Kato and Ken and JJ and Jeff

I recently learned from former GameFan writer Mollie Patterson that Ken Shimura, half of the Japanese comedy duo Kato-Chan and Ken-Chan, died of complications from the COVID-19 virus. This seems like a rather random thing to mention, but this news hit a little closer to my childhood than I would have liked. Not only was Fun with Kato-Chan and Ken-Chan the inspiration for the long-running television series America's Funniest Home Videos, it also gave us, in a roundabout way, the TurboGrafx-16 title J.J. and Jeff. Hudson Soft actually made a game based directly on Kato and Ken's TV series, but when it was brought to the United States, the license was no longer relevant, so they turned the stars into two Americans... a redhead with sunglasses and what appears to be Dan Quayle's stunt double.

See, he was George Bush's running mate.
No no, the other George Bush. Look, you had
to have been there.
(image from NintendoComplete's YouTube page)

Neither the original game nor its Westernized counterpart were all that special... just a retread of Hudson Soft's earlier Adventure Island games with a more modern setting and fewer stone axes. The lead characters would find themselves in wacky predicaments, and the one you didn't pick would impede your progress, flinging soda cans or lying in wait behind bushes to ambush you. Most reviewers probably dismissed it as "forgettable," but it really wasn't for me because it helped define my experience with the struggling TurboGrafx-16. 

Back in 1992, I used to go to this little movie rental store with a makeshift game room in the back. It was the only place within twenty miles where you could rent or play games for the TG16, and I would take advantage of this opportunity whenever I could, drinking in all of the out-of-left-field titles that just weren't available anywhere else. Playing Galaga '90, Bravoman, and of course J.J. and Jeff cemented my view of the TurboGrafx-16 as that odd little system with the 16-bit graphics and 8-bit gameplay, along with a library of explosively colorful, unfathomably weird games. So in a six degrees of separation kind of way, Ken helped shaped that perception. I may not know much about his comedy, but for that alone he has my thanks.

The Direct Approach

Time for some much needed good news! Nintendo recently posted an abbreviated Nintendo Direct, with news about several upcoming and already released Switch games. Here it is in case you haven't seen it.

Here are a few highlights from the presentation. Mr. Driller Drill Land is finally, finally getting an American release, offering an English translation along with a "casual" mode that makes the game as easy as you probably expected it to be when you first saw pictures of the original for the Dreamcast. 2K is finally getting its rear in gear and releasing Bioshock, X-Com, and Borderlands collections for the Switch. Presumably Borderlands 2 will run better on this handheld system than it had the Vita, because it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse. There's an expansion for Marvel Alliance 3 centered around the Fantastic Four and their eternal nemesis Dr. Doom, which looks pretty slick.

Okay, let me catch my breath here... what else? Shinsekai is a search action game where you, a scuba diving alien, must explore the depths of the ocean while fighting giant millipedes, uncovering robot sidekicks, and above all else, not drowning. It looks promising... better than the similarly themed Song of the Deep, anyway. There are a couple of Animal Crossing updates, neither of which fix the limited multiplayer options that have drawn the ire of fans. Looks like it's going to be one island per Switch forever, folks. Arms is getting one of its characters in Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and Bravely Default is getting a sequel, which reminds me that I should probably finish the first game eventually. (Blows dust off his neglected 3DS)

And there's more! Ninjala seeks to scratch that multiplayer itch for Switch owners bored with Splatoon, introducing a cast of young martial artists that use chewing gum to clear chasms and battle each other with Nerf swords and... giant corn cobs. There's a Naruto meets Willy Wonka vibe going on here. Finally (or finally for me, since the other stuff in the presentation didn't interest me much) there's a sequel to Clubhouse Games, the all-purpose time-waster for the Nintendo DS. There are new games blended in with the old, and the graphics have significantly improved, to the point where the marbles in Mancala have a translucent sheen as they're dropped into the gold-lined cups of the wooden playset. For all its many diversions, the original Clubhouse Games was one of the plainest looking games I can remember on the DS, so any improvement to the visuals is a welcome addition.

Mortal Kleanliness

By now, I'm sure you're tired of all the usual COVID-19 cliches... stay home, stay safe, cough into your elbow, avoid direct human contact, etc. All that's important, yes, but you're probably sick of hearing about it. So let's approach the subject from a different direction. You already know to wash your hands thoroughly, but do you know what it does specifically to protect you? This video from VOX explains it all.

See, viruses (and this virus in particular) are coated in a skin of oil, which is naturally water-resistant. If you put water alone on a virus, it slips right off, and you've still got a virus. However, add soap and thorough scrubbing, and something fun happens. The soap bonds to both the oil covering the virus and the surrounding water, and the soap and water molecules pull at either end, ultimately tearing the virus apart. The "guts" spill out and wash down the sink, meaning no more virus.

Put in simpler terms, washing your hands thoroughly lets you perform thousands of gruesome micro-fatalities on the COVID-19 virus. Don't feel too guilty... it would have done the same thing to you!

In related fatality news, I've learned that Mortal Kombat 9, the game that rescued the long-running series from its brief, misguided journey into 3D gameplay, has been delisted from Steam and other online stores. Nothing's been made official yet, but apparently it was Freddy Kreuger who dealt the killing blow. The character used to belong to Warner Bros. through its New Line Cinema division, but the rights recently returned to Freddy's creator, Wes Craven. 

What does Craven have planned for the popular slasher villain? Probably not much, all things considered. Regardless, with the character under new ownership, it's unlikely that Freddy will make a return to Warner's Mortal Kombat series. I suspect that Mortal Kombat 10 will eventually make its own vanishing act from online stores, now that two of its guest characters have been absorbed by Disney Studios.

Too Much Game, Too Few Buttons

Boy, this sure has been a couple of weeks, hasn't it? The spread of the COVID-19 virus has put the American way of life on hold, shutting down restaurants, cancelling sporting events, and forcing people to keep their distance from each other. If anything positive can be said about this disease, it's that it happened now in the internet age, rather than twenty five years ago, when home entertainment options were more limited and a lengthy quarantine would have been a bored-to-death sentence. Could you imagine trying to get through this ordeal without streaming, downloads, forums, or online anything? Scary.

This image from the Turrican 2 instruction booklet
gives you a pretty good idea of what this run 'n
gun shooter was all about, even if its depiction of the
lead character looks more like the T-800 as drawn
by Sergio Aragones.

These days, we've got plenty of ways to waste time without human contact. Personally, I've been entertaining myself by blowing the dust off my Playstation Classic, installing the latest version of AutoBleem, and indulging in the dozens of Amiga computer games that I missed when they were first released. As a console gamer, playing some of these feels like stepping into an alternate dimension. The original Turrican on the Genesis was dreadful, and didn't get a worthwhile sequel until Data East released Mega Turrican in 1994. However, there's a trilogy of Turrican games on the Amiga, with the first two held in fond regard by fans of the system. It's Turrican 3, essentially Mega Turrican but with some special effects removed, they didn't like so much.

There's one other thing worth mentioning... despite the system being designed with graphics and especially video games in mind, the Amiga never had a standard controller of its own. Players were expected to dig out their old single button sticks from the Atari 2600 and play games that way until the 1990s, when they were generously provided with two button controllers. By then, versus fighting games had made six button controllers the new standard on consoles, leaving the Amiga hopelessly ill equipped to handle these titles. Oh, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat were still released for the Amiga... you just had to play them with a two button joystick, or even a single button joystick if that's all you had.

Please sir, may I have some more? Buttons?

Even the stock three button pad of the Sega Genesis had started to chafe by the end of that system's life, so you can only imagine my pure delight in having to play Amiga games a quarter of a century later. Take Turrican 2, alluded to a couple of paragraphs earlier. Your hero can jump, fire, use a short-range energy whip, curl in a ball a'la Samus Aran, release a screen-clearing wave, and unleash a desperation attack where the player bounces around the playfield like the world's deadliest pinball. 

How do you do all this with just one button? As the old joke about porcupines having sex goes, "very carefully." You jump by pressing up on the joystick, which has always felt wrong to me in every genre but fighting games. You fire your weapon with the fire button, naturally, but only rapid taps. Holding it down while standing perfectly still activates the energy whip, which can be arced around your soldier. The morph ball- er, "gyroscope" is triggered by holding down and pressing the space bar on your computer. Be sure you're holding down on the controller while you're reaching for the space bar, or else you'll fire the wave! Finally, you pull off the death blossom by pressing space and the fire button together.

Well, I'm exhausted. In all fairness, you have the option to play the Amiga version of Turrican 2 with a two button joystick, but even that hardly seems like enough. This is clearly a four button job, which is likely why Turrican fit so snugly on the Super NES and why there was an option in Mega Turrican to use the top buttons of a Sega Arcade Pad as the smart bomb. Amiga game developers didn't have a four button controller at their disposal until the CD32, damn near the end of the life of the brand, which is why far too many games on the computer feel so constricted. Could you imagine a Strider-like game where you had to press up to jump, instead of a button dedicated to that task? Could you imagine a Terra Cresta clone where splitting up your ship and dropping a smart bomb could only be accomplished by wildly spinning the stick in either direction? Amiga owners don't have to imagine it... they lived it.

The Transporter

No, I didn't post on "it's-a me, Mar10." My March 10th was about as fun as that stupid spring power-up in Super Mario Galaxy, full of surprise expenses and spoiled groceries and no small amount of stress. That mouse hack I found doesn't look like it's going to work with the equipment I purchased, and I'll have to squeak through the rest of the month on a tight budget. My only solace is that I can bitch about gamers bitching about stupid things. Stupidly.

It seems some Playstation fans are crapping their pants to a golden brown about Sony bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to other formats. Perhaps they consider it a personal defeat after crowing for years about how Nintendo was doomed to become a third party licensee. What they're missing is that console manufacturers have been cross-pollinating for years, even decades, dating back to the last century. Microsoft recently brought its Ori and Super Lucky's Tale franchises to the Nintendo Switch, but years before that, they let T*HQ publish a handful of Rare games for the Game Boy Advance, including a couple of titles in the Banjo-Kazooie series. 

Atari had no reservations about spreading
itself around, as evidenced by this
early 80s advertisement.
(image from Twitter)

Years before that, Atari, once considered the unstoppable juggernaut of the video game industry, brought its own library of games to nearly a dozen competing consoles and computers. Thanks to AtariSoft, you didn't have to own an Atari 5200 or an Atari XL to play hits like Moon Patrol, Centipede, and Galaxian... you could do it on a ColecoVision, or an Intellivision, or that Apple IIe allegedly designed to help you learn in school, even though you damn well know you and your friends were really using it as a poor man's arcade cabinet.

The point is, cross-platform publishing has been around for a while. With the PS4, Xbox One, and PC all using similar hardware, it was due for a comeback. It's a smart business strategy to take a game that's been dormant for a couple of years and give it new life on other formats. Nothing is accomplished by chaining it to one console long after the launch hype has faded and sales have dropped off a cliff. Three long years after its debut, nobody's buying the Playstation 4 version of Horizon Zero Dawn. Everyone who owns a PS4 already has it! Judging from its current price, CDKeys can't give it away.

Much has already been said about the folly of taking up arms in a console war. Sony doesn't need your help, really! It's a $45 billion dollar corporation! It's got its own film studio! But even if it did, does it make sense to deny Sony the money that it would make by blowing the dust off one of its older games and selling it on another format? Try not to think of it as an act of weakness... everybody is doing it.

Broom of Dümb

Dear Cavia:

I recently played your game Bullet Witch, and was concerned that the title might lead players to mistake it for another popular action game with a gun-toting sorceress. This could ultimately result in a costly lawsuit from Platinum Games, or even worse, getting blocked by Hideki Kamiya on Twitter. With this in mind, I've come up with a handful of alternate titles which should prevent future legal action. 

Bulletproof Mooks
Stay-Away-a-Netta
Grime Time Live
Shitty Shitty Bang-Bang
Players May Cry
Turd Sand-Witch
Digital Nyquil
Beat Down II: The Worsening

No need to thank me. In fact, I would consider it a personal favor if you didn't send me a free copy of the sequel.

Sincerely,
Jess