Well, today I was going to talk about how really awesome Berserk Vol 11 was. I was going to say how twisted and amazing and… hell.

I have to move again. I have to change hotel rooms a-fucking-gain. I can’t keep doing this. I just got done with two 10 hour drives and moving both times. I hate this bullshit. Also my car is all fucked up from valet parking, which I now have to call and complain about.

Damnitall, I can’t seem to get ahead here!

Anyways, I made a Berserk avatar for now. That should cut it.

So I am in St. Louis now until Wed. morning. At that time I will drive back to New Orleans but will only be there for about 14 days!

I am almost done.

I only regret that I am only now getting to know some friends in the area really well and will miss them all very much when I leave. But so far most of them seem receptive to coming and visiting me at my house. Just so all of them know: if you ever do come I have a basement that can be set up much like an apartment/hotel room for privacy and with a bathroom and all.

Anyways, just dropping in to let them know.

Also of any people on my friends list (and others that aren’t) are welcome here as well if they are ever in St. Louis!

I figured that it may be a good time to put up The Gamer’s Quarter’s exceptionally comprehensive Sonic the Hedgehog article. It is possibly too comprehensive for its own good.

It was originally published in March of 2005 and is written by Ryan Bloom. As a warning of sorts: it is not as polished in editing as our most recent issue, and I would like to think we have made large strides since then:

Dissecting A Hedgehog

Oh happy day Sonic.

Well it is done, again. Issue 6. One and a half years. This issue is good though, I swear it! Please pass the word on to anyone who you think may get some enjoyment out of the magazine.

It took a while to do this one and I was way more hands off than normal. Benjamin Rivers (Lestrade) did the layouts for the entire magazine this issue and he is behind the new design changes. I probably drove him mad with the way that I do things and the way we get revisions taken care of. I really appreciate all the work from him.

The cover art was done by Mariel Cartwright and is probably better than we deserve. I know that she had a ton of problems with getting it done due to her Mac. She also did the back cover. Though I know she claims it is not good, I disagree.

All the articles in this a very tight and very excellent reads. We are missing a few of our “A Team” writers, but I think we make up for it exceptionally well. The following are blurbs for all the articles to hopefully pique your interest:

A Medium of Moments
Mobile Gaming
—Matthew Collier
The Buggles once sang in the 1970s about the video format killing the radio star . . . However, one genre, starting out as some pixels on a monochrome screen, has the potential not to destroy, but save another genre dear to us. Mobile gaming can save classic game design.

The N-Gage Is Dead; Long Live the N-Gage
Nokia-GAGE
— Wes Ehrlichman
I’ve never met a gamer that was able to take the N-Gage very seriously, but maybe Nokia themselves were. Could it be possible that they were spending all of this money and all of this time trying to figure out exactly what it was that gamers want, making costly misstep after costly misstep nearly the entire way?

Medium Possibilities
The Music of Double Dragon 2
—Ash and Dan Pringle
Is it possible that a good videogame might be more than just a well-crafted piece of entertainment? . . . Let’s look at a creative element of a videogame, at the music of the NES classic Double Dragon 2.

Console Identity
Sega—SMS, GEN, GMG, SCD, SAT, SDC
—Heather Campbell
When I asked for a Sega CD, I wasn’t just upgrading . . . I was asking for something special, solitary, and secret. I was asking to be alone. To be left alone.

Crossing the Boobicon
The Physics of Heavenly Bodies
—M. O’Connor
I’m sick of crossing the boobicon just to play a goddamn videogame.

Your Mileage May Vary
Videogame Transportation
—Marc Spraragen
Shall I walk, or take the mind-bending vacuum tubes? Ride the horse or call the owl? Make a slow-paced, fine-tuned search through the alley, or a quick helicopter trip to headquarters?

Death in the Impasse Valley
Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Furai no Shiren—SNES
—Ancil Anthropy
A man stands on a small hill, a brief pause in what has been a long journey . . . He adjusts his broad rain hat and steps down from the hill, toward the trees, a white weasel following at his heels. The rain hat is a gift from a friend now dead. So is the quest.

Persona Visits E3
—Jonathan Kim
“It’s larger than four of my hands put together!”

An E3 Survival Guide
Los Angeles, 2006
—Andrew Toups
As I sat in the media-registration line the day before E3 started in the Los Angeles Convention Center, unsure of whether or not my credentials would be approved, I tried to think about what I’d do if I were denied entry. I eventually decided that I’d spend the rest of the week at strip clubs playing (or trying to play) my Nintendo DS.

Hard Drive Optional
E3 Survival Guide
—Heather Campbell
Driving in Los Angeles is easy. Simply remember a few key tips to arrive at any destination.

How to Get Back Into E3
—Mathew Kumar
Now, as soon as you lose your badge, consider yourself back at square one. To the ESA you are, no matter what or who you actually are, a blagger, and the first rule of being a blagger at E3 is to never talk to anyone at the media help desk.

E3: Unwrapped
—Colin Booth
This approach to getting by might come off desperate to some. In fact, it is desperate. It’s an approach for the desperate.

The Drinks Are on Keith
Intellivision Party—E3
—Matthew Williamson
The first evening of E3 was doomed: we were separated from the rest of our group, the party had been abandoned by others, and the drinks were overpriced . . . We needed to get out. Or at least get someplace with cheaper drinks.

Mechanical Donkeys
M.U.L.E.—A800, C64, NES, PC
—John Szczepaniak
Having read these energetic and emotional stories, I felt guilty at not being able to publish them in their entirety . . . Not only do they cover the making of M.U.L.E., but they also speak about the early days of Electronic Arts, and of the development atmosphere of the early 1980s.

A Broken Robot at the End of the World
Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet—PC
—Chris St.Louis
Planetarian is actually a work of minimalism in a field rife with predictable conventions. Instead of pursuing a harem of doe-eyed lovelies in a high school, the player attempts to tolerate—not woo—a slightly batty robot living in an abandoned planetarium.

Worship the Glitch
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion—WIN, 360
—M. O’Connor
Oblivion is the first Elder Scrolls game to be released with any sense of polish. It is nowhere near the buggy, insane mess of Daggerfall or the cold, brown world of Morrowind. The polish has enraged people.

In on the Auction
A Letter to SCEA
—Marco Michilli
These PS3 kidnappers . . . are buying systems that they don’t want and ransoming them off to the highest bidder.I honestly see these eBay scavengers as a problem that can be fixed with my very simple and modern proposal to your fine and open-minded company.

A Brief Note on Pacing in Videogames
The Soul of Wit
—J.R. Freeman
Pacing is more and more important in this modern era of game design because we, people who have been playing games for years, are growing up and moving on with our lives and do not have eighty hours to spare towards a single game anymore.

Untold Tales of the Arcade
Stand-Up Role-Playing Games
—Francesco-Alessio Ursini
I confess, shamelessly even, that I wandered around magical lands while playing arcade games. What’s worse, I enjoyed it, as most of the titles I played offered not only spells, orcs and scantily clad fairies, but also nifty game mechanics, interesting challenges and lovely graphics.

Stay Awhile, Stay Forever!
Further Adventures in the British Games Press
—Paul Lilly
“’Ello mate, that’s some good work . . . How would you like to be famous, mate? We’d like to use your work.” Neither of us realized the utter chaos that would ensue, or how much I’d be exploited, once I had said yes.

Why Game?
Reason #5: Scoring Culture
—Francesco-Alessio Ursini
Gaming is about development, of the player and of the game medium as well; countless hours and countless players have dissected engines down to the very bytes of code, trying to find out what lies behind the fireballs and rank increase and all the things we see on screen.

~
As you can see it is an excellent line up. Feel free to copy and paste anything you want.

ENJOY!

So… strangest thing. Just after my giant Umihara entry a Japanese independentdeveloper released a very Umihara-esque Freeware Game. You should take a look if you are a fan. It involves something with this link for downloading. I had someone walk me through it, sorry.

I know that at least one person reading this blog actually reads my GSW column. It is the reason that I don’t really update this Live Journal as much as I did once, so sorry about that.

Anyways, I recently did a write up on Umihara Kawase because I have been obsessed with it on and off for the last 3 or so years. At one point it was just an obscurity, but recently I really focused on getting good at the game and actually did! Well, sort of. Anyways, I did a lot more research this time for the game than I have done for others and I have quite a bit of excess information to share.

Apparently this game has quite a healthy following, or did until the late ’90s. The initial SNES game was released in late 1994 and it seemed that when the internet was in its adolescence many people used it as a place to dump their many Umihara Kawase accomplishments. This site has a nice run down of full completion times of Umihara. If you notice, unfortunately, there has not been an update since 2004. Still, for those aiming to speed run the game it is a nice place to gauge your skill against. You can get a full breakdown of the fields and their times for each run. Yes, those times break down into Min:Sec:MilSec. Here is a tool assisted speed run if you want to take a look.

Next up is a fairly comprehensive site on Umihara, but unfortunatly it mainly focuses on the PS1 release of the game: Umihara Kawase Shun. I will just point to the interesting stuff for now, but the whole site is worth a look. I should take a moment to note that this site also hasn’t been updated in about three years. This page has a breakdown of the difficulties of all the fields for the PS1 version of the game. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom you can see images for the SFC version then some striked out text which basically says “failed at creating a difficulty chart for SFC version.” This page shows a lot of neat little bugs and tricks. If you are looking at that screen and questioning the (5 min) part: that happens if you hit select 100 times. Also, that compass trick is from field 57, not the field in the beginning of the game. The only other interesting thing to note is that the link page is composed fully of dead links.

Now, here is the last site, and it is semi-NSFW (nipple less breasts): Umihara Kawase Fan Art. There is not really too much to look at and most of it is poor fan art, but it is funny to see this collection put together. Again, note that almost all the links are dead. That aside I am surprised that any of the art is still there considering that the site hasn’t been updated in 5 years.

So that’s it, a lot of old and dying information. So why keep pointing out that all the info is old (still relevant though) and a lot of links are dead? I am going to take up another side project of sorts: I plan to make a new Umihara Kawase Site, and I plan on completing and possibly speed running the game. So as a start I have already begun with ordering both the SFC and PS1 “complete guide books” from Japan, which I will try to scan in and write up techniques for important parts. I have also recently acquired a copy of the PS1 game (not the re-release with the extra fields unfortunately) for an excellent price.

Isn’t everyone excited?! You should go play the game if not.

Yeah, well, ok, so it is not terribly interesting, but I haven’t decided to do a project like this in quite a while so it’s a little nerve wrecking for me. Also the last time I attempted something like this (with DonPachi), even though I managed to get everything put together, I never managed to follow through with it. So please don’t be upset if I fail!

Also, if you have any other important, interesting, or bizarre Umihara Kawase links or information, please let me know.

Lost Magic is much better than any review I have read gave it credit for. Plus it has Studio Ghibli character designs.

Basically you actually have to learn magic in the game or you won’t be good at it. The game does not hold your hand at all in this manner. And ignore the “RTS” part of the description. It is very action packed. It does involve “strategy” and is “real time” but… it only looks like that on the outside. It also has excellent use of the touch screen. Another fine example of a game that could not be pulled off on any other system (well, maybe the Wii, but that’s not out yet).

Apparently this description (brief opinion) was not clear enough so I was asked to expand on it and ended up writing a review of the game.

”I like the sound of frantic RTS as long as it’s all . . . streamlined, I guess — simple and accessible, as I imagine such a game on the DS should be, and not overly cumbersome or stressful like, I don’t know, Starcraft. Do you think I’d like Lost Magic, then?”

Again, for the record, there is not really much in connection with Lost Magic and the RTS genera aside from how you manipulate your characters.

As far as “cumbersome or stressful” well… it is not really either for the first two hours. Then it becomes stressful because you really have to move faster, and on top of that you have to know more. You really have to learn magic, and know how to perform it accurately, and on the fly. When you start feeling comfortable doing that then the game gives you more combinations of how to cast magic to the point where there are literally more ways to attack an enemy than you will know what to do with. I currently have access to about 120 spells and that is only about 1/3 of the total spells [Minor gameplay spoiler: It should be noted that most are made as a combination of a total of 15 unique items. You don’t have to learn that many unique spells]. You just learn what works for what settings and use it. It gets to the point where you have to pull some of this stuff off fast too, and they can become complicated to draw.

There are time limits on the levels, which really just forces you to move your ass. You could plod along and the game would be exceptionally easy the entire time without the time limits (much like the first hour). Not so much is it there to be a pain in your ass, but it is there to get you moving. Taito designed this very well to keep the adrenaline pumping and your hands moving. Every 3 - 5 min battle will be non-stop moving and managing after the first two hours of the game. But then you get better and you learn how to deal with each setting and level (some of the levels have a puzzle like feel to them) you don’t really have a problem. Going back and trying to capture more monsters from already beaten levels is not as hard each succeeding time because you learn how to deal with them. I can also say that aside from one level, any level that I died because of a “time out” was usually because I was attempting to beat the level in the wrong way (or the obvious and safer way). The game will force you to think outside the box a lot.

With this said there are some problems with it. Any “save the villagers” missions are terrible because those villagers are idiots that try to get themselves killed. There are also a few levels that really don’t give you enough time to move at any pace slower than an all out sprint. I didn’t hit one of those levels until the 7 hour point in the game though. And they are not that frequent. The “pathfinding” is terrible, so lets avoid that word and just say that if you tell something where to go it will only go in a straight line there: a greater level of management is needed to move around objects. Since the screen is so small and the sprites are also small you will have problems singling out and healing an individual ally (or yourself). Also the story takes a turn at a point from bland yet fitting to cheesy and “wtf?” But, yea, still, the story is kinda nice at times, and it fits with the magic system and the world you are fighting in.

Someone once said that this is the most hectic DS game since Trauma Center, and that is pretty much spot on. I think that may have something to do with why I enjoy it to the degree that I do. It does not kick your ass anywhere near as fast as Trauma Center does though (the learning curve is much smoother). The pace and levels of management can be just as breakneck comparing TC to LM, and this is for sure a plus for me.

SO OK, I ADMIT: the game is “hard,” but it is hard in a good way. In a 16 bit way.

A direct comparison to Starcraft and its ilk would not be easy to do. In Lost Magic the level opens up: you have yourself and all the allies you will ever have during the level [Minor gameplay spoiler: You can eventually cast spells to “turn” enemies to your side temporarily]. You then have a few objectives to accomplish that are usually either: kill all the enemies, or kill one specific enemy (a “boss” of sorts). Then you highlight who you want to move with a circle that expands with the stylus or you touch the person who you want to move. You use the d-pad (or the face buttons like a cross depending on hand setup) to move the screen around and you then point at either: where you want the selected person/s to go or who you want them to attack. Then they start to do it. Remember what I said about the lack of pathfinding. So! you start to go in that direction and then you realized that you want to cast magic at an enemy. Hold the L (or R depending on hand setup) and then draw your Rune and when it is drawn, point to where to cast it. SIMPLE. This is all you will ever do.

Now just speed it up and multiply the amount of spells you can cast and the difficulty/complexity of casting them.

I use to have one other problem with casting a specific Rune, but I found out that I am just an idiot and now it is not really a problem. This game really shines like I would expect a Taito game to: it is rough and abrasive with cute outer shell. It is a very good challenge (what many people consider hard) and won’t disappoint with its magic system at all.

OK I JUST WROTE A REGULAR REVIEW OF THE GAME.

3 out of 4 stars Runes

So, Capcom put up a new Megaman ZX video (click the pink thing in the center, then click where it says NEW).

Previously I was not too interested in the game, but now I am quite interested in it. What the hell Capcom? Why are you making me renew interest in Megaman after safely assuming the Megaman franchise was dead when I played X5? First Powered Up, now this? I can’t take it.

Also, for some reason I like the artwork too!

Yes, I know that Mega Man is spelled as two words. I don’t like that, so just deal with me. And, no, I don’t say Metroid anywhere in this post.

I am currently running on 2.5 hours of sleep from last night. I don’t know why, but I went to be around midnight and lay in bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. I don’t know what really came over me or why I did that. I is beyond reason/explanation. Needless to say I am probably not going to last very long tonight before I pass the hell out.