I wrote stuff this past week, and now I’m forcing you to read it. Or at least putting it out there, you know, to tweak your sense of guilt and obligation. I’ll be tracking the clickthroughs so I can know once and for all who’s just using me for my bandwidth.
echochrome
This preview turned out to be a lot more pretentious than I expected. But hey, at least 1UP style dictates that all game titles are written with an initial cap rather than the emo-boy all-lower-case style that Sony has trademarked for the game. Redeemed by groupthink.
Pokémon Ranger: Bataonnage
I think “batonnage” is French for “scribbling around things with a stick.” It’s almost exactly the same as the original Ranger so far as I can tell. You know what would have made it awesome? If it were “Pokémon Ranger: Batardage,” a game in which you walk around hitting monsters with a loaf of bread. Me, I have an olive loaf I’m saving up for Mr. Mime.
Super Dodgeball Brawlers
I wonder what the publisher of this game thinks of the fact that the premise of this article is basically, “Thank goodness for emulation!”
Bangai-O Spirits
Apparently this didn’t even make the top 30 software charts in Japan. Honestly, does anyone find that surprising? The Japanese gaming audience is no longer receptive to the sort of wacky, hardcore games Treasure develops. Their only hope is to start making Dragon Quest spin-offs for Enix, or maybe Idolmaster: The Shooting. Whatever. The point is, they’ll need more underage chicks if they want to sell in Japan. Hopefully Bangai-O will fare better here, though, because it’s pretty great… even if it doesn’t play much like the Dreamcast version.
In Bangai-O Spirits can you move around while charging the missile swarm? If you can’t that’s disappointing because that sounds much less entertaining than how it was in Bangai-O (running away from enemies to charge vs running into swarms of bullets to power up instantly).
You can’t move around, but it does a good job of building up tension as everything closes in on you at once. The d-pad will let you sort of ‘focus’ the barrage in a given arc rather than 360 degrees all the time, which can be handy.
In the first game there was never any reason to sit on the spot and wait for the bullets to come to you. It sounds like a step backwards but I guess I’ll just reserve my judgement until I actually play it.
Sly Bloom County reference there.
My wife is looking forward to echochrome, though she’s never touched the PSP. A big reason for that, though, is that I’m too busy with Crisis Core.
I’m so happy that someone got the reference.
I got the last four books for a 17th birthday present, and quickly picked up the rest. That had as much to do with my maturing sense of humor as anything.