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Before we dive in here, a caveat. I bought the PSP version of Retour; I don't have a Vita, and there's literally nothing exclusive to the Vita library that interests me. I had planned for a slew of screenshots to accompany my reflections here, but upon reading through the manual, I discovered...that the PSP version of Retour doesn't have a screenshot function. I'd thought that this was now a standard feature with visual novels (which Retour is, basically), considering that Maren included it four years ago, but apparently not! Built-in screenshot functions on platforms like the Vita have led to the phasing out of game-internal screenshot functions, it seems. The lack of accompanying screenshot doesn't matter as much with Retour, I suppose, as this is largely a story with which the audience for Retour thoughts is going to be familiar, and promo screens showing expressions, environments, etc. have been all over the place. Still, it's a disappointment.

Also, I believe I've been spoiled in regards to the truth about Brian. There was a screenshot collection on Tumblr that incidentally mentioned a small but crucial piece of information - just one word, and it's a very deep cut; the OP may not have even realized the significance of the term. But the picture it paints, let us say, seems to fit with the info that's already been leaked about Brian and make it make sense. I'm actually quite interested in how they're gonna do Brian's story if what's being indicated here is correct. (I'm still gritting my teeth a little about being probably spoiled, though. It wasn't as if that post needed that information, dang it.)( Read more... )
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- Akari Funato has a new 20-page digital manga up in her Booth shop. Entitled "Peko no Suke," it appears to have something to do with traditional Japanese cuisine. I haven't attempted to order it yet, so I don't know if customers outside Japan can just roll up & plunk money down without additional rigmarole, but I figured I'd spread the news in case someone out there had the time to check it out before me.

- Speaking of Booth, I just discovered the very similar Chamela, which also specializes in selling doujin goods. The site's older and kind of a mess, though - the search engine is largely useless, and you're better off using Google and "url:chamela.com" etc. Granted, I haven't found much - a Baten Kaitos binsen, a couple Silent Hill 4 11121 doujin, a horror doujin compilation that includes stuff on Rule of Rose, of all things - but, hey; maybe you want to window shop for your favorite franchise.

- Suruga-ya's online shop has gotten in just a ton of old game magazines. Oh, dear.
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OK, let's bring this to a close before I start talking about Retour. ( Cut )
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A while back, I posted about an excellent Humble Bundle deal on Neo Geo games: 25 of the system's headliners for $10. I picked it up mainly due to fond memories of the candy-colored shooter Twinkle Star Sprites back in my Gametap days, but I was also curious about the library of an odd system with which I was almost completely unfamiliar.

Part of this is due to how the lion's share of Neo Geo games are fighters, a genre at which I am all thumbs. (The Neo Geo's ultra-hefty price tag back in the day was also a factor.) And, indeed, the Humble Bundle featured a great many fighting games - but it also featured the first three titles in the Metal Slug series, 2D shooters with spectacular sprite work that have produced many an impressive gif on VGJunk (like the one above).

I ran through those three games, one per night, and had great fun. The games are entirely dedicated to spectacle, and spectacle they are: there are so many detailed enemy sprites just bursting with life, huge & tiny & everything in between. There's an emphasis on overwhelming presence, but also a great attention to the finer details, making for a real visual treat. The games in motion also trend toward shock & awe; the Neo Geo's horsepower allows so much on screen at once that the game space is often just an utter pandemonium of bullets and explosions. To add to it all, each individual enemy death is surprisingly - and, to be honest, needlessly - gory; in the thick of the mayhem, though, the blood barely registers. And you get to commandeer a lot of neat-o heavy machine guns and tanks and ROCKET LAWNCHAIRS and fighter jets that produce equally unsubtle hails of bullets and carnage.

All the action at once is a big adrenaline rush, but it handicaps the games somewhat as shooters. Like in Contra, a single hit will kill you, but, as you can gather from above, it's much more difficult here to see from where those hits are coming. As a result, there are sections of the games where it feels like you have no choice but to die constantly. In a way, the difficulty doesn't matter, because the game's in endless-continue arcade mode - but it's a big hit to the flow of the games, to be constantly taken out of the action, if only for a few seconds at a time. I really do wish that they were tilted more to the gameplay side, that getting into a groove had a chance of keeping your high going, that you were allowed to prove yourself in some sort of legitimate challenge - that would provide a satisfying feeling of accomplishment to go along with the constant fireworks. As it is, all you can do is watch the number of continues used in your playthroughs slouch from mid-double digits to low double digits with replays. There's ultimately not much to say about the game - you just sit back, pump A, and watch the show. But it's a show you won't see in any other series.
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Yet more complaining about video games. This time, it's games that I made an earnest attempt to complete last year but where I didn't get past the finish line.

I picked up The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on sale several months ago against promises of a beautiful walking simulator combined with an atmospheric mystery. When I finally got around to playing it this holiday, I discovered that it was a little heavy on the beauty: it's an extraordinarily demanding game specswise, and I had to turn every graphical effect off or to its minimum settings to get the game to run at a blistering 4 frames per second. Turned out that that was only the beginning of the frustrations. First, this is another goddamn game that breaks saving, with no manual saves allowed and checkpoints that are very infrequent, the first coming about an hour and a half into gameplay, leading to my initial 45 minutes going down the drain when I took a break before apparently doing anything the game deemed noteworthy. Second, the game's paths are so poorly-marked that finding anything you're required to find is an exercise in pixel-hunting frustration. Third, the "atmospheric mystery" is more of a "stupid gory horror story" in the vein of The Hills Have Eyes, with the family of the titular vanishee being possessed by a demon that turns them into bloodthirsty psychopaths and the first plot vignette revolving around a murder committed via severing of the victim's legs. Fourth, the ending is so trite and renders what came before it so pointless that the designers were prompted to write an extensive defensive apologia for it. Not that I came close to reaching that ending, though; points 1 to 3 were enough to send me to the internet and see if pushing through all the above aggravations would be worth it. Turns out: definitely not.

Besides the PS & Lunar series, I haven't dabbled much in 16-bit Sega RPGs, so I thought I'd fire up the Sega Genesis Classics Collection I have on Steam and give Wonder Boy in Monster Land a try. I'd seen it on a Giant Bomb Quick Look for some retro collection and was drawn in by its adorable Duplo art & animations. (Your healing fairy friend, for example, will continually whap enemies on the head with her little wand when she's not on Curaga duty.) But there ain't enough of that. The cute elements begin to wane around the halfway point, whereas the gameplay weaknesses are constant: your pathetic little butter knife has a range of about 2 pixels, and you have like zero invincibility frames (and a low health bar, with big leaps in damage from level to level). I eventually wandered away when I reached the ice castle, with whose slippy, slidy floors and rampant enemies the "zero invincibility frames" combines smashingly, let me tell you. I tried using a walkthrough, but even it got confused here. I actually got about 80% of the way through the game, so I might go back, but I'm not chomping at the bit.

I've been playing Legacy of the Wizard even since I was a kid - I even remember the commercial on TV for it. I was charmed by the central idea of an entire family on a quest, with Mom, Dad, son, daughter, and even the family dog (er...monster) pitching in. This was my first real, earnest attempt at it, though - and it apparently is a legendarily difficult game due to its sheer size, as these Nintendo Power counselors will tell you. What deterred me, though, was that the game, in the words of this rather annoying article, is somewhat "poorly programmed." The very last section of the girl's stage depends on making a jump that in essence depends on glitching out the game, as it's not a move that can be made normally. (It took 30 attempts before I got it the first time - and I then lost nigh-instantly to a boss who for this character requires an item that you get in another family member's part of the dungeon.) I went on to the father's stage, but it features these block puzzles with really unreliable and frustrating block-pushing controls. Apparently, Dad's stage can be cheesed by his daughter, so I'll have to try that in the future; the game has interesting ideas, such as the truly versatile sets of powers possessed by the various family members (the "dog," for example, is weak but does not take damage from colliding with his fellow monsters, which allows him to ride them to reach new areas), but for right now, I just want a break.
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Up here. I motored through the remaining portion of the game in one night a few weeks ago. I haven't gotten up the gumption to detail what happened yet because I'm done with the game. It proved itself to be stupid and not worth the trip. It's all over but the eBaying.
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Fooling around on Wayback and discovered that the defunct Japanese Spy Fiction website was hosted on Sammy's old domain as well as Sega's. Archive.org's preservation of the Sammy mirror is more complete than that of the Sega original and includes some of the Range Murata production sketches. Unfortunately: most of the sketches for the main characters are missing (no Nick, Sam, or Michael; very few of Billy or Sheila), and none of the "vocabulary" pages I wanted to translate are present.

IIRC, the missing sketches weren't revelatory - no great shots or drastically different designs (save for Sheila, who, as expected from Range Murata, got a passel of sketches and a variety of designs being the female lead, but the quality on all of them was rather rough). The vocabulary was also mostly duplicated in the in-game Garbologies and in the official guide. It's the principle, though. And I do remember one tidbit from the vocab about how Kelly Wong's guards were called "Black Butterflies" because they all consisted of handsome men and were meant to conjure the image (expressed in a Chinese four-character phrase) of "black butterflies around a red rose," the red rose being Wong. I like little world-building tidbits like that, and it makes me wonder if there were any others I missed in the now-vanished webpages.

Sigh. Always back up your files, kids.

There was, however, salvaged a early sketch of Dietrich in a more sedate design:

He looks like a watchmaker.

Also on archive.org: Parts of the U.S. Spy Fiction website. Access Games took it over after it lapsed, so there's newer, Japanese-language content mixed in with the vintage stuff, but if you sift through and mind the dates, you'll find a Flash animation where Nick gets a kinda nifty intro (not prudent to focus on his eyes so much there, though) and an old Swery Q&A where he weighs in on the "pirate vs. ninja" question.

Anyhow, while we're at it: Here, have a fanart of Dietrich.
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Merry Christmas to you and yours.

- The Neo Geo Humble Bundle offers 20 defining titles for that impressive oddity of a system for only $10. Now, you'll want an XBox360 controller (or an "Xinput controller" - Google for a list) to play most of these, as many come only in an emulation shell that's finicky about controller inputs. That said: the first three Metal Slugs (vanilla, X, and 3) are Steam-enabled and worth the $10 on their own.

- There's a bunch of game soundtracks up on Amazon Japan for 399 yen - that's a little more than 3 USD. See here for details. I grabbed RE2 & 3 plus Demento (Haunting Ground) myself.

My return to Shattered Memories featured the return of Lisa Garland and the game doubling down on its incest themes. ( Cut )
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I wish I were back in the halcyon days of having nothing to report.( Cut )
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Oh, there's so much about which to talk, but this bears posting right now: there's a new Neo Angelique game on the way! The return of His Holiness stabby priest Mathias! (Er, from the dead? I don't know if this new project's following the continuity of the previous game or that of the anime. The latter seemed to have better visibility; it was a minor hit when it originally aired.)

Anyhow: More Neo Angelique! More Mathias! It's a Christmas miracle!

Again not much to report. ( Cut for lots of rape story references )
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Not much to report. My gameplay roadblock was just due to overlooking a certain pathway, which I located easily enough through being methodical; once back on track, I encountered an Otherworld section, then buzzed through a therapy session and left Harry in front of the high school.

The Otherworld sections do get more challenging, by the way, albeit not in a desirable manner; in the latest one, I had to negotiate more or less back to my starting position, around a circular path and through several different lodges. Unfortunately, with everything dark and iced over, the terrain is indistinguishable, and given that I wasn't running in a more-or-less straight path this time, it was nigh-impossible to get my bearings. Harry can pull up a map on his smartphone, but the controls are fiddly, and you constantly have monsters breathing down your neck. Plus, even if you have your flashlight turned off to minimize monster attention, for some damn reason, Harry will automatically turn it back on once he puts away his cellphone - which, given the multitude of overlapping situational functions mapped to just a couple buttons, got me caught in countless loops of accidentally turning the phone on when I meant to turn the flashlight off again, then accidentally opening up the contact list or camera app in my attempt to turn that off, then getting jumped by monsters in the interim and dying. Between all this and the incessant little-kid monster screams on the soundtrack, the sequence really got on my nerves. It's a change of pace for Otherworld segments, I'll admit that - metaphorical fast zombies in place of slow - but not one that I enjoy.

I gotta also say that the whole Vince McMahon, psychiatrist thing is really starting to undermine the game. He even talks like a sleazy wrestling promoter, even when he's allegedly offering therapeutic treatment to a patient. I mean (spoiler warning for the video description below the play window - I was spoiled on that before I started playing), look at this - the one session right at the timecode I've linked. It makes Tender Loving Care look APA-approved in comparison. The game so far, in fact, is generally stupid in its treatment of allegedly Mature Topics - as per the video, it actually thinks that real-life teenagers fall into the categories of "virgin" and "slut" (with Vince's leering line readings underlining the alleged titillation factor), and there have been three fairly elaborate rape references in as many hours of playtime. At least Tender Loving Care had John Hurt with a weird dye job.

The new piano puzzle, the replacement for the "Birds Without a Voice" gem from SH1, involves Harry plinking away on a toy piano to match a tune played by Cheryl in a phone message. Unfortunately, to mimic the notes, you have to listen to Cheryl's mom verbally abuse her over & over. It was realistically done, for once, but, brother, was it unpleasant, in a visceral real-world way. At least it was a respite from being chased by screaming mannequins for a bit.

My save did actually reload from right where I left off, though, which is a relief. Nausea did kick in, but playing the game just before bed helped. I'll try the same thing again tonight - maybe it'll inspire another Henry Townshend whodunit.
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Note: If you play Shattered Memories late at night then stay up correcting a Silent Hill 4 interview translation while listening to an LP of Resident Evil 2, then you will have a dream where Henry Townshend is tracking down William Birkin for murder while being sporadically menaced by iced-over Otherworld segments.

I may have taken too much survival horror in one dose.
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Hot motion sickness update: For the last session, I sat almost as far away from the TV as the controller cord would reach, and it seemed to improve matters, at least initially; I didn't feel ill during gameplay, but it did kick in after I stopped, and though I didn't have to go lie down, I was still feeling nauseous three hours later. My last session with the game was a bit more intriguing, so I'm motivated to keep at it, but it's not practical for me to keep on wrecking my evenings by continuing to play, so we'll see where it goes.

Upon loading the game, I made a new discovery: the "save anywhere" system doesn't work as advertised. I'd made my save after meeting Fargo Cybil and making a few phone calls, but my loaded game flung me back before the Cybil cutscene, leaving me to have to go through the tedious phone call rigmarole all over again. If technical limitations won't let me save anywhere, fine, but don't pretend I can save anywhere when I can't.

The Otherworld actually made its appearance in my last session, and...man, is gameplay lazy in this title. Harry's in an iced-in area; your suggested route and exits glow blue. Child mannequins patrol the area and attempt to latch on to Harry. Harry's job is to run at a constant mad dash through the area and, if a monster grabs him, press X to not die. If he's caught too many times, not even X will save him, but he'll just instantly start over at the beginning of the level, so who cares. No fighting, no exploration, no staring at disturbing imagery; with a good run, the first Otherworld section is over in three minutes. That's it - just a series of quick copypaste QTEs. It was something to do besides yell "Cheryl" constantly (which is actually mapped to a button early in the game, and which I felt compelled to do a couple times in each new area just to stay in character), but, brother, not much more.

More successful was the game's second therapy session, where Vince McMahon had me color in a house, and due to the presence of only kindergarten colors in his Crayolas, I made it purple & blue with a pink mailbox. Then, in the very next cutscene, Harry found himself in the usual broken-down, grimy-filtered Silent Hill milieu, only before a screaming-bright purple & blue house with a pink mailbox. I laughed out loud at that one.

(The Vince McMahon thing is getting distracting, by the way. I hope they justify it by having Kaufmann run over someone with a car soon.)

That house was supposed to be Harry's house, by the way, but when he got there, he discovered that it was actually home to a different family. This Harry has a few screws loose; not only does he forget until he speaks to Fargo Cybil that he has a smartphone by which he could've called for help when he discovered that his daughter was missing, but he also forgets that, wait, he's not on vacation in this town, he actually lives in Silent Hill. I suppose they're trying to play up an "is Harry nuts, or is it Silent Hill???" angle, but the way he's acting, the scales are tipped to, no, he really is nuts. Which kind of saps the tension out of the story, in a way: why should I hurry to find Cheryl, because who knows if Harry even has a daughter in the first place, really. (I do wonder what's going on here, though - just in a more-abstract, less-urgent sense.)

I do have to say that the game looks great for a PS2 game. I know that it was originally a Wii title, so it comes from a system with (a little) more processing power, but they did a great job with the port visually. I'll also reiterate that it does really nail that "walking through a snowy night" feel. On the other hand: I suppose all the snow piled up in the roads is a more realistic obstacle than abrupt hell-chasms, but at some point - c'mon, Mason, just climb over the damn piles. You've climbed like 20 head-high fences two hours into this jaunt; it's not like you're gonna fall through heavy piled-up snow, despite what anyone on the dev team thinks.

Anyhow: I'm currently stuck. I'm in this little snowed-in outdoor area with about four locations, but it all just leads in one big loop, and I can't figure out where to go. Furthermore, I've triggered all sort of phone messages and whatnot through exploration, but I haven't had a cutscene in about an hour's worth of gameplay, so I'm nervous as to where the save system is gonna dump me next time I fire up the console. We'll see, I guess.

I'm gonna play my next session right before bed, so even if I get motion sick, I can just sleep it off. Wish me luck.
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As I write this blog post, I am lying on the sofa trying hard not to just curl up with my head in my hands. Shattered Memories is all over-the-shoulder 3-D, and it's just making me utterly nauseous. Maybe I'll adjust, or maybe I'll move my chair back from the TV a bit...or maybe I might be ditching Mr. Mason 2.0 for Mr. Townshend shortly.

Outside of motion sickness triggers: I have to say I'm on the "rubbish" side of the divide so far. The controls are atrocious - kind of a weird half-tank control, half-"regular"-style where one analog stick moves Harry back & forward, but only in this really stiff, cardinal-directions-only way, and the other analog stick twists his body slowly around. It's way worse than either of the established survival horror control schemes, and I'm shocked that the folks who cry foul over tank controls haven't screamed bloody murder over this. Gameplay is largely limited to "press X to not die" moments - or, rather, "press X to open door" or "press X to listen to answering machine" or "press all kinds of buttons to operate mundane household objects in a mundane manner." I can see that they're going for puzzles with the last part, requiring you to figure out what kind of analog-stick rigmarole will cause Harry to shake a key out of a soda can, but, you know, I've never really felt the need to play a soda can-shaking simulator. (I know that this is probably meant to set up "can't get the car keys in the ignition" moments of tension in chases later on, but - really, come on.)

Also, you have to mash buttons to open doors. That is the stupidest thing.

I understand that the game's "psychological profiling" takes into account how long you look at certain items & whatnot. I was initially worried when I heard about this mechanic, as I'm a completist who likes to take my time examining everything, but there's no point to doing so in this game - there are no items to miss, and I can't control Harry well enough to look at anything that well. That says a lot about the game, doesn't it? "I can't look at anything, and furthermore, I don't care to try" - there aren't many worse complaints.

The game isn't exactly subtle about its "psychological" material elsewhere; its opening scene is of Harry & Cheryl at an amusement park putting their heads through a knight & damsel cutout, which is repeated three times in a row, just in case its significance eluded you. I answered the opening psych questionnaire, saying "yes" to abstract ideas and schedules and "no" to cheating on partners and drinking to relax, and it resulted in Cybil looking like Marge Gunderson from Fargo (and being a condescending git, all ho-hum handwavey about Harry's missing daughter) and Harry being a bespectacled dweeb. But then again, the psychologist (the Kaufmann analogue) is a Vince McMahon lookalike who knocks back whiskeys before sessions, so perhaps I shouldn't hang too much on the game's psychological pretensions.

My heart sank when I saw Victor Ireland wannabe Tomm Hulett, the man behind most of the cut-rate U.S. knockoff Silent Hill installments, with a producer credit in the opening. His presence was keenly felt early on in a lovely (and quite huge, just so you won't miss it) bit of restroom graffiti about gang rape.

Living in New England with snow season coming down the pike (making its debut this week, actually), I have to say that the "snowy night" setting was probably the most unsettling part of the game for me. Not much more says "urgency" like no more light and snow coming down. It's tough for me to find ice scary, though, and that's what the Otherworld is apparently made of this time around.

Really, though, 45 minutes in, there's nothing compelling here - no letters from dead wives, no living nightmares about knife-wielding kids in alleys, no rooms chained from within and mysterious holes in the walls and God knows what else. It's a very humdrum experience that's nearly devoid of actual gameplay and is making me physically ill. I don't know if I'm going to be able to tough this one out.
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So I'm starting this. I'd wanted to play something seasonal and was thinking about replaying Silent Hill 4, but I concluded that it was too soon! (not really since my actual first playthrough, but I've been watching some LPs & listening to the soundtrack a lot). I've no interest in any of the entries in the series farmed out to Western developers after Team Silent broke up, but I find Shattered Memories' concept of a "reimagining" of the first game's story interesting. Not that SH1 was grievously broken or anything, but I think the idea of remaking a title by taking the premise and running in a completely original direction could stand to be applied to more games. (Mostly ones that weren't all that hot in the first place - *cough cough* Phantasy Star III.) Plus, as a standalone remake, Shattered Memories has no impact on the "actual" series storyline, so who cares.

I've heard only extremes about this game: that it's brilliant or that it's rubbish. Nothing in between. I also know a couple of the plot twists thanks to some indiscreet blog commenters. I'm going in mostly blind, though.

My PS2's been acting up lately - unable to read certain DVDs and in general showing signs of a weak laser - so I hope I'll be able to play the and that this playthrough won't be derailed by technical difficulties like some others (more on Mystic Ark later). I got it for $15, though, which is significantly less than going internet prices, so if this goes south, I can at least recoup my investment.

ETA: The tag abbreviates as "silent hill: shattered memo". Perfect.
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Akari Funato's Booth shop; nothing of interest in stock as of this writing. (The excellent 201108A doujinshi is listed as part of a two-pack but is out of stock right now.) Funato says that she plans to put her PDFs up on Booth eventually, so stay tuned.

ETA: Funato has a Twitter and Tumblr, apparently, but outside of a pic of the covers of what were apparently her first Lunar doujin (with just a little sketch of Lemina), the accounts don't have much but a) pics of that goddamn Chain Chronicle iPhone game and b) a "don't scan ANY of these comic panels!" notice Funato put in her Under the Rose books that she retweeted like 10 different times.
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Breaking radio silence to promote this excellent retrospective on the Mortal Kombat movie, as told by those who made the film. The article even gives special attention to the soundtrack. No Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, but I suppose one can't have everything.