Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

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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Capping off the year with bad opinions: a Random Hoo Haas tradition

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 at 11:39 pm Comments Off on Capping off the year with bad opinions: a Random Hoo Haas tradition

I’d intended it to just be another blog post, but then it spiralled out of control and I figured I might as well give it its own page.

And – you won’t believe this – the old Games I Own page got updated with some scattered whatnots! I had some old reviews lying around and figured I’d chuck them up. I’ve no idea what I’m doing with that page these days — apparently I began crossing off games I no longer own? But the Other Games section is still dedicated to games I never owned or only owned temporarily…? — and the temptation to restructure the whole thing would be strong if I gave that much of a toss. We’ve all got bigger fish to fry, surely!

People are making a big hubbub about the new decade and it’s making me anxious. It’s just a Wednesday, folks. Whether that Wednesday sucks remains to be seen, but we’ll take it from there and see what happens. Maybe we can ask for a refund if it doesn’t live up to expectations.
I’m working on a project that I hope to roll out in a month or two, and I’m looking forward to see where it goes. I’ve a terrible track record with hyping up projects that inevitably go nowhere, so I’ll try not to jinx myself!

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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Always never not timely

Friday, August 9, 2019 at 12:20 pm Comments Off on Always never not timely

So I played a bit of Taisen! Bomberman back in 2016, recorded some footage and made the barest of notes, but I wasn’t desperate to cover it. I figured, hey, it’s an Android game! You don’t need access to a Japan-exclusive phone service just to play these games, so what’s the rush? It’s not like the game’s gonna disappear anytime soon and I’ll have to rely on the dodgiest of second-hand accounts to even learn what the game was about. Perish the thought!

Well, guess who’s frantically researching the game after hearing it’s getting delisted on August 26th. The 2014 game and 100 Man Bomberman Battle have already been delisted when I wasn’t looking! Both games can no longer connect to their networks and thus won’t progress past the title screen. I’ll let you know how that crow tastes.
Until then, please read the Taisen! Bomberman coverage, where Bomberman trades his shoes made of bubblegum for some corporate-branded running shoes.

“If I don’t play soon, I’ll die of boredom.”

Wednesday, June 12, 2019 at 12:47 pm Comments Off on “If I don’t play soon, I’ll die of boredom.”

Updated Scans & Bits with what you’d usually expect. More obscure Mario guff, rarities like some F-Zero and Landstalker manga, dumping raws on MEGA for the likes of Rockman ZX Advent, Ninja Turtles and Kirby, plus two new pages for game manuals and guidebooks.
Oh, and the officially licensed Shrek manga. Yeah, I had a double-take when I saw it existed too.

I had a case of the unwellies a few weeks ago which left me nigh-incapacitated… and it says a lot about my priorities that my first thought was, “now’s probably a good time to play Donkey Kong 64.” A debilitating flu really takes the guilt out of playing a nine thousand hour-long game!
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It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad (Bomberman) World

Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 9:21 pm Comments Off on It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad (Bomberman) World

The Bomberman Shrine Place updated with coverage on Bomberman World, featuring a look at its quirky regional changes and smorgasbord of unused stuff, and also a translation of an interview from the Bomberman Maniax book. This game has been long, long overdue some coverage on the site, and it came about because I wanted to get into the ol’ map-making lark again. Nobody had made any for it yet!
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Some games I played in 2018

Monday, December 31, 2018 at 10:29 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2018

eyyy nothing better than updating your web browser only to find the newest version of my plugins stink and it now displays foreign language text in a needlessly bulky font, ruining my otherwise lovingly-spaced page designs. I dread to see what it’s done to the Bomberman shrine!

What’s new this month?
Scans & Bits has a bunch of stuff because I wanna see people translate this stuff already (I’LL COMMISSION), including all of the Super Princess Peach and Sonic Generations manga, plus the rest of the Sly Cooper in my possession because it got a lot of buzz for some reason.
Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated with some reader submitted bits and bobs, including hopefully more user-friendly methods of accessing Metal Slug Advance’s unused stages and debug dipswitches.
The Bomberman Shrine is just some junk I had lying around, though the Pocket Bomberman page is worth a goosey if just for its unused material, complete with .IPS patch so you can sample some of it yourself!

It’s that time again: writing thoughts about the media I gorged over the past 12 months. At this point this routine is just a formality for my ailing memory – I keep needing to remind myself, yes, I’ve beaten Star Fox Command and gotten all the endings, I can’t just keep making excuses to play it again!
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“Have a 腐臭 day!”

Monday, October 1, 2018 at 3:54 pm Comments Off on “Have a 腐臭 day!”

You’ll have to forgive me for still being on my manga research kick. It’s just such a novelty, y’know? I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I felt so starved for video game ephemera as a youngster it was a blessing to see any video game franchise as merchandise, as a comic, whatever. I’m not sure if we even had Nintendo comics published in the UK, Nintendo Power and Valiant being such American staples; the closest we got were the two Sonic the Hedgehog comics and the occasional surprise in other magazines such as Max Overload, but it was slim pickings.

And then you turn to Japan and it seemed like it was coming down in video game media – more than I can count in the ’80s alone! Whether or not they were good is a whole other matter, but seeing obtuse one-and-done games like Star Force or Pirate Ship Higemaru getting a manga treatment just seems wild… and they’re darn near undocumented online. I could argue they’re interesting little nuggets of history, but I think that’s just me trying to sugar-coat my big dumb obsessions.

Just on a lark, I figured I’d make a somewhat chronological list of serialised Mario manga from 1985 to the mid-2000; I’d already been keeping tabs on these in my notes for Scans & Bits, but there was no point making proper sections for them until I had actual material of my own to share. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s more out there; if working on the Bomberman media section has taught me anything, the moment you think you’re 100% comprehensive, three more obscure manga appear out of the woodwork!
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193rd DUNK: Infringement?! Slam Courtroom!!

Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 10:37 pm Comments Off on 193rd DUNK: Infringement?! Slam Courtroom!!

As part of research and documentation for Scans & Bits, I bought what could be scientifically described as a shit-ton of Comic Bom Bom. I definitely had to document Dr. Mario-kun, I wanted to get the full run of Ganbare Goemon, and I was curious about all those Ninja Turtles manga. But these 700+ page magazines are always full of funky curiosities, be it bizarre toy phenomena of the early 90s, coverage of video games long forgotten, or just its strange bevy of manga I’d otherwise never heard of.

The series that really got me guffawing with shock and awe in every instalment I saw was Katsuyuki Toda’s DANDAN Dunk! (DANDANだんく!), a sports manga following the pint-sized Makishima Dunk (or Danku, but where’s the fun in that) who makes up for his lack of height with some bomb-ass basketball skills. What sets it apart from other dry sports dramas is its joyous disregard for any attachment to reality – every episode I’ve seen goes some real crazy places!
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