GameSpite Quarterly 2, #35: Shadow of the Colossus

31 August 09 | 08:45 | Posted by:

Shadow of the Colossus
To my lasting shame, I only just managed to get around to playing Ico a year or two ago. This makes me a terrible person! It also means I still haven't tackled its sequel of sorts, and Ben's excellent write-up makes me want to play it now. But it also makes me realize that it's only the sort of game I can thoroughly enjoy if I have time to take it slowly and really soak in the exploratoin. Maybe after I retire?

category: games, gamespite | forums | thirteen comments | §

NES ABC: Abadox

30 August 09 | 06:59 | Posted by:

Hey, look, I did another one of these. I probably ought to try not to let a month pass between each entry of the NES ABC. In my defense, I've been a bit occupied with certain other projects lately.

ToastyFrog's NES ABC: Abadox
Natsume | Semi-horizontal Shooter | 1990



TOASTY: You know how these days Natsume is pretty much "the company that coasts along on endless Animal Crossing games"?

YUKI: That's Harvest Moon. There's a big difference, and anyway Harvest Moon came first.

TOASTY: Eh, whatever. Where I was headed with this is that unless you're a 12-year-old girl, Natsume is pretty much worthless to you, because all they make is the same worthless cutey-cute farm simulation over and over again.

YUKI: You're a jerk.

TOASTY: I'm a...? Er, anyway, my point is that it could be worse. Natsume could be the company they were in the NES days. Back then, instead of endlessly rehashing their own creation to the point of stupidity, they were much less ambitious. Instead, they rehashed everyone else's ideas. You know how Shadow of the Ninja was such a convincing Ninja Gaiden ripoff that Tecmo went ahead and published the Game Boy Shadow of the Ninja as a Ninja Gaiden game? Well, after playing Abadox, it's clear to me that this was Natsume's primary tactic at the time: swipe a game from someone else, do the absolute minimum necessary to avoid a lawsuit, and wait for the money to pour in.

YUKI: Abadox? That's just a generic shooting game, right? I don't see how that's such a ripoff. It's just trite.

TOASTY: Well, then, clearly you have never played Abadox. Or maybe you've never played Life Force? Because that's what Abadox is, you know. It's Life Force. Totally and completely. OK, sure, you control a guy in a suit instead of a spaceship, but that just means Natsume ripped off Section-Z a little bit, too. Other than that, the two games are embarrassingly similar: you scroll automatically left to right through grotesque biomatter as naggingly familiar waves of enemies attack. Spiky protuberances emerge from the ceiling and floor. At one point, you have to shoot through weak bits in a wall to advance. And then you meet the boss, a sort of lumpy brain-like thing that has to be shot in the eye. And this is just the first stage!

YUKI: Wasn't Life Force the one that switched between horizontal and vertical shooting? So it's just a coincidence. The similarities obviously end once you reach the second level.

TOASTY: Oh, you think so? What if I told you the second stage of Abadox is also a vertically-scrolling level?

YUKI: Come on, it can't really be that shameless.

TOASTY: You're right, Abadox isn't completely the same as Life Force. The vertical stages scroll downward instead of up. As this is possibly the only shooter in the world to play like this, it's bafflingly confusing. Like playing Mario right-to-left.

YUKI: But still... I mean, it doesn't have the same power-up system as Life Force, right? That's kind of a trademark.

TOASTY: No, you're right: Abadox has a strictly linear power-up system. But Life Force on NES is a weird mash-up of the arcade games Salamander and Life Force, and the Gradius-style upgrades were added somewhere along the way. Back in the earliest chunks of its DNA is a linear power-up system startlingly similar to Abadox's. The whole thing is some sort of proto-Life Force.

YUKI: Wow. Is it like this all the way through the game?

TOASTY: Beats me. All I could think about the entire time I was playing is how much better Life Force is, so I bailed midway through the second level and destroyed the Bacterions a few times instead.

YUKI: And you call yourself a reviewer? Where's the due diligence? I bet the game probably gets a lot better after the first few stages.

TOASTY: Yeah... maybe not. But, here's some actual research for you: If you happen to notice the music sounds a lot like the tunes from Life Force's Konami cousin Contra, that's because Natsume actually employed one of the sound programmers for the NES version of Contra as the composer for this game.

YUKI: Wow, that's impressively brazen. My respect for this game has just increased dramatically.

category: games, NES ABC | forums | fourteen comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2, #36: Metroid Prime

29 August 09 | 07:54 | Posted by:

Metroid Prime
As always, Mr. Driggs brings us another insightful sideways look at a great game. In this case, the game in question is Metroid Prime. As you may have inferred from the link graphic and post title. I'm sorry, that's the best I can offer. Look, the article itself is clever and intelligent and highly readable, so the stupid front page link to it doesn't have to be, alright?

See also: GameSpite Quarterly 2 table of contents.

category: games, gamespite | forums | six comments | §

You like metroids redux

28 August 09 | 07:40 | Posted by:

About 25,000 people have looked at it over the past week thanks to casual links from Joystiq and specifically Penny Arcade, and in my typical fashion of doing the right thing too late to matter, I figured I might as well give the Metroidvania section -- also known as metroidvania.com! -- a thorough overhaul now that those links are going away and no one's going to read it anymore. Or rather, that I'd finally fill in all the blank descriptions to give at least a little hint of why each title appears on the list.

Of course, if I really had my druthers I'd genuinely overhaul it and start over from scratch, but free time is something that I don't precisely have a surfeit of. And it would probably be a better idea for me to poke around and bring old, forgotten articles lost in the GameSpite wiki matrix up to code in any case.

Meanwhile, I'm adjusting to my tiny new computing existence. I cut frivolities out of my personal budget and bought one of the brand-new 17" MacBook Pros at the beginning of the year, and it's been pretty much the best computer I've ever owned -- a genuine portable desktop machine. I gave my fiancée my aging, decrepit laptop to use on the road, which was very well-intended but ultimately pretty pointless: She does a ton of photography work, which means processing enormous RAW-format files, and the computer she's using is Apple's first-ever Intel-based system... which is to say, not entirely up to snuff. What I mean is that it takes her about a day to wheeze through batch processing a single shoot. After watching her sit and coax her machine to survive its task for an entire day this weekend, I realized that the only right thing to do would be to pass my mighty behemoth of a system along to her. No greater love has a man for a woman than this.

As for myself, we definitely couldn't afford another 17" system, but I do too much layout and graphics work to get by with the old wheezing geezer, so I compromised and cut out the rest of my budget's frivolities in order to pick up a 13" MacBook Pro. It is very... small.

That's a good thing, and a bad thing. It's bad because the screen has about 2.1 million pixels fewer than I'm used to. I wish, at the very least, this smaller system had the same pixel density as the larger machine (which fit the 1920x1200 resolution of a 24" iMac into 17 inches of screen space), because it turns out the Internet is no longer designed around a trifling 1280 pixels width and I wouldn't mind squinting if it let me see whole webpages in one go. The Mac OS isn't really designed for that resolution, either, for that matter. But, I'm slowly adjusting, and it's not so terrible... although I need to figure out how to reset my iTunes window, since I migrated all my personal data and files and settings from the old machine. OS X's migration feature is seriously amazing and makes it possible to clone one machine onto the other with about a dozen simple mouse-clicks, but I don't think Apple stopped to consider that people might actually have to migrate to a smaller screen someday. Since all my settings were carried over perfectly, my iTunes window is currently so large that the resize handle at the bottom right is impossible to interact with, and the + button causes it to compact into a floating controller window rather than simply making the standard window fit the screen. So thanks for that, Apple.

On the other hand, having a smaller system is kind of great. This thing is very slightly larger and very slightly heavier than a netbook, which is to say light and extremely portable, but the guts are considerably more robust. The one notable difference is that it has only half the L2 cache of the larger system... but beyond the occasional slight pause for queuing up operations and the fact that someone cut away about 65% of my pixels, I don't feel like I've particularly made a step down here. And after just two days, my shoulder is already thanking me for the two pounds I've trimmed from my notebook bag.

Of course, the new system has a rather pitiful graphics card, which I'm sure I'll regret when I want to play the latest 3D masterpieces on Mac... oh, wait.

category: blog | forums | 26 comments | §

so i herd you liek metroids

27 August 09 | 09:13 | Posted by:

I'm going off the GameSpite Quarterly 2 repost schedule today, so I hope you'll forgive me. Today's article has been pretty much in the bag for a week, but after my 1UP review for Shadow Complex made so many people as cranky as it did, I decided it might be best to let the furor over the game die down a bit. I suspect this article is likely to rile up a certain segment of the population, and that's really not my intent. Then Christian had to go and stir up a hornet's nest of controversy, which made me hold off even longer. But this here's the Internet, and in Internet time a week is more than sufficient for people to forget about the latest, greatest, hypest, I-know-it's-perfect-before-I-even-play-it-because-it's-an-exclusive-for-my-favorite-console hit. At this point, you might as well consider this a retrospective rather than a review.

Shadow Complex
If this text seems to overlap my 1UP review overmuch, well: When it began life, this was my 1UP review, penned in a semi-lucid rush at 3 a.m. immediately after finishing the game. After a night's sleep, I realized that would be a terrible idea and wrote something much less feverish. However, the results of my late-night fugue state have been polished and posted as a simple curio for your amusement.

category: games | forums | 24 comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2, #48: Tetris

26 August 09 | 07:37 | Posted by:

It looks like people are beginning to receive their copies of GameSpite Quarterly 2. My own copies won't arrive until next week, since I'm also receiving all the subscriber bonus books along with them and they presumably took a while to print up. And I'm a cheapskate who used the slowest shipping option. But, should you be one of the fortunate few who has received their copy, please feel free to talk about how awesomely awesome it is here. Or, you know, just pick on the few typos we didn't manage to kill off. Meanwhile, have some more content:

Tetris
The first of the deluxe edition bonus articles to hit the web deals with Tetris, which of course we discussed last time as well. The contents of this issue were determined by reader vote, see, so some redundancy is inevitable. In each case, though, a new author has taken up the cause and provided a fresh perspective. Because we care: about games, and about you.

category: games, gamespite | forums | ten comments | §

Comfort in oblivion

25 August 09 | 11:04 | Posted by:

I saw a newspaper headline yesterday mentioning the fact that airline delays were much less frequent this year due to the "sour economy." I stumbled across said headline while waiting for a connecting flight at DFW; I had a little extra time to kill because not only did all three flights I take yesterday depart perfectly on time, each one landed between 20-40 minutes ahead of schedule. What initially looked to be a high-stress hell of rushing to make multiple connections turned out to be a pleasant, leisurely trip in which I had the perfect amount of time to stretch my legs and get a bite to eat between each segment of the trip. I'd always been under the impression that flying for free with bonus mileage was supposed to be awful, but yesterday was anything but. In fact, two of my three flights were half-empty. For the longest portion (the three hours between DFW to SFO), I had the entire front row of the economy plus section to myself. I totally stretched out and leaned back and watched the two-and-a-half-hour sunset. And then to top it off the in-flight movie was Star Trek. It was almost like the airline industry was apologizing for all the lousy flights I've had to suffer through over the past few years!

Of course, the root of my pleasant journey has to do with everyone (including me and mine!) pinching their pennies, and I'm sure we'll see yet another wave of airline bankruptcies all too soon. But at least the ride to hell is a comfortable one.

Star Trek, incidentally, was actually better the second time around. On a crappy little screen! With bleeped-out language! And a cropped image! It's just that good.

Speaking of that good, I'm really proud of 1UP's sequels we want feature. (It says 1UP Staff, but I drafted all except two of those entries.) We tried to come up with a really broad range of franchises, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what a sequel would need to do in order to be worthy of each series' respective legacy. Any idiot can dredge up a forgotten franchise, but the efforts usually stink. If even two or three of these suggestions ever saw the light of day, I would be a happy boy indeed.

Also, I posted a piece on the Retronauts blog that would normally go up here due to its more personal, anecdotal nature. Let's see if anyone complains!

category: blog, games | forums | 19 comments | §

Unseasonal cheer

24 August 09 | 06:29 | Posted by:

So anyway, my time here in Michigan is already up, which is disappointing. I was just getting into the groove of relaxing and not worrying about responsibilities and such. Ah well, life encroaches. I did at least enjoy my trip to Frankenmuth. When it's not busy being racist, it's an amusing little tourist town, and one of its biggest draws is an oddball little shop on the outskirts of town called Bronners. Well, not so little, actually. It's about a half-acre of retail space, all told. That's pretty big, but what makes it notable is that the whole thing is dedicated to selling Christmas goods the entire year 'round.



It's really quite surreal to step into a store to escape the summertime heat and find yourself surrounded by Christmas trappings. And of course most of the holiday goods on offer are anything but tasteful. They're not crass in the same way as Frankenmuth's anti-German slander; just garish. But when you are inundated by half an acre of retail surfaces crammed quite literally to the rafters with the trappings of the holidays, even the most discreet and neatly designed ornaments become a bit oppressive.



Of course, most of what's for sale is anything but discreet and neatly designed -- besides Sexy Santa, of course -- so that certainly doesn't help.

Post continued after link >>

category: blog | forums | fifteen comments | §

Tasteful tourism

23 August 09 | 10:48 | Posted by:

Frankenmuth is Michigan's Germantown, a sort of touristy city that trades mainly in the fact that it has a lot of German heritage. Still, doesn't this little tourist knickknack seem a little... I dunno, racist? Or maybe tasteless?



If this sort of thing is still acceptable, though, I may go into business making some variants of these myself. Here are a few inspirations I had:

• "A Chinese knight is a chink in the armor."
  
• "A pooping Italian is a doo wop."
  
• "An old white person is a stale cracker."

Hmm, I dunno. I don't really feel good about these, for some reason.

category: blog | forums | 21 comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2, #37: Diablo II

22 August 09 | 06:15 | Posted by:

Diablo II
The Internet is all abuzz with the latest news about Diablo III, but you know how GameSpite is: we're mired in the past half the time, so we're still dwelling on its predecessor. In this case, that's not really so unusual, though. Pretty much everyone in the world is still obsessed with Diablo II. It's a game that's got legs... and knows how to use 'em.

category: games, gamespite | forums | three comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2, #38: Valkyrie Profile

21 August 09 | 09:21 | Posted by:

Huh, Michigan in August isn't supposed to be this pleasant. It's supposed to be brutally hot and so muggy that when you take off your shirt you peel off a few dermal layers along with it. But it kind of feels like I didn't even leave San Francisco, aside from the fact that I'm surrounded by verdant countryside. Well, and the fact that a house like my parents' new place would cost a few million bucks in San Francisco. It's not big; in fact, it's a lot smaller than their last place. But it has history.

My parents have this strange habit of buying homes in need of significant overhauls, tweaking them until they're magnificent, and then promptly moving away before they really have time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They bought a place about a decade ago whose previous owner was an old shut-in who chain-smoked and let her awful little dog relieve itself in the corner, so the ductwork had cancer (seriously, there were permanent yellow tobacco stains by all the vents) and the floor had to be completely replaced down to the foundation since it was soaked with puppy pee. They turned it into a really gorgeous home with hardwood floors and a bright, modern interior. Then they moved up to a ranch-style farmhome in central Michigan with an unfinished basement; there they completed the basement, doubling the usable space in the house, before adding a huge garage with a massive family room above it. Within a year they'd moved! Now they have what was until earlier this year an abandoned farmhouse vandalized by local teens (maybe squatters) and whose leaky basement was populated by massive spiders and even bigger mushrooms. Already it's looking homey, with the basement almost fully dried out and a new enclosed porch nearly constructed. Which means they're probably already thinking about the next place they can rebuild. I figure at the rate they're going, it'll be a burned-out crack house shell in the Tenderloin. But hey, it'll be nice to have them local.

Valkyrie Profile
Oh, right, you're here to read about videogames. Hey kids! Do you like being dead and hanging out with other dead people? Well boy have I got a game for you. Valkyrie Profile is about precisely that. It's all for a good cause, though. You're saving humanity from the frost giants or a serpent that eats its own tail or some such. I don't know. Just remember that I love you all.

category: games, gamespite | forums | eight comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2, #39: The Legend of Zelda

20 August 09 | 06:35 | Posted by:

Dear humans, I'm sorry to say that I have abandoned you. It's a temporary state of affairs, mind you; I'm just going to visit family for a few days. But probably I won't be updating much here! It's entirely possible. I hope we can still be friends.

The Legend of Zelda
The online edition of GameSpite Quarterly 2 continues with entry 39, The Legend of Zelda. I'm actually really proud of this piece, which is a sentiment I rarely feel about things I write. I suspect that probably means there's something horribly wrong with it, but at least I have that happy feeling to hold on to for a few more moments before the first comments appear about it.

category: games, gamespite | forums | fourteen comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2: A belated prologue

19 August 09 | 06:03 | Posted by:

GSQ 2 Prologue: A Few of Our Favorite Games
We have a tradition in these here parts of preceding each issue (whether print or virtual) with a group production relating to the current theme. In this case, we took an opportunity to simply write about some of our personal favorite games, whether or not they made the list. Come wallow in nostalgia with us, won't you?

category: games, gamespite | forums | seven comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly 2, #40: 3rd Strike

18 August 09 | 08:29 | Posted by:

40. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
We kick off the first article from GameSpite Quarterly 2 with a look back at the modern hardcore gamer's favorite fighter to feel sheepish about dismissing when it was new: 3rd Strike. In posting this I realized I misspelled the name as "Third Strike" all the way through the printed edition. My deepest apologies to all. Please enjoy this correct version for free.

category: games, gamespite | forums | eight comments | §

Transmissius interruptus

17 August 09 | 19:40 | Posted by:

Oops, I had intended to get the ball rolling on posting Quarterly 2 content, but then I was sidetracked by the need to review Shadow Complex. It was longer than I had anticipated, although that's due in part to the frustrating lack of shortcuts in the game. You know how awesome it was when you realized you could bomb the glass cylinder in Maridia to open a quick path between the deep underwater areas and the familiar rocky paths of Brinstar? Yeah, there's none of that in Shadow Complex. Which is weird, you know, since it's a game that apes Super Metroid in every other way possible.



Oh, I know what you're thinking, but don't be fooled by this screen. It really doesn't imitate Metal Gear Solid at all, outside of these dudes. And they're nowhere near as fun as the tachikoma ripoffs in any case.

Anyway, I gave it a B: a solid score for a solid game. I can tell it's a good one, because I keep thinking about the items I missed and how I could most efficiently make my way through the levels to collect them. Do stick around for the comments on the review, though, if only to see 1UP chastised for letting someone review the game who clearly has never really played a classic Metroid. Ahh, Internet, how I love you.

Apparently we're doing a 1UP Show-style video chat on the game tomorrow, so I guess you can watch me sniffle and mumble my way sickly through that as well.

category: games | forums | nine comments | §

And now, GameSpite Quarterly 2

15 August 09 | 11:59 | Posted by:

I was going to wait until Monday for this, but you know how it is when you finish something and you're excited about it. You want to share it, you know? It's why I can never seem to build up a bunch of blog content to post over a period of time, because as soon as I finish writing something I want to publish it right then. That anxious impatience is simply amplified many times over when it comes to a project as big as GameSpite Quarterly. A month of weekends spent hard at work has reached its culmination, and while I know I should probably wait until Monday when people are actually using the Internet and this news has a better chance of getting some notice, I couldn't hold off. GameSpite Quarterly 2 is GO.

You can use the Blurb shop to pick up the standard edition or the hardcover deluxe edition. As before, the hardcover has quite a bit of additional content over the regular version: 37 pages, to be precise. This is not a filthy ploy to convince people to buy the more expensive book, though. It's just that the cost of a hardcover print-on-demand book is so high that I want to make sure anyone who wants the nicer edition feels more like they're getting their money's worth. The bonus content -- and in fact all content -- will be online before the next issue is released, so there's no need to even buy a copy at all if you have enough patience. The print version simply exists for those of you who are like me and want something nice and tangible to hold on to in this world of digital distribution. (And the deluxe volume only exists because I prefer to own books in hardcover format whenever possible. It's the definition of a vanity press project.)

You'll probably notice that the standard edition is a dollar more expensive than the previous issue. This is also not some sort of gougery. The new book is 20 pages longer than GameSpite Quarterly 1, which bumped it up to the next folio size and thus added a buck to the actual cost of goods. I'll try to keep things more compact in the future, but I can't make any promises; the thing is, we like writing about games, even when it causes a bit of overflow. (The actual cost to produce the hardcover also increased due to the higher page count, but I decided we could stand to take a smaller profit on that in order to keep its already excessive price from creeping any higher.)

Of course, since this is print-on-demand, there's no real hurry on any of this. I intend to make all our publications available indefinitely, so there's no need to worry about buying a copy of this before it goes out of print. This is pretty much evergreen content, and the drawbacks of producing through Blurb are offset by the fact that this material need never go out of print. And since one significant drawback is that the shipping fees that Blurb charges tend to be pretty unreasonably expensive (for which I apologize, but it's out of my control), you may wish to take advantage of our perpetual publications and buy in batches. If you're the sort of person who wants to pick up multiple issues of the magazine, you might be better off waiting until more volumes are released further down the road and ordering several items all at once to save on shipping fees. I'm hoping to publish Year One, Vol. 2 in October, barring unforeseen complications, so maybe you should wait for that.

I guess I'm probably not doing a terribly effective job on selling you on this product, huh? But selling isn't what this is about. This issue of the book contains 40 (or 48, depending) essays on the games that Talking Time voted its collective favorites of all time, and everyone who contributed to GSQ2 poured their hearts into celebrating some truly great creations. Whether you read these articles in one go via print or piecemeal as they're posted online, I hope you will read them. Because they're great, they really are. I could point out which articles made me smile and think, "That was brilliant," as I was editing, but then I'd be here all day. The full list of contents (and eventually the full collection of articles) is available on the issue's index page, and it's easier to simply point you there, because each and every essay is thoughtful, heartfelt, and entertaining. You can actually read about 25 pages of the issue's content on Blurb's site by clicking on each edition's preview feature, so you can see for yourself that I'm not just blowing smoke up your hindquarters.

Please enjoy! The online edition will debut within the next few days. In the meantime, do feel free to promote the hell out of this publication.

category: games, gamespite | forums | 46 comments | §

Six years gone by

14 August 09 | 16:30 | Posted by:

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Sega Genesis' U.S. launch, apparently. I'd write something about it at work, but I kind of already did that last year to mark its Japanese debut and don't have much else to say. And I'm home sick with some kind of sinus thing that's making the rounds at the office; enough of us are out today that I'm going to put forth a little rumor: IGN is using biological warfare to cripple its competition. You can pass that along to Kotaku or whatever.

Being sick at home with while feeling like a small child made of mucus is trying to force its way out of my skull is a pretty crappy way to celebrate the much more important anniversary that today represents: Six years ago today, I arrived in San Francisco.

I can't believe it's been that long. But yeah. The evening of August 14, 2003, I finally let my poor abused Nissan Sentra take a break after a week of cross-country driving and moved my few possessions into an apartment on 23rd Avenue in San Francisco's Richmond district. I'd been out of work for a long time, I was semi-heartbroken from a semi-breakup, I had exactly no money to my name, and I was frankly doing the old-fashioned thing of moving west to the wild frontier of California and hoping for the best. Of course I had a job lined up, but my new employer (Ziff Davis Media) didn't exactly have an inspiring track record with its gaming websites, and I was signing up for a tour of duty with their latest endeavor. No one at the magazines liked us or wanted us around, so we had to sit on a completely separate floor from the print group and beg for the smallest of resources. We were managed by executives with no real interest in our success. I spent the first three years of my life here expecting to be laid off at any moment. Surprisingly, that didn't happen, and now 1UP is the only publication still alive from the once-mighty ZD game group. Depressing!

Anyway, I had a disappointing realization a few weeks ago: I've lived here long enough that it no longer seems to inspire me. I've been taking San Francisco for granted for quite a while now, which is a shame because it's a great, interesting city. In order to remedy that, I've been taking 30-minute walks at lunch and traveling as far from the office as my tiny little feet will take me. And, more importantly, I've been soaking up the sights. Who knows how long I'll be fortunate enough to live in my favorite city in the world? I want to drink it in while I can.



To commemorate my arrival, I decided to start by chronicling where it all began -- which is to say, the site of my first real San Francisco memory. The first full day I lived here, I decided to check out Chinatown... I guess because I was familiar with New York City and wanted to forge a comparison? I don't know. Anyway, as I was exploring the area, I was accosted by the infamous Crazy Roast Duck Man, which immediately made me realize that this city is truly awesome, and every bit as weird as its reputation suggested.

Anyway, that encounter transpired here at the corner of Washington and Walter U. Lum (which is a street, not a guy, although it's probably a street named for a guy). My return trip this week yielded a startling lack of crazy people, eating duck/pork or otherwise. Just a slightly chubby guy who regarded the photo-taking stupid honky with suspicion. And rightly so! I'm never confronted by crazy people in San Francisco anymore, because they have an inherent sense that I belong here. They no longer faze me, so they don't bother. I have become a part of the asylum.



Here is the reverse angle, looking down Washington toward the bay. That corner is actually where I met Crazy Roast Duck Man. Actually, "met" is such a weak word. It doesn't really convey the essence of our encounter. That corner is actually where I experienced Crazy Roast Duck Man. Yeah.



And here's a second reverse angle looking more along the Walter U Lum side.

It's actually sort of fitting that this area is so firmly cemented in my memory as my first interesting experience as a San Francisco native, because in many ways it's an important landmark full of firsts in San Francisco history, too. The corner of Washington and Walter U. Lum is actually the edge of Portsmouth Square, so named because back in the days before they filled in half a mile of the bay with landfill it was right at the water's edge. It was here that San Francisco's first school was established, and where the first American flag was placed in San Francisco's soil -- although back then the city was still called Yerba Buena. So, see? Meeting my first raving nutter there was a similarly monumental event, and simply demonstrates the fact that certain locations are destined to be nexuses of history.

And, incidentally, thanks to everyone who has been reading the site since those bygone days. You guys have a lot of patience for a crusty old man for whom every day is a struggle to keep his act together.

category: blog | forums | sixteen comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, the end

13 August 09 | 06:38 | Posted by:

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
This is it! The last of the material from GameSpite Quarterly #1 to be reprinted online! Now... now what do we do? I guess we'll have to publish a new issue, or something. In the meantime, enjoy this enticing look at one of the very few Castlevania games I have never finished. My shame is boundless.

category: games, gamespite | forums | 17 comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1 extra: Fable II

12 August 09 | 09:12 | Posted by:

Fable II
I thought the original Fable was quite good, but ultimately not inspiring enough for me to seek out the sequel. Mr. Hoeger's article here has made me reconsider that stance, because apparently hidden beneath those dreary, lumpy visuals is a breezy game centered around having a damn good time. As it so happens, that's my favorite kind of game.

category: games, gamespite | forums | eight comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1 extra: The Aging Gamer

11 August 09 | 02:52 | Posted by:

The Aging Gamer
Today sees the first of GameSpite Quarterly 1's final stragglers make their way online with a really great essay by Michael Ayles enumerating a frustration I'm all too familiar with: being an old person in a young person's medium. Fortunately, the great thing about getting old is that we're allowed to complain a lot, so hopefully the industry will change simply to placate our cranky wrath.

category: games, gamespite | forums | 18 comments | §

It's quiet now

10 August 09 | 10:07 | Posted by:

As I buckle down this week for the last revisions and improvements on GSQ2, the site will probably be quieter than usual. I'm sorry to abandon you like this. I still love you, though. And I'm doing it all for you anyway. In the meantime, please enjoy this random piece of litter I saw on the sidewalk near my apartment the other night:



Also, I've posted my proof copies of several books on eBay, because they're just sitting around pointlessly and I figure someone might be interested in them as a random curiosity. More to the point, I always have to pay for press proofs out of pocket, so this is a way to possibly recoup the moderate losses that result. These are quick, one-day auctions, and I'll mail them out as soon as they sell (uh, if they sell). That means technically you could be the first to own GSQ2 and the bonus book, although these are rather deficient versions and won't likely make you the envy of all your friends. Also, I know Internet auctions sometimes cause people to do weird and inexplicable things, but on the off chance you're actually interested in these, please don't get into some sort of manic bidding war. These really aren't worth it and I won't be heartbroken if no one is interested.

• GameSpite Quarterly 1 hardcover proof (interior marked up with corrections)
  
• GameSpite Quarterly 2 hardcover proof (no interior markup)
  
• GameSpite bonus book 1 proof (a couple of pages have markup for corrections)

category: blog | forums | one comment | §

New words

09 August 09 | 12:04 | Posted by:

Yeah, OK, I think it's pretty safe to say that Shin Megami Tensei: Persona has a completely new translation from the PlayStation version.

Meanwhile! I'm about 2/3 of the way through my own edits and revisions in the new issue. I'll wrap up the markups today, and then it's just a matter of incorporating those changes as well as any third-party corrections. While you're waiting, though, why not feast your eyes on the sumptuousness of the color cover? It is behind this here "jump," as they call it in the parlance of our times. It is well worth your click. I can tell it's a great piece, because every time I look at it I see some new detail I'd overlooked. Like the fact that Mario is actually holding a Fire Flower!

Post continued after link >>

category: games, gamespite | forums | 23 comments | §

Perfect timing

08 August 09 | 09:51 | Posted by:

The timing on this one worked out even better than I had intended: a couple of hours after posting yesterday's Game Boy finale in Shantae, Ray's epic Game Boy retrospective went live at 1UP, putting a wrap on our coverage there, too. And a little while after that, proof copies of GameSpite Quarterly 2 arrived via FedEx:



As you can see, the hardback cover art is a little messed up and needs to be reformatted, but besides that it looks frickin' great. (And the paperback looks perfect.) Oh yeah, I need to upload the color cover, too. And do copy edits. And so on and so forth. Still! Almost there. If for some reason you had a hankerin' to pick up the first issue, I'd say hold off for a week or so and get the two together to save shipping costs.

The subscriber bonus book came out a lot better than expected, too. Some of the text is a little squinty to read, but I had assumed it would be mostly illegible. Not so; the contents look pretty nice. I'll be placing an order for those whenever I upload the final edition of GSQ2, I guess, and mailings will commence thereafter to the site's loyal supporters. "But wait!" you protest. "I want one, yet the link for supporting the site has long since evaporated." That's true, but I do have something in mind that'll be fair to everyone. Hopefully.

category: blog, gamespite | forums | twelve comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1: PART FINAL

07 August 09 | 07:15 | Posted by:

Shantae
Shantae is a little like EarthBound: a modest cult favorite wherein said cult demonstrates a disproportionately obsessive love for the game given its original impact and scope. Of course, as with EarthBound, that fervor is fueled by the fact that the game's creators seem to like stringing us along. Just put Shantae Advance on DSiWare and be done with it, WayForward. Honestly.


With today's entry in hand, the GameSpite Quarterly #1 Game Boy retrospective is officially over. I still have some more Game Boy writing queued up for 1UP, but it's of a different nature. (It's not just reprints, for starters.) I still have a few GSQ1 articles to post, of course, but this is it for the main topic. It's kind of a relief! But it also means I have to start writing new stuff for the site now. It was kind of nice to coast, there.

Also today, I've cleaned up and modernized the Zelda Oracles article from way back when the games were new. That was eight years ago. It's really depressing to think about, but: it does mean I have an excuse for the substandard quality of the writing therein; it was eight years ago. It's nice to see sometimes that I really have improved as a writer. On the other hand, it's also nice to look back and see I was making fun of people for attributing everything ever created by Nintendo to Shigeru Miyamoto way back then -- although any cheer is somewhat offset by the realization that people are still acting like the man is the only person at Nintendo capable of making good things. Stop it, Internet! Miyamoto is super great, but give other people a little credit, why don't ya. Sheesh.

category: games, gamespite | forums | eleven comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 11.5

06 August 09 | 07:50 | Posted by:

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
So hey, it's Super Mario Bros. Except portable! That's really all I have to say about this game. Well, except all the stuff I said in the article. Which I said there and shouldn't repeat here, because then what would be the point of clicking through and reading it? Honestly, what this world needs a whole lot more of is a little more common sense.

category: games, gamespite | forums | seven comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 11.4

05 August 09 | 08:10 | Posted by:

Metal Gear Solid
I think this MGS (aka Ghost Babel) is to Metal Gear as Link's Awakening is to Zelda: a unique and incredible little portable summation of everything good about the series. Pity it's such a black sheep. Also, please ignore the last paragraph of this article as it was penned well in advance of E3 and thus before we knew about Peace Walker. Eh heh.

category: games, gamespite | forums | eleven comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 11.3

04 August 09 | 07:40 | Posted by:

The online edition of GameSpite Quarterly #1 is finally winding down, just in time for the second issue to hit. Mr. Armstrong turned in the final version of his cover image last night (it's fantastic), and my proofs of issue two shipped yesterday as well. My excitement is slightly dulled by the mildly alarming realization that I've locked myself into a perpetual cycle with this... but so be it. (I could delegate some of this work, of course, but I'm far too much of a control freak to be able to relax if I did so.) Anyway! Good times lay ahead, I'm sure of it. Work, too, but my protestant work ethic tells me that this is the necessary compromise one must make in order to have nice things.

WonderSwan
Wow, remember when the prospect of playing the original Final Fantasy on a portable system was so exciting that a bunch of people imported game systems and cartridges of a foreign-language RPG? If only we knew then what we know now! Still, WonderSwan actually had a lot going on for it... even if Bandai was pretty clueless about managing the system's fortunes.

category: games, gamespite | forums | five comments | §

Worth your time

03 August 09 | 17:08 | Posted by:

You've already read 'em, but you should read 'em again: Mr. Nomali has revisited his GameSpite Quarterly 1 articles and crammed 'em full of screenshots. It makes a difference!

• Operation C
  
• Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge
  
• Daedalian Opus
  
• Link's Awakening DX

Now I feel like a butthead for not bothering to cram my own articles full of screenshots.

category: games, gamespite | forums | four comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 11.2

03 August 09 | 08:00 | Posted by:

Neo Geo Pocket
Prepping this post for today was brutal, as my Sunday began at 1 a.m. for a 12-hour journey home on no sleep. Cherish these complete sentences, because they were excruciatingly difficult to construct. Anyway, Neo Geo Pocket was great and this post was worth it because I can use one of my favorite Capcom illustrations. And with that, I'm gonna go to sleep now ok bye


Edit: Whoa, hey, I just realized this Thursday is the NGPC's 10th anniversary. So, um, pretend this is an anniversary retrospective that I deliberately posted today for the sake of timing.

category: games, gamespite | forums | thirteen comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 11.1

02 August 09 | 07:19 | Posted by:

The post-per-day format seems to be doing fairly well for us, so I'm considering keeping it going. At the very least, doling out the articles one at a time seems to elicit more interest in each one around the Internet. So that's cool. Certainly this format is a big help while I'm on vacation, and since I'll be on an aeroplane above the American heartland when this entry goes live I guess we'll keep it rolling on through the end of this issue's material (and, incidentally, it's probably the only way all this content will see the light of day before Quarterly #2 arrives). I'll still be blogging here, though, so it's not as though GameSpite.net is just mutating into a mass of warmed-over content. I just haven't had much opportunity to write lately. My vacation has turned out to be four days solid of babysitting tiny monsters masquerading as a nephew and niece, thus I'll probably have more time for personal endeavors once vacation is over. Ah, adulthood.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
It's fitting, I think, that just as the Game Boy's moment of glory was its brilliantly inventive take on the Zelda franchise, so too is this Game Boy-centric issue's highlight Nicola Nomali's exhaustive elegy to the game. Set aside ten minutes of your life today to let the Wind Fish's mystery transport you.

category: games, gamespite | forums | nine comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 10.5

01 August 09 | 08:42 | Posted by:

Game Boy Camera
Hey, well howsabout that. This week's Monday update is finally finished. And only five days late! We wrap this thinly-spread chunklet with Calorie Mate's really great look back at the Game Boy Camera. For something that sticks in my mind as such an iconic element of Game Boy history, it's weird to think it was released as late as 1998. Zany.

category: games, gamespite | forums | five comments | §