The 2007 Archive

The piece is long enough as it is, so all I'll add here are some links to the obviously not-work-safe Valis and Arcus porn that I casually mentioned. The outcry over the Valis porn easily overshadowed the outcry over the Arcus stuff when the games were released (seeing as how Arcus has about three dedicated fans today), but that's still some Arcus porn right there. Yessir.

Though not Coupland’s best, it’s enjoyable here and there. Perhaps, like Microserfs, it’ll be a lot more interesting in ten years.

Something else bothers me. It’s not the fact that none of the book’s characters is particularly appealing or the fact that Coupland lazily inserts himself into it as part of some irksome post-post-modern folding act, or the dozen or so pages of nothing but pi digits. That’s all annoying, but what really bothers me is this self-written profile of the main character.

I've underlined the problem. Who really prefers the PlayStation port of Chrono Trigger, with its unnecessary anime video clips and loading times, to the original Super NES version? No one, that’s who. And it’s not like our hero is ignorant of 16-bit games; there’s a scene where his co-workers are screwing around with Super Metroid on an emulator, an emulator presumably capable of running the superior form of Chrono Trigger.

For shame, Mr. Coupland. If this blatantly incorrect detail is your idea of a joke, it’s still a grievous, inexcusable, and potentially damaging error that I demand to see corrected in future printings, or at least on that website. I'll start an online petition if I have to.

Also, I get to talk about Journey to Silius this week. Reading things over, I realize that I was a little hard on the game, and I think I know why.

At some blurry moment back in 1990, I was telling a bunch of other kids about Mega Man 3, which I’d just gotten my hands on. I thought it was awesome. One boy didn’t agree.

“I got Journey to Silius,” he said. “It’s better than Mega Man 3.”

I hadn’t played Journey to Silius yet, but I knew that there was no way a game with barely a page in Nintendo Power could be better than Mega Man 3, the sequel to what was then my favorite game ever. I got to play Silius a few months later, and I confirmed that its one apparent fan was wrong wrong WRONG. I don’t care if Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man, actually hates Mega Man 3. It’s still better than Journey to Silius.

And while that’s what we’ll supposedly get with Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, I hope the localizers preserved one little exchange just before the first battle, in which the royally enlisted knight Agrias Oaks has some words with the soldiers of Prince Goltana.

No, not her beautiful face!

Her noseless, abstract, largely indistinct face. The same face that most of the other characters have, actually.

I’m always amused when authors go out of the way to tell us that a particularly tough female character is also attractive, especially when it adds nothing to the story. It’s often clumsily used in print, and when it comes to films, comics, videogames or any other visual medium, it’s much more effective to simply show the uncommon splendor of a fierce young woman or mind-controlled cyborg werewolf ninja superheroine. But some can’t leave it at that. Metal Gear Solid introduces Sniper Wolf as “Beautiful and Deadly” instead of describing her combat abilities, and, in the often grim fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin insists on telling us that Arya is indeed a pretty little girl underneath her many layers of plot-accrued grime, because God forbid that a murderous, lice-ridden tomboy should be ugly.

Returning to Tactics, I get the impression that Agrias might’ve been planned as a potential girlfriend for our hero Ramza, who otherwise doesn’t have one (the game’s requisite damsel-in-distress is, after all, his blood sister). Why else would we need to know that stern, matronly Agrias there is actually Beautiful and Deadly, despite having the exact same all-but-featureless face as everyone else in the game?

Of course, Agrias and the rest of the game’s recruitable characters get only cursory development once they join your party, so we’ll never know for sure.

But now we have Hilde, a new warrior from Soul Calibur IV.

Yes, she wears armor. And in combat, she even wears that helmet while striking down less-clad enemies in the name of taste and decency.

Of course, Namco took Hilde’s existence as carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to returning female characters, including Sophitia here. Really, Namco. She’s a mom, for crying out loud.

At any rate, Soul Calibur IV is already better than III.

Well, at least one thing’s right. After that, it looks primitive and seems intriguing in only one way: while games of the Dynasty Warriors stripe are frequently bogged down by their characteristic swarms of enemies, Guilty Gear 2 appears to move much faster. Unhindered by a realistic gait or any actual laws of physics, Sol zips along the ground, rushing past enemies and…uh, beating up a statue.

Still absent are any returning Guilty Gear cast members beyond Sol and Ky Kiske. No Millia? No Slayer? No Chipp spouting barely decipherable English slang? It just isn't the same.

Yes, Treasure’s planning a sequel to a game with some of the tiniest character sprites ever found in a conventional action title, and it’s being made for the contemporary system with the smallest screen. Treasure, you so crazy.

So is this the Treasure shooter that was announced so long ago? Perhaps not. That game was allegedly a traditional shooter and allegedly headed for the Xbox 360. There’s still a chance for a Treasure game that isn't a sequel or an anime tie-in.

For example, there's the Goth Girl…

...and the Furry…

...and the I Don’t Know What the Fuck.

I actually like gloomy Valentine and the bird-lizard Dr. Paradigm up there. Not Izuna, though. It isn't that he's a filthy furry, but rather that he's such a lazy choice. In a series known for bizarre excess, a llama-like fox samurai is both creatively bankrupt and an attraction solely for nutjobs who think they’re really nine-tailed Japanese nature spirits.

At least Ky Kiske returns in Overture as the king of Icuria, though newcomer Sin will apparently take over the part of playing Ken to Sol Badguy’s Ryu. I’m curious about just what Icuria is and how much this new game will show of Guilty Gear’s weird mash-up world, though there’s a bigger question here: what the hell is wrong with Sin’s hand?

The lack of other returning fighters is a bit troubling. I’ll be disappointed if Jam doesn’t show up as Ky’s royal cook/mistress and if Slayer isn’t roaming around, exuding vampire panache and biting Valentine in the neck. And how can it be Guilty Gear without Millia Rage, the bountifully-haired blonde who, according to Internet Rumors, represents series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari’s vision of an ideal woman? We all know what happened when Capcom made Street Fighter III without Chun-Li. Don’t make the same mistake, Arc System Works.

While I enjoy a good fit of obsession about Guilty Gear, I like doing the same for Treasure games. Gamercafe and Majoria's News found this site, where we’ll supposedly see the first signs of a new Treasure game for the DS in a day or so.

And just to catch up on every game that I've previously mentioned here, I should point out that Kiki Kaikai 2 is back. To a point.

Finally, the winner of that little contest was Kierstin Griffin , who correctly identified the game quotes as hailing from Strider, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Trouble Shooter, Phantasy Star 2, and Gunstar Heroes. I hope Kierstin likes old Genesis games and questionably classic ‘90s cartoons.

The following are five actual lines from Genesis game packaging. The first of you to identify them all gets a free Genesis game, possibly even with its inanely written box.

THE TEST 1) “Feel your biceps burst as you grapple with snarling musclemen. Cling to battleship bulkheads. Leap from Tyrannosaurus Rex.” 2) “Sonic’s attitude is can-do.” 3) “Will the girls emerge from Blackball’s evil empire safely? Only time will tell…” 4) “Thrill to Mother Brain blowing her circuits! Chill to Climatrol in chaos! Sweat when the killer lurks in the tunnel!” 5) “Do battle with incredible mechanical menaces! Hang from ledges, shoot in 360 degrees and body slam the mindless minions!”

Note that you need to tell me the exact titles. For example, the second entry is clearly from a Super Mario Bros. game, but which one?

It’s really Guilty Gear 2: Overture, an Xbox 360 action game very much in the vein of Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Devil Kings, Ninety-Nine Nights, Chaos Legion and any other generic Japanese brawling festival that revolves around huge battlefield melees. The details posted so far suggest that you’ll play Sol first-hand and order around a bunch of individual soldiers, with the actual combat resembling a one-on-one fighting game.

By this point, Guilty Gear fans are undoubtedly inured to Arc System Works screwing with the franchise, but Overture is completely new territory. Discontented with making endless Guilty Gear X2 updates and half-baked nonsense like Isuka, Arc’s now raiding Dynasty Warriors, which is arguably the fourth pillar of Japan’s game industry, next to Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and all things Nintendo. Ripping it off makes more sense than Dust Strikers did.

In fact, the only strange thing is the official-sounding “2” in the title. Daisuke Ishiwatari, who created this whole mess, apparently claims that Overture is a natural evolution of what he began in the original Guilty Gear.

To continue the tradition of Guilty Gear games introducing only one new character apiece, Overture gives us a flag-swinging warrior named Sin, who was first spotted in a Guilty Gear theme available on the Japanese Xbox 360 back in 2005. No one quite knew who he was back then, but he’s apparently the prime antagonist in Overture and resembles an unabashedly gay version of Ky Kiske. Or simply a finally-out-of-the-closet Ky, if you buy into Guilty Gear’s subtexts.

It remains to be seen if any other characters will show up, or if Overture will look half as good in polygons as Guilty Gear X2 #Reload Accent Core Cross Slash Queen Reference looks in two dimensions. Yet this isn’t the first time the series has tried to go 3-D. An early, mercifully ditched version of the first Guilty Gear used rendered graphics similar to those of Killer Instinct or Donkey Kong Country.

Take heart, Overture. The bar’s set low.

What's different? Well, the game's story mode apparently has only two playable main characters, as opposed to the five available in the final game. One of those leads is Serena Corsair, while the other is, strangely enough, a white-clad version of Valgar Reinhart. He isn't playable in the final version's story mode, though he has a prominent role as the standard semi-honorable bad guy who turns halfway good once the real villains are unmasked.

And now, an early version of Alien Soldier, Treasure's blisteringly hard Mega Drive action-shooter. These shots come from the May 1994 Gamefan, back when the title had a Slab Bulkhead human hero instead of the bird-headed cyborg seen in the final.

For comparison, here's a shot of the released game's main character and one of the bosses seen above.

I'm also putting up huge scans of the Alien Soldier and Guardian Heroes previews. The shots of Alien Soldier are lumped in with early Light Crusader screens, but I never liked that one enough to compare it now. Even my Treasure fetish has limits.

But wait. The PlayStation 2 version was overflowing with glitches when it came out in Japan, so much so that the publisher even apologized for it. Aksys is trying to fix that, though I wonder if they'll get everything.

And there's no online mode, not even in the Wii edition. At least it'll let us play the modern era's most demanding 2-D fighter by clumsily waving a remote around. You can use the classic controller, but that won't be as much fun.

Except that part. History must remember Pocky at her best.

UPDATE: Already down. But we can plunder The Magic Box's preview.

No, I don't think that's a misprint.

Why can’t I be hugely in love with some other old game, like Dragon View? Remember Dragon View? Sorta-fun Super NES action-RPG thing with shitty overworld graphics?

No one ever makes $450 Dragon View statues.

Shipping this fall!

This is nothing new, as the manga industry’s had Jesus-based comics since the time of Tezuka, and even American artists have used generic big-eyed derivations for things like Buzz Dixon's Serenity and the utterly astounding Truth for Youth series. I’m just amused by Manga Messiah’s version of Jesus, who the cover sells as a grim hero out to cast fire upon the Earth while sporting Jet Black’s beard. Yet he’s still second to Fist of the North Star’s very own Jesus when it comes to pure homoeroticism manliness.

I was who I was, and I was a 13-year-old who wasn’t popular with girls. This may explain why.

If I’d seen this article fourteen years ago, the stupid kid that I was would’ve have typed up a nasty, incoherent letter and mailed it off to Lou Kesten. Today, I’m not entirely in disagreement with it. Beneath all the alarmist nonsense about “Johnny Cage” decapitating an “enemy” with a “death move” on the “Sega Genesis,” it’s at least partly right in its ratings, as the first Mortal Kombat game wasn’t all that good, and the home console ports of the Terminator 2 arcade game were indeed shit. But Mutant League Football deserved better.

It’s surprising how little has actually changed. Debates over violent games still grow bizarre and unreasonable, we still see new Mortal Kombat titles every year, and Lou Kesten is still writing about videogames, albeit with a different mindset. Here’s his top ten list for 2006.

POSTSCRIPT: The EW issue also had this piece about Orson Welles, so there was no way I could've left it behind.

Time Gal’s enjoyable in a weird way. It’s no better than Dragon’s Lair or Space Ace or any other ‘80s laserdisc arcade game that’s more fun to watch than play, but there’s something charming about a green-haired anime heroine leaping through time just to die over and over, usually becoming a midget in the process. It beats watching the cowboy from Time Traveler.

And Reika, by my estimate, could well be gaming’s first non-abstract heroine. Yes, we had Mrs. Pac-Man and the kangaroo from that kangaroo game, but I can’t think of a human female lead that predates Time Gal’s 1985 release. Baraduke came out the same year, but it wasn’t until that game’s end that its spacesuit-wearing star, Toby Masuyo, was revealed to be a woman, and also Dig-Dug’s future ex-wife and Mr. Driller’s mother. Reika's the more stable candidate.

However, I devoted the majority of the article to its predecessor, Flash Hiders, since it started the two-game series and remains more interesting, as experimental fighters go. When it came time to address Battle Tycoon, there wasn’t quite as much to say. Perhaps that’s why I spent nearly a whole paragraph talking about Patchet, the game’s lesbian swordswoman.

Patchet amuses me. Because she’s a lesbian in a cartoony ‘90s fighting game, she’s stupid, muscular, and prone to swaggering around going I LIKES ME THE PRETTY LADIES AND THE SWORDS AND THE CARPET HOMPH NOMTH, or so I've judged from what little of her dialogue I can translate. More importantly, she might have been the very first lesbian in a fighting game, though Wikipedia gives that honor to one of the fetishized waitress warriors from Advanced Variable Geo, which beat Battle Tycoon to the market by a few months.

All of this made me wonder just who was the first lesbian character in any videogame. Wikipedia's take on the matter points to a spurned artist in a 1986 Infocom adventure game called Moonmist, but that entry is such an amazing mess that it randomly devotes a section to Streets of Rage 3 (with a sudden discussion on Johnny Turbo) and explains how Willy Beamish is a hateful, snot-nosed little homophobe.

I don’t really have an answer, so I’m posing this exceedingly important question on this day, the 40th anniversary of the modern videogame's creation. I’d really like to arrive at a daring conclusion, or else I’ll have to admit that Variable Geo deserves to be remembered for something.

I'm three levels in and liking it. The designs are a bit stark (after all, it's set in Country That Is Clearly Not A Cyberpunk Russia No Sir) and I prefer it when I can jump freely in my action games, but it's still a tight little mix of shooting and close-range combat, with some enjoyable nods to classic design. Know how brawlers like Streets of Rage and Double Dragon occasionally let you throw street punks off ledges to plummet to their palette-swapped doom? The Red Star lets you do that all the time. And that's worth twenty bucks.

It wasn't easy to find. Only the local indie game store, a frequently deserted little place called X-Zone*, had it in stock. It's supposedly trickling out to GameStops today, though I'm not sure if larger retailers like Best Buy and Target will carry it at all. Shame on them.

*Possibly a Final Fantasy VI reference. I'm investigating.

I'm playing The Red Star demo. I still live in Ohio. And Acclaim is still in business.

It impresses me. I'm aware of the nicely illustrated and unsubtly allegorical comic on which it was based, but the game really sells me by marrying two old-fashioned gaming staples: shooting enemy soldiers and beating the crap out of legions of street punks. Except instead of palette-swapped thugs, I'm pounding on the fur-hatted minions of an evil URRS dictator named Troika. Yeah, the URRS. I guess calling the end boss “Joseph Stallen” would’ve been too obvious.

The cover art looks like a lazy mock-up, but hey, it’s a fun action game set in a Soviet Russia full of sorcery and high technology, and I'm going to pick up The Red Star when it hits.

A few weeks later, Acclaim goes under, and amid all the gloating of now-grown ‘80s children still bitter over Total Recall for the NES, some choose to mourn the fact that the company's gone to the grave with what might have been its best game in years.

What? XS Games is publishing The Red Star for the PS2? For only twenty bucks? Sure, they haven’t set a firm date for it, but the important thing is that it’s coming and that the new cover art’s better. I bet it’ll be out soon, because the game was pretty much finished by the time Acclaim sank, right?

Right?

I'm checking ebgames.com every month to see when The Red Star is coming out. And it’s always the next month. Always. But the new cover suggests that someone's doing something somewhere with regard to the game. Even if Makita's going to catch her death of cold.

But it’ll be out soon. XS Games wouldn’t screw with us. Surely we can rely on the company that published Superstar Dance Club #1 Hits and gave The Castle of Shikigami II the worst translation ever.

Wow. They’re bringing it out. They even have a website and a press release. And they say it’s “available now.” So I’ll just head over to ebgames.com and…

Aw fuck. But I'm sure this will be the last delay. I just know it.

That was not the way of it
April 4, 2007
It doesn’t really shock me that voice actors play many versatile roles. It comes with their trade, after all, and I’m no longer amazed that Tara Strong is in Powerpuff Girls, Final Fantasy X, and Gurumin. Or that Shion’s voice actress from Xenosaga II is also Ty Lee in Avatar. Or that John Di Maggio and Phil LaMarr are in damn near everything.

But after I’d sunk over 50 hours into Final Fantasy XII, this DROPPED MY FUCKING JAW.

Consider me shocked, Keith Ferguson.

I hate you, Arc System Works.

For now, I have important news: Gunstar Super Heroes is only $10 at Toys R Us. If you have even the remotest, vaguest, slightest, subtly lingering fondness for games that let you shoot things, blow them up, and feel good about it all, you must buy this.

Yeah, it’s short and the less useful weapons from the original Gunstar are gone, but Super Heroes is still an amazing little game, and one that I’m still playing regularly even though I bought it back in 2005. It’s very much like one of those classic action titles that’s worth picking up again and again, not for high scores or actual progress, but just because it’s fun. It’s fun to ride a scampering robotic minecart through a gauntlet of bombs and gunfire, it’s fun to jumpkick your way to the top of a pyramid, and it’s fun to destroy tiny, innocent villagers’ homes for power-ups. It’s also perfect for playing in short bursts on the subway, since you can access any Gunstar sub-stage once you’ve cleared it. Just skip that fucking helicopter level.

I’m still surprised that Gunstar Super Heroes didn’t catch on, considering that today’s gamers are so desperate for decent old-school action games that they’ll praise mediocrities like Ninja Five-O, Scurge: Hive, and Sigma Star Saga. If you can bid sixty goddamn dollars for a game duller than Wrath of the Black Manta, you can spare ten bucks for Gunstar.

Speaking of Sigma Star Saga, it’s also ten bucks at TRU. And speaking of desperation, it’s worth it only if you’re willing to play through hours of awful random shooter levels just to take in a modern, half-misfired version of The Guardian Legend. I was.

I’ll make some updates during my trip, though they’re more likely to turn up on my dumb old Livejournal.

It hadn’t taken long for my host family to figure out that I liked those wacky-ass videogames, so they took great joy in springing this information upon me. I even got to meet this nice neighbor a few times, and though I refrained from hopelessly pelting her with questions like “HOLY SHIT YOUR SON WORKS FOR SQUARE AND MAKES GAMES SO WHEN WILL THEY MAKE A SEQUEL TO EINHANDER OR XENOGEARS OR KING'S KNIGHT AND WHY’D THEY KILL AERIS AND DID HE WORK ON THAT CRAZY CHOCOBO FIGHTING GAME THAT MIGHT NEVER COME OUT*” she picked up on it and mentioned that her son’s newest game was called Ehrgeiz.

I told her that I’d played it, and that I liked it. That wasn’t a lie back in 1999; I’d bought Ehrgeiz a week before I left for Japan, and it had seemed fun for the half-hour that I’d spent with it.

Mrs. Nishimori, however, told me that she “couldn’t really see the value” in what her son was doing. I didn't entirely disagree, but I still assured her that Ehrgeiz was a fun game. Before I left Japan, she gave me Tobal No. 2. I’d have refused it, but she sent it through my host family. And hey, it was Tobal No. 2.

So I still get some tinge of guilt whenever I write about Dream Factory and its gradual descent into the licensed-game shitpile of Fighting Beauty Wulong and Appleseed, even though the young Nishimori might not work for them anymore. MobyGames puts his most recent credit in Xenosaga Episode 1, for which he programmed the bonus mecha-fighting minigame. I wish I could come down on that one way or another, but I never unlocked that part of the game. I just hope his mother was proud of it.

*And it didn’t.

They’ve made a new shooter called Otomedius, and they’ve hired manga artist Mine “Sgt. Frog” Yoshizaki for the character designs, which show off just what Mine does when not contractually bound to draw relatively tame comics about Gundam-obsessed alien amphibians.

The title is a mash-up of Gradius and “Otome,” which means “maiden,” though it’s also the self-applied term for increasing numbers of Japan’s female otaku. Sadly, this game doesn’t seem to be about unkempt she-nerds blasting tanned Tokyo ko-gals and grabbing gay doujinshi for power-ups. It looks more like a mildly humorous shooter.

Some might see this as an evolution of Konami’s Sexy Parodius games, which died out in the mid-‘90s after years of covering up mediocre Gradius-like design with flying pigs and penguins and mermaid bosses and garter-wearing women on missiles. However, I think that Konami’s just seizing upon the cutesy maid-and-schoolgirl fetish that’s been sweeping niche Japanese shooters for the past few years.

It essentially started with Cave’s Mushihime-sama, which didn’t seem all that unwholesome until the company started endorsing statues of the game’s heroine, Reko, some more dressed than others. Ibara, Cave’s next shooter, went even further down that road, with an entire cast of female bosses dressed in revealing gothic-lolita fashions, all ripe to become model kits. And there was Warashi’s Trigger Heart Exelica, which stars two saucer-eyed girls wearing metal thongs.

This is all part of a bigger problem in Japan’s geek sector: “moe,” the intentionally vague neologism that refers to the obsession otaku have with cute and often disturbingly young-looking anime girls. It’s already a subculture unto itself within anime circles, and it’s only recently started to make headway among Western anime fans, who are still mostly dumb, loud teenagers more concerned with banging each other than body pillows of their favorite anime heroines. Bless their cosplaying little hearts.

And now Cave, intent on staying king of Mount Moe, has unveiled a new shooter called Muchi Muchi Pork. “Muchi Muchi” is apparently slang for sexily plump women. That should tell you all you need to know about the character art, but here it is anyway.

All of a sudden, Otomedius looks pure and innocent.

It’s amazing how quickly Cave went from awesome, aesthetically solid shooters like ESPgaluda and Guwange to grotesqueries like this. There was a time when I could look at such things and say “Well, as long as the gameplay’s good…” That time is long past. I doubt I'll like Muchi Muchi Pork even if it has a power-up system where the heroines fight all sorts of food and get larger, more powerful bullets by eating constantly. I'd rather do that in Metal Slug 3.

I think we should see less of each other, Cave. It was fun, and I’ll always like you for ESPrade. But now I think I’ll just watch from afar, with only morbid curiosity about what’ll be in your next shooter. Catgirls in diapers? Huge-eyed female bodybuilders? Gigantic, floating, laser-shooting breasts?

Such editing was also present in the Japanese release, which means that Square Enix has caved in to Nintendo’s family-friendly policies across the board and denied us our right to see 16-bit sprite women shackled and pounded. I'm not sure why this should bother me. It's not a defining moment for the character, nor is it a famous scene in the game.

Others have complained about Square’s new translation changing the dialogue in Ted Woolsey’s original 1994 adaptation. In the GBA release, Kefka now says “son of a sandworm” instead of “son of a submariner.” Riots may ensue.

And there’s more gay innuendo surrounding Sabin.

The translators even take deliberate potshots at insanely devoted Final Fantasy VI fans. You know, I was once thinking of buying this GBA remake.

I’m definitely getting it now.

First there were rumors online. Then there were hints dropped in Play magazine, of all places. And now it’s confirmed: the PSP’s getting a 2.5-D remake of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, one that also includes a port of the original TurboDuo game and a retranslated version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. They've taken everything I like about the series and crammed it onto one UMD. Awesome.

More good news: Konami brought back Ayami Kojima to redraw the Rondo characters and make us all forget about the ugly webcomic-grade art from the last two Castlevania games.

Early footage casts the remake as entirely faithful to the original Rondo, though there’s no way of knowing yet if it’ll keep with tradition and let Maria steamroll through everything by throwing kittens and birds . But for now, let's just be glad North America’s finally getting the lone old-school Castlevania that’s actually aged well.

So there’s a Gunbuster DVD set coming out this month. Gunbuster, being all about huge robots and bickering teenagers and giant space bugs, stands as one of my favorite pieces of ‘80s anime fluff, and I’m looking forward to getting my own copy of Bandai Visual’s big glossy package, overpriced as it may be.

Yet there’s one problem: Bandai Visual and the producers of the series apparently looked at a training montage in Gunbuster's first episode and decided that the accompanying music, a parody of the Chariots of Fire theme, was just a bit too close to the source. After reportedly getting the director’s permission, they replaced the music with a slightly less upbeat selection from elsewhere in the series.

You can watch the original sequence here, starting at the six-minute mark. The music’s no more infringing than what you might hear in a South Park episode, but someone at Bandai Visual was clearly paranoid about American copyright laws (as the Japanese edition of Gunbuster leaves the music intact). It’s a dumb, unnecessary change, but ultimately a minor one. If I’m upset about anything, I’m upset that I deliberately mentioned the Chariots homage in an article I wrote about Gunbuster a month ago. I am now a liar to thousands.

The amazing thing, however, is that there are Gunbuster fans who are now deciding not to buy the DVD set just because of this. Two minutes’ worth of music apparently makes the difference between a beloved cartoon and a butchered wreck, and they shouldn’t support any company that would dare compromise the artistic majesty of watery-eyed schoolgirls and fat robots doing pushups.

Yes, Gunbuster may be all space-war melodrama later on, but it’s flat-out parody in its first episode. Switching some music does little damage.

When this sort of thing happens, I tell myself that anime fans really aren’t the most spoiled, oversensitive specimens in the geek phylum, and that the other branches, from Star Wars to Final Fantasy to He-Man, can be every bit as retarded. But sometimes I just don’t believe myself.

I recently started writing a short GameSetWatch column about failed games. It pays nothing, but I rather like researching the obscure, depressing almost-made-its of any geek subculture. Someone has to.

With every column, there’s usually something that I can’t work in there properly, and the last entry's extra piece was a Wild Guns ad from the August 1995 issue of GameFan. Click for a bigger version.

This was most likely put together by Tommo instead of Natsume itself, though that doesn’t quite explain “GOOM GRAPHICS” and its citing of GamePro’s uncharacteristically restrained rating for the game. I think I like the Game Players quote best. If I ran a gaming mag, every review would be written entirely in onomatopoeia.

Also worth mention is the larger drawing of Annie, who has apparently snapped due to the deaths of her family members and is now emptying a clip into her own crotch.

Lost Planet is getting somewhat average ratings. Though I’ve never thrown a game aside on account of reviews, I’m still a bit disappointed by this. I really wanted Lost Planet to be great. I wanted it to be an across-the-boards hit, a classic, a Thing. I wanted to feel duty-bound to buy it and, almost as an afterthought, an Xbox 360 on which to play it.

Why’d I want all that? Because Lost Planet’s original trailer has one of the greatest exchanges of dialogue I’ve ever seen in a videogame. Around the two-minute point, a sedate, white-haired scientist named Yuri tells the game’s heroine that revealing the main character’s true identity “might create a rift between you two.”

Her response is priceless.

I wanted this to define the Xbox 360’s early years the way Resident Evil quotes defined the PlayStation’s first wave, only instead of hilariously inept B-movie lines, we’d have the calculated, hokey back-and-forth of a lazily written summer popcorn flick. But that dream is lost.

So I’m going to be playing nothing but Final Fantasy XII for a little while longer. I promised myself that I wouldn't buy another game until I finished it, unless, of course, Lost Planet got rave reviews. I hate keeping stupid promises.