Sega! Drop Sonic and Revive the Following....

So, anyone who has played a Sonic game past Sonic Adventure 2 Battle knows that Sonic is basically a giant pile of steaming shit.  Even if the last few games have been passable, they still aren't anywhere nearly as good as they used to be.  All any Sonic fan ever wants is for Sega to release a good, fast Sonic game devoid of all his stupid fucking friends (except maybe Tails) but this never ever happens.

So it's about time Sega just admit it, they aren't going to make another Sonic game that will ever live up to it's legacy, ever.  So here is what Sega should do; drop Sonic and breath life into 3 dead titles and try to actually put some effort into making them so that all the long forgotten fans like me and many others can get mad hype and throw all our money into the Sega coffers.

So if they were to do this, which 3 titles should be brought back from the dead?  Well let me tell you!

1. Shenmue

This is a fucking no brainer, right here.  Just go and look at the recent twittering from tons of fans basically begging for a Shenmue 3.  The ones that aren't begging for a Shenmue 3 are begging for a Shenmue 1+2 HD Collection.  WHY ARE THEY NOT DOING THIS?!  If Sega released a Shenmue 3 and a HD Collection, they would be swimming in so much money that they would be able to afford to provide every employee with their own private jet and still have money left over to fund the other 2 games I'm about to suggest.  Seriously Sega, get a clue and get on this fucking project already, jesus christ man.

2. Vectorman

If you don't know what Vectorman is, you are seriously missing out.  This was a game released in 1995 on the Mega Drive and it was a side scrolling game where you played as a robot shooting the ever loving shit out of loads of other robots.  The cool thing about this game was that the visuals were really slick for it's time.  Cool backgrounds, some interesting levels, vectorman animated all cool like, it was amazing.  On top of that he had this thing where he could transform into different thinks like a robot fish, a drill, a bomb, a frog, a train...all sorts of shit.  There was a Vectorman 2 but that was America only so I never played it, and still haven't.  There was some talk of a Vectorman 3 for the PS2 but it looked fucking terrible so it got cancelled. 

So Sega, NOW is that time to dig out this title, go get a new developer to begin work on a proper Vectorman 3 and keep all that charm that the first game had, none of that grimdark "I'm a serious robot" shit you were planning in the first place.  3D is fine, but just make sure it looks and plays good.  I dunno, release it on the WiiU or something and let us customise Vectorman on the fly with the touchscreen or some shit, just get on it.

and finally! 3. Dynamite Cop

If you owned a Sega Saturn you may know of a game called Die Hard Arcade.  If you don't know Die Hard Arcade, here is a video of me and my friend being shit at it.

Man that was a long time ago....what a terrible video......

Anyway, Die Hard Arcade actually had fuck all to do with Die Hard and it Japan it was called Dynamite Deka.  Dynamite Cop on the Dreamcast was the sequel to Die Hard Arcade and known as Dynamite Deka 2 in Japan.  Now with that confusion out of the way, these games are great beat em' up games that need to be brought back. 

Make a classic 3D beat em' up like this, maybe add in some online co-op play, maybe a 4 player option, improve that combat systems and whatnot and there's a good modern game there.  It's been a long LOOONG time since we saw a proper beat em' up and it would be nice if this genre saw a bit of a revival in the next gen. 

I know that if Sega said they were working on a Dynamite Deka 3, then I'd buy at least 20 copies, just sayin.

So that's it, get rid of that blue idiot and bring back these 3 great games.  We get great games, you get boatloads of money, seriously, heed my advice!

The Techpocolypse

I'm having one of those moments I like to call a techpocolypse.  I don't know about everyone else, but for me, I never have just one thing break or malfunction.  It's like everything that I own syncs up and just fails me all at the same time.

Granted, the thing in my picture was my fault, as I forgot that I was resting the headset on the back of my chair when I sat down, but that's not the only problem.  My Camera has decided that it doesn't want to close the lens properly any more when I shut it off AND my computer has a greater tendency to just start sulking when I try to game on it for too long.

Luckily, I can solve all these problems but it really is a pain in the ass when just everything breaks at the same time.  Anyway, this bit of whining is a way for me to say that there may be a little tiny drop in audio quality on the Rayman playthrough for a while since I now have to use my laptops in built microphone.

Luckily, if you watch the Die Hard showcase or the Three Dirty Dwarfs playthrough on my Youtube channel, the sound quality isn't so bad, it was just way better with that headset.

Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope to god that nothing else fucks up.  Please also note that I will never use this blog to beg readers for free stuff.  If you want to send money somewhere, send it to the Alzheimer's Society.

Saturn Month: Die Hard Arcade Showcase

Well it happened, my good friend finally came to Nagoya and we got to record ourselves playing Die Hard Arcade! 

Although things didn't go to well.....Not only were we dealing with semi-hangovers from the night before, but we had taken up the bottle again just before playing, so our skills probably weren't all there for this one.  On top of that, my friend has very few natural survival instincts so we ate through our credits quite quickly.

That said, it was a ton of fun to record and hopefully you'll get a kick out of watching it too.  We've promised ourselves to come back and record this when we're not being awful and show the world what the end of the game looks like!

VIDEO TIME!

Saturn Month: Preparation for Police Brutality

Time for another round of Saturn games and this time we'll be looking at Die Hard Arcade.  Die Hard Arcade was a fucking awesome coin-op beat 'em up game that got a Saturn exclusive port and is incidentally one of my personal favourite arcade games ever.

The story behind the game itself is fairly straightforward.  Some prick has taken the presidents daughter and you have to go smash the faces of many thugs to get her back.  Really simple premise, perfect for just kicking the shit out of people, which is all you really ask of a beat 'em up game, let's be honest.

That said, the story behind the games development is a bit more strange.  If you go look it up, or when I get round to shooting a video for it, you may notice that it actually has very little to do with Die Hard.  That's because it actually has NOTHING to do with Die Hard and I imagine the title was slapped on it so it would boost sales.  In Japan it was developed and released under the name Dynamite Deka, and after it was complete, they nabbed the Die Hard licence and slapped it on when the released it in the west.

The gameplay is standard beat 'em up stuff, but it's fucking awesome.  You can do normal shit like punching and kicking if you're boring, but if you're awesome you'll use the environment or one of the many weapons in order to make murdering your fellow man that much more efficient.  Kill all the dudes in a room to progress to the next room to kill more dudes.  Sometimes you'll get a quick time event between the rooms so you can have the game automatically kill a dude for you if you get it right.  Then right at the end, if you're on 2 player mode, you get to murder each other as a little nod to stuff like Double Dragon.

The upcoming video will be a little different for this one.  I have a friend coming up to Nagoya to visit me, so we're hoping to grab a copious amount of beer and scream at each other while we die miserably, so keep an eye out for that one.

Also before I finish, the game got a fucking awesome sequel on the Dreamcast called Dynamite Cop

Same game, different setting and much more refined gameplay, it was awesome!  If I ever get a chance to show you that one, I will, so I'll keep my eyes peeled for a Japanese copy of this thing too!

Technical Difficulties!

Remember that I said for Saturn Month I was going to stream whenever I was playing Saturn games? well there is a problem

The problem is that my Internet is not good enough to produce a stream that is worth watching.  Either the frame rate is crap, the video/audio quality is crap or the stream just flat out dies.  There doesn't seem to be much I can do about it, so until further notice, streaming is OFF!

However! This does not mean that Saturn month will be stopping, instead, I'll be filming my runs of these Saturn games and doing some sort of commentary too.  Kind of like a "lets play" I guess, but I'm not going to be good at these games, I'm just kind of showcasing them because their awesome.

So hopefully over the next couple of days you'll be seeing stuff like Nights: Into Dreams, Die Hard Arcade, Three Dirty Dwarfs and Super Puzzle Fighter.  There will be more but those games will be filling up the next few days.

It sucks that the actual "game" part of Saturn Month is being so delayed, but everything is ready now, so lets DO THIS!