Friday, November 23, 2012

GC9X Dispatch - Do This, Don't Do That

Robo-fairy-parent observes.

This month’s game, Wonder Project J, is often described as a “raising sim.” It’s about a robot boy named Pino whose creator is arrested right before he comes to life. Pino is raised by the robo-fairy/living cursor “Tinker” and an invisible god-like entity, “the player.” The gameplay basically consists of bringing various objects to Pino’s attention and praising or chastising him based on what he does with it. Pino’s first reaction upon seeing a cat, for example, is to punt it. *RIGHT CLICK* That’s baaaaaad, Pino.

As longtime readers/listeners probably suspected, I’m old. I’m old enough to be married and have a two year old son. So, for obvious reasons, this game feels a bit familiar. Especially the substantial portion of it I spend telling a little boy to do something and watching him ignore me in the most extravagant ways possible.

But that is something Pino shares with other things besides two-year-olds. Puppies, for example. Or Siri.

Read more »
Posted by xerxes at 11:17 PM 3 comments
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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Update 11/19 - HG101 Book Sega Arcade Classics Vol. 1, Sakura Taisen, Super Locomotive, Hybrid Heaven, Block Out

First things first - HG101 is proud to announce our next book project: Sega Arcade Classics Vol. 1. This 166 volume contains of over seventy classic games originating from the 1980s and 90s arcade scene. All articles have been updated, revised, and expanded from the ones currently featured on the site. Furthermore, you won't very long to get a copy either - it's in its final stages of production, and should be ready for purchase in early/mid December. Both black & white and full color paperbacks will be available through Amazon, priced at $9.99 and $25 respectively (the latter just enough to quality for free super saver shipping) but PDFs will available straight through the site for those with tablets and eReaders.

The biggest thing to note is that the interior looks much, much nicer than the adventure game book. While this volume is substantially shorter, it's also much more carefully designed, with layouts that are designed after the enthusiasm of 90s game magazines. The color volume is pricey, but it's definitely worth it.

This update is more than just a book announcement. Topping the list of articles is a 10,000+ word feature of Sega's Sakura Taisen (also known as Sakura Wars). Somewhere in my apartment, there's a scribbled piece of paper, started back in 2004, that had all of the series I initially wanted to cover here at HG101. Sakura Taisen was one of them. I bought a whole bunch of the games, but the article never took off. So eight years later, William Van Hecke picks up the slack to deliver an expansive look at Sega's unique SRPG series, which heavily influenced titles today like Persona 3/4 and Valkyria Chronicles. The only game in the series to reach American shores was the fifth game, but it came far too late to make much of an impact. Meanwhile in Japan, it was so popular that there was a stage show based on it.

While the upcoming Sega book focuses on mid 1980s and early 1990s arcade titles (and its progeny), Sega has a lot of history before then, much of which isn't covered anywhere in great detail. We have a second volume planned to cover these titles, one of the first of which is a look at Super Locomotive. It's...bizarre. You are a sentient locomotive, who's being chased for some reason? And you have to attack with them steam clouds? Huh. That's interesting. I'd never really heard of this one before, because it never got ported anywhere. But otherwise, it seems to be also recognized for totally ripping off Yellow Magic Orchestra's song Rydeen. It's a great rendition of a great song, in spite of the plagiarism.

Block Out is basically Tetris in 3D (though not affiliated with Pajitnov's own 3D Tetris variant, Welltris). The article also covers Welltris, along with Nintendo's 3D Tetris. Bullet Witch is an early Xbox 360 title was one of the first games developed by a Japanese company and was released by Cavia. Like many of their titles, it has a number of flaws, a few of which were exacerbated during localization, but it remains interesting enough to cover in this extensive manner.

The latest episode of the Game Club 199X podcast focuses on Hybrid Heaven, Konami's bizarre sci-fi wrestling RPG for the Nintendo 64, which we've also posted an article for. Page 21 of the iOS Shooters article covers StarCannon, xFighter 2, Ace Striker and Above the Sky. And Your Weekly Kusoge is Paris-Dakar Rally Special, a seemingly innocuous Famicom racer which is much goofier than it looks. There's no Spotlight Article this update, as I've been busy finishing up the proofs on the Sega book, but you can expect to see some of the updated articles included on the site as well.


Posted by Discoalucard at 9:18 AM 3 comments

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Halloween Update #2 - 10/30 - Alone in the Dark, Project Firestart, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Clive Barker's Undying/Jericho, Shadow of the Comet/Prisoner of Ice, Zombie Raid, Parasite Eve 1, Braindead 13, Folklore, DreamWeb, Fright Night

In case our last update didn't disturb you enough, we're continuing our coverage of the macabre with a second, massive batch of articles. The largest of them is Alone in the Dark, widely considered the originator of survival horror and the game Resident Evil very deliberately copied its concept from. But there is actually an older game that fulfills all criteria for survival horror, and that is the C64 cult classic Project Firestart. This is an expanded reprint of a Making Of that originally appeared in Retro Gamer, so it includes a lot of quotes from co-designer Damon Slye and other people involved with the production. Amnesia: The Dark Descent on the other hand is a much more modern examples of the genre, and certainly one of the best in recent years since both the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series have more or less jumped the shark.

Not survival horror but first-person shooters are the two games made with creative input from renowned horror writer, director and producer Clive Barker, Undying and Jericho. Another duo, Shadow of the Comet & Prisoner of Ice are two Call of Cthulhu-based point & click adventures by Infogrames. The article has previously appeared in The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures, and now finally makes its transition to the site. We couldn't get a House of the Dead article this time, but we're running Zombie Raid by Sammy, which might as well have been a long-lost precursor to SEGA's series. We don't have that much lightgun shooter coverage on HG101, so this is gonna redeem that a bit.

We usually tend to cover only complete series, but we made an exception for Parasite Eve 1, in an entertaining analysis by Pat R, author of our humorist retrospective on the Final Fantasy series. Contuing towards even brighter tones, Braindead 13 is a very cartoonish FMV-based game in the vein of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Folklore might also seem a bit misplaced on first looks, as it's set in a phantastic world vaguely influenced by Celtic mythology. But so is Halloween in a way, and Folklore revolves around the pagan festival of Samhain, which used to take place on October 31st, and many consider the originator of modern-day Halloween.

For our spotlight we've dug out the disturbing psycho thriller DreamWeb, since it's been recently made available as freeware after its addition to the list of games playable in ScummVM. Your Weekly Kusoge this time is Fright Night, a crappy, movie-licensed Amiga game where you run through your house as a suburban vampire and suck the blood from dozens of intruders into your home. And of course our iOS shooter coverage continues with page 20.


Posted by derboo at 5:01 PM 4 comments

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Yu Suzuki Game Works Vol. 1 - OutRun

While we're battering down the hatches on the east coast for the upcoming mega hurricane, I've been putting the finishing touches on an upcoming Sega project which should be announced shortly. In the meantime, you'll probably be seeing a few blog posts detailing some of the more obscure things I've dug up.

I hadn't previously played much with the Yu Suzuki Game Works Vol. 1 disc - this release was a book that came with a Dreamcast GD-ROM including many of his games, and I'd never bothered with it because most of the included games were already included in Shenmue. In updating the article, various places pointed out that the car model had changed slightly in these versions, from a Ferrari F40 to something that resembled a Testarossa, so I decided to grab some comparison pictures in an emulator.

What I also found out is that it runs in a higher resolution than the arcade game, though it's hard to really see the difference. But, it's noticeable in the below screenshots:


Arcade


Dreamcast

I'm not sure if it's an issue with the emulator or the original software, but the colors are darker in the Dreamcast version. I adjusted the brightness to more closely resemble the arcade version, though you can still see the darker road. The shadows don't work right in the emulator either, seeing how they're just pink blobs randomly strewn about.

The most important thing to notice is that the signs in the starting line are actually legible. What's more, a few of them even changed slightly - that one in the lower-right corner of the arcade version has an OutRun logo, but it's been changed to a cat in the Dreamcast one. There's also a sign that says Treasure in the Dreamcast version, and while the arcade one is illegible, it seems to say something different.

The sprites still look low-res in general, so it's probably no more than the artists slightly touching up sprites here and there, since the game is running at 640x480 rather than 320x224.

You can pick up other details too, like the trees looking slightly less jagged, and so forth. I think everyone's been under the impression that these ports ran the game with the original graphics and then just applied a smear filter when running at a high resolution. I think that's only half true - they may have applied some filters (rather than nearest neighbor) when individually resizing the sprites, but it's also clear that they retouched and redrew most of them, to fill out the detail and reduce the blurriness that such techniques usually suggest.

I'm not really clear about the other games on the disc - Power Drift and Hang On seem identical to their arcade versions, and After Burner II and Space Harrier don't function on the emulator, so OutRun may be the only one with any real alterations.


Posted by Discoalucard at 11:43 AM 3 comments

Friday, October 19, 2012

Halloween Update #1 - 10/19 - Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Kyros, Illbleed, Night Slashers, Downfall, Horror Zombies from the Crypt

Welcome to Halloween Gaming 101! As we're approaching the end of October, we're kicking off a huge two-part special full of horror and mystery. Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a hellishly fun co-op monster mash by LucasArts for 16-bit consoles, squeezing together tons of classic horror movie references. Our article covers both the original and its sequel, Ghoul Patrol. It includes interviews with ZAMN creator Mike Ebert and Ghoul Patrol director Kalani Streicher, among other things revealing a very little known inspiration for the series: A forgotten arcade action game by Alpha Denshi, called Kyros, which we honor with its own article.

Furthermore, we're covering Illbleed, one of the craziest horror games out there, featuring gallons of fake blood, evil crashtest dummies and a Toy Story spoof, Night Slashers, a horror brawler by Data East full of early-'90s charme, and Downfall, a morbid indie adventure with intriguingly-looking hand-drawn backgrounds. The kusoge for this update is Horror Zombies from the Crypt, a ridiculously brutal action platformer for 16-bit home computers, while the spotlight is taken by Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria, updated with the improved text from The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures.

Of course we didn't forget our other regular featues, even though we couldn't make them Halloween-themed in time: The Game Club 19XX podcast deals with Crystalis, SNK's Zelda-clone for the NES, and the iOS Shooter article is up to page 19 now. The Games of the World section also got updated, mostly to feature a translated article on the games industry in Malaysia (which ties in nicely with the ZAMN-article, since Ghoul Patrol was co-developed with a studio over there), but also some smaller contributions, like a photo stretch from arcades in Pyongyang, North Korea.


Posted by Discoalucard at 11:35 PM 4 comments

A look at... Tamagotchi clones?

Let me sneak this in before the big update... We've been having a lot of fun in the HG101 magazine scan thread. New forumite Corsair has contributed many a great scan. Wishing to help the effort I went and scanned (photographed) an entire supplement that came with CVG, covering all the Tamagotchi clones released at the time. I don't have an interest in virtual pets, but it's still kinda interesting to see how many companies tried to cash in on the craze. Plus you don't often find scans of mag supplements. If you've got any interesting or rare magazine scans, stop by the thread and share them. I also uploaded one on how Saturn Power magazine was made.
Posted by Sketcz at 5:04 PM 0 comments
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Saturday, October 13, 2012

Game Club 199X Dispatch - Hybrid Purgatory


The Game Club 199X pick for October is Hybrid Heaven, which basically involves the mysterious Mr. Diaz waging a one-man war on an underground facility full of freaky creatures who know martial arts and professional wrestling moves. Except not really, but that's all that can be said for anyone who doesn't play past the first two areas. It gained some degree of notability (and a cover spot for Nintendo Power #123) for being one of the VERY few RPGs on the N64, a console which is otherwise barren of that particular genre. However, it's not really a straight RPG, more like a turn-based beat-em-up interspersed with third-person shooting segments and a bit of non-linear exploration. There really is no other game like it, but I really have yet to determine whether or not that's a good thing. Hybrid Heaven is like a flawed diamond that you eventually come to realize is a perfect zircon; it has a lot of stupid design decisions and general weirdness, but you come to appreciate it for what it is after the absurdity of it all sinks in after enough playtime.

The screenshot above may deceive any first-glancers into thinking it's a third-person shooter along the lines of Winback (another good potential GC9X candidate for the future), but get to an actual enemy and the game initiates a semi-real-time combat system. You can move around freely, but actually attacking or defending halts the action as you get to decide what your next move is. It's a novel concept, but it does seem a bit overblown to wait several seconds and build up power just to toss out a single upper right punch. You can also grab or be grabbed by enemies and be subject to moves that would make Ric Flair proud. Being taken down by a pigman's shoulder buster really puts the merit of this game in perspective. The unorthodox combat does beg the question: Would HH have been any better if it were just a straight beat-em-up? While novel, fights do feel far slower than they ideally should be and get decidedly boring once you realize that out of all the strikes and throws you learn, you only really need about five of them. Interspersed with fights are more active segments that involve some shooting, taking down droids and missile pods with a weak laser pistol that gets no upgrades throughout the game. The least these bits could have done is include a dodge button to alleviate some of the stiffness. Some stages don't always indicate where your next destination should be, and the automap is almost no help at all. 

Yet in spite of all those faults, you can tell that the developers at least tried to make HH the most unique and twisted game it could be. That effort alone is what earns its place on the N64's veritable "hidden gems" list. That, and it's penny-cheap on eBay. The gameplay is actually strangely fun once you know what you're doing, and even if repetitive after a prolonged period of time, it's fun to piledrive abominations in short bursts. Without spoiling too much, my personal favorite thing about it is the ridiculous plot, which is like a Metal Gear story boiled down to its absolute minimum with a heavy dose of Independence Day-style science-fiction thrown in. While ultimately window dressing, it tightrope-walks the line between legitimately entertaining and insanely stupid. Hell, HH as a whole IS both entertaining and stupid, and it's definitely worth at least one play for anyone looking for something different by N64 standards, let alone standards defined by ANY other game (perhaps except for Vagrant Story).

Posted by sotenga at 3:26 PM 4 comments

Monday, October 8, 2012

Update 10/8 - Tracing the Influence, Guide to NES Maintenance, Gateways, Panic Restaurant, Fire Bam, Superman 64

One of the biggest criticisms of our hobby today is that video games are trying too hard to be like movies. In truth, it's always kind of been like that - numerous games from the 80s and 90s have ripped off famous Hollywood actors, most coming from overseas and hoping no one would notice. Derboo's feature article Tracing the Influence takes five pages and probably a few hundred images to dig through the many "inspirations" from movie posters, stills, and other bits of artwork. The Metal Gear/Terminator one is perhaps the most well known, but there are tons and tons of other examples, and is full of a lot of "OH SH-" trivia.

Another feature article too is Ike's Guide to NES Maintenance. Written by one of our forum members, this in-depth guide includes numerous photos on how to clean and keep your NES in working order.

For game articles, we have a review of the recent indie hit Gateways, a Metroidvania take on Portal developed by Smudged Cat Games, the folks behind The Adventures of Shuggy, both of which are available on the Xbox 360 and Steam; Panic Restaurant, one of those absurdly rare/expensive late NES release by Taito (similar in that respects to Little Samson); and Fire Bam, an interesting action-RPG for the Famicom Disk System. And Page 18 of the iOS Shooter article covers UFO Attack!, Space Falcon Commander, Ace Shooter and Flare Elite.

Our spotlight article is Sparkster / Rocket Knight Adventures, for no other reason than one of our longtime readers discovered a cameo of the high-flying opossum in the Konami dating RPG Mitsumete Knight. And your weekly kusoge is the infamous Superman 64.

Posted by Discoalucard at 9:39 PM 4 comments

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Dale DeSharone - an unspoken legend

After HG101 contributor Audun Sorlie wrote a memorial for composer Ryu Umemoto, I felt compelled to dig out the notes from my interviews with Dale DeSharone, who passed away February 2008 from leukemia, and share them with the world. For me there's a feeling, like a sense of duty having interviewed someone no longer with us, especially since as far as I know I'm the only one to have interviewed Dale. He was involved in early Atari software, some acclaimed C64 classics, including Below the Root, an adaptation of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green Sky Trilogy of books. He was connected with the team that developed Red Book Audio, was a pioneer of the CD medium for games, and was instrumental in making sure the Philips CDi had software. His career later included the PlayStation and GameCube, right up to the current generation. Perhaps though, his most known works, are the two side-scrolling Zelda games for CDi, which I will forever argue are well designed games which are fun to play.

Above all though, Dale was a sincere, decent human being, well loved by all those who knew and worked with him. I am always reminded of the memorial comments from James Bach, who explained how Dale had given him a start with his career, taught him to drive and helped him through a family tragedy.

My own experience of Dale was that he went above and beyond when helping with my articles, providing numerous high res scans and always happy to answer my many questions, and I will always remember that.

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Posted by Sketcz at 8:16 AM 8 comments
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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

A Brief Look at Bundle in a Box - Deep Space

There's still a few more days left to grab the Bundle in a Box - Deep Space pack. It's a unique bunch of games, so I sat down for a bit and gave a run through some of them.




Space Giraffe 

This is probably the most well known game in the bundle, being that it was also an XBLA release in the early years on the service. It's got a mixed reputation, due to it being too busy and colorful, but I like it quite a bit. It's a Jeff Minter game, and even though the instruction screen proclaims that it's not Tempest...it's basically Tempest, but with a different ruleset.




DRM 

The initials of this confusingly named title (there's no Digital Rights Management nonsense on any of the games packed in here) actually stands for Death Ray Manta. It makes a good companion to Space Giraffe in that it's obviously inspired by Minter's works, with the colorful graphics, catchy techno music and lots of halfway baffling gibberish tossed about. Unfortunately it runs really slow on my computer so I can't say anything more than that.




Armalyte 

 Apparently this is an update of an old Commodore 64 shooter, which I was unfamiliar with. It's a side-scroller shooter like Gradius, but honestly, not nearly as good. Title screen music is nice and SID-y though.




Dark Scavenger 

This game reminds me a lot of Infocom's Beyond Zork, which was a text adventure crossed with a simple RPG. However, it modernizes the interface by adding graphics and ditching the text parser in favor of menu-selection. It's creatively quaint, or quaintly creative. The art style is interesting, though the writing is a little on the dry side.

There's a bunch of other games included in the bundle, including the space combat simulator The Wreckless, and A Bagful of Wrong, which in itself is a selection of nine MORE games. So while the games included aren't as famous as some of the other indie bundles out there, it's still a great deal for a few bucks.

Anyway, if you purchase, make sure to vote for my very-much-work-in-progress Christopher Columbus is an Idiot for the Indie Dev Grant. And thanks to Indie Gamers for their coverage last week, too!



Posted by Discoalucard at 10:59 PM 0 comments
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