Tasty chunks of zine raining like meat from the sky

Mmmm, meat rain.

The middle portion of poor, doomed Issue Six is available for general perusal and abuse. I hope you like footnotes! Actually, I don’t. I hope you hate them and that this article reduces you to a quivering, weeping mass. You know, for giggles.

I posted a paean to Medusa yesterday that seems to have received far more interest than it really deserves. Too bad Joystiq’s staff is too fumble-fingered to spell my name right — come on, guys, “Jeremy Pariah” is so GAFtard.

Anyway, please take note! Scurge Hive is out this week for DS and GBA. Really, it is. Sadly, it’s not at all the totally awesome game that I had hoped — my score in the most recent EGM is a good-but-not-amazing 7.0 — and I know I said I’d take it personally if it that was the case. But I’m feeling clement this week and would like to encourage each and every one of you to at least consider picking up a copy. If nothing else, it’s probably going to be produced in teensy quantities and will become one of those stupidly-rare portable games like Ninja 5-0, the IGAvanias and (occasionally) Phoenix Wright. Plus it’s actually pretty fun, if a bit repetitive.

36 thoughts on “Tasty chunks of zine raining like meat from the sky”

  1. dragon warrior 4 is well worth emulating. i played it again recently, and man, the story was brilliant. I’d love to see someone knock that game’s style off, instead of retreading FF7 over and over again.

  2. How’s Scurge compared to Megaman ZX? Didn’t you give that 7 or so too? I’m enjoying ZX, and I hadn’t played a MegaMan game for more than 10 minutes in my life, so it’s not like its innate Megamanliness holds any particular attraction for me.

  3. Is there any real difference between the DS and GBA versions? I mean, I’ll probably get it for DS anyway, but it’d be nice to know.

  5. Actually, that’s one of the best gaming soapbox-rants that you’ve done in a while.
    .
    My problem is that I’m stuck in the world of Dragon Warrior (perhaps the most shocking element of that game, in it’s NES era, was that when you rescued the Princess the game was only about half over) and FFIV. All new RPGs, from the Tales series to Star Ocean and so forth, have this very weird action-oriented gameplay where you run around a map whacking things ala an arcade fighter and control any one party member while the CPU controls the others. It’s like Mystic Quest but even worse, because I’m expecting the computer to be adept at dodging it’s own attacks. And these party members, that I don’t have control of, why they could be using my good healing potions all willy-nilly or annihilating their MP casting a SuperDeath spell on a Level 2 Elfling or something! For shame!
    .
    The only such series I’ve been any good at has been Kingdom Hearts, and I get the feeling it’s been toned down to make it enjoyable to kids whose just want to watch Donald Duck throw a tantrum and save the world. At least I know that Suikoden will love me.

  6. Ouch. The sudden Dylan lyrics in the Medusa article, though admittedly apropos, hurt my brain. But, uh, it’s a good hurt? Maybe?

  7. Also, going completely off topic, what’s this wild rumor I hear about Tomm being snatched up by Konami localization? Tomm?

  8. Not to put words in his mouth (though I will readily steal them from his blog), I have it on pretty good authority (http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=7554331&publicUserId=5477956 ) that Tomm will not, in fact, be working for Konami localization. Konami yes, localization, no.
    .
    Though I would like to take the opportunity to start a new internet rumor that his employment with the organization was sealed via a wicked round of Metal Gear Solid online versus none other than Hideo Kojima himself.

  9. Ryan Payton may have been involved, but I think I’ll perpetuate that Kojima rumor instead…

    Ocelots to the left of me… Ocelots to the right… That’s when I got serious…

    Anyway, if I was happy doing Localization I would have stayed at Atlus forever. No need to move to Konami–KojiPro does the localization themselves now. And, I already made a career out of spelling mythological creatures’ names correctly. Why would I move on to a company that spelled them incorrectly?

    Rip and tear, rip and tear… Design’s the thing baby, and I’m the man. I’m a bad man. I’m an Associate Producer.

    (note: sorry for the entirely random mashup of references)

  10. way to live the dream, tomm =) pave the way for the rest of us.

    (goes back to yelling at trauma center)

  12. Ah, fond memories of the Zine… the only magazine that I ever read straight through. I thought that I had something pithy to say. Oh, well.

  13. Ninja 5-0 is awesome. I really like Chain Dive, which is kind of/sort of/not realy/but close enough to being its console equivalent.

  14. I always loved the footnotes, but it are freaking annoying to have to read and then find your place again. I thought there had to be a better way.

  15. If you click “back” at the end of each footnote you’ll be taken immediately back to the jumping-off point. I find it are pretty convenient.

  16. Good article. I liked FFIX, but not enough to get all worked up about in front of strangers. It had the best story, I thought. The only console RPG that made me feel like I was playing a pen-and-paper campaign was FF Tactics.

  17. shivam: Wasn’t really fond of the story, but I can tell that Square “borrowed” ideas from it for FF6. But I still wished Enix of America hadn’t copped out, and cancelled their release of the PS remake of DQ4.

  18. “dragon warrior 4 is well worth emulating. i played it again recently, and man, the story was brilliant.” I agree. I’ve always felt that 4 had the best story of all of the NES Dragon Warrior games. But I also think the gameplay wasn’t that great in 4, especially in the last chapter. I think 3 had the best gameplay of all of the NES DW games.
    Also – Congratulations Tomm. An associate producer is you!

  19. Damn, does it mean I’m worth less than faux salt if my first RPG experience was Final Fantasy VIII? Than VII? ‘Cause I know my RPG cred is already looking pretty bad, having only really played Square RPGs.

  21. legend of Legaia was damn near my last RPG experience, really…god, that game was laughable.

    And re DW4, its not so much the content of the story as how they presented it–separate chapters with separate characters that all eventually came together in the end for a really solid climax. Suikoden 3 tried to do this, and came pretty close, even, but the end game left a lot to be desired.

  22. My first was Scherezade for the NES (I think that’s what the title was), playing on my great-uncle’s borrowed NES. I was promptly exposed to DWII and Zelda after that though, thank god. Didn’t get to play the original FF until I had played halfway through 4 (we’re talking back in the SNES days, no emus) though.

  23. Bah, PS1-era Squaresoft RPG gamers are total posers! Just kidding. Sort of.
    And Jeremy, maybe it’s just me, but I disagree with your point of view on Medusae heads being the defining pain in the ass of the game. First, those damn crows. Secondly, after the last level of Castlevania III, I now have a fear of bats.

  24. I liked that chapter idea, too, but I just wished they did more with Necrosaro’s character. It seemed kind of sad that he was caught up in something he couldn’t control, and I was kind of hoping for a “happy” ending for him. Plus some of the supporting characters got lost in the shuffle. Still, it was fun, in spite of the new-fangled AI for the party which made it tougher to win. (Though at least it wasn’t as annoying as the kind they came up with for Phantasy Star 2…)

  25. Mmm…PSII wasn’t that bad. Bad is some of the JRPGs that have been translated since the advent of the Internets. Try playing Madara for NES and the Cyber Knight series for SNES…that’s some bad AI. At least in PSII you could tell individual party members what exactly to do instead of just pointing them at the enemy and doing the equivalent of “Kill, kill!”

  26. MightyBlue: Always wanted to check out Magic of Scheherazerade-not to mention Flying Warriors-but I played Little Ninja Bros instead. But I ended up showing more interest in it than River City Ransom.

  27. I still wished Enix of America hadn’t copped out

    Actually, Big G, (and I have to explain this every time it comes up), Enix of America wanted with all its might to bring out the IV remake. But the people doing programming for localization are not the American branch–they’re the Japanese developer. So, as you might recall, after finishing the remake, the developer of Dragon Quest VII / IV Remake resigned from Enix, it made an American version of the remake impossible. I have spoken to the people who were at Enix at the time, and they did everything they could–but there was no way for it to ever see release.

  29. and in japan, the ps1 remake of DQ4 still commands top dollar in used stores.

    tomm, trauma center is _hard_.

  30. AoF.Squall

    Well hey, if my first taste of the RPG fruit were of FFIV-VI most everything after would have kinda sucked by comparison, right?

    And that totally awesome justifcation is hiding my deep, unending shame too, right?

  31. ROFL. The FF series is not the paragon of RPG series. It’s good yeah, and some installments are really good true, but don’t buy into the Square’s #1 propaganda. There are plenty of RPGs pre- and post-FF4-6 that are just as good or better.

  32. Yeah, I was going to expicitly relate that statment to only the FF seris for fear someone would think thats what I meant.

  34. GAT–America does the translation, but that wasn’t the problem. PUTTING IT INTO THE GAME can only be done by the developer. Japanese companies don’t “give up the source code” as it were.

  35. Tomm: But if they were working for Enix when they left, shouldn’t Enix technically own the rights to the source code?

  36. “There are plenty of RPGs pre- and post-FF4-6 that are just as good or better.”
    Read: Lufia II. Yum. Among many others, of course. Phantasy Star IV has always been one of my favorites, lightyears ahead of it’s competition in mood and presentation.
    –
    You know what I really, truly dearly miss? The oldschool Enix-style Action RPGs of the SNES era. Those are some of my favoirte games ever. Soul Blazer, Lagoon, others I can’t remember…

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