One Google Search Is All It Takes

 

We all like to rag on a game journo from time to time.  Despite being members of enthusiast press they often don't seem very enthusiastic about the things they are writing about.  However upon my travels around the internet it seems that it's not only video game press that consists of hack writers that probably failed English in high school and the world of Table Top also seems greatly affected.

Despite how steeped I am in Shin Megami Tensei video games I had no idea that this rule book for a table top game even existed.  To be fair, almost all of my table top gaming experiences to this day have been extremely negative so its something I tend to ignore and turn my back on.  Anyway, the game is called Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception and its based on, obviously, SMT 3 Nocturne and was originally released in 2004.  It even has a supplementary book called the Amala Labyrinth or something that adds even more shit to it.  It seems pretty cool and if I could find a table top group that doesn't make me want to fellate the business end of a shotgun then I'd be extremely down to give it a try.

So in swoops Chase Carter of Dicebreaker.com and to his credit, the majority of his article isn't even that bad.  He mentions that there's other SMT table top systems and these things have been around since 1993 which was an interesting fact I didn't know.  Pretty much exactly what I wanted that hack at Gamespot to do when talking about Helldivers (http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2024/03/gamespot-being-embarassing-again.html) although he then does proceed to refer to the game as Tokyo Connection and Tokyo Conception so maybe a lack of reading is how such a fucking awful headline happened.

"Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG based on Persona's video game series" is what it reads and if you know anything about Shin Megami Tensei even just in passing you'll know that what is written here is just WILDLY incorrect.  Just in case I have to spell it out for you, Shin Megami Tensei is the mainline series and Persona is the spinoff.  It's not so much that the information is wrong that gets to me, its that this guy is supposed to be a contributer to this niche interest website and yet can't do even the most basic bit of research to get things correct.  One google search is all it would have taken to know that SMT is the main one, Nocturne is the 3rd game and the Conception is the event that happens at the start of the game which kicks of all of its events.  Its literally on the fucking Wikipedia page and takes about 4 seconds to look up.  Even if you didn't want to look it up you should know that the headline is just wrong because Persona 3 and 4 both had "Shin Megami Tensei" in the fucking title.

If I was willing to be charitable to Mr Carter here I would say that, at best, he's a click harvesting little fuckhead.  Persona is undeniably, at this point, the more well known and more popular arm of SMT so using that in the headline is probably more likely to draw traffic to the rag he's writing.  However I'm not willing to be charitible so I'm just going to assume he's a lazy piece of shit.  You're a niche writer for an enthusiast website.  A website where I imagine its members spend all day pretending to be half-elves while jacking off to pornography of bears or whatever the fuck you weirdos are into.  You aren't so busy that you can see something like this and not look up the absolute basics of what it is and what is is about.

If you're going to take the trouble of writing for a niche topic or in this case, a niche interest within that niche topic, make sure you do it justice.  Instead of just shitting out a crap article to earn a quick couple of bucks why don't you take some time and actually write something helpful to people who may be interested.  But let's be honest, Chase Carter doesn't really give a fuck about what he's doing and gives even less of a fuck about SMT.  Farm clicks, get money and move on

A fucking sad way to exist

Cave Appreciation Post

 

If you were to ask someone who their favorite game development studios are you might get a couple of standard answers.  Square Enix, Capcom, Rockstar, Nintendo maybe Naughty Dog if the person you are talking to is a braindead twat and Activision Blizzard if the person you are talking to is into findom.  However if you talk to someone who's interested in the extremely specific niche of bullet hell shooters the one name that might come out of their mouth is Cave.

Established in 1995 Cave are probably the single most recognizable name in the genre of bullet hell.  Kicking things off with Donpachi back in 1995 Cave's shmups have a unique style and feel to them where you can recognize them right away.  Some of their biggest titles include Donpachi and all its sequels, Mushihime-sama, ESP. RA. DE and Deathsmiles.  For a couple of their lesser appreciated games I would suggest checking out Guwange and Progear as well.   

While shmups are Cave's bread and butter it isn't the only kind of game they have ever put out.  Semi-well liked snowboarding game Steep Slope Sliders was developed by them as well a number of driving games including one Japan only title which I think is about delivering soba noodles to an office?  Its called Delisoba Deluxe and I watched a longplay and couldn't quite work out what the fuck was happening but that seems to be the premise.  They even have what I think is a Tokimeki Memorial clone under their belt called Princess Debut which seems very off brand for them but when I looked up a video to see what it was all about the comments were like "OMG SUCH A GOOD GAME!" and "SO NOSTALGIC" so I guess it resonated pretty well with a few youngin's at launch.  

The one thing that actually blew my goddamn mind was that, apparently, they worked on fucking Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Online of all goddamn things.  If you aren't aware SMT Imagine was a free to play MMO that, was maybe a little barebones but I'm enough of a sucker for MegaTen to have sunk a fair few hours into it.  It shut down and was then kept on life support by some fans running a private server but because the business-men over at ATLUS are fun-hating turbo cunts they shut that down too.  I guess Cave are too busy making more DoDonpachi games to give a shit but I wish someone would bring it back or even just make a new one.

Now that you have read this post you are required to go and play a game made by Cave.  I suggest ESP.RA.DE if you like top down and Progear if you like side scrolling.  Doesn't really matter what you pick in the end anyway because its basically guaranteed to be a good time

Gamespot being embarassing again

 

I don't usually read gaming news websites but every so often an article from one of these rags will come across desk and I was absolutely stunned when I saw the headline of this one inparticular written by one George Yang. 

I had to do a double take when I first saw it and read it slowly.  Helldivers was a game that came out in 2015 that I didn't play.  It was a twin stick shooter with online co-op about shooting stuff, I didn't give a fuck about it.  The game has a lot of positive reviews on Steam, netting it an overall Very Positive rating and yet I have never met a single person either online or in real life who has played it and until its sequel came out, I think a vast majority of the gaming public didn't know what the fuck it even was.  Then Helldivers 2 comes out and the game explodes in popularity and granted, after looking up some gameplay for this post, it does look kinda cool.  I'm not personally a fan of doing online co-op, I'm not into games that are multiplayer focused but it looks like a good time.  It looks like Earth Defense Force.

The first Earth Defense Force game came out on the PS2 back in 2003 developed by a company called SANDLOT and was released under the SIMPLE series.  The SIMPLE series was a collection of budget games for various systems where the number in the title indicated their cost.  For example EDF1 was released under the name SIMPLE 2000: THE 地球防衛軍 MONSTER ATTACK in Japan, the 2000 in the title meaning that the game cost 2000 yen.  This game actually got a western release under the title Global Defence Force and involved shooting a bunch of bugs in third person.

Now I'm not particularly good at doing maths but Helldivers 2 came out in 2024 and I'm pretty sure that is a long time after 2003.  I'm pretty sure, Mr Yang, that your title is the wrong way round.  The title of the article makes it sound as if EDF 6 is cribbing off Helldivers 2 despite not only the series being much older, but Earth Defence Force 6 coming out TWO FUCKING YEARS PRIOR in Japan.  What makes it even more frustrating is that he knows this fact and gives this half assed little paragraph at the bottom of the article about the original EDF but only talking about how the name changed a couple of times before finally settling on the Earth Defence Force title.

This is frustrating in two ways. The first, is that George Yang is such an insipid, crap writer that he's name dropping Helldivers 2, a hot trending game, to drive clicks.  But whatever, that's not exactly uncommon practice in 2024.  What's more frustrating is that George had an opportunity here to educate some people on some gaming history.  "Earth Defense Force 6, the game that helped inspire Helldivers 2, delayed to summer" could have been the article.  He could have spent more time talking about the simple series, EDF and letting people know about a cool series that might have not known about prior.  And let's be honest here, the kind of people who are reading Gamespot are the kind of people who have the most surface level knowledge of gaming, these are the people who could maybe use a little nudge into something about more lower budget and unknown. 

I had a look through George's article history and inspid unseasoned-chicken style writing seems to be his bread and butter.  You're a fucking writer for an enthusiast press outlet, George, why don't you fucking act like one.

Bellend

Consoles Feel Utterly Pointless

 

Back in 2020 the PS5 relased and with a sort of poor lineup of launch games I told myself that I would wait for there to be a better lineup of games before jumping on, also hoping to capitalize on a price drop as reward for my patience but we are now 4 years in and I'm staring Part 2 of the Final Fantasy 7 remake right in the face and I still can't bring myself to buy one, it just doesn't feel worth it at all.

The big problem is exclusivity of titles, it's just not really a thing anymore.  Any game that I think looks interesting on PS5 will, at some point, end up on PC sooner or later.  The one exception to this might be Demon's Souls Remastered but who gives a fuck about that game, really? I'm not about the drop a couple hundred bucks on new hardware and go through the rigmarol of finding space for it under my TV stand and going through all that setup and updates just to re-play a game that I already played to death back in 2009.  Timed exclusivity isn't going to get me to buy it either, the hype surrounding FF7 Rebirth, at least for me, died forever ago and watching streams of the game now that it's finally come out leaves me thinking that not rushing out to get it was probably a good decision.   The Switch sort of deals with this problem by locking a bunch of its games exclusively to that, forever, but a lot of Switch games run like ass-dick and probably would be better on PC.  I'm quite happy, for example that Shin Megami Tensei 5 is getting a PC release so that all the stupid performance hiccups can be squashed and I can play a version of the game that is distractingly shit in the performance department.  Deadly Premonition 2 is another example of a Switch game that saw vast improvements by coming to PC.  Put that stupid fucking rectangle with its flimsy controllers in the trash and just make games for PC instead.

In current day Consoles, to me at least, feel like shitty toys that are aimed at people who have the tech literacy of a 4 year old or actual 4 year olds.  Redundant pieces of hardware sold almost entirely on brand recognition than actually being useful as an entertainment device.  It never USED to be like this, PC gaming and console gaming felt like two entirely different things that offered entirely different types of games.  Look at the libraries of the PS1 and the PS2, for example, and then the PC games that were also being released at that time, there's a little crossover, sure, but it felt like owning a decent PC AND those consoles was a good idea if you wanted to experience the best of everything.  The other thing to consider was that PC gaming back then certainly felt a bit more cumbersome.  It wasn't like today where you can just download a game off steam, click go and it goes, there was usually some form of troubleshooting involved to get the game working and so consoles shone in that department because being able to just slap in a disc and play was great.  But not only is PC gaming significantly easier now in most cases but you can't even just slap a game in a console and play it anymore.  Mandatory updates and subcriptions to bullshit like PS+ and Switch Online hounding you at every turn make the experience very annoying.  Do you want to play Dead by Daylight on the PS5 where you must also have to pay an additional subscription to PS+ to do anything other that the tutorial?  Or do you wanna play on PC where you can play online as much as you want and there's no additional fee to pay on top of your internet bill?  I know which one I'd pick.

Crap libraries, shitty ancillary services that you are pretty much forced to buy into to get full functionality and the fact that you can have a better experience on a more versitile piece of equipment means that consoles are fucking pointless.  Maybe there will be a Switch 2 or a PS6 in the future but unless the landscape of console gaming changes drastically the whole thing can just fuck off

Donkey Konga: The Worst Rythm Game Ever Made

 

No genre is free from it's trash entries and rhythm games are no different.  If you had asked me what I thought was the worst rhythm game before playing Donkey Konga I might have said Parappa The Rapper.  But despite my extremely low opinion of Parappa as a rhythm game, I can appreciate it as being one of the first and the music absolutely fuckin SLAPS but then Donkey Konga comes along and shows me first hand what a really trash rhythm game looks like.

I'm not the kind of guy to get really hung up on UI.  Unless the UI in a game is particularly unreadable or badly made then its not the kind of thing that will even cause a blip on my critical radar.  But right out the gate, the first thing thats very noticable when you hit the start button is that Donkey Konga's menus feel cheap.  This is a first party Nintendo game, featuring one of the companies biggest mascots that's been around since 198 fucking 1 and it has a menu screen that looks like something you'd find on some shovelware bullshit that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, thrice discounted to a dollar.  Zero effort put into these menus at all.  One of them is even called "DK City" or something, the area where you use coins to buy new music and stuff and I thought it make take me to a fun little jungle island interface but no, just the same shit garbage menu to buy nonsense.

But that's just the menus, in the actual rhythm game itself the UI is also trash.  There are 4 types of notes, a left hit, a right hit, a double hit and a clap.  The notes are an obnoxiously bright shade of red and yellow so when you're playing on the harder modes your eyes start to strain trying to read the chart.  There's also no options for speed mods which makes reading charts a pain in the cock but the only reason this isn't more of a problem is because the game is piss easy and even a newborn that's been dropped could clear the highest settings.  Even worse with the UI is that the feedback for successfully hit notes is fucking bullshit.  In literally every other rhythm game that exists there is some feedback for telling the player they hit a note.  Usually the note will vanish and you'll get a little mark that tells you your accuracy, like in DDR you get Marvellous or Perfect or whatever.  In Donkey Konga, though, when you hit a note you get get feedback mark but the note KEEPS FUCKING SCROLLING past the hit zone.  That's behaviour entirely reserved for missed notes, what the fuck.  Not that getting distracted matters even in the slightest because the game isn't tracking full combos anyway.  There are 3 ways to end a song.  Fail, which I have never seen, pass with a silver crown and pass with a gold crown.  The only difference is if your life bar at the end of the song was full or not.  You could go away from your bongos for 75% of a song, then play the last stretch perfectly and end on a gold crown.  It's like the complete opposite of IIDXs failing with a AA rank, it's fucking bullshit.

But all of this is just set dressing, the most important thing is the music right?  Well guess fuckin what? That sucks too.  Nursery rhymes that would even make its target demographic eye roll, terrible covers of pop songs including the worst versions I have ever heard of Another One Bites the Dust and All the Small Things and weird old shit for grandad.  The only good tracks on the game are the Pokemon Theme Song and the DK Rap.  When you're rhythm game has only 2 good tracks in it that is probably  more than any shitty UI and toddler grade peripheral will ever be.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the template was done for them already.  Donkey Konga isn't even an original idea, it's a straight rip off of Taiko no Tatsujin just with the Japanese drums replaced with bongos

Taiko is great too, it's good good music, plays great, looks great, there's a reason that it's been around for so long and is a staple of basically every arcade, even the shit ones in shopping malls and sports centers, even to this day.  All Nintendo had to do was make it like that and instead we got this low effort, lazy, poorly thrown together dollar store knockoff.

Donkey Konga is bar far the worst rhythm game ever made.  Even the biggest arcade rhythm flops like Museca don't even come CLOSE to this level of shittiness.  An embarassing title from Nintendo that makes a good case for maybe not all video game preservation being a good thing. Fuck this game and fuck anyone who worked on it. 

The Real Problem With A Massive Backlog

I have an absolutely staggering backlog of unplayed games, easily in the quadruple digits.  This is not a flex since I don't care about game collecting per se, it's just a problem that's been festing in the background of my life since I've been old enough to have some kind of disposable income.  Even when I moved to Japan and a big chunk of my physical collection got nicked in transit, thanks to the likes of Steam, Good old Games and now Epic giving me free shit that event barely put a dent in my never ending to-play list.

The most obvious problem with a big backlog is time, a real too many games with too little time situation but I don't feel like that's too huge a problem for me personally.  Sure, I'd love more time to game but I get through a decent number of games every year, usually within the triple digits no problem so it's a pretty minor factor.  Another slightly less obvious problem is decision paralysis that one gets from having so many games to choose from.  There have been instances where I'm trying to decide what to play next and have just sat looking at my steam list or flicking through my discs for hours without being able to land on a single thing.  It usually ends up with me picking nothing and doing something else for a bit before I can decide something.

But no, the real problem comes with me being a massive idiot and not remembering what games I have bought already.  The other day on my travels through Nagoya I came across a small used goods store which I decided to have a quick peek inside because sometimes these places have cheap games to buy.  I was right, and there was a tiny shelf of about 6 PS3 games and a couple of PSP games, all for 200 yen each.  Most of it was crap, multiple copies of some Gundam game I don't care about but I did come across a copy of Front Mission Evolved.  I have heard its not that good and I know its not your usual SRPG that Front Mission usually is but for 200 yen, less than a can of Red Bull or a pack of fried chicken at Lawson? Hell yeah I'll give it a go.  When I get home though, I'm going through my Steam library and there it is, Front Mission Evolved on PC sat right there in the list, I already owned the fuckin' thing and because I have so many games and I have long since forgotten what I've bought already I now own two copies of this potentially shit game.

This isn't a recent problem either, back in my high school days I bought Diablo 2 THREE fuckin times.  GAME, the UK version of Gamestop or whatever, would stock copies of it for 5 pounds and I would see it on the shelf and go "oooh! Diablo 2 for a fiver? I'll take that!" only to get home and find it on the shelf by the computer.  What I probably need to do is make a list on my phone of all the games I own so that next time I'm looking through a used game shop I can quickly scroll through it and confirm I don't own it already before checking out.  Although with the staggering number of games I own and a complete lack of motivation this will never happen 

So that it's.  The biggest problem of having a massive backlog of games is that it turns you into an idiot.  Front Mission Evolved isn't the first duplicate game I've bought and I can PROMISE you, it won't be the last

Go Play a Toriyama Game Today

 

In some absolutely soul crushing news today, it turns out that Akiratoriyama, an absolute legend in video games and anime, has died at the age of 68.  I remember when I first came across his work around the time I was in middle school when Dragon Ball Z started being aired on TV and his work has been hovering around my life in various capacities ever since.  Hell, even right now there's a Dragon Quest Monsters towel with a bunch of monster and character designs of his adorning it pinned to the wall behind me as I write this post.  This guy was such a massive force in the field that even people like my wife, who are WAY outside of any of those interests knew who he was an the impact he had.

During his life he was quite the busy guy in the field of video games.  The most well known of it by a wide margin is Dragon Quest with Chrono Trigger following close behind but he worked on some other games that you may not have heard of or played.  The one that sticks right the fuck out in my mind is Blue Dragon, an RPG that sadly remains locked to the 360 and didn't review particularly review very well at the time but back then next gen JRPGs were a bit hard to come by so this scratched a particular itch and the effort was very much welcomed.  While the OG Blue Dragon is locked to the 360 there were a 2 sequels made for it on the DS so maybe those are easier to obtain and certainly easier to emulate if you chose to go that route.

If RPGs aren't your speed though he also worked on some fighting games.  You may think I'm about to list off all the Budokai and Tenkaichi Dragonball games but I'm not and of course I'm talking about the legendary Tobal No1.  It might not look much nowadays and it plays stiff as dick but it hails from a time when fighting games actually had content to experience so comes with a full on adventure mode that involves running around mazes and fighting dudes for experience alongside the regular 1v1 fighting.

The one thing I discovered while taking a quick glance at his wiki page for this short appriciation post is that he worked on a game called Fantasian.  Fantasian looks like a pretty standard JRPG but it's got a fairly unique visual style as all the environments are made out of hand-crafted dioramas instead of 3D graphics and that alone is enough to get me interested enough to give it a go.  Unfortunately it's been locked to the apple arcade for YEARS but maybe, in light of the news, I'll bite the bullet and give it a spin because I'm not sure when or even if a PC port is happening.  I'm not going to look it up in advance, I'm going to see if I can guess which diorama is his as I play then look it up at the end.

Japan and the world lost a legend today, 68 is far too young for anyone to be pushing up daisies.  Fire up some of his games, read some of his manga, watch some of his anime, put some respect on the mans name

Nintendo are Scummy (and quite stupid)

 

Another day, another instance of Nintendo being complete fucking dirt.  Thanks to some nasty lawsuits from Nintendo, Switch emulator Yuzu has been completely taken down.  If you go to their site right now you are sent to a, admiteddly quite funny, message from the developers that reads like a hostage being fed lines from their captor with a gun to their head about how the project is dead and they didn't intend any piracy.  It's not just Yuzu that has been baleeted either, Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra has also been completely removed and is no longer avaliable for download, which in my opinion is considerably more of a problem than the Yuzu takedown.

Now to some degree I get it, the Switch is a current piece of hardware and Yuzu was being used to pirate various games by some users.  Not only this but the Yuzu team had a patreon and were making some decent cash off the emulator which some theorize to be the big reason why the lawyers got involved and why, at least at time of writing, Ryujinx is still alive.  There is also no denying that some people were using the emulator to pirate games, Nintendo are well within their rights to take this stuff down.

But there's a problem.  The first problem is that while I can understand Nintendo taking umbridge with ROM and ISO sites, Emulators aren't JUST for piracy.  For example I have a large collection of PS2 games that I bought back when I used to collect games extensively.  My actual PS2 is being kept in a shoebox in the store room of my house right now so just being able to pop the disc copy of the game into my PC and play it via PCSX2 is an absolute godsend.  Yuzu wasn't a piece of software made for piracy, no emulator is, they are made for convenience and preservation and Nintendo just decided to shit all over that for reasons I cannot comprehend

The other problem is that the Switch is a piece of fucking garbage.  The controllers suck, the pro controllers are overpriced and the system can barely handle its own games.  For example, the last big game I played on my Switch was Shin Megami Tensei 5, a game exclusive to the system AND YET suffered from massive frame drops when entering the fucking menu along with a bunch of other performance and visual hiccups.  My joycons have suffered from drift and the system feels like shit to play in "portable" mode and looks like shit when its displayed on my TV.  People who were using Yuzu to get a better resolution or not have their games run like trash don't deserve to be inconvenienced like this because of couple of fossilized scumfucks in Kyoto are mad they can't win a lawsuit against Palworld so they take it out on some emu devs.

I wrote a post about it previously before I had heard about any of this but emulation of systems and games is the single most important thing we have for preservation.  Nintendo won't fucking do it, if anything they keep closing down stores and services so that tons of games become just flat out unobtainable and unplayable outside of emulation or overpaying for hardware and a used game that they don't make any money off.  You can argue that maybe I'm overreacting a little because some other person will come along eventually and make a different Switch emulator in the future when its less relevant but the fact that a company is so willing to spit in the face of these efforts is just scummy and infuriating.

The funny part, the part that makes Nintendo seem a bit stupid and short sighted though, is that if you do a quick Google search for Yuzu or Citra, you will now find quite a large number of people flocking to uploads of the emulators in order to start using them (and probably pirating some games in the process) now that its ease of avaliability is dissapearing.  I found a certain webpage that had Citra and Yuzu avaliable for downloads and between a bunch of comments saying simply "fuck Nintendo", there were some users saying "I had never heard of Yuzu before but after seeing the news I decided to download it and try it out".  Does this count as the Streisand Effect?

Nintendo can throw their little tantrum and ruin a couple peoples lives, sure, but they aren't ever going to be able to stop the Emulation train.  The more Nintendo do this kind of thing the more people will start to think that its morally acceptable to pirate their shit, and not just their old shit either.  While they are probably a company that's too big to fail and have too many mindless fans that will give them millions of dollars for actual trash I can dream that one day all that good will will run dry and they will be forced to shutter their doors forever

Fuck Nintendo, haven't been good since the SNES

 

Does a Good Video Game Movie Exist?

 

I was reminded this afternoon of the existence of the new Mario movie, a movie I refused to see on principle because it was made by actual trash-lords Illumination.  You cannot convince me that a movie made by the people who are responsible for The Minions existing are able to create something entertaining when the film they are creating only seems to serve as fanwank for children to excitedly point at and go "I KNOW THAT REFERENCE!"

In fact, I can't think of a single video game movie that I have seen that is even remotely acceptable.  Silent Hill might be one that comes sort of close but the story is so fucked in that film and the Pyramid Head cameo so uncerimoniously shoe-horned in that it falls short.  Maybe if it wasn't called Silent Hill it would be a sort of slightly above average horror movie but slap that brand recognition and it becomes unbearably stupid.  Advent Children may also come close but I've not seen that movie in many many years and the only thing I do remember is the fight choreography and the antagonists were constantly asking where their mother was like a lost child in a supermarket.  In an example of one I've not seen I have been told by people who's opinions I don't really take seriously in the first place that the Uncharted movie is pretty good but Uncharted was already ripping off a movie (Indiana Jones) in the first place so turning it into a movie again feels a bit daft.

I don't even understand this obsession with wanting games to have movie adaptations anyway.  The idea that I get from people is that having a movie come out for a game somehow legitimizes gaming, or at the very least that title, as a "proper" artistic medium but that's bollocks.  Who gives a fuck what stuffy old film makers think of gaming, why do people care about their validation so much?  The alternitive is that people just want to mindlessly consume more crap pumped out by a thing that they like which is equally, if not more sad.  I understand wanting a movie adaptation of a book, having the things written on the page that exist only in text brough to life on a big screen.  It's fun to see if how you envisioned the events in a book play out the same way on the screen.  But gaming is already a visual medium, gaming already has titles like Metal Gear that are basically like really long movies anyway but where YOU get to control all the cool gun-fighty and sneaky bits, you don't need a movie.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe the adaptations of games I have seen thus far have just been bad picks.  Maybe Uncharted is great, maybe Five Nights at Freddies is the best horror film ever made (lol), maybe the Uwe Boll House of the Dead movie isn't complete gutter trash (double lol).  So to test this idea, I will spend the rest of 2024 watching as many video game adaptions as I can, both movies and TV shows.  There's an Onimusha show that dropped on Netflix kinda recently actually so maybe I'll start there.  Also there's movies and a series, I think, of Persona which is basically already an anime anyway so maybe that can't go too wrong either.

I'll probably come back here and write a little blog post about each one as I watch them so watch this space, my quest for a good video game movie/TV adaptation begins today

I hate Micro USB

 

This is probably going to be a pretty short post but Micro USB has caused me such problems for such a long period of time that I have to write it down here and make my distaste for this cable connection known to the public.

I'm a big fan of the Playstation 4 controller, it's great.  Looks good, feels good in the hand and the triggers are quite nice.  I like the Playstation 4 controller so much that I decided that I wanted to use it with my PC games too which I was able to easily do by just plugging it in with its charging cable.  The thing about the charging cable is, however, that the side that goes into the controller is a Micro USB connector which for some infuriating reason seems to wear down over time and makes the controller next to unusable.  Not usuable in a nice clean way though, it'll still connect and let you play games with it but if you move even a nanometer the thing will fucking disconnect and either pause the game or get you killed.  

The absolute worst thing that I've seen happen with this controller disconnect is where the pad stops responding but it holds the last input you made.  Back when I was doing deathless or hitless runs of Cuphead there was more than one occasion where my pad would stop working but it would keep running to the right and off a ledge or into a bosses attack.  For anything more intense than a turn based RPG, if you're using a controller that works off micro USB then you may as well just not even bother.

It's not just me either, almost everyone I know has this issue with these controllers.  A long time ago I did a classic Mega Man 2 players 1 controller marathon where we used the PS4 controllers that my co-pilot had and even his cables were suffering from the same issue.  We had to wrap a bunch of rubber bands around the connector to hold it in place and even that wasn't a sure fix, we still had to contend with disconnects throughout that events.  PS4 controllers, not even PS5, PS fucking 4 controllers are still 3-6000 yen, I shouldn't have to McGuyver the thing to operate as intended when I'm paying that goddamn much.

What's even worse is that while I'm focusing on the PS4 pad because its the thing that's been pissing me off the most recently, it's not the only piece of tech that uses micro USB that I've had trouble with.  I recently bought a baby monitor where the screen component of it has a micro USB port on it for charging.  I had that baby monitor for about a month before I started having charging issues with the damn thing.  Not because the monitor was fucked in anyway, but because the fucking connector on the cable had worn down and absolutely refused to charge with out A LOT of fiddling to get it in a very specific position.  We had a separate micro USB charger thing that we ended up swapping that busted cable out with and it works for now but it's only a matter of time before this one dies too.

I know there might be sentient cum-bubble that might want to respond with something like "bUt TaU, jUsT uSe It wIrElEsSlY" but 1) I have tried that and for some reason it won't take and 2) Even if it did work, it doesn't change the fact that micro USB is a pile of shit and no company should be making anything that uses it.

I can't believe I'm at a point in my life where I have strong feelings about cable connectors but here we are.  Fuck micro USB

The Best Marketing Campaign In All Of Gaming

 

I'm not one, personally, to get too swept up in hype and marketing.  Usually what will happen is that I will find out that a game exists, maybe watch a short trailer and then file it away in my mind and not look at anything to do with it ever again until it launches and I get a chance to play it.  I have to admit though, if I was a young Japanse boy in the 90s then there's a good chance that this advertising campaign for the Sega Saturn would have swept me right up into a hype train.

Segata Sanshiro, a play on the Japanese セガサターンしろ (meaning, "play the sega saturn!" said in a sort of aggressive way) arranged so that it sounds like a dudes name was a series of advertisements played on Japanese TV to, obviously, promote the Sega Saturn.  The first few snippits of these adverts depict our man, Segata Sanshiro, a bloke in a karate gi, approaching groups of youths who are not playing Sega Saturn and then beating them up and demanding that they go and do so.  Later adverts depict him doing absolutely insane super-human feats that relate to the theme of whatever individual game they are trying to sell.  For example, one of my favorite versions of this is where Segata is acting as goalkeeper in a football match and instead of just blocking the oncoming ball, he proceeds to flip the entire goal net over his shoulder so TECHNICALLY the ball didn't go in.  After some clips of the game, World Cup 98 ~Road to Win~, the ad ends with Segata being red-carded by the referee while shouting "OH NO!" in an overexaggerated katakana-English accept.

The absolutely insane thing about this series of adverts is that when it came for the release of the Dreamcast, the ad involves a bunch of business folks celebrating the launch when a missle is launched at Sega HQ.  Segata, who just happens to be standing on the roof of the building, proceeds to catch the missle in mid-air, rides it into space where it then explodes and kills him off.  Honestly, a truly hilarious way to give the mascot a sendoff for the next piece of hardware.

Segata Sanshiro seemed to be such a well-liked figure within Japan that he even got his own game on the Saturn but I've heard its an extremely lackluster mini-game collection where your reward for beating the games is the ability to watch the adverts which, honestly, seems trash but having not played it at time of writing this article I'll withhold judgement.  More well liked that the mascot though is the man himself Hiroshi Fujioka who is a bit of a legend here in Japan.  Known chiefly for being in Kamen Rider he's a sort of cultural icon that even my wife, who knows barely anything of video games and even less about Tokusatsu, knows who he is.  Hell, when I looked him up on Wikipedia before writing this blog I found out he even has a fucking planet named after him.  

I wouldn't be surprised if this ad campaign is the reason that the Saturn is remembered quite a bit more fondly in Japan than it is in the west.  Back in England I barely knew anyone who even knew what the Sega Saturn was, let alone had played one.  It was one of those systems that only weirdos like me owned alongside things like the Neo Geo and even today its only really hardcore enthusiasts willing to dig into gamings history that give enough of a shit to look at its libarary.  In Japan though it's a little bit more well remembered.  I've met plenty of folks who have at least got some memories of having fiddled with a game or two on the system in their childhoods.  I even met one guy in a bar once who spent the better part of 2 hours trying to convince me to play Wachenroder which, while it looks cool, I still haven't done yet.  Sorry.

There's a lot of weird, gross and shitty video game advertising out there, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, but Sega really knocked it out of the park with this one.  It's a shame it wouldn't last and Sega would bow out of the hardware biz after the Dreamcast but at the very least their efforts gave us some truly hilarious bits of old advertising to look back on fondly