It's just another Chelsea Monday
18 August 08 | 21:07
New Game + | Weekly Games Releases
Ah, summer time. When the major releases are poopy because
who would ever want to play interesting new games during summer when they have time off and miserably hot afternoons to kill? Thank goodness for downloadable content! The savior of our miserable summers of suffering.
Add To Queue | Weekly DVD Releases
So, there's like this medium called "film." I hear it's pretty popular! You should read about it to take a break from video games, because really those things are gonna rot your brain and give you carpal tunnel syndrome or something.
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Book 'em, Joe
18 August 08 | 10:08
Ninja Five-O
Dev: Hudson | Publisher: Konami | System: GBA | Date: 2003
I remember browsing through a GBA ROM release list back in the summer of 2003, curious to see if there were any ridiculous Japan-only releases I had somehow missed. I figured there had to be
something on par with the goofiness of
Urban Yeti -- and sure enough, there it was:
Ninja Cop. Surely the most laughable game ever, right? The name alone spoke of every lousy early-90s video game cliché imaginable, lumped into a single bundle of stupidity.
Or so I thought! But then I checked out the U.S. release, localized under the
even more ridiculous title of
Ninja Five-O and -- shock! Awe! (A very relevant and timely expression in the heady
they will greet us as liberators days of 2003.) Rather than bundling together the most hackneyed tropes of the '80s and '90s (or at least,
in addition to them), it actually collected the best game mechanics of the 8- and 16-bit eras into a glorious, unified whole.
Ninja platforming with an emphasis on rescuing hostages, straight out of
Shinobi? Awesome. Level designs straight out of
Elevator Action 2? Genius. A simple level-up system and gameplay built around something so archaic as
scores? Fantastic. Oh, and the best integration of a
Bionic Commando-style action game grappling mechanic seen since, uh... well, since Bionic Commando? Well, kids, that seals the deal, even if grappling wasn't a consistently-used core element.
Ninja Five-O really did capture a long-vanished feel -- its music, its gameplay, its color palette, the very nonsensical bosses. The whole banana, really. If it had been released in, say, 1993 on Genesis, it would be fondly remembered as the best Shinobi rip-off ever created. Having arrived ten years later, it was largely overlooked. Not helping one bit was Konami's utter lack of confidence in the game, which led to them not advertising the game worth a crap and producing maybe about three dozen copies. The stupid name and awful box art (which looked like it had been drawn in someone's notebook during study hall) certainly didn't win any hearts and minds. (As they said back in '03.) As a result, it tends to command a fairly steep price on eBay as people become aware of its quality. This little write-up probably won't help! But once you're done with Rearmed, give Ninja Five-O a look. It has a dumb title, but its action is
supoib.
Weirdly enough, there was a Famicom game called
Ninja Cop Saizo back in the day, which came over here as
Wrath of the Black Manta. Apparently they're not technically related (one having come from Taito and the other from Hudson), even though they share quite a few mechanics in common -- ninja magic, rescuing dudes, policemen on the shinobi beat.
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GameSpite 9.2: The subverting subversions episode
17 August 08 | 13:19
No More Heroes
This is another one of those weeks where I randomly pulled stuff together and the articles selected ended up forming a cohesive theme. This happens much more often than probability says it should. But don't get complacent, assuming this will always be the case -- as chud666's look at No More Heroes explains, life is all about subverted expectations.
FLCL
I've kind of been pushing the site away from non-game stuff, because, after all, it's not called AnimeSpite.net. But I sort of hated
FLCL, and I was curious to see if Lumber Baron could work his magic to make me reconsider -- to subvert my criticisms, so to speak. I won't say whether or not he succeeded, but at the very least the result is a fine write-up.
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Yes, Lucca, there is a Santa Claus
16 August 08 | 13:23
Looks like
Chrono Trigger DS has a release date. That is good, although the Square tax is pretty annoying. I mean, seriously, it's not like I can't just go get the Super NES cart for five bucks...oh, wait. Ah, they've got us again, the bastards. But no matter. Let's have a race to see who can get all the endings and a party full of maxed stats by New Year's.
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You should've seen the one that got away
15 August 08 | 18:23
Umihara Kawase
Dev: TNN et al. | Publisher: TNN/Xing/Marvelous | System: SFC/PS1/PSP | Date: 1994
When I've talked about games that keep the spirit of
Bionic Commando, what I've really meant by spirit is that very specific, technical element of grappling and swinging. Lots of games have swing mechanics, but very few put any amount of thought into it. Look at
Super Metroid -- the grappling beam is essential once or twice in the course of the game, but outside of those specific instances you'll rarely use it. In fact, it's better as a cheat for killing a boss than as a means of getting about Zebeth's labyrinthine corridors. Samus doesn't even have any special animations to indicate momentum or gravity, which makes her look stiff and awkward next to Radd Spencer (who crooks one leg forward as he arcs forward and back).
And nothing,
nothing comes close to the technical swinging mechanics of
Umihara Kawase.
Originally designed as a Super Famicom game, Umihara looks unassuming enough; a little schoolgirl carrying a fishhook is the protagonist, and she wanders through surreal stages with digitized clip art backgrounds and bizarre man-fish roaming the pathways. But beneath that lighthearted surface lurks a beast of a game, an exercise in precision physics that can break a man's soul. The original version of the game was described on the box as a "rubbering action game," which isn't as naughty as it sounds; basically it means that Umi's fishing line is
incredibly elastic. Mastering the game is a matter of learning to manipulate the behavior of the line. Where Bionic Commando has very tightly-defined swinging, Umihara's is much more varied and difficult to master.
Frankly, I kinda suck at it. And you need to
not suck by about ten stages into the game if you want a chance of finishing the adventure. In the PlayStation version, the better you are the more interesting routes you can take through the adventure: Secret doors are hidden out of the way in nearly every level, and only true experts of the game can even begin to hope to reach those. It's pretty humbling!
Umihara's never made its way out of Japan, but despite the title it hasn't gotten away entirely: Natsume will be bringing over the PSP port this fall as
Yumi's Odd Odyssey. That's good! But the PSP port notoriously suffered from major physics issues, which completely spoils the point of the game. That's bad! Hopefully they'll fix it up before releasing it, because the core game is an interesting, challenge-driven alternate take on the concept of grappling -- and the only game to really give Bionic Commando's swing gimmick a run for its money.
(Images courtesy of
HG101)
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Bionic Commando rehashed
15 August 08 | 11:54
A bunch of people have been asking for the full text of the
Bionic Commando FAQfic (I just made up that term! Because I'm awesome) from which I read excerpts on yesterday's Retronauts. Silly humans!
It's been here all along. I added better formatting this morning, though. Just for you.
But don't expect
full text. I wrote up Area One and the game equipment one day long ago. Then, the next day, I looked at my life and realized how it was being squandered on nonsense and shut down the entire site in despair. Sadly, that moment of clarity was eventually forgotten, which is why you're reading this now, but needless to say I've never quite gotten around to writing up the rest of the game. Still, what's there is interesting to read. Consider it a small window into an alternate reality where life didn't suffocate the joy and ambition out of me and I went on to become a
real writer.
Also, courtesy of
Siliconera,
Mega Man E-tank energy drinks. So. Awesome.
I don't even like energy drinks! But I will be enjoying several of these at TGS, I have no doubt. Well, maybe "enjoying" is the wrong word. "Forcing myself to down them through a grimace of agony out of dutiful nerddom," I guess.
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Go go bionic
14 August 08 | 21:55
Are you sick of
Bionic Commando yet? No? Well, listen to the latest
Retronauts and maybe you will be! I also, you know,
reviewed the remake. Spoiler alert: I liked it.
Chain Dive
Publisher: Sony | System: PS2 | Date: 2003
Whenever the subject of games that borrowed liberally from Bionic Commando comes up, someone always mentions
Spider-man 2 for last gen's consoles. Whatever! Yeah, you swung there, but there was no
skill involved. Spidey could swing by using thin air as a grappling point, which is just silly. A much better representative of the Bionic Commando swing mechanic is a little-known and incredibly-hard-to-find-info-on PS2 game called
Chain Dive.
Chain Dive is probably best described as the boss battle in the Sky Palace of
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess transplanted into the futuristic city from
Strider 2 and turned into an entire game. The levels are almost entirely aerial, with the hero grappling between tiny points and evading enemies by flinging himself from link to link. It's very exhilarating, and kind of tough. But fun!
Too bad I gave away my copy, because it's stupidly hard to find these days.
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