General

Mystery Tournaments are the best tournaments (and SpeedRunsLive MT6 was especially great)

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

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:

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.

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  1. And thus Lord BBH’s shame lives on. I’M SORRY ;_; ↩

The first possibly-annual Gaming.moe April 1st kusogecast!

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Kusoge •   0

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.

Hope to see you there!

The gaming figures of Winter Wonder Festival 2015

• by Heidi Kemps • In Figures, General, Rad stuff •   10

It’s that time of year again: a weekend where rampaging figure nerds like me mash their F5 keys across numerous Japanese webpages to get sweet, sweet pictures of pretty new plastic figures from the twice-annual Wonder Festival. Wonder Festival is a celebration of all things figure, bringing together garage kit makers and builders, prepainted figure manufacturers, traditional action figure makers, and a whole brigade of fervent otaku.

Every Wonder Festival brings with it a plethora of pictures of new wares from numerous Japanese figure manufacturers. While I’m certainly a fan of figures in general, I’m most excited when my passions of gaming and figures collide to create gorgeous pieces of three-dimensional art. And I’m sure I’m not alone! Yet with so many manufacturers large and small competing for the attention of showgoers and photographers – and with juggernaut series like Kantai Collection spawning huge amounts of merchandise – it’s hard to sort through everything to find the gaming-related goodies.

That’s why I’ve done it for you! I’ve assembled a gallery of Wonder Festival’s gaming figure announcements, both prominent and obscure. Given how much gets shown at a typical WonFes, I may have missed a few things – if so, let me know and I’ll add them ASAP!

Some notes: I’m not posting garage kit pics, because as awesome as resin kits are, a lot of them are extremely difficult to obtain (since the creator probably makes less than a hundred of them). I’m trying to focus on stuff you actually have a chance of seeing in your hands sometime in the near future. I’m also aware that KanColle/Tony Shining Series/Love Live/Idolmaster/Senran Kagura etc. would technically fall under the gaming figures category. My major excuse for excluding them, in this case, is because there are like a billion of them and I’d rather look more at the gaming stuff that doesn’t get the plastic treatment quite as often.

Images are sourced from Akiba Hobby, Dengeki Online, MFC, Figsoku twitter and website, WHL4U, and the AmiAmi Blog.

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World’s End Game Hall: The World Ends With You and taking risks

• by Heidi Kemps • In General •   0

As I write this, I’m sitting on a plane heading back from MAGfest 13. It’s a rather lengthy flight from the DC metro area to San Francisco – a little over five hours – so of course I came equipped with entertainment. Last week, Square-Enix released a new batch of non-Final Fantasy DLC for Theatrhythm, including some songs from Chrono Trigger and The World Ends With You, which I promptly acquired to accompany me back on my trip to the West Coast.

One of the DLC tracks from TWEWY is “Calling,” a theme that plays primarily during exploration and dialogue sequences. It’s a beautiful song, and I was very eager to play it1. What I wasn’t prepared for was an unexpected flood of emotion through me as I ran through it. As focused as I was on carefully gliding my stylus through the note barrage, I felt an intense longing hearing that music again.

But why? After all, back when I played The World Ends With You in 2008, I really enjoyed the game – but I hate, hate, HATED the ending, which I felt was an utterly stupid and transparent twist that undermined a great story concept. It made me bitter towards a game I had invested a great deal of time and emotion into. Yet hearing Calling stirred something inside of me. It made me realize what, exactly, makes TWEWY so very special: it’s a risky game that challenges players to do new things, to step outside their gameplay and setting comfort zones. And frankly, I don’t know if we’ll ever see something like it from Square-Enix ever again.

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  1. The other TWEWY song is Twister, and unfortunately, it’s the worst version of that particular piece. Can’t win ‘em all, I guess. ↩

Cool Runnings: The Underappreciated Speedruns of Awesome Games Done Quick 2015

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Kusoge, Rad stuff, Retro •   4

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!

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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! ↩

(Sort of) Review: Why NES Remix maddens me

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

It’s a feeling I think we’ve all experienced: the uncomfortable notion from withing that there is something deeply wrong with us for not enjoying a particular piece of media. It’s especially discomforting when it’s something that seems engineered to push all of our individual Like buttons, as though somehow we’re the ones that are flawed for not properly adoring this work made to cater explicitly to us.

This feeling cropped up when I started playing the NES Remix games on Wii U. Here were cleverly conceived compilations of classic NES titles with the addition of “remix” games: parts of classic titles remodeled and mashed together in unique ways to deliver bite-sized new challenges. I certainly love Nintendo history, having grown up on so many of these titles, so the concept excited me immensely. But actually playing NES Remix 1 and 2 on Wii U felt strangely unfulfilling,  even downright frustrating. I wondered if it was the platform – these sorts of short objective-driven challenge experiences, I feel, tend to work better in mobile games that you can dig out and play for ten minutes. With this in mind, I picked up Ultimate NES Remix on 3DS, but even playing it to break up long Persona Q sessions left me feeling more irritated than amused.  Obviously, it wasn’t the platform that’s the problem. So then, what is it that makes NES Remix considerably less than the sum of its parts?

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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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