E3 is almost upon us, so there's no better time for me to pull out old stuff I scanned in just before I moved that has nothing to do with E3.
I was looking through some old Game Players issues from late 1995 when I noticed that 3DO's ad campaign sort of sucked. I suppose it says enough that it took me 12 years just to look at them long enough to see that they sucked, but it gets worse when you actually start reading them.
TRUE FACTS: Street Fighter creator Yoshiki Okamoto was visiting the United States for the first time in 1968 when his mother was tragically run down in the street by a red, white and blue monster truck driven by John Wayne with Hank Williams blaring out the windows. Young Okamoto returned to his home country fostering a burning hatred in his heart for all things American, and swore then and there to get revenge on the nation that had subjected him to Hank Williams (and also killed his mother).
He spent the next twenty years obsessively researching ancient rituals that would call forth the dark magicks he required. Even after being hired on at Capcom he would lock himself away in his office for days at a time, refusing food and water, practicing incantations and honing his skills. His hair grew grey and brittle; his skin grew hard and scaly as his infernal work consumed him, but when a test of his powers resulted in the release of Yo! Noid in America, he knew he was ready.
Late the next night at Capcom HQ, the building was empty save for Okamoto. He cackled and sang softly to himself while tracing elaborate patterns on the floor in fresh goat's blood, and when the preparations were done he mumbled some words of a dead language and then proclaimed loudly to the air:
"You may have my characters -- you may see them, you may play them, you may even have Jean Claude Van Damme pretend to be one of them. But you will never be able.... to draw them!"
Then it turned out there was also a janitor in the building and he came in and got kinda peeved about the blood thing.
First, a programming note: I'm going to try changing the schedule a bit starting next week. The Saturday Scan will no longer be a weekly feature, but rather I'll try to have some sort of original content on Saturday. Sometimes scans, but also articles and features and all that other crap I've been putting off doing.
But now on to a more important issue: Why are athletes always having earth-shattering orgasms mid-game?
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - Put Your Game Face On" »
This week's Saturday Scan is less of a teaching-about-some-obscure-crap thing and more of a question thing.
I've never been on an airplane in my life, so I have zero experience with this thing. Luckily, extensive Nielsen research tells me that the audience for Error Macro is comprised entirely of international jetsetters. So: Anyone ever used it? Is it still around? Does it still offer 15 year old SNES games? I notice that the Nintendo Gateway website is still up, albeit with a copyright that says 2001 and web design that says 1997. It lists Gamecube games for the hotel system and GBA titles for the airline system -- as far as I can tell, Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls is the most recent title available -- so I guess it still must be in use somewhere. But really, how far are you going to get in Dawn of Souls on even the longest flight?
I'm also curious about the handful of Japanese games (Panel de Pon, Picross 2, Yakuman, etc) listed, given that the site is in English, the instructions are in English, and there's a column for ESRB ratings but not Japanese CERO ratings. There don't seem to be any region restrictions on offering any of these titles, so it's possible that they were available for play on American flights. Though that does make having Panel de Pon and Tetris Attack on the same list kind of redundant.
Also:
Disclaimer: Please do not actually believe that the Gateway controller had any influence on the design of the Wii remote.
With the ever growing fleet of non-game applications for the DS -- from dictionaries to Internet browsers to English trainers to a cookbook -- I've been reminded of a similar attempt by GameTek in 1991 to give PDA-type functions to the original Game Boy. Needless to say, it didn't fare quite so well.
With the start of the new year, everyone is making predictions for the next 12 months. Even the people at Gamasutra, who should really know better, are asking which console will "win" in 2007. Because scanning things from the future is a very costly and time consuming venture, the Saturday Scan deals mostly in the past. The only way to reconcile these two facts is to look back at looking ahead -- namely, Ultra Game Players' 50 predictions for 1997.
The people at UGP weren't completely off their nut, so you won't see any "by year end, we'll all have personal holodecks" type claims here, but it does serve as a strong reminder of all the major issues we were dealing with 10 years ago. If you'd like, you can give yourself one lashing for every month past January '97 that you still believed the 64DD was coming to America.
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - The Future of the Past" »
This is the third and final entry in the Days of Mana series, chronicling everything from the Lime Slime to a trip to the moon to the attack on the Mana Fortress. The Fortress has to be one of my least favorite final dungeons. It's long and winding, with no save points and several bosses (which made SoM's inventory limit all the more annoying), and then it ends with one of the worst bosses in RPG history. Hey, y'know those party members you've been hanging around with? Can't use 'em! Y'know that magic you've been levelling up? Won't work! Y'know those weapons we gave you and told you to use whatever you liked best? Hope what you liked best was the sword, because that's the only one you can use now! I had dumped the sword as soon as I got the spear and never went back, so I couldn't charge it past level 1 which makes the fight a little.. difficult. Bah.
So anyway, Days of Mana.
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - Days of Mana, Part 3" »
After scanning part one of Nintendo Power's Days of Mana special last week, I concluded the best thing to do would be to follow it up with part two this week. But then I'm a bit of a radical.
This week, we see a strangely chicken-beaked Flammie, travels ranging from deserts to plains of snow, and one of the most hangdog pictures of Santa Claus ever created.
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - Days of Mana, Part 2" »
Much to the dismay of everyone who comes to the Saturday Scan exclusively for pictures of people from the '80s wearing funny clothes, I'm doing something a little different the next couple weeks. Days of Mana was a special feature focusing on Squaresoft's Secret of Mana that spanned three months of Nintendo Power starting in July of 1994. This in itself was unusual, as the magazine typically focused on new games, and Secret of Mana had been released in America in November of 1993.
But the feature was unusual all around. While most games got a kind of mini-strategy guide in the magazine -- usually annotated maps for the first few levels -- Days of Mana covered the entire course of Secret of Mana, from the beginning straight to the final boss. And yet for all it's length (or perhaps because of it), it didn't really offer much in the way of strategy beyond occassionally mentioning what spell worked well against a boss. It's primarily just a journal, written from the perspective of the main character, documenting the events of the game as they unfold.
The question becomes, then, why they would dedicate a total of 36 pages over three months to simply describing a single game released a half year earlier. In the issue preceding this one, they had an additional 4 pages talking about what made Secret of Mana appealing, even pulling out charts to demonstrate the lasting appeal of the adventure/RPG genre over action games.
My only guess is that it was a genuine effort on Nintendo's part to help RPGs gain a larger American audience. People could simply read what happens in the game and become interested -- after all, I couldn't write 36 pages about what happens in Contra -- and you wouldn't scare them off with the stuffy statistics of traditional RPGs. This may just sound like good business, but I've always been a little surprised at how open NP was to covering this niche genre that they themselves often said didn't quite "fit" with American sensibilities. I mean, they gave Illusion of Gaia a cover over Super Punch-Out!!, for God's sake.
So read on and enjoy remembering all the bits of SoM you've forgotten, or just look at the.. unique artistic interpretations of the game's characters (moogles are polar bears with wings, it seems). And if you've never played an RPG, who knows. Maybe, even 12 years later, the article will serve its purpose and get you interested.
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - Days of Mana, Part 1" »
In light of the recent Sony PSP viral marketing debacle, let's take a look at another example of what happens when grey-haired ad men try to be down with the kids. In this case, it's a six page spread in Nintendo Power debuting their, uh.. memorable campaign meant to combat Sega's winning in-your-face attitude: Play It Loud.
In 1990, a mere 90 people got the chance we all dreamed of as kids: to cart their downs syndrome little brother to CALA-FOR-NYA for a chance to play NES games on giant screens in front of screaming crowds. Except, without the little brother. And.. it was in Orlando instead of California. Well actually, it was supposed to be Orlando, then they changed it... Look, there were NES games and big screens, and that's what's important.
Appearing in Volume 18 of Nintendo Power, the following are just a few of the contestants from around the country who made it to the Nintendo PowerFest 1990 finals.
God, I wish I could find tapes of these Oprah and Regis appearances. Anyway, we'll just skip a head a few issues and find out who won. Uh.. Hello? Winners?
Oh there they are, stuffed into one corner of Nintendo Power's letters section. And previously profiled Thor Aackerlund is the biggest winner, with a score 500,000 points higher than his previous best. I've heard it suggested that Nintendo wasn't very happy with Thor's deal with Camerica Games to sponsor their crap (see the bottom two ads here), and maybe that's why they uncerimoniously threw in the winners list here rather than making it a feature. Or maybe they realized no one cared.
You can actually find quite a bit of reading material just by searching for Thor Aackerlund's name -- it's one of those dream names for Internet researchers, one you can type into Google and not possibly find anything other than the guy you're looking for. There's a letter from a 26 year old Thor here, featuring a photo of him, apparently taken in a hardware store, alongside his girlfriend/wife and his frightening eyebrows. There's an interview with Adam Misosky, one of the other finalists, here, in which he talks about his experience at the event and mentions the last-minute change of venue from Orlando to Hollywood. There's also a lengthy description of the 1994 PowerFest with a number of (admittedly small) photos here.
And it just goes on like this. Mobygames has the cover art for Bee 52, another awful Camerica title little Thor was contractually obligated to praise. The best part is the "For the 8-bit game deck from Nintendo of America, Inc" note. They were so unlicensed they didn't even dare call the system by name. You can also read more about the history of Camerica here. And I think that's enough of that for one day.
While my design document for an RPG featuring a team of badgers fighting an evil empire in the fantasy land of Lea'gh'honalben'on is still under review (how can it fail? It has a desert dungeon, an ice dungeon, and a fire dungeon! Shifting paradigms!), it's given me time to consider the question: What makes a good game? Ah, screw that. What makes a game that will sell? Luckily, the April 2000 issue of PC Gamer is here to answer my questions.
And this is unrelated to everything else, but I have to scan the cover because I never knew anyone could make the Quake guy look cute.
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - Cliffy's Design School" »
Woooaaaahhhh this update is XTTTREEEEEEEEMMMMEEEE!!!! Hang ten! Cowabunga! Catch air! Gleam the cube! Post no bills!
Our long national nightmare is almost over. In just one more day, I'll have no occassion to type the word "launch" for another five years. In the remaining time, on the eve of the launch (there it is again!) of Nintendo's latest console, let's take a quick look back on where we (and they) were ten and then five years ago.
I'll probably have to do something of more historical significance next week for the launch of the PS3 and Wii, but in the meantime, let's just look at pretty pictures. This week, we examine the evolution of everyone's favorite dragon/turtle thing, Bowser Koopa, through the main entries of the Mario series. The rush of nostalgia is sure to make it even more painful that Mario Galaxy won't be launching with the Wii.
Continue reading "The Saturday Scan - Reptilian Evolution" »