Recently while doing a bit of research I came across what is possibly the strangest Game Boy Color accessories out there: the Singer IZEK bundle. To be frank, I've seen a lot of odd Game Boy accessories out there, but this one was so unusual and expensive that I felt I had to share it with you all.
For $399 you get the IZEK sewing machine, a special GBC link cable, and a GBC cart that "contains stitch pattern designs. The Game Boy's on-screen menu will guide you through all the functions you need to make sewing fun and easy."
 
Here's the features as listed on the website found at http://sewandserge.com/se...s&brand=Singer&model=IZEK:
* LOWEST PRICE GUARANTEED!
* Select stitches have length, width and mirror image adjustment capabilities
* Five buttonhole styles
* Letters (block, script or outline format), numbers and symbols
* Combine up to three stitches for combination patterns
* Create your own custom stitches
* Favorite patterns, letters and custom designs can be saved in memory
* Menu displays information in English, French or Spanish
* 84 actual stitch patterns
* 25 Year Manufacturers Warranty
* FREE Shipping
As a collector, there's a tiny part of me that would love to have the cartridge just to say I have it. But you have to draw the line somewhere. I am however extremely interested to know if anybody out there has ever seen one of these in person, and can maybe explain how the Game Boy Color connectivity is even useful.
During every Castlevania title, from the NES original to each anticipated portable release of the last few years, one thought has permeated my time and enjoyment of the series:
'I am never moving to Romania.'
One thought that actually never popped into my head?
'What would make these games even more awesome is if six players could speen-run through a montage of levels from previous games.'
Oh, and 'Shanoa is vapid and soulless and somehow still endearing and attractive.' I never thought that. Ever. Moving on.
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We Castlevania fans were all hyped when the series was announced for XBLA, as a good modern console 2D version has been as rare as that last item drop you've waited hours for. Then it was announced that this new incarnation would:
a.) Be six stages long, with a half-hour timer on each
b.) Be comprised of characters, enemies, stages, and everything else from the last six GBA/DS titles
c.) Not have traditional RPG-lite character leveling
d.) Would feature 6 player co-op play
e.) Would cost 15 bucks worth of Microsoft's imaginary funny money.
Put together, this starts throwing up red flags all over the place. How would a standard 'Metroidvania' game that thrives off exploration and atmosphere work as a fast-paced attack-spamming teamwork based action-platformer? It seems counter intuitive to what the series' fans have come to expect. And indeed, many Castlevania fans will skip this one altogether with only thoughts of vague disappointment over 'what could have been.'
I'm such a fan of the franchise I bought Castlevania Judgment, a game whose design could have worked but instead felt so disconnected it might as well have been Castlevania: DraKart Racers in the Night of Despair, so I approached with tepid caution. Could I just play this as a single player adventure at all? Is it too easy to blast through with six vampire killers? (The profession, not the mystical whip.) How do cleaned up sprites from a low resolution portable, some bordering on a decade old, look on an HD set? Will it be any fun? And most importantly, will this give me any juicy story elements for my Alucard-marries-Maria-while-a-lovelorn-Trevor-dies-of-a-broken-heart fanfiction?
Well, there aren't many straight answers over this one. (Except the last one, which is a solid no. I don't write fanfics, I leave that to Paul W.S. Anderson.) Let's get the biggest problems addressed right away:
First, there is no real narrative, no solid story, and no satisfactory explanation as to why the various protagonists from different centuries are gathered together for a slay-ride. Those assuming Harmony of Despair expands or even links together plot threats in the convoluted Castlevania time-line can give up on getting anything here.
Second, while single player gameplay is possible, it is clear the game design is for multiplayer. Big chunks of each level are difficult or even inaccessible with only one person, and the bosses are even worse. There is no scaling for player count; each enemy and boss deals and takes the same damage whether there are one or six heroes, leading some fights to be frustrating and even unfair. (I'm looking at you, stage 2 Puppet Master. You are evil even for a Castlevania villain.) There is fun to be had in single player, but it is much more limited.
Third, and this is directly connected to single player, is that there is no overall 'grinding' that the 'Metroidvania' type games are known for. Oh, there is certainly farming, but no characters 'level up' overall from repeated monster killing. The closest are Jonathan and Shanoa's secondary abilities gaining levels through consistent use (which does power up their respective main attacks.) The rest of the characters have to absorb spells (Charlotte) souls (Soma) learn magic attacks (Alucard) or just get lucky drops for equipment. For the majority of stats, the only improvement method is through better gear found in random (read: super rare) drops.
Fourth, even for multiplayer, the online setup is clunky. For a multiplayer experience designed to revolve around farming, players have to form a party before the host selects what level to play. If your Charlotte needs to farm Death's Scythe attack from level 5, you won't know if the new party you've joined has any intention of going there at all. Worse, the host can only select levels every party member has gotten to, so if you want to play on Hard mode (where all the best drops are) you just have to hope your entire party that randomly joined has also gotten there, and that the host wants it in the first place.
Fifth, if you're a fellow diehard fan of the series, you've already seen all of these graphics before. Sure, they look better now than ever, but part of the appeal of each new 2D Castlevania is the excellent art, sprite, and animation design. Every game in the series borrows some graphical elements from those before, but Harmony of Despair lifts each level wholesale from previous games and rearranges them into an extended remix.
Sixth, menu navigation and documentation are incredibly poor. 'Main Menu' is actually the character equip screen, you can only visit the menus at specific areas in-game, no pausing even in single player, and the game has countless important facets (say, how to level-up spells or use character abilities) that are not described or even mentioned. You practically have to learn by accident, experimentation, or Gamefaqs.
Seventh, (yes, seventh) no couch co-op!
Eighth, NO COUCH CO-OP!!?! Wha? C'mon, that's just lazy, stupid, stupid, greedy, or both. Wait...well, two at least. Sure, there would be some tug-o-war with the map zooming on the same screen, but no split screen or anything? Someone's trying to fleece de moneys out of each and every player.
Ninth, well, see seven and eight.
So why even bother paying $15 for what surely sounds like a bizarre failed experiment?
Simply because it can be a ton of fun.
I've already talked almost half a dozen friends who were on the fence or had no interest at all into buying what we all agreed was an overpriced game, and yet we can't stop playing! For all the missteps and technical issues, grabbing a crew and running through challenging platforming and traditional Castlevania combat just feels right. It isn't the same as a new 2d Castlevania, but instead a bizarre offshoot that yanks familiar mechanics, sights, and sounds, and congeals into a mutant Frankenstein monster that shouldn't be alive, yet sings and dances. Even playing online with strangers, something I rarely enjoy, has been an absolute blast. Almost every night I get messages, texts, or calls asking if I want to play. That hasn't happened since Halo 3.
It may have ultimately better fit an online mod some kids hacked together for the fun of it, but it actually works. There are some intelligent design decisions hidden in the clunky and under-documented interface, such as every player getting character specific drops when an item chest is opened, or the dual crush combos between different characters that can decimate certain bosses. Even the eclectic methods separating each character's farming needs means there are always reasons to go back to earlier levels with beginner parties. And even if they are from previous games, the controls, graphics, music, and effects are the same quality goods we've come to expect. Not superb, but definitely Castlevania.
The interest will fade, as it is a limited design. But our crew is having so much fun farming loot and making different character builds that for the time being it has been money well spent. Who would have thought?
What's next, an iPhone puzzle game based on Symphony of the Night?
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Oh. Nevermind.
Continue reading Unloved #16: Iggy's Reckin' Balls
So... it's now been over a year since I announced the RF Generation Podcast. That went... nowhere. Again, after chatting in the IRC room again, slackur brought up the question to me about just what happened. I had nothing but excuses. It's been in the back of my mind for a long time, but the excitement that he brought to the discussion reinvigorated my desire to podcast for this site. We are beginning the framework and some initial topics and scripts now, but feel it's time to officially...
REANNOUNCE THE RF GENERATION PODCAST!
To reiterate my previous blog post on this: this podcast is for you, the members. slackur and I will be your co-hosts. We will, eventually, have guests from the community as well.
Starting off, we're looking at bi-weekly episodes, but if it takes off (and we get good at this), we may move to a weekly schedule. slackur is working on some topics for us to start off with, but we're going to have a topic in the forums to take your reactions, your topic suggestions, or any other comments you may have about it.
Hopefully, it's not another year before a topic like this comes up and we hope to hear from you guys soon!
EDIT: Wanted to include a link to the new topic in the forums.
http://www.rfgeneration.c...m/index.php?topic=10730.0
I'm a longtime fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. The comic book and original cartoon was a big deal to me when I was young. I saw the original trilogy in the theaters. Not only did I have all three soundtracks, but I begged my parents to bring me to Pizza Hut so I could get the Coming Out Of Their Shells cassette as well. I had an air-conditioner box filled with the action figures. And luckily for me, there were a lot of video games based on the series. This is the first in a series of posts that will explore some of the titles related to the Game Boy Player Land blog. First up -- we'll take a look at the three Game Boy Advance games.
 
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was released by Konami in 2003. It was intended as a handheld port of the Gamecube game of the same title. Not surprisingly, the Game Boy Advance and the Gamecube games are completely different. While the Gamecube title was 3D, this one would be a sidescroller. It plays rather similar to some of the Game Boy Konami games from the series, though oddly it strays from the formula of the Ninja Turtle beat-em-ups that Konami had perfected in the arcades. However, this isn't to say the game is bad. It's a rather competent game that allows a good amount of playing time seeing as each turtle has his own levels to tackle. Konami being Konami also included several levels of other genres, such as switching to first person to keep things interesting. What's funny is that level-varying concept seems to be borrowed from the Battletoads games, which of course were a bit of a ripoff of the Ninja Turtles to begin with. Ultimately, the game isn't a classic, but it is worth a few bucks for the several hours you could sink it to it.
 
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus Konami used the same formula as the previous game, though seems to make everything a lot better. It's also a 2D take on the 3D Gamecube game of the same title, it allows each turtle to complete his own missions, and it throws in some other kinds of levels like Shmup-inspired ones to keep things fresh. However, it seems that to some degree this game just pulls everything off slightly better than the first. It's almost ineffable, but it just feels like a better and more perfected game. The controls are comfortable, the graphics and animations are great, and the music is good. Collectors should note that the first two games were reissued together on a single GBA cart as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Double Pack.
 
TMNT was released in 2007 to coincide with the CGI movie of the same title, and it's easily the best of the GBA games. Though it plays the closest to the Konami arcade games, this game was actually published by Ubisoft. Although the Gamecube version is a 3D game similar to the Konami ones, the GBA port is an old school brawler and completely worth checking out. The graphics are fantastic and will appeal to fans of the comic books, and the gameplay is pure classic arcade beatemup. This one is not to be overlooked!
I'm aware that there was a GBA Video release that contained a couple of episodes of the revival cartoon, but I've never bothered to pick this one up. Later posts will focus on the Game Boy and Gamecube Ninja Turtles games. But what did you all think of the Game Boy Advance releases?
As my game reviews of Small Worlds and Limbo have shown, I have a strong appreciation for a minimalist approach that focuses on just one or two key concepts, thus reflecting a represented idea's pure form. At first glance, it would seem that the shmup field (shoot-'em-up, space shooter, vertical/horizontal scroller, etc) seems to be one of the few classic genres still so relatively simple in concept and execution that to remove any more staple components would dilute the concept to a dull tedium. The barest form (Space Invaders, Asteroids) can be difficult to return to after introducing in-depth layers (Ikaruga, Cave bullet-hell survival, unique scoring methodology.) The oldest are fun for classic nostalgia and score contests, sure, but even Galaga had to layer a bit more complexity over Galaxian to become an industry stalwart.
Cue Hikoza T. Ohkubo's Warning Forever. A freeware PC shmup from 2003, Warning Forever is a perfect example of a talented 'indie' developer that refined a concept into a simple game with more polish, gameplay, and pure addictive quality than the import-heavy genre had seen in years. And to this day, it remains an incredibly fun testament to stripping down a game concept and just keeping what works.
In Warning Forever, there is only your ship avatar and a never-ending stream of boss ships, one at a time. 180 seconds on the clock. Each boss ship has various destroyable compartments and weapons. A destroyed boss ship core grants the player another 30 seconds added to the timer, and every player ship lost costs 20 seconds. No power-ups, no alternate player ships, and only one vulcan-like cannon on the player ship that can either dumb-fire forward or switch to a swiveling fire arc that moves opposite of the direction the player moves. The goal is as simple as it is intuitive: survive as long as possible.
While the initial setup is not really extraordinary, after destroying a few boss ships something notable occurs. If you blow up the front of the ship, the next one has more armor on the front. Killed by a missile launcher on the last boss? The next one will be bristling with missile pods. As each boss ship is destroyed, an artificial process of natural selection will enable the next to better counter your attack method.
In other words, when this-
Becomes THIS, its YOUR fault.
Soon, players will be targeting specific areas during different fights, knowing how to customize their own battles in reverse. Instead of the player ship advancing and leveling in specified directions, the enemy is growing in power against the player's attack methods. While the game includes a button for slow and precise ship movement for delicate dodging, and the hit box on the player ship constitutes a single pixel, the computer will eventually overcompensate its weakness and conquer you. At least, until next game.
The player has a fire control that allows the angle of attack to sweep across the dark void around the two opposing ships, as well as widen the spread or focus the shots into a targeted area by moving towards or away. Warning Forever removes the level-up weapon structure common in these games and focuses entirely on a player's movement, precision, and tactically surgical strikes. The less-is-more approach drops the over-the-top arcade-frantic nature without loosing any of the intensity.
The vector-like graphics and simplistic, retro style sounds give the game a clean, sharp impression. No frills beyond some humble particle effects, Warning Forever nonetheless shows artistic design in the subtle polish that displays Hikware's commitment to an excellent, complete game belying its quiet origins.
It will also run on any PC computer you can still turn on without waking up a hamster on a treadmill or inserting a floppy disc the size of a pizza. Even if shmups have never interested you, the price of admission alone and the ease of which it can be installed and played on anything smarter than a Ti-99 is reason enough to give it a whirl.
If you are like me, your poor consoles and Starcrafts and Warcrafts and house-on-fire might take a back seat for a few minutes or hours as that familiar warning klaxon starts blaring...
It feels good to be back doing one of these after only a week, instead of a month like last time. Now, if I can just keep up the pace for the next couple weeks until school starts back up. Anyway, this week was a little slow for me, especially on Saturday with only one purchase the whole day. Luckily, the flea market on Sunday came through for me with a good purchase.
Continue reading Treasure Hunt Chronicles 2010 - #8
Remember that nyquil fever dream you had that meshing together a bunch of hot girls, samurai, powered-armor, dragons, World War I, sword and gun fights, a bordello, medieval castles, and a lot of mascara? Well, Zach Snyder does. And he made it into a new music video movie:
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Now before you gripe about how unrealistic it is that any movie featuring REC7 Barrett M468s, M4 SOPMODs, HK UMP45s and HK MP5s can be set in the 1950s, that little chronology faux pas (and the other tiny anomalies) are explained by implying the surreal events are all in the protagonist 'Baby Doll's head. And she's in an insane asylum to be 'fixed'. (C'mon, even the MP5s didn't show up until the late 60s. Duh.)
Taking a moment to blink after the trailer ended, I was immediately surprised by two thoughts. One, I never like how dark eyeliner makes a person look in real life, yet somehow it can look kinda cool in movies. And two, video games seem to have helped push the boundaries of how we accept the absurd.
As pop culture has become more completely entrenched in newly developed electronic technologies (and vice-versa,) hitching onto this runaway connection is our corporate tolerance for what was previously, well, nonsense. From the Surrealism movement of the 1920s on up to campy anime-inspired Saturday morning cartoons (R.I.P  ), the entertainment and introspection of our current day is laced with ideas so strange and bizarre, only Jules Verne could have predicted it.
While our modern culture gates itself with a Renaissance-modeled glorification of reason and intellect, peering through the portcullis reveals a growing acceptance of outlandish and strange media. It has become so widespread, it can take a moment to remember just how patently absurd it is to accept what video games take as commonplace: ducking behind cover in a shootout and regaining lost health, picking up an item that instantly heals you, finding food in random items such as candles, streetlamps, and...garbage cans? How about jumping a height equal to or greater than your character's own height, 'double' jumping, the ability to both see and dodge ballistic weapon-fire, hitting anything while going over fourty or so miles an hour and not destroying either you or your vehicle, or every female video game character not requiring extensive back corrective surgeries?
It goes on so extensively that listing the absurdity in gaming is itself absurd. There is so much we have to just accept and realities to ignore while playing a game, that we can't truly keep track anymore.
(I find it hilarious when I hear comments like, "its so unrealistic that Mario falls into the water and dies in one level, then swims submerged for three minutes in the next level." Really? We're going to discuss physics continuity in a game that allows your avatar to take a person-sized flower and use it to throw fireballs from his hand?)
From storytellers around a campfire, to fantasy and sci-fi books, our fiction media has always been rich with unreal concepts, and movies like the Matrix and the recent critically acclaimed Inception take an approach of layering the absurd with ideas grounded in a definable reality. Even the upcoming Sucker Punch attempts to explain itself with the 'all in her head' setup so that even the biggest nerds won't be put off by the true absurdity just featured in the trailer.
But do we need to justify our love of the absurd? It seems common now that we, a western culture that prides itself in technology and 'forward thinking', need an excuse to rationalize the absurdity in our entertainment. Interestingly, this nowadays onus to explain away absurdity in our entertainment seems divergent, even counter, to the video game mentality of old.
In the beginning of video gaming, there was no real interest in explaining why you were a mechanical fly/spaceship in Yar's Revenge. (They did, in a pack-in comic that is only really desirable to collectors.) Pac-Man only developed a loose and bizarre story for the sake of continued sequels. Monkey steal your girl and wreck a construction zone filled with dangerous chemical barrels and cement pans commonly mistaken as pies? Well, soon-to-be-plumber-boy, you know what to do. Where did the monkey come from? What does he want with the rather unattractive Pauline? Where is the police, Humane Society or PETA in all of this? Who cares!
These simpler gaming days were developed with simpler needs in mind. Space Invaders were just that: bad guys from space literally viewed in black and white. The Cold War mentality in the 70s and 80s, with its clearly defined (in the minds of America and her allies, anyway) construct of 'Good' and 'Evil', helped explain unspoken notions of the developer's intentions. There just wasn't as much of a reason to define why something was good or bad, or even why there was conflict. The most liberal ideas of developers were often shoved under the rug for the sake of levity; Dave Theurer's original intent for Missile Command was to show the unending futility of nuclear warfare, as the game never ends and it is only a matter of time before the game's cities are destroyed. The developer even punctuates the somewhat political nature of the statement by stating 'The End' instead of the classic 'Game Over' upon losing a game. While the original coin-op had no storyline and indeed did not require one, the Atari 2600 VCS port's instructions included a sci-fi explanation of the "peaceful world of Zardon and the invasion of the Krytolians." Keep it light for the kids, even if the adults can chuckle at a "Rush 'N Attack." Wink.
As games matured, sprites and textures replaced the details that imagination wrapped around our digital pictures. While the absurdity was no less surreal, the game's graphics described in specific details what years ago our minds just made up. More and more, some of us wanted to know who was in that other tank or jet in Combat, even if it was just a blurb in the instructions that stated some goofiness about robots and aliens. Sure, plenty of us didn't care (many still don't) but as the violence and dark themes in games became a stalwart of the industry, many gamers (and parents, and politicians) just wanted a little comfort knowing that Shang Tsung was really an evil sorcerer and not some Chinese dude looking for his cancer-stricken son who just happened to walk by a fighting tournament. While many gamers don't need a positive context for their avatar's actions in a game (indeed, playing the bad guy is more popular that ever) the fact that there is even a 'good' and 'bad' side to play as is something that defines our industry as closer to actual role play as opposed to static books or movies. As games reach an ever-widening demographic, the responses to 'realistic' or obtuse morality issues will have to grow with it.
Story explanations helped the industry develop the antagonist/protagonist themes in gaming and gave context to the absurdity onscreen. But often, it is not a game's story that helps us just 'go along with it', but the stories we are familiar with beforehand. For example, the Mushroom Kingdom's likeness to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' novels probably helped lay the groundwork for gamers accepting the outlandish universe. After all, many of us were perfectly familiar with the day-glow colors, eating to change size, even mushroom architecture, from a cartoon that debuted three and a half decades before. Now we've grown so used to the idea that touching an anthropomorphized star makes us invincible for a few seconds, that new Mario game oddness like flying around in a bee costume seems to make perfect sense.
Which sums up our industry's acceptance of absurdity as a whole. Early works broke ground on all these strange ideas, and later works just expound on it so we no longer question why gaming reality is such an unfathomable thing.
An interesting development over the the last decade has been the goal of introducing less absurdity and more 'realism' in gaming. Getting into this debate is another topic entirely, but it is perhaps peculiar that developments such as morality systems and more graphically displayed violence is considered to add more 'depth' to a video game. Modern Warfare's now infamous airport scene, in which the player (acting as a secret undercover agent) helps gun down dozens of civilians, would not be as unsettling to most of us if the game used a more cartoon-like graphical design, or if the action were turn-based instead of real-time. That the scene is made to play out as 'real' as current technology allows is a trend that will continue, with consequences that both the gaming industry, government, and consumer public will have to face.
In the meantime, we have gamers and critics that complain that Halo is too unrealistic for them, or they are too old for another Mario. Instead of opening up a laundry list of reasons why 'realistic' games really aren't, or that a gamer is never too old for a fun, well designed game, it is perhaps best to accept that everyone has their internal limits on just how much and what type of nonsensical fantasy is too much for them. Arguing over what each of us can tolerate for absurdity is, well, absurd. I'll go see Sucker Punch, my sister will go see the next Twilight movie, and while neither of us will convince each other that the other movie is just too dumb for us, we can agree that we just like what we like.
No matter how absurd it appears to anyone else.
Continue reading Unloved #15: Lost Magic
Recently there's been a lot of internet grumbling about a supposed Pokemon bootleg known as Pokemon Black. In fact, the game has turned into a bit of an urban legend, as nobody seems to actually possess a copy of this cart. Apparently Black is a hack of the original Game Boy's Pokemon Red which features a Pokemon called Ghost. Ghost can only use one attack called Curse. Using Curse instantly kills the opponent, so you naturally breeze through the game. Supposedly at the end of the game you become an old man, your horrible Poke-killing deeds flash before your eyes and then Ghost attacks you -- which invariably ends badly for you.
Many message boards have gone into a frenzy discussing this game, though nobody can seem to prove its existence. However one group of ROM-hackers have decided to try to make the game a reality, though it will be in the form of a patch that can be applied to the GBA's enhanced remake FireRed.
I recently contacted Team Creepy Black to get some details and share them with readers of GBPL. Here's what I found out for you guys:
noiseredux: First of all tell us a bit about yourself.
Kiekos: Well, I'm Kiekoes, but my real name is Bas, I'm 14 and live in Holland.
noiseredux: How and when did you first hear about Pokemon Black?
Kiekos: When the story was posted on GBAtemp.
noiseredux: What made you decide to make your own version of the infamous game?
Kiekos: Well, it's not my own, we we're discussing about the fact; is it possible to make it and then we got a team of developers, a page on GBAtemp and a website.
noiseredux: And how many people are on Team Creepy Black?
Kiekos: There are 13 or 14 people in the team.
noiseredux: How is the project going as far as have you hit any problems or anything like that?
Kiekos: The project is doing very well, we haven't encountered big problems so far.
noiseredux: Do you expect the project to be done this year?
Kiekos: We hope so but we can not guarantee.
noiseredux: How do you plan to distribute the finished product?
Kiekos: There will be a downloadable IPS Patch, users have to find their own copy of the ROM.
noiseredux: What kind of feedback have you gotten so far?
Kiekos: Well, mostly positive, some people are upset about the fact that we're doing FireRed instead of Red, but that's the only thing so far.
noiseredux: Why did you decide to hack FireRed rather than Red?
Kiekos: We chose Fire Red over the original due to the the originals engine limitation.
noiseredux: Have you heard anything either from Nintendo or from anyone claiming to have been behind the original Pokemon Black?
Kiekos: No.
noiseredux: What are the chances you might put together some actual Creepy Black cartridges?
Kiekos: Slim to none.
Now maybe what you all have been more interested in seeing, the first official screens from the project!
 
 
 
If you want to keep up with the progress of Creepy Black, you can check out the website at http://projectcreepyblack.tk/.
Some of you may instantly recognize the title of this post, others of you may be curiously scratching your heads. If you don't recognize the quote, those are the immortal words uttered by the in-game announcer at the start of every race in the very first Ridge Racer game for the Sony Playstation, one of the system's ten launch titles and one of its best known racers. Many things can and have been written about the Ridge Racer series of games published by Namco, but they are interesting for this blog because five of the eleven games in the series have been in a console launch lineup. The launch titles were:
| Ridge Racer 1 - PS1 | | Ridge Racer V - PS2 | | Ridge Racer - PSP | | Ridge Racer 6 - Xbox 360 | | Ridge Racer 7 - PS3 |
This five part series of blog entries will look at each launch title in the Ridge Racer series and what, if anything, they did to showcase the new capabilities of each system.
Ridge Racer - Sony Playstation
The Playstation's U.S. launch in September of 1995 featured only one game that had also been released when the system premiered in Japan the prior December: Ridge Racer. In fact, Ridge Racer was the only launch game featured in all three major game markets (JPN/NA/EUR ). It seemed clear from the start that Sony was banking on Namco's arcade hit to help sell systems.
In the U.S., Ridge Racer was one of two racing games that new console buyers could choose from when entering their favorite game or electronics store on that Saturday morning in September. The other, ESPN Extreme Games, featured an assortment of X-Games events such as street luge and mountain biking. Only Ridge Racer provided a traditional automobile racing game. So, new buyers looking to take the arcade racing experience home were faced with little choice but to buy it on launch day. As it turns out, they couldn't have done much better: Ridge Racer is an absolute gem of a racing game that accomplished many technical feats fifteen years ago and holds up well to this day.
Arcades in the U.S. were still doing quite well in 1994 and 1995, and though the focus for many players had shifted from fighting games to racing games, there was a lot to choose from in coin-ops around the country in the mid-90s. Increasingly, the best arcade games were seeing high profile ports for home consoles. During the period of time that the Saturn, Playstation, and N64 were released (between May 1995 and September 1996) each console had a racing game associated with it, a game that promised to push the limits of the console. For Nintendo, that game was Cruisn' USA (though the game didn't make the N64 launch). For Sega, the game was Daytona USA. For Sony, it was Ridge Racer.
At the time, I was a die-hard Sega fan and insanely jealous of my friends who were able to enjoy their copies of Daytona USA at home. Sure, the Daytona USA port didn't look arcade perfect, but it seemed close and impressed me nonetheless. When I couldn't play on a friends' Saturn, I would still frequently pump quarters into the Daytona USA arcade machine as my home racing was limited to Virtua Racing for the Genesis for several more years (an excellent game in its own right). By the time I finally joined the 32-bit generation and picked up a Playstation in late 1996 (skipping the Saturn altogether!), I was anticipating the release of new racing games for the PS1 (most notably Gran Turismo) and passed on picking up Ridge Racer. I'd had my fill of racing with Daytona and Crusin' and decided to pick up games for other genres in the interim.
So, I only recently acquired the classic PS1 launch game, and now wish I had done so a decade ago.
 Early PS1 games didn't feature many of the icons on the back indicating compatibility with memory cards, number of discs, etc.
As a launch title, the game is significant for several reasons:
The graphics. There's no denying that an important draw for purchasers on launch day is graphics horsepower. The graphics put out in the PS1 port of Ridge Racer are simply better than they were for the Saturn port of Daytona USA. The polygons are less blocky, the sense of speed is faster, and the scenery is more diverse. There are usually more things happening on the screen at any given time, and aside from the poorly designed menus, the interface is quite polished. Daytona may have been better in the arcades, but if these racing games were meant to show off what the system could do, Ridge Racer was an early harbinger of the doom of the Saturn. Ridge Racer's graphics are bright, pop in is quite good for a first-gen title, and the scale of the landscape surrounding the courses is impressive.
It allowed you to choose your own music. Once the game was loaded and a race started, you could swap out the Ridge Racer CD for your own favorite disc. The game would then randomly select tracks on your CD to play while you raced and navigated menus. Since Daytona USA was a frequent point of comparison at the time this game came out, I should note that I also prefer Ridge Racers original music over Daaaaay-tohhhhhhh-nah's ( especially given the "classic" nature of the latter's songs). That said, nothing beats choosing your own musical selection. In playing the game again for this post, I chose the era-appropriate Beck album "Mellow Gold." Hearing track 11 playing over the credits was a sweet bit of randomness. In an age where CD sales were really catching on, this was a nice way for the Playstation to showcase its versatility.
 Place this in the CD drive to make Ridge Racer unplayable.
It featured a mini-game with a generous reward during the only loading screen. Popping Ridge Racer into a console usually meant a few resets until all the enemies in this one screen version of Galaxian were cleared. Clearing all the enemies in the limited time granted you access to three times the number of cars that would be available otherwise. Not only did you have more options, but many of these were better cars. Furthermore, the game only loads once at the very beginning, a welcome change from the frequent and frustrating waits experienced by owners of many other CD-based consoles at the time. The fact that the loading screen is a game itself was icing.
The game featured a hefty amount of unlocakbles. There were certainly games with unlockables in the previous generations, but Ridge Racer was one of the first CD-based games to offer multiple versions of tracks to unlock, cars that could be won, and other goodies for the devoted player to discover. The ease of saving data on a memory card (times, unlocked tracks, etc.) meant that you could take these unlocked items with you, one of the key selling points for Sony's console.
 The back of the manual provided alternate cover art.
Taken as a package, it is easy to see why Sony pushed for Ridge Racer to see a release in every major region on launch day. Better racing games would eventually come, but compared to racers on other consoles that preceded Ridge Racer, Sony clearly had the upper hand and could better capitalize on the ongoing arcade craze. The game is far from perfect; it is single player, some of the drifting feels too loose, the various tracks are all variations of one main track, the announcer voice is annoying, and the difficulty ramps up considerably in later stages. However, the game is still worth playing today despite these weaknesses, if only to appreciate how different it was compared to what had come before. The game would go on to see huge sales and win numerous awards in the next year. It would also become Sony's first pack-in game.
Ridge Racer spawned over 10 sequels. We will revisit some of those games in future installments.
Next Up: an "end game"
Regular readers of the Game Boy Player Land blog surely know that I'm an active member of the Together Retro game club at http://www.racketboy.com. This month's game is the legendary NBA Jam, a game that I loved in its SNES incarnation. However, something recently piqued my interest: the fact that Acclaim attempted to bring NBA Jam to a Game Boy cartridge not once, but five times since the birth of the classic franchise. That's a lot of ports, but are any of them any good? Well luckily for you, I played them so you don't have to. Let's take a look...
 
The original NBA Jam was ported to Game Boy in 1994, and it does a surprisingly decent job of bringing the original game's feel with it. Of course there are important omissions. There's obviously no "he's on fire!" commentary for instance. But the game does offer up an acceptable two-on-two arcade basketball experience. The biggest problem with the game (which we'll see across the board) is the logistics of the controls. The START button is the Turbo button on the Game Boy port, which was incredibly awkward on the original hardware. Luckily if you're playing this cart on the Game Boy Player then the Gamecube's proprietary controller actually makes this a more comfortable layout to utilize. In fact, this could be one of the only Game Boy games I can think of where I'll opt to use the Gamecube controller instead of the Hori pad.
 
NBA Jam: Tournament Edition was released a year later. Unfortunately it wasn't the upgrade that SNES and Genesis received. Those games were flooded with new features and mountains of Easter Eggs. To be honest, I'm really not sure what the differences are in the Game Boy port of T.E.. In fact, I've heard that the original NBA Jam Game Boy game did in include some hidden characters (though I've never found them myself), while all sources I can find on the subject say that T.E. (and all subsequent Game Boy series releases for that matter) removed hidden characters altogether.
 
NBA Jam 99 made the jump to the Game Boy Color and it was completely anticlimactic. Sure it's nice to see some colorized sprites, but somehow this game looked less like an NBA Jam title than the earlier Game Boy releases. Really, this game could be any old two-on-two basketball game. Though in fairness, it plays about the same as the Game Boy titles, so if you're really against black and white graphics then this could at least be an option to you.
 
Much like the subtle (or pointless) upgrade from NBA Jam to Tournament Edition on the Game Boy, the release of NBA Jam 2001 was really a bit of a head-scratcher. Other than the slight roster update that would come from two years of drafts, really there wasn't much to make this a noticeable upgrade. Same old non-impressive graphics. Same old gameplay from the 1994 Game Boy edition.
 
If ever there was a system that should have an NBA Jam port it was the Game Boy Advance. Indeed, many of us GBA enthusiasts tend to lovingly think of our handhelds as a portable SNES. And why not? The GBA was technically capable of 32-bit games (or so Nintendo bragged), so handling an eight year old 16-bit title should have been no problem, right?
How sad it is then that NBA Jam 2002 is actually the absolute worst game that the franchise has ever released. Yes, that's right. I'm actually telling you that the original GB game with it's awkward control scheme is a far better game than this.
First of all NBA Jam 2002 was able to utilize the GBA's hardware to at least alleviate the difficult control issues of earlier GB titles. But that might be its only strong point. You see it looks terrible considering the hardware it's running on. And though they were smart enough to bring an announcer back, he will annoy you within about 60 seconds with his limited array of voice clips (none of which include "he's on fire!" if you're wondering). The graphics are horrible. Indeed even when the ball goes through the hoop, it sure doesn't look like it. I really can't tell if I made a basket or not without keeping a close eye on the score. And the gameplay is just as terrible. Dunks are missed often, while three-pointers from the other end of the court are a breeze. And for some reason professional basketball players have a really hard time inbounding the ball without causing four or five turnovers in the process. I could go on, but I think you should just trust me when I say that this game is just really bad. No matter how good you know it should be.
 
Apparently Acclaim also had plans to bring an updated NBA Jam title to the Gamecube in 2004, but that never materialized. A part of me thinks this could have been amazing if it was going to be anything like the retro-fitted Wii game that's set to be released in October. But from the preview screens, it's hard to say how it would have actually panned out (see above).
At any rate, it's funny to think that there are five versions of this game available for the Game Boy line, and yet all I can do is wonder just how good SNES emulation is on GBA hardware. Yikes!
It's been a while, hasn't it? I didn't realize until just now that I didn't do a single one of these in July. But, there is a reason for my absence. You see, with that last big haul, I simply had to take a break from hunting. I didn't have room to sort any new treasure and really didn't have any money to buy new treasure anyway. While I still need to work on the money part of it, I have made enough room to start buying again, so I started going to garage sales again this weekend. I went for a full day Friday, but couldn't this Saturday because I had a family reunion to go to. Anyway, on to the treasures.
Continue reading Treasure Hunt Chronicles 2010 - #7
In November of 2002, something big released into the gaming world. Something that has had a ripple effect, forever changing the landscape of interactive entertainment. Something that may outlast motion control, 3D, and other previous innovations that were further enhanced and repackaged for our newer consoles. Its scope rivals the development of online play, and as long as games continue to develop with online features, it may never go away. It is something that its own developers would likely never truly understood the impact, nor the millions of gamers that now refuse to live without it. A new form of gamer identity.
Xbox Live released in November 2002, and while the network fought terrible bouts of lag, the voice chat rarely worked as promised, and the game support itself started slow, Microsoft also implanted something of which took years to see the true effects . As part of the design to separate paid Live accounts, you had to create a gamertag, a sign-on, an account by which all your save games and settings would be remembered.
You created your gamer identity.
Now before I get called out as a Xbot fanboy and all of the other colorful terms used to describe myself, family, and dog, hear me out.
In the beginning, God created the Arcade. And it was good. We plunked in a few quarters, got mauled, came back for more. And as our skills grew, we saw those high score initials pop up, a silent challenge by those strange three letter signatures. Most of us probably just shook our heads and walked away, but others, we took that challenge, and would play game after game, wordlessly making a bet to ourselves and that stranger that our own three letters would surpass them. It spurred us on, and when our name made it to the top, we were the king of the world- or at least, the block that machine was in. Our initials on a high score board was the first step toward claiming our gamer identity, letting others see us, if just locally, putting our stamp on the digital domain. It may seem like a huge jump, but decades later having your name imprinted on a computer moved beyond game competitions, and would develop into Facebook, MySpace, and a whole list of methods by which we use to write our digital signatures, our virtual identities. But back to the more important subject: Games.
While high score tables grew into the home video game market, it would take a few more years and more complex role playing and adventure games before you were able to put more content and progress behind a saved name. The original Legend of Zelda, a console game breakthrough in many regards, allowed you to put in your name at the beginning, and all subsequent progress, every heart container found and every dungeon conquered, was saved under your own name. It was a mark of pride, of identity, to see that progress listed under whatever name you gave your file.
And then things didn't change much for a few decades. Super Nintendo, Playstation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Virtual boy, 3DO, Jaguar CD, even PC. Sure, more games let you name your own proof of progress to show others, and virtual worlds became open and big enough that you could alter something permanently and then call it your own, but gamer identity stayed private, impersonal, isolated from one game to another. Attempts were made to connect who you are to the game you played, but nothing really progressed.
Then comes the Xbox. Using the ubiquitous computer method of logging into a user ID for personalized content was the first subtle transition. Combined with Xbox Live's cross-game connection with your gamertag, a whole new realm of gamer identity opened. Now, if EnderBuggerKiller7 passed you in MotoGP, a day later you might be popping EnderBuggerKiller7 with a PPC in MechAssault, and it was the same guy! The importance of cross-game connectivity was more than mere novelty; for the first time, you could keep a name, a unique identifier, through every online game, and it would stay consistent. Get to the leaderboard in one game, and people would check their own favorite game's leaderboard and see if you were in their turf too, another silent challenge from a name on a table that we mostly phased out of since the glory days of the arcade. With voice chat, the challenge didn't even have to stay silent anymore- you could send a message or talk in-game, egging each other on or discussing strategies.
But if cross-game consistency opened the door for the future of gamer identity, it was kicked off its hinges with the invention of the gamerscore. The true expansion of the idea of global leaderboards, now your entire current-gen gaming career materialized, open and visible, and with it a new sense of progress and identity. Now, you could compare not just a high score in an individual game, but how many games you had completed, conquered, squandered, or wasted time with. You could look up to see if someone had found a secret you missed, ask them for help through voice chat, or just play together. In its ideal form, Xbox Live is designed for community and competition. That it sometimes seems to mostly consist of tweens with infinite amount of time to master a game and a dialect almost entirely comprised of racial epithets and sexual slang (with video chat to match!) is unfortunate, but expected when you hand the keys to the Ferrari over to your little siblings. It's just a matter of time before they crash it and take out a few innocents on the road with them.
It might seem like I'm giving Xbox Live too much credit for not much of a big deal. But the effects of these developments have exploded into every aspect of our gaming. Nintendo, not ready or willing to break out into the online scene just yet, creates Miis; virtual representations of your identity. The Mii represents the same creation as the Gamertag, a virtual identity through which all of your gaming progress is tracked. Instead of universal achievements, you get an entire calender with notes that represent the progress you have made. Not just in games, but almost all activity on the Wii. A look at the calender notes on the Wii reads like a different format for the 360's data tracking, with the same intent; to give you a sense of identity, of accomplishment, of easily tracking your activity. Microsoft would famously copy the Mii idea with a nearly identical Avatar system, attaching you yet again to your digital self. Xbox 360 even imported the Windows method of a small picture, user chosen, attached to the gamertag. Further Avatar customization has become its own marketable, profitable expansion.
Even Sony got into the act, with a profile crossbar system that debuted on the PSX DVR, and then on the PSP and PS3. Now, it's not as simple as putting a game in and just playing- you pick your Profile/Mii/Gamertag, the representation of your global gaming identity, the some of all of your gaming progress on that system. Sony's Home, a derivative of Second Life (which itself is, like MMOs, is a form of expanded digital identity on a wide social network) takes the concept a step further and removes the gaming aspect as a necessary item, allowing a social or exploratory side of digital identity.
While the concept of these unifying systems may seem like a natural progression from our early gaming days, the impact it has on our gaming cannot be understated. It shows no sign of ever going away. We now prefer a game for our PS3 or 360 because we want the trophies/achievements. We feel a sense of loss if we play a game together and can't log on to our own accounts for the representation of our presence. As long as trophies and gamerscores carry over to the next console generation (and they assuredly will,) gamers will buy a system just to keep their numbers growing. I remember playing a DS game and feeling disappointed that I put several hours into the game and would not get anything for my gamerscore out of it! (I'm over it now, as well as buying crappy games to boost my gamerscore. Now I just buy crappy games cheap to boost the collection  ) Many of us try to avoid Miis and Avatars altogether, but they have proven to be so popular that a new incarnation of them will likely stay with us on future gaming systems.
You may not care about trophies or gamerscores. You may just click past the Miis to get to the game. You may never get online, and you may care less about a gamer identity. But the industry has spoken. The methods may change up a bit, but the infusion of gamer identity has fully integrated into our industry. And with the advent of digital downloads and add-on content for even single player gaming, there is now a more justifiable monetary reason to keep track of your digital self. It may never recede.
It is now practically unthinkable that we would buy a new console and not have some type of identity system we log on to, that keeps track of all our private save games, features the name people identify as who we are, and unifies our identity, online or off. The days of just finding your save-game, unattached to any profile, on your PSX/PS2/Dreamcast/Neo Geo memory card is long gone. Now, with the exception of a few portables, we either log on to a virtual identity, or we don't play.
Is it a good or bad thing? Both. Recently, when Blizzard Entertainment suggested the idea of posting the real identities of users inside forums, a sudden and powerful backlash resulted in the company nixing the idea. The privacy element of keeping our virtual identities separate from our real identities will grow more and more important. While there are dangers with any medium that allows role-play, it must be noted that these issues were not the same as when two kids popped in Super Mario Bros. As our electronic entertainment yields more complex, interactive universes, so too will players yield greater personal investment.
We will all feel different about the methodology. Yet our industry moves ever onward. From Combat to Modern Warfare, from Tetris to Peggle, we will continue finding ways to fulfill our wishes of living out an identity that is just outside our own. However, as with any entertainment, the impetus to stay responsible with our identity is on us, the players.
Habitual readers of the Game Boy Player Land blog are well aware of my affiliation with http://www.racketboy.com and the Together Retro game club. July's game was Ecco The Dolphin, a game I had never played until now. Though I had a Genesis at the time of its release, I remember thinking that it was a kids' game. And to be honest, I had never really thought about the game since. So when the game was announced for the game club, I looked forward to it. The concept of exploring the vast oceans in a game that was known more for puzzle-solving than violence seemed like a wonderful change of pace to me. How naive I was.
 
When I first fired up the game courtesy of the Sega Smash Pack available on the GBA, I found myself in the kind of open-water level that I imagined. The music was ambient, and although slightly creepy it was indeed relaxing. I was amazed at the wonderful graphics. My understanding is that the GBA port is based a bit more on the Sega CD version than the Genesis version, which was apparently a bit easier. However, the GBA version has a few less levels than the Sega CD version, so it's not a straight up port either.
I breezed through the first level without much problem, and felt like I was really going to enjoy the game for the month. But here's my actual notes that I kept while playing the game since it utilized a password feature rather than any battery saves:
Ecco The Dolphin
KRMCSRDK - Undercaves - 7/1
YJ.TFNFF - The Vents - 7/10
N-VSZKKY - The Lagoon - 7/11
And that's it. Perhaps you're wondering what happened to my momentum? Well, let me try to recap. I spent about a week in the stupid Undercaves. As it turns out, this game is horribly hard. And I'm not the type to shy away from a hard game. I mean, I can get knocked around in Ghosts N Goblins and actually have a good time. No big deal. But this game is just a total jerk. Apparently everything hurts dolphins! And if you try to swim away from whatever hit you, it will hit you three more times as you clumsily try to get away.
 
To be honest, I would have just left Ecco in the Undercaves to rot if it wasn't for the fact that I really wanted to see the Octopus for myself. So I stuck with it, and made it past the Octopus. And then for a glorious two-days I made some progress. And then I just plain stopped playing. I just couldn't face the game anymore. It just stopped feeling fun to me, and there were so many more levels ahead. I wanted to stick with it, because I've always really tried to do my best with the Together Retro games. But playing Ecco just felt like I was being punished.
I will however end on by saying something positive about the game: it features some of the most beautiful 16-bit graphics you'll ever see. For instance, this has been my desktop wallpaper all month...
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