Random Crap

Stuff that doesn’t fit into one of the other categories goes here.

Dreamcast Mania! – Overrated games

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What better way to wrap up our celebration of the Dreamcast than by killing it off? In my final entry in this series, I’m going to do what I do best – slaughter some sacred cows. Not all of them are at the top of many Dreamcast gamer’s lists (and some certainly are), but at the very least these were well respected games that I found to be severely lacking.

Grandia 2 – I absolutely loved Grandia 2 when I first played it. But I’m an older and wiser gamer, and I don’t think you could ever get me to touch this one again. When people so vigorously defend Grandia 2, I wonder if they remember just what it was they were playing. It is practically the encyclopedia of anime/jRPG cliches. Angsty loner hero who has a tiff with his brother. Demure and gentle female lead. Sexpot second female lead. Spunky kid, big tough guy. And by the end of it all, you end up killing god. →  Look upon my works, ye mighty, and read!

Dreamcast Mania! – Great games you can’t get anywhere else

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Videolamer noticed that in our attempts to keep Dreamcast Mania! alive, so very many of our articles were about the things we missed out on, rather than a celebration of what we had. That changes now. Today we will be going over some of the absolute best games the DC (and only the DC) has to offer. These are not only the reasons why we loved it, but while we still do. These are the games that make it a system still worth owning and playing (meaning you won’t find games like Third Strike, which has a superior PS2 port).

Oh, and I only have a paragraph to describe each game. Prepare for distilled glory.

Soul Calibur – As far as I am concerned, the only game in the Soul series that you can argue was better than this one (and have me actually listen to you) is Soul Blade. For my money and time, this is still the pinnacle of the series. →  Article Kombat

Dreamcast Mania! – Canceled games: Forever Denied

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Over the last few weeks I wrote about two categories of canceled Dreamcast games, those that were PC ports trying to eke out a living on Sega’s machine and those that quickly found a new home on a competing console. In the final installment of this series I take a look at the most tragic of canceled games – games that gamers never got a chance to play.

Castlevania Resurrection

What was it?
This game was slated to be the third 3D Castlevania and star Sonia and Victor Belmont. The plot line was the standard Dracula-has-returned nonsense; if you’re one of the 36 people on earth who care about the story arcs in Castlevania, please let me know, it would be an honor to meet you. More importantly, Sonia was set to sport a very short skirt and wield a whip.

Would it have been good?
Some people are big fans of the 3D Castlevania games. I am not one of them and thus find it difficult to even pretend to objectively answer this question. →  What can change the nature of a post?

Dreamcast Mania!: What did we miss? – Headhunter

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What Happened?: Headhunter was supposed to come out at the tail end of the Dreamcast’s life. It still did – in Europe. Its US cancellation was a big enough deal for IGN’s Dreamcast channel to review the import, meaning it was as important to them as Shenmue 2. Eventually Americans got a chance to play it on the PS2.

The Game: Allow me to get bold and assertive for a minute. 1998 was the beginning of a new little period in which a flurry of Important Games were released. They reinvented series, changed genres, and refined 3d game design. It ended with the release of Halo in 2001. It isn’t that innovation or good games ended there, its just that, six years later, we’re still copying Halo’s formula. Where we once only had Metal Gear Solid for stealth and Medal of Honor for WW2 shooters, we now have countless games in each genre. We rebuilt some franchises, and then franchised the fuck out of the rest. →  Lose belly fat now!

Dreamcast Mania!: What did we miss? – Capcom VS SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001

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What happened – I don’t actually remember if there were even rumors of Capcom VS SNK 2 coming to American Dreamcasts, but considering we got the first game, it seems likely that there were. CVS2 would hit the Dreamcast, but only in Japan. In my experience it was one of the most widely imported titles in the West, to the point where some DC groups talk about it like it was a regular release.

The Game – If there is one thing Capcom’s massive library of fighters has taught us, it is that they never did get it right the first time. The first iteration always comes with its share of problems, while the final revision is often tweaked and polished to perfection. It happened with Street Fighter 2 and 3, it happened with Darkstalkers, and it happened with Capcom VS SNK.

A 100 pound woman and 400 pound man both make identical jumps simultaneously. Who lands first?

The original CVS was novel enough to make it popular, but it was unable to realize the full potential of this concept. →  These are the games I know, I know. These are the games I know.

Gaming Meccas of Japan Pt. 1 — Den Den Town, Osaka, Japan

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Being a geek and living in Japan is kind of like mixing Ecstasy with LSD – it’s one hell of a trip. There are four places in Japan that should be on the must-see list for anyone who calls himself a nerd. The big one is Akihabara in Tokyo and I will be covering that in September along with The Tokyo Game Show. The third spot goes to Nintendo’s world headquarters in Kyoto but there isn’t much to see there because no one is allowed into the facility and tours are never provided. The fourth spot and topic of today’s installment is Den Den Town in Osaka.

Den Den Town can best be described as the poor man’s Akihabara. It is smaller in size, about four or five square blocks instead of an entire section of Tokyo. The businesses in Den Den are also a bit lower scale. In Akihabara, you can find anything that takes a power cord or batteries, both new and used. →  Game is dead. Game remains dead. And we have killed it.

Second helpings of the DS list article

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Yesterday we covered 65 DS games as something of a jesting response to a PSP Fanboy article. Some readers decided to ignore the point of our piece, which was that games are, at least by our standards, the real reason to buy or not buy a system. For those people, we now present a second reason (in their view) to buy a DS — backwards compatibility.

The entire GameBoy Advance lineup is available to a proud DS owner. While a majority of games on that handheld were licensed kiddy garbage, it was still home to some excellent titles you should make sure to play.

After some GBA games, we will then take a look at 10 upcoming DS games that look promising. Like the GBA games, it didn’t seem appropriate to include these yet to be released games on yesterday’s list. But how can we ignore some of the powerhouses coming soon? So here we go, once again in no particular order at all…

Mario & Luigi Super Star Saga
If this game weren’t hugely entertaining, it’d still be a mandatory buy simply for Fawful’s dialog. →  Now is the winter of read this content.

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65 reasons to own a DS

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Recently, PSP Fanboy began a series of articles called “60 Reasons to own a PSP.” They may only be up to reason 45 despite the series beginning a month ago, but today we are showing you everything we’ve got. Yes, 65 reasons to own a DS, but here’s the catch — they’re all games.

PSP fans (we have some at this site) and savvy readers may be quick to point out that PSP Fanboy could have taken the same approach. Forget that it’s debatable the PSP has 65 good games because that’s not the point. The PSP crowd may like games, but we believe the PSP Fanboy article shows what is important to that fanbase.

Features, a lot of features. Nubs, wireless, movies, browsers, messengers, waffle irons. Games are number one on their list, but they still get one sixtieth of the list, like free VoIP (in Britain only) and adjustable screen brightness. No more or less priority than features 2% of PSP owners use. →  [link only works on even seconds]

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The wonderful centigame: Blizzard custom maps

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Every once in a while, I fall into a gaming slump. During these periods, nothing seems to keep me interested in most games I play. They’re either too long or too complex, and I yearn for something a bit simpler to pass the time.

And so, at some point I found custom or “use-map-settings” maps when playing Starcraft. I call them “centigames” – in honor of Wario Ware’s microgames – because they tend to last between a half hour and an hour but still invoke that ADD part of the brain. Through the wonders of Blizzard’s map editor and the “Trigger” system, which allows for unique maps to be programmed, there is a huge amount of games to play – still – for a game more than nine years old.

The campaign itself is simple and entertaining enough, but normal online play can be cut-throat, intimidating, and sometimes repetitive. Custom maps, however, have a huge variety of gameplay types – most of which are entertaining for hours – and a large enough group of followers that you can usually fill up any game. →  Welcome to the Fantasy Zone.

Behind the names of our favorite companies and consoles

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Gamers speak the names of companies and systems on a daily basis, but many of us don’t know what these words actually mean nor their origin. And so here is a list of many of the biggest companies and consoles and what information is openly known about their names. I speak absolutely no Japanese and have no new information to add to this planet, but I have not seen all this info neatly compiled in one spot before. Thanks to Japanmanship and others who had already done much research on the topic.

Companies


Microsoft – Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems created the microcomputer Altair 8800 and Bill Gates offered to implement BASIC on their system. Micro is either from the Micro in the MITS company name or the micro in microcomputer, or both. Either way, it’s not terribly exciting.


SONY – Despite ads that say otherwise, SONY does not stand for So New York. The name actually derives from the proud language of South America – Latin. →  I am become game, destroyer of words.