posts by jay
jay

Haja No Fuuin – Not a Miracle

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In my post about the MSX2 version of Golvellius I briefly mention that I gave the PC88 version of Miracle Warriors a few minutes of attention before befuddledly giving up. Well, I went back to correct this oversight… and didn’t get much farther in terms of actual progress, though I did spend hours trying. The initial hurdle is getting the game to actually load. The first time I booted it up and read the EGG Console directions the publisher was kind enough to include, I correctly booted the software, created a loading disc, changed to it, changed back to the program disc, and started the game.

Coming back to Haja No Fuuin weeks later, the process mystified me. What I thought I did the first time no longer worked and I spent half an hour messing around with disc swapping and loading. Luckily, the all-katakana directions and error messages were beyond the Google phone app’s ability to translate. Unluckily, I have a few friends so I sent a pic to site admin Chris and he gave me assistance with the Japanese. →  Ba da bam ba baa I’m readin’ it.

Video Game Names for the Taking

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Sometimes instead of sleeping, I am at work, eating, or watching tv. Those are just called days. But other times I am not sleeping but should be because it’s the middle of the night and my wife keeps yelling at me to stop using my phone. What she doesn’t realize is that I am about to stop looking at funny pictures and write something that will be of use to mankind for centuries to come, or at least fill some space on my website. 

Today I present to you the results of a restless night that brought half a dozen stellar video game titles into my brain, as if sent from the cosmos, if the cosmos were really tired and somewhat incoherent. These names are being offered royalty free to any and all readers with the caveat I want my first and last name and the word “presents” before the title, ala Sid Meier but it’ll be less egomaniacal because it’s me. →  The post still burns.

Chaos;Head – The story of a Whiny;Loser

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There’s a scene in Wayne’s World, which you’ve seen 9 times if you’re in this site’s target demographic (American, mid-40s, name starting with J) where Wayne laments his misfortune directly to the audience in an unappealing way. “I’m being shit on. Shit on,” he says. The camera begins to pan away from him, the joke being that the audience doesn’t want to waste time with a whining loser. This is my short review for this game – I am the audience and Chaos;Head is Wayne Campbell in the brief moment he is uncool. But I will add some more words for people who demand actual information in their game reviews. You know, nerds.

I started Steins;Gate because it has a reputation as a great visual novel and after Looping Rage, that’s what I needed. But about 3 minutes in I realized that S;G was not the first in its series, so I checked Wikipedia and then my list of ‘eShop games bought on sale I don’t remember I have’ and discovered Chaos; Head on both (the version I played has the word ‘Noah’ appended to the title to designate it as the rerelease with improved graphics, rounder letters, twice the punctuation, etc.). →  Theme Postital

Phantasy Star Never Had a Theme Song

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All serious JRPG series have their own designated musical theme. Or so you’d think, but one of the big three (as of 1995, I will have to check to see if anything has changed in the short time since), Phantasy Star, never had a theme for the overall series. Let’s take a quick look at the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy themes so we are all on the same page as to what “music” is.

Composed by a living (now deceased) Nazi skeleton, the Dragon Quest theme set the stage for the genre’s theme tunes. Grandiose and classically flavored, it’s still in use today and immediately calls back memories of yore and other forced “old English.” Following suit, excellent composer, and as far as I am aware, acceptable human Nobuo Uematsu created a theme for the Final Fantasy series. Both of these themes have been with their series from the first entry, which is an impressive feat. Final Fantasy is so confident in its new music, it often hides its own theme deep within series entries. →  Start your journey now, my Lord.

The Home Arcade Archive Chronicles

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Continued from here

Driving home from West Virginia with Mercs in the back of my minivan, I couldn’t help but think of what to buy next. The seller we had just left also had a Final Round cabinet. Like Mercs, it was $250 which is a fair price for a working machine and monitor with no PCB in it, let alone the game called Hard Puncher: Bloodsoaked Glory in Japan. My minivan lacked the space to carry two arcade cabinets simultaneously so I told my friend Rick, who had accompanied me to West Virginia, the seller, and my wife that I would have to think about Final Round. Rick and the seller both said ‘ok.’ My wife told me to work on the machines I had since I now owned three. It seemed like reasonable advice, but I still thought about Hard Puncher the whole 90 minute drive home from left Virginia.

Back in the garage, not much progress had been made on Bad Dudes subpar monitor and Mercs was proving a pain in the ass to get wired up correctly. →  I’ll read you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!

Shin Maou Golvellius – A Valley of Quality

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videolamer’s Chris sent me a link to a sale on EGG Console games the other day. For well-adjusted people who don’t know what I’m talking about, the EGG Console is a line of old Japanese computer games rereleased for modern consoles. So like Hamster’s Arcade Archives line but for Japan only games that generally require actual reading (in Japanese) as the collection is of computer stuff. I had looked at the EGG titles years ago when it first surfaced in North America and was composed mostly of Hydlide and Xanadu but then lost track of the releases. Luckily for me, Chris knows what sort of garbage I’m into and he noticed Golvellius on the list of games on sale. I immediately bought it and then spent an hour looking into the other EGG Console games, even the ones not on sale because I am fiscally irresponsible.

The Japanese version of Miracle Warriors, my beloved mediocre Master System RPG, was apparently released on the ol’ EGG in late 2025. →  Are anyone else’s nipples hard?

Wednesdays with Andrew – Gunbird and Saturn Bomberman

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA | Sega CD Gaiden

Last time we covered a slew of Sega CD games that I originally presented to victim Andrew maybe a year ago. It was a pleasant detour we all thoroughly enjoyed. But now it is time to get back on track with the original intent of the project – familiarize Andrew with Saturn games before it is too late. For him, not me. I don’t plan on dying.

Gunbird may or may not be hellish

We briefly revisited Galactic Attack before playing Gunbird. Everyone had more fun with the latter as I sat there smiling politely but slowly shitting my pants in veiled anger. See, I’ve never really liked the bullet hell subgenre of shmups. My experience consists of possibly only Castle Shikigami 2, but that seemed sufficient to make a blanket judgement. (That game does have a solid plot, though.) →  Secread of Evermore

videolamer ignoble

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Writers and people who write despite never being able to generate income with their meager abilities all know that for every published great American novel or 200 word blog post, about ten times as much never sees the light of day.  The world may never see a finished version of Kafka’s The Castle or whatever Camus was writing when Gunpei Yokoi ran him down with his car, but now the unpublished works of the videolamer staff are archived in a place accessible to all.

We present to you a trove of our lesser writings, things we were not proud enough to post here on this main website. We present to you videolamer-ignoble. When you have read everything on videolamer.com and even endured the material from the 00s but still have hours of time to fill at work, try this exciting new repository of mediocre content. It may be less entertaining, not as well written, and overall fairly rote but it will still help pass the time. →  Knock knock. Who’s there? This article.

Thinking about the Genesis library: Part I

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The Genesis of the Idea

I’ve been sitting with an unfinished version of this post for half a year. Making up incorrect theories about the Master System is fun because few people actually care enough to be mad at me, but the Genesis is the big leagues. I’ve settled on splitting the ideas I have about the Genesis library into two main parts, one about their first party output and one about third party support. This gets a little muddled because I cover internally developed, developed by a company Sega owns, and at times third party games published by Sega in this first post that’s supposed to be on first party efforts, but I try to clarify what is being discussed.

Similarly to the thesis of my Master System writeup, Sega did the majority of work supporting the Genesis with games – Sega developed 80 titles internally for the Genesis, while Nintendo internally developed 24 SNES games. This was done both by direct development but also a large number of publishing deals. →  Read, I am your father!

Wednesdays with Andrew Gaiden – Sega CD

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA

Long before Andrew came to me, tears in his eyes, confessing his immense regret for not buying and exclusively playing the Saturn – which resulted in the world famous Wednesday’s with Andrew series (everyone on Neptune has read it) – we spent significant time (upwards of 3 hours) playing Sega CD games. Or more like he would come over and have an adult conversation with my wife while I would force the controller into his hands and demand he play whatever new disc I had just popped in. Whatever the case, we played a fair number of Sega CD games and even enjoyed some of them even if I deliberately focused on inflicting pain with most of my choices – as any good friend would. What follows is the chronicling of our time spent playing together, or at least some random observations and jokes. →  Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.