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In March, the strangest thing happened -- I began playing Gameboy Advance games. Well, I suppose you could say that the stranger thing was that I began receiving said games in the mail. From all over the world, those games were coming. One day in February, a PlayStation2 had arrived from one Mr. Clayton Myers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and American PlayStation2, so that gave me the idea to ask the people of the internet to send me videogames. See, I'd asked for the PlayStation2 as something of a joke; I didn't expect someone to actually send it. Mr. Myers, however, did indeed send it. I received it -- on Valentine's Day, actually -- and was filled with warmth.
On the day Mr. Myers emailed me to let me know the PlayStation2 was coming, I blogged long and long-windedly, about Penny Arcade's "Child's Play" program, wherein they request that gamers from around the world buy wonderful gaming-related items off an Amazon.com wishlist so as to brighten the holidays of disabled and/or otherwise hospitalized children. It's a great idea. It's a really nice social thing. What makes the idea go from great to awesome is that all of the items on the wishlists are, on the average, really, really good videogames. It made me think, shit, I'd buy an Xbox and Halo for some kids with leukemia if I had the money. I've been in the hospital before, as a small child, even, and with much enlightened hindsight, I can say that it would have made it much less horrendously boring and depressing to be able to play Halo while in there.
So I told the people of the world to send me bad games. I said that I'd noticed so many gamers and game-collectors stocking the hell out of games they never played anymore. So I told people to send those games to me. Pare down your game library so that it consists of only things you want to play. And someone please, please, send me a damned old hockey game, or something. The hockey game never came. Plenty of other games did.
Well, I did what I promised. I promised I'd play every game I received, and I did. Notice that I didn't promise I'd beat all of them, because some of those games were fucking rancid. I did indeed play them all, though, from the confines of the friendly neighborhood Yamanote Line, when possible.
As last year's Fukubukuro informs you most informatively, the Yamanote Line is a train line that circles around the center of Tokyo. It has 29 stops. Each stop is two minutes from the next. I figured I could play these Gameboy games on the Yamanote Line, with headphones on (as per a challenge from Hideo Kojima), and count the number of stops before each game became unbearable -- unbearable to either continue playing the game or to resist switching to something else. If a game scored a 29 or higher, it was considered "good." If it didn't, well -- it didn't.
The lowest-scoring game had to be Kirby's Block Ball. with a score of two. That one came to me from Martin Gore of the UK, who also sent me -- bless his heart -- Metroid II: The Return of Samus (scored a 32) and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga (scored a 36, got inflammatorily boring once I had it back home). The highest-scorer was Advance Wars 2, sent to me by a Mr. John Lappin. I reckon Philip Kollar's gift of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow would have scored higher, had I not decided to play it on two airplanes and in three airports and six battery lives. I would call that little Castlevania the Gameboy game of the year, if it didn't come out last year. So I suppose Astroboy still wins that crown.
I have here, rescued from a dark part of this old house, the bag of Gameboy games that I saw fit to, after all the games were received, carry around in my backpack while I rode trains and did nothing all day. When I returned home, also to do nothing, these were the games I’d sit next to my right knee while I sat with my back against the paper curtain in my bedroom with straw-mat flooring on early-March afternoons where the sun shined against the brown paper and made my back feel warm. A list will follow. Apologies if I forgot the name of the person who sent the game -- feel free to remind me, please; your reminding is welcome, seeing as you sent me actually good games, or, well, at least, games I saw fit to keep around -- know that, in the end, I had roughly a ten-gallon trash bag full of Gameboy Advance cartridges.
Yes.
In the order my hands find them (the bag is nylon, fluorescent orange, and was a free prize for drinking Japanese Gatorade one day in March when Gatorade debuted to the sports-drink-loving masses in Japan; it comes in only one flavor, and that is the exact same flavor as Pocari Sweat, Aquarius (also distibuted by Coca-Cola), Dakara, and Amino Supli. They like their sports drinks to all taste the same over here, probably for a scientifically-proven reason. That flavor is gray in color, and kind of lemon-limey.):
Pac-in-Time by Namco for the original Gameboy (scored a 13)
Metroid II: The Return of Samus by Nintendo for the original Gameboy (scored a 32; I swear, this is definitely the game they used as a yardstick when developing the Super Gameboy's color scheme)
Zelda: Oracle of Ages by Nintendo for Gameboy Color (not played; actually used to be my copy, before I sold it to a guy for $20 during my great game sale; he beat it, and sent it back during my great game requesting. Ha!)
Super Mario Land III: Wario Land by Nintendo for the original Gameboy (scored an eleven; I played it more than I wanted to, to be honest. I think the only game anyone sent me for Gameboy which included a case.)
Gameboy No Repeat 16M+1M HIM SUPER COLOR 25-in-1 (with lots of games; from Korea)
Super Bust-a-Move by Ubi Soft for Gameboy Advance (scored a five; these games bore me; still more fun than Lumines)
Megaman Battle Network 2 by Capcom for Gameboy Advance (scored a twenty; there's Megaman, and he's got some spirit)
Phantasy Star Collection by THQ (heh) for Gameboy Advance (scored a round sixteen; played it more at home; named my Phantasy Star II hero "KAKY," as always)
Dragon Quest III by Enix for Gameboy Color (actually, that's mine -- the only game I kept after my great game sale.)
Breath of Fire by Capcom for Gameboy Advance (I think I carry this just because it's an RPG and I figure I'll always want to play an RPG on GBA, yet I never do. Hero's name is "KAKY.")
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance by Square-Enix, for Gameboy Advance (English version) (I still haven't played this one more than two hours; hero's name is "Billy." Virtuoso opening. Made me feel like a kid again. Then my parents died and I was sent to the orphanage and sodomized.)
Metroid Fusion by Nintendo for Gameboy Advance (thank you, Philip Kollar, for making me realize I sometimes don't like risks. In another review I call this game "Metroid Run-n-Gun Puzzle Challenge." Played it, beat it, never-wanna-play-it again.)
Super Jinsei Game Advance by Takara for Gameboy Advance (It's the Game of Life. It once belonged to Fujimoto. I'm, uh, holding it while he's in the hoosegow for seven years. He'll be able to play it again when he gets out, I'm sure. Until then, yeah, no Game of Life for him.)
Pokemon Sapphire by Nintendo for Gameboy Advance (my younger brother Clint gave me this one; I like it much. I play it not enough.)
Advance Wars 2 by Nintendo for Gameboy Advance (thanks again to John Lappin; this game absorbed me like no other on Gameboy Advance, and dearly aided myself and Chuck Franklin while we crossed the Pacific to attend E3 -- that one-console, two-players mode is wonderful when you have fourteen hours to kill and you pick the really big map.)
Megaman and Bass by Capcom for Gameboy Advance (scored a sixteen; I got so frustrated at the first stage, until I beat it, and then turned it off. I . . . well.)
Jurassic Park III: Island Attack by Konami of America for Gameboy Advance. I . . . . . . wait a minute.
Who sent me this one? Was it you, Mr. Monaghan? Or . . . who was it?
I remember this game. It was the game that made me decide to, in the end, actually not write the feature about all the Gameboy games. It's the gma ehtat made me realize that would be a complete waste of my and everyone else's time. I actually wrote a review for it which appeared in a . . . certain magazine for people who think they're so intelligent that, in fact, they're too intelligent for good taste and sense. I won't tell you which magazine, because I myself like reading it without recommending it to people. Besides, I wrote it under a pen name, and was done with it.
I began that review by saying that a sixteen-year-old kid, a devoted fan of my website, sent me that game, coupled with a letter that read, and I'm pretty sure I quote: "I got this game for my birthday. I didn't like it too much."
The moral of the review is that I played Jurassic Park III: Island Attack one windy day in March when the sun was up, the sky was blue, the weather was beautiful, and so was--I had diarrhea. It was particularly bad. The night before, I'd merely had a flu. By the morning, the flu had moved into the stomach. The night before, I'd soaked in hot, hot, hot water in my own bathtub whilst writing emails to Brandon Sheffield with my cellular phone, giggling like a schoolgirl about my everything. I had a bottle of ice-chilled C.C. Lemon sitting by the bathtub, and I was sipping it, filling myself with the love of 233 lemons' worth of vitamin C while I liked to think my flu was sweating out of my body. I turned the water on, let hot water in, drained cold water out, fell asleep somehow, and woke up when the temperature of the water was well beyond freezing and I had a fever higher, I think, than any fever I've ever had in my life. And what did I do with this fever? I went and watched "Lost in Translation" on DVD, borrowed from Chuck Franklin. I didn't like it for mostly geographical reasons. I didn't like that Bill Murray could walk from Hachiko in Shibuya to the gates of Kabukicho in less than a blink of an eye. I didn't like the movie's whining, either. Leave Giovanni Ribisi alone, little girl. He's just busy. A photographer in Tokyo, is what he is; there are a lot of buildings with neon facades depicting Chinese letters and many men with womens' hair for him to capture for Americans to ogle, and you're depressed about . . . what? Get some damn medication.
I took some NyQuil I had stocked up for just the occasion of being deathly ill after freezing in a hot bath, and opened an envelope I'd received that morning. It was an envelope full of Megaman games. Megaman and Bass for Gameboy Advance -- which the Yamanote Line would later tell to have sprites that are huge, like in a late Super-Famicom game wanting to show off against the living of the PlayStation (which it once was), Megaman 8 for PlayStation, Megaman X4, X5, and X6, also for PlayStation, and Megaman X7, which I wasn't aware had even been released yet. I played the Xs in order, completing the first stages, bearing witness to the introductions, realizing with pointed reality that the fictions were only mere weeks apart in their continuities, proving that someone somewhere cares about the storyline, and then -- and then, when the medicine had just about kicked in, I put on X7. It loaded. I had perhaps seen into the future, and wished it hadn't.
The young man who sent me the games included a letter, saying that he would have sent his Megaman NES and SNES cartridges if the shipping wouldn't have, no doubt, been too damn much. He added that I probably wouldn't have been able to do anything with them, anyway. I detected from the tone of his short, well-handwritten letter that he wanted rid of Megaman for good. Something had moved him to throw all those games, aimed at a certain point across the Pacific Ocean. The games had reached me. I played Megaman X7 and almost died. The next morning, I'd have diarrhea.
What is wrong with Megaman X7? I can tell you "everything" and leave it at that. I will not. I will tell you that it is poor and misguided. It stars a new protagonist named Axl, who, because of the misguided new two-and-a-half-dimensional perspective, kills his enemies first by using the shoulder buttons to cycle between targets, then by shooting them. If you can muddle all the way through his first level, you get to control Zero, who moves in an over-the-shoulder three-dimensional perspective a la Crash Bandicoot, except that game had collision detection. Getting to Zero's stage involves, of course, mastering Axl's ability to "become" other enemies. This is of course advertised on the back of the box. "BECOME YOUR ENEMIES." When the other enemies are bomb-laying boredom-bots whose rollerskates make movement feel always underwater, this is not a fun feature.
The biggest problem with Megaman X7 is its story. (Heh.) What woke me up from my NyQuil daze enough to be frustrated beyond belief until my hands were collecting frost with the very chill of my hypothermia was the opening cinematic sequence, in which Megaman, as "X," has defeated his great thirty-two-bit, three-disc opponent and has decided to retire before the 128-bit opponents begin appearing. Says he, acted with the voice of a four-year-old girl despite the razor-sharp edges of his costume and his bad, glaring eyes, "I'm through fighting! I'm going to look for a peaceful solution!" I heard this and spit up my vitamin soda. I screamed, throat sore as it was, "DEAR LORD, MAN, YOU HAVE A GUN FOR A RIGHT HAND! THERE IS NO PEACEFUL SOLUTION!!"
I remembered that the next afternoon, now with diarrhea. I took up Jurassic Park III: Island Attack, and played it for the duration of a toilet-venture. The toilet is a great place to play videogames, and let's thank the Gameboy for bring us the possibility. A funny thing about Japanese toilets -- funny if you're American, this will be -- is that the light switch is always (always) on the outside. So you turn on the light, go in, sit on the throne, close the door, lock it, double-lock it, and start filing papers. Eventually, your roommate comes by and turns the light off. You scream an order to turn it back on. He laughs at you. You think -- when you did the same thing to him the other day, you laughed similarly. What kind of invention is that, really?
On the toilet of the afternoon, I was alone in the apartment with my screeching bowels and Jurassic Park III: Island Attack for my black Gameboy Advance with a white battery lid. Even before turning the game on, I was pitying it. Here was a game by a Konami American development house, based on a licensing property so insignificant and tired even the Japanese didn't want to make a game out of it. Yet they knew they had to have someone make that game, or else the license wasn't being "milked" the way Big Game Industry Business 301 in college teaches young Japanese guys with perms and jobs at 7-Eleven a movie license must be milked. So they got these Americans to make a game out of it. the head of the project must really, really want to make videogames. He must want to make big, sweeping, creative epics that show the world the torments of his having an imagination. Real shame about that:
Jurassic Park III: Island Attack for Gameboy Advance is something of a survival adventure. It begins with an MS-Paint generated image of a jet propellor spinning against a blue sky moments before a pterodactyl flies into it and orange spray-paint-tool fire spits up. The box-plane then slides down off the bottom of the screen. Our hero -- a guy in a hat -- wakes up next to the airplane wreckage. A radio console pops up at the bottom of the screen, and tells us: "THIS IS THE COAST GUARD. ARE YOU OKAY?"
"YOU CRASHED ON AN ISLAND?"
"IT'S . . . JURASSIC PARK ISLAND?"
"OH NO!! THERE ARE DINOSAURS THERE!!"
"YOU'D BETTER KEEP THIS RADIO."
So you advance down a screen. With a swirl of the Gameboy's sound chip, a roar echoes. The radio pops up.
"YOU'RE BEING CHASED!! BY A T-REX!! RUN!! . . . do that by double-clicking the control pad!"
You run from the dinosaur. In a box somewhere, you find a "flare gun." The radio describes its use:
"IF YOU'RE BEING CHASED BY A DINOSAUR, USE THAT FLARE GUN TO SHOOT A CRATE OF GUNPOWDER, AND YOU CAN KNOCK THE DINOSAUR OUT."
Eventually you come across a shed of sorts. A dinosaur busts through one of the doors. The radio tells you
"A VELOCIRAPTOR?!?!?! SHOOT THE CRATE OF GUNPOWDER!!!!!"
You shoot it by holding down the fire button and aiming a little cursor with the control pad. It reminded me of hunting in Oregon Trail. There's a small explosion. The dinosaur falls over.
"NOW HURRY BEFORE HE GETS BACK UP!!"
I saw this, and laughed. I laughed so hard I found myself screaming something nonsensical:
"DEAR LORD, MAN, YOU HAVE A GUN FOR A RIGHT HAND! THERE IS NO PEACEFUL SOLUTION!!"
I never beat Jurassic Park III: Island Attack, because the human colon can, at the end of the day, hold only so much shit. However, I like to imagine that everywhere you go, everytime a conflict comes up, there's a crate of gunpowder in a corner somewhere, waiting to be shot with a never-ending flare gun so that it can explode and knock out dinosaurs so their little feet kick and twitch in the air. How perfect would this world be, if, everywhere we went, gunpowder was being stored in crates, and we carried flare guns? That'd really be something. You could really show smiling kiwi jackasses at bars in Korea what happens when they encroach on your girl, that's for sure.
On one level, thinking about the game disturbs me. It makes me feel like I'm watching a nice, honest, kind little brother act out the role of Godzilla in a school play, wearing only his pajamas. It fills me with the notion that Gameboy has been, for a long, long time, a toy. it is a toy videogame system full of toy videogames. Now, now, yes, there are some real ones out there somewhere. For the most part, though, we've got Austin-Powers-themed utility and addressbook software for kids too fucking stupid to remember their own phone numbers and Mario-character-endowed golf games that amount to little more than contests of moving crosshairs against green backgrounds before being congratulated for something you're not sure you really did.
I remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger was on television, talking about "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." ABout how he doesn't actually kill anyone in the movie; he just shoots them in the knees. This does not, of course, stop the fact that other people are killed. If the bad guy is the one killing, it's okay.
This reminds me of the rules of certain English schools in Tokyo -- teachers and students can't socialize with one another outside class. This is because the students would then realize, by hanging out with a teacher who thinks they're cool enough to hang out with, that making foreign friends is a faster road to what they wanted when they signed up for English lessons than, well, taking English lessons. This rule is in place to keep teachers from molesting sixteen-year-olds and making their parents angry when the elopement is announced (two weeks in advance, in Japan, is the custom, so everyone can get the tax documents straightened out). It also, however, stops twenty-five-year-olds from getting to know one another the way adults often want to.
It reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 3 -- how you can eat rats, snakes, and antelopes that are most likely an endangered species, yet cannot eat dogs. When you shoot a dog -- the guard dogs ferociously hunt you down before being shot -- it then disappears, because some international organization would no doubt get very angry if a game featured images of dead dogs which lingered on-screen for more than the time it takes a man to blink.
The moral of this story is that dinosaurs are not real, and neither are videogames. Megaman must die, and so must the Gameboy. Don't fall asleep in the bathtub, and thanks once again for all the games.
(Meanwhile: somewhere in Japan, Nintendo cooked up the idea to package old Famicom games on limited-release Gameboy Advance cartridges, which fat, bald people bought and put up on eBay or Yahoo! Auctions; they did this, I am certain, to keep the "Nintendo" name alive; when a normal man arrived at his local electronics store to find that Super Mario Bros. was sold-out, and when the clerk told him that he could get it used in a place called "Akihabara," and when he went there, only to find it at a Liberty used game store for 6,800 yen -- at that exact moment, the world changed completely, and forever. Shame of the year goes to Nintendo's "Famicom Mini" series. Put them on a disc on make them for Gamecube for crying out loud, you're losing me.)
(the preceding has all been a tim rogers unreview of ridge racers on sony PSP, one of the best games of the year for reasons of existence)
[next: april]
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