The Uncola

Sorry, I don't have too much to say... too worried about the election. However, there is one thing I did want to mention before October comes to a close. I noticed something odd when I played the Arcade1UP Pac-Man cabinet at the local Wal-Mart. (Remember when Wal-Mart actually had arcade games, rather than trying to sell aging Gen Xers shrunken down facsimiles of them? Pepperidge Farm remembers.) Observe!

These are two of the prizes that appear in the center of the screen in the ill-conceived "upgrade" of Pac-Man called Exciting New! Pac-Man Plus. Yeah, yeah, they just call it Pac-Man Plus now, but I still think of the adjectives on the marquee as part of the title. Anyhoo, one of the prizes, a cocktail, is the same as it's always been, but that can of cola is missing the ribbon that instantly identifies it as Coca-Cola. 

Lots and lots of games from the 1980s featured cans of Coke either as power-ups, or background decor. You'll find it hidden in trash cans in Final Fight, retrieve it from scarlet ninjas in Bad Dudes, and throw goons into signs advertising the pause that refreshes in Ninja Gaiden. (The beat 'em up, I mean, not that Castlevania clone amped up on caffeine.) The Arcade1UP version of Pac-Man Plus is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time I've ever seen the telltale ribbon edited out. And rather poorly too, I might add... they couldn't have added a lightning bolt or a letter or something to it? Without that flourish, it barely looks like a can of soda.

I'm just wondering what happened here. Coca-Cola never balked before about its products making stealth appearances in video games. Why now? Was the edit compulsory or made out of an abundance of caution? Look, I realize that I'm probably the only one who gives a crap, but still, it strikes me as a little strange.

Anyway! Good news on the book front. After an exhausting process of taking hundreds pictures in Batocera and swearing profusely at Fatal Fury Special, I've got the 16-bit ports section of Squirrel Burger Cookout all laid out. I hadn't intended to do things this way, but on the advice of HG101's Kurt Kalata, I've added spreads to each chapter with tons of pictures, comparing all the reviewed games. As they say, show, don't tell... but I'll be doing plenty of both in this book.

Dumb and Dumber

There are some unsavory folks on the fringes of the video game industry that leave a faint taste of bile in your mouth whenever you hear their names. Joe Lieberman. Jack Thompson. Leland Yee. Michael Pachter. Some of these people no longer darken our doorstep, like Lieberman, who left the Senate to join the shuffleboard set, and Thompson, who was disbarred after one too many obnoxious publicity stunts. And Yee, well, we're probably not going to hear him rant too much about "murder simulators" after being arrested for such real-life felonies as gun trafficking and money laundering six years ago.

Michael Pachter, on the other hand, continues to annoy gamers with his reverse Cassandra act, getting undeserved attention for industry predictions that are predictably, well...

Desperate to stay in the public spotlight, Pachter's predictions have gotten increasingly abrasive. He described the former CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata as "late and not-so-great" shortly after his passing, and now... there's this.

I'll give you the Cliff Notes. Michael Pachter claims that Switch owners overwhelmingly prefer handheld mode to docked (wrong, as is Pachter tradition... it's split evenly between docked and handheld use, according to Ars Technica) and that if Nintendo were "smart," they'd get rid of the docking feature entirely and just sell the Switch Lite. Ooh, ooh! I know why Nintendo shouldn't do that! Hell, they don't even need to listen to a schlub like me... the fact that Nintendo has already sold 65 million Switch units, and only 9 million of those have been Switch Lites, should be reason enough for them to stay the course and respond to Pachter's remarks the way we all should... with a hearty chuckle and a condescending pat on the head.

The silver medal for the week's dumbest take goes to Alex Hutchinson for claiming that streamers should pay game publishers for any footage they broadcast on Twitch. And where is that money supposed to come from, exactly? All but the most popular streamers are riding the razor's edge of poverty as it is. While you're bleeding the stone, maybe streamers should start paying Hanes and Levi's for the clothes they wear on camera, until they can't afford the licensing fees and switch to a barrel held up by suspenders. 

Look, the streamers already paid for those games. They're giving their publishers free advertising. Maybe you should leave it at that, rather than trying to drill through the bottom of an empty barrel you're already making them wear. I don't know what's more aggravating, the greed of this industry, or the short-sighted stupidity.

Bring on the Night

Recently, I've been playing Night in the Woods on Xbox Game Pass. It's exactly what I was expecting it to be from the descriptions... but it's also a lot more of what I was expecting than I was expecting. If that makes sense.

Mae's not known for her tact. Especially
after she's thrown back a few.

The game presents itself as a side-scrolling platformer, with lead Mae Borowski running through the town of Possum Springs and leaping onto anything that will hold her weight, but past the control scheme, it's a visual novel. The bulk of the game is spent talking to friends, family, and passersby, and anything offered beyond starting conversations is just there to frame the narrative. There's a rhythm mini-game, but it's offered to establish that Mae had a garage band in high school. There's a simple action RPG, but it's just there to forge a bond between Mae and one of her friends. And so forth.

Plot progression is extremely rigid and paths are frequently closed off to the player, making the game feel stifling even in comparison to point and click adventures like the ancient King's Quest series. There is not an abundance of things to do in Night in the Woods; just a lot of conversations to read. If you're not interested in who these characters are and what they have to say, this game has nothing to offer you.

And this really speaks to me. Nobody would
ever drink alcohol if it was just for the taste.

Fortunately, I'm very interested in what this game has to say, and it's not just
because of the impeccable writing. Visual novels have long been the domain of the Japanese, and while their courtroom dramas and outlandish murder mysteries have plenty of fans, I personally have never had much interest in them. The more grounded and relevant narrative of Night in the Woods, on the other hand... now that speaks to me. 

There are severed arms and strange things happening in the shadows and oh yes, all of the characters are cartoon animals, but above all else, Night in the Woods is  a story about disillusioned youth in a once proud Midwestern town, caught in the grip of economic decay. I can relate to this. As a former Michigan resident, I've lived it. I've seen once self-sufficient villages like Sunfield and Mulliken reduced to skeletons by big box stores and online commerce. Banks and grocery stores close, small businesses struggle to survive... these communities have become unsustainable, but people still have to live there, because they don't have the means to live anywhere else. 

Beyond all of her other "charms," Mae
has a bit of a mean streak.

Night in the Woods explores the decline of the Midwest, and the people it affects, in quiet but unflinching detail. You see the lead character return home from college and embrace mediocrity, because it's the only thing she knows. You meet her friends, who work dead end jobs to pay the rent, or manage hardware stores to keep the dying light of their parents' business from flickering out. You accidentally discover that Mae's father, an outwardly friendly man who's always armed with a corny joke, has a secret past as a violent drunk. Night in the Woods is honest without succumbing to melodrama, so things get real in a hurry. Real quirky, real philosophical, real heavy. Real necessary to discuss.

Video games have been around for a long time now, and this hobby has explored nearly every idea and subject imaginable. However, Night in the Woods is the first game I've played that shines a light on the rot that's consumed small towns in America over the last twenty years. The fact that it's the only media of any kind which thinks it's important to discuss is a little upsetting, but if we have to have this conversation with abstractly drawn cats, bears, and crocodiles, so be it.

For Unlawful Carn-al Knowledge

Gee, you spend thirty years selling Wal-Mart cheap crap manufactured with slave labor, and you suddenly think you own the world.

Yeah, it's China again. Hot off the nation's attempt to blot Taiwan out of existence and suppress protests in Hong Kong comes a scheme to absorb Mongolia into its writhing mass. If that wasn't bad enough, China wants other countries to push its propaganda that Mongolia was always part of China, that there was no such thing as Ghengis Khan, and that the wall you can see from space is only there to add panache to the country's backyard.

There's a museum in France that used to have a Ghengis Khan exhibit, but the Chinese Bureau of Cultural Heritage decided that there was no reason a Ghengis Khan exhibit should have Ghengis Khan in it. Why a museum in Europe is any of China's damn business I'll never know, but ultimately the Château des ducs de Bretagne decided that it would be better to close the exhibit than use it as a billboard for China's self-serving historical rewrites.

"What does this have to do with video games?," you say. "I liked this blog better before you got all political!," you say. Well, I say you're lying, because you never liked this blog in the first place. I also say that this has everything to do with video games, because whenever China gets the urge to annex some other country, it tends to trickle down into our hobby, like so much piss from a stopped up urinal. 

Consider this: when Hearthstone champion Blitzchung publicly declared his support for a free Hong Kong, Activision executive and money grubbing turd Bobby Kotick responded by withholding the money he won in a Hearthstone competition, held by Activision. When China wanted to restrict Taiwan's autonomy from the mainland, SNK's current owner 37Games removed all references to the country from several Neo-Geo games. Now China would like you to believe that it was never Ghengis Khan's bitch, and it's going to do whatever is necessary to make you believe that.

Which brings us to this gentleman. 

image from the SNK Wiki

This is Julius Carn from the World Heroes series. He's described on the SNK Wiki as "the strongest fighter of the Mongolian people," and a man who "led the powerful (Mongolian) army into many victories and conquests." Like all of the other characters in the series, he's an expy of a historical figure, and if you haven't already figured out which one, I'll give you a hint: he loves Twinkies for their most excellent sugar rush.

Given China's eagerness to make the world forget about Ghengis Khan, and SNK's eagerness to do China's bidding, it's not hard to imagine what could happen to this character in the immediate future. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but considering what happened to Winnie the Pooh in the Chinese release of Kingdom Hearts (he's not there), it doesn't seem too far-fetched. If J. Carn suddenly vanishes from your digital copy of World Heroes 2, well, you heard it here first.

A Def-Defying Stunt

Pardon my absence. I've been spending a lot of my free time capturing screenshots and laying out pages for the Neo-Geo book, currently titled Squirrel Burger Cookout: A '90s Kid's Guide to Big Neo-Geo Gaming on an Itty Bitty Budget. Unfortunately, the next chapter I'll be working on is... King of the Monsters.

Okay, wrong Neo-Geo game, but it fits. In fact, this was the first Neo-Geo game, so early that it doesn't even have the famous Pro Gear Spec boot screen. I wonder if there are any others like this?

Anyway. I'm just writing to let you know that someone's working on a plug-in for the Playstation Vita which significantly increases the resolution of PSP games. Normally they output on the Vita at their native 480x272 resolution, but GePatch hopes to change this, sharpening their visuals with four times the pixels. You might want to stick with emulation for your high-def PSP gaming fix, though, as GePatch is very early and won't work, or works poorly, with the more demanding titles in the system's library. Thanks to Wololo for the scoop.

History Lessened

It's funny... no matter how much dreadful news there is ("Did you know the governor of Michigan was almost kidnapped by violent rednecks?" "Oh, is it Thursday already?"), and how weary I get from it all, there's always just a little more outrage left in the tank, which gives me the fuel I need to complain about it. 

I took this picture back in 2014. Evidently
it was a preview of coming attractions.

So it goes with the recent announcement that Sony will be pulling all of its legacy systems from the Playstation Store. You won't be able to purchase PS3, PSP, or PS Vita games from your computer, and while you'll still have the option to buy them from the stores built into the systems, this decision will make it less convenient. It's also a symbolic disavowal of these machines. Any move Sony makes to distance itself from its previous generation console and its two handhelds will make it easier for the company to abandon them completely later... and with the PS5 in the wings, they're obviously eager to do just that.

If you were dragging your feet on hacking your PS3 or PS Vita for homebrew, this news should provide adequate motivation to get that done. Sony clearly doesn't care anymore; why should you?