kusoge

Matsuno Family Double Whammy: Osomatsu-kun (Megadrive)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Kusoge, Retro, Reviews •   0

With the good comes the bad, I suppose…

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.

800px-OsomatsuKun_MD_JP_Box

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Gaming.moe’s Second-Annual Kusogecast this April 1st!

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Kusoge, Retro •   0

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!

The 2015 Gaming.moe Waifu Awards

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Kusoge, Rad stuff •   2

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 →

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!

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!

Continue reading →

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

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!)