Blue Stinger: The Good Kind of Jank

 

Blue Stinger was a launch title for the Dreamcast that I pretty much ignored when it came out.  At the time I was much more into arcady type games so I opted for Power Stone as the game I got with the system.  After that I stuck to the arcade and fighting games on the system so my library of titles consisted mainly of things like Soul Calibur, Dynamite Cop, House of the Dead and other games in that sort of style.  I did go on to enjoy things like Code Veronica and Evolution but Blue Stinger was one of those games that stayed out of my collection for the entire consoles lifespan. I'm sort of glad it did actually because this game is all sorts of fucked.  I think a younger me would have scoffed at its weird, jokey cutscenes and got easily frustrated at its gameplay but at older me can appriciate it for the wonderfully weird bit of pre-2000s jank it is.

The game follows Elliot on his adventures through Dinosaur Island.  He's chilling on his boat with a friend while he builds an anime girl-in-a-bottle (no, don't think about it) when a meteor crashes down and causes a monster outbreak.  Elliot is soon accompanied by a guy called Dogs are are assisted by a chick called Janine and the three of them must work together to stop the outbreak by shooting a lot of things in the face.  Oh, also the anime girl-in-a-bottle turns into some weird ghost thing, don't think about it too hard.

On the surface, Blue Stinger might seem like any other survival horror game and I spent my first couple of hours with the game playing it as such but I quickly found out that you will be absolutely miserable if you're trying to go through things that way.  There's no real survival or horror elements to Blue Stinger, its a much faster affair where enemies drop cash and guns/ammo can be bought from vending machines so no need to conserve, just blow everything to high hell.  The horror on the other hand falls completely flat but I'm not entirely convinced that's what they were going for.  The imagry is trying to be horrific with ihabitants of Dinosaur Island having their bodies taken over and mutated but the whole thing has the vibe of a low budget action B movie with a horror theme.  For example there's one point where you have to fight a jeep that's been turned into a giant crab monster and when you kill it you are rewarded with a minigun for Dogs that allows you to just absolutely mow shit down.

Once you realize to not play it like you would play something like Resident Evil though the fun factor jumps up a fair bit.  There's also a number of setpieces throughout the game that are, admitedly, quite stupid but will have you grinning like an absolute idiot as Eliot and Dogs bumble their way through them.  An example of a good one is that there's one point where Eliot has to cross a chasm to get to another part of the island but instead of going around or finding away across, he climbs up a big tower with a gas tank on the top of it and blows it up as he jumps off to have the blast just throw him across.  It's dumb to the point of it being awesome and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are some frustrating parts of the game though.  The two most notable of these are a section near the start where you must navigate a freezer but the freezer is a big ass maze that's slowly killing you AND there's enemies inside it AND if you fuck up the puzzle it becomes a giant heater that STILL kills you as you go through it and the solution to the puzzle or even what elements need to be interacted with aren't particularly clear.  There's also a bit where Elliot gets a bit sick and its not hard but they decided that a lot of wall climbing needed to be done in that part and the climbing is slow as all fuck and it reverses your controls when you're doing it which makes navigating the area take a bout 8 times longer than it usually would.

Overall though, good fuckin' game.  The only other game that I think the company did after this is Illbleed and if you've played that as well as Blue Stinger you might come to the conclusion that the development team consists entirely of insane people.  It's sort of hard to recommend to people but if you don't mind some late 90s jank and you need a good chuckle from a retro game then Blue Stinger has you covered

Grandia 2: A Deeply Flawed Classic

 

Not too long ago I finished Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast.  It was a game that I had beaten before a long time ago, probably during my high school days, on the PS2 and giving it a revisit in 2024 almost felt like playing it for the first time again.  While my memory of most of the story beats were pretty hazy, going in I remembered pretty vividly really being sick of it by the end and unfortunately by the time I reached the end of the game, that memory had turned out to be correct. 

The game follows the adventures of Ryudo, a "geohound" (a sort of monster slaying mercenary, I think) as he accompanies some chick from the Church of Granas as they go on an adventure to put an end to an evil god called Valmar.  On the way they meet a burly furry, a little boy and a robot and together they have to deal with all manner of evil as they go around beating up Valmar's individual body parts that have been locked away in seals.  It's a simple story with plot twists that you could see coming from several thousand miles away even if you had just suffered massive head trauma in a car accident but for the most part it gets the job of pushing the player from dungeon to dungeon fairly well.  

The game has a number of cool things going for it, mainly in the combat department with one of the most interesting implementations I've seen of the standard ATB that I've ever seen.  Instead of just waiting for a bar to fill and then taking a turn, all enemies and party members in Grandia 2 share the same ATB meter.  The meter is split into two sections with a wait mode and a command mode.  When your character reaches the command line you tell them what to do and then they will either execute right away if you're doing a basic attack or there will be some charge time if you're doing a spell or special move.  What makes this so interesting is that both you and the enemy can knock you out of your command with certain skills so aside from the usual strategizing that one does in every RPG of what to use and when, there's also a timing element to all your decisions.  There was one major boss fight, which I won't spoil, where it had an extremely damaging attack that could bring all of my party members to near death in one go except he was never able to pull it off after the first time because every time I would see him charging it up, I would knock him out of it.  The move I would use to do so would deal less damage, but not having to waste time healing up every time he did it made the fight, overall, much more efficient.  Grandia 1 had the same battle system and the only game I can think of outside of these two examples that does something similar is 2014's Child of Light that basically ripped off the battle system wholesale from Grandia.  

Usually I like to shit on English voice acting in modern games because most of the people that seem to work in that field have about as much vocal talent as a used up kitchen sponge but Grandia 2 has some decent performances going on in the dub.  Mainly because the majority of the main cast is made up of Metal Gear Solid voice actors such as Cam Clarke and Kim Mai Guest as well as many others so even though the script in the latter half of the game is so painfully cringe-worthy I nearly turned myself inside out, its softened by at least having voice actors that are easy on the ears.

But Grandia 2 also suffers from a lot of issues.  The writing is a big glaring one where it seems OK at first but then turns into a 14 year olds first story in the latter half but the gameplay is where most of the bullshit in this game goes down.  The dungeons are short, boring and uninspired.  There's a few cool ones but the vast majority of them require no thinking and don't even have that much in terms of explorability so after 5 or 6 of them they just become sort of grating.  Not to mention that whenever Ryudo has to climb a ladder or push a block the animations for these things are PAINFULLY fucking slow.  You can go and find a life-partner, have a child, raise the child and watch your child graduate university in the time it takes for Ryudo to push a cube a few inches or in the time it takes for you to watch the party climb up or down a ladder one by one.  Thankfully its not to prevalent throughout the game but any dungeon with cubes or ladders can go fuck itself.  

Another big issue is the grind.  You don't NEED to grind to get to the end, for the most part you can just get a couple of things and get to the end if you want but who plays RPGs like that really?  The game throws so many skills, spells and passive abilities at you that all need to be upgraded using coins you get from combat that if you wanted everything you would be grinding for HOURS.  At first I was trying to upgrade everything to max before moving on but the amount of coins needed to stay up to date was so insane that I ended up just finding one battle strategy that worked and then telling everything else to fuck off.  I didn't even unlock a single one of burly furry mans skills except for his first one that could knock enemies out of there charge time because the amount of coins I needed for Ryudo's "win the game" button along side the passive skills to make sure he doesn't eat shit was just too much.

The combat though is where one of the games biggest problem lies though.  As interesting as the battle system is, almost every skill and spell in this game is accompanied by a long, unskipable cutscene of the magic flying around the battle field doing its thing.  I was playing via an emulator for the Retro Achievements and even with the power of emulator speedup, by the time I was at the end of the game I was about ready to eat buckshot for breakfast if I had to watch that fucking ZapAll spell effect again.  This is true for enemy skills too so while you can kind of make regular combat not as tedious by only spamming regular attacks and the early skills with short animations, if an enemy wants you to watch a 90 second cutscene of the sun exploding then you better hope to fuck your cancel skills are ready or your time is being well and truly wasted.   It's a fun bit of spectacle at the start but by the end of the game you'll be begging for a way to skip them.

But despite all of those complaints I did genuinely enjoy my time with Grandia 2.  It's deeply flawed in a lot of ways but its charming and cozy.  Maybe it wouldn't appeal to todays RPG fans who are far more used to either extremely dull real time combat found in the likes of modern Final Fantasy or snappier turned based systems found in games like Persona 5 but if you're willing to exercise a bit of patience then Grandia 2 is a generally pretty good game that's worth checking out. 

2024: The Year of The Dreamcast

 

I haven't published any posts to blog in a hot minute and that needs to change.  Not that I haven't been painfully aware of my lack of games writing but I'm so busy with streaming, YouTube, making my own game(s), work, baby and a ton of other shit that sadly this has fallen completely to the wayside.  No excuses though, let's change that.

I decided two things at the start of the year.  The first being that I would not play more than a single game at a time when it comes to going through my backlog.  For the last couple of years I tend to have a bunch of games on the go, I peaked at one point at 7 concurrent playthroughs of different things and while I don't struggle to remember the goings on of each game for the most part, it does mean that the rate at which I complete stuff becomes immensely slow so this year I want my playthroughs to be a bit more focused.  The second is that I want to focus in on the Dreamcast this year and explore its library a bit more closely.  

Around Christmas last year I was wandering around the retro game stores in Nagoya and while going through the aisles of a Super Potato I started looking at all the Dreamcast games.  The Dreamcast was a system I owned back when it was new, I remember vividly the birthday that I got it with a copy of Powerstone and I played the shit out of that thing, there's a lot of fond memories tied to Sega's final piece of hardware.  But one thing I realized when looking at the selection of titles in Super Potato is that my experience with the system as a child barely scratched the surface of what the system really has to offer.  Sure, I played a ton of Powerstone 1/2, Dynamite Cop, Shenmue, Resident Evil: Code Veronica and other stuff but really I was only scratching the surface.  There are tons of interesting looking titles, a lot of which were locked to Japan and even if I could have got hold of them back then, my younger non-Japanese speaking ass wouldn't have been able to get a lot out of them.

But now its 2024, I live in Japan, fluent in the language and Dreamcast games are easily obtainable, I can go hog-fuckin-wild on this thing and get real intimite with it's library.  There's stuff that I have lined up that I have never heard of like Visual Novel JRPG deSPIRIA or Diablo clone based on an anime Record Of Lodoss War as well as games I always new about but have never had a chance to try like Blue Stinger and Cannon Spike.  A quick google of "obscure games for the Dreamcast" has led me to quite a number of interesting titles that I can't wait to try out.

I did decide to be boring though and kick things off with a game I've already finished once, Grandia 2.  I haven't touched a Grandia game since my high school playthrough of Grandia 2 on the PS2 and since it was sort of a big deal on the DC back when it launched I figured I'd kick off my year with a trip down memory lane.  It's an extremely good game but maybe I should have played a bunch of shorter stuff first to get some completions under my belt instead of jumping right into a meaty JRPG, but oh well, not gonna stop now.

If you are interested in my exploration of the DC and how my individual playthroughs are going then I talk about it in my weekly backlog vlogs so give those a gander if you want to see what weird and obscure shit I come across over the course of the year. 

If there's any stuff you think I should play, leave a comment or tell me in my stream or something.  Between exploring this system and some of the new stuff on the horizon I'm pretty excited for this year in games

Sonic Adventure

 

Nostalgia can be a strange thing.  I remember owning Sonic Adventure for my Dreamcast back in my younger days and I remember it being quite good.  At least I remember the Sonic sections being quite good and then the rest of a game was sort of a blur.  After finishing it on stream recently I can safely say that while I did have a bit of fun with the Sonic sections it was considerably more jank than I ever remember it being.

In my head Sonic didn't really get completely screwed until Sonic 06 and before that, Adventure and Adventure 2 while not the best games in the world were still solid attempts at making a 3D sonic game.  But I can safely say now that Sonic Adventure is just as broken and also suffers from being really really fucking boring.

When the game starts out and you only have Sonic to play with things are sort of OK.  You run very fast down a path, dash at enemies and then watch a badly voice acted cutscene and everything is great.  But once you finish his stages, in order to see the real ending of the game, you have to play as all of Sonic's stupid fucking friends.  Tails is sort of the same as Sonic, Knuckles is stupid McGuffin hunting, Amy is boring, Gamma has a cool idea that is over the moment it starts to get going and Big the Cat's campaign houses the worst gameplay segment of any game on the system and I say that as someone who loves Sega Bass Fishing.

What really surprised me though is all the weird buggy type things.  Often at points in the game the characters would get stuck on...the floor? I'm not entirely sure what was going on but often I'd being trying to navigate the hub world into the next stage and my character would just start flailing around, unable to move as the game struggled to work out how floors work.  The other big thing that I could have sworn wasn't a problem back in my teen years was loops.  Whenever a character had to go through a loop they would get half way and the forget how their legs worked and they would just stop dead.  This would cause them to fall off and usually result in a death.  Thankfully the game is piss easy and showers you with 1 ups but its still horribly annoying to have to play the same segment 4 or 5 times while the game works out how to get the character around a 360 degree piece of terrain.

So while we all like to rag (rightly so) on Sonic 06 for being a glitchy mess, let's not forget that Sega were practicing those techniques here first, because I sure as hell did.  

I Miss Quirky Peripherals

My post yesterday evening about rail shooters got me thinking about video game console peripherals and just how boring they have become in the modern age.  We have stuff like the Kinect, the PS4s pad thing but I only seem to ever come across people complaining about those.

I mean what the fuck happened to every console having a gun.  Back in the day, every motherfucker and it's dog had a goddamn gun in order to play all those arcade rail shooter ports.  The Wii kinda had a gun thing going on but that was nothing more than slotting your remote into a hunk of plastic.  I want shit like the Sega Saturn Predator back.  It was fucking heavy as shit, lit up when you fired it and it was fucking big.  You knew that when you got that motherfucker out the draw, shit was going to go down.

Back then, developers were always trying to do interesting shit with their systems and giving you interesting ways to play.  NiGHTS on the Saturn saw the release of a "3D" controller which looked kind of like an arcade stick and was designed to make playing that game a bit easier or something.  The Dreamcast had a fishing rod for use with Sega Bass Fishing but also worked with Soul Calibre so you could swing it around like a sword.  This resulted in getting smashed by someone with a controller but it was fun nonetheless.  Nintendo were famous for their weird fucking peripherals such as ROB the Robot for the NES and the Game Boy Transfer Pack back when Pokemon Stadium came out which blew peoples fucking minds back then

Sure, they were gimmicky and the number of compatible games was kind of low but the point is that a lot of the time they were fun to use.  I spent HOURS playing ports of rail shooters and HOURS with the fucking DC fishing rod just because it was a novel way to play.

With modern systems, a lot of the shit is built in or has been done before a long time ago and it worked better (Kinect and Eye Toy for example).  Things like touch screens were novel back when the DS was new but in 2014, a touch screen on a modern device is fucking standard.  The closest thing we have to a proper interesting peripheral is the Occulus Rift or any other VR headset thing.  That thing is pushing boundaries and giving people a chance to experience games in a way they never have before which is awesome.

It also makes the console a bit more interesting I think.  I'm constantly finding weird bits and bobs in the retro stores around Japan and sometimes I have no idea what the fuck they would ever be used for.  40 years from now when people are going around retro stores for PS3s or whatever, there isn't going to be anything all that interesting to find in a junk box because aside from the standard console/controller/cables/games there wasn't really much else to fuck about with.

I know it's mainly a problem with technology being what it is and the need for all this quirky bullshit being reduced to basically zero but I'm sure the creative minds in the games industry could come up with SOMETHING that would make me want to play their game based on the method of input alone like they did back then. 

Maybe one day.

Next Gen is Really Grinding My Gears

OK, this is fucking stupid. 

Not too long ago we saw the release of the PS4 and Xbox One, something that should be an exciting time with all these new games and fancy hardware to play it on.  But no, it's not an exciting time, it's a time filled with loud obnoxious noises, sighing and eye rolling.  Let me show you what I mean.

That's a montage of the Xbox One making horrible grinding noises when you put the disc in, and there is a PS4 version as well.  Not to mention that since the release of these systems, a great deal of my twitter feed is "oh, my PS4 broke" or people asking questions like "just how many people have faulty systems?" and then getting a ton of replies.

This is fucking unacceptable!  When I bought my fat PS3 when MGS4 came out, I had absolutely no issues, and until it got stolen there were no problems.  Same with my slim PS3, which is preowned as well, zero problems there.  I had no problems when I was gifted my first Mega Drive, no problems when the N64 came out, nothing for the Dreamcast and then in 2013 suddenly the cutting edge systems have stupid high failure rates.

Microsoft and Sony...why fucking bother?  I don't want to have to worry about my potential purchase of a PS4 or Xbox One maybe failing because YOU can't fucking quality control.  One or two faulty systems is just tough luck, that shit happens, but THIS much faulty hardware being sold to people is a fucking joke and you should be ashamed.

Just go look at twitter for a while or do some searching on YouTube and there are tons of people with videos or tweets about how their shit isn't working as intended or just flat out not working at all.  Hell, the systems are less than a month old and already the term "Blue Light of Death" has been made up for the PS4.

So until this shit gets fixed, fuck next gen.  Right now there aren't any games I even want to play and even if they were I wouldn't want to spend the money because my system probably won't work.  So yeah, get fucked Sony and Microsoft, how about making something that works before taking peoples money?  Bunch of arseholes need to go drown in a lake of dicks.

Shenmue 3: Good Idea, Bad Idea?

Very recently, I have been made aware of a rather sizable community of people all in support of a Shenmue 3 to be released.  This makes me very happy, Shenmue and its sequel are amazing games and it's a story that has been left unfinished for years now and that's just wrong.

Just to fill people in who don't know, Shenmue was a Dreamcast game that came out in Japan at the end of 1999 and in the year 2000 for everyone else.  It was, at it's core, an adventure game about a guy called Ryo Hazuki trying to get revenge for his father who was killed in front of him by a dude called Lan Di.  The player would walk around town, talking to people, gathering clues and items to progress the plot and having a few fights on the way.

Now after reading that you may think "what's the big deal?" but that's the problem with Shenmue, it's really REALLY hard to describe.  It's so much more than just a bog standard adventure game and there is so much to do crammed into what today would be called a small playable area it's staggering.  Aside from the adventurey revenge plot stuff, there is basically a Japan life simulator in here.  As Ryo you are free to go to shops, talk to basically anybody in the street who all have fully voiced lines, play games in the game center, enjoy some slots, collect gatcha figures....the list of stuff to do is fucking huge.

Hell, if you bought Shenmue you had access to full versions of fucking Hang On and Space Harrier as goddamn MINI GAMES.  Games that you could literally sit there and play for hours are nought but side attractions in the world of Shenmue.  So if the story is so good, and the game play is awesome with lots of content, how could a potential Shenmue 3 possibly be a bad idea?

To put it simply, gaming has changed and it's changed a lot.  Shenmue, as good as it is, is a slow methodical game.  Even the battle system revolves around finding spacious areas to practice in because it's not a simple one and if you don't put in at least a little time getting the hang of it, you'll be screwed.  There's also a lot of aspects to Shenmue that really weren't all that good but gave the game it's own charm.  The voice acting is a good example of this, it's kind of slow, stilted and weird in a lot of cases but not once has anyone called it bad, including myself.  Although, if you sit our current generation of gamers in front of a Shenmue title and I guarantee it'll be nothing but complaints.

Yes, this is what I'm worried about, Shenmue being drastically changed to suit the lowest common denominator.  The battle system being simplified, the amount of freedom being reduced for a "more streamlined experience", the once well placed and well done QTE's turned into a massive annoyance as they just do most of the combat for you, just like the list of the old games positives, the list of things that could go wrong is also huge.

Not that I don't have any faith in good old, Yu Suzuki.  I'm sure if he's in charge of a Shenmue 3 it'll turn out just fine, but keep in mind that he works for Sega, the company that basically wrote the rulebook on how to shit on your own gaming series'.  The other risk a Shenmue 3 runs is that it might come way to close to becoming another Yakuza game.

Not that there is anything at all wrong with Yakuza, but Yakuza is NOT Shenmue, not even close.  If a Shenmue 3 came out and it played just like a Yakuza game I can guarantee there would be the same amount of fan outcry as if you made the game shit.

Don't get me wrong with any of this post, I WANT a Shenmue 3, I really really do.  Nothing pains me more than to see something this good go unfinished and not get the degree of love and attention that it deserves.  My point is that Shenmue was very much a game of it's time and if it was made now, I can guarantee that Sega would not allow it to be made the way that we want it, it would be changed because they want it to sell.  Remember, gaming is now this mainstream thing filled with people who don't want to put in the time and effort to experience something like the people back in my day.

One final point to address.  There is some talk of people wanting a Shenmue HD collection, which sounds like a great idea at first, but let me just leave you with one image about why you might want to be careful with that idea too.

Yeah, this isn't the good old days of the Dreamcast anymore, let's pray that maybe something will happen with the Shenmue series, but let's also be very careful what we wish for.

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!