Back to Basics.

Around this time every year, I get waves of nostalgia. Not sure why it is--perhaps there's some chemical change in the brain brought on by the atmospheric weather shifting. But I start to think of those halcyon days of my youth, when I could easily go a 12-hour stretch just playing video games. Since I did this in the cold basement during my high school years, that could be another reason it's associated with fall.

Anyway, I've dealt with the pangs at work for some time now, and this weekend broke out my Sega Saturn and hooked it up. My NES was a little more inconveniently packed, so Guardian Heroes, Thunderforce V, Dragon Force, Astal, NiGHTS and Albert Odyssey had to suffice. It was some nice playing, and a surprising reminder that there are some games that just look plain ugly by today's standards but still play like the bomb (TFV and NiGHTS being two shining examples.) It was also a reminder that you can't skip playing a game for a couple years and then come back fresh and on top of it as you were before. I got my butt handed to me in Guardian Heroes and TFV, but in my own defense, I made it to the next-to-last stage of TFV on my second play.

I proceeded to capitalize on the mood by recording the soundtrack of Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldean. I have no shame in admitting that to make this a day-and-a-half affair I cheated horrendously with my Gameshark. I'd beaten the game before fairly anyway. ;)

Ultimate Warriors

Having completed my portion of the latest Chosen episode that went up today, I cracked open that Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires game that had been awaiting its turn in the Playstation 2.

The game is addictive, consuming. It combines the same old beat-em-up action of a Dynasty Warriors game with the minor political maneuverings of taking over China. You can hire up to 9 main characters ("Generals") and 10 generic nobodies ("Lieutenants") and can play as any one of them in any given defense or attack that you make. Throw in the ability to make any character your emperor, start in any of 24 different regions of China, and have random assortments of items and troops each time, and you're looking at a lot of replay...

Meanwhile, I've been playing for at least half a dozen hours and am not even halfway through my first game. Phew...

Arg!

Just when you thought it was safe to go out and plunk money down on a bunch of CDs, they go and announce the Konami Music Masterpiece Collection.

Well, at least one is guaranteed the full set from the box, unlike the Famicom Game Museum CDs...

Oh, and lookee, announcement of the Devil May Cry/Devil May Cry 2 soundtrack set also. It's such a bad time to not be rich...

Deathwatch.

Apparently a car bomb killed seven U.S. marines just outside of Fallujah yesterday, which brings the total death toll for U.S. soldiers to 985 since the war started, or rather, since the war was announced as over and victorious. What was once a curious question in my mind--will we hit the magical number of 1,000 before election day?--pretty much seems to be a given now, with the only real question being just how far we can overshoot it and whether it'll have any impact on decisions come November...

Ping-Pong Family.

Driving back from the airport today, my wife and I discussed my video game snobbery, and she used examples of how I usually elect not to post people's requests in newsgroups for common things like Final Fantasy, whereas I instead purchase and collect things like "Ping-Pong and Daddy Ping-Pong," in her words.

I looked at her, confused. "What?"

"You know, one of those soundtracks you ordered. It's like Daddy Ping-Pong or something."

I searched my memory, then realized she was referring to the soundtrack for Donpachi and DoDonpachi. I'd only mentioned them the one time and I'll be the first to admit that DoDonpachi is not the sort of name that instantly and indelibly sticks with you.

To this day, I don't know what DoDonpachi translates into. It could very well be "Daddy Ping Pong"...

Cat and Mouse

Today has been a clean-up day. I've spent most of the day working on our bathroom, a beast unto itself. But as I scrubbed away at hard water stains and soap scum resevoirs, my mind began to wander. It could have been the Lysol fumes. But I made a tragic mistake, and began to think about logic in video games.

As any hardcore gamer can tell you, there isn't much logic in games, but sometimes you try and make some, and that's what I started doing. And before you go thinking this wasn't a big deal, I'm not talking about how your character can die and then come right back to life, flickering in and out of existence for a few seconds, invulnerable to the attacks that just killed him. That's easy stuff, as long as you have a strong working knowledge of the differences between quantum wormhole and relational physics.

No, what I started out with was the 1942 series. Started by Capcom in 1984, this family of games (1942, 1943, 1943 Kai, 1941, 19xx and 1944, respectively) put you in the pilot seat of a World War II-era plane, charged with taking down enemy planes and sinking their carriers. This seems normal, but the catch is that you're an American fighter pilot, sinking Japanese planes and boats. Did some Capcom executive say to his coleagues, "We need something different. How about a game where the Americans are killing us? It'll be a sensation!" ?

If the reasoning behind a Japanese game manufacturer creating a game for a Japanese audience that glorifies American soldiers killing their people seems too meager for your awesome mental capabilities, then turn to Mappy. Any way you slice it, there's just no reasoning with this game. Namco's vastly underappreciated game puts you in the shoes of Mappy, the Micro-Policeman. As a policemouse, it's your job to apprehend the cat burglars who have stolen various items like the Mona Lisa (two of them, to be exact-hmm)... Well, actually, no, as a policemouse, it's your job to sneak into warehouses in the dead of night and steal back these goods without getting caught by the cat burglars. It's kinda like a rogue cop mouse thing... Or something. Neither you nor the cats can actually jump--which is a well-known fact of nature--so you'll have to use trampolines to get from one floor to the next. Oh, and there are doors that release microwaves that will carry cats off the screen, and if you take too long, a gigantic coin will roll out of the attic and chase you down.

I'd go on but your head is probably already hurting as much as mine...