Subatomic Brainfreeze

Blazblue Continuum Shift early impressions

My arcade got the Blazblue upgrade Continuum Shift yesterday, and before I partied hard for New Year's I killed some time at the machine. Since nobody has arcades anymore and the home port of this game probably isn't coming for some time (the European announcement was a bait and switch), I figured I would say a little bit about it.

This isn't a Super SF4-size upgrade: Arc is small, 2D is a ton of work, and characters are a lot more complex in BB than they are in SF4. The two new characters are Hazama and Tsubaki, both of whom appeared in the story mode of the last game. On the superficial level, the voices have all been re-recorded, the backgrounds reworked, the character portraits have been redrawn (the look is less "generic anime", thankfully). There's a new announcer and she's even worse than the first one.

The meat of this game is that the characters have been worked over in the name of game balance. Some characters were fundamentally changed, others were made much stronger, and a few more or less fine and got a tweak here and there. I'm going to get into what I saw at the arcade, so the rest might only really be of interest to BB players!

Espgaluda 2 may be region-locked AND I AM SICK WITH RAGE

Well, guys, the holiday season finds me a tad sick. Too cold, too much merrymaking, too much to drink-- a long walk in a rainstorm that was, perhaps, ill-advised-- and I've spent the post-holiday season lying in bed with tissues in my nose, watching cartoons and sniffling. But something has me up, ladies and gents. Something has me pissed off.

You will recall that Japanese arcade shooter developer Cave recently won some good will among niche gamers with their Xbox 360 port of Mushihime-sama Futari by making the game region-free, which no Japanese 360 developer has ever done before. Cave's people explained this as a "test run" for the international market. People were pleased and the game sold briskly.

Now Cave has another arcade port coming: Espgaluda 2. While no announcement had been made one way or the other, common sense dictated that Cave would embrace Futari's international success and go region-free for this game, too. I had put the game on my to-buy list and continued about my business, whistling obliviously. After all, why would anybody squander the good will and renewed interest created by the last release?

So of course it turns out that Cave is thinking about doing exactly that. I'm going to cut and paste the relevant piece, a personal conversation with Cave general manager Makato Asada from a reliable source:

Anyways, I asked him if ESPGaluda II BL was going to be region locked.  I didn't get the full on Japanese teeth-sucking or anything, but he did say the vote isn't in yet.  He was glad that foreigners bought Futari, but they were still considering whether to do it for BL.  There is apparently far more work than flipping a flag to make a game region free.  It has to be approved in every region it plays in, so there is not only money to think about, but unfortunately resources to deal w/ the same process 5 times.

This sounds like Japanese for "no dice." I want to harp on one of these sentences in particular: "He was glad that foreigners bought Futari, but they were still considering whether to do it for BL." What kind of thinking is this, guys? You're glad you sold some copies but you're not sure if you want to sell some more copies of another videogame? Isn't selling copies of videogames the whole idea, Cave? Isn't Cave small and niche enough that it needs every single sale it can get? Comeoooon.

The other thing we learn is that it's apparently a pain in the ass to get a game cleared as region-free: the game has to be cleared for every region it could possibly be played in, and this costs money and time. If we read between the lines, it's possible that the sales on Futari didn't make up for the resources spent making it region-free.

But then I look at the regional compatibility list. There are very few games that a Japanese gamer just can't play on a Japanese 360. If a game didn't come out in Japan, it probably was released region-free, and as such can be imported. A lot of these region-free games aren't from big publishers who expect big returns. A few of them look like outright shovelware. And yet these publishers can go to the trouble of dealing with the region lock procedure.  Why shouldn't Cave-- and all the other Japanese 360 publishers-- have enough pride in their excellent work to hold themselves up to standards that shovelware does?

My buddy Sean, who bought Futari, had this to say: "This is why Japan will fail this century. Their stupid shoganai ethic." That's pretty much how news like this makes me feel.

What pisses me off more than this lamentable situation is the reaction of the typically elitist, myopic buttermonsters in the thread. In summary: "who cares? Just buy a Japanese 360 like I did!" This misses the point. Region locking the game instantly cuts off the overwhelming majority of potential foreign buyers. People who are willing to pay $300 for a new console to play five or so videogames-- all of which are in the same genre-- are in the extreme minority. There are probably more people who did it to play Idolm@ster. That's how niche this is.

Yes, it's possible, but it's ludicrously impractical-- have fun not being able to walk into a local store and buy a videogame for your 360 without consulting The List, or having to import points for your Live account because your Japanese account won't take your foreign credit card-- and unless you only care about 2D arcade shooting games, it's money you could be spending on a lot of other things. It is not a great situation.

Neither is being at the mercy of region lock, of course. You know what's a great situation? Region-free videogames. Region-free videogames own. Hook us up, Cave. These games are not going to come out in the West. If they do, they are not going to sell unless something drastic is done to make them palatable in the mainstream. Importing is the only way we're seeing these games in the west. If you can afford to make this commercial and sell Dodonpachi underwear that warns the ladies that your dick is the final boss, you can afford to deal with region-lock.

"CAUTION POINTS" for viewing Filmed Entertainment "AVATAR"

CAUTION POINT ALPHA: Do not watch this movie if you are not watching it in 3D.

I'm serious, don't even bother: go the right way or don't go at all. All this movie's impact is in the special effects, the 3D, and the action. If you're not wearing your 3D shades you've lost much of what's special about it. I actually flinched to dodge a tear gas grenade at one point. The 3D stuff isn't driven by shock "made you jump" stuff, though: the tricks are constantly being used to subtler effect. I will say, however, that this beats the hell out of your eyes. I had to take my glasses off from the strain at a couple different points during the overly long movie: it's like Virtual Boy overexposure, but with more colors.

I expected the CG people to be all the way in the Uncanny Valley, but unlike, say, the recent Christmas Carol remake, these CG people are actually convincing. Of course, the movie makes sure to almost never have live actors and CG ones in the same scene-- save a few shots towards the end-- but the CG, standing on its own, is now strong enough that these sections come off exactly as "real" as the scenes with live actors do. You have to hand it to Cameron: the bar is officially raised.

CAUTION POINT BETA: You have seen this entire movie before.

The whole thing, beginning to end. Man from dominant civilization infiltrates the Other, learns their ways, becomes accepted, sleeps with a girl, changes sides on the spot. It's done well enough, but like everybody has been saying, you're in this for the visuals. You will be stunned by an unparalleled visual assault, but not surprised and certainly not moved.

CAUTION POINT GAMMA: A number of the plot points of this movie are stupid.

A couple of friends said "sure, go ahead, spoil us" over dinner at Go Go Curry, and by the end of it they were laughing their asses off. There are a number of seriously groan-worthy "I can't believe you expect me to go with this" moments in this movie, most of which are packed together at the end.

Characters aren't much better: there's the noble, peace-loving, nature-respecting and utterly perfect natives (the Na'vi), the puppy-stabbingly evil humans (all but the hero and his friends, the nerds in a world of uniformly evil marine jocks), and they're all completely hollow. It's hard to sympathize with such caricatures.

The final scene also ensures that this will become the official furry recruitment film for the next fifteen years.

What Did I Waste My Decade On? ANIME CONS?

I can't remember when my first anime con was anymore. It was probably Big Apple Anime Fest '02, which I remember pretty faintly. They told me Tomino wasn't doing autographs, you know, but he was. I-- and everybody else who got one-- stumbled upon the guy in, I kid you not, the basement of a Virgin Megastore. I'd brought my Haro alarm clock and everything, so I was overjoyed to get it signed. The only other thing I remember was that the theater went into a full-on ovation at exactly the scene in Char's Counterattack that you'd expect such a thing to happen at. You know what I'm talking about.

What Did I Waste My Decade On? THE ARCADE?

My taste in videogames underwent a pretty drastic shift with the Dreamcast. I'd spent the Playstation 1 generation devouring one RPG after the other, with maybe Street Fighter on the side. When I got a Dreamcast the situation inverted, and I was mostly playing arcade games. Hard games that lasted 20 minutes were quite a departure from the three-week expeditions I was taking in the PS1 days, and they were actually much more involving to boot. It's nice not to be so committed.

What Did I Waste My Decade On? ANIME CLUB?

Outside of a few people on the internet, I didn't really have any friends who were anime fans back in high school. Gamers, sure, but no anime fans. Probably for the better. It was especially weird to see anime and manga become a teen fad when I was in college: I hid all this shit when I was in high school!

What Did I Waste My Decade On? GETTING ANIME?

The first decade of the millennium is rapidly coming to an end, and as part of my ongoing quarter-life crisis-- a perfect storm of unemployment and restlessness-- I thought I would try and remember what the hell I did with all that time, subject by subject. This'll be tough!

Mushihime-Sama Futari: Arrange mode is pretty easy-- OR IS IT?

What can I say? I always get two or three posts (and hundreds of hours of wasted time) out of my videogames. I thought I'd go into detail about Arrange mode, as it's both the clear entry point for anyone who hasn't played one of these games before and an interesting design in its own right.

Arrange mode is specifically designed as a console experience. It's probably too easy to be released as an arcade game: even first-timers would sit down, put in their dollar, and win twenty minutes later. To call it the "training wheels" mode is not unfair, and it's even easier if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, the game doesn't bother explaining (arcade ports should all bother explaining), so I will.

(This is putting aside Novice mode, which is very straightforward and even easier.)

The first safety net is the reflect system: unlike the other modes, you are controlling both characters at once, and can switch between them with the tap of a button. One character fires (let's call this one Reco), and the other does the job of reflecting bullets (let's call this one Palm). In rapid fire mode (don't ignore the rapid fire button in this game, it's vital), bullets that get near you slow to a near-halt. This allows you to either leisurely fly around them or to reflect the bullets back by holding the laser button. Reflecting creates a large amount of medals that give you points, so one way to a high score is to gather a ton of bullets around you and fire them back when they're all together.

By reflecting and gathering bullets, you increase Reco's multiplier while decreasing Palm's. If Palm's score multiplier runs out, you won't be able to slow or reflect bullets. However, if you've used the reflector that much, Reco probably has a high score multiplier herself, so you would switch Palm to the front to refill him and put Reco in the back to reflect bullets. If you just play it careful, make sure to only reflect when necessary and with large groups of bullets, you can do this almost indefinitely.

Even if you do run out of reflector, Arrange mode adds auto-bombing on top of that. In a shooter, the bomb is typically used not as an offensive weapon but as a means of escape: you see the bullets, you know you can't dodge the bullets, so you toss the bomb and make them go away. With auto-bombing, you don't even need to think about that much: if you're hit by a bullet and you have a bomb, the bomb drops and you escape with your life. You are given a staggering six bombs per life-- three for each character-- and they go a long, long way. I just got done beating Arrange in all three difficulties without continuing by taking advantage of this stuff, and of the three only Ultra gave me any trouble. And I'm a pretty mediocre shooter player.

What's clever about the design is that as easy as it is to just survive, Arrange mode is also a very challenging high score game. Simple reason: using the reflector the way I used it-- or letting a single bomb go, for that matter-- really hurts your score. If you want a high score you can't lean on this stuff. Instead you want to fill up both players' multipliers to 9999 as soon as possible: firing your laser from there puts you in "fever mode" (I recommend yelling "BANGARANG" or "FUTAE NO KIWAMI AAAAH"), where you reflect everything that comes near you and your score shoots through the roof as the multipliers rapidly wind down. Eventually you're unable to reflect, and if you want to keep the jackpot going you have to dodge bullets like a normal person. You probably already know how dangerous that can be.

If the game had come without Arrange mode, I'd probably only recommend it to genre fans with a little experience under their belts. But considering that Ikeda and friends put in something so accessible, I have no problem mentioning this game in the same breath as Raiden Fighters Aces for a starter shooting game on the 360. It's certainly keeping me busy!

Mushihime-sama Futari: ARE YOU READY TO DIE OVER AND OVER AGAIN?

A little while ago I cautiously sounded a preemptive hype alarm for the upcoming Xbox 360 port of Cave's arcade shooting game Mushihime-sama Futari. Well, I've been playing the game pretty thoroughly and I'm happy to report that all hype was warranted: this is an excellent port of a wonderful game. Absolutely nothing went wrong. If you're at all interested in Cave's work and you have a 360, I advise you buy the game right now, though the cost of importing is admittedly steep. This is a top-shelf wine kind of situation. As for the rest of you, there's a post below. It's going to be long.

Princess Family-Size and the Night of a Thousand Spankings: A study in localization

As you may remember, I've been playing the Super Robot Wars spinoff RPG OG Saga: Endless Frontier. Its main draw-- the action-game battle system-- is alright, but the RPG that surrounds it is rather poor: between boring, uninspired dungeon design, a high encounter rate, and amateurish graphics outside of battle, the whole business feels like an afterthought. On top of that, the game drags on for at least twice as long as it should by endlessly recycling material: almost every boss in this game is fought at least three times in the story.

If not for Atlus USA's localization, I never would have had a motivation to finish the game. See, the game makes clear early on that it's not taking itself too seriously. The script is goofy: the characters can't stop talking about each other's breasts, and the hero is fond of pet names. You can imagine where this goes. Over on the Twitter (which you should follow, because I talk about a lot of things that aren't even noteworthy enough for this blog) I kept myself busy by putting down every single notable pet name or sexual innuendo I came across in the game. The tag was #ogsboobs. People on the Twits were entertained by this, so it's time for you to be too. Following is a full list of every single entry I made under #ogsboobs. This will take a while. For the record, I aim to use "Siren of the Love Ambulance" at some point in my life.