went! fought! ouendaned

elite beat agents was the game that tipped me over the edge and caused me to finally buy a DS, and i wasn’t disappointed: it quickly became one of my favorite games of all time, and ever since then i’ve been hankering to play the original japanese version, osu! tatakae! ouendan (i.e. go! fight! cheer) and its sequel.

ouendan is certainly an import-friendly game (and now that i think about it, i think it’s the first import game i’ve officially completed), and i thoroughly enjoyed getting to re-experience the series’ unique and totally awesome gameplay with completely different stories and songs. (i also enjoyed the character design, which is by the same artist as EBA, atsushi saito.) there are a number of other small differences between the two games, and in some ways it’s a bit surprising that i so preferred EBA to the original. part of it is no doubt due to the language barrier, but in general the situations and characters in ouendan seemed just less wacky and off the wall overall. the songs throw enough curves that even an EBA vet like myself will have to spend some time getting to the highest level of difficulty, and not knowing any of the songs except one added to the challenge (although i’d only known a bit more than half the songs in EBA). incidentally, if anyone’s wondering, the one song i did know in ouendan was “linda linda”, originally by the blue hearts, which is featured in a pretty rad japanese movie called linda linda linda. the one major drawback in ouendan compared to EBA is that at the hardest difficulty level the markers appear for what seems to be a shorter amount of time than in EBA, thus requiring much more memorization, which i find to be a fairly cheap way of adding “difficulty”. so all in all this doesn’t surpass EBA in my affections, but i’m still definitely looking forward to playing ouendan 2, and of course i’m still hoping for the day we get a US sequel to EBA.

cheer-ful links:
- crackedrabbitgaming.com has a great fansite including links to original versions of the songs, screenshot translations of the menus, and a page of trivia
- the official website is in japanese, but it includes some rad wallpapers and interviews with the developers that google translate might be able to help out with but isn’t working for me at the moment.
- gamefaqs has a few good FAQs including translations of almost all the game text and the japanese lyrics to all the songs and their english translations
- interview with iNiS co-founder and game designer keiichi yano
- entry at wikipedia

brawlin’ family

i’m in the midst of a long game so i thought i’d put up a quick post to spotlight a webcomic that i rediscovered recently, brawl in the family. i’ve dipped into a fair number of video game-related online comics but haven’t really found many that kept me interested for very long. pixel pals, which i posted about last year was one exception, although it seems to be on indefinite hold. brawl in the family is another exception and is, fortunately, alive and kicking. it features charming hand-drawn, oftentimes extremely simplistic artwork befitting its first main character, kirby, but there’s a surprising range of art styles that have been used. although originally the strip’s focus was on kirby and the denizens of dream land, it expanded to include the brawl universe in general and has developed a wide range of humor, including a recurring series of sight gags of kirby and the surprising results of his copy ability and an april fool’s series of waluigi comics. i think video game fans, particularly nintendo fans, will enjoy the strip which i find to be more consistently funny than most, but don’t take my word for it: check it out yourself! oh, and be sure to check out this great mario cartoon with three alternate endings.

adventures of kirby

kirby games aren’t my favorite, mostly b/c they’re so easy, but since playing brawl i’ve wanted to see meta knight’s first appearance, which was in kirby’s adventure for the NES. kirby’s adventure is the second game in the series and the first to feature kirby’s now character-defining ability to copy enemies’ abilities by swallowing them (who knew that such ruthlessly carnivorous behavior could be so darn cute?).

although the second in the series, this was my third kirby game, and the game held very few surprises, particularly since i’d already played the game immediately following, kirby’s dream land 2. kirby’s adventure often gets good reviews, even today (e.g. lucas m. thompson’s review of the VC release on IGN), and a lot of people seem to count it among their favorite games ever. but my reaction to it and dream land 2 were similar: in my mind both suffer from painfully easy levels without enough variety in enemies or geography to keep the scenery somewhat interesting to compensate at least partially for the complete lack of interesting gameplay.

i actually don’t have much more to say about this game, other than that i enjoyed kirby’s adventure more than dream land 2. the game as a whole feels bigger, and it includes additional powerups, more sub-boss and boss battles, and a colorful ambience provided by the NES that the gray-scale game boy lacked. it was also nice to see the original appearance of characters i was introduced to when i played the puyo puyo spin-off kirby’s avalanche. but it seems supremely pointless to me that the game’s “extra” mode is just beating the whole game at 100% with no saves.

nintendo fanboy i may be, but the kirby series is still ranking pretty low on my list of favorite nintendo series. but i played through the first part of the next game in the series kirby super star, which appears on the SNES and was recently remade for the DS. and even though super star is still as easy as ever, it looks like kirby has a lot of new moves and that it’ll be more interesting overall.

it was recently announced that the starfy series would finally be coming to the US, and although i’m definitely excited to have more games that were previously exclusive to japan, i’m leery of the starfy series being even more mindless than the kirby series. but of course i’ll be keeping my eye on it anyway, and i haven’t completely given up on kirby. i’ll try to keep an open mind as i find out how the rest of the series pans out.

kirby’s adventurin’ links:
- as usual kirby’s rainbow resort has tons of great info on their kirby’s adventure sub-site, including official artwork and loads of screenshots, most of the instruction manual, and the soundtrack.
- youtube video of (almost) every ability
- here’s a FAQ (or two) if you’re missing the last few secrets to get 100%.
- 1up has a nice history of kirby, recapping all the main games as well as all the spin-offs
- screenshots of the ending at vgmuseum.com
- entry at wikipedia

geometry revised

i meant to post this two page preview (1|2) of geometry wars: galaxies from nintendo power (aug 2007/V218) in my last post reviewing the wii version of the game. but i couldn’t find my scanner (long story), so i only just got around to scanning them today. i always find it interesting to compare beta and final versions of games, and although the article doesn’t include a whole lot of detail, it’s interesting to compare the differences, including the changes in the enemies. the image at the top of this post is from NP, and the second image is from IGN and appears in B&W in the game’s manual (click on either for a larger image). the preview mentions “parasites” which thankfully weren’t in the final release, because they “latch onto ships then hinder their abilities. you’ll need to shake the remote to lose them.” (ech!) the preview also says you’ll be able to “swap save data between the two systems” (i.e. the DS and wii versions), another feature that didn’t make the cut (and wasn’t missed at all). ah, where would we be without those old issues of NP to provide us with all of this cocktail trivia?

attack of the art at destructoid.com

i’ve long been a fan of fanart, but i’ve been too lame to organize my own weekly column highlighting the best on the web (not to mention too overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it online). so lucky for me (and you) there are sites like the aforementioned racketboy.com that keep me supplied. racketboy’s fanart series doesn’t update all that often, but destructoid.com has a good weekly series called “art attack friday“. i’ve come across it several times but have only now just noticed what an admirable job they do. they’ve apparently been running them for a while, so the backlog should keep you (and me) occupied for a good while.

super mario rendered

geez, where does the time go? i’ve got a review coming up, but here’s a quick post to catch up a bit. i randomly came across this random italian guy’s blog that collects official renders and artwork. it includes two nice collections of official super mario renders/artwork from the sports and RPG series, most of them high-resolution versions. check them out here and here.

mario’s got a tanooki suit; i’ve got tanooki mario on a tee

still catching up on things, but hopefully this will be the last random post before a proper review post. i was out of town for work this past week, and pretty much the only good thing about it is that i came across these awesome nintendo t-shirts at a random mall in a store called hot topic. apparently these officially-licensed shirts have been out for a while and are sold at a lot of other places (at least online), but i must have been completely out of the loop b/c if i’d known i’d def. have bought some before now. i don’t recall seeing anything like the number of designs at the the nintendo world store in NY so maybe they haven’t been out for too long (the girl in the store said they’d been out for at least a couple of years), or maybe it’s just been longer than i thought since i was last there.

anyway, after i snapped up a couple of shirts at that store, i immediately checked their online store for sizes of shirts i’d kind of liked but they hadn’t had. but then i found some other places that also sell nintendo shirts online, namely this store on ebay called zanybunny and a site called myteespot.com. the three places carry slightly different stuff and i spent way too much time looking through them all, but i ended up going with myteespot b/c they had the most designs (including patches, hoodies, buttons, caps, keychains, wristbands, and more) and free shipping for orders over $50. as a nintendo fanboy i’m totally psyched to have the shirts, but as a somewhat socialized human being i haven’t quite decided how willing i am to expose my geekiness in public. in the right situation a nintendo shirt could make a great conversation starter … but you might want to think twice about wearing them to certain places. somehow i think they’d be less appreciated at, oh, your workplace, your 10-year high school reunion, the gym, and pretty much anywhere you’re trying to attract a mate. otherwise, it’s mario wearin’ the freakin’ tanooki suit FTW!!!1!

retro together with racketboy

i just realized that my post from two weeks ago was my 100th post for this blog. w00t. thanks to everyone who has ever stumbled across this blog in the two years and four months it’s been up. by far the most popular post has long been the one with the scan of a super mario shampoo magazine ad which apparently seems to show up on a lot of general image searches for “super mario”. who can even begin to guess the cosmic powers at work here (or rather, at google)?

once again i’m in the middle of a few games, so no review this week. i don’t mind too much, though. although this blog’s central focus will always be my long-winded thoughts on games, i do keep up on what’s going on in the gaming news and in the online world, and there are loads of links that i’ve accumulated on the offhand chance that i’ll have an occasion to pull them out. one particularly noteworthy one is www.racketboy.com which has loads of great info on retro consoles and games. the site is divided into five main sections:

• Retro Gaming 101: Learn essential information about vintage consoles.
• Defining Games: Discover the games that gave each machine its personality.
• Hidden Gems: Explore the best games that usually go unnoticed.
• Cheapest Games: Collect the best games without spending much money.
• Holy Grails: Discover the rarest and more valuable games of all time.

i’m still working my way through the video game canon, but the lists on racketboy have proven to be well worth perusing. i prob. spend more of my time reading the “hidden gems” sections since most of the games in other sites’ top 10 or top 100 lists are so well known and don’t vary much from site to site.

the site also has some other great features. one is together retro, a sort of video game “book” club. basically racketboy chooses a retro game for everyone in the group to play for a week or more, depending on the game, allowing participants to compare scores, share tips, debate, and discuss. my list of games to play is already so long that i haven’t really had any chance to participate in the club, but i keep my eye on the selections and it’s great to read through the accompanying posts in the together retro section of the site’s forum. another feature i enjoy is the “The Most Stunning Artwork” series in which racketboy highlights great fan art from various series.

so what’re ya waitin’ for? check it out!

final fantasy tactics tackled

fiiiiinally finished the endless game i’ve been plodding my way through, final fantasy tactics for the original playstation. i’d been aware of the game ever since i began my obsession with the fire emblem series, and also b/c the follow-up on the GBA seems to regularly get mentioned in “top GBA games of all time” lists.

having been focused solely on fire emblem there were a lot of adjustments i had to make to playing FF tactics. there’s the isometric view, and the way the battle time advances took some getting used to since you have to constantly check the menus and time meters to see whose turn is coming up next and remind yourself of what commands the enemy has already entered in. one of the main differences between FE and FF tactics is that characters can die but aren’t permanently lost unless they miss three of their turns without being brought back to life. the other main difference is that the majority of your time is spent using “generic” characters who take no part in the story. (although you do get more unique, named characters with their own special abilities later, and eventually they can completely replace your original party if you choose.)

despite the learning curve in general i think my FE experience helped and i didn’t have much of a problem beating the game, although the game seemed to drag on and on. looking back it prob. didn’t take any more time than a FE game, but there were quite a few drawbacks that made the game a chore to finish. i agree with a lot of what the entry on wikipedia says:

Criticism is made on gameplay, plot and the localization effort. One of the reviews of RPGFan criticized the difficulty of the game as being inconsistent with each encounter against enemy units. The factors that influence the difficulty of the game include overpowered enemy units or party members, and time had to be taken to level up before any progress can be made. Though in-depth, IGN also noted that the game’s plot was confusing at times … The game’s localization effort was criticized by reviewers as poorly written, being rife with grammatical mistakes that almost stopped players from enjoying the storyline.

of those complaints, the main one for me was that the story is so lousy. half the time i didn’t really know who was doing what to whom, nor did i ever care. on top of that the localization is one of the absolute worst i’ve ever encountered with tons of awkward as well as flat-out incorrect writing, which is a major problem for a text-heavy RPG. as for the level grinding, this wasn’t too much of a problem and i sort of expected it since the game has a fair amount of emphasis on random battles (unlike almost all the FE games where there are no random battles). the main exception to my general feeling that the amount of level grinding is tolerable is that at one point about halfway through i inadvertently overlevelled the main character, ramza, and everyone else in my party was way underlevelled in comparison. i hadn’t realized that random encounters base the enemies’ stats on your most powerful character, so i was pretty much screwed fighting stupidly tough random battles until i was able to bring the rest of the party up to ramza’s level. one other thing that annoyed me was that unlike FE you don’t get to preview the map before you start it, so you can’t adjust your equipment or characters at all. even setting the start positions of your characters is a virtually completely blind process.

quite a number of complaints, but as for the good stuff the graphics, although more cartoon-y than i’m used to, are generally well done, with great character design, pretty good environments, and some great battle effects. the gameplay is pretty solid, although i was surprised that the central game mechanic isn’t the battle system so much as the game’s character class system, which is robust and well designed. basically every generic character starts off as either a squire or a chemist. after you reach a certain level you can then change class (a squire can become a knight or an archer and a chemist can become a priest or a wizard). after you reach a certain level in those classes you can change to even more advanced classes. this built-in progression of classes keeps the game feeling fresh, and it’s a lot of fun to experiment with the different classes and combine the abilities of the various classes, although some of the classes and their abilities def. seem like useless padding. there are also a ton of other extra game elements that i didn’t bother getting into b/c they just seemed useless, namely the “propositions” in which you send some of your party away for some time to fulfill missions that you don’t monitor at all and get only paltry rewards for completing; the monster recruitment where you can get monsters to join your party but who don’t change classes and generally don’t have many useful abilities; and the monster “poaching” where you can sell monsters you’ve killed for special items. there are also two lengthy sidequests (the deep dungeon and the quest to get cloud from FFVII) that i had absolutely no interest in embarking upon.

phew! even though i’m ecstatic that i can finally stop playing this game the game was actually pretty good overall; a better story would’ve been a major improvement. i’ll keep the GBA FF tactics on my list of games to play, although from what i’ve read it doesn’t sound like there’s much of a story there either so it’ll prob. be quite some time before i try it out. may try one of the tactics ogre games instead.

finally! some fantastically tactical links:
- battle mechanics guide: indispensible reference for the underlying equations for the game engine
- great fan site at squarehaven.com with tons of great stuff, inc. a great guide to all the jobs, the full script, and official jobs artwork and summons artwork.
- pretty good general FAQ: with class info, battle strategies, and more
- another good FAQ
- youtube video of the main parts of the cloud sidequest
- useful FAQ on what the brave and faith stats do

he really is a mega man

another NES classic bites the dust. i’d played and beaten mega man 2 back when i was a tyke, and i think it was one of the few times my mom let me rent a video game. i really didn’t remember anything about it, but after the announcement of the completely retro, completely 8-bit-styled upcoming release of mega man 9, a brand new mega man game, that sent fanboys worldwide into conniptions, it seems like everyone’s been arguing about what the best game in the series is. well, it’s less like an argument and more like a chorus with a few naysayers, as it seems most everyone favors the second installment.

i had a good time playing through the game (on normal mode, b/c i just wasn’t in the mood for anything too taxing). this is a classic mega man game, so it comes with all the fun of getting to choose what order to tackle the stages in, and the graphics, music, enemies, and bosses are all as great as you’d expect. the added password feature def. made me more inclined to play the game in the first place, although i found the levels in MM2 to be noticeably shorter than the original game. the original was a game that i did own and knew pretty much inside and out, so it was hard not to compare them. and although most people prefer MM2, they also acknowledge that the first game is the more difficult of the two, and i’d def. have to agree. the only difference between the two difficulty modes that i’ve seen so far in MM2 is that the enemies take more bullets to kill, but otherwise the environmental puzzles (e.g. disappearing blocks, moving platforms, etc.), which seem to be the same, were rarely challenging to me. maybe the original game made me a pro at them, or maybe i’m just remembering the original as being more difficult than it actually is some twenty years later. in any case, with mega man back in my life you can be sure that i’ll be revisiting both games as well as reminding myself of the other games that followed and checking out the ones i never got a chance to play. rock on, rock man, rock on.

tons of mega man love means mega mega man links:
- mega man forever is a nice fansite that has a nice page for MM2 w/ sprites for all the enemies and a great section with in-game and official artwork of all the boss robots in the whole series.
- the creatively-titled mega man homepage also has loads of great info and sprites including a completely complete game list and the answer to the question: “so how many mega man games are there?“. (the answer: a heckuva lot.)
- this ultimate mega man retrospective at gamesradar.com actually lives up to its name and recaps practically every game and boss in the series.
- someone made some totally alsome mega man hats
- IGN’s list of top 10 mega man robots of all time (and no, the much maligned wood man with his leaf shield power didn’t make the cut)
- interesting interview with inafune, the man behind the mega man at gamesradar
- a skewering of a feature from the olden days of nintendo power in which readers could submit ideas for mega man bosses, on i-mockery.com
- PDF of manual at replacementdocs.com
- a look at MM2’s infamous european artwork
- entry at mega man wiki
- entry at wikipedia