So hey, I just wrote an anime review about Osomatsu-san, the recent reboot of a classic gag manga/anime that was a massive hit overseas. Remember how I mentioned that there were two Osomatsu-kun anime series before it, one from 1966 and another from 1988? Well, as you might already know, 1988 was the launch year of the Sega Megadrive in Japan. The console launched in October of that year with Space Harrier II and Super Thunder Blade, impressive renditions of popular arcade titles, while a very faithful port of Juuouki/Altered Beast followed soon after in November. But here’s a factoid for you: the fourth-ever Megadrive game, released a little under two months after the console’s debut, was a licensed game based on Osomatsu-kun.
Titled Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijou (“Nonsense Theatre”), the game features a bunch of familiar series characters: the Matsuno brothers, Totoko, Chibita, Iyami, Hatabou, and so on – in new and bizarre roles in a strange-as-hell series of fantasy settings.
It’s also an astounding pile of garbage. And I played all of it.
We’ve been around for a while now, and I’ve been doing my best to try and establish a few traditions around these parts. Last year on April Fools’ Day, we ran the Kusogecast, which involved many hours of playing a wide variety of garbage for your entertainment.
Well, we’re doing it again! We’re still going to play awful games for a lengthy stretch of time, but this go-around we’re going to limit it to a single title. We’re going to see how far I can get into the legendary Famicom RPG, Hoshi wo Miru Hito/Stargazer, in a six-hour stretch.
It’s going to be painful. And amazing. Painmazing!
Everything will be going down on my stream channel. We will be starting up on Friday, April 1st, at 5:30 PM PST and end around 11:30-midnightish. Co-commentators will be joining me throughout to share in the “””fun””” and “””excitement””” of one of the most utterly unfair RPGs ever.
(In case you’re wondering: I’m playing the patched, translated version with actual saves and fixed walkspeed. Yes, I know, it’s not the 100% authentic kusoge experience, but I think constant password re-entry whenever I wipe isn’t particularly entertaining as a viewer. No savestates, at least, so I’m still suffering!)
If anything changes — which is possible, given some connection hiccups I’ve had lately — I’ll be sure to post it on my Twitter accounts, @Zerochan and @Gamingmoe. I’m looking forward to another April 1st of terrible retrogames, and I hope you are, too!
Ah, yes, it’s that time again – 2015 has shuffled off into the history books, and the majority of 2016 lies untold before us! Which means it’s also time for a now-annual Gaming.moe tradition – the Gaming.moe Waifu Awards.
In case you’re wondering – no, we’re not awarding awards to our favorite game waifus, because I’d have the same winner every year. It’s a name we adopted in the general spirit of the site for non-traditional year-end awards. Rather than doing typical categories like “Best Graphics,” “Best Fighting Game,” and the ever-argued-over GOTY, we give awards based on weird, arbitrary categories based on noteworthy happenings of the previous year. (You might want to check last year’s awards to get a better idea, as I explain the concept a little more in-depth there.)
2015 was a very good year for gaming as a whole. We got lots of fantastic new releases, juicy industry drama, and promising new projects. Of course, not all noteworthy happenings were the stuff of major hashtags and gaming news site headlines. Let’s celebrate the best (and worst) Waifus of 2015! Continue reading →
One of the more bizarre bits of drama that was going down in the Japanese game industry recently was the situation with developer/publisher Imageepoch. The CEO, Ryohei Mikage, had vanished without a trace, the company’s social media accounts went silent (or disappeared entirely), and the company’s latest game, the 3DS RPG Stella Glow, was wholly acquired by Sega1. Speculation over the health of the company ran rampant, and the rumors were confirmed earlier this month with the company’s filing for bankruptcy in Tokyo court.
Imageepoch was an interesting company – it was built as an independent RPG development studio by the aforementioned Ryohei Mikage, a young developer and entrepreneur who had seen a fair bit of success in spite of his relatively young age. Over the course of the company’s life, he was able to lure big-name talent away from companies like Square-Enix, Namco Tales Studio, and Atlus in the hopes of turning Imageepoch into a RPG creating powerhouse – even going so far as to launch a label called “JRPG” in hopes of being seen as the future bearers of the genre. But obviously, things didn’t go quite as planned, and a little over a decade after their founding Imageepoch is no more.
I sat down with fellow Japanese game enthusiast Elliot Gay – formerly of Japanator and currently running his own import-centric site, Doki Doki Kusoge – to talk a bit about the life and times of Imageepoch. We’d both had quite a bit of experience with the company’s output: I’ve reviewed pretty much every English language release of their titles, while Elliot has spent a lot of time with the Japanese-exclusive releases. In this article, we take a look back together and remember Imageepoch’s brief, occasionally interesting, but mostly disappointing life and output.
The late 80s and early 90s are riddled with stories of meteoric rises to stardom and falls from grace, but perhaps none burned out quite as spectacularly (and publicly) as M.C. Hammer. We often forget just how much of A Big Deal Hammer and Vanilla Ice and other 90s musicians/groups were1. Honestly, I’m not sure if even modern social media powered bands like One Direction come close to just how visible, overblown, and heavily merchandised Hammer and company were. We laugh at the ridiculous crap their faces were plastered upon now, but at the time, these guys defined coolness to young people.
Yes, MC Hammer had it all in the early 90s: mansions, racehorses, a vanity Saturday morning cartoon series, and the admiration of millions, yet numerous poor investment decisions, a taste for expensive theatrics, and constantly overextending himself eventually bit him in the ass. I’m honestly surprised people didn’t see it coming at the time – watching the 2 Legit 2 Quit music video again, over 20 years after its debut, will rid you of any pity you might feel for his extravagant lifestyle and rapid crash really fast. The amount of sheer ego and hubris on display here is simply jawdropping.
One privilege that major English language recording artists have is that their stuff faces very few barriers to worldwide acceptance. Popular English music is inherently a global thing, just like Hollywood films, even in territories where English isn’t widely spoken. Such is the case with Japan as well, where audiences were equally taken by Hammer’s impressive dance moves, slick beats, and flashy performances. While his contemporary Vanilla Ice may have earned eternal infamy in Japan by becoming a nasty Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure villain with a prominent bulge, Hammer wound up getting tributes (and attempted tributes) in a handful of games, including an all-time classic.
If you’ve been to a nerdy convention with a game room, you have doubtless encountered some manner of gaming tournament – usually for stuff like fighting games or FPS titles, maybe some RTS or MOBA sessions if someone arranged a LAN setup for PCs. Every so often, however, you’ll encounter the fabled “mystery tournament.” The idea behind these is that you get a bunch of people to play through a gauntlet of different games with varied short goals, eliminating players along the way until you wind up a champion. Pretty typical, save for the multi-game part – the catch is that none of the players know in advance what is going to be played, and typically the game choices are obscure or off-the-wall so that players, in all likelihood, have never played them before.
Mystery tournaments are tons of fun for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, they present a playing field that’s a bit more level – everyone’s going into these games at least semi-blind, so you don’t have the “oh, I’m out of practice” reluctance that would come when considering entering specific titles you may not have had time to play. Another factor is that they test a completely different set of skills than a typical game tournament: whereas a fighting game tournament might test your ability to compete against several different characters and individual playstyles in a single game you’re intricately familiar with, a mystery game tournament challenges your ability to quickly learn rules and figure out effective means of play coming from no familiarity at all across multiple titles. Sure, having a good knowledge of action games might be helpful when you’re given a random platform title to play, but what happens when you get something totally new like an unreleased indie game with completely bizarre mechanics that the dev gave to the tourney organizers? You’d better be able to learn, and quickly.
The absolute best thing about mystery tournaments, however, is the games themselves. You’re given an opportunity to discover interesting titles – some of which you’d never consider playing or overlook amongst your already-massive backlog – within a fast-paced and competitive environment. Now, this certainly isn’t the best way to first experience some games, but getting (or even just seeing) that taste of a game from a mystery tournament can be enough to get people interested in exploring it further. For example, when competitive indie darling Nidhogg showed up at the finals of a Northwest Majors mystery tournament, it got a whole heaping of hype and attention1:
Or check out the finals for Lethal League, from UFGT9:
Of course, the games don’t necessarily have to be obscure – you can take old favorites and put new and unexpected twists on them. UFGT was very well known for this, their mystery tournaments included stuff like Spinjustice (playing Injustice while people spin the chair you’re sitting in slowly), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 all-Thanos teams, Soul Calibur 2 on DDR pads (see the first part of the video above), and last year’s surprise ender Don’t Break The Ice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxZEc9HgBp4
It’s great on many levels: organizers can showcase games that they want to give more attention and think players would enjoy, participants get to explore a bunch of old and new games they may have otherwise overlooked, and developers can showcase, build hype, and get feedback from players in an exciting environment.
I’d like to encourage people to organize and participate in in-person mystery tournaments, which is why I’m writing this – to help bring more awareness to the format. But it can be difficult: having a bunch of different games usually means having a bunch of different consoles and controllers to manage, which can be a tech nightmare, especially when running on a tight convention schedule. It’s also a fair bit harder to promote a mystery tournament given that you can’t attach the name of a popular game to it (even if you’re playing some bizarre variant of said popular game).
Fortunately, it’s also possible to organize mystery tournaments through the internet. SpeedRunsLive, who you may know as part of the folks who put on the Games Done Quick marathon, holds their own online mystery tournaments twice a year. While I’m not a speedrunner, I’m (obviously) a huge fan of the format, and the SRL Mystery Tournaments have a few interesting twists that make them particularly appealing. Read on for an account of how my Mystery Tournament 6 experience went down.
You may have noticed a bit less content than usual this month, something I’m not particularly happy with. Chalk it up to a combination of GDC and the work resulting from it (speaking of which, check out my interview with Danganronpa writer Kazutaka Kodaka over on the Anime News Network X button column!), a whole boatload of new releases for March/April/May that need coverage and reviews, and first-time participation in the SpeedRunsLive Mystery Tournament. (I’m out of the tourney now, sadly, but the stuff I’ve been playing during the tourney has provided an inspiration for future articles, so I’d say it’s been a very worthwhile exercise!)
With all of this on my plate, April Fools Day has crept up on me – and I completely forgot about it! It hit me yesterday that we were close to the most amusing day of the year for game-related fantasies and parody (because screw the April Fools haters), and I had absolutely nothing prepared… nor any real idea what I was going to do. But since I’ve been trying to stream more as of late, I had a sudden burst of inspiration: To both make up for a lean March and celebrate a day of awesome, awful things, why not have a lengthy stream of some awesome, awful kusoge?
So that’s exactly what we’re doing. The first possibly-annual Gaming.moe Kusogecast will be tomorrow, April 1st, from 4PM to 10PM PST. Join in on twitch at twitch.tv/devilrei to watch me play carefully cultivated garbage while chatting it up with various guests! I’ll be playing different games throughout the evening, and it won’t just be the stuff I covered in the panel, either, so come to see some new obscure disasters and some old favorites! If you can’t catch part (or all) of it, fear not – Twitch VODs will be available, and I’ll also export things to Youtube for posterity.
And here we are folks, official video of the panel from MAGfest themselves! I may upload my backup copies as well, since those provide a better look at the projector. Please try not to mind my initial nervousness. Also, yes, I know I said “EXP” when I meant “HP” during Hoshi wo Miru Hito. My mistake!
As promised, here are the notes from the Cho Kusoge! panel I gave at MAGfest 13 last week. I’m editing together a bit of footage from the event still (as well as waiting to see if MAGfest themselves have higher-quality footage), so hopefully that will be available soon as well.
If you’re anything like me, you had the Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedrunning marathon running throughout most of last week. The great thing about AGDQ is that, since it runs 24/7, there’s always something going on. However, since our frail humanoid bodies require things like “food” and “sleep” and “jobs through which we acquire necessary funding to live,” it’s almost impossible to watch everything that looks interesting on the AGDQ schedule as it airs live. While a lot of us make time to watch the speedruns of really big games, there are a lot of smaller titles with really fantastic play that get shown as well. But since they’re at odd times, or they’re of relatively unknown titles, or they’re not really viral-video material, they have a tendency to kind of happen and be forgotten. Even people who see the schedule and think “Yeah, I’ll watch this later” may likely forget them amongst all the other stuff happening that week.
But personally, I think there were a lot of really noteworthy speedruns at this year’s AGDQ that I worry a lot of folks missed out on. Yes, we all saw and enjoyed stuff like Tetris TGM and the Megaman X race and Boshy and Shovel Knight and blindfolded OoT, but just because you missed it and it wasn’t trending on Twitter doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great run. Here are some of my picks for the best runs of AGDQ 2015 that you might have missed!
