The Gamer's Quarter

[Cycle]

I managed to get GBC games to run on my DS. There are alot of great titles, and also lots of shit ones!

Did you know SkiFree was ported to the GBC? It was! It's not a very good port!
_________________

[elvis.shrugged]

I bought Toejam and Earl, Sonic 2 and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Virtual Console today.

The latter two are givens for both my sister and myself, since we grew up on them, but I've never played TJ&E. It's pretty interesting! I've only played it one-player (I don't know anyone IRL that would play it with me, I think), but it's still a bizarre, oddly-compelling game. I sort of like it! I made it up to level seven, after an hour and twenty minutes of gameplay, and died.

Is the sequel good?

[dessgeega]

the sequel is great but entirely different.
_________________

[elvis.shrugged]

Just what I'm looking for, fantastic to hear.

What's your take on the TJ&E games, Dess?

[dessgeega]

the first one is a pretty great co-op roguelike, as far as i know the only one of its kind. you should play it co-op if you get the chance. the second is a super-charming platformer with very playful level design. the third is a retread of the original that mostly misses the point.
_________________

[purplechair]

I finished Pokemon Ranger, yesterday morning. The gameplay was pretty weak (you draw circles around Pokemon while not letting their attacks break your line), but the presentation blew my mind. Well, maybe.

The main Pokemon series still looks pretty much the same as it has for the last 10 years, but Ranger takes all the same elements and redesigns them from the ground up, spec'ed for the DS instead of the GB. Instead of random battles, you can see wild Pokemon scamper around in the field with their own little AI patterns - Donphan will rush you on sight, Ralts will teleport away if you get close, Polywhirl will dive into the nearest pond to escape you, that sort of thing. It would have been a nice touch if the wild Pokemon chased each other round and interacted, but you can't have everything. The only horrible artefact hanging over from the old games is the fugly sound effects they use to portray Pokemon cries... for one thing, it creates this strange duality where Pokemon communicate with audible buzzes and crackles most of the time, but with dialogue boxes popping up to say "Pi pika-pi!" at certain key moments in the script. That and the cornball plot.

Characters and environments are less rigid and more realistic. Battles take place on the spot, without cutting to a totally different perspective. You get a much greater sense of exploring a living world. Blah blah blah blah blah, I guess. Basically: If they made a normal Pokemon game like this (and without some goofy evil gang trying to abuse Pokemon), it'd be truly excellent. Unfortunately, the capture system makes this something of a curate's egg.

[extrabastardformula]

Hitting Crystal Castles in the MAME. Very fun with a trackball as it was meant to be played. Understand the isometric thing a lot more than I did as as kid who got freaking lost when Bently went behind things. Makes me really appreciate the trackball as a game controller and kind of miss it. Moused are so very not the same.

[simplicio]

I picked up the new Taito Collection, played G-Darius for two levels and had to quit; that game is pure overstimulation. In a really good way, with an incredible amount of stuff going on in the background and the subsequent rush to figure out what's dangerous and what's not, and the capture mechanic, and the rotating action. Next time I'll need to go in prepared.

Great use of music and scale (no pun intended) too.
_________________
"Worlds turn the new machine to thee. To thee. Though, thine the new machine space."
-Kurt Schwitters, 1919

[Lestrade]

I beat Super Paper Mario last night and now I feel that bittersweet sadness one feels when one finishes a good book. I enjoyed the game so much, I'll miss it. It was all... very satisfying. I guess it's time to move on to Nights fo' realz. But in truth I just want to sit for a while and enjoy the afterglow.

[dessgeega]

super paper mario is one of the worst games i've played in recent memory.

lestrade.
_________________

[fish]

[aerisdead]

[SuperWes]

I think Super Paper Mario is a bit like Panzer Dragoon Orta in that by itself it's probably pretty good, but when it's played as a companion to what came before it there's some unidentifiable piece of the puzzle that's missing. If I posted more at Select Button I might be inclined to call it "soul."

-Wes
_________________

[Ethoscapade]

i really don't think it's good compared to anything.

trying to contextualize it at all just leads to the conclusion that nintendo wanted to make their own kingdom hearts.

[JasonMoses]

[Fred]

[Lestrade]

[dessgeega]

oh lestrade.

don't worry, you're still invited to my birthday party.
_________________

[aerisdead]

[dessgeega]

i refuse to believe super paper mario isn't a broken game, but i am willing to leave this as a matter of personal taste. i guess i'm just still bitter about the game, since i cherish the original so much. i'm sorry for being snobby.
_________________

[simplicio]

[extrabastardformula]

[SuperWes]

Hey guys, I like Bullet Witch.

-Wes
_________________

[Lestrade]

I don't review games, so I can enjoy them purely on a selfish basis. I get the feeling that even if I did review games, however, I could still give something truly flawed good marks if I enjoyed it well enough.

Granted, this is probably because I am not the kind of person who would watch, say, a dogfighting movie and feel the urge to tell the person beside me that "an F-16 couldn't actually do that." I just couldn't care less, and I'm not in this whole thing—meaning TGQ or this community in general—solely to debate the finer points of one gameplay mechanic over another. I guess I'm just not hardcore enough; what I get from games is entirely different, and, I think, not entirely welcome.

I'll stick to art and let you guys 'n' gals do the talking. Incidentally, I haven't drawn anything game-related in a while (except for the TGQ piece I just sent to Shaper).

[ryan]

[SuperWes]

[aerisdead]

[dessgeega]

lestrade i would happily welcome your snark.
_________________

[simplicio]

Dear Gamer's Quarter,
I've cheated. Playing through Secret of Mana, on original hardware, for the first time in a decade, curiosity overtook me. 10 years ago I knew and loved every aspect of this game; its songs are more familiar to me than my parents' folk records. Back then I had a level 99 save my friend deleted, and I rebuilt it, spending hours on the road between Pandora and Kippo leveling magic and weapons, and even more running through the Mana Fortress and back to collect the rare armors and final weapon orbs, but the internet was a slight thing then, and I had know way of knowing I could break the game like this. Yes, today I glitched the Mantis Ant.
It tried to protest; the first restart froze after my plunge down the waterfall, while the dialog skipped ahead and the screen began to drift a slow diagonal loop. I felt the onset of guilt even then, but I persisted. The second try took, and I ran to Potos, not even pausing to hack at the rabites on the way. There was the Mantis! I quickly restarted, bringing back my whole party to the fight. It fell in two strokes and gave up that first sword orb, and upon pulling me back to the surface Jema made no mention of my two sudden companions. I escaped to the sky, feeling every bit a thief, but Watts showed no compunction at forging the stolen goods; the price was right and his hammer was ready.
I had the Mana Sword! Relic of legend and distributor of three times its former damage! Motorcycle turtles and sneezing yellow floating heads alike all fell before me! It was an unstoppable power!
But at what cost to my soul, TGQ? What is that great internal pricetag?

PS: Didn't matter one bit to that first gold ninja. He killed us all dead in under three seconds.
_________________
"Worlds turn the new machine to thee. To thee. Though, thine the new machine space."
-Kurt Schwitters, 1919

[dessgeega]

so instead of playing wizardry v, i've opted to play the snes port of dungeon master, which is like wizardry with exactly one layer of abstraction removed, and clevel level design full of traps and riddles. the game was designed to be played with the mouse, but the snes version controls surprisingly well with the d-pad, and has added ambience and music and redrawn character portraits (you can't see that chani's pupils are blue, though). i managed to get a copy with the instruction manual, which is handy to have on hand (even though it's available online) because it has tables of useful information. and a fifteen-page backstory i refuse to read.

i finally managed to clear stage 10 of roadblasters so i've been starting at stage 11, which is helping the game stay fresh. apm, have you gotten your copy yet? i havn't played the arcade version that much and i'm curious how the genesis port compares.
_________________

[ApM]

No, but it should be arriving soon!

I just sat down with the NES port and got to rally 26 with about 725,000 points. I think that's the first time I've sat down with it with a critical eye to the level design, which was rather pleasant, on the whole. By rally 23 they were giving me cruise missiles on levels with extremely low fuel to try and tempt me into vaporizing cars which might be hiding fuel orbs. Clever bastards.

There was a weird bug where when I hit rally 19 it gave me the option to go back to rally 15 again, which kind of makes me want to sit down, loop around those four stages for a while, and see what happens when you roll the score over a million.

[Fred]

[dessgeega]

i'm amazed that there's a nes port of roadblasters. also re: amazement, i warped ahead to the "weapons factory" stages (early twenties) and, wow, they're ridiculous.

i have reached dungeon level 3 in dungeon master. immediately upon entry i am faced with a sign reading "prepare to meet your doom".

:o
_________________

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

A night of SEGA Model 2 emulation. Games tried were Virtua Cop, Sega Rally (which, since my controller with analogue sticks is currently arse I had to make do with just watching the attract), House Of The Dead and Dynamite Cop (which has hilarious dialogue). All ran quite well barring the bouts of expected slowdown and graphical errors that you would expect from incomplete emulation. That said, Virtua Cop ran with almost no slowdown and very minor graphical errors which is sweet. I haven't played it with a mouse since it was ported to PC last decade and I could still complete the game on one credit. It made me hunger for some PS2 Virtua Cop action despite my dislike of the "upgraded" visuals. Maybe tomorrow if I can be bothered lugging my PS2 upstairs to connect to the television that isn't the LCD.

To hell with recent CPS3 breakthroughs, Model 2 is where it's at.
_________________

[SuperWes]

I got Resident Evil 4 Wii. The Wii controls don't really add a lot to the game - it's a bit like Twilight Princess Wii vs controller - but the game is as good as ever. It's amazing how much of it I had forgotten about in just two years.

-Wes
_________________

[dhex]

is geometry wars worth $2.50?
_________________

[ApM]

[fish]

[dhex]

ah well only runs on xp. shoot.
_________________

[aerisdead]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

I bought Metal Slug Anthology. It does not have a 60hz mode.

Like, what the fuck?
_________________

[Scratchmonkey]

Went to Best Buy with my wife to get the Diablo Battle Chest. They only had the one, so then we went in the complete other direction and hit the Pinole Best Buy to get another. After a complete and utter failure at getting Diablo II (with expansion) to start a game just over the LAN (which is really a WAN, which is probably why we had so much trouble with it), we just started a couple Battle.net characters and played that way. There were some serious lag, it was still a good time anyway.

Got about midway through Act One, wife is a corpse-plundering Barbarian and I'm an aura Pally, with an emphasis on Might and Thorns. I think the real key to Diablo II is the item creation, in that you fairly regularly find something that's an upgrade from your worn equipment or at least causes you some thought as to which item to wear. So many Diabloalikes, including the Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath games, are just stingy in terms of equipment. Anytime where most of the stuff you wear is stuff that you bought in stores, that's poor game design because really, killing the monsters is horribly simplistic and thus only really worthwhile for loot.

Or, as my wife likes to say, Diablo is really about shopping.

[Cycle]

Zelda Wifi looks like lots of fun! It actually was pretty fun when I played, but I need to read a FAQ because the I don't understand all the little mechanics so I kept getting my ass kicked. Still! Pretty sweet!

Transformers DS makes me think a console version would be pretty sweet. The DS version, however, isn't, but the intent is there!

I also played that free Motorcross game. Shame they didn't find a publisher, it's a swell little title.
_________________

[Lestrade]

Okay, I finally managed to enjoy a nice couple of hours of Saturn gaming. It was a bit of a busy day yesterday, and after dinner I had to fill the void (since I beat Super Paper Mario last week, now I am new-game-less).



First, after seeing some more of that new SSF2T HD art, I felt like Street Fightin'. I played the SSF2T game on SF Collection, and then switched over to a quick five or ten minutes of SF Zero 2' (AKA SF Alpha 2 Gold). It's weird; the sound on this version seems really muffled, or was it always that way? Playing this gives me a masochistic urge to play the SNES version of Alpha 2; man, that game was something—maybe not something good, but you know. It actually played well, but the music was terrible and the loading times (!) were jarring.



Anyway, next up was Nights. I wanted to take a serious crack at the game, having only briefly played it upon receiving it in the mail from the mighty Rud13. Hmm. I don't know if I really, truly dig the game; though after playing for a while I thought, I don't know why everyone kept begging for a 3D Sonic game on Saturn; Nights is it! It's a game of moving in mostly one direction, completely on rails, in an abstract land, doing things that don't make sense at all. It just feel the same to me.

Regardless, I managed to progress further—never getting anything higher than a C anywhere—but I find that I get really frustrated if I have to re-do a stage. Perhaps it's the inelegant way the game fails you; after the "Night over" screen, you're just booted to the main menu. I guess I'm spoiled in 2007, but if I fail a stage, maybe you should ask me if I want to try it again? Even this pause in gameplay is enough to make me not want to retry; so I'd either try a different stage or, by the end of it, just decide to quit for the time being.

Afterwards I tried out Christmas Nights, and though the stage is just a swap of one of the existing stages (a disappointment I wasn't aware of), the sheer absurdity of it was entertaining enough. Will I be coaxed into getting all the gifts? I'm not sure, but it's actually tempting.



Finally, I booted up Layer Section (Rayforce) for the first real time since returning from Japan and man, this game is everything I wanted it to be. I'm a big fan of RayStorm on the PS1 (after reading Francesco-Alessio's write-up on the series in TGQ#3), and I just can't get enough. I'm not great at the game—as of last night I can only get to the boss in Area 3 before biting it—but unlike when I play Nights, I'm just as eager to start over when I lose.

I played in both regular and tate mode (granted, I didn't actually flip my TV), and it's odd how the Saturn mode (regular) is missing some special effects, like all the columns underneath the one planet's surface in Area 2. It's also a bit tightly-cropped versus the original; you have to know the bosses to be able to sneak to the top of the screen and blindly use your lock-on since your viewpoint is a bit stunted.

But damn, the fact that the game employs such an integrated narrative, such as the transitions between stages, adds so much to the experience; flying through the atmosphere from space and down to the earth's surface is just breathtaking. I can't wait to keep playing.

An interesting note: I played the game with the 3D controller, since I didn't feel like swapping it out for the regular Saturn pad when I switched games—and hey, I prefer it! I'm so used to newer-gen controllers that using the old flat Saturn pad just feels weird in a lot of cases.

Speaking of which, I really wish all three games in this series were available on Xbox Live. I was looking up other versions and ports of this game and it looks like the recently released Taito Legends 2 for Xbox has the game; hopefully this game makes it to the next backwards compatibility update (yeah right). For now it looks like the Saturn is the only real way to play this game, huh?

(Incidentally, searching for Rayforce/Layer Section on Google brings up Dessgeega's website!)

[dessgeega]

rayforce is pretty much the best game ever. i don't know what the deal is with those effects left out in yoko mode. the only place i really notice stuff missing is in the moon in area 2. it is weird.

so i have passed the third floor (actually the fourth floor, if you count the opening floor where you select your party) of dungeon master - the "prepare to meet your doom" level. doom turned out to be hordes of enormous, fast, thick-skinned, poisonous worms. there were many battles of attrition on this floor, and they taxed my party's already-strained food supplies. in the end they persevered, reaching dungeon level five with their backpacks stuffed with worm rounds.

the best part was this hallway where you have to sprint to get under a gate as it closes. i had retreated to rest, treat poison, and mix potions. when i ran to the gate again, the worms i ran from were blocking the passage, and the gate came down on my head: BAP! everyone in my party took damage. i took a step back, out of the doorway, said HMM, and waited. the worms slithered forward under the open gate. the gate came down. BAP! it was a good moment, and a valuable tactic was learned.
_________________

[JasonMoses]

[dongle]

I'm playing God Hand as part of BS' Motherfucking God Hand Week.

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

I booted up Dungeon Master today, after days of quietly debating whether or not I should abandon Etrian Odyssey and Ogre Battle. I like it quite a bit! It's rather simple, a bit like Eye of the Beholder but less confusing, somehow. It reminds me of the Scarab of Ra, an old Apple II archaeology game. I read somewhere that you can't save in the PCE version; every time you reboot the game, you resurrect various characters and work your way back down into the dungeon. Since you've already mapped it out and figured out the solutions to every puzzle, progressing to the next few levels becomes rather easy. IS THIS THE SAVELESS RPG WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR?! Maybe.

Five things I love:

No music. I can listen to my own tunes if I am so inclined.

The startup screen smoothly segues into the game itself, like Super Mario Bros.

The first enemies you encounter are monster broccolli and mummies. After you kill a broccolli, you can devour a thick slice of its florets. Whenever one of your adventurers eats something, s/he makes a thick gulping sound.

There is a shirtless barbarian named HALK.

You can recruit children to fight for you.

Someone on SBDN said that they are trying to port it to the DS, which would be fucking ace.

[Cycle]

My friend owed me a big favour, so he's letting me use his GameTap account.

This is like, the Games You Haven't Played But Really Should Have service. I've already download a heap of games I should have played but haven't.

But also, the exclusives! Saturn games, Dreamcast games (chu chu rocket and motherfucking toy commander on my PC!), URU online... apparently some two player games can be played over the net, so my friend and I are going to look into that and maybe play some Toe Jam and Earl or something.

So yeah, I'm pretty impressed by the selection so far. Any recommendations?

One thing: why they offer the genesis version of earthworm jim? the pc version featured uncut levels (and even a few more full levels), way better graphics, sound and a level select that unlocks as you progress through the game. Whatever, I guess!
_________________

[dessgeega]

the last express?

also, i can't imagine playing dungeon master on the pc-engine. the snes has just enough buttons to make it work.

i've finished exploring dungeon level 5.
_________________