Dare to Play the Game

Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. I’m your host that hates hard drive crashes. My hard drive of 6 years or so crashed on Friday. (I love beeps). However, my fairly new (less than a year) hard drive is just fine. So all the really important stuff was really on that drive anyhow. I however had to restor… my operating system and a few small programs here and there. I am back up, and it is actually running better due to the OS being on the newer drive. I followed that up with Tuesday buying a new graphics card(ATI X1300 512mb AGP) and soon we’ll see about connecting that computer to my tv and being a little more centralized.

Wow, nice bikini. I’m still waiting for Morgan, for her take me beyond the waves, into cyberspace. We could make interesting music together, hopefully something besides the Japanese pop that most rpgs make. A rock ballad perhaps, one about a love unrealized, and one that omits anything about a stalking reference. (like Loving You is a Dirty Job by Ratt)

Very soon, my precious, my preciousssss. I am hereby proclaiming September 18th the official USA WII Day for West Columbia, Tx. If some kinda exec at Nintendo wants to send me a WII in celebration for that day I will kindly take the day off to play it and sing its praises. I’m just saying. That is pretty awesome that a playable system will be available to mess with at these shows. Even better, pricing and true release info will be announced. I can hardly wait, come on $199. Is anybody else scratching their head at Wiimote-based mahjong? I mean really…come on. Have you ever tried to play mahjong, it fries your brain seriously. Of course I got the same feeling from Nintendo 64 games which is why I never bought the system. Oh well.

SmackDown vs. Raw ’07 Roster Confirmed
The wait is over. All 51 current superstars are finally revealed.

Tables are pains to hand code in HTML. Seriously. Anyhow, glad that a full roster has been announced. Too bad it sucks. First the good points, Batista, Chavo, JBL, Johnny Nitro, Kurt Angle, Psicosis, Randy Orton, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, Shelton Benjamin, Triple H, and of course Matt F’ing Hardy among others. Bad points; Chris Masters (just got back from Wellness and is now basically a jobber), Daivari (annoying wrestler and gone from the roster as of oh about 4-5 months ago), Joey Mercury (gone due to wellness), Paul Burchill (oh great, Pirate gimmick), and Lance Cade/Trevor Murdoch (crappy tag team). No Spirit Squad, Viscera is in, but neither of his recent tag partners (Val Venus or Charlie Haas), Jeff Hardy isn’t in there, neither are Paul London/Brian Kendrick. So both of the Smackdown/Raw tag champs are not represented. Kid Kash is in, but his partner Jaime Noble isn’t. And none of the ECW roster unless they transferred over from Raw/Smackdown (meaning no Dreamer, Sandman, Balls, CM Punk, etc). For the women wrestlers; Ashley, Victoria, and Maria are bad omissions in my opinion. But then again, women wrestling in the SVR games have been terrible. I hope the CAW engine is good enough and here is a late thought if possible. In Smackdown 2 for PS1, there was a huge name bank in CAW of wrestlers they just forgot in time for the game but could announce when you came out to a match. I think like 8-10 actual wrestlers. Tommy Dreamer and Chavo Guerrero are a couple I can remember off the top of my head. Now the last SVR did have like Jeffery and Matthew, really generic first names. What they could do is have a first name and last name bank, but make them seperate. That way we could use names at will and we could sneak in TNA names. Then the announcing could be “Jeff (wait one second) Hardy”. It could really work. And I don’t believe it would violate any trademark laws because you aren’t putting them together intentionally (something like Samoa…Joe might be a bit too obvious though).

Another forgot…hrmmm, another not so-remembered classic; Forgotten Worlds was a very fun horizontal shooter that resembled a little bit of Contra and a little bit of R-Type. It was one of the first games to sport a character that can swerve his gun around 360 degrees to shoot the various types of enemies. Enemies from your basic space thug to bosses that resembled Egyptian gods to the final boss at the end who can be only described as some crazed big blue demonic angel with hairy legs. The game has a cult following, and the characters have popped up from time to time in other games including Marvel vs Capcom and Namco X Capcom. Even the shopkeeper (Sylphie) makes an appearance who can actually change dress and become other characters in Namco X Capcom. The powerups were impressive and as with many Capcom games, the challenge was dialed at high. A near arcade perfect copy of this sucker would appear later in Capcom Classics for PS2/Xbox; but Genesis had the best version for a long while.

I love good ideas, especially from Anonymous…I mean heck he seems to write me every week. Bubble Bobble first appeared in the arcades in 1986 and was an instant hit. It’s simple yet addictive gameplay (translation: easy to get going luring you into playing the later stages over and over again with its increasing difficulty and interesting play) was what got most people interested. You took on the role of Bub or Bob and the idea was to blow a bubble at your enemies. Once the enemy got trapped in the bubble you could then run it over with your horns thus scoring you points and fruit. Fruit was just more points mostly. There were secret rooms also which meant over 100+ levels for your gaming enjoyment. Taito produced this wonderful game on every system you could think of, even current gen systems like Xbox and PS2 as part of the Taito Legends package. This version is perhaps the most arcade accurate version, with the Sega Master system version being also near perfect arcade accurate. Many sequels were spawned such as Bubble Bobble II, Parasol Stars, and my favorite Rainbow Islands. This is also one of the fewer older games that I will play and play (like Dig Dug & Galaga) until I can hardly see anymore.

PS2

Backyard Baseball 2007
Spyhunter: Nowhere to Run
Yakuza
Nascar 07

PSP

Guilty Gear: Judgement
Loco Roco
World Championship Poker: All In
Nascar 07

XBOX 360

Test Drive Unlimited
XBOX Live Arcade Unplugged

XBox

Pro Stroke Golf: World Tour 2007
Spyhunter: Nowhere to Run
Nascar 07

GBA

Harlem Globetrotters World Tour
Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots
Uno/Skip-Bo

Big news this week, well that would be Yakuza. The first clone besides Saint’s Row that looks truly equal to the GTA’s (sorry Driver and True Crime fans). Another Spy Hunter game might be interesting, though I still think everything after the first arcade game went pretty much downhill. Nascar 07 also comes out this week if you like racing around a circle, eating chicken fries and have three names. Sorry, I still don’t think anything about Nascar nor care to.

Looking at my release schedule for the upcoming 2, 2 1/2 months – I see at least 6 games that I want pretty badly. I do have a EB Games GC that will take care of oh..2 of them (and the 2 budget ones at that) :). Justice League Heroes, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Guitar Hero 2, Sega Genesis Collection, Capcom Classics 2, & SVR 2007. Who says PS2 games are dying? Anyhow, add that in with the WII release and I might just be broke. Oh go look at my auctions kie? Items for auction by Kedrix – starting Friday – Sept 1st, 2006. Thank you, drive thru and take care.

As Always,
Kedrix of Aldrianian
(*The Forgotten One*)