Archive
Captain Rainbow Translation Watch Vol. 2
IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE, IT'S A...HERMAPHRODITE??
The second in a series of almost content-free updates on the status of the Captain Rainbow English and Italian translation:
As of May 10th, 2010:
Translated text eng/ita [34%]
English Editing [9%]
Italian Editing [15%]
Hacking [ND%]
Beta test [0%]
As of June 13, 2010:
Translated text eng/ita [43%]
English Editing [9%]
Italian Editing [22%]
Hacking [ND%]
Beta test [0%]
So we got about 10% more translated in about a month–not too shabby.
For more info on Captain Rainbow, be sure to visit Lovedelic Life and keep checking back here for regular updates. (Or sub via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook!)
Shiren Returns 2 Life
The Wi-Fi Rescue Code worked! He’s back!
If there’s one translation of anything I most want, it’s this:
Aaaaaaand school is over for the semester, so work can resume on both translations! In the past few days, I’ve gone back to working on Shiren the Wanderer 2. Its kinda embarrassing to say, but I didn’t figure out how pointers worked in that game until just now I was never able to find the points for any of the text in the arm9 file, so I just assumed that I would have to work with the predefined limits in that file. Oddly enough I found it out due to the fact that crystaltile2 can “extract” the arm9 into multiple files(never noticed that before ^^;;). It ended up that the pointers were using the locations in the extracted file, so I just had to subtract 4000 from the normal arm9 to get the pointers. SCIENCE!
Visit him and encourage him to ‘get ‘er done!’
TinyRPG: The World’s First FRPG
There aren’t many RPGs set in Mexico
That’d be Fortnight RPG, for those struggling with other, more profane, solutions to this ‘riddle’:
Indie game maker Andre Spierings has thrown down the gauntlet to bigger members of the role-playing game cosmos.
It took Square Enix over five years to create Final Fantasy XIII, and Blizzard’s been hard at work on Diablo 3 (pictured) for almost a decade. By contrast, Spierings has managed to push out his isometric click-fest Tiny RPG in just two weeks.
That’s pretty impressive for what is a dandy1 little time-waster.
The Facebook page for the game is here and the website is here, but appears to be down.
1 Yes, today’s anachronism is “dandy”.
Miyamoto, Iwata and You Walk Into a Bar
This is probably going to be just slightly better than LBP2
This is certainly something that will send the Internet all a-twitter (and a-Twitter) today:
The original plan was to make the game in one year, similar to their development time target for Majora’s Mask. However, they ended up taking two-and-a-half years. Iwata noted here that because they didn’t have to take that one year to refine the player movement, the full development time was spent exclusively on stage creation and tuning.
There’s also this, which is great news for some of us:
Miyamoto also noted here that the game starts off “at full acceleration” and feels like it’s more difficult than the original — so difficult that he shouts out and slams his table when playing by himself late at night (Iwata responded that he’d like to see this).
I’d also love to have an audio recording of this, if only as my ‘you’ve got mail’ chime. Or to scare off hungry bears. Or koopas.
The nice thing about Nintendo games is, 99% of the time, they do not rush them on the creative end which, while also potentially-inviting auteur disease (WiiMusic, sadly, was one of those victims), they also seem to mostly avoid that by really prototyping the hell out of everything for playability purposes, subsuming their ‘art’ to the desires of the bulk of the audience. (Thank God.)
And here’s something else to whet the appetite–the first SMG2, NA, commercial:
Captain Rainbow Translation Watch
The first in a series of almost content-free updates on the status of the Captain Rainbow English and Italian translation:
Translated text eng/ita [24%]
English Editing [9%]
Italian Editing [15%]
Hacking [ND%]
Beta test [0%]
Translated text eng/ita [34%]
English Editing [9%]
Italian Editing [15%]
Hacking [ND%]
Beta test [0%]
For more info on Captain Rainbow, be sure to visit Lovedelic Life and keep checking back here for regular updates. (Or sub via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook!)
Egg Hatches, Goes to PCs
No, not that Billy Hatcher–the popular one
Every once in a while, I stumble across the odd PC port that I didn’t know existed: generally revs of various shooters and the like and, every now and again, an RPG like Lunar, so it’s somewhat surprising when one like this comes completely out of left field1–one like Sonic Team’s Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg:
Producer Yuji Naka stated in an interview with IGN that eggs were chosen as the focus of the game to give the player joy from caring for and hatching eggs, and a feeling of anticipation “because you don’t know what’s going to come out of eggs”. Animals were incorporated into the game to convey a mood of adventure, in contrast to the digital pet-based Chao creatures highlighted in previous project Sonic Adventure 2. The GameCube was chosen for development over the competing PlayStation 2 and Xbox because of its wide audience that Naka felt would appreciate such a family-friendly game. The game uses an engine that Naka called “an evolution of the Sonic Adventure 2 engine.”
What’s more, it apparently got a US release but hell if I noticed.
So, yeah: it’s also on PC and, apparently, YouTube and NicoNico have no video of it whatsoever, but you have something even better–me!2
It looks like this, only way way better.
But, uh, there isn’t much to say: it’s basically the Cube game with the ability to bump the resolution up to 1600×1200 which, while nice (and just kills the jaggies), hardly justifies the asking price, unless you simply must have every piece of Sega memorabilia the world has ever seen. (And, oddly, you can’t even force Vsync, etc., via the driver control panel.)
Still it’s out there, somewhere, waiting to be had on this slow, sloooooow, Sunday afternoon.
1 Billy Hatcher also played left field.
2 That is to say: better than nothing…almost.
PSA: Pay What You Want Indie Game Bundle
It’s for a good cause, too
While I think World of Goo is, probably, the poster child for grossly-overrated indie games, this bundle, that also includes the stupendous Penumbra Overture1, for whatever you want to pay, is a fantastic deal:
The bundle packs DRM-free editions of Independent Games Festival award winners World of Goo, Gish and Aquaria plus Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture for Windows, Linux or Mac, which cost $80 if bought individually.
Aquaria is also pretty good even though it has some minor design flaws (they don’t really wall off hellishly difficult areas as well as they could, at least in the early versions, where I spent, literally, 3 hours trying to kill one boss) but the whole bloody pack for whatever you want to pay and it’s for charity? That’s win-win-won:
The average payment is 8 bucks, so don’t you dare contribute less than that, XBLA players who routinely pay 10 bucks for *one* game!
1 Probably the best ‘survival horror’ game I’ve ever played and I’ve played pretty much *all* of them.
Zombies Panic North America
I’m pretty sure they mean the zombies are the ones panicking
Zombie Panic in Wonderland is up on WiiWare today for a mere $10, less than the price of a day at the shooting range, and you don’t even have to BYOZ:
A sudden wave of zombies is attacking Wonderland. To save his friends from the spell of the “amorous zombies”, machine gun in hand, the player will have to solve the mystery of the “scented dwarves” in time and put an end to the evil power hidden in the castle in the northern city.
Cut scenes, music with lyrics, seven playable characters, hidden levels, final bosses, different weapons, lots of zombies attacking you at all times, explosions, demolitions, fire …
Etc.
I reviewed the import a while ago and, generally, liked what I saw:
Zombie Panic in Wonderland is the first title squeezed out of Spanish outfit Akaoni and recently erected a presence on the Japanese WiiWare shop thanks to Marvelous Interactive. Being the intrepid soul that I am, I laid my dollar bills down to give this fairy tale-cum-shoot ‘em up a proper, up
skirtclose, examination…
Get the rest here.
Galaxian-A-Like Distracts You From Work
It’s hard to “print screen” and play at the same time
Top Shmups has the goods:
Nayhax is a timed vertical shooter in the form of Galaga and games like that where the enemy come screaming down towards you. You only get three minutes of play but you can at time by collecting time capsules that are dropped on various levels throughout the game but you can also lose time doing the same thing. You only get one weapon of choice however there are upgrades that you can collect and you will need them in later levels and when you reach the boss stage they aren’t difficult but if you want to save time you need al you can get. Graphics and sound are very retro so retro fans will love this. Controls are Cursor keys to move and Ctrl to fire. This is a must for retro fans who want a quick shooter.
It’s actually quite good, as it turns out which, for a browser-based game, is saying something.1 (It doesn’t huirt that Galaxian is about the least-copied game design of all time2, just behind…Alisia Dragoon3.)
1 I place most browser-based games one notch above iPhone games and somewhere below the Bally Astrocade.
2 Yeah, yeah: it’s a Space Invaders riff—don’t bother me w/ details!
3 Yeah, yeah: it’s a Mystic Defender/Peacock King riff–don’t bother me w/ details!
Bullet Hell Hits Club Med: ESPGALUDA II Review
Cave; iPhone3GS/iPod Touch 3G; Trailer; iTunes
Look, it just isn’t working out between us: we both did our best but I think it’s probably better for everyone if we just moved on. Oh, no, no—don’t cry! Look, it’s not you, OK? It’s me! I, I just can’t get into it, you know? I mean, yeah, your skin is smooth as glass and you’re in amazing shape— just look at you! So thin and slinky and, man, most people would just kill to be with you, with all your apps and games and stuff, but this whole touchscreen thing and no buttons? It’s just not working for me…wait…what’s that? Oh my God, is that…ESPGALUDA II?? Oh baby, I didn’t mean any of those mean things said! It was the DS talking, the filthy little whore, she’s just so built for games with all those buttons and a d-pad but just…let me slide my finger around a bit, get some sweat going…oh yeah, you like that, don’t you…ooh yeah…that’s hot! Oh baby, you are so fine…
Going solely by first impressions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that ESPGALUDA II, the latest in (very infrequent) portable shoot ‘em ups from Cave, is the be-all, end-all of the genre: the graphics are stupendous, the music like a choir of angels singing (assuming the choir had access to synthesizers and Yuzo Koshiro) and a control scheme that’s actually better than a stick or control pad?? With a laundry list of features like that, It’s almost like the first time you had sex, only it’s fun and satisfying, with no embarrassing, premature, accidents or performance-related issues–you got in there and did your job as the reincarnation of Don Juan and Casanova combined. Unfortunately, as good as that sounds –and it does sound good, especially, I’d wager, to an inexperienced 16 year-old/shmup-player–it also proves to be, ultimately, its undoing.
The first thing that strikes you about Cave’s latest is, damn, this game is beautiful: Hyper-detailed, entirely 2D, graphics w/ a ‘rendered but not too rendered‘ look that typifies Cave’s output. Legions of enemies rumble by before being exploding into sparkling gold and gems, huge bosses flexing monstrous muscles driving expertly-animated wings careen into view, and the high speed scrolling as oceans of danmaku curtains hove into view as you expertly zig and zag through them, suffer but a hint of slowdown. Truly, it is, without doubt or hesitation, the single best-looking portable shooter of all time.1 Really, it’s completely eye-dropping if you take even a few moments to soak up all the animation and graphic detail, even on the iPhone/iPod Touch’s relatively meager screen estate.
The audio, too, is remarkable, if a bit low-fi compared, at least, to the 360 version. It certainly sounds the part and it is all there, but it seems pretty obvious that some corners were buzzed to keep the file size down from monstrous–it’s almost too bad you can’t rip and use the OST in its stead, but it’s hardly deal-breaking and, in any event, the actual tracks themselves are slick.
So with all that good will built up, secure in the knowledge that this is the be-all, end-all of portable shooters (trumping a large number of consoles ones, in fact) and that nothing could possibly go wrong—that it’s smooth-sailing, easy-going, look ma, no hands, joystick—I have some bad news: that lack of a joystick/ d-pad and some tactile, clicky, buttons? Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark.
See, this game doesn’t actually play very much like its brethren. Oh sure, it’s still a shooter, you still whip and zip around the screen, encroaching and retreating w/ verve, but it doesn’t quite ‘feel’ correct. Instead of the inherent movement limitations of an 8-way joystick you have virtually infinite, hyper-precise, analog control. And I do not mean analog control as in every game console since the N64—I mean finger to the screen, character moving virtually 1:1 with your thumb, no lag, no sense of weight, as quickly as you an move your finger from point A to point B2. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t love a control scheme that lets you bend the game to your will while barely breaking a sweat? Well, for one (million?), probably every Cave and/or shooter fan on earth.
The problem is that with a complete lack of inertia and virtually-unlimited movement is that it’s married to a game designed for a control scheme with very precise limitations—limitations that simply don’t exist with a touchscreen unless consciously-implemented–which they aren’t–probably for very good reason: whenever an iPod game attempts to emulate a d-pad or joystick it’s always to less-than-optimal results, unless those controls are very limited3. Cave wisely eschewed this path but it, basically, breaks the game.
Not ‘breaks’ as in ruins it completely, mind you, but ‘breaks’ in the sense that it doesn’t play correctly. Whereas with a joystick it would be virtually impossible to perform insane, figure eight-like moves without wide arcs of movement (you can only corner so tightly on something that is bound by binary input), those rules go out the window when you can blitz the screen like a pinball launched into a rubber room. You’ll find yourself, most likely on the first play, threading needle-like gaps through a hailstorm of bullets that would, under normal conditions, have seen the trio of avatars on offer battered senseless, like the weakest-link in a game of junior high dodgeball.4
In fact, I think it’s safe to say, that on “Normal” difficulty, experienced Cave vets will be 1cc’ing this game within 24 hours of buying it, a feat which, normally, is relegated to urban legends about some savant-like player in a dingy arcade in Osaka with extra eyes and an extra set of hands named Wonshishi. Experienced shooter players need to skip straight to “Hard”–which actually feels more like arcade default–to obtain any kind of challenge and, even then, it isn’t remotely as difficult as it should be, i.e. arcade/360 on normal.
There is another way, however, to increase the overall difficulty, but this merely invites iPhone-itis: there are three different control schemes available that offer increasing amounts, in theory, of precision. The problem is, these additional controls, in practice, actually decrease precision as you must make sure you’re hitting the correct ‘button’ which, in any shooter (let alone of the Cave variety), is courting death on each attempt. So, by default, most people are going to stick with simple because it’s the lowest maintenance, least frustration-inducing option but also the most shallow and least-fulfilling, gutting the core gameplay to make it accommodate the sub-standard ‘buttons? you’re lucky we gave you a second one on your mouse’, game-hating, misanthrope that runs the orchard in Cupertino. (There’s also an iPhone Mode but the less said about that, the better which features more, unnecessary, touchscreen tomfoolery.)
What it boils down is ESPGALUDA II is a portable marvel, packing in nearly all the aesthetics of its arcade and console bigger brothers, featuring graphics and audio that laugh the DS and PSP out the door, down the stairs, into the street and under a passing truck, but at considerable cost: ‘cow goes moo’ difficulty with a ‘My First Cave Game’ control scheme enabling it.
In the end, it’s still worth the paltry asking price, and it’s still quite fun (and amazing that it’s running in the palm of your hand at all) but it probably isn’t going to be particularly well-received by long-time fans, is still far too much for casual, pick-up-and-play, gamers (iPhone Mode or not) and, for the rest of us, it’s all over so fast…
Wait, is that it? That’s all of it? Jesus, if you’re gonna give it up that easy what’s the point? I need a challenge—the chase is half the fun—and you just let me run my fingers up and down, back and forth, and, bam!, 1cc! Hell, if you were any easier, you’d have been on your knees before I pressed start.
1 For the hopelessly anal (*raises hand slowly*) there have been some sacrifices made in that not all frames of animation made it over intact from the arcade.
2 For the geeks: think of how DC Comics’ Flash (or Neo in the Matrix) sees the world: everything in motion around him is moving at a snail’s pace and he’s able to sidestep bullets, speeding locomotives and nuclear missiles due to this ‘telescopic’ view of time–that’s exactly the kind of feeling you’ll get when playing ESPGALUDA II on iPod as everything feels like it’s moving in slow motion relative to you.
3 Soosiz is a good example of this where you only have three inputs, tops: left/right and jump.
4 You remember that kid: pale, sickly, taped glasses and not a single athletic bone in his body, mercilessly pounded into submission by an incoming barrage of welt-inducing spheroids—hell, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you were that kid.
