Outrage Trigger

I finished Douglas Coupland’s Jpod over Thanksgiving. It’s pretty much a revamp of his fascinating mid-‘90s geek subculture pastiche Microserfs, but this time it’s about modern-day game programmers bouncing off each other in a series of interconnected plot threads and ersatz observations about life in this gosh-darn-kerazy world of McDonald’s and Google and E-Mail Tony Hawk Jpeg Karaoke Internet Hug Machines.

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.

Scar Removal

I recently started playing Final Fantasy Tactics in preparation for the enhanced, retranslated port that hits the PSP this Wednesday. It’s made me realize that, as much as I love the game, a lot could be improved with a simple, cohesive rewrite of the dialogue.

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 wonder why 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. Did it figure into some discarded subplot about her, her knightly duties, and scars? Too bad 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.

Prototypical Treasure

I recently found not one, but two things that combine my overbearing fondness for Treasure games with my love of stupidly obscure trivia. From the September 1995 issue of EGM comes this preview of "Guardian Warriors," which all good Treasure nerds (and anyone who reads the lower caption) will recognize as an early version of Guardian Heroes.




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.



And here are huge scans of those Alien Soldier and Guardian Heroes previews. The shots of Alien Soldier are lumped in with early Light Crusader screens, when the game was called Relayer. I didn't spot any obvious differences there, but I admit that I never played the final game that thoroughly. I should fix that, as I find that even lesser Treasure titles are still something to be...uh, valued.

The Red Star: A History in Covers

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.

2005

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?

2006

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.

2007

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

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.

Gunstar Blues

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.

Semantic Nonsense

A new scandal arises. The GameBoy Advance port of Final Fantasy VI apparently censors the original’s scene of Celes being beaten by a guard while chained to the wall. No longer punched, she now just falls to the floor, apparently overcome by a case of the vapors.


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 abused. Seriously, though, 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.

Slightly Behind the Scenes

So I callously disparaged the Final Fantasy XII Collector's Edition in my last update. And then I went and bought it anyway.

As I thought, most of the extras are engaging, but not really memorable. Instead of a making-of-the-game feature, there's just a load of developer (and translator) interviews, and a half-hour “History of Final Fantasy” overview that does little more than run down the plot of each game and point out the many incarnations of Cid and the Chocobos. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't mention the god-awful Final Fantasy Mystic Quest or the planned Famicom version of Final Fantasy IV. A few interesting details pop up, but if you're a big enough Final Fantasy nerd to pay extra for a bonus disc, you're probably a big enough Final Fantasy nerd to know everything that disc could possibly tell you.




However, it's nice to confirm that Akihiko Yoshida doesn't walk around in the same medieval bondage outfits he uses in his character art. He just looks like he belongs in one of Japan's few Weezer cover bands, a proper calling for anyone.

Shining Forth

Final Fantasy XII comes out this Tuesday, but actual copies have already trickled out to magazines and some rental stores. After seeing both the regular edition of the game at the office and handling the two-disc special edition at EB, I prefer the former. The special edition is metallic and regal, but the two discs are packed halfway on top of each other in a manner ripe for scratching, and an extra ten bucks is just ridiculous for a documentary and some interviews (none of which is likely to detail how director Yasumi Matsuno went nuts and left the project).

Besides, the regular edition has much nicer cover art.

The Warp Whistle

Yesterday saw an important event in the world of videogames and largely unjustified nostalgia. I'm speaking of the DVD release of the Fred Savage film and notorious Nintendo vehicle The Wizard.



It's not a good movie. In fact, it's not even a particularly engaging bad movie. It's really quite routine and dull, outside of a few wonderful scenes: the Power Glove's sole moment of greatness, Christian Slater and Beau Bridges reluctantly bonding over an NES, the future lead singer of Rilo Kiley falsely accusing someone of molestation in an arcade, and, of course, the insanely extravagant unveiling of Super Mario Bros. 3. Once you get past the stupid kick of seeing a film that revolves around Nintendo games, there's not much else to do, other than point out the script's parallels with The Who's Tommy and spot Tobey Maguire's first on-screen role.

But it's an important movie, dammit. If you grew up in the shadow of Nintendo and were any sort of normal kid around 1990, there was surely a moment when your ambition in life consisted of trekking across several states, meeting a cute redheaded tomboy (or being that plucky tomboy, if you were a female Nintendo brat), and taking your quasi-autistic kid brother to the fictional equivalent of the Nintendo World Championships, all in the glorious name of videogames. It may not have lasted long, but that moment was there. Don't deny it.

For those film history nerds among us, The Wizard also concluded the short trend of '80s movies that dealt with videogames as a wondrously juvenile subculture. Like Wargames, The Last Starfighter and the legendary Joe Don Baker satire Joysticks, The Wizard envisions a world where playing games, getting high scores, and beating Mecha-Turtle will somehow help you overcome your crippling insecurities and change your life for the better. As the ‘90s started up, this fantasy gave way to films that occupied themselves with the actual games instead of their broader implications. It wasn't a change for the better, perhaps because it's easier to make a cohesive film about young game nerds hitchhiking to Los Angeles than it is to turn the backstory of Double Dragon or Super Mario Bros. into any sort of decent movie.

So it doesn't really matter that The Wizard's DVD release is astoundingly bare-bones, lacking any special features, trailers, or perhaps a commentary track where Christian Slater gets drunk while Jenny Lewis groans about how the film and Brooklyn Bridge robbed her of a childhood. It's enough that the now-grown Nintendo kids of 1990 can watch their youthful ambitions played out in some Reagan-era fever dream, where a large corporation could back a film just to show off Raccoon Mario and kids could apparently catch rides across Nevada without ending up in shallow graves by sundown.

It's still a lousy movie, but I think that's the point.

Valis Returns Again

For those still reeling (or laughing hysterically) over the unfortunate news surrounding the Valis series and its clearly unsafe-for-work descent into porn, here's some shred of comfort: last year, Telenet made a Valis title for mobile phones. It's a side-scroller very much in the style of the 16-bit Valis games, with a gallery of all the outfits Yuko wore during the franchise's more pleasant days. It probably wasn't much of a hit, otherwise Telenet would've made another one instead of pimping out the Valis name to a porn developer.








Cute and innocuous, the portable Valis: The Phantasm Soldier's homepage shows no signs of tentacles, violently coercive lesbian trysts, or horribly misplaced swords. Taking the current advancements of Japanese cell phones into account, I do think this could be a decent game.

But I also think that we should never, ever trust Telenet again.

Valis Returns

Wow, they're making a new Valis game! Remember Valis, the 16-bit action series about a schoolgirl named Yuko turning into an anime version of She-Ra and saving an alternate dimension several times over? Yeah, the games are mostly average, but they were fun back in the days of the Genesis and TurboGrafx, when we could be entranced by a plucky female warrior, decent Castlevania-style play mechanics, and cinema sequences that used "amazing CD technology" to mimic those then-novel Japanese cartoons.

The series quietly died around 1993, but now we have Valis X (or Valis Cross, as it's pronounced) for the Japanese PC. Here's the official website.



I don't remember the original games showing Yuko with quite such large breasts or an expression that mixed drugged stupefaction with a dawning sense of terror. Still, this is an official Valis title—there's the Telenet copyright in the corner—so we should be interested. Let's look at the screenshots and see just what sort of game this is.








Yes, it's a lesbian porn game. A lesbian porn Valis game. I'd make some joke about Philip K. Dick spinning in his grave, but he never had anything to do with the Valis games in the first place. Besides, he might have even endorsed lesbian anime sex in his unhinged later years.

This sort of thing turns up all the time in unlicensed gaming subcultures, where you can find just about any porn based on just about any game. It's truly rare, though, for a company to put out fully authorized smut about their most recognizable character, and that's precisely what's happening here. Telenet was a major Japanese game developer during the early ‘90s, but the days of Valis, Cosmic Fantasy, El Viento, and all those shooters are long gone. Like a film director with no career left, Telenet's doing porn. And so is Yuko, whether she likes it or not.

That's the disturbing thing about this: Yuko doesn't seem to be enjoying it at all. If she was going about things with a huge orgiastic grin on her face, there'd be far less cause for offense. But no. We can't have harmless, consensual lesbian stuff, because the audience won't buy it unless a woman is cringing, blushing, sobbing, or dying.

Telenet's actually endorsed a series of Valis X games, with four more titles that focus on other characters like Cham, Valna, and Yuko's stupid classmate Reiko getting sapphic with each other. Telenet also has the temerity to charge about $25 for every game, and they're download-only. Granted, I dont think anyone should pay any amount of money for something like Valis X, because that'll just encourage more of it.

Victory

Well, that settles it.




At game shops across Japan, social retards and vapid schoolgirls alike are standing in line for the next available shipment of Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth. At every Gamestop and EB Games and doomed mom-and-pop gaming store across America, clerks are shoveling through piles of newly traded-in DS systems. At Nintendo's headquarters in Redmond, Reggie Fils-Aime is sitting dejectedly behind his desk with tears rolling down his face and bouncing off his enormous chin. The PSP has won.

A Tale of Modern Games In Two Parts

PART ONE
National Console Support stocks a new model of Koyori from Sengoku Cannon. For reference, this is Koyori.


In characteristically delightful NCSX prose, the store's website reveals that the Koyori model's clothing can be removed. NCSX expects the figures to sit on hand for several months.

PART TWO
NCSX sells out of the figures within a few hours.

PERSONAL OPINION
Sengoku Cannon, being a side-scrolling PSP shooter from Psikyo, sounds cool at first, but not after you've seen the boring screenshots and read the unflattering reviews. Given the choice, I'd sooner have a Koyori figure, which could at least lie sealed in a safety deposit box until the day it's worth a grand on eBay.

Oh yeah, and buying frenzies surrounding naked toys are hilarious.

Valkyrie Profile Week: An Interview

VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005 ends today, unless I come up with some sort of clever addendum that makes the whole thing worthwhile. Since I've exhausted my Valkyrie Profile merchandise, here's an interview with some of the game's voice actors.

It comes from one of the last issues of Gamefan—not the scattershot, grandly unprofessional Gamefan that Dave Halverson ran, but the Gamefan that started up after Halverson left in 1998. I never liked that version of Gamefan. While Halverson's publication maintained a good-natured aura in spite of its frequent excesses, the second generation of Gamefan was much the opposite: surly, posturing, and fixated more on dumb in-jokes and homegrown catchphrases than games. You can see it in this interview, where Gamefan wastes time with a potshot at one of the editors when they could ask, just maybe, something about Valkyrie Profile.



In fact, most of the questions have little to do with the game. It's more like a glimpse into the actors' careers circa 2001. But you can read Megan Hollingshead's take on two of the characters she played, and her performance was easily my favorite from Valkyrie Profile.

Valkyrie Profile Week: Valkyrie Fight Tag

For this installment of VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005, I'm going to plug Valkyrie Fight Tag, a homebrew PC fighter that's probably known to anyone who liked or even played Valkyrie Profile. It's worth mentioning again for the sake of the people who didn't, just because Valkyrie Fight Tag is surprisingly solid, considering that it was likely made by a crew smaller than the PlayStation game's cover design staff.
Like a lot of “doujin” fighters, it's simple in design, with three buttons, easily performed moves, and not much game balance. The programmer(s) replicate the PlayStation game's sprites really well, making them just a bit larger, and the fan-art character portraits look better than some professional game illustrations. It's all a pleasant diversion, especially for Valkyrie Profile fans.



It's not quite a fighting game based on Les Miserables, but Valkyrie Fight Tag's worth whatever download arrangement The Underdogs runs you through. A pity it's not a fully licensed tri-Ace game, or it might've ended up in the PSP version.

Valkyrie Profile Week: Another Comic

VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005 continues with a look at another Valkyrie Profile comic I own. It's called “Kami to Hito no Tsumugu Uta,” which I think translates to “The Spinning Song of Men and Gods” or “The Song Cycle of Gods and Men” or something like that.

I picked it up at an Ohio anime convention, back when I still went to such things. The dealer's room had a corner entirely devoted to doujinshi. The vendor was a deceptively average-looking guy who had helpfully sorted his selection into the clean publications and the many varieties of pure porn. I walked by and saw a Valkyrie Profile book in the normal section. The art wasn't amazing, but the author had apparently cared enough to use a unique, crinkled, and antiquated-looking cover, and it caught my eye.

Then some preteen girls walked by, and the dealer started yelling HEY LADIES GET YOUR HOT YAOI CREAM-FILLED MAN BUNS COMICS HERE and WE'VE GOT HARRY POTTER AND INUYASHA FOR ALL YOUR YAOI NEEDS and other things that might sound clever if you were a recently paroled sex offender.

I looked at the slim Valkyrie Profile booklet in front of me and realized that it deserved a better home. So I bought it and left. With haste.



I thought that the comic might be horrifying filth in disguise, but it's clean. There are no scenes of Lezard and Mystina screwing in a magical academy's broom closet or Arngrim and Lawfer exploring flowery knight love or the entire cast joining in a massive drunken pseudo-necrophilic Einherjar orgy in the halls of Valhalla. None of that.

Instead, you get two stories: one explores Lenneth and Lucian's relationship just as the game did, and the other deals with Claire, Lucian's common-law wife, as she figures out that, well, Lucian never really loved her. It's a bit on the bland side, and the art, while serviceable, is never all that impressive.



I get the idea that the author, Misuzu Fujimiya, really liked Valkyrie Profile and wanted to do a somber and faithful story about the game. It succeeds there, but I find myself of the opinion that fan fiction is better when it's just batshit crazy. Furthermore, I was disappointed to find a website run by Fujimiya, who's apparently drawing creepier stuff now.

So there's one-third of my vast doujinshi collection: a half-decent fan comic with a nicely textured cover and a reminder to avoid some or all parts of anime conventions.

Valkyrie Profile Week: A Comic

In honor of the recent news about Valkyrie Profile 2, I declare this to be VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005 and promise daily discussions of the game and its related merchandise until everyone's horribly fucking sick of it.
Today, we look at Yuu Hijikata's Valkyrie Profile manga, published in 2001 by Gangan Comics, for those of you who hunt these things. While a lot of legitimate game-based manga titles are collections of short stories, Hijikata's work tries to span the game's entire storyline in two 175-page volumes. This is not well-advised, yet it's strangely entertaining to watch it all play out.




At first, it all goes well. The first book covers the initial stretch of Valkyrie Profile, introducing Lenneth Valkyrie, the Berserk-inspired warrior Arngrim, bratty Princess Jelanda, and Belenus, who was just sort of boring and got sent to Valhalla first whenever I played the game.




The comic is paced better than the typical tri-Ace story, and though much of it is a line-for-line recreation of the PlayStation game's script, some differences emerge. Lawfer, whose death wasn't shown in the game, buys it in the manga during a big dramatic face-off with Arngrim (there's gay fan fiction in there someplace), and Lezard, who's like Harry Potter grown up and gone bad, appears earlier. Hijikata's art is fairly good, and I really dig the covers, even if they can't match the illustrations that Kou and You Yoshinari did for the game.




Unfortunately, the whole thing pretty much stabs itself in the eye during the second volume. The project's editors apparently stormed into Hijikata's studio to demand that the story wrap up in five chapters, so that's what happens. After a brief scene about vampires and the introduction of Lenneth's past-life boyfriend Lucian, everything shifts into a fast-forwarded account of the PlayStation game's last act, with Lezard and Mystina and Hrist and Loki all running around as the world ends. Granted, the original Valkyrie Profile's big finale is a deus ex machina in truest fictional form, but it was never as rushed and incoherent as Hijikata's version.

The manga's a fun curiosity for Valkyrie Profile fans, although its slavish adherence to the game's plotline means that there's not much to see if you've already been through the story on the PlayStation. But hey, geek merchandise doesn't have to make sense.

Final Fantasy XII Is Still Around

Let’s check in on Final Fantasy XII, seeing as how a demo of it ships next week with Dragon Quest VIII. For one thing, those of you who doubt the ingenuity of the game should note its latest step in bravely discarding series tradition. Observe that Final Fantasy XII’s ostensible villain, Vayne Cardas Solidor, has brown hair instead of white or blond hair!



All joking aside, I really am looking forward to Final Fantasy XII. I remain firm in my delusion that it will be a brilliant change from the franchise’s typical form, that it will have a marvelous story capable of singly vaulting games into the realm of high literature, and that it will be a beautiful, priceless experience such as to leave you gaping in open wonder and regretting that you ever doubted director Yasumi Matsuno for a second, you ungrateful shit. Don’t try to tell me otherwise. At least not until the demo arrives, at which point we'll probably learn that FFXII is much like previous Final Fantasies, only with an MMORPG battle system, a few Shakespearean allusions, and bizarrely realistic bunny women.


The Final Fantasy XII demo is intriguing in other ways, as it’s debuting in America. I’ve heard of no such release for the Japanese market, and as far as I can tell, no U.S. gaming website landed special previews of the demo. Unleashing it on the public at large suggests either Square’s confidence in the game or the fact that they just don’t care anymore because Matsuno has fallen ill or quit or gone stark raving mad, depending on who you believe. The project is now overseen by Saga series creator Akitoshi Kawazu –in other words, the man behind Unlimited Saga. Damning as that may sound, Kawazu’s just the executive producer of FFXII and, in effect, merely the one called in to guide the project’s last leg.

The real burden of proof falls upon co-directors Hiroyuki Ito and Hiroshi Minagawa, who’ve been closely tied to either Matsuno’s past work or earlier parts of the Final Fantasy series. Ito designed Final Fantasy Tactics, directed Final Fantasy IX and helped invent the battle systems on Final Fantasy IV, V, VI, and VIII. Minagawa is a Quest veteran who handled the art direction for Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Vagrant Story. They’re some of the best talent Square has left.

So if Final Fantasy XII is a hideous, embarrassing plane crash of a game, I'll know whose fault it is.

Mine, for getting too excited about a video game.

Gunstarting Somewhere

Gunstar Super Heroes ships to the U.S. next week. I won’t discuss it at length until then, but I can already confirm that it has some great backgrounds.



From what little I’ve played, it’s awesome. Much like the Genesis game, it hits you with lots of different gameplay styles and details, all clever enough to make you sit back and think about them when you’re not even playing, and I’ve always thought that to be the sign of a great game. Yes, there’s no two-player mode and the weapons are down to four from the original’s fourteen, but you won’t notice any of that, especially not when you’re collecting baby chicks.


Attention Treasure employees: you’re all forgiven for Silpheed: the Lost Planet, Stretch Panic, and, hell, any other shitty games you might have made. I’ll even forgive you for canceling Gun Beat –which, I maintain, would have amazing and not the disappointing mess that all available evidence suggests.