indigozeal

1) I was poking around Pixiv and found this collection of "retro gaming badges," or concepts for them, anyway. Anything that includes Symphony of the Night, D2, Shoujo Kakumei Utena, and the "4// Itchy. Tasty." quote has my vote, but it also clued me into -

2) Silent Hill.

Shizuoka. ("silent"+"hill")

I had never made that connection before.

3) I have a bunch of Silent Hill stuff to post, starting with the conclusion of my Silent Hill 2 run, but my more recent travels in the franchise led me look up stuff on The Room, and I was shocked to discover that the fanart pairing of antagonist/protagonist in that game is huge. Huge. HUGE. Perhaps not uncommon with...well, nearly any game nowadays, but not usually found for a title where one party appears to have significant hygiene and sartorial issues and the other has a complete lack of affect. This is the most bizarre popular romantic pairing I've encountered in gaming, and this includes a week in which I discovered that Sari-Thea yuri might be canon.

4) Also, this coupling apparently has an official commemorative day: 11/21, for plot-related reasons. 11/21 also happens to be my birthday. You shouldn't have, guys.

5) Hmmm.
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It seems like I've posted a lot of negativity on here as of late. I can't renege on my opinions, but perhaps I should balance them out with reminders of the stuff in the hobby that made me smile recently.

- Supergreatfriend finished his LP of Shadows of the Damned, an underappreciated action title by Suda 51 (with music by Akira Yamaoka) that fuses grindhouse hellscapes with Día de los Muertos imagery and offers among the typical Suda frathouse bluster some unexpectedly tender characterization for its protagonist and a soupçon of sideways wit. "Sin...Sinchester!" "...It's pronounced 'Sinster.'" "How do you know!?" "My cousin's from Sinchester!"
- This is indescribably beautiful. It deserves to be in a museum.
- It's relatively rare to see anime characters effectively rendered in another art style. The double profile of Dyne & Ghaleon here, besides being really technically proficient and an excellent artistic contrast of the two characters, reminds me of good Don Bluth, and I wish I could see entire cutscenes in this vein.
- You've probably seen this, but: FF3 dialogue box magnets, with raised etched lettering. I'd buy them in a heartbeat if I could recall any examples of FF3/6 dialogue I actually liked.
- I'm not on the Tiger & Bunny fan train, primarily because no grown adult deserves to be called "Bunny," but I think this fanartist did an excellent job of translating its lead characters to another franchise's aesthetic.
- For FF4 fans: beyond awesome.
- It makes sense that there would've been Mystic Ark binsen produced, but huh. Who knew.
- Sherbet-colored fantasy. Also, while we're at it: YESSSSSS.
- CHERYL??
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From livvyplaysfinalfantasy:
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...
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"What is a man?! Seriously, I'm asking - I really don't know."

"It's called 'fashionably late,' freckleface."

"Maybe you, the person who knows how to unlock things very easily, can use it."

"The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you competent enough to rescue the president?"

"This curse of mine is gonna be really inconvenient tonight."

"Hey, you know that town, Silence Glen? ...Oh, 'Silent Hill,' right, right, right. OK, well, sometimes I see it when I can't sleep at night 'n' stuff. Weird, huh?"

"A man chooses. A slave obeys. Eh? Eh? EHHHHHHHH?"

"York, this town goes nucking futs when it rains. Mr. Stewart said that, not me."

"You're in a bunch of corridors that look all the same."

"War. I haven't noticed any changes in it recently, I guess."

"This is a well. You might think that there is something to it...and where did you come up with that idea? Dumbass."

"And what about Killerman? That's right; how about that? What do you think of that? Maybe Killerman is...the same person for whose identity the original question asks! How entertainingly droll!"

"That jerk Ghaleon just crushed the sun tea I had lying out!"
".........Wow, that's really annoying!"

"Are you watching hidden away in a not-immediately-apparent place, Dyne? These young people have an interior luminance that from all appearances bears a certain resemblance to your own."

WHO THE FUCK TRANSLATED THIS AND WHY THE FUCK WERE THEY NOT FIRED IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD
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"But it seems that logic took a holiday about the time that Frankenstein started chasing the Wolfman around Dracula's backyard with a chainsaw, and we can hardly blame it, really."

I've been complaining a lot lately and have more complaining to go, so have a lighter interlude - a Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness LP from the same witty fellow who did its forebear, Castlevania 64.
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When kevin wins, the planet loses! is a wordless examination of video game pixel backgrounds as art in its own right.

There's a beautiful town in Holland with no roads.

This person makes interesting jewelry from raw crystals, albeit of dubious practicality. That celestite ring'd knock yer eye out, yeah?

Color Scheme Designer does what it says on the tin.

For your other art needs, a Handy Art Link Megapost.

Since this doesn't have the billions of hits on YouTube it otherwise would, I assume this isn't widespread public knowledge: Jeremy Soule did a remix of Terra's theme. I'm going to need a "why am i talking about secret of evermore" tag eventually. (But I know the answer to that: Jeremy Soule.)

Speaking of FF6: this is all Perler beads. All of it.

Amazing that this is wasted on a pachinko game. Or maybe they're just composing in view of future soundtrack sales and the joke's on us.

This person has a huge selection of tracks from doujin game music remix CDs, which proves that there're too many damn remixes of FFIV's "Battle 2" and...er, Terra's theme out there.

Freakish.
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I didn't really appreciate Symphony of the Night's music when I was first playing. I think this might have a good deal to do with the PSP's speakers - there're a lot of little details, a lavishness, I'm noticing on my YouTube listens on which I didn't pick up during play.

The music in traditional, stage-based Castlevania games is noted for being heavily melody-based. "Bloody Tears," "Iron Blue Intention," "Vampire Killer" - they're all catchy and to a degree repetitive, staying within a relatively tight, narrow musical window and returning to their origin relatively quickly.

"Dracula's Castle" never lets you settle into a groove. Its opening is almost more ambient than orchestral; the larger composition takes you through several different melodies, motifs, and tempos, becoming ever more grand and expansive. It's the first piece you'll hear upon being let loose in the game, and it immediately establishes: this is a wider game, a more ambitious game, than your previous Castlevanias. You're not going to, as they say, walk to the right until Dracula is dead; this game isn't going to lead you by the hand. This track is built for wandering.

I'm sounding a bit dismissive here of the earlier Castlevanias of which I grew up, and the "Dracula's Castle" itself doesn't quite cut that way; the baseline of the primary section of the track (starting at :22) is the series's trademark metal synth sound. It's quieter, though, and less directly driven, and lets other elements take the fore in certain sections - the drums, a harder guitar line, that "moonlit night" ambient sound. It's an excellent anthem for a game that pays respect to its predecessors and yet isn't quick to settle - but instead just builds and builds.
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Though I've been aware of Game Center CX/Retro Game Master for a while, it wasn't until the impending Kotaku cancellation notice that I decided to check it out one snowy, lazy morning. As stupid as Kotaku can be, I do feel sorry for them in how the broadcast deal didn't work out. The fansubs are more accurate and less stilted, and the dub narrator is a bit bombastic, but Kotaku's episodes aren't bad at all, really. Then Kotaku mentions the fansubs in their cancellation notice to console those left hanging, and they get slammed for promoting piracy. They couldn't win either way.

I think Kotaku's choice of episodes handicapped them a bit; some of the Famicom-era games showcased were a bit uninspiring. Were rights to broadcasting the games themselves an issue? I mean, the appeal of the show is either a) "hey, I remember this game; I wonder how he'll get past this point?/oh, God, this place; I hated this place/omigod, he's having trouble with that?! Just ***** why can't you see that arghskjfsdkl" or b) "Jesus Christ, look at the crazy/awesome shit that never came over here." The unfamiliar, bland games that have no visual interest (Wing of Madoola; 53 Stations of the Tokaido, as promising as the concept itself is) are just thin gruel to hold attention for an hour-long effort.

That's kind of my problem with the whole show, actually, even with eps showcasing good games - Game Center eventually becomes trying to watch when the kacho gets stuck in one place for hours on end. Arino often compounds the problem through making some aggravatingly simple mistakes, like refusing to read the manual and thereby getting stuck for several hours on end through ignorance of an incredibly simple trick (like Alucard's bat transformation in Castlevania III that would've short-circuited his eight-hour grind through level 7). Obviously, Arino's personality makes up for his poor decisions - as do the little details like the "police investigation" in the murder-mystery adventure game and the cavalcade of local cuisine specialties offered to him as the Kacho progressed down the 53 Stations of the Tokaido. The show's more about the joy of gaming than anything else, and if it sometimes missteps in communicating that, I can't fault the effort. I've been pretty much marathoning the show since yesterday, so they must be doing something right.

(It also serves as a reminder that I've wanted to play Human's other survival-thriller 16-bit title, S.O.S., ever since I saw it on the department-store shelves a decade before I'd ever heard of Clock Tower but have never sealed the deal. I'll have to rectify that.)

I started off with Kotaku's stream of the Clock Tower (SFAM) ep, naturally, and was pretty pleased - even though Arino got stuck, he didn't get interminably so, and the show works better with a game with auto-saving where he doesn't have to backtrack or replay constantly. I was surprised he figured out the use of the pointy rocks so quickly and pleasantly impressed with how he sussed out the two-item black-robe puzzle on the first go. He actually happened across a number of neat little hidden things on his first run - the haystack evade (and Scissorman's apparently hilariously broken pathing there), the pool death, how to use the ham outside of being captured... I was annoyed that they resorted to hand-holding him to the S ending, though - what was he missing to get a good ending in his last unassisted run, information about the clock tower? He must've kept getting the E elevator ending - he certainly wasn't getting the D ending as shown after visiting the secret room. Probably was a game-design error to trigger E in so many different circumstances - that was probably what made Arino think he'd hit a wall.

He got the car ending, though, and that's the important thing.
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This Monty Python-esque LP of the much-maligned Castlevania 64 makes a fine case for the game's poor reputation, but a few of the game's locations struck me as unique for the series - an astronomy observatory, a crystalline tower, a devil's lab of technological research (in which, as the LPer notes, Dracula seems to have invented the radio years before Marconi). Of course, this being Castlevania 64, all these locations are horribly low-res and blocky, which makes me wish all the more that they'd appeared in one of the lavish 2-D treatments. We're always running through the same front hall-underground caverns-that bloody freaking clock tower shenanigans in Metroidvanias, all the typical gothic castle stuff; it'd be nice to see a wider variety of rooms. Zombified Jay Lenos tending Dracula's Haunted Garage? (Well, maybe not.)

Note: While it's undoubtedly the best way to experience Castlevania 64, that LP has endgame spoilers for the game's sparse story ten seconds into the first video, just to give fair warning.
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Elite Beat Agents is in every other aspect a portrait of a perfect difficulty curve, but beating the last song on Hard (or whatever difficulty Chieftain represents) is freakin' impossible.

The NES port of Ultima: Exodus has significant grind problems and those 3-D dungeons that turn me off. Also: no real ending.

That Lamia fight in The Battle of Olympus is not only brutally unforgiving in the precision jumping it demands but is real offputting coming as it does near the very start of the game.

Castlevania III still has some of that typical Castlevania platforming while flying enemies are ducking & weaving at you, but that's a pretty weak complaint, as they're aggravating but not insurmountable. (Everyone in the thread from which I swiped this topic who picked CV3 mentions the stage where you have to climb up the falling blocks. That stage was neat! I liked that stage!)

Phantasy Star II: Chara balance could've been a little better, or at least character choice a little more crucial. Also, doing a no-Visiphone run would probably illustrate this, but having save points be so far between in Dezoris, particularly in the endgame, was perhaps not such a good idea.

I know Final Fantasy IV came at just the time the molds were being broken - heck, it broke a lot of them itself - but Rosa is a fairly insufferable Mean Girl of a damsel in distress. Also, I think I've fallen out of love with it a good deal. Time to try out the GBA version?

SFC Clock Tower has a heroine who's modeled on the lead in Phenomena and has her come across a refrigerator overrun witih insects and can't do anything but stick a can of bug spray in her hand.

Various Lunars: TSS has a muddy palette, no cohesion in its art design, and looks downright 8-bit at times; EB has stupid WD pop-culture/body-function jokes in particularly unfortunate places, like the climax of the Zophar fight; the three characters into whom Xenobia was split in SSS didn't have enough dimension (characterwise) to support the change; EBR has, as Akari Funato said, sucky drawing in its cinemas and a Ghaleon death scene with minute yet mood-breaking changes that make it inferior to the original; Strolling School has a mundane battle system; MSL's Blade isn't remotely necessary, the balance is tipped from "feel-good childhood memories" to "sugar-high kawaii escapades," and while it somehow didn't strike me when I initially saw it, that fingerpainting scene is really, really beyond the pale. Bonus Vheen Hikuusen complaint: the Guildmistress comes off as overridingly smug. (Though I've complained about this before.)

I imagine without a hint book that the instadeaths in King's Quest III that come from mistiming your absences in regard to Manannan's arrivals and departures could be really buzzkilling.

Deadly Premonition: I keep mentioning it, but man, that ending.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is too long to have no saving.

I can't really gainsay a single one of its accolades, but Chrono Trigger is kinda overpraised nowadays. Also, that "Marle & Lucca MST3K the other characters" ending is kind of an empty, missed opportunity. (My love for Chrono Trigger is like my hate for Phantasy Star III - dimmed by time. Perhaps I should rekindle the spark.)

The arcade Golden Axe is kinda short and lacks that fun pit stage. The lightning effects in the Sega Genesis Golden Axe aren't as rad as they are in the arcades, and the eagle's eye doesn't move. You also don't get the gutpunch opening of seeing Alex struck down firsthand.

Again has no replay value, and the Roger character is ill-considered.

In a similar vein, ever since someone pointed out that Brainless Randy in Illbleed's Killerman is an inadvertent-or-not parody of the mentally challenged, I've felt guilty about watching the segment and a little guilty about enjoying the game as a whole.

That tunnel maze in Myst is boring and aggravating.

If you are playing a Hunter in The Lord of the Rings Online, then everything - everything - is going to be your fault.

...I guess it is time-consuming to bomb every wall for heart containers in The Legend of Zelda?

If the shoulder buttons on your DS are worn down, you can't play Dialhex.

Big Bang Mini wears down your DS shoulder buttons.
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