Fan dancers

For some reason I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else. I don't like this. It's like even the old school gamers don't care any more. Mai is in KOF Sky Stage. This brings the cast up to five. Kyo, Athena, Iori, Kula, and now Mai. I suspect the roster is going for a boy/girl equal split, so I'm guessing we'll be seeing another guy get revealed next week. My money is on K', after his snubbing in XII. Also, the official page got updated to resemble something proper, with a story, character, system, and movie sections. I was always taking this whole thing with a huge grain of salt, but after seeing the Mai movie, and most importantly hearing the music therein, I'm on board 100%. Let's go King Of Fighters shooting.

Bayotainment

Le's do dis video game shit right.

(Why is the SnP 2 arrival so muted? This is a Treasure game people, TREASURE. The guys who made Gunstar Heroes. I seriously hope the kids these days can appreciate the significance of this, otherwise I quit gaming.)

EX Turbo + α

Hori seems to be refreshing their product lines for the upcoming holiday season. Of particular interest to me are their joypad controllers. I already have the original EX Turbo pad, which is a great arcade controller, but has some oddly designed components tacked on to make it a more universal peripheral.

Hori,

I can whole heartedly promise you that I will never, ever try to play Call Of Duty using one of your controllers. Therefore there is no need for you to tack on analog components on something that will only ever be used as a digital input device. No sticks, no triggers. I hope you can remedy the situation by the time the EX Turbo 3 pad comes out.

Love, me.

In the mean time I'll be picking up a EX Turbo 2 pad, wonky analog sticks and all. Interestingly, Hori seems to be making an effort to push their peripherals in America too. The pads, as well as several sticks, are listed on amazon.com, with an availability date of November 23 for the EX pad 2. Play-Asia also has the pads up for pre-oreder, but with a December date. Also of note seems to be region specific color variants. Japan will get a white and black controller, while Americans will be black and blue. Curious, and a little annoying. Now I have to decide which color to get and from which vendor.

Retract the roof

It doesn't happen very often, but I'm glad when it does, since it usually means something is better then I anticipated. Such is the case with Ikkitousen Eloquent Fist. After spending more time with this one then all my other PSP games combined, I'm forced to retract my earlier statements, and am going to go out on a limb and call it a "good game." Source material notwithstanding, it actually is a wholly competent entry into the long-neglected, often maligned, beat'em'up genre. It even manages to innovate a little. (Keeping it 2D helps a lot, too.) Let's face it, most of these games are pretty shallow. Starting with the grand daddy of 'em all, Final Fight; walk to the right and mash the A button to perform a short, multi-hit combo; repeat until everyone is dead. Keeping with tradition, each character in EF has a simple, multi-hit combo just like always. But now they also have a second attack button to mix things up with, in addition to a crowd-control attack button. (There's also a jump, but it's really just for show.) This in itself isn't very surprising. Most of these are standard features in modern 3D action games. What put me over the edge was that the a character's attack strings aren't set in stone. You aren't dialing in a combo over and over like so many modern games, but chaining attacks, so you can improvise the order as you see fit. It may not always string together, but you always have that option. For example, let's say a simple combo is A-A-A-A. A stronger variation would be A-A-A-B. This is pretty much standard in all action games today. What Ikkitousen does here that sets it apart from those games, and puts it closer to 2D fighters like KOF is the option for a string consisting of A-B-B-A. Since stronger attacks tend to knock an opponent down or away from the player, such a string would leave the enemy standing, and therefore vulnerable to further attacks. The freedom to improvise, combined with the varied properties of the attacks (knock-up, knock-down, etc.), as well as the multitude of characters available, all differing from each other in attack speed and combo strings, give Ikkitousen Eloquent Fist a surprising amount of depth. Much more so then all of Capcom's and Konami's games combined. I am surprised by this Marvelous, and I apologize for calling your game shit at first. I look forward to the sequel.

Last time on...

I just noticed the last thing I posted about were Sting's new games. What the hell Japan? Give me something new to write about. No, Toshihiro Nagoshi's Playface doesn't count, for fuck's sake. First, some new Hexyz Force characters. I don't feel the designs in this game are up to Sting's usual quality. They're all so un-interesting looking. Not to mention these anthropomorphic cats remind me of that snore-fest Jeanne D'Arc. The music is still fantastic, so I'll make sure to pick up at least that disc when it hits. Then we have some Yggdra Unison stuff. Not the least of which is the Flash applet embedded in the right-hand column of this blog. It'll randomly pick a movie to stream, a trailer, or a gameplay demo, so click it a few times. Today they've revealed a few of the "rival" characters that will face off against the "heroes." People like that bum, Izanagi against Milanor, or that shady priest against that other mounted knight (Gordon, thx Gamefaqs). Watching some of the movies in the embedded Flash applet actually made me a bit weary. This is a brand new game, with brand new contrivances to put up with. It better have a brand new pay-off when it's through, or it might not be worth it for long time Yggdra fans. How about a feature where I can plug my Yggdra Union GBA cart into the DS, containing the cleared save file, which will just unlock everything in Unison? C'mon Sting, give a guy a break. Also, I see that Pamela has been made a regular cast member now. Gre~at...

Back in my day

Man, I'm slow. Either that or lazy. You pick one. In any event, this week is Christmas for some reason. A ton of retail and downloadable stuff is dropping all over the world. I just got a shipping confirmation for Tekken 6 and Nostalgia from amazon.com, and just authorized my credit card company to allow a charge from Play-Aisa that covers Baynoetta and Sin and Punishment 2. I decided to import that one to match my "import" VC release. Hopefully the Euro Agarest Senki gets delayed a week, or I'm gonna have to sell some organs to pay the rent. Anyone need a slightly used liver? Act now, it ain't getting any better, that's for sure. Next week is a return to normalcy, with 3D Dot Game Heroes hitting Japanese stores. I believe that we're finally at a point in time where I can safely sit back and wait for one of the multitude of niche US localizers to pick this one up and bring it over. Likely in a timely fashion too, like Spring of 2010. You kids have it easy these days, when I was your age we had to wait years and get half-assed translations, with grammatical and spelling errors and stuff, oh, and content would sometimes be cut out completely, and... what was I talking about again?

Oh, I get it

Finally, the point of Sting's partnership with Atlus is clear. Atlus has money allocated for marketing purposes. First, here's a bunch of pre-order bonuses for Hexyz Force. Not really sure what they're supposed to be; phone cards, post cards? Whatever they are, they have pictures of the game's gals doing things they normally wouldn't do. Good enough for me. In addition to that, Atlus went all out with a promotional site hosted by famitsu.com. I'm not sure what that means, since those are usually bought up by foreign (American) publishers looking to sell their shit to the Japanese public. I hope it's not a sign of weak confidence in the game's quality, it's starting to grow on me.

Then we switch gears to Yggdra Unison. Here's a PV showing of a little of how the game works. Looks like a tower defense/real-time strategy/sudoku hybrid(?). Oh Sting, you crazy funsters. The music alone is worth the click-through, buying this one day one. There was also a revelation recently of a new, secret character, who will join under special circumstances. I don't know who it is, an her design looks generic, but at least it shows that this game already has more backing the the original cellphone incarnation. Yggdra needs to be an anime Atlus, get on it.

If it ain't broken, break it

I picked this up last week after noticing that the field environments were turned into static 2D maps in the upcoming Persona 3 Portable. Too bad, since everything else about that game looked to be a major improvement over the PS2 game. (Alternate main character, full user control over party members.) I did play a little bit of this one (trying to finish P1 first), but I never got the sense that the battle system is completely broken, like I did when reading up on it. Computer controlled AI is a huge minus, on paper, but in practice it seems to work well enough. After all, the biggest problem artificial AI has is that it's usually dumb as a brick, hitting an ice monster with an ice spell, when there is a perfectly good fire spell in its magic arsenal. Not so here, on one of the rare occasions when the AI controlled characters were allowed to move, they actually exploited the enemy's weakness. I hope this was by design, and not just dumb luck. The attack the character used also happened to be the strongest special ability. This fills me with hope that future encounters on higher levels of difficulty (I haven't even made it to the 5th floor of the dungeon) will go relatively smoothly. I still want the PSP version for the added content, and it seems I should keep this one around for the stuff that was cut out. So much for the definitive version, eh Atlus? Maybe you can combine both and release it on the PS3 next year.

Black Tue, Thrs, & Fri.

This week is a blank slate. I should probably not be picking up things of questionable quality and merit, though, since next week looks like financial death. Not only are over priced games dropping in all regions, I actually have a DVD or two I should pick up. Brilliant strategy guys. I don't get it, do your products disappear from stores never to return if left sitting on a shelf for a month? Why couldn't you release the Claymore box or Nostalgia set in September? Or better yet, _this_ week? The week of October 26th sees Nostalgia, and Tekken 6 here, while Japan gets Bayonetta, Sin and Punishment 2, along with the Tekken. Then, just for laughs, Europe decided to not only localize Agarest Senki, but release a LE for $80. In addition, Ryuhei Kitamura decided to direct an anime sometime ago, which Bandai Namco decided to put out on R2 DVD next week. Not to be outdone in the bonehead move department, Funimation decided to take all the Claymore discs that are already out, stick 'em in a cardboard sleeve, and release the "box set." I don't even want to start adding up all this stuff. Baynoetta alone is $80. Damn, I know Sega needs the money, but come on, It doesn't even come with the art book, you got to buy that separately.

Exciting shooting girls

G-Mode put up a new game on Japan's cellphone game portals. Gekimusume is split between Red and Blue variants, each focusing on a different character, possibly based around the concept of catching 'em all. No idea what it is you're supposed to collect, but there's a gallery to show it off. I promised you marginal updates, didn't I?

The world ends with the cat girl

Since I've been ignoring this place over the past week, I feel I should pad this update with some marginally relevant posts. Steins;Gate came out last Thursday for the Xbox 360 in Japan. That still is somewhat of an uncommon event to see an exclusive 360 game in Japan, especially one directly aimed at the domestic market. I have this odd feeling that that may change very soon, though. There's a demo up on XBLM, which is now available to silver members.

The game is set in the same world as Chaos;Head, and deals with similar subjects, while making the story up as they go along. This one will require not only full Japanese reading skills, but also the ability to comprehend just what the hell is supposed to be going on. With the rising popularity of "very Japanese" entertainment in recent years (Persona series, The World Ends With You), I could easily see someone taking a shot at a localization. Especially since this one, more so then other recent ADV games could go over well with the American anime/Sci Fi/Xbox audience. It'll never sell millions, but it could be a success, especially if it gets distributed digitally via Xbox Live, for example. I hope someone else has the same idea.

Knights in fairyland

Hexyz Force will get an OST on November 18th, a week after the game hits stores. It's composed by Shigeki Hayashi, who kicked ass with Knights In the Nightmare, despite the game's best efforts against it. I'll probably pick this up and wait for the US localization, which will probably come with its own version of the OST, with better arrangement. This one will have 54 tracks, span two discs, and cost ¥3,150. If he's working on Hexyz Force, who's doing the music for Yggdra Unison?

It's good until they screw up the port

Examu announced the return of Arcana Heart yesterday. They began the media campaign for the cleverly titled Arcana Heart 3 by confirming that three of the characters from past games will be returning in this installment, along with their respective Arcana. If they're going to expressly state the obvious a piece at a time each week, this game will be out next November. Or maybe they'll take a page out of SNK's book and release the game before completing the media campaign, and continue to announce characters after everyone's played the game already. Listen, Arcana Heart isn't that big of a deal. Here's a Protip: "Everybody from the first two games will be returning. Please look forward to new characters and further announcements." Done. I look forward to the Wii port.

I'll drink to that

D3 was kind enough to let every one know that Tamsoft's upcoming craptastic Exorsister has been renamed, and made part of the Simple 2500 series, meaning that it'll cost about $25 at retail. Awesome! Crap games at a low price, everybody wins. It was also delayed from November 19th, to December 23rd. Boo~! On top of that it will have some generically shitty anime on the box when it hits. The art in the game has thankfully been kept the same. What the fuck? This ain't gonna be no masterpiece D3, don't keep us in suspense here. I hope the extra time will be used to add drinking and dancing minigames to go along with the Dream Club cosplay.

Shiro Catz

Gotta get ready for that Tatsunoko VS Capcom Ultimate All-Stars and Super Street Fighter IV. The Classic Controller Pro was actually smaller then I expected. It's the exact same size and also feels the same as the original, just with hand grips. The buttons, d-pad, and sticks are also identical. The biggest change are the shoulder buttons, which are now laid out like a Dual Shock controller. It takes about three seconds to get use to the new layout. The only downside I can find is that cheaper plastic used for the underside of the controller. The top is still the shiny, high-grade stuff Nintendo loves so much, but the underside feels like a Chinese knock-off. The pad is also lighter then the original CC. The hand grips do make it a lot more comfortable for fighters, like Tatsucap, and don't take anything away from games like Muramasa. A worthwhile upgrade, at the right price.

The MadCatz pad is all Catz, all the time. It's actually decent. The d-pad and buttons are large and loose, making it feel a little like the bastard child of a Saturn pad, and an ASCII pad. It is surprisingly large in area, but fairly thin. It also has rubber grips on the sides and bottom. It works very well for what it was designed, Street Fighter, and well enough for other fighters. I could play KOF and Garou without any trouble. The problem with this one is the placement and size of the Start button. I think that Start is a pretty important button myself, but maybe the mad cats don't agree. It's small and uncomfortably out of the way. It's also very close to the X-bubble button. The plastic and build quality are pretty cheap here, but feel solid enough in one's hand. I'll actually have to take it into a real game of Street Fighter to give it a proper stress test, but if it can hold up under extended use, this one could be a wholly acceptable pad. Interestingly, I heard about this from Famitsu and got it from Play-Asia, but the packaging and paperwork has no Japanese or other languages on it, just English.

Slow week is slow

The only thing I had planned on picking up this week was the Asian version of Magna Carta II. Well there goes that plan, since Play-Asia just sent out an email letting me know that the release date has been changed from "October 13th" of just "October." It would seem that October 13th was the US date, which is still on track, and Play-Asia assumed the Asian version would ship at the same time. If they're assuming all this, how am I supposed to know that an Asian version even exists? Let's not forget Armored Core For Answer. Luckily, the game is pretty low on my radar. The only other release this week is Stein's Gate for the 360 in Japan. It's a sort-of big deal for 5pb, but I have no intention of picking it up. The art is nice though. Next week is a blank slate. Back to Persona 1 on the PSX for me.

The ring of fire: As usual, due to the collective failure of the North American distribution system, I can't know what comes out until it's on store shelves practically. And it would seem all the action is in the West this week. PS360 gets Brutal Legend, and Way Of the Samurai 3 (from two different publishers?). Even the Wii gets in on the action with an update to A Boy And His Blob. And just for laughs, Ju-On. Then on Friday assorted digital distribution systems will take virtual delivery of Machinarium, which is supposed to be really good.

Loose lips sink ships

It's been a while since I last visited the neo-geo.com forums. Apparently the last time was before May of this year, since that is when they put up an exclusive interview with SNK's GM of Overseas Marketing, conducted by forum members in December '08. Once upon a time neo-geo.com was the epicenter of SNK activity outside of Japan, nowadays, not so much. It even became the defacto SNK-USA during SNK's bankruptcy and restructuring, becoming the only official source for English language releases of the last few Neo Geo home console releases. It's cool to see them still functioning in that capacity, at a much slower pace, much like SNK themselves. The interview is mostly fluff, but one thing did immediately catch my eye. The guy basically spilled the beans on KOF Sky Stage, jokingly mentioning that "maybe we'll make a KOF shooting game." (The interview was unfortunately posted after Microsoft announced the game during their showcase, though.) The other bit of note is him basically shooting down fanboy's hopes for the return of G-Mantle. Although after his cameo in DokiMajou Plus, I wouldn't put too much stock in that claim holding true. Old school SNK represent.

Get it over with

After nearly a year I finally saw the credits roll in Persona 4. I did take over six months off from it, but that's part of the point. I got the bad ending, which pretty much was the game getting tired of playing itself, and my total play time was a little over 90 hours. I may, or may not, try to go back and load my file to try to get a different ending, but I sure as hell will never play through this game again.

The problem with Persona 4 is that it's too damn long, because it's actually three games in one. There's the standard RPG part with dungeons, recycled enemies, equipment and magic spells. There's the ADV/school life part with dates and inane conversations. Then there's the murder mystery with crime scenes, clues, and detective work. All three parts are involving, and time consuming, and they all get in each others way. Having fun hanging out with your friends from school, up pops a dead body to mess things up. Getting close to figuring out who's the killer, well now you have to slog through a randomly generated dungeon and kill the giant spider boss to get to him. That last part is by far the weakest point of Persona 4. The RPG element is bare-bones and boring, but at the same time the most time consuming. I'd guess that 2/3 of my time was spent crawling through the randomly generated dungeons while inappropriate techno music played in the background. If the RPG part was taken out of P4, it would still be just as enjoyable, if not more so. Conversely , if the developers put some thought into designing the levels, as well as trimming the unnecessary padding, it would halve the time required to complete, and likewise would increase the enjoyment of the player. P4 is the rambling Director's Cut that keeps going off on tangents before finally stumbling into a conclusion because even the director is getting tired. I once heard that Atlus had no plans for a Maniax revision because they put everything the wanted into the original game. Well I'd suggest they release P4 Maniax with half the shit cut out of it, as the definitive version of the game. Maybe next year on the PSP.

In the time I took off from P4 I finished, among other things, Final Fantasy XII, clocking in at over 100 hours. The difference is that the time I spent in FF flew by so effortlessly I never paid it any mind until I noticed the play time of my save file was over 90 hours. I started watching the clock in P4 at around the half way mark. Never a good sign.

Paranoid Odroid

Attention Wonderswan devs, start porting all your shit, NOW.

The art of storytelling.

Nothing going on this week either. It's so slow, in fact, that I put on Enchant Arm yesterday to keep myself occupied. Stop laughing, it's a good game. It actually helps if you think of it as less of an RPG, and more of an ADV game. I played for an hour, and 40 of those minutes were spent in conversation. Where's my sequel From? Next week barely sees some new stuff. Magna Carta II hits the 360 in English. That's it. Everything else I had marked down was delayed. Not surprisingly, both releases were in Western territories. UK distributors are just as bad as US ones it seems.

Alive or dead?

Due to the Ninja Gaiden Σ 2 hype, I've been in a Tecmo mood. So I went to my game shelf and realized that the only Dead Or Alive games I have are the Beach Volleyball ones. That's sort of weak sauce, so it was off to eBay to pick up the games I never owned, and/or sold in the past. I have played each game extensively, which is why the realization that I never actually owned any of them was such a surprise. So, $80 later, we have here the entire DOA series on Xbox. Thankfully, I don't think I have it in me to go back to the Saturn for the original. (Which reminds, why the hell isn't Beach Volleyball 1 backwards compatible on 360?) I mainly wanted to play through 2, since that's the one I had the least exposure to, unless you count seeing it everyday behind the glass in the store where I bought my Dreamcast games. I popped it in, watched the opening animation, and turned it off.* There was really little need to go on, since the intro pretty much explained the entire DOA story, unless you really wanted to know what Bayman's deal is. Popped 3 in for a minute, and was shocked at how good it looked. This was practically a Xbox launch title. This is why Team Ninja were held in such high regard for their tech back then. Looks better than 4, frankly. 4 I got just to have. I picked it up on release, but got rid of it when I got the NTSC-J 360 thanks to region locks. This means that I have to unlock everything again. Probably not gonna happen. Tried playing 1, couldn't get past the third guy, gave up. Everything is status quo in DOA land.

*Not really. Played a few rounds. Realized it doesn't support an arcade stick explicitly, even though 3 did. My Hori stick still worked though, but the button layout had to be rejiggered.

(Confession time: I've had the DOA movie on DVD for the longest time, but could never bring myself to watch it. I don't think I'm ready for it just yet.)

By-the-numbers

TGS was boring this year, mainly since SNK wasn't there. They didn't feel the need to show up since they're only releasing one game in the near future, Samurai Spirits Sen. Therefore I'm sure they'd appreciate if you watched this trailer. Nothing really new here. The only addition to the home port are playable boss characters. As by-the-numbers as a home port can get. I hope the Japanese version has all the blood from the US version locked away. I'd hate to have to buy this twice. This has been as by-the-numbers as a post can get. Thank you for reading.

Barrier breached

Looks like someone at Arcsy found their spellchecker. Too bad, leaving it in would have assured certain victoly. In any case, there will be an additional new guy in Continuum Shift. Looks like Johny with knives. Name's Hazama, and his symbol looks like some sort of beetle. I'm not to thrilled with these new characters for some reason. This guy, and Tsubaki (last week's new addition) just feel like they're missing something. Maybe it's the levels of polish that the original crew got. These new guys feel more like the old Guilty Gear rejects. Slap some animation frames together, and call it a day. Speaking of GG, where have I seen this before? They can't even re-color it to look like night time, since they pulled that one in #Reload. At least mirror it or some shit, really. Whatever, game's a long way off, hopefully things will be made up to snuff before I have to pull out my $70.