I have a softspot for Red Ninja. Perfect example of a PS2 game doing a bunch of things few other games tried, and there are a lot of ninja games on that system alone. The wire weapon is very cool even if it doesn’t do what you want sometimes. The final boss is hellish though
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soundtrack is by one of the two composers of the Super Castlevania IV OST also as well as UFO: A Day in the Life and some other stuff. i put this track on one of my mixes:
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Did anyone ever play that PS2/Xbox Aeon Flux game, I vaguely remember playing the demo as a youth and not really knowing what i was doing or what it was but enjoying jumping around and running on stuff (on a roof? by a dumpster?). Ninja talk activated a flashback
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it’s on my list to check out soon! i did try watching the 2000s movie a while back and had to turn it off after like five minutes… in a way it was comforting to realise nothing about that era felt nostalgic to me yet
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i actually thought this game was super impressive when i played it a long time ago! i guess it looks good because they used textures really well to make everything look more detailed than it actually is or something? i dunno. but i remember thinking that it looked way better than most all-3d ps1 games
the tv show is set in the wake of a kind of bloodless apocalypse where an emp wiped out the entire stock market. somehow this meant that evil corporations and financial institutions have more power than they did before, rather than less.
also the protagonist is a genetically engineered super-soldier who escaped from the super-soldier factory as a kid. she lives in a squat in an abandoned (possibly before construction was even finished?) building, and instead of paying rent, they bribe a local cop to look the other way.
you can get it on dvd for a pittance, though i also remember the basic gist from when it aired many years ago
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reading this and immediately thinking “this person played as Rue and got a bad game instead of playing as Mint and getting a good game”
please tell me I’m right
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you’ll rue the day you didn’t pick mint
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was gonna post exactly this.
Threads of Fate playing as Mint immediately elevates the game to successfully charming instead of striving-for-charm-but-failing
at least for me
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iirc james cameron was accused of plagiarizing cybersix by the creators of that work when he made this tv show
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guess i have to check my notes, but iirc did the right thing and went with Mint during my playthrough a decade+ ago.
maybe should give Rue a spin then!
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MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics (Steam)
This time they did the “Light Reduction” feature right and it actually does remove all full-screen flash effects, as far as I’ve seen–a character with an activated Power Gem in Marvel Super Heroes doesn’t cause a red screen flash on each hit with Flash Reduction on, for instance.
So I can finally play that game and heck finally have less-flashy and actual arcade-quality versions of the other early games in the Vs series, pretty pumped about this. ^ _^
MvC2’s CPU is still too easy to beat with spam even on max difficulty (and if I wanted to play it I would probably play the DC version in Flycast for single-frame input delay) and I’m gonna guess MvC1’s boss is still more of a pain than I can deal with, but really looking forward to digging into the others.
Oh and I think you CAN mostly play The Punisher without having to shoot people–I mean, you can do other violent but not gun-violent things to them, like hit them with battle axes or grenades or bodyslams or whatnot, so pretty excited for that, too; seems like a good evolution of the Final Fight system, with lots of moves, enemies, and weapons, and some cool stages.
So far this is set up to be probably my favorite Capcom game collection ever, by a LOT.
Down sides:
- Still has the overly complicated menu system of the earlier collections using this same template, like Capcom Fighting Collection
- Not great support for both the controllers I tried:
- DualSense: Steam Store page says “USB only” and indeed, did not work natively when I tried it wireless. Wow. Why. Didn’t try USB. ; P Does work wirelessly via Steam input but of course it shows Xbox-style button icons. Grrr. (Update: tried wired, same problems. Same also with DS4. Can straighten out some of the buttons by hacking the .ini, but nobody has found a way to get the d-pad to work, outside of Steam Input. Ludicrous.)
- Hori Real Arcade Pro 5 PS4: on PS4 setting (didn’t try PS3 or XInput or whatever), lever directions weren’t recognized. ; PPP Works via Steam Input, of course with the wrong button icons. Argh. Oh well, shouldn’t be too annoying now that I’ve got the button mappings set–which you have to do per game even though all but two of the games have the exact same button set-up ie 3 punches & 3 kicks. : P
Update:
Oh! A player found a workaround for the wrong icons thing with the PS4 controller!!! (Steam calls it a “DualShock.”)
Right click Marvel Vs Capcom in your library
Manage > Browse Local Files
Open Config.ini
Find line that says “Button Prompt = X360”
Change X360 to PS4
Save
Start game to see if it works
It worked, thank goodness! Capcom, why???
One issue people have with this version of MvC2 is that it’s running at an enlarged original resolution rather than an actual hi-res resolution like you can get in, say, the emulator Flycast–so it doesn’t look nearly as nice here. That kind of thing probably won’t encourage people to stick to this version.
Dunno about multiplayer, not my thing.
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i played as mint! gimme a lil credit!! idk her cutscenes were fun and the modelling/mapping of the whole game was crazy but maybe that cohesiveness was why it didn’t really stick with me, i kind of feel like i was pining for some big nasty rescaled sprites a la mischief makers or klonoa or something to shake up the tone a bit… i have the same response to megaman legends so maybe past a certain degree of cartoon fidelity things start to feel a bit academic to me. if everything had looked like sengoku turb on the other hand 
i’d compare it to playing one of the later Mana games except that sounds way more damning than i mean it to be
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1999 pop punk song 10 Things I Played Without You.
Playing the Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town remake in my mid-30s feels weird because all of the characters you can marry come off as pretty immature and I feel weird about it. The females, anyway. I want a Single Parents mod that makes all of the parents candidates for marriage. The choice would be a lot harder if it were Sasha, Anna, Manna, Lillia, Jeff, and Ann’s dad Tom Atkins.
I was going for Elly even though she’s pretty stuffy and boring and I prefer her as a baker like in HM64, but then she sent me this letter on my birthday:
How gauche.
Ann seems interesting. I never really went for her much when I was younger.
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bubsy 3d - man, i kind of liked this one. the controls actually feel more deliberate and interesting than i’d expect, the jumping flash style shift to top-down camera when in the air, little strafe hops and surprisingly generous ledge grabs, combined with levels that sort of feel like the 3d verison of those huge abstract maze levels from old shareware platformers… indeterminately dotted with stuff but where all that stuff is made a little more interesting by the surrounding sparseness. like ulillillia i became briefly obsessed with hopping up tomb raider style the awkward tangled knot of polygon geometry that’d get me to the rocket. it did suck being spat on(?) by the little guys, which kills you instantly.
having a videogame character recite speechlines at you will always be annoying but i also have to say i kind of enjoyed trying to figure out what bubsy’s whole deal was meant to be. why does he sort of talk like a raspy 1940s female comedian?? or like all his jokes come from old Little Rascals scripts? it was kind of endearing to me.
aeon flux - little bit of a booo moment when the peter chung animated intro cuts into a 3d version of the movie aeon wth less interesting hair BUT she does die a goofy looney tunes death in the opening movie and then reappears in the game without explanation so i gotta give it points for that. was quite laggy on the emulator but the movement was actually quite slick and fun - you vault things automatically and get a nice boost if you time a jump right off them, you can roll under things, a lot of the other actions seemed pretty stagemanaged to make them as snappy as possible which i’m not complaining abt bc it turns out after 200 videogames where i gradually build up momentum swinging on a pole to reach another pole i’m quite happy for the game to shoo things along a bit. the animations are quite good and spidery which helps a lot. it’s also funny that the gun is super weak to encourage you to run around spraying it directionlessly just like in the show.
the game itself was apparently made in 9 months(!!) so like it feels fine and functional but a bit bare, lotsa interchangeable empty Futuristic Corridor areas with exactly two guys in them… the tutorial sequence is infiltrating a fashion show and doing a runway walk etc which is funny but all the fashion models are wearing interchangeable npc outfits and the fashion zone is pretty much identical to the lab zone and factory zone… it’d be nice to think this was solely a deadlines problem and not just indicative of the general lack of juice we expect from videogames as a whole. the funniest thing is that there are multiple sections where aeon flux has to climb inside a big metal ball and roll to the next area with physics controls! Monkey Ball: Act Zero. then later one of the gizmos is also a little deployable physics sphere that rolls around the same way too. might as well face it you’re addicted to ball.
ninja jajamarou-kun onigiri ninpouchou - sort of a cross between a platformer and a shooter - the camera is on a track and you run around the bottom of the screen throwing shurikens at the corridor in front of you, but you can also stop and go backwards and there’s vertical stuff to climb on which makes it feel more open than you’d expect. pretty fun. first boss was a ninja who looks identical to you but in a different colour palette, who died in a single hit.
mdk2 - i never knew what the deal was with these… i remember seeing an ad as a kid and being mystified by the main guy’s xenomorphy helmet and weird protruberances, so i’ve always filed it in my head as sort of a gadget: past as future-esque disorienting artgame thing (maybe aided by a slightly fawning interview with dave perry that i read in the debut, maybe only, issue of “ireland’s first videogames magazine” at the time… the rest of the issue was an interview with the official lara croft cosplayer - like, i guess eidos paid this specific lady to go around to various pr events dressed as lara croft and do the gun poses and stuff, as “the real lara croft”…? i don’t want to make fun since it was certainly generating more social value than anything i’ve ever done for money).
anyway it turns out this is much more of a straight shooter than i realised but it’s still quite charming. the ps2 version of this has like 8 different controller configurations and all of them are terrible… BUT it kind of feels generous enough with speed and space that this doesn’t matter too much… it definitely feels like the work of people hyped up on playing quake deathmatches all the time who were in love with the feeling of just running really fast around big arenas, and it’s kind of a relief after playing a bunch of games with much tighter controls but much more boring and codified levels (leap 3 platforms, shoot 2 guys to open gate to next platform etc). very generous with new tools and the stuff with the extremely 90s sniper ui is fun too. i remember people writing excitedly in games magazines of the time about getting to see the terrified expression of the aliens as you followed the sniper bullet right into their brain, etc, idk how you get there from what’s in the game but it’s endearing to see something play with game cameras in this way. people seem to think the first game is better so maybe i should try it out.
rogue ops - every time i went looking for spy themed stuff on cdromance i’d find this one and kind of sigh because YES it was in the wheelhouse but otherwise seemed so generic… what finally got me to try it was finding out it was built on the bones of a cancelled late n64 game called “thieves world” that looked pretty cool. unfortunately by the time this one came out 9/11 had happened so instead of a cat burglar you play a Green Beret Turned Exclusive Antiterrorist Organization Soldier who does qtes on people to snap their bones instead. quite a career change.
anyway it turned out not to work on the emulator so i watched a little bit and it looked pretty bad. one funny thing from reading the plot synopsis is that there’s a mission about breaking into a base in uzbekistan. why does everybody have it in for uzbekistan? it was where they sent archie to fight in riverdale and i’m pretty sure i saw some other dumb action thing in the last while where it was also the all-purpose rogue state stand in. i’m not saying uzbekistan is probably great or anything but from what i can tell they’re not notably invading anyone. time to lay off, you guys.
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Read this thinking you were talking about what was actually called Rogue Trooper and was very surprised at how stealth focused it sounded compared to how it looked.
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Breaking into HR Village in Monster Hunter Generations X pitted me against a Mizutsune for the first time
Did not enjoy my bubble bath
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got timesplitters 2 for nostalgia. enjoying it a moderate amount. aiming the sniper rifle is really weird, though
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Oh hey I played that game (on PC) for some reason
Unless you’re a huge 2000AD fan with a fondness for babysitting 2006 companion AI I don’t recommend it
I don’t remember any stealth, no
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Did you get to play as any of the other characters? They all play different, the Doc segments are like adventure games where you gotta combine items to make new ones.
The first game on the other hand is just focused on the running around and shooting. I played through it again and it wasn’t as good as I remember but was still a fun enough time.
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I love the fake mystery of what does M D K stand for? You love to have that kind of marketting and buzz for no reason.
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