11/26/03

The Dan Hibiki tribute page has been updated!  Special thanks go to Kao Megura for his assistance.

I don't have much else to say, so I'll just wish all my readers a happy Thanksgiving.  Oh wait, there IS one other thing I wanted to get off my chest.  Does Viewtiful Joe remind anyone else of Bud Bundy, the sarcastic, sex-crazed teen from Married... With Children?  I sure get that Rapmaster B vibe from him whenever he's not wearing his spandex.

11/24/03

I've moved into my new apartment, and I'm getting used to it... but my computer hasn't.  It's been acting up lately, giving me general protection faults errors and freezing during the boot up process.  It looks like I'll have to take it into work and figure out just what the trouble is, because I have an unsettling feeling that it will only get worse if the problem goes unresolved.

Anyway, I was just thinking... there's still a lot of confusion as to who created the Pac-Man series, thanks largely to Midway's taking all the credit for them back in the early 1980's.  Look at any Pac-Man arcade machine manufactured during that time and you won't find a single mention of Namco, despite the fact that it was actually the company that created the game.  Now that Namco's distributing Pac-Man worldwide, they should clear up the confusion that Midway had created by putting stickers on the fronts of all those old Pac-Man arcade machines.

Don't mind me... I'm just babbling.  Anyway, there's new content on Advance Theory and a full review of SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos on the review page.  Check it out!

11/18/03

I'm currently preoccupied with moving so you won't see many updates from me this week.  Fortunately, I do have a special treat that ought to keep the delays a little more, er, bearable... a guest drawing of Byron from Kiken, the editor of Dodge the Bullet.  By the way, DtB is a really cool site if you're into shooters... Kiken concentrates on a single game and offers all the information you could possibly want about it, including pictures, replays, and a detailed review.

11/15/03

My recommendation for the day is Double Dragon Advance, Atlus's resurrection of the  wildly popular fighting game from the 80's.  Once you start playing, it quickly becomes obvious that this isn't just a straight port of the original arcade title.  Double Dragon Advance borrows ideas from the previous games in the series to offer the player more rounds, more characters, and more technique.

I was never a big Double Dragon fan... I always preferred Final Fight for its bigger, brighter graphics and faster gameplay.  However, Atlus improved the game so much when they brought it to the Game Boy Advance that I can't help but recommend it over the relatively untouched Final Fight One.

11/13/03

I've finally played SNK vs. Capcom.  As I mentioned earlier on my Livejournal, it's a solid game, but nothing exceptional... if you already own Capcom vs SNK 2 there's no reason to spend three hundred dollars on this.  However, it does finally give me a reason to update the Dan Hibiki tribute page.  I'll start work on that once I get permission from one-time contributor Kao Megura to use portions of his SNK vs. Capcom move list on the site.

Before I go, I've got a question for SNK.  Why has Bao suddenly taken up residence inside Hugo's hair!?

11/11/03

The great thing about this hobby is that no matter how much you THINK you know, there's always something new to learn.  For instance, did you know that the popular party game Bomberman first debuted in 1983, several years before the NES version was released?  Furthermore, the plump little robots everyone's come to associate with the series are nowhere to be found in the original game.  Heck, there isn't even a versus mode!  However, it does share one thing in common with the later games in the series... the bombs.  They're pretty much the same as you remember them, still spreading fire in four directions and still dangerous to the player if they're carelessly dropped onto the playfield.  I've included a side-by-side comparison of the original Bomberman to one of its more modern counterparts, just to demonstrate how much the series has evolved since it first premiered twenty years ago.

Here's another big surprise.  The underappreciated but always fun to play Buster Bros. series wasn't originally conceived by Capcom... Hudson came up with its basic play mechanics for a computer game called Cannon Ball, also released in 1983.  I'm not sure how Capcom got its hands on the rights to this game, but it was probably for the best, as Buster Bros. is a great deal more advanced and fun to play than the game that inspired it.  These pictures illustrate just how far the game has come since its humble beginning on the MSX computer.

Finally, it appears that Fatal Fury may not be the first game in the long-running South Town series after all.  Prior to the creation of the Neo-Geo, SNK dipped its toe into the fighting game genre with Street Smart.  It doesn't look like the game has anything in common with Fatal Fury, but listen to the soundtrack and you'll hear more than a few similarities.  Here's the first round theme song from Street Smart, and the South Beach theme from Fatal Fury.  They're pretty much the same, huh?  It makes me wonder if there are any OTHER ties between both games that we may have missed...

11/6/03

Well, I'm back from a two day seminar on cellular phones.  That doesn't sound especially exciting... and quite frankly, it wasn't.  However, since the seminar took place in a movie theatre, I got to play some great games in its arcade on my lunch and coffee breaks.  Games like:

SIMPSONS PINBALL PARTY:  Oh, what a difference ten years makes!  The first pinball game with the Simpsons license, released in the early 90's by Data East, was based on early episodes of the series, so like them, it wasn't that funny... well, unless you just couldn't get enough of Bart saying "Eat My Shorts".  In that case, you've never seen anything more hilarious than this.  Furthermore, the gameplay didn't really heat up until you activated the multiball feature.  Fortunately, Simpsons Pinball Party has more targets, more characters, and more of the humor people have come to expect from newer episodes of the show.  My only gripe is with the game's merciless difficulty.  I witnessed and personally experienced a half dozen drainers that occured less than ten seconds after the ball was put into play.  Also, the playfield is perhaps a little too extravagantly designed for its own good, with a secondary LED display and a large bust of Homer that rotates jerkily whenever the ball hits it.  The only thing these doodads really enhance is the price, which is why you'll be very lucky to find this table anywhere other than a exorbitantly priced theatre in a big city like Grand Rapids.

ZERO GUNNER 2:  Psikyo's known for its shooters... but it's also known for well-intentioned but flawed play mechanics.  This overhead shooter, featuring a trio of helicopters which can spin to face their enemies head-on, is a perfect example.  The concept had potential, but most of that potential is ruined due to a limited control system that cheats the player out of the precision they need to battle the swarms of jets and towering bosses.  You have to hold a button to turn your helicopter, and while you're turning, you can't dodge bullets or attack.  If the designers had included a dial controller or extra joysticks, Zero Gunner 2 would have been a lot more fast-paced and fun.  Without them, this shooter is too awkward to enjoy fully.

STAR WARS TRILOGY:  This is an older title by Sega that tries to capture all the exciting scenes from the first three (or should I say last three?) Star Wars films.  That's a lot to ask from just one game, and it becomes more and more clear as you continue to play that the designers couldn't handle it all.  The first round is fantastic... it's a polygonal redesign of the original Star Wars arcade game with a heart pounding conclusion inside the trench of the Death Star.  The second round, however, lacks the urgency of the first, and throws in a scenerio that's like Virtua Cop but with 100% more Stormtroopers and 100% fewer light guns.  The next round is a frustrating forest run on a Lightspeeder which drains your energy quickly with constant tree collisions and attacks from the always present Stormtroopers.  If you can survive (or have enough quarters), you'll move on to a climactic sword battle with a beautifully rendered Darth Vader, which somehow makes the annoyance of the previous two rounds worthwhile.  Overall, it's a pretty good game, but a little too ambitious.  It's tough enough to get all the action from ONE Star Wars film into a video game, let alone three.

I also played with a digital photo booth from a company called Zuvo.  I can't recall the name of the booth, but I know I wasn't that impressed with it.  I could do most of the same things with my home computer and digital camera, without having to put up with a silly, scantly-clad bimbo with a high-pitched, thickly accented voice.  Anyway, here's what happened when I put three bucks into the machine...

It was a pretty hollow "victoly" if you ask me.  The photo booth didn't even bother to erase all of the blue screen draped behind me!  I do like the graphic, although I can't help but think that I've seen it somewhere before...

11/3/03

I can't think of much to rant about right now, so I hope you'll be satisfied with the six new reviews I just posted on the Game Boy Advance page.  Hopefully I'll have an update for tomorrow that's a little less half-assed than this one.