Super Mario Kart is Actually Garbage

 

I remember as a child seeing  Super Mario Kart on TV screens around electronic stores and thinking it looked like the coolest shit in the world but for some reason my parents never got it for me.  None of my friends who also owned a SNES at the time had it either so while I enjoyed Mario Kart on the GBA, DS, Gamecube and Wii throughout the years, the original outing had completely passed me by until recently.

Well, I really should thank my parents for never buying me this one because holy shit is this game a piece of fucking garbage.  I'm actually surprised at just how popular Mario Kart is in the modern day because if I had played this one when it was new, I sure as shit wouldn't have been so willing to give the later entries a try.

As far as the core game is concerned its pretty similar to what you might be used to if you too have only played the newer games.  Drive around the track, collect items to pelt at the other racers, try to come first.  The big difference with this game, however, is that it's worse in pretty much every way.  Most notably the handling of the karts is complete ass.  Just steering left and right feels like pulling teeth and the drifting?  fucking forget it.  You jump and do drifts in basically the same way but the drift sends you flying super wide around corners if you try to hold it for anything more than a nanosecond and the AI that is constantly cheating will just take it tight without so much as a jump and just overtake you anyway.

Not only does the AI cheat with its driving but it LOVES to cheat with the items too.  On 50cc its not so noticable but on 100 is when you really start to feel it.  Most tracks only have a single section on them where there is a collection of item boxes.  But the AI racers don't give a fuck about that, if you are in first the second place racer will CONSTANTLY be pelting you with shit to try and make you screw up.  Even if you aren't in first place the AI fucking cheats with the items.  After I managed to pull a win on the 100cc special cup, I decided to check out the 150cc mode because that's usually the most fun in these games.  I was in like, 6th or something and the Luigi in front of me popped a star, ok fine.  But then, right after that star ran out, he just fucking popped another one.  We hadn't crossed the item boxes, his inventory should have been empty, but nope, fuck the rules he's just invincible forever I guess.  Even when you get items sometimes they just wont work.  At one point I had a red shell which I fired at the first place racer who then proceeded to just fucking jump over it.  Not like, the little hop that you do when you press L or R, a big ass fucking jump as if they had the feather item but, once again, there's no way in hell they should have had that shit because earlier in the lap they were pelting me with mushrooms, so what the fuck?!  Playing Super Mario Kart is like playing with a shitty little kid who just starts making stuff up when they start losing.  "Nuh-uh, you can't overtake me because my car suddenly has giant rocket boosters", fuck off kid, how about I boost you into a wood chipper.

Not to mention that a single error can basically cost you an entire race even if that error is made on like, lap 2 of 5.  In the later games the AI also cheats a bit there too but you can outskill them.  You can race so well and be so far ahead in those games that even if you get smashed with back to back blue shells, in most situations a human player will be so far in the lead it won't matter.  In Super Mario Kart you can be in first for a whole race, playing perfectly and then clip the dirt for a nano-second and suddenly you're in 7th holding nothing but a banana peel and a bucket of salty tears.  If the course has bits that you can fall off and you happen to go off track then fucking forget it, just restart because you aren't climbing the positions fast enough for a decent result.

I'm sure there's some massively sweaty bellend who's really good at Mario Kart who can play all the tracks perfectly and get world record times who would disagree with everything I've said about the game but to you, hypothetical person in my mind, I say that you can fuck right off and fellate an exhaust pipe.  Mastering a shit game doesn't change the fact that it's a shit game, go away.

Thankfully, unlike the later entries the game rolls credits at the end of 100cc special cup so after trying 150 and seeing the bullshit dial turned to fucking 15 I put the game down.  No, I refuse to sit here and roll the item dice for hours on end until I get a gold cup, it's not worth it, not even for Retro Achievements.  The later games are fun as fuck but this first game belongs in the pits of hell next to Shaq-Fu and fucking Hong Kong 97.  Piece of actual garbage

Otogirisou

 

Spike Chunsoft is a developer that you will be quite familiar with if you're into games like 999 or Danganrompa but I became familiar a few years back when I picked up a copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru in a used book store for about 100 yen.  After being quite impressed by that I took it upon myself to seek out their other games and came across their first foray into the sound novel genre with Otogirisou.

For those unfamiliar, a Sound Novel is basically a choose your own adventure book that you play on a console.  The difference between a sound novel and the much more popular visual novel genres is that while a visual novel will have elaborate art and CGs, a sound novel is basically just text with a couple of crap background pictures but tries to create more of an atmosphere using sound and writing.  While you may want to put Sound Novels in the same boat as something like walking simulators, they differ in the fact that a lot of them still have fail states and puzzles to solve.  For example in Kamaitachi no Yoru it's pretty easy to make a string of incorrect decisions and either blunder into death or pin the who-dun-it murder on the wrong guy.  There's a mystery to get the the bottom of and a killer to avoid in that game so while it is just text on a screen there's still a fair amount to think about.

Otogirisou on the other hand is a bit less like that, there aren't really any fail states and you essentially are just playing a Goosebumps choose your own adventure book but on a Super Nintendo Cartridge.  It feels more like a proof of concept for later games in the genre rather than an actually fully developed thing but it's story is still interesting enough to make it fun to play.

The game follows two characters, which you can name, as they are involved in a car crash and end up stranded in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night.  The two of them make their way to a mansion and then shit starts to get spooky.  In my playthrough the two of them explored the mansion for a while before accidentally triggering a bunch of memories in the female lead where she remembered that she actually used to live here and severely injured her long lost sister in a boiler fire many years ago.  The twin sister stalks the house trying to kill the both of you for a while before you set the house on fire (again, lol) and make your escape.  There's more to it than that but I'm not spoiling the whole damn plot line in the blog post in case you want to play it yourself.

But even if I DID spoil the whole plot line in this post it wouldn't matter because the very story being told in Otogirisou changes with the decisions that you make.  The car crash on a dark stormy night will remain constant every playthrough but what happens after that is up to the selections you make.  Other examples of plots that I haven't played through yet include an ancient curse, a mystery regarding the history of the houses construction and being chased by a giant fish monster.  The game doesn't have a chapter select feature so while that's kind of annoying for repeat playthroughs but the game is short so skipping through the repeat bits is more of a mild annoyance rather than a huge time sink

I played the SNES version but there does also exist a PS1 version and if that's anything like the PS1 version of Kamaitachi then it probably has chapter select and section skipping as well as a nice tree so you can see how many of the story lines you've finished.  I'm not sure if that's ACTUALLY the case, I'm just making assumptions based on how the other games are.

I don't think an English version of this game has ever been released or an English patch made available by fans so it's sort of hard to play unless you know Japanese or are willing to learn a boat load of Kanji to get through it, which is a shame really.  There's also a movie based on this game that is available through through Hulu and Amazon Prime if you wanted to watch a version of it rather than play it but I don't have those services so I'm unsure if they are subtitled in English either.  IF you can play Otogirisou though, I recommend it because the genre has come a long way since the SNES days and it's nice to see where it all started.

EVO: Search for Eden

 

When I think about the games in the SNES library that the lame retro game fans on Twitter like to talk about, E.V.O isn't one that gets talked about all that often.  That's not to say it's completely forgotten, when it does get mentioned people do usually like to chime in with an "oh yeah, that game is awesome!" but unlike your Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers and Marios, E.V.O isn't brought up all that much.

The story is simple, you play as a small creature and you must evolve your way through various time periods to reach Eden and become Gaia's right hand man.  Eat your way through a bunch of fish, dinos, mammals and birds and get to her to win.  It's a simple premise but the plot is sort of secondary here, we're not here for story time, we're here to eat some smaller, weaker animals.

The game starts you off as a fish and you must bite a few creatures nearby to kill them and gain Evo Points. Once you have enough Evo Points you can open a menu that has a pretty high number of options (later on at least) and you must evolve your creature to bring up its stats so you can kill and eat more things to evolve even further.  As you do this, you'll eventually reach a boss and upon killing the boss you'll be teleported to the next age where you'll do it all over again but as a different animal instead.  Later on in the game it's possible to evolve in specific ways to get specific creatures but I never worked this out.  For example I know for a fact you can become a human at some point but I ended up finishing the game as a weird horse-lizard thing with massive fangs.

The game has a fair bit of jank to it though, with stiff controls and pretty awful jumping even with all the upgrades to make your jumps better but the game is so pathetically easy overall that it doesn't really feel like much of a problem.  Some of the bosses can be a bit annoying but doing an evolution fully restores your HP and there's usually an option that costs basically nothing so once you work this out dying is ALMOST impossible.

The other irritating thing is that whenever you enter a new age and become a new animal, your stats are decreased into oblivion so while in the previous section you had massive teeth and a billion HP, once that area is over your back to being a small rat with 5hp that does no damage to anything.  This means that you have to do some annoying grinding which brings down the pace of the game but once you get going again the fun comes back pretty quickly.

So despite its pretty glaring flaws E.V.O is a really good game that's very much worth checking out.  I don't think it's been released on anything so you may have to get dodgy about it but in my opinion, it's worth the effort.

Translation Troubles

I generally try to avoid topics like this that involve identity politics but given that the guy on the bad end of this story is a dude who translated a number of Megami Tensei games, I at least want to throw my two cents into the sea of lava rage that is this situation.

First, and I kind of can't believe I have to clarify this kind of thing, don't call people nasty slurs.  Even  if you don't like the person you're talking to, there's a million different ways to insult them without resorting to this crass, needlessly upsetting bullshit.  Get creative, get classy, there's no need to use this hyper offensive language because chances are it'll just cause the user more trouble than it's worth.

So the story is a guy who's name I'm reluctant to use since he's already had enough crap thrown at him, released a fan translation of Ganbare Goemon 3 for the Super Nintendo.  In that game a character in the original Japanese text refers to themselves as "new half", which this guy directly translated as "tranny"

Oof, to say the least.

This of course triggers Twitter to go up in arms about the whole thing and start throwing all sorts of anger and abuse his way, which then leads to him basically purging his entire Twitter account and leaving nothing behind but an apology for what happened.  Depending on where you stand on his apology, he says that he wasn't fully aware just how offensive that word was and he didn't mean to upset people (to paraphrase)

To some extent I understand where the mob is coming from, I get that if someone is using an extremely popular platform to spread genuine hate against people of any walk of life, it's probably better that it be shut down, people don't deserve to feel shitty about themselves just because some idiot has ignorant, backwards views about what is and isn't ok.  But the translator in question never came across that way, he's not some "alt-right neo Nazi" using Goemon 3 to try and normalize nasty slurs into the common lexicon, he's just a dude who made a bad word choice when working on a passion project.

I'd be willing to bet money that if it was pointed out to him, without the vitriol, his reaction would have been "oh really? so sorry! I'll change that!" but instead we now have a passionate translator out of the space and a nasty taste in everyone's mouth.  

Super Castlevania 4 Isn't That Easy

Castlevania has changed a lot since its days on NES and SNES but whenever you talk about classic Castlevania with people the common opinion is that Super Castlevania 4 is the easiest in the series.

There are a lot of features in Super Castlevania 4 that basically all the other ones didn't have, including other SNES Castlevania games like Dracula X.  These included an 8 way whip, the ability to crouch walk and a sub weapon mapped to it's own key rather than being up+whip.  This made managing the games many challenges a lot easier to deal with compared to earlier games however what gets my back up is that people talk about Super Castlevania 4 as if its an easy game.

Despite all the advantages you get in this game compared to others there's still plenty of bullshit that will make you want to tear your hair out.  For example any stage that scrolls up will have the bottom of the screen instantly kill you if you fall down rather than just scrolling back down to where you came from.  This is especially annoying in some stages with tight platforming or a cheeky enemy that will smack you into a bit because you let your guard down for a second.  However that's not the worst of it because once you get to stage 8 in this game things start to get really bullshit.  One hit kill spikes fucking EVERYWHERE are the big offender and I do mean absolutely everywhere.  Then there's the clock tower which has the aforementioned death drops but only this time with TONS of enemies that could potentially knock you into them.  Then you get to stage A and there's fucking stairs that fall from underneath you that will sometimes not allow you get a proper footing on them and if you make it through that there's random floating platforms that will carry you up into more spikes if you are unlucky and aren't given another one to jump to.

This becomes all twice as hard if you're trying to speed run because not only do you have to worry about these traps but also things like health management so you can damage boost off basically everything to save time and making sure that you always have a triple shot cross.

If you really think Super Castlevania 4 is an easy game go and replay it right now, I think you'll be in for a little bit of a shock.  Still though its a great game so it doesn't matter if you breeze through it or die an absolute shit ton, you'll have fun with it.  If you've not played it before then what the fuck are you doing?  Go play it right now

Picross

The last few weeks I've been depressingly busy with stuff and finding time for any real meaningful gaming sessions has been tough.  With what time I can squeeze in I've been playing Persona 5 which I can't share with you guys so I've had to horde that experience all to myself.  However, if I didn't find time to game at least a little bit in a 24 hour period I might go insane and that's when Picross came to the rescue.

I discovered Picross a few weeks ago in my local bar on a weekend.  That seems like a weird place to discover a video game but it's a video game bar where there are systems on the counter and games for days, it's a great place I'll do a post on it one day soon.  Anyway, I'm just sat having a drink but the dude next to me is playing Picross and usually I'm not drawn to puzzle games but for some reason I couldn't stop watching him play it.  Eventually I ask him to explain to me what's going on and after the evening was done I got curious and gave it a try myself the next day.  Well I was fucking hooked since it's incredibly easy to understand and yet still manages to be quite challenging.

The idea is simple, you get rows and columns of numbers and those numbers tell you how many filled in squares there are on that line.  If there are multiple numbers in the column it means that there is a space between the filled in areas and using nothing but these numbers you must uncover a picture on the grid.  The game on Gameboy and SNES has you trying to figure out these puzzles within 30 minutes and hitting an incorrect space causes you to lose time.  As you go on the grids get bigger and bigger which of course means the puzzles get harder and harder.

It's just an incredibly relaxing game to play and the challenge never really feels stressful.  Despite the timer going in the background as long as you take your time to work it out it's never really an issue but in the instances where mistakes are made and you really do end up battling the clock you get quite an intense experience. 


There are a pretty large number of Picross games.  There's the original game boy game and the sequel to that on the Super Nintendo.  There's also Picross 3D on the DS and a sequel to that on the 3DS which I'm told are very good and the extra dimension adds a good amount of extra challenge.  There's also a number of free Picross games on mobile too so if you wanted to give it a try then these might be a good place to start too.  There's even a fucking Final Fantasy Picross RPG for mobile called Pictologica where you solve small Picross puzzles in order to make your party of heroes attack stuff.

There's probably a bunch of other games I don't know about too but that should be enough to get you started.  Give it a try, it's fun, addictive and can be played in very small and quick bursts which means that even if your schedule is fucked you can squeeze in a quick puzzle here and there.

Sim City Build It

This isn't a game I thought I'd be so quick to blog about or even play at all.  Usually when I see phone games like this my mind immediately remembers complete rip off titles such as Dungeon Keeper or basically any free to play city builder for the phone.  Usually these games demand that you pay real money in order to keep up with the demands of the game OR ELSE it will fuck you for it and make it basically unplayable.  While Sim City Build It kind of does the first one, it doesn't do the second.

The aim of the game is simple, build a city.  You do this by purchasing residential areas, factories, government buildings, public services etc. and from there you just have to watch things grow.  This is a long running series that started life in 1989 and has sort of grown into one of those franchises that everyone with even a passing interest in games knows about.

SNES Version

The games have since been become extremely streamlined and very easy to get into.  I seem to remember Sim City being pretty hard to understand and manage back in the day but I played the original when I was VERY young so there is a chance that my memory is sullied by the fact I was just a stupid kid who knew nothing of city management.

Anyway the one big problem I have with the phone game is that it takes a long time to do anything.  For example, you level up by building residential areas and upgrading them, which in turn increases population.  Increasing your level will of course, unlock new features, which isn't a bad thing since it's sort of nice to have all the games concepts trickled to you rather than just having a big info dump and then saying "OKAY GO!".  The problem is, you need money to do anything and you get money by upgrading residences so you can't help but start levelling up and just when you start to think everything is fine BAM! it hits you with fire stations or sewage and you don't have nearly enough money to deal with these problems. 

So the only course of action is to halt all expansion and just sit and wait for taxes to roll in which of course is taking a hit because of the lack of the new thing it just introduced that you can't afford.  The pain of this goes away a little as you unlock things like a trade depot and cargo missions but it still  takes a while to get anything done.  That said though, having a building on fire or every member of your town shitting their pants due to no sewage system doesn't fuck you completely.  Your happiness will take a hit but with a little bit of patience you can fix the problem and be on your merry way.

Not bad for a phone game and great to just fiddle with between short tasks.  I'm actually surprised by how fun I'm finding it and the production quality on it is top notch.  Of course you can pay if you want but it's possible to get a fairly decent looking city without spending a penny and after that it's just patience.  It's free so it's not like you have anything to lose, go try!

Retro Game Prices

One of the great things about living in Japan is just how easy it is to find retro gaming stores.  Within about 15 minutes from my house there are 5 shops that stock retro games and 4 of those 5 stores are specialist shops that have insane collections available for sale that one could browse for days.

However, I like most people do not have access to unlimited money so after a while you become very sensitive to pricing.  The good thing about having so many stores close by is that I'm able to shop around and get insane deals on certain titles.  For example, Megman 2 usually sells in one of the specialist stores for about 2000 yen but I managed to luck out and pick it up for 250 at my local Book Off.  At lot of the time it feels like patience is key when it comes to retro game collecting.  Sure, you COULD splash out for a certain title but it never seems not worth it to wait a little longer and have it pop up somewhere weird with a slashed price.

So while I'm browsing the internet a few days ago I came across a page on E-Bay for a game system collection that was being sold for £69,000.  Here's the link if you care http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272037894133

Now granted almost everything in that particular link was boxed and there was a few arcade cabinets in there but £69k? Really?  To be fair to this particular guy, everything is boxed and looks like it's in great condition but even then the price seems WAYYYY too high.   Typically, a boxed retro system in Japan will set you back around 20,000 yen (£106 at time of writing) and he's selling 163 systems.  That's £17,278 and give or take a bit because there might be some collectors shit but it still wouldn't go much north of 50k.  Peripherals generally don't cost all that much either so unless those arcade cabinets are INSANELY valuable I have no idea where £69,000 came from for all that, it seems like a rip off.

But I'm being overly critical of that one guy, that collection is huge, boxed and generally pretty cool and there is some shit in the photos on that link I'm not quite sure that value of so maybe he does have a case.  But what REALLY pisses me off with retro game prices is when some fuck jacks up the price of a Super Nintendo console or some shit, labels it with "RARE" on E-Bay and is just flat out trying to rip some poor sod off.  Here's a great example

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Super-Nintendo-SNES-Games-Bundle-X11-/301797947865?hash=item46448f39d9:g:cbkAAOSwEgVWRZT9

This guy wants £55 for these 11 games but just look at these titles.  6 out of the 11 games are sports games and where I'm from those things sell for about 60p.  I even remember when I used to live in the UK and I'd occasionally find some SNES or Mega Drive games and sports games for those systems were worth fuck all even in a country where finding old shit is hard as fuck.  One thing I love about that link in particular is the Kid Clown game.  I managed to find that shit in one of the specialist shops BOXED, pristine condition for like 500 yen.  That whole stack is worth about £20 if you're being generous and it's this kind of insane pricing that upsets me.

Still though, I don't want to believe the person is an asshole trying to scam people who aren't as familiar with retro game collecting as I am. I want to believe that he or she is just as ignorant as the person who may pay that much for that stack and their just under the misguided impression that those games are worth more than they actually are.  However there are A LOT of people out there who are just out to rip you off and this is doubly so if you're buying online.

It's a shame that one has to tread so carefully but if you are looking to start building a retro gaming collection then what I said before I feel is pretty important.  It's a game of patience, no need to drop a large sum of money on that rare thing that popped up somewhere straight away because it probably will pop up again cheaper somewhere else.

Be careful and happy collecting.

Final Fantasy 6

Well, my apologies for being slow as fuck but last night I finally beat Final Fantasy 6 on Stream so it's about that time where I come here to say a few words about it.  This won't be a particularly long post since it's FF6 and basically everyone ever has played it but I'll take some time to share a few thoughts.

As far as classic 16-bit RPGs go, Final Fantasy 6 is up there as one of the best and for damn good reason.  Everything about this game is awesome from the story to the game play and the reason it took so long to beat wasn't because of a lack of enjoyment but I just got heavily distracted by speed running other things.

Your adventure starts out with a group of rebels battling an empire but this part of the game really only serves as a sort of lengthy tutorial for what's to come.  Eventually you hit a point where shit hits the fan really hard and after following a plot rail for a short time you are eventually just given a big giant world to explore and it's entirely up to you where to go.  The open nature of this game is quite a stark difference to a great deal of the series that has you on a plot rail for 99% of the game and then a few side quests near the end.  This game is more like, plot rail for about 50% of the game and then everything else is side quests and that's awesome.

Maybe it's because I'm a huge dumbass but I needed quite a lot of help to find various things hidden within the game.  There are characters in the various towns and cities to give you hints but some things I don't see how you could work out without some dumb luck.  I'm sure there are some really hardcore players that could tell me how I'm wrong on this point but as a casual player I found the entry to a few of the side quests really weird.

Once you are done with a few of the quests you end up being pretty much unstoppable however that doesn't make the final area of the game a walk in the park.  The game makes you split up your team into 3 groups so if, like me, you were only really focusing on 4 members in your main party the final dungeon ends up being a real pain in the butt.  However I'm going to label this as a good thing because it forced me to put my thinking cap on and really plan out how I was going to progress rather than just gear up and stomp the final dungeon with no effort at all.

Aside from the story, great game play and fun flow and pacing the game also sports some excellent music and great visuals.  You can tell whoever put the sprites and tile sets together for this game really wanted to get the most of that SNES cart and I guarantee you that almost every gamer worth their salt knows at least 1 or 2 tracks from the OST just from off the top of their head.

So, onward to Final Fantasy 7 and while you're waiting for my marathon to start why not go give FF6 a whirl yourself?  If you've not played it already then you absolutely NEED to go do it, right now.

Emulation Vs Carts

Anyone who has any kind of interest in older games knows about emulation and where to get their favourite roms.  There are a number of purists who will tell you that carts are the only way to go but how do emulated games stack up to the actual thing?  I'm not here to talk about the legal side of things, that's another topic for another time, I'm just talking about how it feels to play the game on an emulator vs playing on actual hardware.

I for one am all for a little bit of emulation mainly because it's fucking convenient.  I have tons and tons of SNES and NES carts lying around my house but I don't have the space to have those consoles hooked up all the time, which is unfortunate.  Emulation is a good way for me to be able to play all the games from my retro collection without having to go through the effort of digging out the system and hooking that bastard up in order to play it.  Maybe I just want a go on something for 30 minutes or whatever, I don't want to have to go through a bunch of effort for a quick go on something.

However, I do feel like some of the experience is lost when playing on an emulator.  The first thing, at least for me, is comfort.  When I play on my original hardware I can lay back on my couch and just chill but when emulating I have to play at my computer which is significantly less comfortable.  Technical issues will also rear their ugly head when emulating which has led to many a stressful evening.  Sometimes a certain ROM or ISO just doesn't want to function on your emulator of choice and having to work shit out to get certain games to run is a massive pain in the hole.  It sometimes gets to the point where it would have just been faster to hook up my system rather than spend time googling around for configuration setups for specific games.

So while I feel that carts are infinitely better, emulation has a few perks that just makes life a hell of a lot easier.  For me as someone who speed runs, emulation makes streaming a fuckton easier and it makes practicing certain segments of certain games a lot faster and less annoying too.  That said, I'd much rather be chilling on my couch playing my retro games than destroying my ass on my shitty computer chair, but that's just me.  For people that don't have access to older games or for people that just want to keep their old collections easily accessible, emulation is pretty vital and as much as the big companies hate it, it's here to stay and that's a good thing.

R.I.P. FC Dual

A LOOOONG time ago I bought a system called the FC Dual.  It's a Chinese made multi-system that plays NES and SNES games.  At the time I bought it I was quite happy with it, it played the games I wanted it to play and I didn't have to shell out 10k+ yen for both individual systems.  However, I made a mistake because this fucking piece of shit just died on me for no goddamn reason.  After taking a moment to reflect on the system I have concluded that it's a huge piece of shit and I would have been better off just spending extra on the original systems.  Here's why

1)  It looks like shit, feels like shit and the controllers suck

This thing is obviously made stupidly cheap because this thing has worse build quality than some of the children's toys at the school I work at.  It's probably the cheap build quality that caused it to die because one moment it was fine and then one cartridge swap later and BAM, no more video output.

The controllers are also fucking atrocious with a terrible D-Pad and shoulder buttons that hurt your fingers after a while.  Everyone knows that the Xbox 360 had a fucking awful D-Pad but the FC Dual somehow out-sucks even that.  Also the black wire covers were coming off the controller and I have no idea how THAT fucking happened considering I treat my gaming collection with the utmost care.

2)  It treats carts like a dog that doesn't want to let go of a tennis ball

More true for FC games than SFC games but HO-LY shit the FC Dual is the system that just doesn't want to let go.  When you are taking a game out you have to pull really fucking hard, almost to the point where you want to stop out of paranoia that you might break the fucking thing.  I found that you could take them out calmly but rocking them left and right out of the slot but that took about a minute and a half to do which is bullshit considering that the original systems have fucking eject buttons.

3) Compatibility

So a while ago I bought Dig-Dug 2 from a retro shop near my house.  I take it home, pop it in and the fucking thing wont load up.  So I take it back to the shop and ask for a refund where they promptly shove it in a normal Famicom and the thing works absolutely no problem.  I have a couple of other obscure Famicom games that don't work in the FC Dual but will work completely fine in a regular system.  Once I realised what was going on with Dig Dug I started getting paranoid every time I bought something that the fucking thing wasn't going to work.

So there you have it, 3 big reasons why the FC Dual is a massive piece of cock.  I know it seems really cool to be able to play 2 consoles worth of stuff in one system but they are so cheaply made that it's almost not worth it.  Just shell out for a original system and you have something more reliable and you don't have to contend with shitty controllers or comparability issues

The March Retro Haul

February Retro Haul

The Japanese Lucky Bag (Game Edition)

Well, my New Year Holiday is officially over and I topped it off by purchasing myself a "lucky bag" from one of my local retro shops!

First of all I better tell you what these things are.  In Japan a lot of stores do huge new year sales and as part of that sale they may provide a lucky bag.  A lucky bag is a sealed off bag of goodies and you're not allowed to see whats in them.  I think the idea is that in every few bags the stores will put in something REALLY good, so if you're lucky then you'll get something pretty pricy for a bit less, don't quote me on that though.

Most of the stores that provide lucky bags are clothes or cosmetics shops, but I'm not interested in that shit so I wandered into my local retro stores and found one that contained games.  The bag I bought cost 2000 yen and contained 20 SNES games!  Sounds like a good deal right?

Wrong....kinda...

While I did get some good games like Final Fantasy 5 and Populous, the majority of games I received were complete trash.  Without naming the good ones I got 3 football games, 2 baseball games, 1 tennis, 1 basketball, 1 wrestling, 1 shogi, 1 panchinko, 1 slot game and a horse racing game.

So my lucky bag wasn't so lucky, but 2000 yen isn't a lot of money and there was a nice feeling of excitement as I took it home.  There was one other bag in another store that cost 15 yen more but it only had 10 games.  However the store told you what games you could get and they were all pretty good.  I didn't pick that one because I owned most of the games in the pool and I thought it would be more fun if it was a complete mystery.

Maybe next year I'll get something better

November Retro Haul

I've mentioned it a few times on this blog already but I have just moved into a new job and because of this the money I had last month was rather limited so I didn't have a lot of dosh to do retro shopping with.  I did do a little bit but not enough to warrant a video so the November retro haul will be done as a written post with a few pretty pictures.

The first game I purchased last month was Brain Lord on Super Famicom.  I have no idea wtf this is since, according to Wikipedia, it was never released in the EU.  I've not had a chance to play it yet but judging from a quick Google search and look at the back of the box it's some kind of action RPG that bears some similarities to Zelda.  Once I get round to playing I'll be sure to talk a little more about it but until then it'll just be another one of those obscure boxed games I bought for next to no money.

The second game I bought this month was Baroque on the Sega Saturn.  It was a little annoying to get this home and then remember that I hadn't changed the watch battery in the system so I can't fucking save.  Anyway Baroque is a rougelike for the Sega Saturn that was remade for the PS2 and Wii in 2008.  The idea is that each time you die various things change and you have to meet various conditions before each death in order to advance the plot.  It's an interesting game but a total pain in the arse to play in Japanese thanks to dialogue that's hard for even native Japanese speakers to understand.  It's one of those games I'm going to spend a long winter afternoon off work with slowly plodding through and translating all the weird shit.

I've never played Chocobo Mysterious Dungeon 2 so there isn't an awful lot I know about it.  I remember playing one quite a while ago on the Wii that was a rougelike but I'm not sure if this one is the same kind of thing.  The older Chocobo dungeon games have always interested me since as far as I know they weren't released in Europe and I've never really had a chance to play them. 


So that's it for this month and with Christmas right round the corner I don't think I'm going to have all that much money to do a lot of shopping in December either.  Once the holiday season is over though I'm going to be trawling the retro shops hard so expect some big hauls in the new year!

The July Retro Haul

Picture unrelated I guess, but whatever

Here is this months retro haul.  Fuck Front Mission

Visual Novels: An Understandably Underrated Genre

A few months ago I picked up Kamaitachi no Yoru from a retro game shop.  My wife has been playing the shit out of it with a friend of hers and I've been tagging along for the ride.  During their evenings of playing Sherlock Holmes I couldn't help but feel that the Visual Novel as a genre of gaming is slightly underrated

For those that don't know, a visual novel is the video game version of a "choose your own adventure" book that was popular during my childhood.  The game presents you with a story and at key moments in the plot you are presented with choices and those choices will affect the outcome of the game.

Kamaitachi no Yoru, for example, is a murder mystery game about a group of people who find themselves stuck in a ski resort log cabin with a murderer.  You read the story from the perspective of the main character as he tries to unravel the mystery and stop the killer from taking more victims.  It's an extremely interesting experience because despite it being no more than a picture book on an SNES cart it kind of plays just like a puzzle game with you trying to figure out who the killer is based on the events unfolding around you.  Your decisions in that game may lead you down the right path to the murderer or get everyone killed and with many endings to discover multiple playthroughs are required to get the full story.

Kamaitachi no Yoru is not the only visual novel I've enjoyed though.  There are quite a few and games like 999 and Virtues Last Reward are rated pretty highly for the story and ability to allow someone to get truly lost in a world of mystery.  Even badly translated visual novels such as Lux Pain on the DS still had a strange charm to them that kept me playing and wanting to figure out what was going on even if the writing in the English version was laughably bad.

Since these games only have to focus on one thing, they do it REALLY well.  Sacrificing traditional game play for an immensely well thought out plot and an unforgettable experience.  At this point you may want to call me a hypocrite because I slam games like Gone Home for being "non-games" or "walking simulators", but there's a key difference between Gone Home and a game like Kamaitachi.  You see, in Kamaitachi I'm using my brain to figure out a puzzle of who is going around committing the murders.  I have to take in all the events around me and play detective in order to reach the best ending of the game.  In Gone Home, you walk around a house and read badly written articles about how someone is a lesbian and the amount of brain power involved in that process is exactly 0.

But I understand why Visual Novels aren't as popular as maybe they should be and that's because their reputation has been sullied by the porn game.

You see, whenever I think of visual novel my mind ALWAYS goes straight to Japanese porn games.  Understandably, people don't want to play or be associated with games that involve schoolgirls being fucked or whatever because that shit is kind of weird (for most, some must find it hot or this shit wouldn't sell).  But these porn games are probably in the majority, or at least it seems that way when if you walk around some of the stranger specialist shops in Japan so the Visual Novel kind of has a bad reputation as a result.

What's really strange about this situation is that I gave one of these porn visual novels a try one time (the above one) and it actually told a really touching story about a girl being bullied at school who finds a friend in the main character and together they stand up to their adversaries, win the day and fall in love.  Sure there were some scenes of gratuitous fucking but if you took all that shit out then there's a good story in there and I think it's sort of a shame that it's ruined by these weirdly drawn sex sequences.

So I think everyone should give Kamaitachi no Yoru or any non-porn Visual Novel a try.  You may be pleasantly surprised just how enjoyable they can really be.

June Retro Haul

Back again with some more retro game purchases! Enjoy!

"That Game" Syndrome

When you've been playing games as long as I have, "that game" syndrome is one of the worst things that can happen to you.

You know what I mean, you're just spacing out one day and then you remember some awesome game that you played years ago.  You remember the general premise, art style, music or something like that and those memories make you really want to play it again BUT you can't remember the games fucking title.

You scour the net for hours and hours trying to find out what the hell the game was, asking on forums only to be met with tons of people giving suggestions that end up being way off.  At this point most people just give up but for the people who do find that game it can go one of two ways.

The first is that they fire up the game and it's exactly how they remembered it.  You play it for a while and come away with a deep sense of satisfaction from the little nostalgia trip you just took.  The other way, which is way more common, is that you play the game and it turns out to be a total piece of fucking shit and you have no idea why you wasted so much time wracking your brains about it in the first place. 

This is what happened for me with Mohawk and Headphone Jack, a piece of shit platformer for the SNES that I bought when I was quite young.  I remember the night I got it quite vividly too.  I went to to game store and got a pre owned version of Donkey Kong Country but when I took it home and popped it in, the fucking thing didn't work.  So I took it back and got it exchanged for Mohawk and Headphone Jack and at the time I thought it was fun.  Years late I played it again and I had no idea why I enjoyed it so damn much as a kid.  Maybe I was just happy to have a new game, but playing it now it's just a frustrating load of crap.

No doubt it'll happen again sometime but let's hope that when it does, it's a good fucking game.

The Japan Gamer Episode 1!

From today I am starting a new series that I am calling "The Japan Gamer" (for lack of a better name) so I invite you to take a journey with me as I explore the world of Japanese video games and video gaming culture!

To me, the most interesting stuff taking place in Japan is contained with the Game Centres, but to start things off I want to share with you a piece of hardware I found during my trip to Osaka known as the FC Dual.

The FC Dual is a piece of kit that plays both NES and Super Nintendo games and is a lot cheaper to buy than buying the two systems separate.  I talk about the system in my unboxing video, and then I test out some of the games I bought around Nagoya in the second part! Enjoy!