OMG Nintendo

The Commodore 64 has arrived to the Virtual Console and older gamers like me are filled with a sudden onrush of nostalgia. Here is something we grew up with and enjoyed as the first major home computer to hit it big and, in some cases, used as our main gaming system when our parents wouldn’t buy an NES but were willing to buy a C64 since they could use it for things too.

Of course, nostalgia can only carry one so far and as we’re beset by the first three games to be offered from the systems past, we must look them over carefully and see just how good these games actually were, despite whatever we may have felt when we were five years old, joystick in hand and eagerly awaiting the floppy disk to load.

In this case, the first game up is PitStop II by Epyx, a game more than a few former C64 owners might not remember by name but will instantly recognize it as “that game where your tires changed color!”

Thanks to a small case of over-eagerness by Amazon Canada we now have a sneak peak of some of the titles Atlus may be offering in the US over the next few months.  Three of the titles listed are for the Nintendo DS and they are all somewhat interesting either due to being part of a notable franchise or having a quirky mechanic that may draw in those beyond the game’s standard audience.

The first is Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier, an unusual game in that it is technically a spin-off of the Super Robot Taisen OG games and yet in practice is so completely different in play mechanics, world setting and story that any relation between it and the original series is somewhat tenuous.   Yet the different play mechanics are interesting enough that the game could find an audience in America beyond those looking for OG references.

Next is Knights In The Nightmare, a Strategy RPG with a twist.  You control a party of knights by moving a wisp around the screen to touch them and activate their abilities, all the while having to weave and dodge around a hail of enemy “fire”, resulting in something that almost looks more like a shump than an RPG.

Finally we have Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor, another Strategy RPG but one that takes place in the modern world, involves using a Nintendo DS-like object to make friends with your demon cohorts and even allows you to purchase new demons through a not-ebay-really system called Demon Auctions.

I’m looking forward to the first and third the most and the second one sounds quirky enough that it could be worth a try.  What’s everyone else looking forward to?
 

With the high volume of video games that are released month after month, it is inevitable that one or two will slip through the cracks.  This can happen because a game will have the misfortune of being released on the same day as a more highly anticipated game or at a time of the year when sales are slow (like the early January to late February window following the Christmas season), the company releasing it gives it little-to-no advertisement or a very small print run, or any combination of these factors.

One such game is the strategy RPG Drone Tactics for the Nintendo DS.  Originally created by Success and released in Japan with the title Konchuu Wars, Atlus snapped up the distribution rights for the US release and gave the game its new title.  It arrived in American stores on May 12th of 2008 and with a Metacritic score of 74 it seems doomed to spend the rest of its days in quiet obscurity.

Does it deserve such a fate or will a more in-depth look at what it does reveal that there is more to this game than it was given credit for?  Jump on in to find out.
 

The Conduit's an unusual game in that High Voltage was showing off footage of it in public way before most developers would want to, thanks to the game's unusual birth as a project without a publisher. Over the weekend, High Voltage released a new "Improvement Trailer" to make  everyone appreciate just how far the game has come in terms of visual polish.

How far is "a really long way"-- The Conduit, at this point, looks better to me than a lot of your earlier and lower-budget Xbox 360 stuff. I've sat here for about ten minutes thinking it over, and I'm not sure I can think of an already-released Wii game that looks better than The Conduit besides maybe Super Mario Galaxy. That seems kind of wrong, somehow.

Can you guys think of a Wii game on the market that looks better than The Conduit? 

Nintendo's Wii is outselling its competitors, and making traditional gamers furious, because it's one of the first video game systems in years to appeal to, well, everybody. While video games have staunchly spent the last decade or so appealing to young men between about 18 and 35, Wii is huge with the over-40 set, families, and women.

Ubisoft's Ann Hamilton, brand manager for the girl-oriented (and bad-to-mediocre) Imagine and Ener-G lines of games, thinks the enormity of the Wii's success can be entirely attributed to the system's appeal to women. "What’s driving the Wii sales is the use of Wii by women, girls and families,” says Hamilton in the Tulsa World. “It’s a really female-driven platform."

That's a pretty bold statement. Do you guys agree with it? At Ubisoft's last press conference, they reported roughly one-quarter of their revenue coming from their girl-oriented game lines-- which were significantly slimmer back then. Is the company just hyping up its product? 

Bonus round: How many of you reading this are female Wii fans? If not, do you know any? (No counting the girls who work here, either.)

I really wanted to post about this yesterday, but a hard week of work elsewhere left me completely wiped. Let's try it now, shall we? 

Word broke a few days ago that Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto had filed a patent for a new type of gaming interface that is absolutely revolutionary. Called "Kind Code", the patent describes a new feature that may show up in future Nintendo games. Kind Code lets you surrender control of your character at any time, so the game can show you a demonstration of how to complete whatever section you're stuck on. In theory, you could use Kind Code to demonstrate how to complete an entire game, although you explicitly cannot save your progress after using Kind Code to complete a section of the game.

What do you think of "Kind Code"? Is it a feature you'd use in your games? I can't say I find it appealing, but I've been gaming since I was four and have a typical hardcore gamer's opinion about the value of in-game achievement. Even games like The World Ends With You that use limited AI to assist a player don't sit well with me. Of course, I've also been gaming long enough to know what it feels like when you're stuck in a game with no idea what to do, because what's expected turns out to be utterly counter-intuitive.

So I stumbled across this piece by Amber Ahlborn over at 61 Frames Per Second, and boy did it make the nostalgia sparks start flying. It's about how she really enjoyed Tetrisphere on the N64, but never bought a copy and now regrets it.

That was an experience I'd had plenty of times, never thinking it could be universal. My parents weren't willing to spend much on my gaming habits as a kid, so I had to pick games out knowing I'd be playing them for three months. That's how my RPG habit formed. But it also meant that no matter how much I liked any title with a major multiplayer element, I was hesitant to ask for it. I was an only child and would probably end up with something I could only play occasionally. So I rented and rented and rented Super Smash TV, but never bought a copy... and boy do I regret that now. That was probably the best SNES co-op title I ever played.

Any of you out there have a "game that got away" lament to share? Something you couldn't afford, or didn't really want until too late?

With Mega Man 9 on the horizon, the idea of intentionally retro games was on my mind. I got to thinking about old RPGs I liked and now this is up at omgRPG, and now I'm curious to see what you guys have to say on the subject. Have you ever played a game that you liked better because of gameplay elements that relied on visual limitations like a 2D playfield or pixel art graphics? Have you downloaded an old game from VC you never played before and found yourself blown away? If so, drop in the comments and talk about it.

I'll start with an easy example (tangential to Nintendo, but whatever): I pulled out my old PS1 copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night over the weekend to show someone who'd never played it. I popped it in to my PS3 and was utterly amazed at how good all of the 2D bits still looked, while the 3D... well, that was impressive ten years ago, wasn't it? This just made me realize I'd never liked any of the 3D Castlevanias as much as any of the 2D games I'd played, since the castle's look and physics just stop working right in three dimensions.

So Etrian Odyssey II came out this week. I thought about picking it up, but then realized... hey, I never finished the first one. Played very far into it, but even though it was a game I loved, but always ended up putting it down to do something else and then never picked back up. Atlus is promising Etrian Odyssey II will be the first game on "hard mode", too, so maybe this'll get my RPG chops suitably warmed up. I've already heard from friends playing it that a bunch of the broken tactics I use here aren't viable in the sequel.

So! We're gonna do a playthrough of Etrian Odyssey. This will spoil quite a bit of the original game for you if you haven't finished it, so reader beware. I'll try to keep all the spoilers under the cut. This week we'll be covering character creation and my trip through the first strata of the Labyrinth. This chapter will be a little longer than future ones since EO starts slow, but don't worry, I won't chronicle every single time I beat up purple rats.