Summer Games Challenge 2018 - begin when ready!

[Nert]

^Great write up on Startropics and glad you enjoyed it. It really is a fantastic nes title, every bit as good as the other Nintendo licenses from back then. Not sure why this particular one is so overlooked.

[pierrot]

I've made it to the second disc of Killer 7. Disc 2 starts with Target 04. I'm sort of beyond any real enjoyment in playing the game, and just at the point where I want it over. I'm potentially going to get rid of it after I finish it. I find the game to be pretty tacky, and tasteless. The plot is entirely vague, and amorphous, with a bunch of senseless violence, and crass exposition. Generally I'm not too phased by these things in a lot of video games, but Killer 7 kind of makes me think of Quentin Tarantino's style of pretentiously wrapping the most banal package in the most gaudy, tawdry packaging possible. Killer 7 spends a fair amount of time sort of aimlessly describing the personas, and parts of their backstory, without really spending much time on who or what they are, or giving me a reason to care. The gameplay feels equally careless with the premise, because most personas serve little more than utility roles. I've really just focused on Dan, and KAEDE, and only bother to switch to another persona when I actually have to use one of their special abilities. Some of the last couple chapters have tried to prevent me from doing that, to a certain extent, by making me kill a bunch of Heaven Smiles (an omnibus term for the enemies in the game; I won't bother saying anything more about them, because it's unimportant) before I can wake up Dan or KAEDE. I can just farm enough to wake on of them up at the beginning, anyway, though.

The gratuity in the game kind of started with Target 02, Cloudman, with some odd sexual references at the beginning of the chapter. To start the mission, I essentially (in a cutscene) walked in on a "caregiver" riding an old man in wheelchair. Anyway, I thought this sex angle might end up sort of thematic for the chapter, and I thought that maybe the chapters would be playing off of a sort of seven deadly sins, thing, but no. I guess it was just purely for shock value. I did not see a way that those sexual references at the beginning fit into any sort of greater theme in the chapter.

I'm a bit more annoyed by the second half of the last chapter I finished: Target 03, Encounter. It starts out with this old dude, out for some sort of revenge, standing behind a guy, talking to him in a way that insinuates he raped the guy's wife in front of his son, then tosses his daughter's severed head to him, and kills him execution style. Why was all of that important? Well, I'm pretty sure it wasn't at all important. Technically that guy he killed betrayed him, but he didn't really suffer at all because of it. So, as far as I can tell it was just acting out on a cheap vendetta. Honestly, I don't have a clue what the fuck Suda Goichi is driving at here. This chapter was basically a showdown between Dan (an assassin), and his murderer (I don't have the time or patience to even attempt to explain this) who runs orphanages to harvest kids' organs. It culminates in one of the dumbest exchanges I think I've ever witnessed, anywhere, when Dan says, "I think what you've got here is no different than what those guys do at immigration," and the old man, Curtis, responds with, "All I wanted to do was shed light on my life." At which point, the guy is killed by a car wash. It's like a new level of incomprehensible. I can't even--.

[Key-Glyph]

Wow, pierrot. That's... something. That game is considered a classic? Maybe for infamy? I enjoyed the write-up, though. Please know that your exasperation is at least entertaining to eavesdroppers.

Tonight I'm planning to start LOOM. And by "start" I mean "fire up a new save for something like the fifth time." I've had this game since 2011 and have been taken with it all along, but for some reason every time I've started a runthrough I've wound up losing steam and wandering away for a few weeks or months. Normally that would be fine, but I've always chosen the hardest difficulty and tried to memorize the spells without writing them down in a misguided desire to live the true wizarding experience™... a decision which effectively makes revisiting a partial runthrough impossible.

This time I think I'm going to write things down, or perhaps bring down the difficulty. I really don't want to keep hitting this roadblock over and over again when I inevitably drift off to a console and can't pull myself back to the computer for a while.

My husband is really interested in LOOM too, so I'm gonna hook the lappy up to the TV so he can backseat game on it. Should be fun!

[pierrot]

Wow, pierrot. That's... something. That game is considered a classic? Maybe for infamy? I enjoyed the write-up, though. Please know that your exasperation is at least entertaining to eavesdroppers.

Eh, it's probably a little bit of a stretch on the term "classic." It reviewed pretty well, and was talked about quite a bit a decade or so ago, but it feels like it's been pretty well forgotten, now. It was the West's introduction to Suda Gouichi, also: He mostly worked on a bunch of Japan only adventure games before, but became much better known after No More Heroes, and Lollipop Chainsaw. I guess it might be somewhat infamous as a game that one video game censorship crusader used as an exhibit for his arguments. I'm actually a little surprised it managed to skate with only an M rating. I'm also kind of shocked that this was an exclusive on a Nintendo console at one point.

If I had to throw the game a bone, the incomprehensibility could be, at least in part, because I'm playing the US version, and text translations are pretty bad--I've been trying to understand the text purely from an English perspective, but in the latest chapter of the game I was reading one of the NPCs, Travis, talk about this dude's "representatives," and how an artist shouldn't go crossing them, which made me consider the word that was most likely used in the original script, and my conclusion is that the translation should have been "financiers." Also, as sort of a perfect storm of poorly communicating across cultures, the spoken dialogue is in English, even in the Japanese version of the game (It's part of the reason I never bothered trying to get the Japanese version), which is really bad, because while it's all perfect English, I'm sure it's acting like a bad filter that strips out a lot of meaningful information for the purpose of adding a more "cool" vibe to the Japanese version of the game. It's a little bit like a Resident Evil effect.

Anyway, thanks for the encouragement, Key. Best of luck on your quest to beat Loom this year. I think this is the year, for sure!

[casterofdreams]

I finished the first Megaman Battle Network game. I got my little completion star at the end of the word continue on the splash screen. It’s not fully complete but I want to see the end credits. Took less than 11 hours.

Anyway, onto the second game. With these types of games it sucks to basically start over since none of the chips carry over for obviously reasons.

I mentioned in my original post that I was going to pepper Megaman Zero Series in between. Well I realized the games require a bit more time and dedication than I initially thought (read: difficult) so I shelved it for now. I replaced it with portable versions of Persona 3 & 4 in the meantime.

[pierrot]

I finished Killer 7. It was something, I guess. Not sure what "something" that was, but it occurred to me that I have enjoyed, in the past, a somewhat similar experience in Linda Cube. So, what's different? Well, vastly different gameplay styles aside, Linda Cube also uses a lot of abstract imagery, and sequences of events to tell its story, but still makes it feel relatively cohesive, with proper themes and symbols. Skimming over a Plot Analysis guide on GameFAQs, it's clear that people have put in a tremendous amount of time trying to extrapolate meaning from the haphazard, and frankly unhinged story elements in Killer 7. The problem, for me, is that these interpretations (like the way Heaven Smiles try to run into the player, and self destruct, could be interpreted as symbolically representing Kamikaze of the Pacific theater) are often too disjointed from other large segments of the story, and it's far too easy to me to see it all as meaningless, or a thought experiment on Nihilism. The approach to analyzing the story seems to be stripping things away into separate, parallel frames of story references. A couple of them were fairly simple for me to recognize, generally, in playing the game, but I see no consequence to them. I'm convinced that there isn't actually a plot in Killer 7; I don't see anything to actually take away from the story elements. They primarily stand out to me as a purely basal, sensory inputs, and whether or not it's the targeted output, the response largely appears to be--completely divorced from my own reactions--"cool." Yeah-- "cool" just doesn't do it for me, and really, I don't find there to be anything actually "cool" about Killer 7. I find it to generally be either idiotic, psycho-babble, or kind of awkward.

Anyway, critically speaking, the story, art style, and sound design were the most unabashedly praised elements of Killer 7 on release. I've already made my thoughts known on the story, but I find the graphical style, and sound design to be a bit of a mixed bag. More so the graphical style, because, as I mentioned in an earlier post, RenderWare looks pretty terrible no matter what, but it's difficult for me to entirely agree with the praise of the sound design, when the background music almost completely drowns out some lines of dialogue in a couple of the earlier boss fights in the game. I will say that some of the music, and sound effects did stick with me, occasionally in a bit of an unpleasant way: Some of the sound effects are a little horrifying.

It seems that, traditionally, the parts of the game that drive people away from it are its controls, and lack of deep gameplay. I mean, I felt it was a fairly easy game, and it did feel like a little bit of an adventure game, in how it plays, but the gameplay (along with the sound, I suppose) was really the part I had the least qualms with. The controls are quite different from much of anything else I can think of, but I didn't really find them to be particularly frustrating. The main point of frustration I could concede is that fighting the Heaven Smiles can be almost asinine at times when trying to keep track of them from their laughing, and having one standing right behind a corner, or getting sort of interrupted by the screen change of a branch in the path while trying to get into a position to set up for the gunfighting. Basically, it can be a little too easy to suddenly, and inexplicably have something explode in the player's face, and in some cases, it's an instant death. Fortunately death usually isn't very punishing in this game.

Anyway, I'm done with it. Time to sell it.


1. Garou: Mark of the Wolves
2. Sega Rally
3. Killer 7
4. Metroid Prime
5. Super Monkey Ball
6. Streets of Rage
7. Zelda II
8. Uncharted 1
9. Virtua Racing
10. Dragon Quest VI

I'm thinking about starting up Super Monkey Ball, but I'm not really sure what it takes to actually beat the game. I'm not very good at SMB, but I tend to watch speedruns of it at least once a year, and if the requirement is to get through Extra levels, or Master levels, I don't think this is a game I'll be able to finish.

[ESauced]

I would say that you could say that beating Monkey Ball is beating the Advanced levels. That’s essentially the normal difficulty.

[Key-Glyph]

Hey casterofdreams, can you repost your list? I think you're doing a Mega Man Rush, but I forget which games. I'm only familiar with the NES Mega Men, so I'm trying to glean the gist of this alternative world you're blasting through. It sounds totally different from the 8-bit installments.

Also, pierrot... sell away!

As for me, I finished up another game this evening.

• The Last Express (DOS)
  StarTropics (NES)
  Maniac Mansion (NES)
  Lemmings (GEN)
  Metroid Fusion (GBA)
  Tetris (GB)
  Resident Evil: Code Veronica (PS2)
  Ultima III: Exodus (NES)
  Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego? (DOS)
  
  LOOM (ScummVM)

LOOM is a gorgeous LucasArts point-and-click you might remember hearing about from a certain NPC in The Secret of Monkey Island. Even though I'd first listened to that pirate's boozy pitch way back in 2004, I kind of thought it was just a gag, and hadn't thought to look into the game at all until 2011. The reason I finally investigated is sentimental for me: a colleague (who eventually became my mentor) recommended it when we discovered we'd both loved Monkey Island. What I loved about discovering this quirky commonality between us is that he and I are two generations apart -- so, during those very same moments I was playing computer games as a kid, he was playing those exact games as an adult, sometimes with his own kids, one of whom is exactly my age. I just think that's sweet, these parallel experiences we had on opposite ends of the parent/child dichotomy.

Later he actually found a LOOM cassette tape that came with his original boxed copy, and left it in my office inbox as a gift. It contains an audio drama that explains a chunk of lore that occurs before the game's beginning. The existence of such a tape should give you an idea of how much heart and soul went into this game.

And there truly is a lot to love about LOOM. First of all, it is clear immediately that there is an immense amount of worldbuilding behind the story, which I adore. The world is deep even though you only get a few inches into its surface. But second of all, the interface is so brilliant. I may love a good old-fashioned verb grid, but LOOM has simplified the player's interactions with the game world in a way that is delightfully and uniquely genius.

It's a little difficult to explain, but as you go along your adventure you learn "drafts," which are wizarding spells you cast to perform an action on an object. That is to say, you are collecting your verbs as you go in the guise of a list of spells (there's one for "open," for example, among several others). So, if there's an object you want to open, you click on it, then cast the draft for "open."

But the spells themselves are cast by playing a melody of four musical notes. These notes are revealed to you when you come across an object that can, or wants to, perform a particular action. For "open," you come across some seagulls on a dock who sing four notes when you click on a clam on the shore. When you highlight the clam and repeat those four notes, the shell opens, and the seagulls chow down. What's so enjoyable about this approach is that you will frequently learn a melody but won't know precisely what it does until you mess around with it; you don't realize what the seagulls are teaching you until you wind up serving them dinner. There are some other even more clever ways the game plays around with this convention, but I can't say any more about it. It's something you have to experience yourself.

The game is very short, so I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys this genre and wants to see it forged into something very, very special. The tragic thing is that the game was intended to be part of a trilogy, and we never saw any further installments. Ugh! It kills me.

[alienjesus]

1. ActRaiser (SNES)
2. Conker's Bad Fur Day (N64)
3. GoldenEye 007 (N64)
4. Fire Emblem: Fuuin No Tsurugi (GBA)
5. Mother 3 (GBA)
6. Ecco: The Tides of Time (MD)
7. Shenmue 2 (DC)
8. Jet Set Radio Future (XBox)
9. Resident Evil HD Remaster (PS3)
10. Mega Man 8 (PS4)
Bonus: Crazy Taxi

So, I picked up in Resident Evil in the labs. I had so much ammo and I immediately ran into zombies. So, to save my good ammo and to remind myself what the game felt like at the beginning, I killed them all with my 150 handgun bullets. Luckily there was so kerosene nearby too so I burned them all to prevent any more crimson heads.

After that I equipped my shotgun and grenade launcher and went to town. I got some computer passwords, watched Kenneth's final moments in first person, found 3 MO disks, ran around with some volatile chemical (utterly underwhelmingly as I had already cleared the path of all enemies). Then I ran through the boilerroom and was assaulted by a whole horde of Chimera enemies. This took up basically all of my remaining shotgun ammo, but I opened up the lift to the final boss.

Final boss round 1 followed crazy spoilers where the STARS traitor was revealed (*gasp* who would have thought it?). It went pretty well. He got 1 lucky hit on me but my 6 acid grenade rounds dealt with him pretty easily.

After that the self destruct went off (I assume Samus Aran was visiting?). I rescued Chris on my way out thanks to my MO disks, saved just before the exit, and equipped the magnum, 24 bullets and 5 first aid sprays I had on me to go and take on the final boss, who fell pretty quickly. Resident Evil beat!




I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would, and it wasn't at all scary (honestly and genuinely, I think Resident Evil 4 is a far scarier game than REMake). However, it never really sunk it's hooks into me (unlike those Chimeras) - I always found myself struggling to motivate myself to turn the game back on to carry on. Overall, I think it's a solid title, but nothing I'm crazy about.

Next up for me is likely Shenmue 2 due to it's length, but I also plan to try and get through some of the shorter games on my list in the upcoming weekend as I have a free house - Ecco 2 and Mega Man 8 are likely candidates.

[Key-Glyph]

Yo, congrats on finishing the game, AJ! I'm really interested to hear that you didn't find the REmake scary. It just seems so scary from the screenshots and gameplay I've seen. I have a copy that I've been planning to sell, but now I'm wondering if I should keep it? You're making me doubt myself.

So I've started my next game: Maniac Mansion on the NES. As I mentioned before, I played this game almost to completion as it exists within Day of the Tentacle, but got discouraged by an unfortunate and ridiculous death. Then I was given the NES version as a gift and was really interested in seeing the differences -- plus I had a theory that the excellent BGM in the Nintendo version would make the game less unsettling to me. (The port within Day of the Tentacle usually has no music, giving the whole thing a really stressful atmosphere and lending more power to the sudden sound effects, which will make you jump.)

Well, I can already report that nope, the presence of background tunes does not alleviate my stress level! I don't know what it is about this game exactly, but it gets to me. It's probably that there are a lot of unknowns to me. I know you can die, but not all the ways; I know there's an overall time limit, but I'm not sure how much; I know characters move through the rooms sometimes and can catch you, but not necessarily when, or what the rules are to their movements. I'll certainly look all these things up when I'm done -- and please don't tell me the answers, because I really don't want to know yet -- but for the time being I'm still leaving characters in closets as far away from the main throughways to feel better about things. Hahaha.

I've also decided to choose characters entirely on how good their tunes are, so Michael is my main man, followed by Bernard. I'm almost thinking of starting over and choosing one of the writer character Wendy, though, because her theme sounds like a route or ship tune from a Pokémon game, and that's funny to me.

Yeah, I think I'll do that, and have Dave, Michael, and Wendy.