More Beef Life

lynxara @ 2011-12-12T02:14:00

2011-12-12T07:15:07Z

So I thought I'd post about this here for lack of any other sort of blogging outlet that would make a lick of sense for it. Don't go thinking I'm going to update this thing regularly or anything now.

I occasionally write list articles for Topless Robot, a geek cult site run under the auspices of the Village Voice and edited by Rob Bricken. When I manage to complete a list, it tends to do fairly well. My latest topic was awful Hanna-Barbera cartoons, since (as a child with cable in the 80s) I grew up watching vast amounts of the company's output in rerun. I can't imagine any kid growing up now, or even anybody around now in their 20s, would have had a similar experience. I don't think any generation of kids will anytime soon.

In the 90s, cable networks became much less reliant on rerun material to fill out kidvid blocks and syndication slowly died out. Cable networks began to produce their own major hit cartoons, Cartoon Network with the first wave of Cartoon Cartoons and Nickelodeon with the Nicktoons block. In due course, The Disney Channel went to basic cable and joined in the high-quality original programming festival with Kim Possible. Now we've got a fourth kids' programming channel in the Hub, which is still heavy on the reruns but is already cranking out credible programs like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Transformers Prime. Kids now can choose from a vast array of new cartoons to watch, made in a variety of styles and genres, and at a fairly high average level of quality. Kids today got Class of 3000 where my generation got Hammerman, to make the starkest comparison possible.

In this much more competitive environment, truly wretched cartoons tend not to survive their first airing, let alone linger in reruns for decades after their initial cancellation. Back in the 80s, though, a kid with cable could grow up on a diet of cartoons so bad that they make Johnny Test look like a paragon of competence and good taste. Due to Hanna-Barbera's sheer prolific output, it was easy to sell cable networks (especially once Turner bought HB) on filling up their kid slots with nothing but miscellaneous Hanna-Barbera reruns. Utter dreck like Galaxy Goof-Ups ended up perpetually rubbing shoulders with more worthy reruns like the original Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear shorts. Sometimes you'd have programs featuring the same characters shoved into the same time slots, so one day you might something fun like Yogi's Treasure Hunt and the next it's goddamn Yogi's Gang.

Anyway, many of the cartoons on the bad HB list are cartoons I grew up watching as a sort of captive audience, fascinated but repelled as I waited for something better to come on. Some I discovered while trying to watch basically anything HB was involved with as research. Going into this project, my idea for a cut-off level of "bad" was going to be Dastardly And Muttley In Their Flying Machines. My rationale for this was the cartoons being bad enough to actually get made fun of by other Hanna-Barbera cartoons. There's an episode of Yogi's Treasure Hunt where Dick Dastardly forces his funny animal foes to watch episodes of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, complete with his captives moaning and groaning about how boring and repetitive they were! Yogi's Treasure Hunt was by far the best of the HB crossover cartoons, in my childish opinion, so if it said this Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines thing sucked then it must be true.

So when adult me, which had a more thorough grasp of how cartoons end up good or bad, started digging into the HB back catalog to see how bad it got, I really expected that Dastrdly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines would end up somewhere on this list. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The HB back catalog is a deep rabbit hole that leads to an underground river of sewage. The sheer quantity of product the studio flushed out in the 60s, 70s, and 80s really was enough to rerun on cable for decades. There's no way for a studio cranking out that kind of quantity to maintain any sort of consistent quality.

Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines wasn't bad enough to make the cut. A lot of things I watched, sometimes the entire misbegotten run of them, were ultimately not bad enough to make the cut. In the comments for the article, people make calls for the inclusion of some shows that they feel I omitted. In many cases, I watched these shows, and trust me: they aren't that bad. Usually not very good, true, but there's a big difference between lame and merely awful. In particular, a lot of the sitcom-based shows and The Three Robonic Stooges actually aren't anything special if you force yourself to sit down and watch several episodes of them. The bizarre premises lead people to assume they simply must be bad cartoons, but mostly they're just average. In particular, the licensed cartoons were never allowed to look as bad as your Blast-Off Buzzards and CB Bearses.

There is one comment about should've-beens on the list that I have to admit has some merit, though. One person made a very credible argument for the HB Godzilla cartoon, which inflicted the dread Godzooky on the world. I really wanted to give the Godzilla cartoon a look for the list, but simply was not able to find any episodes of it. I never saw it in reruns, so I simply couldn't write about it with any sort of emotional honesty. Based on descriptions of this cartoon, I am inclined to think that it might just be bad enough to bump The Thing or Sky Commanders off the list. Of course, sight unseen, I would've said the same was probably true of the Mork & Mindy cartoon or the cartoon where Fonzie travels through time with his talking cat, and those both turned out to be pretty harmless.

VOTOMS IN SRW!

2011-01-05T02:01:34Z

VOTOMS IN SRW!

VOTOMS IN SRW!!

Moon Knight is kind of stupid.

2010-12-02T05:05:10Z

Writer's Block: It's allergies ... really!

2010-08-22T07:07:14Z

What was the last thing that made you cry?

First question listed was submitted by rainingcookiies. (Follow-up questions, if any, may have been added by LiveJournal.)

View 2245 Answers

Something got in my contact lens. My eye teared up until the thing... probably a mote of dust... was washed out.

Sometimes life is not very dramatic.

lynxara @ 2010-08-21T20:21:00

2010-08-22T00:21:27Z

People sometimes wonder why I disliked Megas XLR so much. It's because deep down, I knew a better creative team could've made something like this instead.

Now, this show is something I can see in SRW. Even the trailer makes it clear that Tartakovsky knows what the fuck he's talking about.

lynxara @ 2010-08-04T18:59:00

2010-08-04T22:58:59Z

There has to be some specific gene in our DNA that makes butter pecan ice cream start tasting better as we get older.

Re: Dullalala 11

2010-04-21T06:42:55Z

To Whom It May Concern,

It has come to my attention that Isaac and Miriam from Baccano appear in eleventh episode of your ongoing animated television production, Dullalala. I write to address comment on this event to whichever parties in the production staff that were responsible for it.

Fuck you people.

Seriously. What the hell were you thinking?

In conclusion, fuck you.

Regards,
A. Ashby, Esq.

P.S. Honestly, you guys can just fuck right off.

lynxara @ 2009-12-10T17:51:00

2009-12-10T22:51:06Z

I usually ignore LJ's goofy "question of the day" things, but today's struck me as potentially interesting.

The one movie I think everyone should see is Birth of a Nation. It is one of the clearest possible demonstrations of how film can be used to powerfully express abhorrent ideas.

I'd like to think that if more people saw this nasty ol' flick, you'd get less "Well, it's just a movie, it doesn't really matter!" bullshit out of J. Random Moviegoer.

lynxara @ 2009-12-07T13:57:00

2009-12-07T18:57:38Z

There's nothing I like more than a hater who feels suddenly compelled to link to my work. I like to imagine him grimly realizing that he has no choice.

lynxara @ 2009-10-25T19:47:00

2009-10-25T23:47:12Z

So an interesting addendum to my previous post about the Siren in Borderlands.

Now that the game is out in the wild, I've been tripping across gameplay accounts and impressions from friends-- same as any big new game. Most of what I heard was totally expected, except for one thing: the Siren class is hopelessly busted.

By "busted," I mean busted in the strategy guide sense of the term. A busted item is so optimal that you have no logical reason to use anything else, a busted character makes all alternative choices sub-par by comparison. Well, the Siren is better at DPS than all other classes in a genre where combat is largely a DPS race. She can debuff and stun enemies, she can self-heal and self-buff. Even without a completely optimal build, she can go solo and (reportedly) outperform an entire team of the other characters at equivalent levels.

The Siren's achievements don't suggest that she is by far the best class in the game. They suggest quite the opposite, that she's a stealthy class that will be useful in groups but not getting a ton of solo kills. So either whoever came up with the Siren achievement list either played the game poorly or just didn't write them based on how the game actually played.

It is also possible that the current Siren simply does not work as intended, since I've read speculation that her ludicrous DPS is purely the result of Elemental damage being superior to all other damage types due to a quirk of calculation. The Borderlands developers I believe said they were disinterested in making the game balanced, which is typical for loot fiend games (but not really desirable). It will be very interesting to see if Elemental damage or other elements of the Siren are patched in the PC version.

Game Center CX 2: Electric Blogaloo

2009-10-20T01:18:55Z

Game: Gunduel

Shoot down 100 enemies without dying. This isn't hard at all-- the game throws oodles of screen-clearing power-ups at you!

Game: Star Prince SA

Shoot down 50 enemies in 3 Minute Mode. This is quite a bit trickier than Gunduel's challenge simply because you only have one life and it's a lot more likelier that you'll get killed.

lynxara @ 2009-10-19T16:47:00

2009-10-19T20:47:05Z

So today I read up a bit on Borderlands. It's a game that sounded like it was very much For Me: a co-op shooter with lots of alternative attack methods available and a loot system that is quite nearly utopian for a loot fiend like myself.

Ah, but there was of course a dealbreaker. (Isn't there always?)

For whatever reason, the Borderlands dev team decided that four white guys would be too much-- they wanted a girl. The girl's class is called the "Siren." Every stereotypical girl-in-an-action-game power one could possibly conceive has been welded onto this class. Essentially, if you want to play a male character, you get three archetypes to choose from, but if you want to play a girl? You must play the girl class who only gets to have traditional girl powers.

Based on what I know of the game, it doesn't seem like it would've been significantly difficult to either provide two female playables or to craft a male and female model for each class. Either option would've made me feel welcome as a Borderlands player. Instead if I picked up the game I would feel merely tolerated.

I probably won't be finding out more about the game as I've lost most of my interest in playing it. Pity, that.

Game Center CX 2: Tokyo Blog

2009-10-18T01:16:30Z

I may just be posting Daily Challenge data for a few weeks after this. I've unlocked the first of the two text adventure games and while I think I can crack it, I'll need a lot of help to do so.

Demon Returns

*****
Release Date: September 26, 1986
Notes: Half of the reference here is obvious-- parts of Demon Returns are clearly based on Super Mario Bros. The other half of the game is clearly derived from Wonder Boy, better known as Adventure Island in the US.

Demon Returns shares a release date with the Japanese version of Castlevania, Akumajo Dracula, which released for the Famicom Disk System. I guess Castlevania is how you get to the idea of a bouncy fruit-eating platformer with a ghouls n' monsters theme. The soundtrack also feels a bit Castlevania-ish in the castle levels.
*****

Demon Returns is an excellent 8-bit style platformer. The physics are basically like Mario, though some enemies can't be defeated by jumping on them. You can also choose to knock enemies over with your claw swipe attack. Then you can surf around on the enemy, which lets you take an extra hit and increases your jump height. You can jump off an enemy in mid-jump, which effectively gives you a double-jump.

Instead of a timer, Demon Returns has a fruit gauge that ticks slowly down as you traverse levels. Refill it by grabbing apples-- if you grab every apple in a level, you'll find you can take your time. Grabbing a golden apple instantly refills the whole gauge. You can also find apples in bonus rooms, which you occasionally find after swiping demon pots.

Demon starts off a tiny, miserable thing but can power-up by collecting Moon Medals. One Moon Medal makes him Super Demon and two makes him Super Demon King, who throws tornadoes. Taking a hit from an enemy only knocks off one 'level' of your power-up-- i.e., Super Demon King is busted back to Super Demon, not Demon.

Your job is just to traverse stages to their end. At the end of every world's fourth level, there's a castle containing a boss you must defeat. Other levels end with a pair of swirling lights that form a gate. If you touch the lights when one is very high, you get a large point bonus and summon a garden full of flowers that shine and dance.

09: Defeat and ride an enemy. Knock an enemy over with the claw swipe and then jump on-- it'll behave a bit like the skateboard from Adventure Island, though more controllable. Just ride it around for a bit and you should pass the challenge. Note that when riding an enemy, you can jump extremely high, but areas with lots of pits become lethal.

10: Break a block with the Spin Tornado. In order to use the Spin Tornado, you need to collect two Moon Medals to power up into your green form, the Super Demon King. The quickest way to do this is to beat World 1-1 as Super Demon and then pick up the first Moon Medal in World 1-2.

11: Collect 100 Souls and earn a 1-up. This challenge is fairly simple to complete by the end of World 1-2 provided you discover the demon pots where bonus rooms are hiding. You don't lose your souls upon dying, just when you get a game over. Just don't get so caught up in collecting souls that you let your fruit gauge run down. Souls drift slowly up to the top of the screen, so trying to get to 100 will slow you down a bit if you don't focus on bonus rooms.

12. Clear stage 1-4. Note that if you use the Warp Zone in 1-2 to skip ahead to 2-1 or 3-1, you won't clear the challenge. The challenge won't be cleared until you've defeated Hades Prince at the end of 1-4. So you need to beat all four levels in World 1. To defeat Hades Prince, use your claw to swipe over one of the enemies he throws at you. Ride the enemy, then hop onto Hades Prince's head. He'll take damage, but you shouldn't suffer anything worse than losing your ride. It takes two hits to kill Hades Prince. Note that while riding an enemy, it's possible to grab the golden apple at the center of the room.

Clockwork Ninja Haggleman: Koume Edition

Another of the four Wakuwaku Boy games. This one appears to be completely identical to the first Haggleman from Retro Game Challenge, but it's worth noting that the Koume sprite was altered to replace the Haggleman sprite in cutscenes as well as gameplay. This makes the segment where you rescue the princess either questionable or terribly interesting, depending on your personal preferences.

*****
Release Date: Fan Club Giveaway
Notes: As the title suggests, the difference between standard Haggleman and Koume Edition Haggleman is that you now play as Koume, Haggleman's inexplicable ninja robot sister. They probably used Koume for this game to gently mock the curious cult of personality that's grown up around Mega Man's rarely-playable robot sister, Roll. Playing as Koume doesn't change anything significant about Haggleman, it's pretty much identical to the original from Retro Game Challenge.

"Sprite swap" games like this were are still used as fan club incentives to this day (for instance, Japan's Club Nintendo offered "Tingle's Balloon Fight" not too long ago). Retro Game Challenge parodied the "product advertising" type of sprite-swap game with the cup noodle version of Rally King, so I'm pretty sure the Koume Edition isn't meant to be a riff on the likes of All-Night Nippon Super Mario Bros or Gradius Archimendes. It's probably some game that was given away by a gaming company as a promotion.

There are a few good candidates for what the Koume Edition could be referencing. It could be the Disk-kun giveaway tournaments from the mid-80's, where winners received a gold disk version of Nintendo's Golf that contained a secret 19th hole that couldn't be found in regular versions of the game. A later Disk-kun tournament awarded winners a rare prototype version of Punch-Out that ended when you defeated Super Macho Man (Mike Tyson and Mr. Dream were added in later versions).

I'm not totally certain either of these games is what the developers had in mind, though. There may be a contest giveaway from some other 80's Famicom game publisher that matches up to Koume Edition a bit better. Still, this is definitely the sort of thing it's riffing on. If you do happen to know of a promotional 80's Famicom game that reminds you of Koume Edition, don't hesitate to drop me a line.
*****

Game: Rally King EX

In the 2000cc class, perform three drift boosts in the second lap. This is actually quite easy due to how large the Rally King EX courses are.

Game Center CX 2: Blog Harder

2009-10-17T02:51:08Z

I translated most of this myself, but thanks goes out to bensanaz for helping me do quite a bit of research.

Mutekiken Kung-Fu

*****
Release Date: June 21, 1985
Notes: A take on Spartan X, widely considered the first true side-scrolling beat 'em up. This game even shares the Japanese release date of the Famicom version, which was released in the US as Kung Fu for NES or Kung-Fu Master for other systems and arcades.

This game's 2P VS mode is an homage to Yie Ar Kung Fu, a game considered one of the earliest versus fighters. The graphics are very obviously patterned after Karateka as it appeared for the Commodore 64, as are some of the gameplay mechanics.

The packaging goes to town parodying the idea of a non-Japanese, non-Famicom game made by weeaboo Westerners. The cartridge is shaped more like a C64 cart than the obvious Famicom shape. The manual and "cover art" really recall the packaging you saw in early Western computer stuff, especially Broderbund games.
*****

If you ever played a side-scrolling beat 'em up, you'll be quite familiar with the controls here. A punches, B kicks, and you jump by pressing the up button (which is weird). You can crouch by pressing down, which lets you perform massively cheesy crouching kicks and punches.

05: This one's really easy-- you've got to knock an enemy back from your character. You can just tap the punch button twice to get the desired effect. What actually causes the knockback seems to be attacking an enemy while it's locked up in hitstun. Doing this successfully causes a red flash to appear when you hit the enemy, instead of the usual yellow flash.

06: Beat the mid-boss of Stage 1, the dread Afro Karate Boxer. If you remember how cheap the low sweep kick was in most early martial arts games... well, that's how you win here.

07: Get the Mutekiken power-up, then kill multiple foes using your new super-launching attack abilities. To do this you have to collect four "ki marks," power-up orbs that enemies can drop after you beat them. The ki marks are only dropped if you kill an enemy by throwing another enemy into it with a combo string. You can use combos with the low sweep kick to achieve this very easily.

08: Beat the boss of Stage 2. (Arino doesn't aim high, even as a demon king.) Nothing special required here, just remember to crouch to avoid birds and that you usually need to jump a lot during boss fights.

Game: Demon Returns

Get 50 souls in one play. It's okay to die while gathering the souls, but if you get a game over you need to restart. You may be able to do this in World 1-1-- if not, you shouldn't have to play farther than World 1-2. You get souls by defeating enemies or breaking blocks with your claw sweep attack.

Game Center CX 2: The Bloggening

2009-10-15T19:58:19Z

kouaidou provided significant assistance in translating challenge requirements for Story Mode.

Wiz-Man

*****
Release Date: October 5, 1984
Notes: An obvious riff on the "maze game" genre that Namco pioneered with Pac-Man, though it reminds me a little of Bubble Bobble with the way some of its items spawn. It's even made by Tomato, the company that made all the Namco-related parodies in the first game!

Wiz-Man's release date references one of the most complicated maze games, Devil World. This was Shigeru Miyamoto's stab at making a distinctive maze game for the Famicom. Since it was designed for home consoles, it featured item-collecting and more enemy-killing than a simple quarter-muncher like Pac-Man.

Devil World is actually much harder to play than Wiz-Man since the screen is constantly auto-scrolling in different directions and you can get crushed against the edges. The item collecting is much less intuitive, too. Wiz-Man is sort of what Devil World would be like if it was actually any good, come to think of it.
*****

Wiz-Man picks up crystals in a maze, a bit like Pac-Man. To pick up red crystals, Wiz-Man must be holding a fire rod. To pick up blue crystals, Wiz-Man must be holding an ice rod. Rods appear at fixed points in each level. If you hold a fire rod and pick up an ice rod, your fire rod returns to the point in the level where it usually spawns.

Rods create "magic bursts" when you press the A button, either ice blocks or flames. Enemies that wander into a magic burst will die unless they happen to be immune to that magic. Blue enemies are vulnerable to flames and red enemies to ice. White enemies are vulnerable to any magic burst.

In each level, gold rods appear after you've survived for so long. A magic burst from a gold rod can kill any enemy. Getting multiple gold rods involves surviving a really long time and picking up extra gold rods when they spawn.

Surviving for a long time also seems to cause the golden bell to appear. The golden bell triggers bonus time, when the empty parts of the maze fill up with golden crystals and all enemies disappear. The golden crystals are just worth extra points, but any gemstone spawns you would normally trigger during bonus time will be 1-ups instead.

Wiz-Man has secret warps that let you skip levels immediately. You trigger warps by picking up a certain large crystals in a certain order on a floor. This is usually not the order advised for maximum score, it's a little random. Each floor seems to have a specific method of warping, though.

Challenges:
01: Pick up either two ice rods or fire rods. Create two magic bursts simultaneously. You can do this in floor 1 very easily. In later levels you can pick up as many as three rods at once.
02: Pick up eight shining blue crystals in a row. This is easily done on floor 1. Pick up the two blue rods and you'll notice that the large blue crystal next to Wiz-Man begins shining. Pick up only large blue crystals that shine to clear the challenge. Doing this grants you a bit score bonus and seems to make certain bonus items like the golden bell and gold rod appear at more advantageous times.
03: Clear floor 4 of Wiz-Man. The easiest way to do this is just to clear levels in order. You can use warp points and I believe it'll count for the challenge.
04: Gather 10 gemstones in one life. The gemstones appear in the center of the maze for 10 seconds every time you gather 50 or 100 crystals. The counter starts over if you die, it seems. Getting all ten gemstones seems to demand being able to survive on one life to around floor 6. Gathering 1-ups during bonus time doesn't seem to count toward the gemstone limit, so you may want to avoid grabbing the golden bell while doing this challenge.

Cosmic Gate [MASA-X]

*****
Release Date: November 15, 1984
Parody: Cosmic Gate was a pretty blatant parody of Galaga and its various sequels, especially the obscure Gaplus. The MASA-X version parodies one of the Famicom's main competitors in 80's Japan, Sony's MSX computer.

While the MSX was in theory potent hardware capable of better graphics and sound than the Famicom, the system required some skill to program well. While Konami issued a bunch of great MSX games, a lot of fast-paced Famicom action games turned into slow-moving piles of ass on the MSX due to shoddy porting.

The MASA-X version of Cosmic Gate parodies this by making the controls, graphics, and sound much worse than the original version. It's clearly supposed to be a lousy port converted by an outsourced developer-- it's credited to ASOBII instead of TOMATO. Your ship maneuvers and fires projectiles very slowly, which makes the game more challenging to play.

It's hard to pin down exactly what the release date is referencing. Both Galaga and Galaxian were ported to the MSX in 1984 but neither game launched on November 15. My guess is the date is referencing an infamous "bad port" for MSX that came out on that date.

If you know of any MSX (or other) games that definitely came out in Japan on November 15, 1984 please get in touch. All of the Game Center CX release dates are references to real-world game releases so it's just a matter of figuring out what came out on that day.
*****

You unlock it after completing challenge 04. All of its play mechanics (and it seems, certain cheat codes) appear to be carried over from the first game intact. Story Mode doesn't seem to feature any challenges for it, instead it's in "free play" mode here. Of course, Arino's parents won't buy him an expensive thing like a MASA-X, so you can only play this version of Cosmic Gate by visiting a local game store called Wakuwaku Boy that has a demo unit set up.

The only significant addition is a "big boss" who appears during the bonus asteroid field stages. If you manage to kill him you seem to get a very significant point bonus, but it's pretty difficult to pull off for reasons noted above.

For some reason my copy of Game Center CX 2 thinks I'm beginning the game on October 26, 2008. I don't really want to argue with it so I'm just going to play the Daily Challenges in order from here on out. I don't know yet if Daily Challenges are date-specific or what just yet.

Game: Haggleman Koume Version

You need to clear the second floor with "no misses." This seems to actually mean "clear the second floor without getting hit once." Flushing the boss out of its hiding place early makes this much easier.

lynxara @ 2009-10-15T15:32:00

2009-10-15T19:32:50Z

Well, GamePro pulled the plug on BlogFaction yesterday as part of the editorial change-over from George Jones (who hired me) to new EiC John Davison. This effectively shuts down OMG Nintendo. I had anticipated something like this happening for... geez, I think about a year or more. I made my first prediction regarding it when sardius left. So, I'm a little sad but not exactly surprised.

Maintaining a vast network of niche satellite blogs made no sense when GamePro.com itself was clearly starved for content. A lot of things posted to BlogFaction sites would've gotten ten or twenty times the traffic (at least) had they just gone to GamePro.com instead. Hiring specialist writers is a fine and wise thing for rounding out the staff of a game news & reviews outlet, but sequestering your specialist writers in a hard-to-find blog ghetto is not.

What I was told when I got the call from GamePro is that Davison wanted to focus on actually building GamePro.com into a good gaming site (as opposed to about half of one) and felt shutting down BlogFaction was an important part of getting GamePro's resources focused on that. I think that's absolutely the best decision to make given the situation so I can't even be angry about losing the paycheck. I've got other things lined up and I'll be quite comfortable through the end of 2009 at least.

I was told I had a shot at being part of the new GamePro.com as a "valuable contributor," but my outlook on that opportunity is cautious at best. I'd be happy to accept freelance gigs from GamePro, but the company has plenty of full-time employees to take care of already. I think there may be less work to go around than the company expects, just given what a rough economy it is now for any magazine-like business. Still, I'd like to pitch in and help if I could, I suspect Davison's GamePro would be an interesting place to work.

What I feel right now is mainly a disquieting sense of being unmoored. I can still do my daily business blogging at VGN and other work that's very satisfying, but I had invested a good four hours a day or more into maintaining OMG Nintendo for a little over two years. Losing that is losing a significant part of my daily routine. I still have a feeling like I'm not quite sure what to do with myself when I get to the part of my day where I would usually go out to read gaming news. I had even set most of my gaming diet to revolve around the blog, almost exclusively Wii and DS games.

Now I can go back to investing a lot of time in the imports and niche RPGs that make up my usual gaming diet. (So as far as that goes, I'm quite pleased GamePro had the grace to let me go just a few weeks before a very interesting-looking new Super Robot Taisen ships.) To help wean me off the compulsive need to go post Nintendo stuff somewhere every day, I'm going to start posting rough FAQ material for the shiny import copy of Game Center CX 2 that kouaidou brought me from Japan. GCCX2 offers players "Daily Challenges" to complete, so writing about one every day for a year or so should help me scratch that lingering Nintendo-blogging itch in a way that will be vaguely useful to other fans.

I'll also note that back when sardius departed we discussed the idea of starting some sort of group gaming blog that would let us carry on like we did in the early days of OMGN, but perhaps with a focus that could be broadened to include more writers and a less hardware-specific approach to talking about the sorts of games we both seem to like (retro games, cult games, and shitty games). sardius now appears to be a full-time playboy millionaire in Gamasutra's employ so I don't know if he'd still be able to participate or not, but the project is still appealing. Depending on how this winter goes, I may opt to launch something in spring. The main thing I want to do is think carefully about what the focus of such a site would be... the world of gaming blogs is a very crowded one and I'd do it a disservice by launching with nothing particularly fresh or interesting to say.

lynxara @ 2009-10-04T12:50:00

2009-10-04T19:50:13Z

So, folks who hang out with me on IRC know my Internet connection has been shitty at best for the past week or so. I was pretty sure it was a sign of either a dying modem or router but I needed a prolonged period of down connection to justify the BS I'd need to go through to determine which it was.

Yesterday the connection finally went down for good and as I suspected, it turned out to be a modem dying of old age. I'll be online intermittently, mostly to work, until about Tuesday or Wednesday this week when the new modem arrives. I won't be on IRC so contact me other ways if you need to speak with me. The same goes for other folks in the house who use the connection.

lynxara @ 2009-08-17T19:30:00

2009-08-17T23:30:03Z

My art's crap, but I still love coming across stuff like this.

lynxara @ 2009-08-14T17:35:00

2009-08-14T21:35:37Z

So, for very complicated legal reasons, the family of Superman creator Jerry Siegel are currently going through a series of court battles with DC Comics regarding the copyright to various aspects of Superman. A lot of their case revolves around proving that much of the basic elements of the Superman mythos were created wholly by Siegel with no input from DC or licensees. Right now, the Siegels are winning as most modern interpretations of copyright clearly indicate that Siegel and Shuster got ridiculously screwed.

It's worth pointing out that this legal battle is extremely unlikely to damage Superman's publishability or result in the Siegels having the right to do as they please with the character. What is more likely is that at some point Time-Warner will give the Siegels a suitably ludicrous sum of money for the basic copyrights to Superman.

Fans, of course, are not always creatures concerned with what is likely or moral. There is a certain amount of panic spiraling up from some quarters about the possibility of there never being Superman comics in some theoretical future.

Check out the comments section of this post that gets into the latest ruling made in favor of the Siegels, based on unpublished material that Denis Kitchen provided. What the Siegels obtained was a mere pittance in terms of IP, but by god that's a pittance that could turn into the cancer that's killing Superman.

Edited to add another reaction from Tom Spurgeon that sums up a lot of things about the situation very neatly (but certainly not nicely).

lynxara @ 2009-08-13T15:47:00

2009-08-13T19:47:25Z

Don't buy this guy's books.

(Or buy them second hand / check out from library only.)

People have a right to their opinions, but the tone here is absurdly irresponsible.

lynxara @ 2009-08-09T13:20:00

2009-08-09T17:20:50Z

So Kotaku has started a feature called "Sunday Comics," where they collect strips from the Internet's gaming webcomics all into one page.

Reading the page this day, I was struck by how dissatisfied I was with the vast majority of what I was reading. Poor art, poor pacing, poor gags.

Are there any good gaming webcomics besides Penny Arcade (which wasn't about gaming this week)? It seems that there must be, but I do not know where they are.

lynxara @ 2009-07-18T12:49:00

2009-07-18T16:49:12Z

American comics appear to be developing an obsession with unaging but in fact very old women that just happen to look perpetually sixteen that may soon be on par with Japan's obsession with unaging but in fact very old women who just happen to look perpetually eleven.

lynxara @ 2009-07-02T12:01:00

2009-07-02T16:01:33Z

Some more Neo information has surfaced regarding movement rules for flying units. What I'm hearing is that while flying units can maneuver around obstacles more easily, they can not maneuver around non-allied units. This means that a very large flying unit could be easily "pinned down" by even small ground units that were deployed strategically. This part of movement is almost exactly how Sunrise World War worked, although that game still used a tile system.

Some digging has revealed who this mysterious "Red Company" is that owns part of the Wataru rights-- the same company apparently co-owns the rights to Sega's Sakura Taisen games. Obviously I don't really know the rights situation here, but I recall one of the Wataru games was a pack-in for the old TG-16 (Americanized into "Keith Courage" over here). If there is a rights situation keeping Wataru out of SRW, it probably involves some company having paid a lot of money for Wataru video game rights that have yet to run out. Remember that the main reason why Takara sits on rights for SRW properties is because it publishes its own games (through owning interests in Tomy and I believe Atlus Japan).

Neo's new system is... Free Move?

2009-07-01T04:09:57Z

Some new SRW Neo scans are out and they seem to confirm the new system that the game is debuting. It's nothing like Parts or Capturing from GC... instead, it seems to pretty much be Phantom Brave's free movement system.

(Minus the ally-chucking, of course.)

http://img1.a9vg.com/200907/01/1246416397730.jpg
http://img1.a9vg.com/200907/01/1246416414826.jpg

Other new features:

Map is full 3D and can be rotated a true 360 degrees, so are the map representations of units.

Weaker attacks will only be seen as map animations using the 3D models, traditional attack videos will only be made for major attacks and finishers.

In addition to obstructing movement for non-flying enemies, map obstacles are now going to obstruct certain attacks as well. A weapon that fires in an arc might shoot over an obstacle but other attacks might be blocked.

Unit size will affect movement-- a small unit can squeeze through enemies and small gaps better than large units

Unit size will also affect attack range, though-- small units will have less range on average than larger units.

So basically Neo is completely reconstructing the traditional approach to SRW gameplay balance. It may play even less like a traditional SRW game than even squad-based games like Z.

More on Wataru and SRW Neo

2009-06-30T15:54:02Z

So, rumor has it that SRW series producer Terada appeared on Sunrise's radio show on the 21st to discuss the Sunrise inclusions for SRW Neo.

Apparently the Japanese blogosphere is really pissed off about the lack of Wataru in the first SRW to acknowledge SD robots so Terada addressed the issue where the hell Wataru is in Neo. Allegedly he said that when the game was conceived Wataru was supposed to be in the series roster, probably instead of NG Knight, but that there were many problems with locking down the rights. Fans in the US are theorizing that this has to do with Wataru being partially produced by a firm called RED Company that might be sitting on the rights Takara-style. NG Knight was probably used instead because it's really just Wataru but slightly more sarcastic.

Also from the show: apparently Banpresto has access to all of the original Sunrise production materials for Daiteioh and Sunrise is going to supervise the inclusion. So everything established about Daiteioh in Neo is going to be approved by Sunrise and considered officially canonical, from attack names to the general flow of the plot to the character quirks. While I expect this to mean Daiteioh gets a disproportionate amount of screen time, it's still going to be a treat for Eldran fans.

A final note of interest regarding Terada's approach for Neo is that he's promising a new and as-yet-unrevealed game system that is part of why the robots are in 3D for this game, and he's also promising that the game will be primarily emphasizing the style of early 90's anime whenever possible. Apparently Neo will have a different OP/ED group than the usual JAM Project, instead using singer Misato Aki, and both songs are promising to be "in 90's style." Should be interesting-- this is not a period of mecha show production SRW has tackled before so it will at least be different.