Slingbone's Batcave

[bkdevart]

A quick note about the new Kriby game. Kirby is a monster! You can tear through streets in a robot, destroying traffic. You can fly through the air, destroying ships. Basically, wherever you go, you destroy things. And it's a lot of fun.

[bkdevart]

In the 80′s, I was a big fan of the roller rink.  A place by the name of Skateland was miles away from the home I grew up in, and kids from my elementary school would roller skate in circles to very loud hip hop, pop, and glam rock.  Rollerblades were a new thing.  I had a lot of good memories there - the rush of holding hands with a girl I had a crush on as we coasted clockwise, chatting with people I knew and people I didn’t.

But my favorite thing was the arcade, which was a great place to stop when a break from skating was needed.  I remember watching the intro screen to Ghosts ‘n Goblins.  It showed a man in nothing but his boxer shorts, laying on the ground with a beautiful, clothed princess.  A red demon suddenly appeared, grabbed the princess, and flew off with her.  Logically, the man puts on his suit of armor (which lay behind him), and goes off on a quest to kill a bazillion zombie, ghouls, evil plants, and other monsters to save her.

But the funny thing was, he could only get hit twice - and the first time knocked his armor off and left him in nothing but his boxers, just like he was before he was rudely interrupted by the red demon in the intro.

As a kid, this was hilarious.  I loved the dark tone of the game - it was difficult, and every kind of imaginable monster seemed to appear and strip you of your dignity before killing you.

A few weeks ago, the third game in this series - Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts - appeared on the Virtual Console for the 3DS, and I’ve been working hard at saving that princess.  I still laugh when my armor flies off.  But it’s also a damn good game, challenging but not unfair, and absolutely brilliant in how well it holds up after so much time.

I hope I can beat it.  The kid I was would think that would be awesome, considering he couldn’t beat the first stage in the original game.

[bkdevart]

Monster Hunter Generations came out on Friday.  The game is a celebration of over a decade of games in the series, picking villages and regions from the four main entries.  Monsters that haven’t been in recent entries return, along with some new ones.  The overhauled battle system, which allows for four styles to be applied across each of the 14 weapons, really amps things up.  And being able to play as a Prowler (a.k.a. Palico, Felyne, etc) lets me finally pretend that not only am I hunting mythical creatures with my cat, I can also BE my cat.

I really can’t think of how this game can be made any better.

[tinycartridge]

Check out this gorgeous Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap remake ⊟

Oh, wow! So, Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon’s Trap is an excellent game, a sort of open-ended platform action game with cute animal transformations. Just saying, in case you haven’t played it. It’s great, it’s available in like 2 different versions on Virtual Console.

But also, if you haven’t played it! There’s a new version coming, published by DotEmu and developed by LizardCube, a new company formed by two people who worked on (lots of cool stuff in addition to) Soul Bubbles! 

Oh, also play Soul Bubbles you guys.

SUPPORT TINY CARTRIDGE Join Club Tiny!

[bkdevart]

Well look at that!

[bkdevart]

As I get older, I start to notice more often that things disappear.  Things like being able to buy certain types of light bulbs, a building on a corner that was replaced by another building, my hair, and more memories than I'll ever know about.  There are brief memories of games I've played whose names have disappeared from my mind, too.

I remembered one started with the player as an armored knight, slaying monsters in a dungeon with a sword and shield.  After fighting a dragon, the knight was turned into a lizard man and set off on a quest to get his body back.  The game was a lot of fun, filled with platforming and action, with a system of gathering coins from defeated monsters which can be spent on armor upgrades.  A decade passed before I remembered the name of the series: Wonder Boy.  I remembered remembering that sometime between 2006 and 2010, when I saw the series pop up on the Virtual Console on the Wii.

I bought Wonder Boy in Monster World for the Genesis through the Virtual Console, super-happy to be seeing the game I never finished from so long ago.  But it wasn't that game.  Thanks to extremely convoluted licensing and distribution deals, the Wonder Boy series has been known by many different names and the numbering system gets wonky as well.  A detailed look on the entire series and an interview with one of its creators can be found at Hardcore Gaming 101's wonderful site here: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wonderboy/wonderboy.htm

Monster World was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed playing it, but it always left me wanting to find the game that I had stuck in my memory.  It wasn't until I found the site above this week that I was able to figure out the game Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap.  I turned on the Wii U, booted it into Wii mode, hopped on the shop and paid for a port of the game that's now 27 years old.

The opening was exactly as I had remembered.  I spent an hour and a half playing it this morning, getting cursed by another dragon and turned into another form of a really, really small knight who can walk on walls and ceilings.  The stage and enemy layouts compliment the forms and abilities really well - enemies will run along the same ceilings that the mouse-man can, and hidden paths can be found by scaling certain walls that appear to end at the top of the screen.

Even though the system it was released on disappeared decades ago, I'm going to beat this game eventually.

[bkdevart]

I’ve been playing Shin Megami Tensei IV lately, hoping to complete the game before its sequel comes out later this year.

The Shin Megami Tensei games are traditional JRPGs with turn-based battles.  It’s focused around summoning demons.  Lately I’ve been getting a kick out of reading their descriptions, since the demons in the game are based on various cultures around the world.  I’m going to spotlight my favorites throughout this blog regularly.  Here’s the first:

Kikimora “A female spirit that appears in Slavic lore.  Her face and legs are said to be like that of a bird. She appears in the dead of night to make babies cry and spin thread.  It’s said that those who see her or hear her spinning will meet with misfortune.  In some cases, she helps with housework, but only if the wife is a hard worker.  If she is lazy, the Kikimora will tickle the children in the night and make the mother suffer.  Still, if you wash all the dishes in the house with a tonic brewed from ferns, you can reconcile with her.”

That’s what the game said about Kikimora.  How about Wikipedia? “When the house is in order, Kikimora looks after the chickens and housework. If not, she whistles, breaks dishes, and makes noises at night. She also comes out at night to spin.”

I feel like the first man to see a Kikimora had an axe to grind with his wife.

The top picture above is from the game, the one below that was drawn in 1934 by Russian illustrator Ivan Bilibin.

[bkdevart]

One of my favorite places to go in the late 80’s and early 90’s was the arcade.

Our local mall had a place called Aladdin’s Castle, which had about 30 machines.  Game screens lit up this dark, loud room, bouncing flickering light unnaturally against the walls.  Each arcade game struggled for attention, hoping for a few quarters.

Sega was an absolute beast in the arcades.  Their games were fast, beautiful, and mechanically interesting.  If I wanted to ride a bike, I could sit on a bicycle frame, leaning left and right as a motorcycle mimicked my moves through a race track.  I could pull up on the throttle of a plane, gliding over trees while firing a missile in a dogfight.  These were games on cocaine; faster than we could believe and full of so much energy.

The screenshots above are from the SEGA 3D Classics compilation that came out last week for the 3DS.  It was developed by Sega’s M2 division, which specializes in porting classic games.  They recorded sounds from the buttons and gears of the arcade cabinets and then spliced the sounds back into the the 3DS games.  They added features and made the games run smoother than they originally did.  They did it with such a love and attention to detail.

Sega’s maintained an excellent blog with interviews from the developers, and it’s totally worth a read: http://blogs.sega.com/category/sega-3d-classics/

[bkdevart]

There’s something neat about finding a new place.  I think about when I was a kid, riding my bike, and there’d be some street I hadn’t gone down before.  The yards would be new and unique, the colors of the houses might change.  Instantly my brain would tickle itself, making up stories about those houses.  I’d wonder what the people did there, what their lives were like.  As I get older traveling tickles me the same way.  A new city, state, or country all offer the same opportunities for new stories and people behind them.  And the scenery!  The infinite combinations of trees, flowers, rocks and wildlife have been enough to inspire photographers and painters for centuries.

If there’s one game I can think of that embodies this sense of discovery, it’s Xenoblade Chronicles X on the Wii U.  The game focuses around settling humans on a foreign planet.  It begins on foot, at the smallest scale, where you move slowly through a staggeringly beautiful environment.  Gigantic cliffs rise in the distance, with waterfalls emptying themselves into shimmering lakes.  The large structures are attention-grabbing, calling from a distance and constantly growing closer during long treks.  The game, wanting to give players a chance to explore, provides tools to make it as entertaining as possible.  If I want to see over a hill, I can fire a camera probe up into the air to look over it.  Later on, machines are acquired that can act as vehicles to travel quickly, or leap over obstacles that couldn’t be climbed.

Essential to this is the layout of the environment - if it wasn’t intriguing to look at, there wouldn’t be a want to explore it.  Creating large vistas, sharp drop-offs that provide views to places previously unexplored - I imagine the designers modifying the landscape to make the surrounding areas as visible and spectacular as possible.  It’s brilliant design, and shows the experience that Monolith has acquired over the years building RPGs.

Dear reader - have you played Xenoblade Chronicles X?  What were your favorite locations and moments?  What other games have you played that gave you the same sense of wonder and travel lust?

[bkdevart]

Focus: Video Games

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to use this blog since I signed up, and it hit me the other day as I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts - Tiny Cartridge (http://tinycartridge.com/).  It’s an excellent podcast (and site), which covers the games I’m into, and generally doesn’t fall into the negativity trap that a lot of people who cover video games do.  They talk about the things they love, and leave it there.

I love video games.  I don’t know what percentage of my life has been spent playing them, but it’s large.  I think video games are a marvelous thing that didn’t exist too long ago, and it has been neat to see them grow and evolve over the decades.  So that’s the focus of this blog: I’m going to talk about everything about video games I love.