Kusoge

Gaming.moe year-end special: The 2014 Waifu Awards!

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Kusoge, Rad stuff •   0

A while back, I did freelance work for the Shonen Jump Alpha web portal, writing a bunch of assorted gaming content for them. One of the most fun bits I got to do was the Games We Love 2012 Awards, which was basically me, another freelancer, and my editor making up ideas for wacky awards that would stand out from the typical “Best Graphics,” “Best X360 Game,” “Favorite New Character” stuff, and I think it turned out nicely.

Unfortunately, SJ’s freelance budget got gutted soon after, and I haven’t written for them since. I’m still quite sad about that, because it was a really fun gig.

But that feature stuck with me, especially when I started thinking about posting a year-end wrap-up here. I don’t really like “Game of the Year” awards, mainly because my personal tastes are utterly divorced from the popular AAA software zeitgeist. I decided that, much like those Games We Love awards, I wanted to hand out awards (and “awards”) in categories less typical. We’re all about the less typical here at Gaming.moe, after all.

I also thought long and hard about what to name said awards. I posed the question to my followers on Twitter, who had some great suggestions1, but I was convincingly convinced to stick with my original idea of “The Waifus.”

Here’s a quote that shall be forever enshrined in history

So, without further ado, Gaming.moe presents the inaugural Waifu Awards!

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  1. I still really like The Dakimakuras (or Dakis for short). Close runner-up! ↩

Anecdote: My THQ media experience

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Kusoge •   0

There’s a superb feature on Polygon today about the collapse of THQ, and I highly recommend that everyone read it. With all this new info about THQ’s inner workings circulating the internet, I feel like it’s time to re-share a little story of Veteran Games Journalism that I posted on tumblr a while back. Here, for your reading enjoyment, is a small account of my experience with tragic-in-hindsight company wastefulness, which I originally wrote in early 2012.

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Mikie (Konami, arcade, 1984)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Kusoge, Retro, Reviews •   1

Mikie-Title-1

One of the best thing about the early-80s worldwide arcade boom was the sheer creativity exhibited in the concepts. The youth of the gaming medium meant that developers would try anything and everything looking for the next megahit. I mean, yeah, there were definitely a lot of alien-shooty spaceship games, but there was also stuff that you’d have a hell of a time trying to pitch to corporate higher-ups nowadays. (“I mean, yeah, the space marine FPS is a safe bet, but I’ve got something even cooler! Imagine a game where you’re fighting against another guy, with a lance, and you’re riding an ostrich, just kind of flapping around this weird space-time void! Wouldn’t that be awesome? It’ll sell MILLIONS!”)

Technical limitations also forced games to veer away from realism into realms of strangeness and abstraction. Even games that had a setting based in some matter of reality would have to rewrite “rules” in order to make them into something that would make a (theoretically) fun game. Clearly this was the problem facing the Japanese programmers at Konami when they decided they wanted to make a game about American high school life. Not only did these guys have zero actual experience in American high schools, but what the hell kind of game could you make out of that? After much deliberation, it was decided to focus on the major element of high school everyone remembers: terrible people in highly visible and obnoxiously dramatic teenage relationships.

So now, let’s take a look at this very early Konami arcade game, one that puts us in the shoes of Mikie, high school asshole extraordinaire.

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Game music highlight: Last Rebellion

• by Heidi Kemps • In Game Music, Kusoge •   0

Last Rebellion is one of those games that really deserves an in-depth dissection, mainly because pretty much everything that could go wrong with a PlayStation 3 RPG did manage to go wrong here. You don’t win a kusoge of the year award from Japanese players without screwing up royally somewhere along the line, after all. Hell, it released in January of that year (2010) and was bad enough that it stuck in everyone’s minds for that long!

There’s one thing going for it, at least: some of the music by Rei Kondoh is good. Like, really good. Especially the main battle music, which is phenomenal:

Bonus: the Hironobu Kageyama theme song, which I’m pretty sure has never been sung at a concert. (But I’d sure love to be proven wrong there!)