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As good an RPG as Final Fantasy XII is, and as much as I'm sure it'll sell to high hell in Japan and America alike, I'm warning you Westerners out there about Chu-lip. This is Chuck Franklin's game of the show E3 2004, even though it's been out in Japan for almost two years now; Natsume is releasing it in America this summer. It's an RPG in which you play a young Japanese boy with too-short shorts and huge lips. Your quest is to kiss a neighborhood girl who lives in a pipe, and you have to kiss her underneath a certain tree. The idea is that, if you kiss her under this tree, you'll fall in love forever. To complicate matters, the girl doesn't seem to like you much, and to complicate them further, she never leaves her damned pipe. The game moves in a kind of Shenmue pseudo-real-time fashion, where day changes to night. It's nice. You play the game by kissing various depressed citizens of you Japanese-Depression-Era town, bringing them life, and bringing yourself romantic experience. Sometimes, you have to solve puzzles.
Chuck Franklin jumped on me, figuratively, at this point in my description. I was explaining the game to Brandon Sheffield, who would probably like it.
"You don't solve puzzles!!" Chuck Franklin said, obviously very proud of his game of the show's not including puzzles. "Like, sometimes you have to, like, sneak up on people, or whatever, using the analog stick; that doesn't mean you're solving puzzles!!"
I almost pointed out to Chuck Franklin that the press materials say the game involves puzzles, and that Chuck has not, as of this point in time, actually played the whole game -- only the first twenty minutes or so. Then I figured, well, hell, let the guy believe what he believes. He's a kid, and he has dreams. This is the guy who doesn't believe my Las Vegas Stories -- and why should he? Poor kid has never been to Vegas. He doesn't know what it's like, there. He'll figure it out, eventually.
Besides, what is a puzzle, in a videogame? Does giving an item to one character who gives you another item which must then be given to another character qualify as a "puzzle"? If not, why not? Even so, what kinds of puzzles are contained in Chu-lip? I don't know. The game, however, will retail for only $9.99 in America, so go get it. You're at least guaranteed a little bit of fun. Tell them I sent you.
Hey, I want a quote on the back of the game box. Say I said the game was "Amazing, enchanting, bizarre fun." Something simple like that. I can make an award for it, too. Say the game won insertcredit.com's best deal award of 2004. Is that not enough, beloved Natsume PR? Okay, here's another one. It's big. I'm serious, here -- put this on the back of the box:
insertcredit.com RPG of the year award, 2004. There you have it. You may award me for game-box-quotage by sending me the T-shirt I forgive you for scamming me out of with your dice game. It's okay -- you didn't know, then, that I was a such a hard-hitting industry professional. I forgive your mistake.
Let's try to hit on more game-box quotes and awards, shall we? I'll run down my little mental list. I'll put the game titles in bold italics, as I've been doing, and the box-quotes in all bold. Observe:
insertcredit.com pinball game of the year, 2004:
Mario Pinball for Gameboy Advance is simple enough, and fun enough. Like other Gameboy pinball games, it is bright and happy in tone. Unlike other Gameboy pinball games, it uses pre-rendered 3D-ish graphics, and a three-quarters tilted-pinball-table perspective. It's cute, and addictive. While it doesn't immediately impress with its simplicity like Devil's Crush might, it sure beats the fuck out of anything on N-Gage.
OH SHIT THAT'S RICH
. . .
Where was I?
insertcredit.com pinball game of the year, runner-up
Odama for Gamecube is a pinball game produced by the time-acclaimed Yoot Saito. It went virtually unnoticed by press until day three of the show, when word got out and its booth got crowded. We were hanging out with The-NextLevel.com's "professional fanboy 2003" awardwinner Chris Kohler near the end of the show (oh god why), and that bastard yanked us in the direction of Odama. Hey, what can I say, whenever that big guy yanks me, I have to follow. Good stuff happens, sometimes. Near the demo kiosks of the game was a full suit of samurai armor in a glass case. Chris Kohler, who had actually not yet seen the game himself, tried to explain it to us: "It's, like, a pinball game, well, no, not really -- it's a samurai war simulator, like, you pick your troops and everything, and then you hit a pinball around, triggering war events." We watched some group of three Chinese game journalists pass a Gamecube controller around, not relenting the game. It was apparently addictive. One journalist told her friend about the analog control of the flippers, and how it was both odd and compelling. I watched the game intently -- there's a silver ball, rolling around, and you're batting it with flippers. "It's a pinball game," I said, probably to no one. "No it's not," Chris Kohler said. "It's a pinball game," I repeated, more loudly. "No it isn't," Chuck Franklin said. "It's a pinball game!!" Chris Kohler shook his head with a "you can't take this guy anywhere" look on his face. So we call the game runner-up because it is, perhaps unintentionally, making people think it's something it's not. As a pinball game, it is fun, and addictive enough to keep four Chinese people from letting me touch the controller once in twenty minutes. Yet despite what is says on the box, Odama is a goddamned pinball game. It's a goddamned good pinball game. That just doesn't make it not a pinball game.
Let's move on:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for Gamecube is flat, boring, and more simple than it tries to pretend to be. They should have let Miyamoto produce it. The man asked to produce the "Harry Potter" games. EA only asked to pay eighty trillion dollars for the license. Hell. Miyamoto would have made it for only one system, though at least it would have been a brilliant game. As is, in its multiformat state, it plays like a new Zelda adventure directed by epileptics with recurring amnesia.
Viewtiful Joe 2 is a sequel to Viewtiful Joe. Viewtiful Joe was celebrated for originality that was, actually, not even originality. It was just a pleasant rewarming of old 2D gaming. (Here, if I were British and rich off videogame-magazine money, I'd append the word "goodness" and a "..." after "gaming," and put it on a cover headline.) The sequel, which many will consider brilliant because they like pretty things and get paid to like them, is more or less more of the same. It is a sequel in the vein of Megaman. Most accurately, this game's jump over its predecessor is much like Megaman 6 over Megaman 5. No, that is not a compliment. If you ask me, the first game shouldn't have a sequel. I say this as an audacious individual who owes no allegiance to anyone, least of all Mr. Atsushi Inaba, the game's producer and an acquaintance of mine. "Viewtiful Joe should never have a sequel," I told Inaba, whose favorite game, to this day, is Namco's Wizardry for Famicom, because he likes games where you have to "use your imagination." I took delight in pointing out that you don't really use your imagination in Viewtiful Joe -- you let the game's obviousness point out what you have to do seconds before you realize how insanely difficult the doing of it is. He took this in with a sick grin on his face. We're making a sequel, he said. Like a Megaman game, it's going to start with a nice, simple introductory level, before ramping up in difficulty until it's harder than its predecessor. When asked if he thought the sequel was necessary, or even if he wanted to make it, he told me his answer, and then asked that I not reveal it anywhere. So there you go. Viewtiful Joe is a retread-sequel in true Capcom fashion, though hell if it don't got that Dante from Devil May Cry and a whole bunch of awesome-as-fuck graphics in it!
insertcredit.com game of the show, e3 2004: tim rogers' special vote:
Jak 3 (aka Jak III, aka Jak and Daxter 3, aka Jak and Daxter III, aka Jak Jak and Daxter 3 III: The Precursor Legacy) is an excellent game. I play it, and I think -- this is excellent. Naughty Dog has listened to criticism. The hero of the game, Jak, no longer carjacks the innocent civilians he's supposed to be savioring. He now rides dune buggies in a rolling desert. The dune buggies are equipped with machinegun lasers. In one of the demo levels, you have to shoot these giant beasts in the desert. That level is fun. In another level, you have to ride a lizard, and eat smaller lizards. That level is kind of boring. There's no flavor to the controls. You're not doing anything aside from walking around slightly more quickly than Jak's normal walking speed. There's another level where you have to ride platforms in an industrial setting in spite of rising lava-acid. That level's hard as hell. I like it, though I was not able to beat it. There's another level where you're searching through sewers. There were plenty of sewer levels in Jak II -- none of them felt this well-designed. The game is planned better, and sculpted more cleanly than its predecessor. That's all it needs. Well, it also has more guns. Like, four more guns. They're basically just new attachments to each of your old guns, though, shit. More guns is more guns. There ain't nothing wrong with that. There is a little something wrong with the flying mission on the demo -- the ships in Jak 3 differ from those in Jak II, in that Jak II's ships are controllable only on two planes (low and high); now, you're free-flying, and with flight-simulator controls that remind me of Ace Combat in a pleasant way. (Ace Combat 5 by Namco, for PlayStation2, wins the game tim rogers spent an hour playing at E3 award, for the second year in a row, kind of. Last year it was Ace Combat 4 that won.) What we end up with is a slightly iffy feeling. It's not fully polished. I still like the idea of it more than I'll bother to explain -- I just believe it needs a little polishing. As far as I could discern, there's no way to lock on to targets. There are a lot of targets -- thirty-two of them have to be taken out to finish the level. So yeah -- give us some general lock-on, please. Amy Hennig, director of Jak 3, told me that the game will have more of a gentle learning curve, this time. If think this is probably for the best. Whether this means the hardest parts will be harder than Jak II or not remains to be told. The game has a "Light Jak" alter ego in addition to Jak II's "Dark Jak," and Jak has a new hairdo this time around and everything. I'll quit writing about this game, now. I wrote half a novel's worth about Jak II, in two articles for this fine website, so you know where to go if you want to read up. Naughty Dog, if you want a quote of mine for the box, you're going to have to hire me as a playtester. I'll kick your game's fucking ass.
the insertcredit.com chris woodard award for excellence in trailers:
Killer7 by Capcom has a nice-looking trailer. It is well-edited and well-cut. Now show us the game already, jackasses.
the insertcredit.com metroid game of the show:
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is Retro's followup to 2002's insertcredit.com game of the year Metroid Prime, so far the only videogame to earn a perfect score from this fine website. Based on a full demo run-through, it's not worse than the original. Which means it might just be just as good. There's a whole new planet, and a whole lot of new weapons. The control is the same. This is good. Expect to fight about a million of those shadowy Samus clones. That should be very fun. The gameplay involves a lot of switching between the dark side and the light side of the new planet, and using your dark and light beams to different purposes in the different worlds. Might this mean that Retro, too, is learning from Treasure? I have two points of criticism: first, Retro, please, don't change the control scheme. I want all the assholes who complained about the controls of the first one to wake the fuck up. I, a lover of Metroid Prime, have no problems playing Halo; you, lovers of Halo: get with the program. Different games control in different ways. Accept it. Again, I ask: would you really want to use that gimpy little C-stick to aim? Really? There are a lot of fools who won't buy this game if the word gets out that you can't change your control scheme. The Brandon Sheffieldy side of me says: good riddance. That won't stop the game from being a good game. There's more to life than the business element of art, kids. My second suggestion: the logo shows the words "METROID" "PRIME" "2" and "ECHOES" in four different god-damned fonts. Do something about that. It looks tacky. My proposed solution: just call the game "Metroid: Echoes," or even "Metroid Echoes." Or must the word "Prime" be in the title for it to sell to the American public? Is the word "Metroid" not odd enough? Hideo Kojima lamented to me, back in February, that Metal Gear Solid 2 has to be called what it's called. He said it was unavoidable -- he couldn't just call it Metal Gear Four, or Metal Gear: Sons of Liberty, because market research dictated that the "Solid" was necessary. (Kojima then turned the game into, well, a sequel to Metal Gear Solid in more ways than . . . two. That, however, is for another story.)
the insertcredit.com third annual brandon sheffield award goes to:
Katamari Damashii is a game that has had, from the start, an official Romanization for its title: Katamari Damacy. "Katamari" is Japanese for "clump" or "collage." "Tamashii" or "Damashii" means "soul." "Damacy" is the last name of a Final Fantasy villain, a name that's only revealed in the preorder version of the instruction manual. The game is about rolling a ball. There's a story involving a messy alien king and the little guy sent to clean up after him, yeah. Still, it amounts to you rolling a ball. You're the guy in charge of the rolling. You use both analog sticks to roll the ball. One controls your X-axis, and the other controls your Y. It plays a lot like a wooden "Labyrinth" game with a metal ball, only you don't see the playing field tilt. This is important: you don't see the playing field tilt in Katamari Damashii. If it tilted, the game would lose all signs of mystique. As it stands, that mystique is pretty and clean. You're rolling a ball and picking up small objects. Pick up enough pieces of litter and eventually, you can pick up cats, which meow. Pick up enough cats and your ball increases in diameter, and can pick up people, and then trees, and buildings, and then your mother, and eventually you can pick up Chris Kohler's mother, and then the game explodes. It's not a bad ride while it lasts -- and I know this because I done played it already in Tokyo, enough to get bored of it -- though it doesn't last long. Like all good rides, it's a ride made even better with the help of good music. Now, while I agree the music is "good," that doesn't mean I like it. It's cleanly produced music. It's new music. It's techno-ambient bossa nova at times, and it's good old-fashioned drum'n'bass at other times. Westerners have been eating it up for months now, partly because the music is Japanese, and partly because they come to like it partly because it's in Japanese. The British have been emailing me every five minutes asking for lyrics translations and write-ups on why the game should be released in the West. I tell them -- no, I don't feel like translating the damned meaningless lyrics, and shit, man, of course this game is coming out in the West. It's that kind of game. It was destined for Western release before it was put to the Japanese market. I know this because of the faux-clever Romanization (the game's Japanese title is two kanji, both of which look very similar). Games like Jet Set Radio carry a shine with them from before they're even completely finished products. This is the shine of a "wacky" Japanese game that's designed to become more popular in the West than it is in Japan. Welcome to the club, Katamari Damashii. Brandon Sheffield likes you very much, so much so that I, Tim Rogers, write this on his behalf.
dumbest title of the year:
The Legend of Zelda: The Minnish Cap is Capcom-Flagship's third attempt at a portable Zelda game. I say "attempt" because the game feels like it's trying to atone for a sin. Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Zelda: Oracle of Seasons were both brilliant little games full of striking concepts and smooth execution. The Minnish Cap, playable in semi-complete form, feels hokey, though almost kind of like one of the recent 3D Zeldas (the R button is your changing-multi-purpose button, for example). There are these scenes where suddenly the game zooms out, and Link is the size of an ant seen from a blimp. I don't get it. In closer-ups, he looks like the Links in The Four Swords for Gamecube, which I have reviewed in a clandestine location that will be unearthed soon. What, exactly, the hell a "Minnish Cap" is, neither Eric-Jon nor I could fathom. It defies the rule of title a modern fantasy epic -- always use words the readers will immediately recognize: "The Return of the King." "The Wheel of Time." Et cetera. The word "Minnish" just sounds so dirty. Please do something about it, or else offer a blurb on the front of the box to explain what the hell it is, for God's sake.
the 2004 n-gage award goes to
God-damned everybody and their god-damned cellular phone games.
Please, let's stop playing games on our phones. If only some keen developer would find a way to port Japanese sex-friend-classifieds over to the Western market, then you'd have something to do on your phone during that long car ride when you should be listening to Garth Brooks and singing along and endangering traffic. Shit. (Well, in all honesty, that sex-friend stuff would probably work in England . . . island nations, you know . . .) Square showed Final Fantasy, which I have cautioned them about already in this feature. I caution them again: that game is not the fucking Bible. I warn Tecmo similarly: Ninja Gaiden is, at its best, like the Book of Job, at least, in that it can teach a man about heartbreak and loss. Usually, when it does this, it does this through little bastardy birds who swoop down out of nowhere and knock you off platforms. Now, it is doing this by being on a cellular phone, and being virtually unplayable as such. Please remove this game from existence before tomorrow, Mr. Itagaki, or me and Final Fantasy Dog aren't going out drinking with you when I get back to Tokyo.
nicest title of the year:
Silent Hill 4: The Room is a simple title. It had a nice trailer, with completely washed-out sepia visuals and Hitchcockian camera angles. It really showed us what Silent Hill is all about as a series: giving us pretty things to hear, obscuring the things we can see (removing from sight, as it were), and paying homage to movies. The game was playable in a portion of the Konami booth fashioned to look like a kitchen. I played it for a moment, and wondered why it was on demo. I just didn't like the theme demo stations at the Konami booth -- especially the Metal Gear Solid 3 jungle.
I got a letter from a reader a couple of months back, asking me "Why don't you like Silent Hill?" I replied that this was a strange question, because I'd never said I didn't like Silent Hill. The reader replied, saying that I'd never talked about Silent Hill, period, and that was my biggest crime. I replied that he should go fuck himself. He never replied to that. Now, I tell you all, right here, that I don't like Silent Hill because Silent Hill doesn't want me to like it. It doesn't grab me and say "LIKE ME MORE." It doesn't say anything at all to me, just that it's a moody game with a lot of mist and dark rooms, that it's something couples whose male and female halves I despise with equal hatred will tell me it's a game I can only enjoy if I play it with "someone special." Fuck that shit. Maybe I'm being harsh, I don't know. Still -- the matter stands that Silent Hill does not do much for me. After E3 2004, I understand a little bit more of why. See, the Silent Hill 4 trailer opens with a shot of a drop of blood swirling down into a shower drain. This is a direct rip-off of a shot in "Psycho." Most likely, the Silent Hill producer thinks that peeling things off the sides of his favorite movies and plastering them to the bottom of his game will make it a work of genius. He might be wrong. I don't know. He sure is selling more videogames than me, at any rate.
Still.
It's no secret that Hideo Kojima stole the character designs for Policenauts from the "Lethal Weapon" films' Mel Gibson and Danny Glover; still, he put things into those games that make them play as more than text-selection adventures. He told me, of Metal Gear Solid 2, that, while the story consisted of a series of things ripped from newspaper headlines, popular films, and Tom Clancy novels, he was sure to incorporate enough literary personality and gameplay depth to make the story something that could be told only in videogame format. What's more – Kojima says that he does not begin a game without some ce
Hideo Kojima names his antithesis as Shinji Mikami. Shinji Mikami's philosophy behind the original Resident Evil was to take the American horror movies he loved so much, and turn them into a videogame. He got into videogames because he played Shigeru Miyamoto's The Legend of Zelda, and liked it so much he couldn't see himself not involved in the making of games. He made a kind-of role-playing game called Sweet Home. It was about people infiltrating a haunted house. Resident Evil was a revisitation to similar themes, only now he was determined to use the available hardware to its fullest in an attempt to recreate a horror film, with the player in the lead role. This worked to mostly spectacular effect in its day, and Shinji Mikami is now a rich enough man to pull serious weight in his company. Kind of.
In Resident Evil's case, the movie-like camera angles exist so that the hardware doesn't have to move too many polygons. Being that cameras don't move all that much in old movies (the best kind!), this also had the effect of making the game seem like a playable movie. I consider Resident Evil a game first and a cinematic game second. It has a goal -- get out of the big spooky zombie-infested house -- and it just happens to, without being pretentious, present itself like a movie might present itself. It does this, as I have said, for reasons of technical space-saving -- and also because it is using the example of movies to create a new type of entertainment. "Survival Horror," it's called. When we talk about "Survival Horror," we who play videogames don't both to say "Survival Horror Videogames," as we'd say "Platform games," or "real-time strategy games" (though not "First-Person Shooter," which is rarely confused with a "First Person Shooter," the police officer designated to kill the first guy in a bank robbery bust). "Survival Horror" is something that fuses videogames and movies. It spawned many imitators -- most of them from other Capcom houses (odd, that) -- and the most ferocious one is Silent Hill, from Konami. It is ferocious because it is not content to imitate Resident Evil -- it evolves it as a videogame, as a thing that is played. Mikami must have know that revision is necessary for ultimate evolution, and that the best reviser is your opponent. This is why the samurai (and the pinball wizard) must at first learn to parry his opponent -- it gives him time to observe. And eventually, the samurai scores a quadruple bonus, with Resident Evil 4.
insertcredit.com game of the show e3 2004
Resident Evil 4 impressed Brandon Sheffield. It impressed Chuck Franklin. It impressed Vincent Diamante. It impressed Frank Cifaldi, Chris Woodard, and Seth "Fingers" Flynn Barkan. Most importantly, it impressed me, Tim Rogers. That alone makes it our pick for "game of the show."
Chris Woodard's initial impressions were scoffing: "I didn't know that many shades of brown existed." Brandon's impression was shock: "This situation is gorgeous," he spoke. This was at the Nintendo press conference. After an hour of pie charts and graphs where Nintendo patted themselves on the back for selling the most new consoles (neglecting to mention the PlayStation2's exponentially higher installed user base), the video rolled, and it was a simply, undeniably gorgeous situation. Of the 2003 trailer, introduced by Shinji Mikami himself, I said to Brandon, "I might actually play that." Of the 2004 trailer, I said to Brandon, "I must play that." Brandon agreed, amazingly: "Yeah, me too."
It's not easy to say why Resident Evil 4 is so wowing an experience. It's something you have to see. It abandons the movie-like 2D camera angles and tank-like control scheme of the other games for an over-the-shoulder 3D experience. It abandons the cliché horror-movie staple of zombies for a whole slew of townspeople who move as though crazed, scream as though possessed, swing weapons as though professional killers, and bite you as though hungry. The story takes Resident Evil 2's hero Leon Kennedy to South America, where he has to rescue the President of the United States' daughter. Why she's in South America, we don't know. Why these people in this little village are so fucking insane, we don't know that, either.
The game's setting and tone smack you in the face with a frying pan of otherwordly spookiness, even in the short demo. The villagers, when they scream to each other about setting the house you currently occupy on fire, are screaming in not-subtitled Spanish. Even to speakers of Spanish, the effect is that the language sounds demonic, and like something not of this world. It's a first for Resident Evil -- evil forces that can communicate, wield weapons, and open doors. Yet what the hell are they? What's wrong with them? Why are they keeping piles of dead body parts in their houses? It's disturbing as hell. (I'm guessing that they're victims of the T-virus, late in the stage right before you die and turn into a zombie, and I'm guessing this as a guy who hasn't seriously played a Resident Evil game since the original.)
Kenji Eno said, of his D2, that he wanted to simply "make a game about snow." That game was very snowy. I wonder if Mikami ever had a desire to make a game about a browning semi-coniferous forest? That seems to be what Resident Evil 4 is, at the moment. Eric-Jon Waugh, who likes games that are about seasonal settings, gave Resident Evil 4 a whirl, and came away impressed. He survived for about forty-five minutes. That sounds like a lot -- it's not, really. He just happened to spend most of his time using binoculars to zoom into fallen leaf textures, and approach explosive trip-wires in the woods. I died in ten minutes, after getting about as far as he did. Eric-Jon plays videogames like the perfect playtester. I play them like some asshole who likes to see people die. Chuck Franklin plays like a professional, lasted twenty minutes of pushing Leon to run at top speed and shoot everything on the mark, and declared in the end that "This demo is not meant to be beaten." Either way, for more or for less, we all play games, and we have all decided to play this one to completion when it is released.
Resident Evil sequels have, ever since 2, been mostly rehashes (if rehashes with slight revisions) of the first game. The first game was, perhaps, a drastic revision of Sweet Home for Famicom. This game, Resident Evil 4, is the jump over Resident Evil 2 that Resident Evil was over Sweet Home. It compels immediately, and it may breathe new life into the lumbering zombie that is the survival horror genre.
Oh hell, that was bad . . .
I said before that Mikami will do something great, and rise to some kind of throne with forty working plastic buttons. That day is still coming. It is not Resident Evil 4, however. No – it is something greater.
. . . oh shit -- I didn't mention SNK yet!
the insertcredit.com SNK award goes to
King of Fighters: Maximum Impact.
I like this game a lot. Eric-Jon has written many of the reasons why right here. You can read it if you like. I'd recommend it. All I'll say is that the game feels fun, and I want to play it with a stick, against my loud foreign friends in Tokyo. We will, most likely, do this.
And oh, it kicks the shit out of NeoWave. Which I really should have taken pictures of in Azumabashi. The arcade staff freakos were all over me the moment I stepped in the door, though. I didn't risk it.
. . . okay, so I was out of battery.
Anyway! Maximum Impact is nice. It reminds me of Soul Blade, back when it was brand new. I thought, then, "This is kind of like Tekken, only . . . much more fun." I think the same thing of King of Fighters: Maximum Impact. One could say, if one wanted to, that Maximum Impact is to King of Fighters as Street Fighter EX2 is to Street Fighter II. One would, however, be kind of wrong. EX2 was too strong in its insistence that it was a new and revolutionary 3D fighter. This brought it down. Maximum Impact tries, first and foremost, to be a King of Fighters game, and it works, as that. What's better is that you can pick classic Terry Bogard or Mark of the Wolves Terry Bogard. This is a joyous day.
oh holy shit no why did you show me that?
This dubious honor goes to Metal Slug Advance, just beating out Sonic Mega Collection Plus. It goes to the early game that should not have been playable. Last year's honor went to Namco's Star Fox for Gamecube, which this year is revealed anew as like a hybrid of Star Fox Adventures and Star Fox 64. This is perplexing, because Star Fox Adventures was like a mix of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64. So this new game is a mix of Star Fox, Zelda, and Star Fox. Hmm. Metal Slug Advance, at any rate, is 20% complete, yet playable at E3. You press the jump button, and float up toward the top of the screen. The journey takes five or six seconds. The game is plagued with slowdown that appears maybe-deliberate. It is not deliberate, because I've played a Metal Slug game before, and it was not like this. Please fix it. Thank you.
Oh, and that Advance Wars on Gamecube better be a joke. It looks like a Medal of Honor game or some shit. I won't point out that the "Advance" in "Advance Wars" stands for Gameboy Advance, and that this game's Japanese title is Cube Wars, the latest in a series of games starting with Famicom Wars and continuing to Gameboy Wars and Super Famicom Wars, on the Famicom, Gameboy, and Super Famicom consoles, respectively. The reason for the word "Advance" being idiotically in place in this new game's title are explained, kind of, in my entry on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Check it out, why don't you?
. . .
Did I miss anything?
[next: where were YOU when insertcredit.com fans ate freezer-burned ice cream?!]
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