5/19/02

Yes! No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks... and best of all, plenty of time to update The Gameroom Blitz. Now that all my college courses for the semester are finished, I've got plenty of time to work on not only this site, but a new one that should be available in another couple of months. I'm finally confident enough about my artwork to start an on-line portfolio, and I think you're gonna like what I'll have available on Rogue's Gallery. In addition to THAT, I'll be doing more comics and drawings for Chris Farrington's site and helping a couple of friends design an intense shooter that hearkens back to the good old days, when video games were all action and no pointless filler. What the heck, as long as I'm making plans, maybe I'll even spend some time at the college gym, working on losing all the weight I gained over the winter. Heh heh, dare to dream, right? :D

Anyway, since I've been gone for so long, I guess I owe you guys a pretty big update. Fortunately, I've been squeezing in the occasional game between finals, and my contributors have been really generous over the past month, so it shouldn't be a problem. In fact, now that I have all of these MAME discs, I'm thinking of starting a brand new section devoted to arcade emulation. There are just so many games to talk about, including dozens with characters, themes, and play mechanics so strange I'm amazed they were released at all. Take Puchi Carat, the Breakout/Bust-A-Move hybrid overflowing with cute, sometimes barely dressed anime characters. It's pretty, it's sooo pretty, but the somewhat random gameplay prevents you from playing strategically (and what good is a versus puzzler if you can't plan your moves in advance?). Then there was Dangun Feveron, the shooter that thinks it's a dance and rythm game. Nevertheless, it is excellent... nothing's ever going to top Radiant Silvergun but this comes a lot closer than the dozens of cookie-cutter Raiden/Aero Fighters clones available for MAME. Twin Cobra 2 was a fantastic shooter, too... the gameplay itself was fairly standard, but it has some of the most effective scaling effects I've ever seen. Your helicopter will change altitudes at certain points in each round, and it's very exciting to watch your chopper cut through clouds and race toward a city teeming with enemies. Finally (well, not REALLY finally, because there are too many games available for MAME to talk about them all here), there was a rather odd title that took place on a circuit board. You played as a little spark, trying to reach the end of the circuit while blasting resistors and avoiding other sparks. Great... it's like I'm taking my unbelievably dull Intro to Electricity class all over again.

I've been doing a little collecting too, a hobby that's been facilitated by the incredible prices at Blockbuster Video. As much as I hate to praise a company that's owned by Viacom, I have to give them credit for slashing the prices of their overstocked games to lows even my local pawn shops couldn't hope to top. "Wow, what a difference", indeed! I didn't think I needed a copy of Konami Krazy Racers, but at $6.99 there was no way I could resist it (by the way, it's actually a pretty good kart racer, even if Konami's characters were the last ones I'd imagine in a game like this). Dreamcast games were even more ludicrously cheap, averaging about five dollars a pop... if they were priced any lower than that Blockbuster may as well have thrown them away. Naturally, I was drawn straight to the Capcom fighters on the shelves and took those home... I didn't really want Street Fighter III: Third Strike before, but a five dollar price tag tends to change one's mind really quickly about a purchase. The same goes for Power Stone 2, although after playing a half hour of this frustrating button masher I'm starting to wonder if I should have just left it alone and bought Spiderman instead. Oh well, I can always make more trips down there, and I strongly recommend that you do as well. You'll be really surprised at what you'll find... quite happily surprised if you're a Dreamcast or Game Boy Advance fan. I've heard rumors of really cheap Playstation 2 games, too (how does ten dollars for Maximo strike you? Yeah, that's what I thought...), but by the time I went down there all they had left was a less than generously priced State of Emergency. You'd better head to your local Blockbuster sooner than possible if you want any hope of getting the best Playstation 2 games for a great price.

Now it's time for a few retractions (pan camera to the gun pointing at Jess's head). Even though I didn't mention any names, the friend referred to at the end of my last post insisted that I take back what I said about him, making a veiled threat that we would no longer be friends if I failed to comply. So, I've drawn a line through the offending comment. I hope that's enough, because said "friend" has been treating me quite poorly lately and I don't feel like bending over backwards to satisfy him. If he responds with more threats, they'll just go in my junk mail folder along with the bank account transfer schemes, herbal Viagra ads, and all the other useless crap I don't read.