Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

Talking about RPGs because I don’t know!!

Monday, October 19, 2020 at 9:59 pm Comments (0)

I dread being asked what my favourite anything is. I’ve a whole lotta favourites! Literal stacks of favourites that I shuffle between depending on the mood or time of day! It’s like asking what my favourite pair of socks is — I cycle them! You can’t ask me to rank one pair of socks above the other! They’re all the same colour! And it’s at that point the analogy begins to fall apart. Not unlike my socks, actually.

This stinks because I sure would like to engage with folks on Twitter a bit more often, but unless it’s a multi-tweet thread about a topic that’s of interest only to myself and no one else living or dead, then I typically don’t wanna do it. I do appreciate folks daring to tag me in tweets, but it invariably results in a week of hand-wringing whether I’ll respond or not… and then not responding anyway because to reply after waiting a week just feels rude. Rest assured I read all emails, DMs and correspondence, and I appreciate it and give them a lot of thought, and then rarely actually put those thoughts into a reply. I don’t think that’s very reassuring, actually. My apologies.

Whatever point I was trying to make, I assume it applies to when pal herrDoktorat tagged me in naming iconic RPGs I’ve played in my life. There’s maybe a dozen I’ve played long enough for me to say with confidence I have played them, but RPGs aren’t really my strong suit…! To name off three game titles without context doesn’t gel with my brand of being needlessly fucking verbose, so let’s just rattle off all the RPGs I’ve played enough to have a tangible opinion on. I never said they’d be good opinions, so I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the court! You’re talking to a man who associates Mario with RPGs more than flippin’ Dragon Quest…!

Final Fantasy VII

My introduction to RPGs! A friend of my dad’s just gave the game to us for whatever reason, and it was unlike anything we’d played before. I, as a dumb youngster, was put off by the fact you couldn’t jump. Why have all these detailed 3D environments if you can’t jump!? But watching my brother play it was fascinating, seeing the story play out through text and many varied setpieces and environments. When Shadows of the Empire on Nintendo 64 was as cinematic as a console game had gotten in our experience, this was a whole other kettle of fish.

Because Europe missed out on so many iconic JRPGs, this was probably how most folks were introduced to the genre? Without Chrono Trigger or the like, the only alternatives were obscure Game Boy titles or flippin’ Rings of Power on Mega Drive, I don’t know. Even in America it seems like the first RPG to take on mainstream success, thanks to its big-budget advertising campaign.
As such, it’s kind of resulted in a lot of people reading the game the wrong way; for your first RPG to tackle a complex narrative and themes of unreliable narrators and withheld memories is going to cause some complexities, even before you factor in its iffy translation. I should be the last person to judge people for reading a story the wrong way, (Dok will attest to my lousy reading comprehension), but it’d be nice if people got their personalities right once in a while. Aeris is meant to be spunky!
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The lost fangames of Kirby’s Rainbow Resort

Thursday, August 27, 2020 at 8:40 pm Comments Off on The lost fangames of Kirby’s Rainbow Resort

Because I’ve already gotten a headstart on being a very wordy bastard, Some games I played in 2020 is up, though unfinished, as you might expect. Check back in four months and I might have some shockingly tepid takes on Persona 3! Though it’s likely I’ll have more to say about Croc 2. You know what I’m like.

And of course, Scans & Bits updated with the last missing episode of Crash Bandicoot Dance Jump Daibouken, some more CoroCoro Sonic, and also links to more scanning and  translation efforts, as well more MEGA uploads of Fami2Comic and Dengeki Nintendo. My scanner’s currently on the fritz, so I can’t tackle the stacks of magazines I still need to scan in full. If there is a hell, that is absolutely not among the list of tortures, but darn it, I’m upset.

I assumed my internet connection was just being dodgy, but it seems longtime ClassicGaming-era fansite Kirby’s Rainbow Resort has finally shuttered this year. There’s still a gateway page, but almost all of the pages have vanished — not even replaced with a 404 error, but simply blank white pages! The forums are still accessible, though largely abandoned and plagued with PHP and MySQL errors… yet some of the site’s oldest pages are still alive, strangely.
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Just what sort of world is Angel Land where Pit has adventures?

Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 2:37 pm Comments Off on Just what sort of world is Angel Land where Pit has adventures?

Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated with unused objects in MS7 and Advance among other things, sourced from reader submissions that have been sitting in my inbox for at least two years. I don’t know what I do to deserve this kind of support, but y’all might wanna reconsider. Why, you can drop this stuff on TCRF without having to wait on me to get off my keister!

I’ve been on an inexplicable Kid Icarus kick lately, for some reason. It’s a game that’s always stood out among the early first-party NES library, automatically earning a reputation as the counterpart to Metroid in some capacity. Paired with its Game Boy sequel and prolific appearance in the likes of Captain N, for years it felt like a franchise that was forever missing in action, at least until Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Uprising gave it a very anime makeover.
Unlike other NES titles of its time, it’s a game you don’t quite immediately ‘get’ within just 30 second of playing. Most folks’ impression of the game is largely based off of climbing for a bit, entering doors that lead to nowhere, then falling down a pit and turning the game off. Not quite as pick-up-and-play as the likes of Balloon Fight, is it?

I figured I’d finally give the game the time of day, and did so by playing the 3D Classic version on 3DS, which offers a new “custom” mode that eliminates Pit’s slidey movement and allows you to slow his descent while falling. It doesn’t undo all the game’s old-fashioned quirks, but paired with the digital manual, it made the game that bit more accessible to a total rando otherwise unacquainted with the game. The price is still something worth balking at (someone please put bricks through Nintendo’s windows until they re-evaluate their dodgy prices), but paired with the colourful new backgrounds it’s at least a better show than just a raw Virtual Console release with no extras.
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BHB: Big Honkin’ Bombs

Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 7:17 pm Comments Off on BHB: Big Honkin’ Bombs

Updated with some Scans & Bits, including the last remaining chapters of Sly Cooper, the final episode of Mutant Turtles ’96, the missing episode of Crash Bandicoot Dance! Jump! Daibouken, a few more scraps of Dr. Mario-kun and Shogakukan’s Sonic the Hedgehog, and all but the intro of the short-lived Advance Wars manga.

Under the cut: waffling about the story of Bomberman games, and the one story that actually made a good impression on me. Riveting stuff, I know.
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Get lost on Zebes!

Sunday, December 15, 2019 at 8:16 pm Comments Off on Get lost on Zebes!

I’m falling behind on reporting site updates here, especially when that’s all my Twitter is for these days. Do people still use RSS for that type of thing? Are my RSS feeds even visible in this terrible layout? Well, whatever. Old habits die hard.

Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated with more unused object documentation and other bits and bobs. This one, like all its updates in the past years, is possible thanks to reader submissions like yours. Please send less of them.

The Bomberman shrine updated with new coverage for GB 3, GREE and the Taisen * series, plus updates to World, Saturn and Neo. It’s practically all about cameos! Taisen *’s littered in cameos! Saturn Bomberman was going to have more cameos, judging by unused voices in the data…!

More Scans & Bits, because it requires no thinking on my part. Sonic, Sly Cooper, Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and other guff. Also, do check out translations for Chou Soujuu Mecha MG and Sly Cooper!

For the past few months I’ve been posting gameplay videos on my YouTube channel every Friday, typically of fangames, mobile phone games, or stuff nobody otherwise wants to document. Some of them feature text commentary, where I get to bust out contextual titbits on the games’ development tools or fangame scene at the time, based purely on a few months of lurking in the early 2000s. This month I’ve been putting out two videos a week, mostly to burn through backlog, but also to free up time for a new project that’ll hopefully appear on the site in the new year. Get excited! Or don’t! Everything’s subjective! And you know what I’m like with premature announcements!

I’d gotten multiple requests (not they came from multiple people or anything) to document games from Metroid: Fan Mission, a now-expired fan game hub. Fan game projects have a terrible habit of going offline without anyone noticing, taking with them practically all evidence of their existence, and seeing a whole hub go down is a shame. I’m more miffed about the multiple Star Fox fangames that have completely disappeared without a trace, but that’s for me to fume about in my own time.
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Wild Guns: Live & Reloaded

Friday, February 9, 2018 at 9:02 pm Comments Off on Wild Guns: Live & Reloaded

Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated recently with some debug menu gubbins for 7 and XX. Still holding out for that debug menu in Metal Slug Advance! Anything to close the book on that game!

I’ve been playing a heck of a lot of Wild Guns lately, both the SNES original and the fancy-pants Reloaded edition. For some reason it’s simply pushing all my buttons, it’s the exact type of game I want to play at this point in time! It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s intense, and it pushes me to play better with every attempt. I’ve finished the game on the hardest difficulty with all characters in one credit on both versions now, and I’m still playing it… partly because I don’t know what to move on to next! Bot Vice, maybe?
I’m still kicking myself for short-changing the game’s new content in my last “Some games I played in 2017” post, though I’m shocked there still isn’t a good list laying out all the changes and differences yet. The game’s been out for over a year! Not that it’s a huge deal, the preview trailers do a decent job of showing the highlights, but I’ve been playing both versions so much I want to get it down just for posterity.
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Some games I played in 2017

Sunday, December 31, 2017 at 10:10 pm Comments (1)

Sneaking in a quick Bomberman update with Bomberman 2001, a game that barely existed as a game. Any chance of finding new information it via search engines had already been squandered when at least three forum threads sprung up about it, so I might as well chuck this up. If someone happened to have raided that E3 booth seventeen years ago and done a runner with its contents, maybe we’ll learn something!
Despite no intentions of another yearly review article, I still keep track of the media I consume. I played nearly sixty games this year and watched eighty-something movies… and I’ve, like, barely anything to say about any of them. I’ll try and squeeze out some thoughts on the noteworthy ones under the cut!
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More talkin’ ’bout manga peeps won’t care about

Sunday, May 7, 2017 at 1:39 pm Comments (2)

I don’t want to make this a routine, but you might have guessed (because I’ve become incredibly predictable ever since I exchanged my personality for nerd-ass obsessions) I bought another Japanese gaming magazine for the sole Bomberman comic in it: the August 2007 issue of Fami2Comic.

It’s kind of interesting comparing this to the Dengeki Nintendo I also acquired for the same silly reason; despite being an offshoot of Famitsu, the hot shot magazine whose reviews were taken as gospel for years until people realised, huh, they sure do like bribes, don’t they, Fami2Comic feels like the definition of “second-stringer”. You look at that other blog post and the games its manga were based off, and there wasn’t a game there that wasn’t some manner of international success. Fossil Fighters probably ranked higher than Bomberman during that period in terms of awareness and popularity! (during that comic’s run there was only ONE Bomberman game on shelves… in Japan, Europe and Australia only. welp!) There are four years between the two issues, mind – Dengeki’s lineup might’ve been trash when this one came out for all I know.
I thought it’d be amusing to do another quick looksie at the manga Fami2Comic has to offer, and it’s probably the only spotlight they’ll be getting on the English internet anytime soon, so why the heck not.
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Some games I played in 2016

Saturday, December 31, 2016 at 2:58 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2016

Wow, I’m punctual for once in my life! I admit after 2015 (which should be finished sometime soon-ish) I realised I’m running out of opinions even I could be bothered reading, so I figured a blog post with a few lines for each game would be enough. If there’s a game I really need to waffle about in detail, I’ll probably find an outlet for it, but until then, read on!
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Please consume my wares.

Saturday, May 21, 2016 at 9:30 pm Comments Off on Please consume my wares.

Chucking up some game reviews because it’s been a while since I’ve used the blog for bloggin’! That and I forgot how bare some of the ONM Remembered entries were. I finally began to highlight images without commentary to spare myself the trouble and hope it’d give the image some time to be appreciated… but it just looks like lazy content. Welp! The next couple of weeks are a bit wordier, talking about topics that are probably only interesting to me and nobody else. That’s what you come here for, right?
… anyway, here’s a rambly review.

A few years ago my brother was raving about Treasure Adventure Game, a freeware indie 2D platform game that just ticked all his boxes: it had a huge world to explore, all sorts of little details and activities to appreciate, a day-night system that dictated each NPC’s daily routine, and the simple thrill of just riding around in a boat. It was darn-near his favourite game! I didn’t get into it at the time (because jeez, unskippable intros, what a bore!), but I picked it up earlier this year to give it a look-see.
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