I swear to God this game has so much walking forward down meandering, branchless pathways that I'd kill for a snowboarding minigame by this point. I'd go in for a pick-up game of Blitzball just for some damn variety.
There was going to be a post of actual substance here earlier but I put it off to play FFXIII HA HA HOW SILLY OF ME
PS SHUT THE FUCK UP VANILLE
I know it's been said so many times it's a worn-out cliche by this point but somehow it remains ever-relevant because people inexplicably keep supporting his bullshit jesus christ shut the fuck up tim rogers
edit: Man I made two posts in a row yelling at someone to fuck off normally I wouldn't want to do that but Goddamn shut the everloving fuck up tim rogers
ahaha go fuck yourself ea
So Project Needlemouse turned out to be Sonic 4, a new 2D Sonic for direct download. "Sonic 4" somehow manages to carry an even greater weight of "no, we're going back to the old school, serious this time" than calling the 2006 game Sonic the Hedgehog did, although we all know how well that turned out.
I hold no hopes for the game, as anyone familiar with the Sonic series shouldn't. But to be honest, my problem is not so much that I'm worried they'll screw it up, but that I don't know that I care. Maybe it's just because I wasn't a Genesis owner growing up, but the 16-bit Sonics are not actually that great as games. This was an argument people had repeatedly when discussions would come up on how to "fix" Sonic -- maybe the original game concept itself is simply too limited. When levels were fast they were over too quickly, when they were slow they were plodding and dull. I'll admit I haven't played any of the Rush games, which were apparently well-received, to see if anything's changed in modern times.
They released a short trailer, which is below. One shouldn't judge based on 3 seconds of footage, but the animation seems strangely slow, especially in direct comparison to the old Sonic sprites (which they chose to do in their own trailer).
It's a bit of a shame that this perpetuates the idea that modern 2D games belong only on portables or as downloadables, though the market for a traditional Sonic may be so small at this point that pitching it as a download is the only way it could get made.
..is counteracted just slightly when I read one advertising a site for "wholesale nipple covers." Because Goddamn I am sick of getting my nipple covers at retail.
You want to feel dirty about video games
(don't click that at work for God's sake)
(don't click it at home either)
(don't click)
And to make things a little more uncomfortable, Nippon Ichi has recently announced Prinny 2: Dawn of the Great Pantsu War. The plot involves recovering panties belonging to Etna, who you may recall is the girl from the Disgaea series who looks about 12.
Thank you, Japan. I'd admonish you for shitting all over yourself with fetishistic nonsense if I didn't know that saying so would give you an erection. And thank God American publishers are finally bringing some of that sweet cartoon porn/tepid knock-off RPG hybrid action to our shores, because we as a nation have suffered too long from the lack of a proper successor to the throne of Cobra Mission.
Your thought for the day is to consider, for a moment, cammyfan.com. A 13-year old, still regularly updated shrine to the character Cammy from the Street Fighter series. Consider the little details, such as the essay on "Why I Love Cammy," which reveals that the webmaster has a license plate which reads CAM FAN. Weigh his insistence on excluding pornographic content from his galleries, as he declares such content to be "pitiful." Meditate on his admission that his "favorite moves are submission moves."
Ponder the photo of the man himself, towering over three Japanese Cammy cosplayers. Take note of the hockey jersey. Review his ideas for fan fiction. Observe one such idea born shortly after September 11, 2001, in which Cammy hunts for Osama Bin Laden. Decide if you agree with his assessment that it would be "really fun" to "mix reality and Cammy." Contrast and compare Capcom's official storyline for Street Fighter 4 with the webmaster's own concept created nine years earlier, in which Cammy partners with a trained cat that can spy.
Just... just think about it.
Siliconera has a translation of an Iwata Asks interview with the people behind the Sin & Punishment games (the first on the N64, the second on the Wii). Of particular note is this segment:
Nakagawa: …Yes. That’s why we thought we could work on the Nintendo 64 too. But, the Nintendo 64 … sure was something (bitter laughter).Iwata: (laughs) It was a machine that was hard to create things for and didn’t work at all.
Nakagawa: Y-Yes. It didn’t work at all…
Nothing like hearing the president of one of the biggest video game companies in history say "Hey, remember that old thing we made? What a piece of shit!" And then Nakagawa has half a second to decide if he's being lured into a trap.
Over the past few years I've been picking my way through Quintet's so-called Heaven and Earth trilogy of action RPGs on the SNES -- Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Soul Blazer was relatively straightforward and normal, putting aside the occasional.. eccentricity:
But Illusion of Gaia is where things started to get a little weird.
First, there's the game's infamous raft sequence, a scene in which the player and his token female friend stand around on a raft in the middle of the ocean for a long time. It's not a cutscene, because you still have control of your character, but you literally have nothing to do but walk back and forth on a square about a quarter the size of the screen, talk to the girl a couple times, and then wait for the next day to come so you can do it again. You have never seen a game stop so suddenly and dramatically in its tracks.
Later, you enter into a Russian Roulette game played with a glass of poison instead of a bullet. You and the champion take turns drinking from a selection of glasses until one glass is left, which must be the poisoned one. It's the champ's turn, so he must be the loser, except:
He insists on drinking it anyway, essentially committing suicide. (Despite how it may appear, this scene is not taking place on a raft.) You report back to his pregnant wife (!), only to find:
Kruks conveniently being the animals you need to ride to get across the desert to the next dungeon. How does she feel about this?
But the person you love just offed himself and left your only worthwhile possessions to the kids who blew into town this morning.
Still later into the game, your intrepid party gets captured by some starving tribesmen who intend to eat you. Just before they dig in, however, token female friend's pet pig comes running in and throws itself on a fire, cooking itself alive to feed the tribe and spare your lives. Also your dead mother's soul pops out.
Lastly, you deal with one of the game's villains by setting off a fire trap he's standing next to. In most games he'd just fall over, or perhaps flicker and disappear, but here he has to collapse into a flaming heap and crawl after you like the Terminator as his flesh continues to burn before finally expiring at your feet. He wasn't even a monster or something, he was just a regular man and then you set him on fire.
This is all ignoring the more subtle, less graphic weirdness to the game's story, such as the fact that all this magical crap is taking place on Earth somehow, as evidenced by visits to famous locations like Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China.
The continuous bleakness of Illusion of Gaia lets up a bit in Terranigma. But the seemingly blase attitude towards death doesn't disappear entirely, as evidenced when you wake up in a cavern after barely surviving an avalanche.
Always a sign you drank too much.
The goat explains to you that she and her husband got stuck here in the avalanche too, and her husband didn't make it. As any grieving widow would, she then suggests you both eat him.
This isn't the first time he's been in my mouth, that's all I'm saying.
Iron-clad logic. But your prudish main character still isn't convinced, and says he can't eat.
That's a shame. I just.. I just really wanted you to help me devour my husband.
Later, you come to a kingdom with a princess who has been stricken mute. She was adopted by the king and queen from a village that was destroyed, and thus the boneheaded magical girl you're traveling with at the time suggests the way to snap her out of it would be to create the spectral illusion of her dead parents.
For some reason you go through with this plan. (Surely there were other options; I hear flowers work well.) I dunno about the princess, but the king sure finds it interesting:
I really should stop thinking out loud!
Yes, the resolution to this entire side plot is having the king casually mention that these two people look like some folks he had murdered. But it seems dead people don't fluster anyone around here:
Careful, it smells like something died out there. Because it did. It was the king. The king died. Out there.
But even without the occasional corpse, Terranigma is odd enough on its own. It expands on Illusion of Gaia's idea of a fantasy RPG taking place on the real-world Earth to a great degree, tasking your character with resurrecting what is essentially modern civilization. The world map is actually a simplified map of Earth, and you wander around locations like the Sahara and Arabia and Spain, whacking monsters with sticks to revive the world's plants and animals and people. Once you bring back people, you can start visiting towns, including a city in North America called... Freedom.
America, it would seem, is populated entirely by trollops, grizzled prospectors and black people. Seriously, you never see black people prior to this and then you go to Freedom and suddenly they're everywhere.
At least in Illusion of Gaia, signs of the real world were ancient artifacts like the Nazca Lines, which already feel otherworldly enough. But it feels weird walking around in a jRPG and stumbling across things like this:
This raises far more questions than it can answer. So Jesus existed in the world of Terranigma? Why didn't he fix all this crap then so I don't have to do it? Am.. am I Jesus?
To cap off all this oddity, Quintet put themselves in the game, in an office located (naturally) in Japan.
I imagine that's supposed to be a mustache, but instead it looks as if even the man on the sign is depressed. Inside, the developers are all represented by talking chickens sitting at computers. The office also contains a trash-strewn room where the team apparently sleeps when they're too busy to go home, which is suitably horrifying.
Later in the story, everyone in this building will die when a killer virus is released in Neotokio. I suppose they would want it that way.
all I was trying to do was play dig a pony goddammit
