Quick post this morning to publish a GameSpite Journal 9 piece that I somehow passed over: An interview with the creator of something called EarthBound Saga. I’m not entire sure how I feel about this whole thing. Dude seems to maybe take things a little too seriously considering he’s in his backyard making YouTube movies based on a video game. I’m not judging their work or anything; I just feel like there’s an inherent whimsy to EarthBound that doesn’t really come across here. Maybe I’ve been trolled?
Meanwhile, my latest weekend feature for 1UP is online as well, looking back at the Mega Man Battle Network games and attempting to scrutinize them in their proper context. Love them or hate them, they did at least push back Mega Man’s inevitable drift to irrelevance by several years.
The thing that amazed me with the MMBN series is how fast they started spitting them out. It wasn’t even one a year, I swear it got down to like 6-8 month gaps.
It felt to me like they were trying to get as many sequels out the door as possible while 2 was still fresh in people’s minds so people would buy up sequels before finishing what they had and seeing it was going downhill or something.
“It felt to me like they were trying to get as many sequels out the door as possible while 2 was still fresh in people’s minds so people would buy up sequels before finishing what they had and seeing it was going downhill or something.”
That pretty much applies both to the original MM series AND to Street Fighter, too. But yeah, MMBN seemed overkill even when compared to THOSE.
Ah, but can it be that Battle Network, in delaying Mega Man’s irrelevance, also hastened it with annual (or more often) releases?
I wonder if, in all those cases of dual releases (as with Pokemon), there’s a significant difference between the sales of each (does Pokemon Black sell more or less than White, for example?).
“Ah, but can it be that Battle Network, in delaying Mega Man’s irrelevance, also hastened it with annual (or more often) releases?”
It certainly burned out in a hurry.
Me, I wonder what would have happened if, say, Powered Up had been released for the DS.
The best thing about earthbound is that it seems whimsical but it’s a lot deeper than you realised by the end of the game.
Excellent retrospective for a series that deserves a second look. I ignored the Battle Network games for years before a friend of mine gave me a copy of MMBN3 and said “You will love this.”
What made that series unique was the way it scratched three itches simultaneously – action, RPG, and CCG. Sadly, after the first three games, Capcom seemed to want to minimize the deepest part, the CCG aspect, to give Mega Man himself more innate powers. I suppose it was easier to crank out sequels that way.