I'd like to add my personal good news to the plethora of excellent Phoenix Wright stuff that's been coming out this week. Today, I have FINALLY secured the last game in the series, which gives me the complete Ace Attorney series in one place!



It took me forever to find these games after Jonathan Holmes introduced me to the series on the Wii, and now that they've been out for such a long time, they're all crazy expensive. After months of searching, I ended up finding them at various GameStops -- all in mint condition -- for less than $20 a piece. One of the games was also a birthday gift, so I actually only paid about $70 TOTAL for the entire series.

But the centerpiece of the collection isn't any of the games, oh, no. It's this amazing stylus that was a preorder bonus for Justice for All in Japan that my girlfriend was able to track down online:



IT'S HIS ARM, PEOPLE. HIS POINTING "OBJECTION!" ARM. And I don't even mind the fact that it looks like his finger is wearing a condom!

I'm in my glory right now. If I had paid the full prices for these games (i.e., what they're worth NOW), I wouldn't be nearly as giddy. The fact that I paid next to nothing for the series is what's blowing my mind.

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to get to go to the Sundance Film Festival and catch a showing of Indie Game: The Movie in Salt Lake City (about 20 minutes from my house). I had been following news about this movie for quite a while -- mostly through Destructoid -- and I was crazy excited that my first Sundance experience was going to be a movie about video games. While not a whole lot of actual gameplay from any Indie games is shown, the movie is much more about the people who decide to dedicate their lives to making these games for all the rest of us to enjoy. After hearing their stories, I can safely say that I will NEVER try to program a game while on a deadline.

The documentary is laid out similar to others in the genre: Interviewees in front of a camera, talking about the process of creating their games, mostly DURING the actual process itself. The movie concentrated on three specific games and their creators: Braid, with Jonathan Blow, Super Meat Boy, with Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen, and Fez with Phil Fish (which was confirmed to be finished at the end of the show, with a release date planned for sometime within the next couple months). The audience got to hear about the inspirations that went into these games, and that was one part that I really found fascinating. In fact, Refenes said something that really made me smile -- He said that he didn't necessarily care if people absolutely loved his games or not, but that he made the games for himself, and not for other people. If other people liked them, then that was great, but if they didn't, he still had something he was personally proud of. That's an awesome way of looking at it, as far as I'm concerned, and as we all know, Super Meat Boy was indeed a success. He used the money they earned to pay off the debt his parents had built up over the years, and McMillen used the money to buy a house (and a hairless cat) for his wife.

Blow, while admittedly not the most interesting person to listen to, was obviously the most experienced in game programming. He explained how he created elements of Braid to reflect himself, and how he responded to almost every post about his game on the Internet to make sure people "got it." In fact, he said he was actually very depressed after his game launched, because he wanted it to be understood. And no, the video they showed of Soulja Boy "reviewing" Braid didn't help, I'm sure.

Fish's story was particularly agonizing at times. His first partner left during the creation of Fez, and it was actually against the law for Fish to show the game at last year's PAX without that person's signature. He was stressed as hell leading up to the show, knowing that at any moment, he'd have to pack up and go home after all his hard work. This was made even harder to swallow considering that the public hadn't seen anything related to Fez since the FIRST video that was shown, so it was an extremely important part in the game's production cycle. He ended up having a playable demo available anyway, and the signature he needed was indeed acquired at a later time, so everything turned out okay.



I liked how the movie was shot, because it ended up feeling like a drama. At times, it seemed like it actually had a storyline, and you wanted to know what the characters were going to do next. I had to remind myself more than once that this was actually non-fiction, and that all of this had actually happened. Just knowing that raised my own blood pressure, and I now have so much more of an appreciation for what these small developers do. Companies like EA and Capcom have thousands of people making these games at any given time. The groups shown in this documentary had no more than two each, and in Braid's case, it was ONLY Blow working on it. Knowing what I know now about the creation process, that these guys quite literally wanted to kill themselves during the whole thing, I'm absolutely blown away even more than I was as I played their games in the first place.

The coolest part of the showing was that Refenes showed up for a Q&A afterwards. (I meant to bring my copy of the Super Meat Boy Ultra Edition, but I forgot, so that pissed me off for a bit -- I got my ticket stub signed instead by him and the directors.) Being a journalism graduate, I took particular note of one question an audience member asked, which was related to the best way of getting the news about Indie games out there. Refenes said that journalism is going to make or break the Indie game scene, and that good journalists actually sit down and play the games they review, rather than just throwing something together to get the first review on the Internet. And that's when things got awesome.

Refenes, in person, talked about Destructoid's own Jonathan Holmes, telling the audience how passionate about gaming and writing he is. His praise of Holmes was extremely high, and he brought Holmes up when he was speaking about what all game journalists SHOULD be doing, and the right way to do it. I thought I wanted to meet Jonathan in person before, but this pushed it over the edge now. Let's hang out sometime!

Anyway, the movie was great. I'm not a huge documentary guy, but I am a huge video game guy, and I definitely appreciated what was done here. Even if you've never had an interest in game programming, you should check this out when it's available to the masses -- You'll actually enjoy and appreciate the Indie games you play even more than you do now.

It looks like Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir, that 3DS Fatal Frame spinoff that we learned about a while back, has been confirmed for a North American release. The most exciting thing about this is that it's actually being published by Nintendo, which is a surprise after the whole refusing to publish Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse thing. The game will release in North America on April 13, 2012. On a Friday, appropriately enough.

Fatal Frame on the Wii is easily one of my favorite horror games that I've ever played, and so much love was put into the fan translation that it's hard to not appreciate the experience. I've been closely following news about this one, because you actually aim the 3DS like a camera, and the included "journal" makes the spirits show up in your own house. I'm absolutely ready to give myself nightmares for life.

In March 2010, a highly under-the-radar Wii game named Calling was released in the U.S., a few months after its Japanese debut. This horror game was immediately panned by critics, and currently holds an abysmal 49/100 on Metacritic. I'm a sucker for anything that even remotely resembles horror, so a friend and I got it through Gamefly and played the entire thing from beginning to end. It's cheesy, it's linear, and it's filled with more Japanese horror cliches than you can shake a stick at.

Well, maybe I'm also a sucker for stuff that other people tend to hate, because I loved every second of it.

The premise of Calling isn't award-winning -- There's a website called the Black Page, and it has nothing but a counter that shows how many people have died after visiting the site. The main character, Rin, goes to the Black Page because she promised she'd visit a little girl in the hospital. When the girl wasn't there, she checked the website, which the girl also frequented. It all spirals downhill from there, getting more and more people involved.


I honestly can't tell if this guy is enjoying himself or not.

The reason the game is actually called Calling is because cell phones play a huge part. You're called by spirits, you call spirits, your phone's camera can see the supernatural, etc. One of the things that pulled me in is that once you find a phone number, you have to dial it yourself. While you're dialing, you could be attacked, or even in the middle of a fight that's already started. Since you don't actually fight back, you have to run fast enough and far away enough to pull your phone out and dial before you're killed. Since you have to use the d-pad to get to the numbers on the phone, this can get a little annoying, but there's only one spot in the game that actually makes this overly difficult, so it's not terrible. This manual use of the phone also brings the Wii Remote's speaker into play. I've always thought that the only really good use of that speaker was to emulate a phone, and this game is no exception. When you hear spirits talking to you through your phone, you actually have to hold the Remote up to your ear to hear their voices, which is a lot cooler than just sitting there and hearing sound come out of your TV.

Speaking of the Wii Remote, let's talk about the controls for a minute. I had played Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse and Ju-on: The Grudge prior to playing Calling. As much as I loved Fatal Frame (Ju-on was an insult of a "game"), it had one major problem: The controls were terrible. Instead of using the Sensor Bar that comes with EVERY Wii console, aiming in both games was taken care of using the actual motion in the controller, making it very unresponsive. Calling completely does away with that terrible design flaw, and actually uses accurate, line-of-sight IR aiming goodness. Not only that, but there's a run button mapped to the Nunchuk, so the game can be as quick or slow as you want it to be. I've always believed that the Metroid Prime games always had the best controls on the Wii, and Calling comes pretty close to those.

The gameplay itself, as I said, isn't anything a fan of horror (especially Japanese) hasn't seen, but I love that stuff, so I welcomed it with open arms. There are some genuinely scary parts in the game that you wouldn't expect to see, because they break the fourth wall a lot. There's one particular spirit who doesn't do anything except look at you for about half a second before he disappears through the bottom of your screen. This ghost ONLY shows up if you do a quick turn or even exit a menu to get back into the game. The menu will fade out and here he'll be, out of NOWHERE, and he'll just disappear as soon as you see him. There's no reason for him to even exist outside of making you wet yourself, which is the kind of cheesy stuff that I love, especially when he wasn't there at all when you first went into the menu screen.



There's one feature in particular that I want to talk about, something that NONE of the reviews on Metacritic touch on -- Trust me, I checked. Calling has an absolutely EXCELLENT interactive feature with the Wii's Message Board. When you quit playing the game, you'll find that you have a message on your console. But when you go to read it, it won't be in a nice, neat, white envelope like normal, oh no. It'll be in a burned up, decrepit envelope, and when you open it, it'll show you a picture of who's going to die next in the game. This... is awesome. I don't care if you hate this game's guts, you can't deny that this is a cool feature. And it doesn't end there. Throughout the game, you'll find another spirit that has no bearing on the story -- She's just there to creep you out. She's known only as the Girl in Red, and she's the nastiest, most unnerving thing in this game. When you find her, you'll get a message on your Wii in a crimson-colored envelope. The writing won't be all nice and typed -- It'll be scrawled messily on the digital paper. One letter I got literally said "I was watching you today," with a giant eye drawn under the foreboding words. NOT ONE SINGLE REVIEWER mentioned this feature, and it's probably the coolest thing I've seen in a video game this generation. To my knowledge, no other games on ANY other platform actually do anything like this. It's totally unique and a hell of a scare, and no one mentioned it. It blew my mind then, and it blows my mind now.


This is actually a message received in the Wii Message Board -- OUTSIDE of the game.

Now, the game was panned, and that's because it wasn't perfect. The story was very, very lackluster, even though it wasn't the worst I've ever seen. There are no plot twists -- What you see in the beginning is what you get throughout the entire thing. The voice acting is also probably one of the worst attempts I've ever heard in gaming, so it's a damn good thing you can switch to the original Japanese voices instead of suffering through the English dub. The replay value is also moderately low, although there is an extra chapter to unlock and all the Girl in Red appearances to go back and get.

Calling may not have been the greatest game ever released, and it may not have been the scariest. But it certainly wasn't a bad game. I immediately bought a copy once we were done with the Gamefly rental, and I've been happy with it ever since. The Message Board integration is unlike anything else I've ever seen, and takes the happy feeling of the Wii and turns it upside-down, leaving you sweating even after the game is turned off. No other game I've played does that, and I think Calling deserves recognition for it. If you have a chance, give it a shot if you're as much of a horror lover as I am -- A little cheesiness never hurt anyone when it's presented this well.

8/10

In the new Japanese-exclusive book, Zelda 25th Hyrule Historia, Nintendo has finally revealed the official timeline. Here's an image, so prepare yourself:



Kinda out of left field, huh?

Anyway, here's one of the many sources, so read to your heart's content, and my apologies for the double-blog.

A couple weeks ago, Destructoid gave us a preview of a couple Indie bundles that would be coming our way. I was particularly excited about the Little Big Bunch, because it contained the PC version of Explodemon, which I loved on the PS3.

As you can plainly see on their web page, both Explodemon and Munch's Oddysee are listed as being DRM-free, which is part of the appeal. I downloaded the bundle, and I was immediately asked to be on the Internet and logged into a bundle-specific account just to INSTALL Explodemon, and to even download the installer for Munch's Oddysee. This, as you no doubt are telling yourself right now, is definitely DRM. But when I complained about it in an email, this is the response I got from the people running the bundle:

"DRM has got nothing to do with Internet access. Most games nowadays have some form of multiplayer option which requires Internet access. Once you’ve installed your game you are free to do with is as you like. You can re-install it, pass it to a friend, whatever. However, what we can’t do is simply shove the files up on an open server somewhere and ask you to help yourself. That would make the games freeware or shareware, which they aren’t."

Interesting, seeing as how both of those games are offline, single player titles. And didn't they just describe exactly what The Humble Bundle does all the time?

After downloading the installer for Munch's Oddysee, you won't need an Internet connection ever again, and after installing Explodemon, you can literally just copy and paste the installed folder to another computer and it'll run fine. (I actually just made mine a giant .zip file.) But that doesn't by any stretch of the imagination mean they're DRM-free.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw this information out there. It's nice that they're doing a charity thing, but it really is false advertising for two of the five games in the bundle. Charity may be good, but The Humble Bundle this ain't.