It’s Thursday, and Thursday means it’s time for massive human rights violations free pudding another Retro Roundup. No Retronauts, though. It’s sometimes difficult to work up the wherewithal to record a podcast when you are inherently introverted.
It occured to me as I was working through Lunar Knights that Boktai is living proof of Hideo Kojima’s burning jealousy.
Kojima’s baby is Metal Gear, of course, but clearly he feels hemmed in by his connection to the series since he announces that each and every chapter will totally be the last one overseen by him, no really I mean it this time. What would he do if not post-modern militarism? Obviously, the man wants to oversee Castlevania. But no, they gave it to some newcomer instead. Oh, how it must have galled Kojima to see the apple of his eye handed over to the comparatively inexperienced Koji Igarashi, all because he was tied down by the corporate mandate to make the Arsenal Gear sequence as verbose and inscrutible as possible. Imagine the wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The reserved, anal-retentive fury!
Yet what could he do? Metal Gear Solid 3 was in the works, and even if he was sick of being the series overlord he still couldn’t bring himself to leave his baby in someone else’s hands, even if it meant a shot at adding metatextual commentary to the next Castlevania. After all, if he let someone else direct MGS3, how could he be sure the game would hit its quota of crotch-grabbing and jokes about Eve’s breasts? And so he stayed with Metal Gear, though it galled him.
But an outlet came in the form of Boktai. But since Konami already had a platform series about killing vampires, they were like, “Why not make it like Metal Gear?” And he was like, “But I’m totally sick of Metal Gear.” And they were like, “But we’ll give you a vanity label.” And he was like, “Ahhhh yeah.” Well, that’s how I imagine it went. I wasn’t there so some of the specifics might be off.
Anyway, Lunar Knights has two hot-swappable playable characters, one of whom is a physical powerhouse while the other uses spirit-based ranged attacks. And there’s a level called 13th Street. So, basically, it’s an isometric Portrait of Ruin.
Sadly, there is no stylus-based zombie-giblet blasting to be found so far. Still a pretty good game, though.
“Pretty good game”? Uh-oh. Disappointment-ton confirmed.
P. S. I see myself as “logged in as jparish”. What the dilly-o? Server/spam troubles?
“No Retronauts, though. It’s sometimes difficult to work up the wherewithal to record a podcast when you are inherently introverted.”
*I* hear that Jeremy Parish actually died, and 1up hasn’t been able to find anyone who sounds like him yet to run the podcasts.
Someone with the talent of Kojima should do more things than just MGS. But, well we know money runs this bussiness.
By the way, will retronauts ever talk about Street Fighter? :)
I thought it was really clear since Boktai 1 that it’s homage to the trinity of video games Castlevania, Zelda and Metal Gear.
Oh, sure, the what has always been obvious. The why, however, has only just dawned on me.
The why actually makes sense though. It was only the failure to make the connection (Kojima being indentured to the MGS series + his wanting to work on something else). I can only hope that whatever he’s thinking of for the Wii can give him some sort of reprieve. He has REALLY been wanting to work on the Wii, right?
I call crotch grabs a “Metal Gear Handshake”. As in its most recent useage, “I have no idea whether our server is male or female, and I don’t intend on giving Captain Androgyny there a Metal Gear Handshake to find out.”
I never figured out why the President didn’t just ask Raiden what his gender was instead of feeling him up.
Because he’s the president. Try to talk to Bush without getting your meat touched.
I’ll pass, thanks.
Didn’t you know? In Japan it’s considered rude to ask someone what gender they are, but the country is filled with completely androgynous people. When you must know a person’s gender, a simple crotch grab suffices to avoid the embarrassing question.
No no no. All you guys are wrong. That his how people greet each other in America. God you people are dumb.
Did they leave in the solar sensor support that was previously unveiled (namely: put a Boktai game into the DS’s GBA slot)? If so, have you tried this out? I’d assume that the virtual weather on the top screen makes it kind of unnecessary, but it’d be nice to have if I were ever playing it on a picnic or something. Boktai = #1 picnic game ever!
What I’d like is them to pull a Phoenix Wright on the original trilogy by updating it for the DS, with the virtual weather system replacing the solar sensor. Added plus: the third game would get another shot at coming over.
Yeah, slotting in a GBA Boktai cart gives you a few bonuses — you can buy extra sound data for the music test, and collecting light in the sensor adds extra bars to the sun meter. It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice way to get ahead. Light collected by the sensor is added to your solar bank, and it lets you have an advantage during cloudy in-game weather. Since you can use equipment that offers huge stat bonuses under cloudy skies, the sensor lets you have the best of both worlds. (And it’s possible to change the in-game weather to be almost permanently cloudy, if you want to be a cheap bastard.)
God, that was a jumbled, incoherent mess.
Jeremy
This is the third week without a Retronauts podcast. :( I can understand the holiday break. Please don’t tell us the podcast has been discontinued (which would be a big disappointment)? What happened to the episode that you were going to do about game music? Also, in a previous podcast Chris Kohler eluded to a podcast that discussed Donkey Kong (at which point you cut him off stating that the podcast had been recorded but not yet released so Kohler shouldn’t discuss it). What happened to that podcast? I’d love to hear it…even if it is in the old format, which I enjoyed as much as the new format.
Jet Pilot
Your incoherent messes are better than my coherent ones.
So you’ve played it? How are the 3D space-shooter levels? They didn’t look very good last time I saw them, but I’m wondering if it plays better than it looks.