Mav’s Blog

The video game flood in the months preceding Christmas has finally begun as I received Super Paper Mario a few days ago (yeah, laugh it up United Statians). To some, it may have already started a few weeks ago with the release of Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3 but I somehow messed up the Bioshock preorder and had to wait roughly 2 weeks to get my hands on it. Sadly it’s not the revolutionary shooter it was advertised as but nevertheless a good game. Can somebody tell me how good Metroid actually is? The European release date is October 26th so there’s still more than a month left to go over here…

At about the same time, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Megaman:ZX Advent will get released but so far, I’ve only preordered Zelda because of money reasons. I would have to import ZXA US Version anyway because there’s no word on the European release yet and like I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts the first ZX game was released this June because the translation took this long. Anyway, I’m not sure if I’ll buy it right away. The Remastered Soundtrack has arrived about 2 weeks ago though and I think it’s pretty nice, while not exactly as good as the one of the original ZX. But there’s a remix medley of a few ZX tracks in NES style - that made my day when I listened to it

Back to video game shopping in the coming months… So there’s Metroid Prime 3, Zelda:PH, Megaman ZXA, Half Life 2: Orange Box in October alone. Then there’s of course Super Mario Galaxy on November 14 (16 in Europe!) and don’t forget Smash Bros in December (not in Europe this year…). Luckily I don’t have an Xbox 360 because then I would also have to buy Assassins Creed and maybe a few others… But maybe I should get one sometime next year because of Burnout, GTA, Devil May Cry and whatnot.

So, the final months of 2007 will be awfully expensive. Anything you are looking forward to? Doesn’t have to be video games…

All this talk about Legends 3 with the Lost Planet engine and he’s already in…

Sort of… Both the character from Dead Rising and Megaman got added in the latest patch (PC version). Upon closer inspection you can see that it’s just the Dead Rising guy again but in his Megaman suit, a secret in Dead Rising. Too bad, but it’s a start

Megaman ZX Advent was released in Japan about a week ago and I’ve heard it’s pretty good but you probably won’t get different opinions of Megaman players who are even importing these games. Anyway, I won’t bother importing games from Japan anymore since I can’t read Japanese and even in a Megaman game, that makes it pretty boring. One thing I’m importing for sure is the new ZXA Tunes remastered soundtrack though. Its predecessor, the ZX Tunes, is one of my favorites and I really hope they keep releasing those as I think these soundtracks are wasted because of the sound quality of handhelds, especially on the GBA. Now the DS is actually quite alright quality wise but the remastered tracks are still so much better. So if you like Megaman music, I suggest buying these two along with the X1-6 pack and the classic 1-6 set and don’t forget all the other Remastered Soundtracks of MMZero 1-4 and… oh alright, maybe just those 2

On a sidenote, I’m almost done ripping Megaman X1 at last! Tileripping isn’t especially fun but now we have a base set we can use for our demo game coming with the Nova release - note that this is not Lost Heaven, Forest Hunter is always talking about. A few sets from the other games would still be nice though… seems as if I’m gonna stay tileripper for a while.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/11281

This is an interview with Keiji Inafune, creator of Megaman, about future installments of the Classic, X and Legends series and it seems like he and others from Capcom are really interested in finishing or at least continuing either series if there wasn’t the money problem. In my opinion a further sequel for the Classic series would be nice to have but one for the X series wouldn’t, even though it’s my favorite one. The X series died with part 7 because of the story break. A Command Mission sequel would definitely catch my interest though.

As for Legends, I can’t say I’ve played the first two (plus Misadventures of Tron Bonne) very much but the bits I have played were pretty good, save for the bad lock-on feature. So even though I don’t know the series that well, I think this type of game would be a good way to sort of revive the whole franchise because it seems that only Megaman fans are playing Megaman games because - to be honest - they never have that much new gameplay elements or a deep storyline to appeal to players who have never picked up one of its gazillion predecessors. The Legends sequel would be more of a mainstream action/rpg game garnering interest of a much bigger crowd than the simple and always-the-same action platformers.

I’d love to see such a game/sequel made… but how would it look like? I can’t imagine a Megaman with Lost Planet graphics quality. How likely is it that a next gen Legends will see the light of the day anyway? “Not very” already sounds a little too optimistic. Maybe we’ll see a Wii game though, it’s not high end hardware-wise so the production is probably a lot cheaper

For now we’ll have to settle with ZX and Starforce sequels on the DS and this isn’t all that bad now, is it? The ZX series already takes place in 23XX so they only need to make 6 more series before hitting the Legends timeframe, which is 30XX if I’m not mistaken.

As if it wasn’t already expensive to begin with because of two birthdays - my brother on May 19 and a friend on May 29. No, there was Spiderman 3 I was so looking forward to (and was terribly disappointed) and then there’s still Pirates of the Carribean 3 coming out this week. Luckily Shrek 3 isn’t out yet, like in the USA - I have to wait about a month for it. But I heard it also isn’t as good as the two predecessors.

And of course the most important thing is Mario Strikers Charged Football (Soccer, not American Football) I’ll be getting this Friday or Saturday. Since I haven’t played the first one on the Gamecube, I just hope this game is well worth its money, especially because I already bought a Wireless Router for online play, but I would’ve needed that one sooner or later anyway. The reviews I’ve seen so far were pretty good (one was 8/10, another one 88% and then another one in the same region) so it seems like it’ll keep me entertained for a while . Hopefully it doesn’t keep me from doing my work for Stencyl, which consists of tile ripping for the time being.

I almost forgot, it was mothers and fathers day this month, too. Not that these small presents are really expensive but it all adds up… With the inclusion of the upcoming game and movie, I will end up spending almost 250€ (almost 340$) this month. Given that I don’t have a job right now, this is quite a chunk of my current funds. However, my birthday is coming up in a little over a month, so I’ll get some presents for a change. Actually my real birthday is on Dec 23rd but a day before Christmas is so horrible that my parents and I agreed on changing it to my Name day.

Now that I’ve beaten Megaman ZX twice (to unlock something), I can’t wait for the sequel coming out this fall (US version). Luckily Handhelds aren’t region locked as the European version of the original ZX will be released in June, almost a year after the Japanese release and I’m simply tired of waiting on games I want to play in English anyway.

Like I already mentioned on the forums, there is no fixed release date for Super Paper Mario I was really looking forward to buying. Since European Nintendo games usually have 5 languages to choose from (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian) it’s no wonder it takes this long and I’ve heard SPM is rather text heavy. But even normal games take Big N 3 to 6 months to translate and adjust for the European (and Australian) market. A month is fine with me but anything above that just makes me want to mod my console and buy the US import which is a lot cheaper anyway, including expensive shipping and import taxes!

With this delay history in mind, I honestly doubt that Euro gamers will see many of all those AAA titles in the Wii Lineup 2007 but rather have to wait until late spring. Just about the only game coming out here first is Mario Strikers Charged because it is developed here and Soccer is most popular in the European region anyway. In case you’re looking forward to this game, you’ll know how it is to wait for the local version. There are still many people in forums who are complaining why they have to wait for the game and the Europeans don’t. Even more complained when Ocarina of Time was released on the EU Virtual Console first, even though it was pretty clear that they wouldn’t have to wait much longer.

Ranting aside, if we get at least a few of those games, I’m gonna be broke by the end of this year… In addition to GTA 4, Burnout Paradise and a few games on the DS, there’s just so much I’m looking forward to.

I may have hinted at the fact that I’m not quite the Megaman freak I once was in my first Blog entry but the more I work with the games (x1-3 specifically) ripping or documenting things, the more I feel the urge to play the others I may or may not have beaten yet. Just recently on a Capcom press event, Megaman ZX:Advent has been announced to be released this fall. Not that a sequel to the (very good) DS game was so surprising but it reminded me that I still have to finish the original ZX, which, in turn, reminded me of the Zero series I have lying around here.

I only beat MMZ1 so far because some fire boss prevented me from advancing in Zero 2 and thus, neither Zero 3 and 4 ever got inserted into my DS for story reasons. That’s what you get if you buy 4 games because you can’t wait for the new game (ZX) but I wanted to buy the Zero series sooner or later anyway. Now should I give Zero 2 (and sequels) another shot or simply finish ZX? By the time I’ve decided on what to do, Forest Hunter will have another Blue Bomber assignment for me…

In any case, I’m really looking forward to ZX:A even though I highly disliked Axl in the X games. It’s supposed to have a better map than the first one but it isn’t hard to do much better than that, though I welcome the info that one of the major problems of the original is adressed here. Well… let’s just wait and see

It took me 3 weeks to cover X2? There are no other excuses than plain lazyness I guess. With no deadline and all, I keep pushing it until tomorrow, then tomorrow again and so on… Even though I have no work or anything stopping me from doing useful stuff for Stencyl, my head just wants me to do fun things like playing games, watching movies and the like. This has to change

Or maybe it’s just because I don’t like X2 at all (except for a few tunes) for reasons I can’t really explain. Well the double X-Buster upgrade was kinda cool back then and at least it does something better than Megaman X3 and that’s hiding the low enemy count. X2 has 26 enemy types and introduces about 2 or 3 on average per stage without reusing many of the previously seen robots while X3 has about all the stages littered with those purple artillery robots to make it really obvious. But I should add that I didn’t really notice (or care) before doing these enemy documentations.

In case you’re wondering (probably not), Lazy Mind is the ending song to Rockman X7, performed by Showtaro Morikubo who is also voice acting “X” and, as I recently discovered, Kadaj in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (japanese of course). I used it as a title because I was just listening to it when starting to write and I’m kinda lazy right now, though not necessarily lazy minded

I just finished documenting all the enemies of Megaman X1 and it took quite long because it almost has twice the number of enemies of X3! When working on the X3 enemies, I really noticed how few enemy types the game actually had because I could dash through most of the levels past all those standard purple artillery guys among maybe two new types per level. In the end, X3 only had 24 and I just found 40 in X1. And still there’s so much more detail to it! At least I didn’t see any X3 enemies laughing when hitting me…

That’s almost like in Metal Slug, which has loads of fun animations you don’t normally see when playing through the game just once. Though as far as I know these sprites are hand drawn which already makes them so much more detailed and fluid.

Now lets see how many enemies X2 actually has. At least it has a sort-of cameo in it which was pretty funny when I saw it for the first time. It’s more like four cameos in one and that’s a big plus . This enemy, obviously from the scrapyard level, shows parts of four X1 enemies.

• the head of a miner, who usually liked to throw picks at you
• the wheel of the… the wheel, your very first enemy in X1
• again the head and parts of the body of those big fish who tried to eat you
• and finally a mettool helmet

Those “few days” I mentioned in my last post were a little longer than expected but now I’m really back again. I better start up X1 and 2 again to catch up on the enemy documentation. At least X3 is finished but since the first Blue Bomber version came much earlier than expected, all the data is also needed much earlier. Gotta speed up then…

I think the bigger problem we have is the lack of artists. Those already on the team can’t manage all sprites and tiles of all the games, so hopefully a few new artists will be joining us soon. Especially when we’re going to go public with the whole project.

And now on to something else, gaming related. I’ve been playing a lot of Gears of War lately and I haven’t had as much fun playing the coop mode over and over again since … since the last Smash Bros. game. You just have to pick this game up if you own an Xbox 360 and if you don’t, simply buy one just for this game. And while you’re at it, also buy Burnout Revenge, which should be rather cheap by now anyway. Eversince playing Burnout 3 on the original Xbox, I don’t even bother looking at other racing games anymore which are either too slow or too realistic for my taste. And even though the Burnout Revenge 360 port was a launch title, it looks very impressive with high resolution textures, smooth framerates and even higher sense of speed than on the Xbox or PS2. Of course it’s still the same game though, so if you already own the last gen version, you’ll have to decide for yourself if you’re willing to buy it again for the sake of better graphics.

Both these games are no secret top games of course but I just wanted to mention them because I’ve had so much fun playing them lately. Maybe one or two of you will rent or even buy them now too

Eli said he would probably not work on the Blue Bomber kit within the next few months and now he’s released a working demo of it as a surprise.  Of course I’m not mad because he lied… ;). How could I? But now it seems like we (Forest Hunter and me) don’t have as much time as we thought for the docs and the demo game. Time do get to work, right?

Well, I won’t be able to do much in the next few days, but after that I can do … stuff :). There’s still a lot of enemies to be documented and probably a whole lot of PMs to be sent back and forth. But first, I’ve got to test the release. Hmm so much to do, but I’m so excited! It’s the Blue Bomber after all…