Gaming on the L train

I like to look cool. Obviously I’m not alone in this, but living in New York and taking the much-derided (for its “hipness”) L train makes this a more pressing issue for me than most. Many of our dear readers no doubt plop into their clunky cars, polluted with fast food wrappers and other etc’s, and drive to and from work more or less anonymously. I, on the other hand get jabbed with stares by confidence-sapping girls who are far too pretty, rich, and successful to ever want to talk to me for more than an instant. Still, I like to pretend.

So when I received my shiny-black Nintendo DS for Xmas, my thoughts quickly turned to “how cool am I going to look using this on the subway?” In fact I’d say this was the second thing that came to mind, right after “why didn’t I get any fucking games?!” →  Read the rest

Chris loves Jesus part 2

Continued from Part 1

The casual (or obsessive?) reader may ask, “How does one foster a personal relationship with Jesus?” The best way for me was to translate it.

Don’t look at it too long or your brain will melt.

Long, long ago in a mindset far, far away I decided to translate a Famicom game by the name of Jesus: Kyoufu no Bio Monster. Despite all the difficult aspects of both translation and ROM hacking, I managed to create a patch that (I hope) carries across much of the feeling of the game.

The first task, naturally, was to figure out what in the hell was happening in the game. I could figure out the basics between context and the words I already knew. From there, I ended up using an electronic dictionary to figure out the rest. →  Read the rest

Chris loves Jesus part 1

I’d like to tell you all a little story about me and my friend named Jesus. No, not that Jesus… This Jesus doesn’t save. It uses passwords instead.

I like women who match their bedrooms.

When it comes to obscure and unknown games, it takes a lot to get much less known than Jesus: Dreadful Bio-Monster. Although it came out on several systems in Japan, it saw no English release. Despite the – somewhat recognizable – name, the game bears no teachings, or indeed any characters somewhat resembling, the well-known founder of Christianity (in fact, the name refers to a space station in the game). There is a bio-monster, however, and it inspires dread.

Jesus is an adventure survival horror game developed by Enix and published by King Records. While most console adventure games have some element of action, Jesus more resembles a text-based adventure. →  Read the rest

Review – Kingdom Hearts 2

Sora picks up a new, more badass outfit in KHII. Donald still uses his sailor outfit left over from his porn star days.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away (let’s call it Japan), a man from SquareEnix and a man from Disney were getting drunk in a karaoke bar when, somewhere between sake and bad renditions of Michael Jackson songs, one of them stumbled upon a most wonderful idea: why not take all the best aspects of the Disney universe, throw them together with all the best parts of the Final Fantasy series, and from this soup of uberness draw the most amazing game ever conceived by man? The two set off to do just this, and on September 16th 2002, if Jesus himself had come down from heaven to bring rapture to the world, no one would have noticed because they’d have been too busy picking up their reserved copies of Kingdom Hearts from Gamestop. →  Read the rest

The state of videogame movies

Uwe Boll has done it again with BloodRayne. Not since the blockbuster Alone in the Dark has a movie kept me so close to peeing in my pants at its sheer awesomeness. German superstar Boll shows promise of becoming the next Hitchcock, but don’t be surprised if in 50 years comparing the two directors is a major insult to Boll.

Those who question Majesco’s motives for licensing the BloodRayne property have been silenced. They clearly did not just sell their IP to anyone who would pay any amount of money for it. Majesco saw the same blinding aura of talent we all see in Boll and placed their faith in him accordingly. The company put the respectability of their character on the line for this movie and it paid off in a big way (the movie is almost as sophisticated as BloodRayne’s nude shots in Playboy). →  Read the rest