General

The Continuing Underappreciation of Super Mario Bros 2 (by its own creators)

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Retro •   2

So hey, how about that Super Mario Maker 2, huh? I know a lot of people are raising a stink about online multiplayer restrictions at the moment, but playing Mario online in general sounds wholly unappealing to me, so I don’t particularly care either way. No, what I care about is that oh-so-interesting “Extra Game Styles” listing in the Maker part of Super Mario Maker 2.

We already know about Super Mario 3D World, but there’s definitely space for another non-standard game style there. Some have speculated that perhaps Nintendo is making a Maker mode based on Super Mario Bros 2, aka Super Mario Bros USA. If that’s true, then I am going to be obscenely happy.

Why? Because for a good chunk of my life, I have longed intensely for a proper follow-up to Super Mario Bros. 2, and Nintendo has never seen fit to deliver. If they won’t make it, then hopefully somebody else will.

You see, Super Mario Bros 2 holds a special place in my heart. It was the first game I ever finished, beginning to end, all by myself, and I was incredibly proud of that fact. I loved everything about it: The music, the level design, the character selection (of course I played as Princess, gotta have some representation), the overall theming… eight-year-old me was positively obsessed with SMB2, and for good reason: It’s a fantastic game that absolutely stands the test of time, and it’s a goddamned shame how the very people who made it have never bothered to revisit its gameplay.

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Hypnospace Outlaw and the (inevitable?) death of online communities

• by Heidi Kemps • In General •   1

I’ve backed a fair few games on Kickstarter, and my general rule of thumb is “never back for more than you’re willing to lose if the project goes south.” That usually means I’m pledging something like $10-20 dollars. Some of these games have delivered, some have gone into the project mismanagement hell small-team games the find crowdfunding success often stumble into. If the latter happens, I’m not out enough money to make a fuss, and if the former happens, cool, I helped a game be a thing!

But if I could go back in time and edit any of my pledges, I’d give a whole lot more money to Hypnospace Outlaw.

Hey, that’s me!

Man, Hypnospace Outlaw. What a game this turned out to be! The end product wound up significantly different from the initial Kickstarter pitch: it changed from a weird action-game set in a 90s-style internet to an exploration/adventure game over the course of its creation. That was absolutely the right call, as the story (and, perhaps more importantly, all of the substories of the individual Hypnospace denizens) seen through exploring and interacting with the faux-online-service is a wonderful trip. I’m still working on finding all of the secrets of Hypnospace, and so many elements of the game continue to stick with me — I frequently find myself singing Chowder Man and Fre3zer songs to myself at strange times.

But one thing in particular about Hypnospace Outlaw really stirred a lot of emotions in me. I’ve been using various online services for a very long time, starting with the likes of Prodigy back in 1992 when I was but a preteen. I’ve seen many online communities spring up, thrive, and then fade away, a cycle that always seems eerily similar every time it happens.

When I played Hypnospace Outlaw, I saw all of the hallmarks of another online community destined for death. No, I’m not talking about the event that launches players into the game’s final leg: it’s very clear that the writing was on the wall for Hypnospace long before that happened. In fact, Hypnospace is doomed from the outset of the game, and you watch it collapse before your very eyes.

But while Hypnospace might have been fictional, the story it tells of a fractured, angry community and the corporate interests it’s at odds with are very real indeed.

WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS FOR HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW PAST THIS POINT!

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Let’s Make a Retro Compilation!

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Retro •   8

Hey! Did you see the MegaDrive/Genesis Mini at SegaFes this year?

Well, unless you were in Akihabara, I doubt you saw it in person, but the initial reveal was broadcast live on Sega’s YouTube channel. And while they haven’t announced the entire games lineup yet, what’s included is very interesting! Sonic 2 and Shining Force are gimmes, but stuff like Madou Monogatari, Vampire Killer/Castlevania Bloodlines, and Wrestleball — Wrestleball! — make me feel like this’ll be the first of the mini-consoles that I actually buy.

Of course, they announced the US version too, along with a bunch of its games, and… well, the lineup is considerable less exciting, in my opinion. Are there still people out there who regard Altered Beast as anything besides a gay-subtext-laden exercise in camp with miserable gameplay? And seriously, how many of the people potentially buying this thing would have even finished Ecco the Dolphin?

Then again, we still haven’t seen the full lineup of either platform, so perhaps it’s too early to judge. Still, from the early look, the Japanese MegaDrive Mini is a lot more in line with my tastes.

Of course, the MegaDrive Mini is the latest in a flood of mini-consoles that began with the NES classic: tiny little plug-and-play replicas of the classic systems with a curated selection of games that represents the platform’s history. Nintendo, SNK, and Sony have all released mini-consoles of this nature, to varying degrees of success. (You can’t seem to give away PlayStation Classics at this point.) After eeing the stumbles others have had — and having licensed out a fair few MD games to cheap plug-and-play manufacturers, to often poor results — Sega’s decided to take their time with the MD Mini. Good for them, and good for us Sega fans!

However, this all got me thinking. Retro compilations are a tricky beast: Most companies are content to just slap as many ROMs as they can on a disc, quality and adaptability be damned, often without really testing or adjusting anything. Remember how Xybots has a completely unmapped button in Midway Arcade Treasures 2, rendering it unplayable? Remember how Microsoft was so desperate for GameRoom content that they offered Atari 2600 Venetian Blinds, which is literally a game where venetian blinds open and close?)

They charged Microsoft Funbux for this

Making a retro compilation is easy. Making a good retro compilation takes a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and effort. Part of the reason why the NES and SNES Classics sold gangbusters was that they picked a whole mess of good, representative games for them!

But you don’t really understand how hard making something like a classic compilation is until you try to do it yourself. When it comes to picking a game lineup (to say nothing of actually doing the emulation work), there’s a lot of factors to take into consideration.

So you know what? Let’s give it a shot.

I’m going to take my all-time favorite console — the Sega Saturn — and try and pick a selection of games that not only have broad commercial appeal, but represent what made the Saturn special compared to all of the other consoles of the mid-late 90s.

So let’s do this, folks. We’re going to make a (totally theoretical) Sega Saturn Classic!

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The Curse of CONTENT

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Retro •   6

Man, 2018 was quite a year for games, wasn’t it? Of course, it felt like everything amazing got overshadowed by The Cowboy Game coming out at the tail end of the year. You know, the game where if you dare to say anything slightly negative about it, a horde of people was come in and shit up your comments and Twitter mentions.

I mean, clearly the game is amazing, right? After all, no other game this year had as much CONTENT as Cowboy Game. A huge, explorable world! Numerous player and NPC interactions! Realistic horse testicles that some poor graphics rigger in crunch time likely had to miss his daughter’s birthday party to create!

But it’s like… whenever I hear someone I know talk about Cowboy Game, they never seem to be having that much fun with it. They want to play it because it’s the current gaming zeitgeist, but when they talk about doing stuff in the game, it’s never with the sort of excited fervor you hear when someone is describing something they are really, truly passionate about. It just feels like they’re experiencing The Game With the Most CONTENT because that’s what you’re supposed to do unless you want your gamer cred to be shot. Sometimes I wonder if all the vocal fans are genuinely enjoying that game, or convincing themselves that they are (and posting incessantly about it) because they feel like they have to.

CONTENT, in all caps, is what I think of when you’ve got a game that just has a lot of stuff in it for no reason other than to make the game bigger, longer, more epic!!!1! Open world games are often the ones that feel the most CONTENT bloat, but they’re certainly not the only ones: we’ve all played a JRPG that went way overboard with the sidequests, an action game with levels that are pure padding, and tacked-on systems like crafting, levelling, and skill trees in games that don’t really need them. CONTENT is, theoretically, supposed to keep you engaged, but often does the opposite: it wears you down, leaves you longing to get back to the fun parts, and can even make you feel spiteful towards a game for wasting your time with unsatisfying, superfluous empty bullshit.

So folks, let’s talk a bit about CONTENT, why it’s present in games, and how games can be better about giving the player a lot of stuff.

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Adventures in Doujin Land: How I Self-Published a Book About an Incredibly Obscure Video Game at a Japanese Convention (and so can you!)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Doujinshi, General, Rad stuff, Retro •   0

It’s been quiet here lately, I’m afraid. It’s due to a combination of things: one is that I have been having some health issues as of late. Nothing too serious, thankfully, but still enough to put a dent in my activity. I have some surgery scheduled for early December so it should be taken care of soon.

The other thing that’s been eating up my time, if you’ve paid attention to my Twitter or Patreon feeds, is that I published a book. A doujinshi, to be precise.

Yes, I finally turned my decades-long dream of doujin publishing into a reality! Some people want to write gaming books to sell on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but me? I want to sell directly to my core audience: the hugest nerds on Planet Earth who absolutely love obscure stuff, and that’s exactly what Japan’s doujinshi scene offers. If you can dream it, you can sell it.

But how did this go from pipe-dream to reality? Well, it was a long and interesting journey, that’s for sure. But I know I’m not the only Westerner with Japanese doujin dreams, so I’d like to share my adventure so that others may learn from it and embark on their own self-publishing endeavors.

Part 1: Getting the idea off the ground

Part 2: Printing a book overseas (Coming soon!)

Part 3: The Game Legend experience

Every Classic Sonic Special Stage, reviewed

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Retro •   0

Hey, I reviewed Sonic Mania Plus recently! Some people seemed to take issue with the fact that I said the new content was a bit of a letdown — which I think more people might be inclined to agree with now that the game’s out. I mean, the team had the opportunity to put the Love Tester back into Studiopolis and they didn’t. I had to dock a point immediately right there. (It’s a joke, people.)

But some folks seemed unusually incensed that I said the special stages were bad. I don’t know why this point in particular seemed to get folks all in a huff, because… well, yeah, Sonic Mania special stages are pretty miserable. They’re absolutely the weak link in an otherwise spectacular game, and having to play more of them was not a fun prospect, made worse by the fact that the special stage rings are still a royal pain in the ass to find (and farm in postgame).

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve played a lot of classic Sonic. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time in these games’ special stages. I think I have a pretty damn good idea of what makes for a fun Sonic special stage. And, my friends, Sonic Mania’s special stages are absolutely not fun, especially in comparison to some of the other great special stages Sonic has offered us.

So, readers, I would like to once again present you with a painstakingly compiled list of mini-reviews. This time, we’re not reviewing games, but games within games. We’re going to be looking at all of the classic Sonic series special stages1 and evaluating each type… and maybe tell a fun story or two of youthful obsession.

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  1. Except the SMS/Game Gear stuff. Those games aren’t very good, I didn’t own a Game Gear/SMS, and I don’t care. ↩

Konami versus the fans of Tokimeki Memorial: A Legal History

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Retro •   5

Hey, did you hear about the PUBG vs Fortnite legal case getting withdrawn? Boy, that thing was a complete disaster, huh? But ours is an industry filled with legal shenanigans… many of which, like Capcom v. Data East, Silicon Knights v. Epic, and now this, have ended disastrously for the plaintiffs.

However, it’s not always like this. We only really see these cases from a Western perspective — and, indeed, many of the most important legal cases in gaming, like the infamous Tetris debacle, were decided in US court. But there have also been plenty of legal issues surrounding games in Japan — see the recent spate of game bar closures — and one Japanese company is quite notorious for its use of litigation.

Long before #FucKonami was a trending hashtag, long before Western music game fans and developers cowered in fear of Konami’s legal threats, there were incidents in Japan involving one of Konami’s most popular (at the time) game franchises. These incidents earned Konami a great deal of notoriety among game fans in Japan as a litigation-happy tiger of a company that would happily devour its own fanbase. Somehow, though, these stories never drifted overseas, likely because the game involved was seen by the west as “some weird Japanese dating sim thing” that was of little interest or importance.

It’s time to change that. It’s time to take a look at Konami’s legal actions against one of its most fervent fanbases. Let’s examine Konami’s legal battle against Tokimeki Memorial fandom.

Before we start, perhaps it’s best to talk a bit about what Tokimeki Memorial (frequently abbreviated as Tokimemo) was, and why it was such a big deal.

Tokimemo is considered to be one of the defining “Gal-ge,” or games centered around fostering and nuturing a relationship with one of several eligible virtual women. In this game, you play as a high school boy going through the school year, meeting various girls and finding one you eventually want to win over. By paying attention to the girl’s likes and what she wants in a partner, you budget your time and raise stats to become more appealing. You also have to make sure not to annoy any of the other girls, because they’re catty bitches who will spread damaging rumors about you. Eventually, you’ll reach the end of the school year, where one of the girls — hopefully, the one you were aiming for — confesses her love for you under the tree of legend.

(If you want a slightly more in-depth and fun look at the gameplay, I’d highly recommend the Game Center CX episode centered around the game.)

Tokimeki Memorial did well when it debuted on the PC Engine CD in 1994, but it was the eventual enhanced ports to PlayStation and Saturn that really made the game blow up in popularity. Shiori Fujisaki, the pink-haired girl-next-door archetype on the PS and Saturn covers, became an instantly recognizable face across all of gaming. Konami had a huge hit on their hands, and merchandised the everloving hell out of it: to this day, you can wander into any Japanese secondhand stuff store and likely find various Tokimemo knickknacks.

Of course, with a hit game comes sequels and spinoffs, and they were numerous. The first sequel, Tokimeki Memorial 2, was a huge game spread across five CDs, and is widely considered the best in the franchise in terms of gameplay and presentation… yet it didn’t stick around in gamers’ hearts like the first game did. A disastrous move to 3D visuals on PS3 with Tokimemo 3 upset many, and Konami opted to focus instead on the growing otome market with Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side, which had you playing as a girl trying to impress a bevy of hot dudes. The last Tokimeki Memorial game, Tokimeki Memorial 4, released on PSP in 2009, and its very existence seemed like a surprise to many.

(A fun fact shared to me by my late friend Andrew Fitch — who formerly worked at Konami’s US branch — was that the weird PSP game Brooktown High was meant as a testbed to see if an “American Tokimemo” would work. We miss you, Andrew.)

Since then, Konami hasn’t done much with the series, aside from putting out the occasional bit of Girls’ Side content. Love Plus on the 3DS was seen by many as an evolution of the game’s concepts, though Konami basically destroyed that series as well. Currently, there’s a game called “Tokimeki Idol” on smartphones that looks like a really bad attempt to cash in on the Idolm@ster/Love Live! wave by using scraps of an old IP. The decline of Tokimemo itself is worthy of its own article, as it’s due to a variety of factors, but one thing that may have played a part was Konami’s antagonism of its own fanbase through legal means. Such as… Continue reading →

Astonishingly Awful Gaming Merchandise: Consumerism is Scary Edition

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Retro •   0

Happy Halloween, everyone! But considering the world we’re living in is an apocalyptic hellscape, it’s like every day brings us fresh, Halloween-like horrors!

…Okay, that’s a little too negative for this site about gaming love. After all, no matter what happens, we’ll always have positive gaming experiences and the friendships and bonds they help create to get us through things. I got a firsthand glimpse of this at the recent Portland Retrogaming Expo, a yearly convention that celebrates the rich history of gaming. It was a fantastic show, filled with arcade games, classic consoles and games, an interesting variety of vendors, some great panels, and museum exhibits that included unreleased NES games and the Sony Playstation Super NES CD. The show was great, the people were great, everyone was happy, and good times were had all around.

Of course, a lot of the vendors were selling old games and consoles, and I’ve come to realize I’m almost completely over my game-collecting phase: with so much making the transition to digital, I’m more inclined to collect things where physicality is more important. Most of what I bought at the show was game-related merchandise, books, and crafts from local artists — I didn’t acquire any actual games. Not to hate on people who do collect games: I just find collecting things related to games more interesting in general than owning a whole roomful of titles for every console under the sun. (I’m more about acquiring and holding onto the games that really mean a lot to me.)

There was no shortage of merchandise at PRGE. Lots of cool stuff could be had from a variety of sellers, but I also saw a lot of random crap that left me scratching my head, pondering why it even existed. Do companies really believe we, as fans, are so lacking in taste that we’ll buy anything with a familiar game character on it, no matter how ugly or devoid of value? Well, um… yes. And the fact that this crap keeps getting made is proof that someone — many someones, in fact — are falling for it.

So today, on this most frightening of days, we’re going to be looking at some of the worst pieces of gaming-related merchandise out there. Truly spooooooky!

I didn’t want to make this too easy for myself, though, so I put some rules down for this feature.

  • No T-shirts. As painfully terrible as many gaming T-shirts are, I already ranted about them at length.
  • It has to be at least somewhat retro-flavored. There’s some really bad Fallout merch, I know,  but I’d like to keep this more focused on the commercial exploitation of nostalgia.
  • No Funko POPs. Fish, barrel, you know how it goes.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some merchandise that’s so bad, it’s scaaaaaaaary! (…okay, I’ll stop)

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The Problems with Metroid: Samus Returns

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Reviews •   3

Boy, people sure do love some Metroid, huh?

Samus Returns was one of E3’s biggest surprises, though I certainly had trepidation when I learned that MercurySteam was the developer. They’re a bunch of passionate guys, obviously, but I’ve found their previous games (the best-known of which are the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow sub-series) to be… lacking, to put it simply. I tried to keep a little bit optimistic, saying “They must have made a hell of a pitch for Nintendo to give them the keys to a Metroid game.”

And then Samus Returns released. And it was… good, actually! Pretty darn solid. It’s got some cool map design, the atmosphere is great, and there’s some neat puzzle design. If I gave it a numerical score, it’d be a nice seven-out-of-ten. That means it’s quite good!

… but it’s still not the rave-fueled 9s and 10s I’ve seen handed out to the game. Honestly, I find those a bit of a head-scratcher, because while Samus Returns is good, it has problems. Some really big problems, even. And I didn’t see anyone really touching on them, either. I can understand the elation of finally getting a 2D Metroid again after so long, but Samus Returns isn’t perfect by a long shot.

Thankfully, on this wonderful web site o’ mine, I can eschew the standard review format and dive straight into everything that grinds my gears about Samus Returns. To be fair, some of these problems were also present in the original Metroid II: Return of Samus — but shouldn’t a remake try its best to fix some of that? I also haven’t played AM2R, so there won’t be any comparisons on that front. It’s just me, you readers, and a whole lot of nitpicking from someone who’s not a Metroid die-hard but loves this sort of game. So let’s jump right in…

(I wanted to get screencaps to better illustrate some of my points here, but the whole Miiverse work-around to get 3DS screens is a ginormous pain in the butt, so I eventually had to abandon the idea. So, this article’s going to be all-text. My apologies!)

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The difficult, unending hunt for good gaming T-shirts

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Rad stuff, Retro •   1

I don’t think of myself as a particularly fashionable person. I’m completely out of the loop when it comes to “mainstream” fashion trends, and my knowledge of high fashion is limited to the supporting cast of Jojo Part 6. Even a lot of counter-culture fashion goes right over my head: I just don’t see the appeal.

But there’s one article of clothing I genuinely love: T-shirts! I have a closet and a dresser full of various tees in a rainbow of colors, all emblazoned with printed imagery. I’m never wanting for something nice to wear on my torso.

In the past couple decades, the image of a T-shirt as something cheap and lazy to toss on when you don’t want to wear your good or even your “business casual” clothes has begun to change, thanks in part to designers who have taken the idea of a printed image on a shirt to new artistic heights. It’s great for us nerdy types: there’s a wealth of tees out there that let us express our passions and interests to the world at large — and T-shirts are typically more affordable than most other types of fashion, which means we can enjoy them without breaking the bank too much.

There’s still one big problem though: A lot of nerdy T-shirts are terrible. And this goes doubly for gaming T-shirts. Many widely available gaming tees offer up a level of cringeyness that few other poorly-conceived tees can even hope to match.

I don’t think it’s possible to see this and not immediately want to punch the person wearing it

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