Let the Sun Shine In

I'm fighting a cold (or worse?) right now, and I'm not feelin' so great. However, this late-breaking news perked me up just a little. Hamster and Platinum Games have teamed up to make a sequel to Terra Cresta that will hopefully take the bitter taste of Terra Cresta 3D out of the mouths of fans. We're getting dangerously close to April Fool's Day so I won't put too much stock in this game being released, but at the same time the early footage looks pretty authentic, and there's too much thought put into the new play mechanics for this to be a cruel hoax. I'll let you be the judge.

This time, there are three ships instead of the usual five, and they're tethered by bolts of electricity, which act as bullet absorbing shields. The formation of ships gathers energy with each successful shot, and that energy can either be invested in homing missiles or the series' trademark phoenix attack, an apparent tip of the hat to Radiant Silvergun and its sequel Ikaruga. Sol Cresta already looks better than Terra Cresta 3D for the Sega Saturn... but then again, so did that phlegm I hacked up a couple of minutes ago in a coughing fit. (Hey, if I have to suffer from this, so do you.)

The Terra Cresta sequel will be released for home computers, the Playstation 4, Nintendo's Switch, and... not so fast, the Xbox One wasn't invited to this party. I'm sensing bad blood between Hamster and Microsoft... they've never released anything but Neo-Geo arcade games for the Xbox One, and lately, even those never get discounted in Microsoft's weekly sales. 

I'd love to know the scandalous details of the breakup between these two companies, but Hamster doesn't seem eager to discuss it on its Twitter account... and Microsoft is too busy buying everything that's not bolted down to respond to its customers. Alas, poor Discord, I knew you well...

The Agony and the Ecstasy: AtGames Legends Gamer Pro

Last Friday, I finally got my Legends Gamer Pro in the mail. I spent the rest of the weekend yelling at it.

I'll get into the details in a moment, but there are a couple of things I want to mention first. Anyone ever hear of the game Asuka 120%? Well, you'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months. This quirky fighting game with a cast of high school girls was translated to English for the Sega Saturn a few years ago, but a version of Asuka 120% will be ported to the Saturn's ancestor, the Sega Genesis, and then brought over to the Switch with extra content. Thanks to ResetEra for the scoop. Actually, I heard about this from multiple sources, but this was the only link to the news I could find in a quick Google search.

You'd think this would make me deliriously happy as a fan of both fighting games and Sega's most popular console, but there's something about Asuka 120% that really sticks in my craw. Eighty percent of it is the fighting, which is kind of floaty and generally ends in clashes where characters trade punches in mid-air until the player gets sick of hammering buttons or the CPU decides it wants to win. Is there some logic to how this works, like a rock-paper-scissors relationship between attacks? I've never been able to figure it out myself.

image from CD Romance

The other, uh, forty percent of my beef with this game lies with the character designs. Everyone's got these comically oversized forearms that make you think Popeye took an extended shore leave in Japan seventeen years before the cast was born. I don't think anyone was surprised by Cathy's torpedo boobs, but the gorilla arms are one exaggerated anatomical feature that remain bewildering a quarter of a century after the game's debut. 

Beyond that, I'm pretty sure the game's going to be ridiculously overpriced on the Genesis, a system that's ill-equipped to handle its large sprites and bright colors. It probably won't be Paprium bad (for a variety of reasons...), but wallet-emptying nevertheless. I'll pass.

Okay, here's the second thing I wanted to mention before I get to the Legends Gamer Pro. The streaming service CBS All-Access just became Paramount Plus, and Viacom recently dumped a crap ton of classic Nickelodeon shows onto it. Hold on, I'm getting to the relevant part here. One of those shows is Nick Arcade, a spiritual successor to the video game show Starcade thoroughly drenched in 1990s style and 16-bit era pop culture. 

That's the most press Gun*Nac
ever got, I'm sure.
(image from YouTube and Stephen Wilds)

Let me give you an idea of what you'll see in an average episode of Nick Arcade. The podiums the players stand behind are giant Game Boys. The games the contestants play are early releases for the Genesis, Neo-Geo, and Super Nintendo. The final round is a crude augmented reality challenge designed by Psygnosis, and practically impossible to play from a first person perspective. The host is a headcase who patterned his comedic stylings after Howie Mandel. It's hilarious and embarrassing at the same time... now that's cringe-ertainment!

Okay, now onto the main event. As I was saying earlier, I got my Legends Gamer Pro in the mail last Friday, and it's been giving me headaches ever since. For days I thought my system, consisting of a massive control panel and a palm-sized, disc-shaped console, was broken. Neither the second stick nor the trackball would respond to input when connected to the puck, and trying to install CoinOpsX was a vicious cycle of starting the installation process, being explicitly told that the installation was a success, then being told when trying to run the program that CoinOpsX was not on the drive. Repeat until thoroughly infuriated.

It turns out that the system wasn't broken... just AtGames' miserable customer service. There were fixes for many of the issues I was having, but I had to discover them from other users, as AtGames would not respond to repeated requests for assistance, either on Twitter or via email. The joystick dysfunction? This suggestion from Cheap-Ass Gamer forum member ZincDust put that to bed. I'm told that CoinOpsX will work after a hard reset of the system, but that hasn't worked for me yet. The games I put on my flash drive do work, but only through the AtGames "Bring Your Own Games" service, which provides only barebones functionality. It gets the job done, but the footage I've seen of CoinOpsX is so much more stylish. I want that experience, and at the rate things are going, it doesn't look like I'll ever get it.

I'd say the Legends Gamer Pro was just barely worth the $100 I paid for it. It's a surprisingly ambitious product by AtGames, with an online store, leaderboards, optional pinball tables, and compatibility with controllers beyond the included control panel... which is handy when you don't want to drag the damned thing from room to room. At the same time, it's an expectedly buggy product by AtGames, with a cryptic, stubborn, user-hostile design. Things often don't work the way they should, and the company hasn't shown much interest in guiding you through its nettle-filled hedge maze to a solution. 

I nearly sent the LGP back to Wal-Mart, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because AtGames' customer service is so dire, and because they expect players to just figure things out when there are no readily apparent solutions to the issues they created. Is it obvious that disconnecting and reconnecting the control panel in the wireless pairing options will bring your trackball back to life? No. Does AtGames tell you how to get your trackball to work when the console won't recognize it? No. Why do you have to get this information from a random stranger on the internet when it's AtGames' responsibility to tell you? Hell if I know.

You may have gathered from this and previous posts on this blog that AtGames is a garbage company. Go with that feeling.

Downloads Aren't Forever

It's a bad time to be a Playstation owner, it would seem.

Bryan "The Gay Gamer" Ochalla caught this alarming rumor from Wario64, a typically reliable source for gaming news. It seems Sony will shut down the online stores for the PSP, PS3, and Playstation Vita as soon as late summer of this year. What this means is that if you've purchased a game for any of these systems online and it's lost in a hard drive crash or some other mishap, you won't be getting it back after August. While you can back up PSP and Vita games to your PC using Sony's Content Manager Assistant, I don't know of any similar tools for the Playstation 3... not that games spanning twenty five gigabytes or more would be all that convenient to archive anyway.

But wait, it gets better! There's another report, this time from Does It Play, that the Playstation 4 is built with a CMOS battery that will make a C-MESS out of both your downloaded and physical games after it eventually dies. You'll have to get online to verify the ownership of your downloaded content after the battery kicks the bucket, and your disc-based games won't run at all. Yes, even if you had the foresight to buy physical copies of PS4 games, they won't help you much once the system's internal battery runs dry. 

If you thought that was a stunning revelation, just wait until you hear that the Philips CD-i first released thirty years ago has a similar problem with a cantankerous coin battery. Playstation 4, CD-i am your father!

image from Morbotron

Between the possibility of legally obtained Playstation games making a vanishing act from your systems and the news that transferring saves from the PS4 to the PS5 is a Scanners-level headache, I'm feeling a lot more confident about my purchase of an Xbox One. Sure I haven't been playing games much on it lately, but those games will be there for me when I eventually get back to them. Whenever that is.

Dial, Minus Style

I did it, you damn dirty homo sapiens. I bought an arcade spinner for all my brick-breaking, tube-running, adorable planet-defending needs. There's just one little problem, though... see if you can spot it.

My dial is currently without a proper home, so it's taken temporary residence inside a Tupperware container. It ain't sexy (how are electronics "sexy," exactly? I'm still wondering twenty years after the gaming press started using, and overusing, that description...), but it gets the job done. The spinner spins, the buttons press, and I can even use the case to store last night's lasagna after I'm done with my marathon session of Ghox, or whatever. 

So I guess it's good enough for the moment. However, I'd much rather have something with class, and mass, and if at all possible, four buttons. Most games that use a spinner top out at two, but Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulation demands four, and yeah, I need to play that one as nature and Sam Palahnuk intended. Since the GRS spinner only has support for two buttons, I'll have to install an encoder or a USB joystick inside the case, and join the two peripherals with a hub to give myself access to all the inputs I'll need.

Speaking of silly, superfluous toys, I broke down and got one of those Legends Gamer Pro joysticks, since it was super cheap and I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get another chance after the stimulus runs dry. That'll arrive in about a week, and I look forward to kicking the tires of this mammoth twin joystick. What I probably won't get is Megavolt85's upcoming Dreamcast controller adapter, which makes the system compatible with everything but your Peloton exercise bicycle, but I'm tempted.

He Who Laughs Clast

It's official... Microsoft now owns Bethesda lock, stock, and glitches. It's pretty big news for most people, since the lion's share of their games will be available on the successful Xbox Game Pass service, but it's hard for me to get excited about it, because the kinds of games they release aren't really to my personal taste. 

Honestly, I find myself confusing Bethesda with its competition more often than I should be comfortable admitting. Who published Borderlands again? Oh, that was 2K, not Bethesda. What about Bioshock? That was a 2K thing, too. How about Crysis? That was Ubisoft, I think. Or wait, that was Far Cry... Crysis was published by Electronic Arts. Instead of risking further confusion, I'll just skip the Bethesda talk entirely and post a picture of the Maneki-Neko I scored from the local thrift store.

A friend had brought me a beckoning cat from Japan some years earlier, but its ear got chipped after falling off a shelf, and it's currently stuck somewhere in Michigan. However, this one is large, local, and largely unblemished. I'm pretty happy about that... way happier than the Bethesda acquisition made me, for sure.

There was something else I needed to tell you. I've been playing Iconoclasts on my Switch, and while it's one of the better search action games you can play on the system, it falls face down in its oatmeal about halfway through, saddling you with a stealth mission that makes absolutely no sense and is absolutely no fun to play. You, the mute protagonist, and your friend, a ripe-smelling lady pirate*, must hide from an invisible superhuman named Ash who tries to track you down. Get caught and he'll crack your head against the pavement while leaving you with a parting insult. Fire at any trace of his location and the bullets sail past the telltale piles of leaves stirred up under his feet.

(* I'm not sure why the game is so fixated on Bea O'Plenty's aroma, but it comes up a lot. Like, more than Wario's smell in a Wario game, and his favorite snack is garlic.)

This completely mandatory and thoroughly obnoxious scene nearly derailed my progress through Iconoclasts. Mercifully, there's a solution, which I'll share with you now.

Lead both Robin and Mina to this small, hidden pool in the center of the stage. Hide Robin (press down and melee) and switch over to Mina. Fire your shotgun directly upward, then duck down and wait for Ash to walk over the bridge. When he does, target the trail of leaves with your gun and blast it to chip off some of his health. Duck back down for a couple of seconds to keep the heat off you, and repeat the process. Keep luring Ash out into the open and shooting him in the groin and he'll eventually yield... you won't even have to use Robin to deliver the coup de grace.

This combines strategies from a variety of online sources, but takes Robin out of the picture. She's the character you'll play for the majority of Iconoclasts, but I found her useless in the battle with Ash... her weapon charges much too slowly to hit the cloaked creep reliably, and even when a missile connects, he'll sometimes block it. Ash can't see you blast him from below with the shotgun, and he can't effectively counter the attack, making him easy prey.

Now that Ash is beaten, the only thing you'll have to endure from him is a long speech about hide and seek and the tragic fate of his daughter and blah blah blah yakkety schmackety. That's nice... now would you go away already? While you're at it, take your crummy stealth action with you.

One more thing! From now until they eventually run out of stock, you can get the AtGames Legends Gamer Pro for $99 from the Wal-Mart web site. I know, I know, "ew, AtGames!," but this particular AtGames product has been well received. You're getting one trackball, two joysticks, and a hell of a lot of buttons in this unit, along with a circular console with 150 built in games, and the potential to play a whole lot more. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to make the LGP play more games, but considering all you're getting for one Benny, it might be worth the effort.

Move Over Plumber, Now There's Something Greener

Sure it's March-io 10th, but that happens every year. We haven't gotten one of these since the 1990s.

It's a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game with pixel artwork, in the style of the old Konami beat 'em ups! As a long-time fan of the heroes in a half shell and crushing buttons into plastic powder, I'm down. I especially like the running animations for the lead characters... just look at this!

So when are we getting Shredder's Revenge? Judging from how it looks so far, not soon enough.

Another Spin?

You think I would have learned my lesson by now, but nope, I want to take another crack at the whole "arcade spinner" thing. This new product by GRS looks really promising, fitting into the button hole of a standard joystick and being designed with simplicity in mind. You don't have to buy a controller board; it's already built into the unit, and supports USB right out of the box. You don't even have to buy buttons, because two regulation sized arcade buttons are included.

Early Amazon reviews claim that this dial has a heavy feel and will "spin for daaaays," which is precisely the experience I want when I fire up MAME for those rare games of Victory, Block Block, or Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator. The bummer is that it's fairly expensive at $54.99, but if Grandpa Joe makes good on his promise of a third stimulus package, I could probably fit it into my budget.

Another peripheral I'd like to have at the moment is a clicky stick game pad like the kind they used to make for the Neo-Geo, because the standard D-pad and buttons on a Switch Lite are woefully inadequate for Match of the Millennium. Honestly, there are a few quality of life improvements Code Mystics should have added to the game, like separate buttons for light and hard attacks, but the lack of a fighting game friendly D-pad was beyond their control. The game seems beyond my control too, judging from all the swearing I did while I was playing it. Would you friggin' do the dragon punch already, Ken? No? Well, dying is fine too. You go do that. (Putz.)