I don’t remember how or when I found this, but since our network was down this morning I was poking around old videos I’d previously downloaded, and discovered this awesome French documentary on shmups.

It’s very exhaustive and impressive, and covers everything from Space Invaders to modern danmaku shmups and doujin shmups.

If you lack mad French skillz, you can get the English subtitle file here, and use it by watching the movie in VLC.

Japanese and Italian subtitles are also available on the translator’s webpage.

A couple weekends ago I settled grudges between four different gangs, I passed English, Chemistry, Art, and Gym with flying colors, I bought a really sweet bike, I trash-canned some jocks who were trying to pick a fight with me, I won a lighthouse in a boxing tournament, I learned martial arts from a hobo in exchange for broken radio parts, I won a teddy bear at the carnival, and I helped my alcoholic English teacher avoid getting fired. Over the next few days I “finished my term” at Bullworth, but I’ve still got tons left to do.

Bully is everything I liked about GTA3, minus everything I didn’t like about it. There’s still a big, sprawling world with tons of stuff to do, it runs in an improved version of the same engine, there’s still tons of variety in the missions, but your sniper rifle is replaced by a slingshot, your grenades are replaced by stink bombs, you can talk your way out of most conflicts (if you’ve passed enough English classes), and nobody dies EVER, which is a really refreshing change of pace. There is still lots of violence, but the majority of it is used to assert your dominance over violent thugs and make them stop picking on weaker kids, and it’s all fistfights (with great, simple, schoolyard fistfighting mechanics). There is no reward whatsoever for random violence (unlike the GTAs, where everyone carries cash), and you can actually use authority figures to your advantage by luring someone into hitting you in front of them and watching them get dragged away to the principal’s office or the police station. If you get caught by the cops or the hall-monitors, on the other hand, the worst you can do is stomp on your captor’s foot or punch him in the crotch, and then run away and hide in a garbage can or a locker until he gives up looking for you. Hitting girls or little kids is one of the most egregious offenses in the game, and will get you sent straight to the principal for a stern reprimand and the confiscation of most of your hard-earned stuff.

It’s also significantly more gratifying to get a health bonus by making out with a girl who you’ve wooed with chocolates and flowers and gotten out of a jam or two than it is to get a health bonus by picking up a random hooker and then face the moral dilemma of whether or not you want to run her over and take your money back afterwards. It’s also pretty funny to watch, since the game’s protagonist is about five feet tall, and the girls are all significantly taller, and if you accidentally make out with one of your girlfriends while another of your girlfriends is nearby they get into a hair-pulling girl-fight over you, which is rather amusing.

On the downside, there’s no radio, but since there’s also no carjacking (there is bicycle-jacking, though) there’s really no opportunity to listen to the radio anyway, and the game’s excellent, moody, Danny-Elfman-esque background music more than makes up for it.

I also have to say that trash-canning jocks who try to pick fights with me is one of the most gratifying video game experiences I’ve ever had.

I “finished” the game last week, but in true Rockstar fashion, even though I “finished” it, I still only have 75% completion. There are still bike rallies and go-kart races to win, rubberbands, CCG cards, and garden gnomes to collect, lawns to mow, and an untold number of hidden mini-missions. The other night, right before bed, I rode my scooter into the driveway of a retirement home, and a little old lady waddled up to ask me a favor. Unfortunately, while you’re riding a bike or scooter, the button that normally targets people so you can talk to them punches instead, and I accidentally punched this poor little old lady right in the crotch. Then I spent the next fifteen minutes on the run from the police, who don’t take kindly to ruffians who punch little old ladies in the crotch.

Rockstar Vancouver also gets major kudos for making the exact opposite game to the one that drooling, headline-hungry fucktards who-shall-not-be-named accused them of making, not only because it makes those idiots look like the idiots they are, but also because it’s a really pleasant change of pace from the head-shots and “Xtreme-ness” that normally fill games from not-Japan. When was the last time YOU played an action RPG in which nobody dies?

At this point I honestly feel that Bully is the best video game I’ve ever played. It’s even ever-so-slightly better than Rez and Rakugaki Showtime.

Rejoice, all ye kiddies who have “this totally bitchin’ idea for a video game” but don’t have the impetus or means to actually make it! As long as your idea is vaguely horror, sci-fi, or suspense themed, you can enter it in the 2007 Eerie Horror Film Festival Game Competition! The competition’s categories range all the way from “complete game” to “game concept”, and although the prizes have yet to be announced, they’re sure to be better than the uncomfortable silence you get from most people who you tell about your game idea!

OK, I kid. Although the vast majority of “bitchin’ video game ideas” I’ve heard from people over the years have been incredibly stupid, I actually have heard a few that would make awesome video games. So if your game idea sounds totally awesome in your head, and especially if it ALSO sounds totally awesome to all of the friends you’ve told it to, then by all means enter the competition, and I wish you the best of luck. The “early entry discount” deadline is March 1st, and the absolute final deadline is September 1st.

In other game competition news, IndieCade 2008, which commendably hopes to be another showcase of independent video games, begins their call for submissions February 28th of this year, and the Experimental Gameplay Project just began a new two-week competition today. The theme is attraction, and the grand prize is an internship at EA. Although it’s not explicitly stated on the competition website, entries involving a gigantic corporation that attracts fresh-faced, naive young programmers, crushes their souls with 80-hour work weeks, chews them up and spits them out and thinks nothing of it because there’s an endless supply of those fresh-faced, naive young programmers, probably will not be regarded kindly.

Super-clever (by which I mean “lazy”) developers will make an attraction-themed horror game and submit it to all three competitions.

Six months ago I jokingly said that Tim Rogers is the Lester Bangs of video games. After reading Tim Rogers’s novel-length Fukubukuro 2004 last night, devoid of sarcasm and despite the horrible things it might do to his ego, I have to say that Tim Rogers is NOT the Lester Bangs of video games. Tim Rogers is the motherfucking Ernest Hemmingway of video games. Maybe if I’d read any Kerouac I would feel that he would be a better comparison, but I haven’t read any Kerouac, and I have read some Hemmingway, and Hemmingway is what it reminds me of.

Fukubukuro 2004 vaguely claims to be a review of the top 12 games of 2004, but it’s actually a “year in the life” of a womanizing, video-game-obsessed American gutter-punk living in Japan who, by virtue of being American and an incredible writer, ends up rubbing elbows with living legends of the Japanese video game industry. It is quite pretentious, and I get the feeling that there’s a fair amount of embellishment, but that just makes it even more Hemmingway, except with all the droning about boxing matches and bullfights replaced with salient observations about various video games.

The only downside of the work (I don’t feel comfortable calling it either an “article” or a “story”, so “work” will have to do) is that rather than have any sort of ending it jarringly jumps into a review of Dragon Quest VIII. Maybe Tim decided at the very end that a work claiming to be a review of video games should at least have one fairly-traditional video game review, or maybe it’s just there to jerk the reader back into the mundane before the tone of the rest of the work drives him to drink.

I can count on one hand the number of friends who I’d recommend Fukubukuro 2004 to, and I can count on MANY hands the friends who I would NOT recommend it to. Check it out, and if you can make it past the first page without shouting “what is this pretentious emo bullshit???” then you’ll probably enjoy reading it all the way through.

Man, so about a year ago I wrote an article about how ridiculous the XBox360 marketing effort was. Apparently Sony got jealous of all the derision I was piling on Microsoft, and decided to do everything they could to get me to make fun of them too. At this point, I have to give in and say that yes, Sony, you have shamed yourselves in ways that Microsoft couldn’t possibly have dreamed of. Here are some highlights:

Our sorrowful tale actually begins a couple years ago, when Sony unvelied their brazen entry into the handheld gaming arena, the PSP. There were high hopes for the system; it had a good launch line-up with Lumines and WipeOut, and there were hints that it could play homebrew games off of memory sticks. On the downside, the system had some design flaws. The square button often got caught on the edge of the screen, and the system overall wasn’t very ergonomic, and tended to hurt your hands if you played it too long. Netjak described the experience of playing a game on the PSP perfectly by saying “This is one of the cruelest jokes ever played on fans of a game. It’s like you’ve been given a nice big King Crab dinner, only you’ve been purposely given no implements that can break its shell open. You can try and crack it open with your hands, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get at any of the goodness inside, and you’re going to totally wreck your hands.” In response to these complaints, Sony President Ken Kutaragi said “I believe we made the most beautiful thing in the world. Nobody would criticize a renowned architect’s blueprint that the position of a gate is wrong. It’s the same as that.” Absolutely!! If Frank Lloyd Wright built my house, but forgot to put a front door on it, I wouldn’t complain! I’d say “Look at me, bitches! Frank Lloyd Wright built my house!” and then I’d crawl in through a window.

The PSP’s marketing campaign consisted primarily of ugly graffiti, and TV commercials that suggested playing the PSP was as entertaining as watching carpet and listening to cheese. Yeah.

Sadly, the software library for the PSP hasn’t done much growing in the over-a-year since its release; the majority of PSP owners I know use theirs primarily to play emulated NES and Neo-Geo games. Worth every penny!!

Speaking of delicious crab dinners, our next chapter takes place at E3 2006, which is best summed up by this video montage of highlights. In a moment of pure unintentional hilarity, the internet meme of “giant enemy crab” is born. Also note the SIXAXIS (OMG palindrome!) controller, a last-minute attempt to compete with the Wii controller by gutting all the rumble features from the PS2’s controller and replacing it with lackluster motion sensing.

Sony laid low for a few months after that bout of genius, until September when they revealed their new model for “unlockables” in games; whereas on previous systems bonus content is unlocked by playing through the game repeatedly on different difficulty levels, doing special things in the game, finding hidden endings, completing side-quests, etc., on the beauty and the majesty of the PS3 players will forego all that pesky “gameplay” and unlock things simply by giving Sony more money. How much money? 1up.com calculated that to unlock all of the cars and tracks in the PS3 Grand Turismo game, a player would have to shell out somewhere between $426.50 and $975.

A few months later, while Nintendo was charming the pants off consumers with its loveable, everybody-friendly Wii Would Like To Play ad, Sony was busy terrifying the world with their creepy baby ad. I can only presume that they were harkening back to the bizaare PS2 commercial David Lynch made for them, and… uh, actually, I have no idea what they were trying to do with that one. Their advertising efforts became significantly more ridiculous in December, however, when Sony hired some 20-something advertising execs to pretend that they were 20-something idiots, trying to get one of their grandmothers to buy them a PSP for Xmas, which was immediately met with lots and lots of ridicule. A week later, the FTC cracked down on “viral marketing”, and Sony had to take the site down.

Meanwhile, the PS3 had finally been released, and it’s flagship game, Genji (the “giant crab battle” one) met with mediocre reviews, primarily because of a game-breaking bug where the key to exit a level sort of falls out of the bottom of the code if the player spends too long on the level, permanently trapping the player in that level. Even better, it’s possible and sensible to save the game at a later part of the level after the key has disappeared, at which point the player has to erase his save game and start all the way over from the beginning.

The latest chapter in the story of “the only possible explanation for all of this is that Sony is specifically trying to commit suicide” is Sony’s proud announcement earlier this week that the SIXAXIS controller (the one where they gutted a PS2 Dualshock controller and replaced the rumble with motion sensing) had won an Emmy! The videogame community is general was astonished, and someone did some research and discovered that the SIXAXIS had not, in fact, won an Emmy. The Emmy had been given to two controllers: the Wii controller, and the Dualshock controller — you know, the one that Sony gutted and abandoned to make the SIXAXIS to compete with the Wii controller.

So there ya go, the amazing tale of Sony’s last two years in a nutshell, which is in a totally different league than any of Microsoft’s silly XBox360 marketing. We at Inverted Castle look forward to whatever appalling misadventures those loveable scamps at Sony get themselves into next, and will continue to play all of the great games that are still coming out for the PS2 (with rumble!).

Update: Damn! I knew I was forgetting something! Business 2.0’s “101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2006″ lists Sony’s PSP White billboard as #67.

Update 2: There was something else I forgot to mention, but to their credit Sony fixed it with a patch today (1-24-07). Remember how much hype there was about how some Playstation 1 games actually looked better on the Playstation 2? You’d thus expect Playstation 1 and 2 games to look even better still on the Playstation 3, right? Well, until today, they actually looked significantly worse. But it’s fixed now. Heck of a job, Sony!

…for the full version of Pretty Pretty Bang Bang. Details are here. Please forward this on to anyone else who might be interested.

Feel free to comment on this post with any questions.

I am some manner of posting-machine today, making up for lost time or something. This one’s fairly short, though; I’m just posting to point out that Platine Dispositif, makers of the best shmup EVER, have released a demo of their next game, a “metroidvania” which I believe is called Chelsea: Bunny Must Die. Go check it out; it’s quite Cave Story-like. Except with less plot. And more rigid and Metroid-like level structure.

Important! When you start the game, you will think that the controls are broken and you can not move right. This is not a bug, it is a feature. You will be able to move right as soon as you pick up the thing just to the left of the starting point that looks like a snowglobe with gears in it. I do not understand why this is. Perhaps someone can explain it to me.

Platine Dispositif also recently released a demo of a new shmup called Dandelion: Starchild Journey, and although I downloaded it last week along with a ton of other doujin game demos, I got really busy and haven’t had time to play any of them yet. I’ll try to check them out tonight and then post about any particularly awesome ones tomorrow-ish.

People have been having trouble getting the Chelsea: Bunny Must Die page to come up, so here’s a direct link to the demo download.

Apparently every human being who owned a PC and was a teenager at some point in the ’90’s, including me, played Out of This World. I remember that it had a very interesting, polygonal-2D graphic style, and that it was very pretty and very fun but also very very frustrating at times. In fact, the closest analogy I can think of to describe my memories of it is that it was like being kicked in the ribs by a beautiful golden boot. I’ve read lots of mixed reviews of Flashback and Heart of Darkness, the two subsequent and similar games that were developed by the same team, but I think I was always afraid that they’d have more of the kicking and less of the gold, so I never got around to checking them out.

Recently, however (well, actually, a few months ago. I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while), I think I discovered the other golden boot to match Out of This World: Matt Dabrowski’s Between Heaven and Hell. Heavily (and admittedly) inspired by Out of This World, it has that same “kicking in the ribs” sort of difficulty, but it’s also just as golden. The puzzles are excellent, the gameplay is solid (though also very frustrating at times), and the production value is very firmly rooted in “shoestring budget charm” rather than the “shoestring budget amateurness” that shoestring budget games so often have. Dabrowski works with his shortcomings rather than against them: he admits that he can’t draw backgrounds, so he just roughs them out and then smudges them up in Photoshop until they look all neat and oil-painty. He admits he can’t draw people, so he just motion captures himself and a few friends he suckered into helping him with his project. These decisions, either intentionally or accidentally, give Between Heaven and Hell an excellent, unusual, and very intriguing graphical style that fits the setting perfectly, and also stands out amidst the sea of other indie games.

It’s free (which, as usual, simultaneously elates and irritates me), so go check it out!

…is TOTALLY going to be the refrain of my next hit emo song.

It’s hard enough to work on indie PC games in the hopes of making money off of them with beautiful, solid, and completely free games like Cave Story, Eternal Daughter, and Within a Deep Forest floating around, but at least those each took several years to complete. My hopes were raised when Derek Yu, creator of Eternal Daughter, decided to charge for his next game, Aquaria, but today those hopes were dashed to pieces by Nifflas’ release of Knytt — another beautiful, solid, and completely free game — a scant seven months after his last release, Within a Deep Forest. Knytt isn’t nearly as long as its predecessor, and reuses much of the same engine and tiles, but it’s still beautiful, and it’s still well-made and it’s still completely free.

Near the beginning of Within a Deep Forest, there was a little village full of tiny people (actually, there were many little villages full of tiny people throughout the game). In Knytt, one of the tiny people from this village is abducted by a spaceship, which proceeds to crash on a different planet. The little person, who I presume is named Knytt, must wander around a very Within a Deep Forest-like landscape collecting the broken parts of the spaceship, using a Shadow of the Colossus-style beam of light to guide him. The controls are much simpler than they were in Within a Deep Forest; Knytt can walk and jump and climb up and down walls, and the only special abilities are a couple of optional, secret abilities which are not required to finish the game and are primarily there to help you explore.

Go play it now, play Within a Deep Forest if you haven’t already, fall in love with both, and then shake your fist at Nifflas for totally ruining it for those of us who want to try to make money off of our indie PC games.

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve updated; I’ve spent the last six months deluding myself that if I made a “feature length” “metroidvania” game in Flash that people might be willing to pay for it, even though it’s written in Flash. I don’t believe this any more, so I’m moving on to other projects. If you’d like to check out the demo version of it, you can find it here. I’m also in the process of moving to Portland, Oregon, which has been keeping me very busy. If anyone in the Portland area is looking to hire someone with lots of experience doing unusual things with video game mechanics and working within specific hardware-imposed, budget-imposed, and/or thematic constraints, but who hasn’t had any of his creativity crushed out of him by being a faceless drone at some giant company (that would be me), I’d love to hear about it.

Update: Dessgeega has written a very nice review of Knytt over at selectbutton, in which she uses the recently-coined term “icebergvania” to describe it, which is either awesomely stupid or stupidly awesome. I’m not sure which.