There, that was me blowing off the dust on this blog that I haven't used in like... forever.
So I saw some kids playing the New Super Mario Bros. game on a Wii at a Best Buy, and I overheard some older kids who were passingg by scoff and remark, "who cares, it's just another Mario game," and the young punks shuffled off to go smoke crack or something, I dunno... but it got me thinking.
Do we live in a day and age where it's no longer possible for new cartoon-ish mascots to appear and shoulder an entire franchise on their own the way that Mario, Sonic, and a slew of impersonators once did in the later 80s and early 90s? The youngest ones that I can think of today are Ratchet and Clank, and to a lesser degree, Jak and Daxter, and they're both pushing 7 years old now. Blinx the Time Cat certainly didn't make it that long.
It seems like long ago, franchises were developed around personalities, whereas now they are developed around concepts. We are in an age where the majority of video games aspire to achieve a hyper-realism, looking realer than real, and the characters that occupy those spaces aren't really characters, they are purely avatars for the player to project themselves on to.
When we were young, it was fun to pretend we were Mario, or Link, or Sonic. These days, it seems like the only chance kids get to do that when it comes to video games is through TV license games like Spongebob or Naruto. There doesn't seem to be a market anymore for developers who want to establish their own creations. I'm not suggesting that the following examples were the best that video games ever had to offer, but that means no more Kirbys, no more Crash Bandicoots, no more Earthworm Jims, no more Bonks, no more Ryus and Kens, no more Spyros, no more Sly Coopers, and no more Bubsy the Bobcats (although I can live without him...)
Has that era of gaming completely vanished? Is it poised to make a come back? Ever?
The challenge of putting a game guide together on a wiki is how to present information in a concise enough way to give players all the information that they want or need, without overwhelming them. At StrategyWiki, we have also been dealing with the challenge of presenting information about a series of games such a Street Fighter II in a way that cuts down on the amount of redundant information that gets presented. To deal with that, we've incorporated nearly every version of SF2 into one Table of Contents. Each game has their own move lists, but each character page references the moves from each version of the game, so there's a lot of cross population of information.
With the release of SSF2THDR, it seemed only natural to bump the number of SF2 games covered by one, and treat it like any other version created, rather than start anew with a brand new guide. But the question remains: is this in fact the best way to present this information? A lot of people will have a variety of opinions about this, and no one way can truly be considered the "right" way, but I wonder if we've come as close as we can. I know that some people are going to like it, and some people are going to hate it, but the most important question is can everyone understand it.
I'd like to solicit opinions from the Destructoid community on the choice of layout that we have built the SSF2THDR guide upon. I'd really like to know what your opinions are concerning the ease of ability to understand and navigate around the guide for both hardcore players, and potential novices. You can go directly to the guide and start browsing around, or have a look at the snapshots that I provided. How would you improve upon it? What, if anything, really needs to change? Of course, if you see a mistake, by all means, feel free to fix it. It is a wiki after all. Thanks in advance, and feel free to ask me questions if you have any.
Well, I've been away for a while, wallowing in my own sorrows (see my previous post) but I think I'm ready to come back and focus on what's most important in life: video games and talking about them with other video game lovers. Cuz let's face it, my social life has always taken a back seat to my love of games. Why should one measly failed marriage change that? (Don't worry, I'm not bitter... much.)
Today my thoughts are focused on one thing: the GP2X Wiz. Historically speaking, it's extremely rare for me to buy the same product twice unless it a "junior" model of an existing console. I bought the Atari 2600 jr., the top-loading NES, the SNES jr., the PSOne, and the PS2 Slim. And I bought a handful of GBA models, but they were limited editions. If I end up purchasing this GP2X Wiz, it will literally be my fourth GP2X purchase. So what the hell am I talking about? Feast your eyes on:
Now, the only thing that's really attracting me to this model is the 533MHz clock rating on the ARM processor. That's over double the original speed, which means that the stuttering SNES emulation on my white F200 model should be a thing of the past. Can't say I'm fond of turning the right hand buttons into a second d-pad, but I don't think it will matter too much in the long run. As long as I can Shoryuken with ease on the left side, I'll make due. The built in rechargeable battery is a nice touch as well.
I know there are a couple of Pandora fans out there, but despite all of the supposed "progress" being made to that system, it's still vaporware as far as I'm concerned, and I am highly unconvinced that it will live up to all of it's supposed promises. It easy to claim that the device will have everything under the sun and the kitchen sink, and that the battery will last a bajillion hours, but somehow, I just don't think so.
So I will probably break down and invest in one of these and replace the two I already have at home (and really need to sell... any takers?) I will try to jump back on my usual style of blog, posting about my continuous chronological adventures with Famicom games that I write strategy guides for on StrategyWiki. That is of course, if people are still interested in hearing about them. I know some of my write ups have been hit or miss. But it's fun to share some of the uncovered gems that I come across on occasion with all of you.
Update: Irony of ironies, I did end up taking a leak right after I wrote this post ^_^;
Before I start writing this post, I just want to say up front that there's no need to call the Waahmbulance. I'm not writing for sympathy, or a whole bunch of "cheer up, it'll get better, you're better off" comments because I know that's not what this community specializes in. What it does specialize in is humor, and I really need to laugh right now.
So my wife is leaving me. No it's not another guy (or another girl), no I wasn't an asshole, no it wasn't any of the usual dumb shit that a wife leaves a husband for. After being married for a little over 2 years, and being together for over 7, my wife decided that being married simply isn't for her. She didn't want to be responsible to anyone else in the world but herself, and she realized that her continuous denial of the fact that I actually worry about her when I don't hear from her hurt me quite a bit. She doesn't want to hurt me anymore, but she doesn't want to change either, so she decided it was time to leave, even though we still love each other very much.
The thing is, I had this beautiful half black, half Japanese gamer chick for a wife, and at the moment, I don't see how I'm possibly going to replace her with someone else. Early on when we were going out, I wasn't sure if she was exactly the right girl for me. I used to think it was because of the race difference (I'm just boring vanilla) but now I'm starting to wonder if I didn't know something was up way back then. All of my friends, mostly game developers, thought I had found the holy grail: a hot chick who likes games. And I felt that way as well, so I made it work. And to this day, I would have continued to make it work because of my "never say die" attitude towards marriage. She finally decided we could never be happy if we kept going the way we had.
When we first got married, she said she wanted the same things out of life that I did. She's finishing up her degree in Japanese language, and she had an opportunity, just a few months after our wedding, to go to Japan on an exchange program. It was 3.5 months, and I knew it would be hard as hell to live without her, but I thought what the heck, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I figured when she got back, the ball would roll back in my favor, and she would dedicate herself to the marriage. Instead, she was so inspired by living in Japan, that the ball actually rolled further in the opposite direction. She wants to spend a year there, and I just don't want the same thing. I want to plant some roots and build a family.
So now I find myself in the unenviable position (or is it?) of being single again at 32. I was never good at the bar game, and I think I come across way too much like a gamer geek when I write profiles on on-line dating sites, even though I'm just trying to be honest. I have more dimension than just my interest in games, but that's hard to communicate. Anyway, I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that it's over, even though a very small part of me holds out hope that she will change her mind. I guess I'm just a Pac-Man who has lost his Mrs. Pac-Man, a Link without a Zelda, a Mario missing his Peach.
Nor would you have, it was a text / point-n-click adventure for the Famicom Disk System that was only released in Japanese. That is until a ROM hacker known as Mute translated the game's Japanese text into English in January of 2003. After playing through it and translating some of the walkthroughs that I could find, it turns out that the game is incredibly short. You can finish it in under half an hour easily. You can take a look at my English guide for the game right here.
As a concept, Suishou no Dragon is interesting. It seems to borrow from a ton of the typical sci-fi anime cliches that exist, and meshes them into some playable storyline. The problem is, this storyline seems to live in the absence of any supporting or background material. You never really learn much about your character, or Cynthia and Nial, the friends that you are attempting to rescue. You have no idea why the old lady doctor is so willing to help you and provide you with free space scooters. The game just sort of drops you in to the middle of someone else's life, tells you what you need to do, and lets you go on your merry way. Perhaps the instruction manual filled in a lot of the back story and the existing relationships, but I'll never know.
So if you get past the whole "I don't know who the hell I am, or why I'm doing this stuff" part and get down to the doing, what you find is your typical point-n-click adventure game, where the pointing and clicking takes the form of an on-screen arrow that you move around with the d-pad. When you need to move to another location, you cycle through all of the available directions and select one. I often don't like point-n-click adventures that have random solutions such as "touch item X that you collected with item Y in the room," because I don't have the patience to sit there and try the 200 different combinations of items that are available. But this game really has very few items and interactive objects on the screen, so it felt "solvable."
Most of the solutions are fairly intuitive, while a few seem like red herrings (the whole monument on the planet of Alias thing with the tablet for example). But really the story is so short and you can pretty much get through the game without a walkthrough except for possibly two or three moments. As far as I know, nothing ever became of this franchise, but it is notorious for one piece of trivia: When the game came out, a popular Japanese gaming mag thought that other mags were stealing their material. So they intentionally placed a bogus article in one issue, about being able to enter a secret code that would let you play strip rock-paper-scissors with the girl illustrated above. They did it just to see if any other magazine would steal this "secret" and print it. Pretty like the whole EGM Sheng Long in Street Fighter II thing (which was an intentional joke on their part,) players were trying like crazy to get a little anime girl to play rock-paper-scissors and take off her clothes. That's the only real lasting legacy that this game ever had.
So it's about 9:30pm for me, and I'm sitting here staring at my not-so-meager collection of games that I have. Between the Wii and the 360, I have about 20, not counting downloaded games. Make that around 50 if you count GameCube and Xbox games, and chalk that up to a crapload if you want to count PS2 games. And I'm just trying to figure out...
WTF do I play?
I'm in one of those "no particular game" moods, where I'm not really deeply into any one game at the moment, and I'm finding it hard to figure out what direction to lean in.
Now, to be fair, part of the problem is I'm 32, and I just don't have the same amount of time and energy that I used to have, say, 10 years ago. So the thought of plopping down on the couch and diving into an RPG or playing more GTA4 for hours is not as appealing. It's not the playing of the games themselves that's not as appealing. It's the idea of staying up late, going to bed at some retarded hour, and getting up early for work the next morning that's the problem. And I don't even have kids! (yet...)
So it's hard to pick a game that I know I won't be able to tear myself away from in less than 2 hours. So that still leaves a bunch of choices. How about a fighter? Soul Calibur IV is coming soon, I could bust out SC3 for shits and giggles... but nah, I didn't have too much fun with that. I might as well stick with SC2 and play as Link. Or how about Beautiful Katamari on the 360? Well... I already did the biggest level in the game and rolled up the whole earth. What else? Oh, I started playing through Boom Blox, why don't I pop that back in... no wait, my arm is still killing me. I know, I could play Guitar Hero III, but there's the one song I can't play on Expert and it pisses me off...
See, this isn't something I normally go through, it just strikes me every now and then when I'm exceptionally bored. Normally, I fill this time working on StrategyWiki, but I'm just not in the mood right now. I think I'll just turn on Cartoon Network and watch Adult Swim...
My name is Scott. I've been playing video games since my hands were big enough to hold a joystick. I started with the Atari 2600, and graduated to the Atari 800 computer where I taught myself how to program in BASIC. I eventually got a NES, and later a Game Boy. The first summer I ever worked, I was a CIT at the day camp I attended. I worked all summer long to save up enough money to buy the SNES the very day it came out.
I attended college at the University of Pennsylvania. I was introduced to the internet my freshman year in 1993, and I fast became a console pirate, purchasing a copier and downloading ROMs off of IRC channels. Good times. In my senior year, I purchased the N64 as soon as the street date was broken, and skipped classes for the next three days to play Mario 64. I also bought a used PSX the same year.
After I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and a degree in Psychology, I was accepted to Digipen. I was part of the very last class that attended the school in Vancouver, before they moved the campus to Nintendo of America's HQ in Redmond Washington (across the street from Microsoft). After completing the program, I got my very first job as a programmer at Ubisoft.
I lucked out with Ubisoft because they were actually opening a studio near my hometown in NYC, so I actually landed my dream job and got to live on the east coast near my family. I worked on Batman: Vengence. I met a number of cool people, but the only one I still keep in touch with happens to be a buddy of mine who was the lead designer on "Army of Two." He is without a doubt, the greatest game designer I have ever had the privilege of working with.
The studio in NYC didn't pan out for Ubisoft, and they decided to fold the team up to Montreal. After living in Vancouver for a year and a half, I decided I had enough of Canada, so I stayed in the NYC office, which transformed into GameLoft. I stayed there until me and the buddy I mentioned landed a job at 3DO. We both moved out to Redwood City and started working there.
3DO wasn't a great company, but it wasn't terrible, and I met a crew of people who became some of the greatest friends that I have ever had. I worked on Dragon Rage, which was being led by Kudo Tsunoda. He told the execs that it was going to be an Army Men game with an art asset swap, and it would take 6 months to complete. The truth was we were building a new engine from scratch, and it would really take a year to get it done right. When the six months were up, the execs asked for the game, and we weren't even close to finished, so we had to do 12 hours days, 6 days a week until the game was finished. 3 months later, nobody cared about it anymore, and it went straight to the budget bin.
3DO closed down very shortly after. While I was at 3DO, I got to know two people who amazed me: Howard Scott Warshaw and Tod Frye, two of the original Atari 2600 programmers. Getting to meet them and talk with them about "the good old days" at Atari was an amazing thing to me. (I totally recommend visiting Howard's site, Once Upon Atari and ordering his DVD about what those days were like.) I still run in to Howard infrequently at retrogaming conventions and it's always a delight.
After 3DO, I worked for a THQ studio that used to be called (oddly enough) Pacific Coast Power & Light. It's known as Locomotive games today. I was put on the WWE Crush Hour game, the game that was designed to mix the WWE up with Twisted Metal. I created the game's shell and character selection screen. It was actually a pretty cool game, but THQ's love for WWE had cooled down when the game was close to finishing (right after WWF became WWE, the ratings started to tank), so they rushed it and laid off the whole team.
Wishing to return to the east coast, I applied for jobs that I could find there, and actually lucked out with a job opening at Firaxis Games in Hunt Valley, Maryland, home to Sid Meier. When I got there, they were toying with the idea of remaking Pirates, and were prototyping a lot. The results were mixed, and Sid decided to get involved with the development personally. They knew they wanted to make a console version, and they put me on the small team responsible for porting the game to the Xbox. I had doubts about the game, and I wasn't enjoying the tasks I was being given (such as working on the in-game glossary), and things didn't work out. I made a lot of good friends there who I miss working with.
By this time, I had been with four companies in six years, and my girlfriend who moved from California to come live with me was in the middle of going to school to get her degree, so I did something drastic: I grew up. I ended up looking for any available programming job, and accepted a position with a UPS owned software company as an algorithm designer. I've been there since 2005, I get paid more money, and work fewer hours than I ever did as a game programmer. But I really miss the creative environment and working with people that I have a lot in common with, i.e. a love and passion for video games.
I am currently a staff member at StrategyWiki, as well as the copy editor for Retrogaming Times Monthly, so I'm still involved with video games (mostly retro games) in my own way. I am now living in northern Maryland. Welcome to my blog.
Destructoid is an independently-run publication forged by our love of video games and the gaming community's need of accountable enthusiast press living the dream since March 16, 2006
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