GSQ4: Welcome to the year 20XX

The awkward thing about GameSpite Quarterly is that my hands are sort of tied when it comes to promoting it. There’s enough potential overlap with my real job — or at least the perception of overlap, since in reality there’s frankly nowhere on 1UP for 5,000-word essays on Super Metroid and the like — that I don’t want to give the impression that I’m putting a side project ahead of work. I never work on the books during office hours, and I never post about them anywhere but here and my personal Twitter account.

Nevertheless, I would like for GSQ to be a success. Not necessarily in sales, but in general awareness. We build a tangible product, yes, but you can also read it for free, eventually. I just want to make sure people are reading. I realize that, given the density of words we use and the lack of deliberately inflammatory content or pictures of digital breasts on display, the GameSpite venture is destined to a niche readership of those few people who like to read many words about videogames without being distracted by inflammatory rhetoric or digital breasts. So, I would like to ask a favor of you — you, collectively, the people reading this. Please spread the word of this labor of love however you can. Our group does tremendous work every three months, and if you enjoy that work, I would be grateful if you’d be willing to share links and encourage people to check it out. This may be a niche product, but by god I would like to carve out as large a niche as possible.

Thanks! As a reward for your help, have some more breast-free words about videogames:

Mega Man X: Welcome to the Year 20XX
Since Mega Man 10 launched yesterday, and GameSpite Quarterly 4 launched yesterday as well, I thought I might accept this stroke of kismet and post up one of this feature as a sort of festive, tangential tie-in. Mega Man 10 is not Mega Man X, but the former started me thinking about the latter regardless — specifically, why the latter is so great. Those reasons are enumerated here.

14 thoughts on “GSQ4: Welcome to the year 20XX”

  1. I tell friends about GSQ whenever I get the chance. I’ve even name-dropped on some of the larger gaming blogs – you know, to make me seem like the cool kid.

  2. As much as I wish the game had a slightly higher difficulty level to complement the aforementioned deliberate pacing — similar to how the best of the old-school Castlevanias are empowered by having both, yet in contrast to Mega Man 2’s ability to get away with less challenge due to its breezy pace and sublime design choices — this review pretty much explains what MMX1 got right. Admittedly though, I am biased a little towards the items in a few of the later games.

    Regarding Gunstar Heroes though, I’d say it upped the ante more in the mid-boss department.

  3. You are the cool kid, saywhatnow! That Member’s Only jacket you’re wearing is all the proof you’ll ever need.

  4. See I wanted to read that whole article… but once I got to “Mega Man X will forever be one of the finest entries in the Mega Man franchise.” I had to quit reading as I realized everything you were writing was in fact all LIES! Everyone* knows that the finest entries in the Mega Man franchise consist of 3 titles… Mega Man, Mega Man 2 & Mega Man 9… all others do not exist (or should not exist).

    *Everyone refers to all the cool kids. :P

  5. ^I’m sorry, but MM1 as one of the best in the series? LMAO

    Anyway, I recently played through the remake of MMX for PSP, MMX: Maverick Hunter. Its fantastic! It loses that 2d, sprite-based charm, but seeing everything updated in 3d is really cool, and theres some cool anime cutscenes. Plus, you can play as Vile!

  7. My hypothesis is that Mega Man X is Mega Man 11. Mega Man X2 is actually Mega Man X+2=12, so Mega Man X is Mega Man X+1=11. Mystery solved. ;)

  8. I can still remember coming home from school and playing MMX for hours on end. To me it didn’t matter that it was relatively easy, or how X was, already, a bit of a whiner. It just had this enduring quality that kept drawing me back, even to this day.

  9. I will promote your and your team’s work at my usual lurking place, but please, don’t dismiss digital breasts so quickly. It’s eye candy at the double-click of a button.

  10. I might be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter when you off Chill Penguin; Flame Mammoth’s stage freezes over anyway.

    And I think MM4 ditched 200X for 20XX, if that matters at all (not much, really, since 20XX can be 200X).

    Nice write-up, though. I’ll have to link to this on MMN later.

    Personally speaking, I never understood the insistence people had of Mega Man X being Mega Man 10. The letter “X” was in everything in the 90s, but you never saw people insisting that they were reading “10-Men” comic books before “The 10-Files” came on Fox and that they were all a part of “Generation 10.”

    That people not only made Mega Man the exception, but were sometimes adamant about it would always bewilder me.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play my 10box 360.

  11. MMX is a classic when it comes to gameplay and weapon utility. I beat the game for the (roughly) 136th time last week, and even then, I still discovered new uses for all the weapons. I only recently discovered the beastly power of the Flame Wave on random enemies. And, of course, it has one of the top 10 soundtracks on the SNES.

    I actually liked MM6 as well. It was certainly an improvement over the garbage that came immediately before it. It was my favorite by far among MM4-8.

  12. Just in case you didn’t know already, Gamespite Quarterly was mentioned in the latest issue of UK mag Retro Gamer as book of the month, which actually spurred me on order a copy of GSQ2. Looking forward to receiving it in the next week or so!

  13. I was going to say something about hating to nitpick, but I actually love to, so I will. Mega Man 6 came out at almost the same time as Mega Man X (beat it by about a month and a half in Japan, came out a few months later in NA), so at the very least Mega Man X was already pretty well known by the time people were playing Mega Man 6.

    Also, I’ll spread the word as best I can, Toasty. Regrettably, my main sphere of influence is just going to result largely in internet mandrills flinging poo at you, but hey, publicity is publicity, right?

  14. As long as it’s internet Spark Mandrills flinging poo at him, I’m sure everything will turn out just fine.

Comments are closed.