’t ever get it running emulated, I was a fan of the (i’m making up this hierarchy here) 2nd generation Sonic games (Sonic 2-3, K), so the visuals and controls, being very 1st-gen Sonic, looked murky and daunting. Enter this:

I was on edge from the day it came out until I obtained it today. This is my bloody chance to finally play Sonic CD. At the outset, I didn’t really care about anything else that would be on the disc, I was so enamored by the idea of playing SCD that I missed the details of what’s on the disc.

Sonic CD is pretty cool, I’ve decided. It feels really weird to me though. I only played the original Sonic once, and that was after being spoiled by the fluid and beautiful Sonic 2. The element that really makes Sonic 2 is the spin dash. An instant burst of speed, easily controlled and satisfyingly executed. Sonic CD, having been developed parallel to Sonic 2, has a sort of half-ass spin dash that’s not very intuitive. Hold down, hit A, wait for a moment, release down. Clumsy, but it works after some practice. Sonic CD also kicks major ass in an area that’s (obviously) very important. Level design. Forgetting for a moment that there are parallel past, present and future versions of each level, the levels are very non-gimmicky, as Sonic 2’s, and moreso Sonic 3’s, levels could be. The whole package of zones feels inspired, and themes often pervade each individual act.

The wonderfully detailed graphics fall somewhat short of Sonic 2’s cleanness, and way short of Sonic 3’s OMG BRIGHT COLORS. I like em though. There’s lots of stuff going on in them.

And the intro is nice. It looks kind of Toriyama-esque to me, it’s definitely miles away from the US Sonic cartoons. I didn’t listen to the game music much, but I rocked some Ben Kweller and Outkast with Sonic.

That Mobius-strip-looking feet blur is kinda cool too.

Enough about Sonic CD though, it’s hyped enough. The rest of the collection is even cooler than Sonic CD. It’s made of Sonic underdogs. The Game Gear Sonic/Tails games, Sonic the Fighters, Sonic R, and the two Vectorman games as unlockables.

R. Okay, I have to admit, I am hooked on Sonic R. I freaking love it. It’s racing that feels like Sonic. It has stuff to unlock after you win all the races, and those extra characters rock. (I’m really wondering where that creepy floating Tails doll came from.) Out-of-the-way shortcuts often show you hidden things that you wouldn’t expect. Controls are workable, but rather awkward in the beginning. The graphics have been upgraded and are simple and crispy.

I can talk like that all night, but it dosen’t explain why I love it so much. I just do. Damn.

The Fighters is odd. It’s nice-looking and all, but it’s really weird to play. Often, I can’t beat Bark (the poler bear, haha), and the control scheme and difficulty feel really cheap. Maybe it’s just me, I’ve never been good at Virtua Fighter-like games. It’s fun though, and the historical value fully justifies its inclusion in the collection.

I didn’t get into the GG Sonics all that much, though I did play a lot of Sonic Drift 2. Maybe I’m just in a racing mood. It must have been great as a portable game, because I’m pretty sure I devoted enough time to it to kill a GG’s battery. It helps to not think of it as a ‘crappy Mario Kart,’ but as a Sonic-themed Pole Position.

Tails’ Adventure looks promising, it’s like a little Mario World, a little RPG, and Tails.

Tails’ Sky Patrol was fun, but I could get nowhere in it. It’s Tails as a helicopter armed with a ring, the role he was always meant to play. XD

Oh yeah, and I’m definitely not disappointed in Streets of Rage being replaced with Vectorman for the American release. Vectorman was groundbreaking to me when it came out, and I’m going to enjoy playing it again. I just took a peek at it tonight, and the animation still astounds me.

And loving it.

Nintendogs is one of the oddest experiences.

Since I took advantage of EB earlier in the month, I was able to pick up Lab & Friends, my N-dogs lunch bag, and a little paw print screen cleaner. ( I can clean my screen in style now!) I am going to start packing my lunch for school because of that little bag. But I digress.

I was kinda freaked out when the game asked me to say the name of my newly adopted Corgi. Like… say it out loud? In front of everybody? I hadn’t really thought of a name. So I inhaled, and spoke quietly the first name that came to me.

“rocket…”

The puppy was excited. I did it like 40 more times (Rocket. Rocket… Rocket! Rockette? Rokit! Roooket. Rockit! Rocket.), until I was starting to get comfortable with it. Then we learned how to sit.

So, if you’ve already played it, you were probably totally bored by that little anecdote. I purposefully avoided the Ninten-blogs and whatnot to keep the experience pure. And pure it was. Nintendogs is a lot of things, and I can’t really begin to pin it down. The best comparison I have is that it’s like Animal Crossing in spirit, except you can’t really cheat. (yet?) It’s also like The Sims, but extremely simplified. And it’s like Katamari Damashii but completely different.

It’s cute though, and I don’t even like dogs. If and when this comes out, I’ll be all over it like OMG KITTIES <3<3<3!!!11 and dog people can make fun of me.

Anyway, I just taught Rocket how to sneeze on command.

Before you get into my new windy tirade on Mario and music below, I wanted to do a little update on what I’m playing.

Since I’ve had to work so much this week, I had but a few precious moments of game playing. Most of it was spent trying to get more stars in Feel the Magic between editor training and other things. I did beat it on Hell mode, and I almost jumped up on the table at Denny’s to celebrate it. Two new games, though, are going to be holding my attention for a while. Unfortunately for Shenmue II, Dragon Quarter, Phantom Brave and Disgaea, they’re going to wait while I get away from RPGs for a while. I fully appreciate the artistry and depth that RPGs allow a game’s story to go to, but for now, I need something more twitchy. This is what I dove into for the weekend before the fall semester kicks in.

I’m playing Super Mario Sunshine for the second time, as the first was just a rental. (I got 26 shines in.) It’s shaping up to be a really fantastic experience that drives me to play much more than Mario 64 did. M64 just sat there and looked pretty, but Sunshine is gleefully taunting me.

I had a craving for Star Fox a couple weeks back, and wouldn’t rest until I had played one that I hadn’t played before. Which was easy to satisfy, because I’ve only played the first one. I picked up Star Fox 64, because it looked like the purest Fox experience out of them all. I’ll be moving on to Adventures and Assault sometime soon. SF64’s given me carpal tunnel several times over and I like it. Just gotta rest my thumb.

This is a weird one for me, being an Xbox game. I don’t have a Xbox, and never wanted one at all because everything for it looked “stooooooopid” to me. But the Xbox is good for a few things, and this is definitely one of them. It manages to combine a really well-thought-out plotline that involves the best use of an overused RPG story element ever (AMNESIA omg) and an action-based, strategy-based, awesomeness-based fighting system. I’ve only done the first chapter, and most people say that it gets better later on, but I’m incredibly impressed so far.

Sure, my gaming preferences are out of date. But I hardly ever pay full price for a game, I’m not affected (or disappointed) by hype, and I get to talk about stuff with a wider perspective. So nyeh.

I’m going to COMPLETELY complete Super Mario Sunshine as an ongoing gaming project between a friend and myself. We’re trading off every shine. It’s sort of like when I used to play Mario 3 with a friend, except that was actually two player. That was a looong time ago though. I really miss two-player-alternating style games. And co-op. There have been exactly NO co-op games recently that I can think of. Not that I’m really thinking that hard.

Back to the point: Each new Mario, of course, has new gameplay elements (ignore The Lost Levels for now =p), but one thing that’s really struck me is that every Mario has new music. The music is all in the same vein, but the new twists that happen in gameplay and setting are incorporated into the music! Seriously. Compare Mario 1 and 3 for a sec. 3 has much more intricateness, but still maintains the ragtimey feel of the original iconic score. The melodies are completely new, as they are in every Mario, but 3 has them taken to new places, just as the addition of Raccoon Leaves and Frog Suits (et al) took the gameplay to new places. The gliding melody of the first auto-scrolling level really reinforces the movement. The movement isn’t too fast or forceful, but it’s always there, pushing you along like a good breeze. That’s how that music feels. To me anyway. The soundtrack also reflected the more adventurous journey that spanned very different locales. Changing themes backed the journey from one world to another.

Now think about the leap from 3 to World. SMW had a similar idea of a journey across different places, but they were all connected, and the overall world felt much smaller. The music tended to repeat more, though the ‘overworld’ for each area was a unique theme that reflected the tone. Vanilla Dome was always fun, because it sounded echoey, like a cave. Forest themes are always string-filled and follow major tonality changes down by the full step. That chord changes always says ‘forest’ to me. Plus, Yoshi’s drums. That addition was so subtle that I didn’t notice it for some time (maybe years!), but I always subconsciously noted it. The drums disappear when you lose Yoshi, and all the fun and wonder that Yoshi adds to the game. The soundtrack adds to the gameplay, or vice versa.

SMW 2, or Yoshi’s Island, kept it up with a soundtrack to complement the really cool settings that looked like Miyamoto sketched them out in crayon and watercolor.

Mario 64’s castle setting brought a certain formal pomp to the overworld soundtrack. It maintained playfulness, but approached reverence, like a bunch of 8-year-olds pretending to be chivalrous knights and kings and whatnot.

Sunshine really drove the point home for me though, about what ‘Mario Music’ is. It’s gotta be bouncy, which covers the original ragtime up through 64’s music, and playful, which encourages the player to explore what can be done with Mario’s moves. Note that as the gameplay becomes more intricate, the music becomes more loose, it plays around more in the melody. Sunshine takes the cake on fun, loose controls, and it has the music that reflects it with it’s rhapsodic interplay of instruments. It also can’t be completely free, like live music, where minute mistakes in timing or tone or pitch give it unique sounds. It has to be rigid. This music feels much less midi (or tracker) than anything previously, though it dosen’t approach the dynamic of live music. It’s still rigidly locked in rhythm, just composed more playfully. As a side note, I’m thankful that the past two generations’ move towards live music hasn’t affected Nintendo that much. Their solid melodies, in my opinion, really play out better as computer music than as they would be performed by musicians.

(Aside: I’m biased toward computer music. Not that I can’t respect a beautifully wraught, fist-clenching, sloppy Modest Mouse guitar solo that no computer without feelings can begin to approximate… but the constraints and stiffness of computer music create something special to my ears. Don’t get me wrong. Both can be equally expressive.)

So, the next Mario. Who knows what will happen. It’s hard for me to think of what more can be done, but I also thought the same thing after Mario 64. I know the music will always be there though, and it will tie the gameplay together, subtly influencing the player like it always has.

One of my favorite hobbies is collecting pixels. Like sprites and things. I like the way they’re so, well, pixelly. Yeah. Okay, so I’m a big nerd. You knew that.

I recently played a lot of Pocky and Rocky for SNES, because it’s one of the few SNES games that works on the DS SNES emulator. And it’s good. So, my forum avatar switched from my old sleeping Pictochat tanuki to this:

Rocky just after the screen-clearing attack. I’m working on a few more, slowly, from a collection of screenshots. Like this:

Ride it! Also, just because I have it lying around:

Ark from Terranigma! And, relatedly:

A pixel mosaic done on a wall at UTA. Whoever does these needs to do more.

Rub it, you poor bastard, rub it.

I’ve never owned Feel the Magic, so my two or so opportunities to play it have been limited. The first time I didn’t even have a DS yet, and was playing on a friend’s. He introduced it to me as kind of a dating sim (I don’t think he has a clue what a dating sim is o.O), and assured me that it was indeed, a worthy game. However, FTM rubbed me the wrong way. I got as far as the Parachute stage, and I said, “WTF does punching in numbers on a pad have to do with parachuting!?” I was terrible at it, I couldn’t even do that stage, so I gave up.

I came back to it after I acquired a DS, and after countless hours in Mario 64 minigames, my touchscreen skills had improved. Borrowing a copy, I started to get a feel for the game’s charm. I actually got to sit down with the opening sequences intact, and see that the game never meant to make sense. What does punching in numbers have to do with parachuting? I dunno. What does incredibly twisted ‘performance art’ have to do with wooing a hot silhouette? I dunno. Furthermore, I don’t need to know. So, this time, I managed to bungle my way through the entire game, and then I gave it back, edified. That was six or so months ago.

Another friend admitted that, while the game was indeed good, he couldn’t get past the Steal level (the one with the flashlights and cats). As he was talking though, a wave of good feeling washed over me. Suddenly, I had to play it again. I couldn’t even really remember much about the game, except that on several occasions I thought I was going to break my DS. So I borrowed it two days ago, and have played it since. This time, I made it though Normal, then (with an FAQ’s aid) found all the rabbits, then made it through Hard, and I’m working on Hell.

Hell YES.

So, the plot. A minigame-type game dosen’t need a whole lot of plot. It can be silly (like Incredible Crisis), or really trite (like Wario Ware), and FTM covers those two. At the same time, it’s heartfelt, romantic, dramatic, and really honest when it’s being silly. That seems to be a first. It really puts the player in the hero’s goldfish shirt, depsite the player not having direct control of the hero most of the time.

In fact, if someone made that goldfish shirt, I would buy one, and wear it until it wore out. Then buy another.

Towards the end, the primary plot of “I just met this girl and I must have her” really blossoms. The bad guy, the big punk dude, manages to steal her away, which is an interesting plot device to employ. On one hand, it has a “Popeye and Brutus” motif to it. Big guy steals hero’s girl, hero kicks big guy’s ass. On the other, it has a more epic “Final Fantasy” feel to it. Not only is this your girl, but she’s also important because she’s sparking semi-repressed childhood memories that suddenly haunt you in the game.

This sets you up for one of the best freaking endings ever. And one of the reasons I keep playing now. I’m more into it than I’ve ever been, despite how much I’ve played it and should be bored of it by now. I’ll try not to go into spoiler territory, but when the hero takes off his helmet, that moment is priceless.

The mechanics of the game were actually, I believe, a little ahead of their time when it was released as a launch title. Not only had noone really played touchscreen games before, but this one requires timing and accuracy. LOTS of it. The first time I made it though, the Bull level took me several tries. I was awkward with a stylus, and too slow knocking out the bulls. And the damn skiers. I cursed them to no end. I was way too twitchy. I was also hopeless in Monocycle. I have really shaky hands, especially while under stress, and I can’t even draw a semi-straight line to save my life. If most DS players were like me, they bungled their way through and probably never touched the game again. Of course, I doubt most DS players are like me, but at the time, touchscreen gaming was new. And as most new things are, a little awkward.

Going back to it recently, I flew through Normal, and had a moderately bumpy ride through Hard. Monocycle didn’t even faze me on Hard, and everything I remembered as being so very hard was much easier. I now consider the DS a teacher, a mentor and trainer in hand skills. It’s clear that I didn’t spend all that time in Kirby and Meteos for nothing.

So, with word of a sequel coming, I’m ready. If you haven’t felt the magic lately, or you never got through the whole game, or you never played it, go to it. It is, how you say, awesome.

Bottom right corner, Animal Crossing clock! Sure, I had to let Nintendo’s network testing program do whatever it wanted to on my computer, but it was totally worth it. Seriously though, I haven’t noticed anything amiss. And I’m helping the official Nintendo wi-fi cause. And and, it reminds me every minute that I could be playing Animal Crossing instead of letting my village waste away. It’s okay though, I’m good at catching ghosts. If you’re a Nintendo member, you can fill out this survey and get one too.

Sorry for the boring posts lately, but there was my anthro final, and now I have some free time. Whether or not this will inspire writing, who knows.

I’m currently waiting on my x-rom 512 flash cart so that I can do all sorts of new tricks with my DS. That’ll be fun!

They said no.