My wife and I were sick this weekend, so we shuffled down to our local library and checked out some DVDs. One of the DVDs was The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, which we were surprised to discover is actually a videogame that plays on a normal DVD player and has slightly more interactivity than the latest Final Fantasy games (you can pause at any time, and you can skip forward AND backwards!). In the game, you play the titular piano tuner, and you have been hired by some sort of evil count or duke or psychiatrist or something to wander around his Myst-style island and “tune” all seven of his automatons before the next lunar eclipse. From the plot, it seems like the “normal” ending is that you tune all seven of the automatons and then go on your merry way and he uses them to take over the world or whatever, but the “best” ending is that you talk to the other people in his mansion and learn his secrets, and then you specifically “mis-tune” all of the automatons to do the very opposite of what he wants and foil his evil schemes and save the beautiful opera singer that he has enslaved. Unfortunately, since this is the Quay Brothers’ first foray into videogames, they spent too much time on the plot and the amazing graphics, and really didn’t put much work into the gameplay, so it’s only possible to get the “worst” ending, in which you don’t tune all of the automatons in time and you get stuck inside one of them. I was able to talk to the other people quite a bit, and intentionally mis-tune one of the automatons, but honestly that all pretty much happened without me touching the controls at all.

I really wish the Brothers Quay had asked me for a hand on this one, because it has a lot of potential and with only a little bit of gameplay tweaking this would have Game of the Year written all over it. More than anything it makes me want to remake it into the incredible game it was meant to be, but my version wouldn’t be nearly so pretty because I just don’t have the artistic skills of the Brothers Quay. Stephen, Timothy, if you happen to be reading this, drop me a line and maybe we could help each other out.

This is such a wonderful little game. Treasure just takes a simple mechanic and sees how many different boss fights they can make out of it. No levels, just a dozen good old boss fights (well, there are the filler levels with the giant-breasted women you can snap for extra points, but those are only handy when you’re running low on points, and not even necessary if you’re really good at the game because you can get points from the bosses, too, it’s just harder). For all its light-heartedness, it also contains the most disturbing scene in any videogame I’ve ever played, including the Silent Hills, Resident Evils, and Fatal Frames (when you lose to Demonika, the “haunted room” boss).

In case you’ve never heard of Stretch Panic, the title comes from the fact that the lead character is a little girl with a possessed scarf with a hand at one end, that she can use to grab and stretch enemies and the environment. Hurting enemies primarily revolves around stretching and “snapping” them, or grabbing onto them and wiggling the right stick until you send yourself flying through the air to headbutt them. Each boss has a different, secret method of scoring points, and points are used to unlock further bosses and also to use “scarf bombs” by pressing both analog sticks and then madly wiggling them, which do a lot of damage and are also the only way to exorcise the evil spirits from the bosses (who are all actually your sisters) and beat the game.

I think this game gets less love than it deserves because it’s so nice and simple, and because the controls take a little getting used to. Overall it’s just wonderfully creative, though, and oozes Treasure-y ingenuity.

It can also be found most places for $8 new, so if own a PS2 but you’ve never played it you really don’t have an excuse.

Many dark aeons ago I wrote a round-up of various doujin fighting games, and one of the games I mentioned was an up-and-coming King-of-Fighters-esque game called Akatsuki BK. Now, Akatsuki BK has been released, and so far it looks like a very strong contender for Melty Blood ReACT’s “best PC fighting game” crown.

The first thing you’ll notice about the gameplay is that it feels very “meaty”; the game has a certain weight to it that’s hard to describe, but will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the King of Fighters series. The most impressive aspect to me, especially for a doujin game, is the variety of play-styles among the characters. The main character, Akatsuki, is your standard Ken / Ryu, and another character, Electro Soldat, has Guile’s sonic boom and flash kick from Street Fighter II, but beyond that there’s a nun who fights exclusively with revolvers (the only other firearms-only fighting game character I’ve seen was in Toshinden 3), a witch with an over-abundance of special moves reminiscent of the Samurai Shodown series’ Basara, a towering man whose special moves are mostly buffs and debuffs, a petite woman whose special moves are only throws and counters, and Fritz, a grizzled swordfighter with no special moves at all except dashes. This certainly seems like an odd hodgepodge of very different styles, but from what I’ve seen so far it works and balances out just fine.

The game’s story and expository text are very kanji-heavy, and my kanji isn’t so good, but from what I can gather the game appears to take place in a dystopian alternate-present where Axis-like powers won a WWII-like war. I use “-like” a lot in that sentence because there are no swastikas or other direct references to Nazism (aside from Elektro Soldat’s ultimate move being called “Sieg Heil”) or fascist Italy, or any country for that matter, so the impression that I got was that the game’s artists just really liked drawing jackboots and 30’s-style uniforms, and set the game in a “similar-but-different” world so they could make sexy, fascist-looking people without making the social blunder of actually revering Nazis.

A free demo of the game is available on the official homepage, and the game itself is available in a number of doujin shops in Japan. Efforts are underway to bring the game to American shores, but an American release will be unofficial at best, since the game begins with a stern warning that it is for play in Japan only, and if you’re not in Japan you shouldn’t be playing it. Exactly why someone would put the effort into making and publishing something and then expressly forbid most people from enjoying it is beyond me, but fortunately there are no laws that actually support their strange demands, and all they can do is scowl as you purchase and enjoy the fruits of their labors and blow them kisses of appreciation.

This is an article I’ve been meaning to write for a LONG time, and now I’m finally getting around to it.

Many people are aware that there is no territorial lockout on any of Nintendo’s handhelds, and Japanese Gameboy / Gameboy Advance / DS games work just fine in American Gameboys / Gameboy Advances / DSs without any sort of modding. Most Americans don’t know Japanese, however, and are thus reluctant to buy games that they won’t be able to understand.

This is a list of the top five Japanese-only Gameboy Advance games that are not only fully-accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese (either because they’re already all in English or because the gameplay is clear enough that you don’t have to be able to read the Japanese text), but are also so good that they’re worth the extra cost for shipping to import them.

5: Dragon Quest Slime Mori Mori is the GBA prequel to the DS game Rocket Slime. If you’ve already played Rocket Slime, then just imagine it without the tanks and with more challenging gameplay. If you haven’t played Rocket Slime, then here’s the scoop: DQ Slime Mori Mori is a top-down, Zelda-style action adventure game where you play a blue Dragon Quest slime on a quest to rescue 100 of your fellow slimes from an evil platypus and his minions. Since you’re a slime, you don’t have any hands to hold weapons, so gameplay consists primarily of stretching yourself out and shooting yourself like a rubberband at enemies. You can carry up to three things at a time (any combination of enemies, items, and other slimes) by smashing into them, knocking them into the air, and then catching them on your head, and there are mine carts, balloons, and other means of conveyance scattered throughout the levels that will carry anything you toss onto them back to your home town. You use these carts primarily to send home the slimes you’ve rescued, but there’s also a friendly platypus who lives in your town and will build new buildings for your town if you send back the right combinations of items and monsters.

This game has the most Japanese text of any of the games in this list, but the plot is very straightforward, and the vast majority of the dialogue is just slimes thanking you for saving them and making the kinds of painful puns in Japanese that Rocket Slime features in English.

The fourth, third, and second game on this list are all from a series of games entitled bit Generations. The bit Generations games were all designed by Nintendo to promote the “sexiness” of the Gameboy Micro (although they’re also playable on any other Gameboy Advance and on the DS), and are all aesthetically stunning, and minimalist both graphically and in terms of gameplay. They were also all released for around $20 each. Thankfully, because English is “sexy” in Japan, all of the text in all of the bit Generations games is in English to make the games sexier.

4: Digidrive looks exactly like the “competitive video games” you see in sci-fi movies, that look really cool, but make absolutely no sense because they were designed by art designers to look cool in the movie, not to actually be playable games. This one, however, actually DOES make sense, and it’s also a lot of fun. It’s kind of hard to describe, though. It’s a puzzle game based on directing traffic at an intersection. Really. Cars (and by “cars” I mean “triangles”) drive into the intersection, and you can direct them in any of the 3 directions that is not the one they came from. When they reach the end of that street, they stop. Identical cars pile up, and once you pile up 5 cars they “color” that street. On the right side of the screen is a vertical bar that looks like a cross between a shuffleboard and a thermometer, with a puck in the middle and a nasty grindy thing moving steadily toward the puck. “Cop cars” appear randomly (or you can call them by pressing the A button if you have any in stock) and sending a cop car down a colored street “pops” the street, and sends the puck flying up the shuffleboard, away from the grinder. The game ends when the grinder reaches the puck. I realize that makes NO sense at all, but fortunately there’s a “demo” option on the main menu that’ll demonstrate the game for you. There’s also a versus mode, where you and your opponent are launching the puck toward each others’ goals, and can pick up various special attacks.

Here is a video of someone doing incredibly well at Digidrive, which will probably make no sense until you’ve played it, but will give you an idea of what the game looks like. Of course, that’s not the actual music from the game.

3:Orbital is the best game I’ve played with only 2 buttons. It’s sort of like a very abstract and minimalist Katamari Damacy. You play a planet, floating around in 2D space, navigating around other planets using only your 2 buttons: more gravity and less gravity. The other planets are color-coded depending on their relation to you; red planets are bigger than you, and will kill you if you smash into them, blue planets are as big as you, and can be “consumed” to make you bigger, and white planets are smaller than you, and can either be consumed, or picked up as satellites by skimming close enough by them to pull them into your orbit (satellites are worth tons of points, and each one gives you an extra life when they’re tallied at the end of the level). Red planets also each have a ring around them that shows the boundary of their orbit; if you get inside the ring flying tangentially to the planet you can achieve stable orbit and hear a little jingle telling you such. As you become bigger, planets change color to show their relation to you, and once you get big enough one of the planets turns into a yellow sun, which will kill you if you crash into it, but completes the level if you pull it into your orbit. When the sun appears, a little crescent moon also appears somewhere else, which gives you a big bonus if you pull it into your orbit, but is destroyed if you crash into it. Finishing every single level with the crescent moon is the game’s special challenge; I have no idea what happens if you accomplish it, although I did beat all of the game’s 30 levels (and got the moon on about half of those).

2: Soundvoyager is a collection of “audio-only” minigames. Each game starts out with minimalist graphics to help you along, but the graphics gradually fade out so that all you have left is the audio. A blind person would have absolutely zero problem playing this. The minigame menu is arranged in a tree, and every other node of the tree, beginning with the first node, is a “sound catcher”, the only minigame you can’t lose. In sound catcher, you start out in silence, and hear a loop coming at your from some angle. You line up with the loop using the control pad, and if you’re properly lined up with it at the beginning of its measure you “catch” it, hear a little beep, and then the next loop appears from some angle, layered on top of the previous loops. If you miss a loop, it just gets shuffled back in with the ones you haven’t caught yet. Once you catch all of the loops, you hear a special chime, the tune fades out, and two more loops appear, which coincide to the next two nodes on the tree. Catching one or the other will give you access to its minigame, after which you get another “sound catcher”. The other minigames I’ve gotten so far are “sound slalom”, where you must navigate as fast as possible (speed up with the A button) between two alternating points of sound, “sound cannon”, where you have to rotate and shoot down sounds, and “sound drive”, where you have to avoid oncoming audio traffic.

Anyone who’s played In The Pit or Sonic Invaders for extended periods of time knows how relaxing and hypnotic audio-only games can be, and this is by far the best one yet.

1: Rhythm Tengoku (”tengoku” means “heaven”) is the final Gameboy Advance game from the team that made the Warioware Microgames series, and is sort of an extension and perfection of the rhythm games in Warioware: Twisted. Rather than Warioware’s random barrage of microgames, Rhythm Tengoku features eight levels, each of which is divided into five one-minute songs, with each song unlocking when you beat the previous song. Each of the songs is an mp3-quality rhythm minigame reminiscent of the Warioware minigames; for the first song, you control a karate master, punching various things as they fly toward him to the rhythm of the song. For the second song, you control a pair of tweezers, plucking hairs off of the chins of onions with faces to the rhythm of the song. The “boss” of each level is a remix that combines all of that level’s five songs into one medley that shifts gameplay between those five songs as it shifts between melodies. It probably doesn’t sound like much from my description, but all of the songs are extremely catchy, there’s a wonderful and inventive variety to the minigames, and anyone whose played the Warioware games knows how much addictive gameplay its designers are able to squeeze into even the simplest of games. This game is the most expensive on this list at around $40, but it’s absolutely worth every penny.

It’s also worth noting that Rhythm Tengoku can NOT be played on an emulator, because there’s a slight audio lag on Gameboy Advance emulators, and for this game it’s absolutely crucial that the audio and video and input line up perfectly.

So there you go. If you’ve tapped out the American Gameboy Advance market and are looking for something new, or if you just want to feel smug playing a game that almost nobody else outside of Japan has played, you certainly can’t go wrong with any of the five games listed above.

All of these games are available via Play-Asia, an import store that I’ve heard lots of good things about but have never tried myself. You can probably also find all of these games on eBay, but in my experience 99% of the Gameboy Advance games on eBay are low-quality Chinese bootlegs that don’t work at all half the time and will die after a few years the other half of the time (because it’s cheaper for bootleggers to use battery-powered RAM than the permanent flash RAM used in real Gameboy Advance cartridges).

This morning, Harmonix announced their next hit game: Rock Band, which combines the guitar and bass gameplay of Guitar Hero with the karaoke gameplay of Karaoke Revolution, and a full drum kit, for a simultaneous, four-player rock band experience! Since the announcement, there has been some concern voiced across the internet as to how gameplay information for four different instruments will be displayed simultaneously on the screen. I expressed this concern to an unnamed source deeply involved with the project, and he was able to leak me two EXCLUSIVE FULL-RESOLUTION screenshots to quell all the rumors and doubt!

This first screenshot illustrates what four players playing simultaneously on the same Xbox 360 will see:

My anonymous source assures me that when only one or two players are playing on the same Xbox 360, the other instrument screens will be darkened so as not to confuse the player(s).

But that’s not all! My source has ALSO leaked a screenshot that covers a part of the game that has so far been kept completely under wraps: 16-player, four-band, simultaneous, online, battle-of-the-bands deathmatch!!

As these screenshots make clear, there’s certainly no need to upgrade to the latest, greatest, HDTV to continue to enjoy awesome, hard-rockin’ video games, even with a living room full of friends!

Happy belated April Fools’, everyone!

You think “I’ve had about as much fun with pig snot as is reasonably possible”. You fall asleep each night and wake up every morning, content with the belief that there is little to no further joy that you could possibly derive from pig snot. Well, my friend, I’m here to tell you that unless you’ve already played Gesundheit, you are LIVING A LIE.

Gesundheit is probably not the Citizen Kane of video games. It was written in a game construction kit, has only 12 levels, and is a little rough around the edges. It has no pretenses of greatness, and won’t change the way that you view the world… except the part of the world that is pig snot. It’s also free.

Thanks to PIGSource TIGSource for finding this one.

Is this really the same company that made my two favorite consoles, the Playstation and the Playstation 2?

Since our last thrilling installment, Sony has put a $1200 bounty on any PS3s found on store shelves. Simultaneously, and conversely, Sony has said that the reason that there are so many PS3s on store shelves is because of their amazing supply pipeline, so if you go to Best Buy and there are 5 PS3s on the shelves, and then you go in tomorrow and there are still 5 PS3s on the shelves, those aren’t the SAME PS3s; all the ones you saw before have been sold, and magically replaced in the night by the PS3 delivery fairies! Today Sony announced that Kotaku is no longer invited to their parties and has to give back the debug PS3 they use for reviews because Kotaku reported on a rumor about some retarded Mii Channel rip-off that Sony’s shoe-horning into the PS3.

Every day the PS3 looks less like a George Foreman Grill to me and more like a coffin.

For my birthday last week I got Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a hypnotic, three-hour, existentialist essay in movie form. My wife and I watched it on Valentine’s Day (not the best choice for Valentine’s Day, but we’d been wanting to watch it and that was as good a night as any). It’s about these three guys walking through empty fields and abandoned buildings in Soviet Russia, talking about the nature of existence and desire and purpose. Ostensibly, one of the guys is a “stalker”, and he’s leading the other two guys (”professor” and “writer”) through a dangerous place called the Zone to a room where your deepest wish is granted. Since the movie was made in Soviet Russia, and since it’s really all about existentialist dialogues, there’s no budget for special effects, so “the dangers of the Zone” amount to the stalker pointing at an empty field and saying “don’t go that way, there are traps”, and the other two guys nodding solemnly and continuing their dialogue. Even when they finally get to the room where your deepest wish is granted — SPOILER ALERT!! — none of them go in; they just look into the empty room, wracked by inner turmoil. It is, quite sincerely, the best movie ever made in which nothing happens for three hours. It’s deep, and hypnotic, and thoughtful, and makes you wander around in quiet contemplation for about 24 hours after the first time you watch it.

It is with this preface that I mention S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. At first I was morbidly curious about the game; the early screenshots showed landscapes that were perfectly-rendered depictions of scenes from the movie. A lush, green, overgrown field full of rusted WWII tanks. A raised train track dotted with rotting and toppling telephone poles. The unassuming interior of a crumbling building, dust motes swirling in a ray of sunlight. Since the developers were Ukranian, the press release that accompanied the screenshots was brief and ambiguous, and said something like “as Stalker, you guide people through Zone avoiding dangers”. Gradually, however, the whole thing fell apart. I started seeing headlines about the “dozens of awesome mutant monsters!” in the game, then about all the “sick guns!”, and “deathmatch options”. Today, Kotaku has a new movie that features S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s hardcore multiplayer deathmatch mode, and I am really just at a loss for words. Some of those beautiful landscapes and tranquil, decaying settings are still right there in that movie, but it’s had a gigantic intestine-load of Counter Strike pooped on top of it.

Actually, that’s a little too harsh; Counter Strike’s a great multiplayer FPS, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl might also be a perfectly good multiplayer FPS whenever it comes out, too (it’s been in development for four years). I guess I’m just a little shocked by what’s happened in the process of turning Stalker into a video game. Not that Stalker should ever have been a video game in the first place, but if it was it should play more like Shadow of the Colossus, but without the colossi, and with Wander, Augro, and Mono replaced by three middle-aged Soviet men who have all hit rock bottom and are the very epitome of wretchedness and desperation. They would meander around the beautiful landscape and the breathtaking ruins, mumbling philosophy and insight to each other, and every once in a while one of them would point to something completely innocuous and say “don’t go that way, it’s dangerous”.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl being the video game adaptation of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is like… I’m trying to think of a good analogy using a low-key book most people have read… it’s like if GTA3 was supposed to be the video game adaptation of Catcher in the Rye, or if BloodRayne was supposed to be the video game adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. That doesn’t really say anything about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Stalker, but the association of the two kind of makes me sick to my stomach. That’s all.

Update: A commenter on this post has said that when the Chernobyl disaster happened, Russians immediately started talking about the similarities to Stalker, to the point that now the irradiated area around Chernobyl is commonly called “The Zone”, and people who are brave/stupid enough to venture into it are called stalkers. The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is apparently based more around this “real-life stalker” culture than it is on the movie which inspired the culture, which makes a whole lot of sense and makes me feel a lot more comfortable about the whole thing. So there you go. Thanks for the info, Happy Neko!

Alrighty, since lots of people have contacted me saying that they can’t download games from Platine Dispositif’s website, I’ve gone ahead and mirrored all of their demos and free games. This mirror is temporary, and I don’t know how long it will stay up (that depends primarily on how much downloading there is). If there’s too much demand and the mirror crashes, I’ll setup a torrent.

To Platine Dispositif: I’m doing this to help share your games with more people without putting a strain on your servers. If this is a problem, please contact me. In fact, please contact me even if this is not a problem, because I know at least one company who wants to sell your games outside of Japan.

Platine Dispositif: もっと多くのひとにシェアーするために、なるべくそちらのサーバーを負担しないように勝手に流通してしまいました。もし問題でしたら、私に連絡を下さい。いや、問題でもない場合にも連絡して下さい。なぜなら、そちらのソフトの外国流通を援助させてもらいたい会社があります。

(If the text above is grammatically incorrect, please let me know how to fix it. The friend I had translate it for me is used to translating from Japanese to English, not vice-versa.)

The Games:

• Hitogata Happa is the best shmup ever made for the PC. This is the demo version, which includes the first two levels and the first four “dolls”. You probably already know how much I love it. Note: The game has some tricky “kamikaze” mechanics, and the first boss may seem impossible until you watch the demo play (just leave it sitting at the title screen for a while).
• Engage to Jabberwock is a full free game which I talked about here. It is an older game that they released for free just a few days ago on Valentine’s Day. The gameplay is like a giant single 2D Zelda dungeon with lots and lots of bullets. Remember to go into settings and change the control to keyboard if you don’t have a joystick.
• Chelsea: Bunny Must Die is a metroidvania that I talked about here. This is the demo version, and I’m not entirely sure how far it goes (I got stuck a ways into the demo, and I couldn’t really tell if that was supposed to be the end of the demo or if I was just doing something wrong). Remember that you can’t move right until you pick up the snowglobe with the gears in it.
• Royal Edoma Engine is an isometric shmup, a’la Viewpoint or Zaxxon. This is the demo version.
• Gundeadligne is a horizontally-scrolling shmup. This is the demo version.
• Dandelion: Starchild Journey is a shmup with very interesting mechanics played entirely with the mouse. Circle bullets Okami-style to turn them into stars, then pull back on the stars like you would in a pool or minigolf game to shoot them at enemies. This is the demo version.
• Starleaf YO is (I think) a simple, free shmup designed primarily to test an upgrade to Platine Dispositif’s proprietary game engine.

There you go, more wonderful doujin games than you can shake a stick at.

Update: I’ve setup a torrent that includes all of these files here. The torrent will be fairly flakey, though, because I don’t expect it to get very popular, and I’m not entirely sure of the best way to setup a permanent seed for it.

Just a quick note that Platine Dispositif (who, you may remember, I adore) has released one of their older games, Engage to Jabberwock, for free as a Valentine’s gift to their fans. The gameplay is kind of hard to nail down, so I’ll just say that it’s like a bullet-hell Zelda. Go check it out, enjoy it, and then maybe pay them some actual money for one of their other games like, say, Hitogata Happa.

In the past, for some reason, some people have had trouble following links to Platine Dispositif’s site. If this happens with this game, please let me know, and I’ll mirror the download somewhere.

Also note that if you’re playing with a keyboard you’ll need to set the game up for keyboard play first via the settings menu on the title screen.