11/04/2009 - Now, That's How You Sell A Free MMO!
If you've been following my blog, you know precisely what I think of lame attempts to use sex to sell a product.
I think the perpetrators ought to be castrated with a chainsaw.
Which is to say, it was curiosity alone that led me to research Civony - I mean, Evony, purely because the ads were freakin' everywhere and I was curious just what kind of game was apparently buried under all that cheesecake. Unsurprisingly, it appears that the gameplay is just as vapid and uninspired as the methods used to market the game. (And anyone who plays the game expecting it to have scantily-clad women like in the ads is going to be sorely disappointed. To be honest, I call that karmic retribution.)
Which is not to say that there aren't any good free browser-based MMOs. A few years back, I had some fun with Urban Dead, a zombie apocalypse-themed game set in a ruined city. More recently, one of my favorite webcomics ran an ad for Spy Battle 2165, a text-based browser game where you play as a freelance covert operative in a sci-fi future.
The ad in question is only tangentially related to the game (not to mention the comic), but take a look. Heck, why stop at just the ad? Girl Genius is an epic (and hilarious) tale of mad science in an alternate universe where borderline supernatural geniuses called Sparks changed the course of history; it's well worth spending a few hours on an archive binge.
So let this be a lesson to all you developers out there. If you want people to play your browser-based games, don't slap some tired buzzwords onto some stock photo and call it a day. Instead, hijack yourself a webcomic artist!
Hey, it worked for Final Fantasy XI.
Oh, and if you decide you want to check out Spy Battle 2165 yourself, make sure you tell them Ryusui referred you. Or better yet, just click one of the links I've helpfully provided in this blog post!
10/16/2009 - Okay, So Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?
I'll admit, I'm not exactly a follower of Spice and Wolf, or anything at all that I can't get at my local bookstore or on television, for that matter. But then, when you frequent TV Tropes as much as I do, you learn a lot about series you'd otherwise never hear about, purely through osmosis. Add that to the fact that light novels virtually never come Stateside (except when the franchises they spawned become pretty famous in the U.S., such as the inescapable Haruhi Suzumiya), and you can imagine my surprise to hear that the original light novels for Spice and Wolf have been announced for the U.S..
But don't break out the confetti just yet, ladies and gentlemen. See, someone at publisher Yen Press thinks the original cover art featuring ex-harvest goddess and eponymous lupine Holo (and it is Holo) in cute anime girl form will have red-blooded American readers marching against them in armed rebellion. No, instead they've gone for a cover design that's intended to appeal to a different audience...the American male crotch.
Dare to compare.
I mean, seriously. Which would you prefer to display on your bookshelf? Sure, the one on the right can mean anything from "I'm a fan of anime and manga" up to "I have a thing for kemonomimi (and possibly a full-blown furry fetish)", but the one on the left unambiguously says "I let my zipper choose all of my reading material". I understand that Holo does spend a fair amount of time naked (her natural form is a full-fledged wolf, after all), but seriously: the cover on the left makes it look like a trashy romance novel. Or, less charitably, porn. Which is sad, because I hear that Spice and Wolf is a fairly intellectual story: the spice the title alludes to is not the stuff you see in the U.S. cover, but the fact that its other protagonist is a trader. Who, in addition to adventure, has to deal with (and explain to Holo) the concerns relevant to his profession. That's right...plenty of fantasy novels are steeped in political intrigue, but this is one steeped in economics. And such a crazy-sounding concept is enough in and of itself to sell me on it.
None of this is to say that I have an issue with them changing the cover. With the above in mind, it's possible this book might have a much wider audience than the anime/manga fans that the original cover would rope in. But trying to sell Spice and Wolf purely on naked Holo is only going to drive this potential audience away. If you're going to pander to an audience, pander to the people who might appreciate an intellectual fantasy story, a tale with a distinctly non-standard protagonist with non-standard goals and motivations. If Yen Press is so afraid that anime-styled Holo is going to scare away readers, then maybe they should try selling the story on the spice instead of the wolf.
Got an intellectual, reasoned argument against this contemptible cover? Go to Yen Press' blog entry and give them what for!
(And if you don't have one, then please, stay the hell away! The last thing Yen Press needs to think is that the only people complaing about the cover are nutjobs saying they're the devil incarnate for not calling her "Horo"!)
10/10/2009 - Second Verse, Same As The First?
The BoF2 Retranslation is now version 1.2b, fixing a few more typos as well as one obscure bug with the Shaman interface (more info in the readme).
06/24/2009 - A Blast From The (Alternate) Past!
I've said before that I don't review games unless I feel strongly about them. And I feel very strongly that Retro Game Challenge, Bandai Namco's unique sendup of 1980's gaming, needs more love.
I feel this way because its sequel is not already locked in for a U.S. release.
Released this past February by XSEED Games, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishers, the game apparently sold like day-old flapjacks. I can understand why. The line of thinking goes like this: why shell out $30 for an eight-pack retrogaming pastiche when there are compilations like Namco Museum, Taito Legends and Intellivison Lives! that feature real retrogames for a fraction of the price? I'll admit, it took until May before I was able to justify purchasing the game, finding it at a Fry's Electronics for $25 (and the sticker price said $28!), but now that I've played it...I feel like a fool for not making it a release day purchase as I originally planned. The whole, in brief, is greater than the sum of its parts.
To understand the game's premise, thin as it is, we need to take a brief trip to Japan, where this game is called Game Center CX. It was conceived of as a spinoff of a TV series of the same name (which may or may not be released overseas as Retro Game Master), whose main attraction is comedian Shinya Arino's attempts to conquer classic games. In Retro Game Challenge, it is explained that Arino's evil digital doppleganger, the self-styled Game Master Arino, is haunting DS systems everywhere and he's decided to pick on you, the player, by zapping you (or rather, your polygonal avatar) back into the 80's, where you're stuck playing video games with his younger slacker self until you can complete all his challenges.
All this is just a ridiculous framing device for one of the most gloriously meta games out there. The idea of making what amounts to a gaming sim seems ridiculous on paper, but this trip back in time faithfully recreates those days of way back when, before the Internet made cheats and hints ubiquitous. Your best friend is the fictitious Gamefan Magazine (which, ironically enough, was once the name of an actual game magazine), a periodic periodical dispensing tips, tricks, news on upcoming "releases" and the occasional bit of fourth wall-tapping humor. There is something satisfying about plunging through each game, relying only on what the manual tells you and what clues you glean from the magazines: there is an excitement to discovering new codes and secrets that is largely lost in this era where GameFAQs makes everything so simple.
I wax nostalgic because I do, in fact, remember those days when game magazines were the primary source of game info. I got my first Nintendo Power three months before I actually got my SNES for Christmas in 1993. Super The Empire Strikes Back was the featured article; we had Yoda sitting in Dagobah on the cover. It also covered Cool Spot, the infamous SNES version of Mortal Kombat, and divulged some of the finer points of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening's first dungeon (information that would come in handy later, as I also got my original vanilla brick Game Boy that same Christmas). But I digress.
The game is structured as follows: a new game comes out, Game Master Arino drops four challenges in your lap, one after another, and when you've cleared them all, the game flashes forward a few months to the next big release. There are eight titles in all, summarized (as close as I can get to a summary, anyway) as follows:
Cosmic Gate is, at its most basic, a Galaga clone. This is good, however, because Galaga is an awesome game. There are also differences enough to make it stand out on its own: enemy wave movements are a little more erratic and unpredictable, the bonus stage is an asteroid shooting gallery (where you can die!), enemy sprites are palette-swapped instead of switched entirely (which arguably makes them look more freakish and alien on the higher levels), the game features actual powerups (as well as a hidden warp system), and it also has a finite end: after 64 levels of alien shooting, the game dispenses the obligatory CONGRATURATION! and sends you on your way. Keep this fact in mind: you'll need to get there eventually.
Robot Ninja Haggleman is a silly-sounding name (though I suppose you could call him Haguruman if you prefer) for a decent "defeat all the enemies to proceed"-type arcade platformer in the vein of the original Mario Bros.. There's some strategy involved with the matter of the color-changing doors (which, if used efficiently, can be your most effective means of defeating foes), and it takes a cue from Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins (complete with questionable English) by making you play the entire game again to get the true ending. A fine beginning for a fictional franchise.
Rally King is an overhead-perspective racing game. Four tracks, 19 opponents, no pit stops. Not a bad game, but not especially notable.
Star Prince is the spiritual sequel to Cosmic Gate, evolving from a relatively simple Space Invaders-type shoot-'em-up to a full-blown space odyssey in the vein of RayForce (a.k.a. Galactic Attack, a.k.a. Layer Section...), Ikaruga and the like. It seems short at first - there are only four levels, and the first three all have incrementally stronger incarnations of the same boss - but after you're done, the game drops the Ghosts 'n Goblins twist in your lap and sends you back through for another go-round. The number of projectiles approaches danmaku levels towards the end; fortunately, your ship is armed with a shield that absorbs bullets and sends 'em back in an eight-way screen-clearing wave. Proper use of this trick is, unsurprisingly, the key to survival.
Robot Ninja Haggleman 2 is a linear sequel to the original. Mad scientist Chingensai has kidnapped the princess again, he's spirited her off to his Mech-Castle again, etc.. This game is basically "Haggleman 1, Extended 2-Disc Director's Cut With Bonus Scenes": levels are larger, bosses are harder, and if you get to the end of the game - the second end, I mean - there's even an extra final boss battle to face. More of an expansion pack than a proper sequel, really.
Rally King SP is the fictional product of a phenomenon that never really happened in the United States. Sure, we had product placement games over here like the aforementioned Cool Spot and Yo! Noid (which was actually a heavily-localized version of a game called Masked Ninja Hanamaru, but that's an entirely different phenomenon), but I don't think there was ever a special edition version of an existing game made specifically for product placement. Imagine if Masked Ninja Hanamaru came out unmodified in the U.S. and then we got Yo! Noid. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about here. Rally King SP is a special edition promotion between Gamefan Magazine and an instant noodle company; the end result is that the game features remixed versions of the original four tracks with a new "sunset" color palette and some annoying, unskippable cutscenes of Gamefan's blue bird mascot eating cup ramen between every stage. The moral of the story? There are some things you should be thankful the U.S. missed out on.
Guadia Quest...ah, Guadia Quest. This one's an unusual sucker. You'll probably go in expecting a pale rehash of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy: a band of young heroes go out on a quest, plumb dungeons, grind levels, rescue a princess or seven, slay the dragon, kill the Demon King, save the world, etc.. This synopsis, while partly true, is far from accurate. Guadia Quest is an unapologetically old-timey RPG, but it brings just enough to the table to be a decent game on its own merits. Battle damage is no longer left to the whims of the Random Number God; instead, every weapon has a sequence of "hit marks" that determine its performance. You have to weigh the damage output of the weapons you obtain against their reliability: which is better, a powerful blade that is guaranteed to miss 25% of the time, or a weaker weapon that is always sure to hit? There's also the matter of the eponymous Guadias, mighty monsters that can be convinced to join your side through a trial-by-combat. That's right, there's a monster capture dynamic, but instead of lobbing balls or conversation, you have to beat the crap out of your prospective recruit, which is easier said than done as Guadias magically become boss-level monsters as soon as you offer to make a pact with them. The game's world is small for an RPG, around the size of Dragon Quest's Alefgard, but the plot is where this game might surprise you. It opens up with the boilerplate rigamarole about how you are the chosen descendants of a legendary knight who saved the world with the power of Guadias, establishing a treaty between Heaven and the Netherworld, etc. etc., and now the princess of Centraan has been abducted and her father the King tasks you with charging into the depths of the self-explanatory Deep Dungon and rescuing her. Sounds simple enough, but where it eventually goes will surprise those expecting the obvious RPG plot: without offering too many spoilers, the twist right before the end is less Dragon Quest than Bioshock, and while there is a nice happy round of forgiveness handed out before it's all over, the note the game ends on is far from triumphant.
Finally, we come to Robot Ninja Haggleman 3. The first thing you'll notice upon booting this game up is that Haggleman now looks like Metal Sonic. The second thing you'll notice is that jumping on enemies (as per Haggleman tradition) is a good way to kill yourself. Yep, this ain't your father's Haggleman. Haggleman 3 is what would happen if you tossed Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, Kid Icarus and Metroid into a blender with some crushed ice and a twist of lime, and then splashed yourself over the head with the resulting concoction. Haggleman's throwing stars now harm enemies instead of stunning them, and getting in close will allow him to dispatch foes with a sword swipe. There are only three stages (capped off with three consecutive boss fights), but they are long, labyrinthine and borderline sadistic at times: any one of Haggleman 3's levels is easily worth three levels from most other sidescrollers, and exploring each and every nook and cranny of them is not just a good idea, it's the law. (I'm serious. Haggleman 3 introduces an equipment system where you can customize Haggleman's abilities by finding or purchasing "Hagglegears". Some of the benefits these gears confer are required to proceed through key points in the game.) The only thing resembling forgiveness that the game shows is that it's relatively generous with permanent checkpoints; levels are clearly divided into smaller (but still huge) subsections, and losing all your lives will send you back to the start of the current subsection rather than the beginning of the entire stage. You still lose half your cash, though, but you keep your Hagglegears. If this wasn't the case, Haggleman 3 would probably have contributed significantly to the number of DS systems destroyed by violent impact.
At the end of this long and unwieldy dissertation we come to the matter of the game's localization, which is (of course) top-notch. Young Arino's constant commentary is provided by Yuri "Sasuke/Suzaku/Simon" Lowenthal; he sounds about ten years older than what his character appears to be, but this is probably a blessing. The localization has been Westernized somewhat, with Gamefan's content being written by actual American game journalists writing under pseudonyms (or so Wikipedia says); this is somewhat incongruous with the blatantly Japanese setting (tatami mats on the floor? And just where did the first console RPG come from, hmm?) but it adds a welcome touch of verisimilitude. Guadia Quest's localization is fairly straight and to the point, with a few anachronistic gags thrown in for good measure (try talking to the ducks!), while older titles retain appropriate amounts of Engrish ("YOUR ADVENTURE IS NOT END!"), and Haggleman 3's localization is suitably somewhat awkward and corny (the third boss transforms with a declaration that sounds almost suggestive).
All in all, the question you should be asking yourself isn't "why spend $30 bucks on this when I can get a real retrogaming compilation for less?", but rather "where else can I get eight excellent 80's-style games that no one's ever played before?" If there's a Fry's Electronics near you and they're still selling this game for $25, it'll definitely be worth your while (and your money) to go pick it up.
And if you don't?
Then the evil Net Master Ryusui will haunt your PC and drag you into an alternate 90's where you'll have to start up the fan translation scene on your own if you ever want to get back to the year 2009. Gene Hunt will not be there to save you. Pleasant dreams...
06/20/2009 - Get Your Game On!
Introducing the Watercrown Productions Arcade!
That's right...I'm not only an artist, a programmer and a translator, I'm now officially a game designer. These past few weeks toying with Flash (with the help of some experts in the field) have taught me two important things:
1. Object-oriented programming is pure awesomeness.
2. Getting little targeting cursors to materialize between asteroids precisely where you want them is a lot harder than it sounds.
At any rate, my first project, a little arcade game called Hyper Collider, is now (hopefully) ready for prime time. It's probably not everyone's cup of tea: the finished product is a little on the easy side, even after the difficulty ramps up, but hopefully the retro visuals will make up for it.
Enjoy, one and all.
06/17/2009 - Three Trophies for TheCheat!
Okay, no trophies. And I'm still not quite ready to release TheCheat 2.0 to the public. But in the meantime, I've updated TheCheat's page to reflect my current browsing habits (PMing me on RHDN is your best bet, as I rarely visit Acmlm and my old DevBlog - remember that? - is pretty much dead), and provide a valuable usage hint for people using TheCheat to format scripts that use characters outside the usual ASCII set (save as UTF-8, people! You can do it in Notepad; check the page for more info!).
Thanks to kogami for pointing out this issue!
06/16/2009 - The Big Move!
You're probably noticing something odd about your address bar right now.
Google Pages is getting replaced by Google Sites in the coming weeks and I've taken this opportunity to get out while the getting's good. I've had a wonderful experience with Google Pages up until now and I'm sad to see it go, but everything I've heard about Google Sites tells me it's going to be a downgrade. Thankfully, they've made the transition either way as painless as possible: those who choose to stay can have their site automatically migrated to Google Sites, and those that choose to move can download their entire site's content and set up a redirect to their new URL.
It's taken just over an hour to finish reuploading all my content to my new 110mb page: it took a bit of clever file renaming and manual HTML editing, but right now the site should be 100% identical in function to the old one. This might change once Google Pages is finally phased out completely, as 110mb doesn't let free accounts upload certain file types (the Repercussions of Evil MP3 and Murakumo music video are still hosted on Google Pages), but the really awesome thing about 110mb is there are no subscriptions: all upgrades are a one-time purchase. So once I've bought a few extra features, I should be able to host my media here. (And the nice thing is, I'll be able to embed them in my pages. Google Pages didn't let me do that.)
The only problem right now is that without Google Pages, I don't have a proper web page editor anymore (I'm currently writing this news entry manually in HTML!), but I'll have that problem fixed soon.
Let us have a brief moment of silence for Google Pages. And then, let us celebrate, for Watercrown Productions is reborn. REJOICE!
05/28/2009 - Because Updating The Same News Entry Was Getting Obnoxious!
The Breath of Fire 2 Retranslation Patch has officially hit v1.2.
04/30/2009 - Through the Fire and the Flames, We Carry On!
At long last, the Breath of Fire 2 Retranslation Patch (v1.0) is done.
Enjoy, one and all. Enjoy.
UPDATED 05/07/2009 - The Breath of Fire 2 Retranslation Patch has been upgraded to v1.1! The new patch fixes a handful of minor but pesky bugs present in the initial release.
UPDATED 05/14/2009 - The Breath of Fire 2 Retranslation Patch v1.1b is out now! This one fixes several further text errors.
03/12/2009 - Fall Into The Azure Gap?
Happy 2009, everybody!
...Oh, wait. It's three months late for that. Nevermind.
Anyways, my first non-BoF2-related update of the year concerns an unusual subject: a game review. Usually I don't write reviews except about games I feel very strongly about, for or against, and this game is no exception to that rule. I speak of Blue Lacuna, an interactive fiction title that debuted in demo form during the 2008 Spring Thing competition and finally saw a full release in the past few months. You can download the game at the author's website; you'll also need an interpreter (think of it as an emulator, only for a system that doesn't actually exist), and I highly recommend Gargoyle for the task.
The superbrief version of the story is this: A Wayfarer Is You!
...Okay, let's try for the brief version. (The verbose one can also be sort of found on the author's website; Blueful is the story of how the protagonist came to be who and what he is, told in fragments scattered across the Internet. It makes sense once you're familiar with the story, but I vastly preferred how it was originally all put together in one convenient place. Stupid shame I never thought to copy-and-paste it.)
You are a painter of incredible talents; you have displayed these phenomenal abilities ever since childhood. Of course, your painting didn't bring you happiness; you were a curiosity, your artwork a source of income to exploit.
And then you learned to Wayfare, and left this world behind forever.
Wayfarers are artists armed with the ability to journey from world to world, creating gateways to new realities through their art. Painting, sculpture, music...any talent that can be called art can be a Wayfarer's tool. As a result, you are something of a cross between Atrus from the Myst series, Scott Bakula's character from Quantum Leap and Doctor Who: an adventurer whose path is defined only by imagination, but for whom every step along the road is irrevocable, and damned to an eternity of solitude. Wayfarers are one in a trillion; you've met a few in your travels, but such encounters are brief and bittersweet, and everyone else you meet just ephemeral wisps in the fabric of the universe. But then you found Rume.
Rume is not a Wayfarer, but is nevertheless the love of your life; you've lived on Rume's world for a year when the story begins. You're still an artist, but Wayfaring is something you're content to leave behind: life with Rume, a joy and adventure in itself, is far sweeter than your previous, solitary existence. Naturally, this is where destiny comes knocking at the door.
In case I haven't made this clear already, once a Wayfarer Wayfares, it's a one-way trip; the artwork gets left behind, but is no longer a doorway, and a Wayfarer cannot simply "art" his way back to a world; you can't simply duplicate your own work. However, there's nothing stopping a Wayfarer from ending up on a world with another Wayfarer...in fact, a Wayfarer may find himself drawn to another Wayfarer's world. This is what's called "the Call": a Wayfarer may find himself compelled to Wayfare to a particular world, one where a fellow Wayfarer is in distress. You've experienced it once before, and the Call has struck again, just as you were beginning to settle into life with Rume. The choice is yours whether to heed the Call or stay, but should you heed it, adventure awaits...
Blue Lacuna is an ambitious work, sometimes straining the boundaries of its own implementation (I played Release 3, which was still not quite glitch-free; an NPC who was supposed to be bedridden was walking around, giving messages for both his normal and his injured states, the beehive puzzle becomes unsolvable without guesswork after a point, when the actual "bees traveling" descriptions stop getting printed, and the bridge/staircase's functionality is horribly broken), but what works, works solidly. The aforementioned inexplicable experience aside, most of the game is spent in the company - or with the nearby presence - of an NPC with a vast array of random actions and subjects of knowledge; virtually every time you encounter him, he'll be in the middle of doing something and will very likely have something new to say. He manages to serve both as comic relief and the story's key dramatic figure: in many respects, Blue Lacuna is the tale of this Ben Gunn-esque survivor more than it is your own, and much of your time on his island will be spent piecing together who he is and what he's doing here.
The important thing to note here is that when I said "the choice is yours", I meant it. The game gives you many choices, some more subtle than others, and a variety of nonstandard commands and unusual (but appropriate) inputs are recognized. The game tracks your behavior on many levels: every choice you make has its repercussions towards how the story proceeds and how it will end. True to its Myst-inspired origins, there is a choice to be made at the end of the game, although the nature of the choice itself is more reminiscent of the Shin Megami Tensei series, and truer to MegaTen than Myst, how you choose to enforce that decision also plays a role in things.
In addition, the game has what its author calls a "Drama Manager"; think of it as the story's guardian angel, throwing things into the mix whenever there's a lengthy lull in the action. It's hard to get stuck in Blue Lacuna; an event will inevitably throw itself in your face and get the story back on track, and the necessity of sleep, normally a problem to be worked against, is instead vitally important to advancing the story.
Depending on who you ask, Blue Lacuna is either a work of art or a great big bundle of pretentious, sesquipedalian nonsense. Naturally, I view the latter group as a bunch of cretinous troglodytes who should not be allowed within ten feet of a parser. I'll admit that I had some unkind words for the author after playing the demonstration version: it ends without fanfare or summation, dropping a "thanks for playing!" message in the player's lap without even ending the game properly. Now that I have played the full, final version, however, I take it back. I take back every single foolish thing I said, and I apologize profusely. Blue Lacuna stole my heart and broke it, but the finished version put it back together again better than ever. Interestingly, the finished version covers almost the same territory as the demo, but there's more to it: the story is fleshed out better, there are more events and numerous additions to the scenery, and despite featuring the same general locations and puzzles, once the new content comes into play, the finished version feels like a completely different game.
In short? If you like Interactive Fiction, play Blue Lacuna. If you don't, play Blue Lacuna. It's a wonderful balance between story and challenge with a compelling plotline and a beautiful setting. (Yes, it's all text, but you can imagine, right? Well?) To be honest, glitches aside I'd like to call it the best interactive fiction I've ever played, and I've played quite a bit. (Sorry, Andrew Plotkin.)