Sunday, December 26, 2010 Presents: The Guide to Classic Adventure Games

Awhile back I talked about the adventure game book I was working on. It's still under progress but I figured I'd post a quick update on its status.

First off, the cover image is almost completed, which you can see a version of above. It still needs to be Photoshopped, cleaned up and reoriented, but this is pretty much what it will look like. My initial concept was to feature a whole bunch of homemade replicas of items from various adventure games, designed by a few friends of mine and inspired by the feelies from the Infocom games. They look amazing (they're all from relatively popular games - try to guess what they're all from!) but figured those alone would be a little too obscure. So, I took my computer and surrounded it with a bunch of games from my collection, to display just a bit of the breadth of content covered. The back cover image isn't completed, although it does feature the Roberta Williams framed photo.

Second, the Table of Contents has been updated to reflect a more finalized list of reviews featured. There are still a few more I have planned but just need to sort things out with contributors and so forth. I've also posted a sample in PDF format with approximately 50 pages of snippets from various articles, including a few reviews that aren't yet posted on the main site. Please note that these are still in draft form and the final versions will differ slightly, although the basic format will still be the same.

Third, my old pals at The Armchair Empire conducted an interview with me about the book, so please read up on my goals and why I decided to undertake this project.

And finally, the release date and price is still up in the air. I'm shooting to have it done by April, but I'm always planning on anything possible going wrong, so that may shift. I still want to hit the $25 target price, but that will all depend on the final page count, which is looking to hover around at least 650. More news will be posted as they emerge!

Friday, December 24, 2010

Update 12/24 - Spelunker, Dezeni Land / World , Gun.Smoke, Vasara

Doing a real quick update before I hop out the door for holidays proceedings. Spelunker is a cultural icon in Japan - the incredibly fragile hero is one of the most popular 8-bit characters, to the point where there's even a baseball player nicknamed after him - but it's largely ignored outside of the country, including its home country of the USA, where it originated as an Atari 8-bit game. A remake was recently released on the PSN - well, actually it's been available in Japan for quite awhile, but it's new to North America - and it might seem intentionally terrible at first, but with a bit of history you may understand where it's coming from, at least.

Following that up is a review of Dezeni Land and Dezeni World, two very early text adventures from Hudson. They're both big on parodies, featuring warped versions of Superman, Batman, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, C-3PO, and of course, the Disney theme parks. It's worth checking out the articles just for the silly screens, although fans of Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom (wherever they are) will be pleased to know they were developed by the same folk. We also have a look at the Vasara games, two overhead shooters set in feudal Japan developed by Visco, a name not usually known for quality, although these are actually pretty good. Finally, we have a recap of Gun.Smoke, Capcom's Western-themed arcade shooter. We also dug up a computer only sequel, which is terrible, but read about it anyway!

Our featured article this week is Ketsui, which we wrote about six months ago when the Xbox 360 port came out in Japan. However, it recently became playable in MAME (the game is technically eight years old by this point) so I figured it was worth it to take some cleaner screenshots.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

WAHP 13 - podcast dedicated to Japanese games

The latest episode of Warning! A Huge Podcast. More details after the jump!

As always it continues to gain EXP, improving with each episode - especially with the recent level-up which yielded a new official website. This episode had an excellent 2-sided 3-way debate regarding Tokyo's new laws on anime/manga and how they might affect games, with each speaker making some good points. They also mention HG101, specifically our Japanese PC and Kenji Eno articles.

The only small criticism I have for WAHP is that there were lots of comments saying "we could dedicate a whole show to that subject". Enough procrastinating gentlemen. You have the knowledge and an audience, it should (in theory) be easy.

This is probably my last entry until new year. Enjoy the holidays everyone!

Stage 013
Main Topic: Tokyo Hates Lolis

Now Playing: Tales of Graces f, Danganronpa, Persona 3 Portable
Subtopics: We reminisce about the WAHP Live Event, NIS + Imageepoch sittin` in a tree, Inafune trades one Com for another, USA no longer scared of Japan`s post office, fat & pink Cave shooter goodness will grace Westerners, Final Fantasy XIV got 99 problems but a monthly fee ain`t one, Capcom tricks ghosts into coming to Apple`s iDevices, Ninokuni is a level five bomb, Bandai Namco rethinks game development in the West, Yoshiki Okamto now lives in a van by the river, Final Fantasy IV being remade… again…, we talk tall Tales (of Xillia) and in Binary (Domain), PC Engine and NeoGeo live again, we display Evangelion ona-holes on our bookshelves, Coming Next, Comment of You, and oh… this is final episode of WAHP. Well, of 2010, that is.

So You Don`t Miss It:

Coming Next Japan Game Mentions

Umineko no naku koro ni ~ Majo to Suiri no Rondo, Castlevania Lord of Shadow, Gundam Musou 3, Shining Hearts, Inazuma Eleven 3 Sekai he no Chousen!! The Ogre, Final Fantasy XIII Ultimate Hits International, The Third Birthday, Dennousenki Virtual On Force, Momchan Diet Wii Figurobics by Jeon Da-Yeon, Milestone Shooting Collection 2, Saga 3 Jikuu no Hasha Shadow of Light

Other Game Mentions

Star Ocean, 999, Catherine, Tactics Ogre: Wheel of Fortune, Solatorobo, Persona 4, Deathsmiles, Final Fantasy XI, Phoenix Wright, Enslaved, Clash of the Titans, Splatterhouse, Knights Contract, Genji, Folksouls, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, iDOLM@STER, Ryu ga Gotoku

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Hong Kong PSN

I promised to look at the HK PSN nearly a year ago. I even took the photos. Then, not only did I stop visiting the HK PSN, but I also failed to make the post. Here it is - very late! Mainly for the benefit of the chap who asked about the Kojima video on the HK store, and to clear my blog folder of "TO DO" stuff before the year's end (might as well brush this stuff away while everyone's drunk on brandy infused mince pies). Much like Kojima and the guy in the photo, I dangled something just out of reach. To make up for it, there's photos idol models, as featured on the HK PSN.

The Hong Kong PSN used to be awesome, since they accepted UK credit cards back in 2008. For whatever reason they didn’t check that your fake PSN address matched your credit card address. But then someone changed the rules and it was no longer valid.

Since then I lost interest in the HK store, since it was no longer an easy access point for imports. It does however still have a few interesting things, none of which I can even be sure still exists.

* The 400mb Hideo Kojima video was pretty cool. Here's a Youtube video.
* Street Fighter IV tournament videos. How awesome is this? Apparently they had like a pan-Asian tournament, on SFIV, and the HK store hosted videos of it. This alone is worth starting a HK account for. Why didn’t the US or UK stores have videos of this event? Because they’re run by idiots, that’s why. I don’t care if the show doesn’t have direct relevance to my locality, I want to watch top tier players slug it out.
* Japanese PS1 games with English names a descriptions, which is handy if the Kanji on the Japanese PSN store proves too difficult.
* A few Japanese games, with ENGLISH options. This was my main reason for using the HK store. Before that garbage themed Tetris game came out in the US/UK, it was available first on the Hong Kong store, IN ENGLISH.
* Demos for games not available elsewhere. I don’t know if Pixel Junk Shooter now has a demo on the US/UK store, but for months and months, the only PSN demo for it was on the HK store. Well done Hong Kong!
* Special discounts: they often have special offers, and cool stuff around Chinese New Year.
* Lots of music videos by local singers – some of them really cool, in a weird 1980s kind of way (the Miriam Yeung 2008 AGS song is very 1980s).
* A whole series of idol shows, which I can’t even begin to pretend to understand what’s going on – but it has plenty of video footage of attractive young women, wearing bikinis, in hot tubs and outdoor showers. This appears to be some kind of major phenomenon, with quiz shows and other stuff... which I don’t even know how to describe.

Enjoy the photos, make a HK account, then complain in the comments section that none of this information is relevant any more. When I first got my PS3 in 2008 though, the HK store was seriously awesome stuff - especially since none of my PS3 owning friends/colleagues had anything near this kind of stuff on their HDDs.

Merry Christmas!

Friday, December 17, 2010

11/17 Update - Dunjonquest, Trace Memory, Catrap, Total Conversion: Ys III vs Ys: Felghana

Dunjonquest isn't exactly a well-known name nowadays, but back in the early 80s it rivaled the likes of Ultima and Wizardy in popularity. They're a series of decidedly old school dungeon crawlers, but unfortunately got dropped around 1985 and thus never proliferated likes its peers. This article covers the main Dunjonquest games as well as its spinoffs. I had originally heard of the name from the Atari 400 game Temple of Apshai, which was one of the first RPGs I'd ever played, and what I immediately thought of when I played Diablo years later.

Trace Memory (also known as Another Code in Japan and Europe) is a short series by Cing, who unfortunately went out of business earlier this year. It was one of the first Japanese-style adventure games to hit the DS, and eventually paved way for the likes of Phoenix Wright and Hotel Dusk, the latter also made by Cing. (And also 999: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, recently localized by Aksys, and is apparently very good.) Sadly the Wii sequel didn't see release in North America, because we're too impatient to like adventure games, apparently. We also have a review of Catrap, a cute little Gameboy puzzler that sprung from a rather old BASIC computer game called Pitman.

I've also started the first of what I hope to be a series of articles called Total Conversion. Our articles always compare one or two scenes across different versions, but the goal of these articles is to select two drastically different versions, play them to completion, and compare each and every major moment. Here, I've chosen the Genesis version of Ys III and the PSP version of Ys: Oath in Felghana, its remake which was recently released in the US a month or so ago. There's something like at least 70 screenshots from each game, detailing all of the levels, bosses and major story events, so it's pretty exhaustive.

For our Featured Article, we dug up this short piece on Sunsoft Fighter, mostly because the first game featured, Galaxy Fight, was recently released on the PSN courtesy of Monkey Paw Games. It's an alright fighter, nothing terribly special, but it's got a bit of an amusing sense of humor (one of the characters is a Monty Python and the Holy Grail-style killer bunny), and it paved the way for (the superior) Waku Waku 7.

After Over a Decade - Darkstar: The Interactive Movie

Darkstar: An Interactive Movie (not to be confused with Darkstar One, the outer space flight sim that was recently released on the 360) is very much a blast from the past. It has reportedly been under development for over 10 years. It struck me as a particularly brazen project - who releases an FMV game in this day and age? - but one worth investigating.

Admittedly, a lot of that came from the whole "so bad it's good" vibe, which is practically built in to any FMV game. The main character, Captain John O'Neil, is played by Clive Robertson, who's biggest previous role was on the short-lived soap opera Sunset Beach. Much of the supporting cast is comprised of folks from the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and current members of Cinematic Titanic), which practically guarantees that it would be cheesy but enjoyable. The opening cinema has the voice of Peter Graves, speaking from the beyond, rambling off about some kind of vaguely pretentious meanderings as movies of later parts of the game are flashed by. It's all (perhaps unintentionally) remisnicent of Bela Lugosi's role in the Ed Wood films, and we mean that in the best possible way.

And then the game starts's actually kind of good. Not ironically good, but legitimately good.

Well, in a certain mindset, anyway.

The "Interactive Movie" part of the subtitle suggest that Darkstar is something like Dragon's Lair, or at least some kind of Choose Your Own Adventure style game. It isn't. It's actually a point and click adventure game very reminiscent of The Journeyman Project. Enjoyment of this style of game practically requires that you have some level of nostalgia for the mid-to-late 90s multimedia CD-ROM epics, the kind that offered plenty of C-list actors advertised as if they were A-listers, and it presumes you don't mind revisiting such an era. There's a lot about this title that reminds of Ripper, which I coincidentally also recently started playing (and is also pretty enjoyable in its own right.) That being said, there's also a lot more exploration elements than something like Phantasmagoria: Puzzle of Flesh, which was almost completely comprised of "click here to see the next movie" bits.

All of the action takes place from the first person, and you click around the screen to move between various nodes, all accompanied by full motion video transitions. (It's all pre-rendered, so it's more like The 7th Guest rather than the Tex Murphy games.) Each node is technically a panoramic still picture, which lets you look around in full 360 degrees. There's still some issues with it - the hotspots aren't indicated unless you move your mouse over them, and sometimes it's difficult to find the path that brings you to your intended definition - all issues with past games like this too. There's not a whole lot of direction, either, leaving you to wander around aimlessly for a bit until you stumble on something. It's also pretty bad about being forthcoming with information - we understand the elevator is probably locked, but without poking around, you won't understand why you can't open it.

The concept is, you are one of four people in hypersleep aboard a space station that's mysteriously deserted - a common trope. The second is a beautiful woman who's still asleep. The third appears to be have gone missing (Trace Beaulieu's character), and the fourth (TV's Frank!) seems to be dead. (It isn't him, obviously.) The opening segments are unfortunately missing any FMV outside of the shots of Captain O'Neal looking at various instruments.

We have to admit that we've taken towards the strategy guide to figure out where to go, so we can't give much of a definitive opinion of the game until we get farther. But we can comment on the things we do like - namely, the atmosphere. The CG rendering isn't exactly modern, but it would've looked stunning back in the late-90s, and it's got the atmosphere nailed. A lot part of this is due to the unexpectedly excellent soundtrack. One of the composers is from a band called "Ozark Mountain Daredevils", a name which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but it's appropriately moody, and isn't afraid to take the cheesy buttrock route during some of the action scenes during the trailer. Apparently Rush was attached to the project at some point, although their work is not in the final product.

I have heard of people running into technical issues though. The whole game is pasted together using something called iShell, which has been noted to cause various crashes and so forth. I haven't had any problems outside of some sluggishness on the menus. Also take note that the game comes on two DVD-ROMs (it was initially planned for six) and requires a full 14 GB installation. Naturally, that's almost all video files, most of which are Quicktime movies viewable outside the game.

Anyway, we'll have an actual review of this at some point once we get to spend some proper time with it. It's $30 over at their website, and is also available in downloadable form on the Strategy First site. You can also check out the Adventure Gamers forum thread.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Boku no Natsuyasumi TWILIGHT ZONE

After some random Googling I found a video which I had thought was lost (the original Youtube upload had been deleted). Here is a video of a glitch in the very first Boku holiday game on PS1. Japanese players discovered you could force the game to continue into a non-existent DAY 32 of the month, whereupon family members disappear and later, textures and audio go all wonky (around the 6.40 mark in this vid). This is both freaky and awesome, like some kind of deranged twilight zone. Notice how the father is made up of blue polygons and isn’t fully formed, while the mom’s abdomen is missing entirely. This reminds of the subject regarding game glitches which behave as games in themselves. Such as Mario’s Minus World, NES Metroid’s hidden worlds, Zelda 64’s red screen world, a maze of platforms hidden behind the ice scenery in Donkey Kong Country, and a tiny handful of other games which I can’t quite recall. For those interested in Boku no Natsuyasumi, there's the series of diary entries I did a while ago.

Games being removed from PSN

It was recently mentioned in our comments section that Bishi Bashi Special (pictured) has been removed from the EU PSN store. So I ask: why is PSN so horrendously crappy?

This is shameful, since not only was it Konami’s first game to go up, and cheaper than the other PS1 games, it was also for a long time the best PS1 game on there (which is more a reflection that everything else sucked). Still, Bishi Bashi was an awesome, insane collection of wacky minigames, including one called “Uncle Launcher” which was as its name implied, and another involved brides throwing cake. I own the disc so never bought the PSN version, but now I wish I had. No explanation was given, and its removal is a mystery. At least with Outrun it was known to be due to Sega’s licensing running out. But why would Konami remove a PS1 game? They also previously removed Silent Hill, and so I’m left wondering what will go next.

This raises further concerns. Will we start to see random awesome games getting pulled from the Japanese PSN store? There’s about 10 games I still want which are on there, but I’ve been holding off because the cost would be at least £60 ($100+), so I buy one or two when the mood takes me and I have spare funds. If we’re going to start seeing random removals it would be worth buying everything right now.

This is hugely problematic, and is a reason I hate digital distribution. For every Gaia Seed they release, costing $6 instead of $150, there’s the threat of a Bishi Bashi style removal. With physical copies I can wait a few years and even if stores stop stocking it, I can buy it on eBay or forums. And it’s not like I can buy the PS1 discs, because Sony has infuriatingly region locked PS1 discs. So really, we’re all screwed. PSN should be a method for allowing niche games to thrive, and instead we’re seeing them removed without warning and without explanation, denying people the chance to play them entirely. If they’d made an announcement we could at least have gone and grabbed it.

I would recommend all US readers to try Bishi Bashi by buying a UK PSN card, since it is the perfect party game with some fantastic multiplayer modes (it could be the best beer&bros game on the PS1). But I’m afraid you can’t, because Konami won’t let you. Honestly, we’re all better off just going out and pirating this stuff, because companies don’t want our money.

Somebody please try to explain to me the logic behind such rank stupidity. I WANT MY BISHI BASHI BACK!

Monday, December 13, 2010

Chef Island – an unfinished RPG Maker game

For those that recall my entry on NPC lesbians in Suikoden 2, you’ll probably know I am a huge fan of the first two Suikoden games. One of my all time favourite sections was the cooking mini-game in Suikoden 2, which I went out of my way to play as often as possible. I liked it so much I started me own dedicated cooking RPG in around 2000... But never finished it.

Chef Island is unfinished. It was inspired by Suikoden 2 and Harvest Moon, but it’s sheer ambition killed it. Even though incomplete, I think I was really on to something. So before someone does an iPhone app and steals my idea, I’m going to document it here. I have also included a save file for it, in case anyone wants to try it. I also WARN you, it contains a lot of high-school level humour plus, to my great shame, internet slang.

In Suikoden 2 you could acquire recipes throughout the game, along with specialised condiments such as soy sauce and spices. You’d then choose a recipe, along with a condiment and watch it being prepared. Then there were 4 judges taken from random characters you’d recruited, who’d vote on yours or the rival chef’s recipes. It was incredible.
In Chef Island I tried to recreate this cook-off in the setting of a school for up-and-coming chefs. Days would pass and once a week there’d be a cook-off. In the time building up to this you’d be expected to acquire ingredients, discover recipes and prepare by learning about the judges’ preferences. In this way the game was a bit like Harvest Moon. I’d planned for 20 recipes (which was too many for the amount of work it needed!), each requiring 3 ingredients derived from a pre-set number of 6: meat, fish, eggs, milk, vegetables and flour.

I’d envisioned that ingredients could either be found or bought. Eggs could be taken from chickens, fish could be caught, and so on – but only a finite amount. Food would spoil from week to week and so more elaborate recipes would require some effort to acquire the needed amount of ingredients. I even planned a fishing minigame where you had to chase an NPC fish in an underground pond to catch it. Meat had to be bought from the store, and vegetables could be grown (or at least they would have been, had I completed the farming section).

The difficulty was trying to balance legitimate ingredients, and eventually I simplified them into food types (cheese dishes would use milk, instead of specifically cheese). Each ingredient was to have a trigger attached to it (IE: something like fish sets trigger 20 to ON, or whatever), and come cook-off time, you had to choose a recipe from the library and then walk up to a series of 6 pots, each representing a specific ingredient and add them from your inventory, whereupon the game would either recognise the three triggers and you’d get your dish, or it would say you failed your recipe. This took HOURS of work. I didn’t finish this, but I had a big chart drawn up on paper with hundreds of food combinations and related trigger numbers, as I tried to whittle it down.

If you test the game, and set trigger 500 to ON, you can sort of see how everything would have worked, and can kind of play around with the cooking and serving sections. Pressing CIRCLE allows your character to walk through walls in test mode.

Judging was an equally complex affair: 5 specific judges had specific tastes. The pirate had spent so long at sea he hated fish but loved meat dishes. If you had a meat trigger set to ON he’d give the thumbs up – but with 20 recipes to calculate, I had to write about 16 pages worth of trigger recognition. Another was a vegan I think, so a meat trigger gave a thumbs down. The 5th was purely 50/50 randomness. I never finished this bit (you can demo it a little using the save file), but in hindsight if anyone had thought about it, they could have found a perfect dish and aced it all the time – with a little work though this judging bit could have been great.

The game was intended to play out with a simple day cycle where you could perform tasks to help with the cook-off. I included inventory items such as ‘days’ which would increase with each night’s sleep, so the game could keep track of the passing of time. If you’ve used RPG Maker on the PS1, you should agree it’s a clever workaround. Completing side-quests granted you either ingredients, gold or special recipes to add to your library (if you check, there’s an incomplete library section).

Sometimes recipes were just hidden in random places, like the laundry, a letter box, under someone’s duvet in the dormitory. You got one gold coin every day, which were supposed to be gifts from your mom who kept posting you stuff. I also intended for there to be regular letters from mom when you won cook-offs and went up in rank. There’s post boxes, but no letters in them yet.

There was also a lengthy fetch quest where you collected an item, traded it with someone for something else, and continued trading the item until you got a special recipe (I added the items but never implemented the quest itself). After I’d finished the main cook-off section I had wanted to fill it with little details, secrets passages, hidden goodies, and other things. Plus mini-games.

(Above is the general store. I had intended for you to buy items from each post box-looking container - like vending machines!)

You were also to have a rival, Tim Crapdson, who would win by default in case 3 judges or more gave you the thumbs down. He’s hugely annoying, but there is some funny dialogue from him regarding sleeping with a fork under your pillow. Plus, the main character’s skills weren’t stuff like attack or magic evade, but skills like fry, boil, and so on. I had intended to somehow use these later down the line.
Viewing what’s here already shows that there was a spark of something which, if finished, could have been incredible. As it stands it’s about 30% done and not really playable. More annoyingly, the one game which I did finish, Morishinden Chojin, no longer exists due to a faulty memory card.

I’ve often thought about revisiting Chef Island, since I sincerely think it would be an awesome game in the vein of Harvest Moon and could probably make me money. I’ve thought about coding it in QB64, or moving on to better RPG Maker software, but I just haven’t the time. If I had the C coding skills I might even have considered an iPhone app, or an Xbox Indies games, or something. But I don’t. So enjoy this save file for what it is – an unfinished dream.

On another note, how bloody awesome would it be if ASCII or Monkey Paw Games, or someone, anyone, re-released RPG Maker on PSN, and we could all start making games and emailing each other our creations? It’s been far too many years since we’ve had the opportunity to use an RPG Maker game in English.

The save file is HERE. I am warning you now that I was a teenager when I made this, and I take no responsibility for offending anyone because the content is on a level akin to a screaming Xbox Live adolescent. If jokes about hobos, diarrhoea, internet slang, and testicles offend you, stay far away.

The ZIP files contains only an emu save file – I edited the save ever so slightly to remove a slightly gross soup joke, but afterwards was unable to export it to the format used by the PS3. If you know how to convert emu files to PSV, post in the comments!