Schmidt (Koji Igarashi jus…): My wallet needs this to n… Eusis (Koji Igarashi jus…): It's worth remembering th… Parish (GSQ4: We all go h…): They're still there. Not … NevznachaY (GSQ4: We all go h…): Jeremy, could we have the… Acosta02 (Koji Igarashi jus…): I don't know that people … Refa (Koji Igarashi jus…): Heck, I'll take an SD ver… Ryonin (Koji Igarashi jus…): This kinda makes me want … Mudron (Koji Igarashi jus…): I would suspect that peop… Refa (Koji Igarashi jus…): How is this game going to… SonicPanda (Koji Igarashi jus…): So, this is going to be m…
This is the archive, folks. The current stuff is on the main page.
GameSpite Quarterly 2, #27: Civilization
29 September 09 | 21:00 | Posted by:
27. Civilization
The journey through GameSpite Quarterly 2 continues with Shivam's evaluation of the Civilization series. This is one of those instances where I have to take the author at his word, 'cause I'm at a loss for the entire genre. It's a personal failing and I accept full responsibility for it. But you guys voted for it, and I trust you. So... awesome game, huh?
28. Street Fighter II
Hey so I'm back from Japan. Guess I'll start posting new material from the magazine! The second magazine, now on sale and all that. Today's article is a personal look back on Street Fighter II. Now, if I'd written this piece it would talk about how trying to beat M. Bison on maximum difficulty is the single most frustrating thing in the universe and would be 800 curse words strung together. Alas!
I'm packing up to depart from Japan, with a single solitary tear in my eye that the trip was so short (i.e. I didn't really have time to either hang out, do much for Retronauts, or hunt down developers to interview). This tear is tenuous, though, since the fiancée will be waiting for me at home when I arrive after three months on the road. So that's pretty rad.
A less easily mitigated tear is due Tokyo Game Show, which was a lonely shell of itself this year. If ever you needed evidence that Japanese development is in a state of flux, you should look no further than TGS. People kept remarking on how attendance appeared to be way down this year, but that's not so: There have actually been more people at the show than in years past, so far. It's just that there were so many fewer booths than before that everyone had more room to spread out. The combination punch of a recession and a sort of collective bafflement over here at making good things happen on modern hardware (along with the lack of Nintendo at TGS, which seems more conspicuous every year) made for a ghost town of an event.
Still, I managed to witness a few interesting things. Most of the interesting things, apparently; Alice Liang complained to me that I got to write about all the fun and interesting games. Which is weird, because I'm pretty sure she was the one who made the assignments. Anyway, here's what I looked at. Per usual, I tramped about the Square Enix booth and scraped it for everything I could glean, although I did skip FFXIII since Ray and Thierry checked out the TGS demo a few weeks back.
The Good:
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker:
I've made no real secret of the fact that I was kind of burned out on Metal Gear after Metal Gear Solid 4. It was such a brilliant game in so many ways, yet also so terribly uneven. When I went back to replay it after the game launched, I realized I couldn't find it in my heart to care about Metal Gear anymore. So when I was assigned the Peace Walker demo event at the show, I was actually sort of annoyed! But within five minutes of the demo kicking off, I felt practically ecstatic; it was clear that Kojima Productions was taking pains to address a lot of the issues I had with the most recent games. Of course, it's still stupidly chatty and has some pretty dopey character names, but I suppose some things are beyond changing. Talky or not, it plays great and looks visually amazing. So, rock on Peace Walker.
Final Fantasy Gaiden: 4 Warriors of Light:
This game is going to be great. I think the cute art style and the streamlined combat system are throwing people off, but don't be distracted from the fact that 4 Warriors of Light is the work of the team behind the DS remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV. This time, they get to make their own classic-flavored take on Final Fantasy instead of coloring within someone else's lines. I can't wait to see what they come up with. I bet it's going to be a lot more challenging than most people expect, especially in light of the job system's seeming flexibility.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers:
This surprised me at E3, and it continues to be surprising. It's so... fun. Action-y. Solid. Gorgeous. Will it be good from start to finish? Well, it's a Kawazu game, so there's no telling. But to me it kind of looks like Dawn of Mana minus the suck, and that sounds downright great.
La Mulana:
Meeting the team behind La Mulana was a highlight of the trip. It's always nice to talk to small developers who view the press as friends rather than adversaries. We write about games because we like them! Sometimes we are critical, yes, but it is because we want games to be the best they can be. OK, so the press isn't entirely altruistic, but when it comes to independently-made labors of love such as La Mulana, I certainly do my best to be an advocate. Which is why you should be excited about the game! It's a four-person creation, and the remake is looking really great.
Crackdown 2:
Although I'm not a big fan of zombies, I like where Ruffian is taking Crackdown 2. They get why so many people loved the original and seem to be playing up those aspects. This is, as it should be.
The Decent:
Dragon Quest VI:
I'm sure Dragon Quest VI will be great, but the merits of a given DQ title are entirely contingent on how the story plays out over the course of the game and the shape the supporting cast takes. Kind of tough to judge those factors from a Japanese demo on a crowded show floor.
Thexder Neo:
This week, I learned how you pronounce "Thexder" (it's "Tegzar"). I also learned that it is a game determined to destroy your self-confidence. I'm definitely looking forward to it, although I suppose I should look into whether or not PSP Mini games play on old-school PSPs or just the Go. 'Cause I sure ain't buying a Go.
Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday:
I bet this game will be pretty great! But since I only have five seconds of grainy gameplay footage to go by, it's tough to make a definitive statement just yet.
Lunar: Silver Star Harmony:
This looks nice, but I've already played Lunar a few times too many. Mainly I plan to buy it so they'll port Lunar 2 to PSP, because it's by far the better game.
Final Fantasy Agito XIII:
I'm pretty excited about this. Monster Hunter is just a little unwieldy for my tastes, so a zippier, more accessible Final Fantasy patina is probably precisely what I need to enjoy the MH style. But I need actual playable material before I can be really enthusiastic.
The Heartwrenching:
Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep:
This looked so good last year! But the new material shown at TGS was pretty bad -- a dull dungeon, a tepid boss, some crashy and unambitious multiplayer arena brawling. However, the trailer did show off a whole lot of Lilo & Stitch content, including a fight versus Captain Gantu. So that's kind of rad.
Final Fantasy Versus XIII:
I think I would rather have seen nothing whatsoever on this game than a bit of shakycam footage demonstrating just how far the team has to go before this begins to resemble an actual game.
Secret of Mana Mobile:
Dear Square Enix, please make this a DSiWare game instead of just a crappy, hard-to-play cellular title. OK thanks.
It's been a strange TGS. It was a much smaller show than in years past, and I only filed about half as many stories as usual. Yet I still found myself with less discretionary time for things like blogging, which is why there's been a picture of Zelos at the top of the site all week. I submitted my last TGS write-up a few hours ago, so now it's just, I dunno, hanging out and trying to find something to film/discuss for Retronauts. (I did film a Bonus Stage yesterday with the creators of La Mulana; that was kind of rad.)
A strange trip deserves strange food, so I've been hunting something appropriately weird to eat. While I doubt anything will match the sheer awfulness of last year's unrefrigerated konbini teriyaki burger -- though I did eat a piece of beef stomach the other night, or rather I masticated it for several minutes before deciding that something so rubbery is best left to do the digesting rather than being digested -- I've still had my eyes peeled. And I think I might have a winner: Taiyaki!? Gumi.
It is... taiyaki-shaped gummy snacks. And yes, they're taiyaki-flavored, as well.
If you're not familiar with taiyaki, (1) I feel bad for you and (2) they're a waffle-like pastry traditionally stuffed with red bean paste. There's a shop in San Francisco's Japantown that also fills them with chocolate or banana as well, and I found a place last year in Harajuku that sold mini-taiyaki in many wonderful flavors. They are delicious, in short. But they are primarily bread, and bread products are always very strange when emulated in gummy form. Taiyaki is no different!
The flavor of Taiyaki!? Gumi is remarkably similar to the real thing, although it kind of mashes the bread and azuki flavors together into a single corn syrup concoction. That's fine, but the texture is... something. Something gross. Pastries should not be rubbery. Kind of like meat, really. Between this and that stomach, I think the overriding lesson of this trip has been "do not put things in your mouth if they exhibit excessive elasticity."
On the happier side of the balance, I found an entire bag of orange Kit Kat, which is Japan's single greatest contribution to the art of packaged mass-market candies. They are a precious treasure, and I will be hoarding them jealously.
A bunch of my coworkers went to an izakaya the other night and had a good laugh about a drink bafflingly named the "carbon offset." By a weird, random accident, we ended up at the exact same place yesterday for lunch, so I decided to order the beverage they were all too afraid to try for themselves.
Apparently carbon offsets taste like orange and mango. Al Gore should probably hype that up -- it would make the whole "protecting the environment" thing a lot more popular with most people.
The noble pose there reflects my heroically saving the earth through girly drinks. Although I'm not sure why a drink made of non-indigenous fruit that presumably had to be transported across the globe was called a carbon offset. Maybe the restaurant had a secret mango grove out back?
I woke up this morning (much too early) and looked out my window and noticed for the first time that beyond the clutter of Shibuya is a dense knot of trees, a few acres in size. On the other side I can see that really ridiculous latticed building in Shinjuku, but it was the trees that interested me. So, I decided to go for a walk and see what it is. The answer, it turns out, is Yoyogi Park, which was less relaxing than expected. It's currently under reconstruction in a bid for the 2016 Olympics (and because Japan is always in a state of reconstruction; it's a growth industry). Each bench I passed was staked out as a bed by a homeless person. The public bathrooms make Texas roadside restrooms look sanitary. And then a crow lighted in a tree above me and pooped with such force that it struck the ground and the spatter hit my shirt. This trip is not off to a good start!
Despite the awfulness of Yoyogi Park, it was nice to get away from the familiar setting of central Shibuya and into more residential areas where everything isn't catering to tourists and teens. Which isn't to say there isn't all kinds of fascinatingly misused English to be found there, though! I passed a building, very austere and granite-façaded, called simply "Life Creation." Maybe I've just been playing too much Persona, but seeing a sight like that tucked away in the recesses of Tokyo was really kind of eerie.
I'm actually having less time to write than I'd expected since everyone wants to be all social and crap. But I'd hate for this post not to have some sort of game content to it, so here is a link to my Halo 3: ODST review. Weirdly, readers have been a lot more receptive to my opinions than I had expected! Being earmarked for a high-profile review like this is usually a ticket to have the Internet poop on you, much like a Yoyogi crow, but not this time. I don't know what to think. Just when I assume I have the Internet all figured out, it gets all civil on me. Freaks.
Or rather, konbanwa. It's pretty late here in Japan! And I've been awake for entirely too long, much of which time was spent crowded into a little chair on an airplane. I've noticed a definite drawback to my weight loss: with so much less padding on my backside, transit seats and benches are a lot less comfortable than they used to be. On the other hand, this is the first time I've ever been in Japan and not felt like a comparatively grotesque pile of human bloat in comparison to all the people around me. I guess we make tradeoffs in life.
Anyway, perhaps I will have something worthwhile to say once I've slept. Then again, maybe not. I'm well past the "ignorant white guy" phase of my existence, and being here is so old hat that it's pretty much a routine. But looking down at the glow of Shibuya by night is still entrancing, so maybe there's hope for me yet.
I finally got around to watching the trailer for 3D Dot Game Heroes in preparation for TGS, and... wow. What has happened to From Software? They used to be the company that made dense games no one cared about. Now, they're doing crazy compelling things that cling to the niche, but not so much that they won't cross into the mainstream a bit. First Demons Souls, now this.
Seriously, this is fantastic -- not least of all because it's exactly what I've wanted since I played Animal Crossing on GameCube. The structure of the first two AC games' worlds -- the top-down viewpoint and screen-by-screen progress -- reminded me of nothing so much as the original The Legend of Zelda. I found myself wishing on more than one occasion that Nintendo would tweak the AC engine into a retro-style Zelda game that featured 3D graphics but eschewed 3D design. Not that there's anything wrong with the series' modern entries, but the immediacy and simplicity of the NES game help it remain incredibly compelling even 20-odd years later. But that's not really Nintendo's style, so of course it never game to pass.
Fortunately, From is scratching that itch for them. Just watch the trailer above and you'll see a game that shamelessly -- proudly, I'd say -- lifts direct inspiration from the original Zelda. From the triumphant fanfare to the boulders bounding down a cliff face to the seemingly stiff but direct game controls, this is basically Zelda with a 3D facelift... but not 3D mechanics. It is, literally, Zelda in the third dimension, up to and including the voxel style that retains the NES game's essential pixellated look. The visuals are pretty great, but I'm more excited by the underlying concept of 3D Dot Game Heroes: The concept that 3D visuals need not hamper or complicate gameplay.
I guess to some degree the licensed Lego games have already done this, but those are kind of insipid and toothless. 3D Dot Game Heroes is, after all, a From game. And that means, if nothing else, that it exists to punch your soul right in the face with its difficulty level. I, for one, can't wait for my soul to start sporting a From-induced shiner.
GameSpite Quarterly 2, #46: The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
18 September 09 | 03:49 | Posted by:
46. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
A quick little mini-article about what just might be the most criminally underappreciated Zelda game ever. While this issue is oddly dense with Zelda games -- apparently you guys like them, or something -- I was still happy to see Wind Waker make the cut. It's so... charming! And also heavy on the exploration. Which is awesome. Too bad people were such babies about the graphics....
Note: There's an entry right below this one which I published this morning, but which didn't appear on the site until just now for various reasons. Please read it before this entry, as it will help contextualize the bigger picture of this post. I was wondering why no one had commented on it, durrr.
As a wise man with a machine-gun arm once said, "[Mario & Luigi] jes' full of surprises." I didn't expect to like Bowser's Inside Story nearly as much as I did, for starters. Even more unexpected, though, was the fact that the game has some of the best 2D sprite work I've ever seen. Sure, there are more visually spectacular 2D games out there, but so far as I can tell Inside Story looks to be packing mostly old-fashioned sprites. Not much in the way of Muramasa-style jointed, rotating sprite agglomerations, and a refreshing lack of pre-rendered CG art, too.
Or am I mistaken? The animation demonstrated by Inside Story's sprites is utterly impressive, and it's so fluid that I actually have a difficult time discerning whether or not it really is all hand-drawn, or if Alpha Dream somehow managed to concoct some sort of impressive fakeout technique that lets them pass off prerendered CG as traditional art. Characters move with a classical cartoonish grace and exaggeration that few CG artists can duplicate; yet at the same time, each action is depicted through far more frames of animation than most developers are willing to invest in hand-drawn characters. It is a tiny conundrum.
I'd love to talk to the developers, but I fear that Nintendo likes to keep a tight lid on its first- and second-party teams. Heck, even third parties are shy when it comes to talking about their work for Nintendo and always insist on passing it through Proper Corporate Channels first. So, the prospects of a heart-to-heart on Bowser's phenomenal animation are pretty slim, which means I gotta do the old-fashioned speculation thing.
Personally, I'm leaning toward the art being a mix of pre-rendered and hand-drawn art. The sprite silhouettes look very CG, but the fine details have a solidity and flatness that's practically impossible with the interpolation and anti-aliasing that results from rendered sprites. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the character shapes were crafted via CG and fleshed out via hand retouching -- which, I think, is given some credence by the fact that the thick outlines around sprites betray artifacts of careless antialiasing when seen against dark backgrounds (this being the game's single visual flaw).
I suppose it probably doesn't really matter, and it probably doesn't interest much of anyone besides myself. But as someone who really loves the distinctive look of old-fashioned sprite work, I'm sincerely curious to know how they went about creating visuals that somehow demonstrate the best traits of both old- and new-school game art: It sports the smoothness of prerendering, yet it's far more timeless and attractive than, say, the now-horriby-dated original Super Mario RPG. I'd love to know if this is the product of some clever tech trick, or just the fruit of simple labor and effort.
In any case, the results speak for themselves. There's a ridiculous amount of animation for every single character in the game, including the most minor enemies. Yes, sure, it's a (more or less) turn-based RPG, but every creature has lush idle animations as well as multiple attacks -- and each attack is broadcast with some sort of tell to clue you in to the proper reaction to counter with. And then there are all the story graphics; Princess Peach alone -- in her few brief appearances -- has animation enough to put most action heroes to shame. And don't even get me started on Bowser. And the backgrounds! And… yeah.
Secret best-looking game of the year?
(This is the part where some idiot brays like a jackass about how it totally looks like a primitive Super NES game, haw haw, and then I slap that fool so hard his teeth fly out and lodge themselves in the wall.)
I woke up this morning about an hour earlier than usual and couldn't fall back asleep, because from the moment my eyes opened my mind was running at full speed with a sudden obsession: ToastyFrog 2D.
For those of you who haven't been reading the site for years and years, which is most of you, ToastyFrog 2D was a very well-intended idea I had about a decade ago. It flopped horribly. The idea was simple; as PlayStation and N64 had gained steam, the industry transitioned rapidly to making 3D, polygonal games almost exclusively. And while I enjoyed many of those games, I was also acutely aware that 2D games would be sorely missed. Even then it was clear that most developers were more than happy to burn their bridges to the past and shift entirely to a world made of many tiny, textured, Gouraud-shaded triangles, leaving hand-drawn bitmaps a forgotten thing of the past. And even then I thought it was a shame, because 2D games are different than 3D games, and not just on some superficial visual level. They look different, they move differently, they play differently. So, I decided to change the focus of my budding young site to covering news and releases for the increasingly rare creature known as 2D games.
Traffic to the site plummeted precipitously. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I lost something like 3/4s of my readership practically overnight. Because no one really gave a crap about 2D games back then, you see.
In retrospect, I still think it was a great idea for a site. But maybe it was just a little too early? Like, seven or eight years too early? At that point, 2D games were almost entirely relegated to portable systems, which few people took seriously. It's only been with the DS and PSP that the world at large has begun to give portables their due, and even so I know of a few developers who are internally antagonist to them even now -- despite the fact that there are more DS owners than people who own Wiis, PS3s, and Xbox 360s combined. Still, there's a growing movement of people who acknowledge that 2D and 3D gaming are different, that each has its own distinct strengths, and that there's room in the world for both formats -- and that great classic-style games deserve just as much attention as the latest envelope-pushing 3D graphical extravaganza.
I'm pretty sure what jolted me awake this morning was... well, probably the Casino Royale-style martini I had at dinner had something to do with it. But yesterday I woke up and finished up my review of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, which quietly boasts some of the most elaborate traditional sprite animation I've ever seen in any game. Then news slipped that WayForward has finally found a publisher for its long-simmering sequel concepts for Shantae (that publisher being itself, via DSi Ware). And then I went to sleep playing Scribblenauts, which uses a simple marionette-like 2D style to offer a visual lexicon of thousands of interactive objects. Meanwhile, Sega's finally putting together a high-definition 2D Sonic for consoles, Castlevania is getting WiiWare'd, and... some other stuff that I've heard about that will be awesome.
I have a lot of irons in the fire, which is a simple way of saying that my time is stretched entirely too thin. But this stuff's important to me, for some stupid reason, and like everything else I post here I can't really seem to find a way to make it work in the context of my job. Yeah, there's the retro blog and all that, but after you've written about a few dozen new "retro" games you start to think that maybe these aren't some bizarre throwback or evolutionary oddity but simply an entirely separate category of games that can exist side by side with Halo and Assassin's Creed and that lumping them all together as "retro" is a disservice to them. And then you go and create a 2D category for your blog so you have an outlet for an old idea that you were really fond of and that you think maybe has a fighting chance this time around, especially with a moderately successful site wrapped around it to absorb the dissatisfaction of people who don't go in for that crap. And you think: Hey, maybe this will be something good.
29. Planescape: Torment
Apparently all the PC RPGs I shamefully want to play but haven't ended up clustered together in this issue's voting. Here Nich proves that you can write a compelling, insightful retrospective without going on at length like I do. But then, he makes his living cramming words into tiny memory addresses, making them as interesting and concise as possible. Me, I write about games on the Internet.
ToastyFrog's NES ABC: Action 52
Active Enterprises | Crummy omnibus | 1991
TOASTY: By the time Nintendo was ready to pull the plug on the NES, game cartridges offered roughly several million times more capacity than when the system first launched. Eh, maybe my numbers are a little off, but the difference in size between a '83 release like Donkey Kong -- which didn't even include all the arcade version's stages due to memory limitations -- and Kirby's Adventure is pretty significant. Somewhere along the way, enterprising Asian pirates had an epiphany. "Hey," they realized, "if we take one of these big modern chips, we could cram a whole bunch of tiny old games in there!" And thus was born the multicart.
Generally, multicarts consisted of a dozen or so really old NES games, with occasional classics like Contra sprinkled amidst forgotten clunkers like Bird Week, although you'd often find versions claiming to offer 50, 100, even 1,000 games on a single cart. Actually, these usually just had a dozen titles, too, but hid them behind a grafted-on front-end that would let you select among several weirdly modified alternate versions of the games. Kind of like all those alternate modes on Atari 2600 carts, but with less thought given to playability. Sure, Gradius is fun… but is it even more fun when the Vic Viper is invisible? (Spoiler: No.)
Meanwhile, back in America, the nation's inherent Protestant work ethic refused to let home-grown companies like Color Dreams and American Video Entertainment subsist on piracy. No, they made their own original games. Sure, those games were no damn good at all, but you have to admire the underlying ethics behind them. (Never mind about the fact that they were technically illicit releases.) At the vanguard of America's NES efforts was the nation's single most epic 8-bit console work ever: Active Enterprise's Action 52. Putting most Asian multicarts to shame, Action 52 contained no less than 52 unique titles. Even more impressively, intellectual theft was right out; all 52 selections were completely original.
YUKI: That's really kind of amazing, and inspiring. I'm glad to hear you people weren't actually as useless during the Famicom era as you seemed to be.
TOASTY: Eh, heh, well… the sad truth is that Action 52 contained 52 games, but each one was worse than the last. The graphics were atrocious. The sound was grating. The controls, lacking. Most of them weren't even properly playable. The prospect of buying 52 games for $200 seemed pretty appealing until you actually saw the games in question. And then your parents would be horrified by the money you wasted and would never let you buy another videogame for as long as you lived. Just think of how many lives were destroyed by this one game. Well, one collection of games. Well, collection of "games."
YUKI: Oh. That sounds completely terrible. I thought we were only touching on notable games with this ABC series?
TOASTY: Well, it is notable if only for Active Enterprises' outsized ambitions. Despite the fact that even the apologists have to admit that it's a waste of silicon, the company hoped to use Action 52 as a springboard to launch their very own intellectual property. As this was during the peak of the Ninja Turtle fan craze, AE decided to jump on the bandwagon with their own answer to Battletoads. And that answer was: Cheetahmen. Despite the fact that Cheetahmen -- one of the 52 games here -- wasn't really finished, or good, or interesting, the company had a sequel waiting in the wings, ready to unleash upon an unsuspecting public.
YUKI: Oh my god, Cheetahmen!? I know them. They're famous in Japan, or at least on certain Japanese sites. The legendary kusoge that inspired countless videos and musical remixes! Cheetahmen! I had no idea that this is where they were from. I feel like a great mystery has been solved, and my life is a little more fulfilled now.
TOASTY: Why is it that Japan only latches onto the terrible things about American gaming? Why not take pointers from good things, like BioWare games or well-crafted first-person shooters?
YUKI: I don't know, probably for the same reason most Americans think that Japan consists of Godzilla sniffing used schoolgirl panties he bought from a vending machine as he fights ninjas dressed like Hello Kitty.
30. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
This article makes me guilty and sad, because it makes Baldur's Gate II sound completely wonderful. Guilty, because these games are among those I owned for about a decade and never quite got around to playing. Sad, because by the time I finally said, "Right, I should really give these a go," the original Baldur's Gate would no longer work on Mac. Wretched obsolescence!
Just to clear up a little confusion about the subscriber bonus books: They're not meant for subscribers to GameSpite Quarterly, because there is no such thing as a subscription to GameSpite Quarterly. Nice as it would be to offer such a creature, it's not really a feasible prospect due to the publication's print-on-demand style; in order to manage subscriptions I would have to do the fulfillment work myself, which would destroy the last tatters of my free time and make me stab myself in the eyeballs in frustration, and then who would edit the magazine? No, the "subscription" refers to a PayPal monthly donation button I had in the site's sidebar for a while. I took it down in favor of links to the books, because it seemed greedy to have that many "give us your money" links up there at once, and because the existing subscriber base -- a handful of loyal, wonderful altruists -- is sufficient to cover the site's monthly server fees and biannual hosting charges for the time being. A few people have expressed interest in future bonus books, though, so I will see about reinstating that button. OK? OK.
After being unceremoniously awakened by freak weather this morning -- we had lightning, thunder, and hail, the former of which happens in San Francisco once or twice a year at most, while the latter occurs maybe three or four times a decade -- I decided to put my morning to good use. So, I sat down with a pen and a stack of envelopes and prepped all the subscriber bonus books to go out in the mail. I've already made one trip to the post office to drop off the first batch, and here's the rest --
-- all but two of which will be in the mail very shortly. Those two are missing mailing addresses, see.
The cover says "Summer 2009," so I was determined to get these to their recipients before summer ends. They were supposed to go out a month ago, but my schedule never seems to work the way I want, and they're running late. As always. By way of apology, I inscribed each of them with a random doodle of a creature from the GameSpite bestiary. Yes, I drew in the books. They've been defaced and their aftermarket value will plummet. My apologies for that.
I still have about 20 copies left over, which I will be more than happy to sell to people. The price is going to be pretty steep, though: $36. ($38 outside the U.S.) "Th-that's highway robbery!" you sputter. And it would be! If not for the fact that most of that money -- $20 per copy sold -- will be going to Child's Play. If we can sell through all 20 of them, that's $400 bucks to brighten up some kids' lives. It's a tiny drop in the million-plus-dollar bucket that Child's Play normally raises, but I am happy to be the catalyst for any drop in such a worthy bucket, however minute the drop may be. (Half the remaining $16 pays for the cost of the books, padded envelopes, and postage, while the other half goes into the GameSpite war chest for server fees, which is the point of the whole "site support" thing to begin with.)
Please drop me an email if you're interested. The book contains reprinted comics from the past ten years of the site, along with the standard self-effacing commentary that goes along with such things. I hope to have the next book out around the end of the year, and I suspect it's going to focus on a more fleshed out GameSpite bestiary. But we'll see.
31. Resident Evil 4
Hey kids! Do ya like the Resident Evil games? No? Well, Resident Evil 4 was made just for you: An oasis of relief for self-loathing adherents to the franchise. In the process, Capcom managed to set itself up to being pretty much the only major Japanese third-party that still seems relevant in the current gen. This game is the very definition of a mulligan.
GameSpite Quarterly 2, #32: Breath of Fire - Dragon Quarter
10 September 09 | 22:09 | Posted by:
32. Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
Dragon Quarter is one of several games touched on in the course of this issue which already has an extant GameSpite critique. But, you the people voted! And so we included it. And good thing, too, because this feature is quite excellent and really makes me want to blow off my current game-playing, review-writing responsibilities to play it. Wait, I guess that's bad, actually.
47. Rez
Yesterday's portal into a happier world seems to have vanished, but it's not all bad. Life's back to normal today, which means I can get back to the business of posting stuff here. We kick off ten days of uninterrupted GSQ2 content with a look back at UGA's Dreamcast masterpiece Rez. I guess this would have been more appropriate to have posted yesterday, huh? Stupid life, always harshin' my vibe.
I'm back from PAX, but that doesn't mean I have time to do anything here just yet. Bear with me until Thursday and GameSpite will be up and running as usual again. At the moment, however, I'm on the aaaagh no time no time good grief schedule that denotes fall has arrived, and pries me reluctantly away from the things I love most, like working on the site and sleeping and stuff. I'd say "and my fiancée," but she's still photographing the Midwest for another month. I blame the government.
Anyway, I'm off to a review event which will see me locked into a hotel room for 12 hours a day. I always feel a little hesitant about these sequestered sessions, but I'm gonna have to trust my own judgment and the fact that I don't let people ply me with booze to keep my opinion on the straight and narrow. I assumed the game being scrutinized was supposed to be secret, but it looks like they'll have us using our own IDs on the system's network, so I imagine the Internet will know what we're playing before we've even tweaked the control settings. Man, game reviewing. What a big, goofy mess it is sometimes.
I've heard a lot about Scribblenauts this year; like everyone else, I've read the infamous Post 217, and since I worked with superfan Nick Suttner until earlier this year, I heard a lot about it well in advance of E3. And it sounds fascinating, sure, but I wasn't convinced that I needed to add it to my extremely short list of games I'm buying this fall. I can afford maybe two? Yeah. But my first experience with the game in person changed that.
I didn't actually play it myself, but I was with Nich Maragos when he tried it the other day, and that was enough to make me appreciate the fact that all the praise and hype for the game and its dazzling sense of freedom are absolutely true. Apparently the ESRB descriptor for the game dings it because you can tie meat to babies and feed them to tigers or some such, but it's not really as grim as all that. You know how the people flipping out over how you were "supposed" to kill hookers and steal back the money you paid them for a trick in Grand Theft Auto didn't bother to take the time to discover that such behavior wasn't a deliberate design decision but rather an emergent, incidental consequence of the open-ended gameplay? Yeah, I imagine Scribblenauts is going to put that to shame. But look at that screen! This isn't GTA. It's just a game with a really big vocabulary and the wherewithal to give you anything you can imagine.
Hmmm. Now that I stop to think of it, I do have to wonder if that includes hookers. But anyway.
Nich's challenge in the single level he played was to catch a butterfly hovering about three times as high as his little scribblenaut could reach. Simple, right? Well, he decided to eschew a butterfly net for being too obvious, and likely too short. Instead, Nich spawned a vacuum cleaner. And it worked! A tiny upright vacuum appeared, functionally drawing in anything that fell into the vacuum lines at its business end. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite long enough to pull in the butterfly. So he spawned a stepladder. Even so, standing on that wasn't enough to give him sufficient height to capture his quarry. So I suggested a different tactic: Luring the butterfly into range.
"Try a flower," I suggested, remembering when I was a kid and spilled powdered sugar from a donut on my shirt and a butterfly landed on my chest to make a snack of the mess I'd made. So he created a flower and picked it up, and the butterfly swooped down to land on it. Mission accomplished.
This is just a small anecdote, and everyone who's played the game has a similar one. I've never really trusted people who claim a game has infinite replay value, but in this one case I can actually believe it. There should be so many different ways to complete each mission that everyone who picks up Scribblenauts will have their own wholly unique solutions, each resulting from their own distinct sense of logic, intuition, or delirious madness. It's really quite amazing. I'm glad I'm not reviewing this game, because I'm worried that ultimately I'd be patting myself on the back for my own cleverness, and that's pretty much the worst thing that can happen in a review.
Many strange things happen at PAX, including the influx of an alarming number of doughy men wearing kilts. But there are more subtle mysteries to be found, like this display in a nearby shopping center:
I am taking guesses for the purpose of this display. Are tube socks making a comeback, as denoted by the army of tubers? Are they saying clothes look nicest with a little starch? Please posit your best guess here. Meanwhile, I'mma working the 1UP booth this morning. Let the fun times begin.
Oh lordy, it's not even 5 a.m. and here I am waiting for a taxi. What foolishness is this? Oh, yes, right: Penny Arcade Expo. I guess that's alright, then.
I want you to know that my resolve to bring you an amazing (well, maybe?) Retronauts live panel means I have passed up an opportunity to travel to my favorite city in the world*, Tokyo, so that I may sit in front of a few dozen people (or at least, I hope it's only a few dozen) and talk about things that happened in the world of videogaming a decade ago. It's a sickness, really. I have a number of very foolish ideas about how this panel should go, and it will be interesting to see which of them actually make their way past my mental filters into reality. You never know, man. I'm crazy like that.
In the meantime, I rather suspect my regular posting schedule here will be disrupted through the weekend. But of course you can see my disjointed babbling in chunks of 140 characters or less by watching the obligatory Twitter feed, or the other one, and of course my various and sundryblogs. As for now, I gotta see a man about a ride to the airport. Adieu.
* When administered in small doses, i.e. ten days at a time or less.
So, something neat happened last night! I booted up my review copy of Persona to delve into the latter portions of the game only to discover that my 4GB memory stick had become corrupt and my 35 hours of progress in the game were gone. Pffft! Just like that. This was a Sony-manufactured memory stick on an unhacked, untampered-with PSP 2000, which makes me wonder: Will Sony ever make something that doesn't stop working?
I've owned an awful lot of game consoles in my lifetime, and when I think back on the machines that have suffered visible defects or malfunctions, the list demonstrates an alarming trend. Yeah, my old NES eventually became pretty finicky, but it continued working for a decade until I turned it into an art project, and there was a defective DS Lite in there along the way, too. But besides that, all my troubles seem to wear the Sony label. My PlayStation stopped reading CDs unless you propped it up sideways, the drive door on my first PlayStation 2 decided to stop working (with Xenosaga in the system, just to rub salt in the wound), my first PSP had defective buttons, and now this. Oh, and my fiancée bought me a Sony camera that now only works if you don't use flash. I'm pretty sure my PS3 only continues to work properly because I only use it as a movie player most of the time, and I'm sad to think that eventually it's going to die as well, because then how will I play my PS2 games upscaled to look good on an HDTV?
Edit: In an act of desperation, I copied my PSP's contents to my Mac, reformatting the card, and copied everything back over. It became magically uncorrupt -- whew. Thanks, Apple, for saving me from Sony.
Ico
Ah well. I'm sure that so long as Sony continues to churn out games as good as Ico, I'll continue to subject myself to their shoddy, overpriced workmanship. Of course, the fact is that Sony hasn't churned out anything as memorable as Ico this gen, which only fuels my apathy. But I'll wait just a little longer. Last Guardian surely can't be too far away, right?
My final printed copies of GameSpite Quarterly 2 and the subscriber bonus book have arrived. And they look so, so good. I hadn't seen the final color cover in print until just now, but it made my eyeballs explode in happiness. Especially the matte "imagewrap" hardcover. If you ever wonder why we do a separate hardcover deluxe edition, that is why. The non-glossy color looks so rich and amazing. Thanks again to Mr. Armstrong for the phenomenal cover art.
I'd like to show off how amazing the books look, but... the sickly lighting in my storage closet "office" does terrible things to the iPhone's camera. Sorry about that. Please take me at my word when I say the book is utterly and completely gorgeous, though. (The contents ain't too bad, either.)
I will be mailing out the bonus books, along with the comped copies of GSQ2 I owe various special contributors and the last few hardcovers of Year One, Vol. 1 I pawned off a while ago, just as soon as I return from PAX next week. If you're due a bonus book and will be at PAX, though, please leave a note in the comments and I will hand-deliver your copy in Seattle, assuming you can find me. I'm sure you can track me down pretty easily if you know where to look.
And now, for something completely not different at all:
X-Com: UFO Defense
The reader-defined nature of this issue of the magazine made for a few surprises, and X-Com is one of them. I know of the game, and I know it has a great reputation, but I didn't realize it was held so dearly by so many people. Too bad I suck so bad at RTS games and world-building sims. I can only imagine how terrible I would be playing X-Com, which combines both.
27. Civilization
28. Street Fighter II
Dragon Quest VI: 
46. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
Or am I mistaken? The animation demonstrated by Inside Story's sprites is utterly impressive, and it's so fluid that I actually have a difficult time discerning whether or not it really is all hand-drawn, or if Alpha Dream somehow managed to concoct some sort of impressive fakeout technique that lets them pass off prerendered CG as traditional art. Characters move with a classical cartoonish grace and exaggeration that few CG artists can duplicate; yet at the same time, each action is depicted through far more frames of animation than most developers are willing to invest in hand-drawn characters. It is a tiny conundrum.
Personally, I'm leaning toward the art being a mix of pre-rendered and hand-drawn art. The sprite silhouettes look very CG, but the fine details have a solidity and flatness that's practically impossible with the interpolation and anti-aliasing that results from rendered sprites. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the character shapes were crafted via CG and fleshed out via hand retouching -- which, I think, is given some credence by the fact that the thick outlines around sprites betray artifacts of careless antialiasing when seen against dark backgrounds (this being the game's single visual flaw).
In any case, the results speak for themselves. There's a ridiculous amount of animation for every single character in the game, including the most minor enemies. Yes, sure, it's a (more or less) turn-based RPG, but every creature has lush idle animations as well as multiple attacks -- and each attack is broadcast with some sort of tell to clue you in to the proper reaction to counter with. And then there are all the story graphics; Princess Peach alone -- in her few brief appearances -- has animation enough to put most action heroes to shame. And don't even get me started on Bowser. And the backgrounds! And… yeah.
29. Planescape: Torment
TOASTY: By the time Nintendo was ready to pull the plug on the NES, game cartridges offered roughly several million times more capacity than when the system first launched. Eh, maybe my numbers are a little off, but the difference in size between a '83 release like Donkey Kong -- which didn't even include all the arcade version's stages due to memory limitations -- and Kirby's Adventure is pretty significant. Somewhere along the way, enterprising Asian pirates had an epiphany. "Hey," they realized, "if we take one of these big modern chips, we could cram a whole bunch of tiny old games in there!" And thus was born the multicart.
YUKI: That's really kind of amazing, and inspiring. I'm glad to hear you people weren't actually as useless during the Famicom era as you seemed to be.
30. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
31. Resident Evil 4
32. Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
47. Rez
I didn't actually play it myself, but I was with Nich Maragos when he tried it the other day, and that was enough to make me appreciate the fact that all the praise and hype for the game and its dazzling sense of freedom are absolutely true. Apparently the ESRB descriptor for the game dings it because you can tie meat to babies and feed them to tigers or some such, but it's not really as grim as all that. You know how the people flipping out over how you were "supposed" to kill hookers and steal back the money you paid them for a trick in Grand Theft Auto didn't bother to take the time to discover that such behavior wasn't a deliberate design decision but rather an emergent, incidental consequence of the open-ended gameplay? Yeah, I imagine Scribblenauts is going to put that to shame. But look at that screen! This isn't GTA. It's just a game with a really big vocabulary and the wherewithal to give you anything you can imagine.
Ico
X-Com: UFO Defense