Return of the Handheld Wars

 

So the PSP2 or NGP as its currently being called was announced today so the handheld console war will be heating up, what with the Nintendo 3DS due in March in the UK. You can read more about the PSP2 here, as I’m not going to cover it in detail, just give some of my thoughts on the upcoming battle.

Handhelds consoles have always been interesting, as depending on your lifestyle they will either be great for you or a total waste of time. If you’re young free and single, with your own pad, drive/walk to work, and don’t travel much then to be honest a handheld is a waste of time, whereas if you are a commuter or a child then they can be a great asset. From my own point of view I do quite a bit of handheld gaming, I spend a few hours of each week on a train, plus being old and married I do have a habit of sitting on the sofa in the evening playing a handheld so I can be (sort of) sociable with my wife, rather than retreating upstairs to play a console.

So why am I mentioning the usage? Well the reason why is because how these new machines will be used will effect how successful they’ll be. Its well documented that the Nintendo DS has been very popular worldwide, whereas the PSP has been very successful in Japan, but not so much in Europe and the US. I’ve written before about my love for the PSP, but it has struggled in Europe due to pricing, lack of software, crap PSN support, piracy and how it was marketed. I always found it so annoying to walk into a shop and find all the UMD games mixed up with the UMD movies, plus it always seemed to be at the back of stores like Game.

Its funny though that both the 3DS and NGP seem less portable than their previous generations, the 3DS has a 3 hour battery life and the NGP is even bigger than the PSP, but I think this is by design. The mobile phone makers have on the move gaming sewn up as everyone has a phone that can play games, and they are likely to have it with them all the time. I believe this has led both Nintendo and Sony to try and offer something different, hence the 3DS going with the 3D display and the NGP going for the bigger screen and powerful hardware. It makes both of these consoles ideal for the sort of gamer like myself, who plays while sat on the sofa at home, where short battery life and size isn’t an issue.

So which will I chose? At the moment I’m not that fussed about either, although I always love it when new hardware comes out and it feels like its been a long time. The 3DS for me is too pricy, as I predicted back in September, plus at the moment there aren’t any games that grab me. I’m not that interested in 3D and the whole region locking issue makes me not want to buy it on principle. I’d rather pick up another DS, like a DSI XL.

The NGP is a different proposition. It sounds great on paper, plus would suit the sort of gaming I do, but its not without issues. As I mentioned before the PSN support for the original PSP in the UK is dire compared to that of Japan, and I can’t see that changing, plus I wouldn’t bet against region locking/IP filtering. There aren’t any games announced that interest me yet either, I feel RPG’s/SRPGs and puzzle games work best on handhelds but all that’s been announced so far are remakes of PS3 games.

Finally I’m worried about the price. Sony are notorious for getting pricing wrong, and I can see them doing something crazy like pricing it against the iPad. If it is in the £300+ range then there is no way I would buy one, heck even the PS3 is still too pricy for me to pick up. We’ll have to wait and see though, knowing Sony if its planned for a Christmas release in Japan then we will probably won’t get it until September 2012!

Overview – Shmup 1.01

I’ve been meaning to write a general article about Shmups or STG for sometime, but never seem to find time or want to write about something else first. This will be a series of articles, just to give some info and places for people to start looking into them.

The word Shmup comes from Shoot-em ups, which was commonly used to describe games that involved shooting enemies. Just pulling up the Wikipedia articles on Shmups will give more detail then I will here, but here I will try and look at it from my point of view and experience, rather than being factual.

Types

There are a number of types of Shmups, some of which were more popular in the past and some which are (sort of) still around today.

Fixed Screen

These shooters are self contained in one screen, usually where waves of enemies appear. Good examples would be games like Space Invaders or one of my favourites Galaga.

It could be argued that modern twin stick shooters like Geometry Wars also fit into this category, they could also be classified as Arena Shooters, which would be a subtype and include games like Smash TV. As a rule they are great for score chasing, and seeing how far you can get, games like Galaga are what I started playing as a kid and I still play it now.

On-Rails

This type is less common than the others, but there have been some good examples over the years like Space Harrier. In this type of game you scroll into the screen, and move about to dodge the incoming bullets, but usually don’t control your direction, its fixed in a certain direction.

Other examples could include other Sega classics like Galaxy Force and After Burner as well as more modern games like Star Fox and Sin and Punishment.

Run and Gun

These are games which tend to scroll from left to right, and are similar to platform games, but with a focus on shooting. Probably the best known example of this would be Metal Slug, although there are many others.

Scrolling Shooter

Most of the time when reading about Shmups or STG on the internet this is what people are talking about. These are the traditional Shmups, that scroll either vertically or horizontally and include everything from R-Type to Espgaluda.

There are so many good example that I could list here and this is my area of interest, so during my 1.01 about Shmups I will primarily talk about these. Scrolling Shooters have many subtypes, from Manic/Maniac (Danmaku) shooters like the Cave games, to games like Ikari Warriors, which only scroll when you move, and could also fit into the Run and Gun genre.

This should give you an idea of the types available, in my next article I will try and give some examples of good Shmups to try on the current gen of consoles.

2011 Year of Austerity

So its 2011 and the theme of this year will probably be to save money, as I had a bit of an expensive year last year. So far this has involved me changing to an older second hand car, looking at my shopping budget etc., but here I will talk more about my hobbies and general 2011 stuff.

Games

Well I guess I’m going to just buy and less of these or at least wait until they are cheaper prices. This worked well for me last year, where i waited on big releases to drop in price rather than getting them straight away. For example I only bought Mass Effect 2 last week on the 360 for the princely sum of £4.95 delivered, rather than picking it up on release for £35+.

That said there are some games I will buy day one, and for some reason they all come out in February, so it looks like I’ll have to shift some games before then. The games in question are:

• Ys I  & II Chronicles – PSP – 15/02/2011
• Tactics Ogre – PSP – 15/02/2011
• Deathsmiles – Xbox 360 – 18/02/2011
• Muchi Muchi Pork / Pink Sweets Double Pack – Xbox 360 – 24/02/2011

The Muchi Muchi Pork / Pink Sweets Double Pack is particularly annoying as its so expensive, it will probably work out about £85 for the LE imported, but its also the type of thing that actually goes up in price so getting it when it comes out is the best idea.

I can’t think of much else I want, although I’m sure there will be some to come, especially as the Nintendo 3DS is due out and possibly a PSP2. I’ll try not to buy any arcade PCB’s though until I have put some more time into the ones I have.

TV/Film/Anime

I tend not to spend too much money in this area anyway, especially as I’m the only person in the western world without a Bluray player. I do have Sky so will continue to watch that, and I’ll carry on using Love Film for movies.

I have a strange relationship with anime, as I’ve been watching it for nearly 20 years now, but I also realised recently that I have a lot more love for Manga rather than Anime, so I don’t watch that much anymore. I’ll probably pick up the odd movie, but other than that I’ll just use Crunchyroll, which is a bargain at around £5 a month. I know some people hate it and prefer to download fansubs, but for convenience and the fact I get to contribute some money to something that interests me, I’ll stick with it.

Books

I got a Kindle for Christmas so I’ll be using that for my book purchases this year, although unfortunately there is little or no Manga (except Yaoi!) available on the Kindle store.

This means I’ll carry on buying physical Manga, which I like anyway, but I also hope Viz, Yen Press, Tokyopop etc do pull their fingers out and get some on the Kindle store.

 

Hopefully even with being a bit more careful it will be a good year and not too painful, happy new year to you all.

Games Clear Out

One thing I’ve never done as a gamer is have a clear out of my games. This started quite some time ago when I had a Mega Drive and used to trade in games all the time. It was great in theory, as I always got to play new games, but it became an issue when I realised I had barely any games and most of the ones I wanted to play were ones I no longer had. From then on I had a kind of unwritten rule that I would not sell or trade any games, unless of course they were terrible.

This has meant I have have a fair collection, I mean small to most gamers but I probably have 300+ over various systems. I realised that a lot of these haven’t left my loft in the last year or so and a surprising amount had not even been opened, so I’ve started getting shot of them on eBay. Feel free to buy stuff here!

I thought that selling them would be depressing, but in fact its quite addictive, I keep finding more and more stuff to get shot of. And what will I do with all this new found wealth? Well I’ve been hankering after a Ibara or Battle Garegga PCB for sometime, plus I’ll also be buying a new car next year so the cash will come in handy!

Muchi Muchi Pork and Pink Sweets Double Pack Region Free

This is blatantly stolen from Kotaku, but its been announced today that the Muchi Muchi Pork / Pink Sweets double pack for the Xbox 360 will be region free. I’m really pleased about this news as I’m interested in these games as I’m  a fan of Yagawa, but still too tight to buy a Japanese 360.

I’ve placed my pre-order for the LE version at Video Game Imports and will look forward to it turning up not long after its February 24th 2011 release date.

I’ve been meaning to start my STG 1.01 articles but have been a bit short of time, but will most likely start them this month. Other than that I’ve been playing Ogre Battle 64 on the Wii, Valkyria Chronicals 2 on my PSP and Thunder Cross 2 on my arcade machine, all of which are great. Valkyria Chronicals 2 is especially addictive, I should probably just super glue the UMD into the drive, as I haven’t played anything else on it in weeks.

Vertical Screen Resolution–Shmup 1.01

I’ve ben thinking about doing a 1.01 of Shmups or STG for a while now and with Guwange being released today it seemed a good time to start the series. That said I’m sort of starting in the middle as I’m going to talk about screen resolution, which is relevant to some of the issues being had with Guwange on 4:3 screens.

So lets start with the basics. Most Shmups are from yesteryear, so therefore they were developed to be used with CRTs, and most of the time these were in arcade cabinets. The most popular resolution of the time was 320 x 240 for a horizontal game or 240 x 320 for a vertical one. These obviously sound really low now and because of that they pose some interesting problems for the modern day gamer.

Lets start by looking at a modern TV, running in say 720p, which is what most games run in now, even though many run in 1080p. This means it has 1280 x 720 lines, which is obviously far larger then what is needed for a retro game. To get around this problem the image is scaled up, so that it does the best to fill the screen, although wisely most modern consoles encourage you to keep the aspect ratio, otherwise you would get a warped picture. With vertical games this is even more awkward as you lose a large portion of the screen, like in the diagram below:

One way to get more real estate is to rotate or Tate (it is called this in many Japanese games) the monitor and game to gain more screen. This on a 16:9 screen would look like the next diagram:

The problem with this is that most sane people don’t want/can’t rotate their 40+ inch screen so its fairly common practice for Shmup players to have a second 4:3 monitor or arcade cabinet. Normally this lets you play the game in something similar to its native resolution, and you could rotate it like so:

This is ideal and results in a full screen picture for most Shmups, from modern day Xbox 360 ones, right back to PS1 and Saturn games, although resolutions themselves may differ. Guwange on the 360 has a problem though, in that there is essentially no 4:3 option, so when outputting to a 4:3 screen that has been rotated you end up with borders and a squashed picture like the screen below:

Now some monitors may allow the image to be stretched which can help but essentially it is a problem, which hopefully Cave will patch. Even though I’ve concentrated on vertical games here the same kind of issues can arise with horizontal games, for example I am led to believe Deathsmiles 2 on the Xbox 360 has a similar issue with 4:3 screens.

I may in future posts talk about some of the other perils which the Shmup player encounters regarding screens, but suffice to say it can be really annoying.

Edit 11/11/11

I made a mistake yesterday in that I thought the image was being squashed on a 4:3 screen whereas in fact its still the correct aspect ratio with borders on the sides too, like the diagram below:

Guwange on Xbox Live Arcade

The title of this blog says it all really, Guwange has been released on Xbox Live Arcade today, for the bargain price of 800 space bucks (or £6.80 in real money) and if you like shmups at all and own a 360 then you really ought to try it.

I’m no expert on the game, so I’m not going to preach too much about it but essentially its a Cave game from 1999, which has a samurai setting, but what makes it different from the other Cave games is that the man character is walking on the ground rather than flying. I guess in this way its more like something like Out Zone although Guwange forces you to always to shoot straight and it scrolls automatically. The game has a nice scoring mechanic where you collect coins, which get dropped when you have shot enough enemies to charge up a bar, a kind of chaining mechanism.

The game also has 3 modes included, Arcade, which is a direct port, Blue Mode, which is special harder version which was made for one of the Cave Matsuri’s, and a Xbox arrange version, which by all accounts is quite easy and lets you play using a twin stick setup.

There has been some controversy about this release today though due to problems playing it on a 4:3 display, and not being able to edit the button configuration. I’m going to try and do a blog post about the screen issue later, but in short of you have a 4:3 screen try the demo out and see if its an issue for you. With a bit of luck Cave will patch it although I guess that depends on how many people buy the game and how many complain.

I’m having fun with it though and its saved me having to find £300+ for the PCB!

MCM Expo–October 2010

I went to MCM Expo in London yesterday, so I thought I’d post some of my thoughts about it. I’ve been a few times before and the event yesterday was fairly typical, for those that don’t know its a large comic expo, which contains all sorts of sci-Fi, plus anime, games etc. There are a lot of stalls selling various things from manga to Pocky, plus a lot of stalls selling old second hand collectables like action figures and games. Its probably best known for the vast amount of cosplayers, I’d say half the people there are dressed up, and some of them are amazing, I guess the fact they were having the Euro Cosplay championship helped that. Check out Bento_Dans Flickr for some great pictures.

The most interesting thing from my point of view was that Rising Star Games were previewing Deathsmiles, which is to get a UK release early next year. Its great that they have picked it up as its rare for a game like that to make it to our shores, although it did come out in Japan in April 2009. I did ask one of the guys on the booth about the slowdown, which was removed from the US release which angered fans, and he told me that it would be the same as the US version when it hits the UK. That said I have read elsewhere that the slowdown will be the same as the Japanese version, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. He also seemed to think there would be some sort of limited edition, possibly including an art book and soundtrack, which if so will be the one I order.

Other than that I did some wondering about, saw some other games like Kirbys Epic Yarn and Donkey Kong Country Returns, which both looked pretty cool, if not my sort of thing. I finally played Dragon Quest IX, which I know has been out for a while, but it was great and I really must buy it. It was good playing it on a DSi XL, if the 3DS wasn’t coming I’d probably get one.

I went to the Anime industry panel and there was a fair few announcements, probably the biggest two came from Manga Entertainment, which was that they will be releasing K-On! and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzimiya next year. They also have the second season of Haruhi which they will possibly be bundling with Haruhi-chan.

The only other thing worth mentioning was my lunch. Normally I just eat in one of the places inside the Excel, but the food is usually over priced and a bit crappy. This year though I decided to venture a little and found a nice little Japanese restaurant near the Ibis.

It was surprisingly quiet in there, but I managed to get a great Bento lunchbox including salad, rice, teriyaki salmon and tempura vegetables, plus a pot of green tea for £13. Not too expensive given how nice it was, but I guess its enough to put the many teenagers at Expo off.

I’m not sure if I’ll go to the May Expo next year, but if not then I’ll go to the October one. Its a good day out, if a little hectic and tiring.

PSP – The modern day Saturn

I was inspired to write something about the PSP today, after reading this Kotaku article about how the God of War Developer, Ready at Dawn, wonders why people still develop PSP games. They make a very good point, the PSP is all but dead in the west and has been for more than a year, it has been killed by rampant piracy. I mean why would you bother spending £30, which is too much for a handheld game I might add, for a PSP UMD when you could pirate the game and have it load faster, plus store multiple games on a memory stick?

This has lead to abysmal sales of games in the west, even highly anticipated titles like Metal Gear Solid – Peace Walker have bombed, and the PSP Go did nothing to help, if anything it made things worse by being such a failure. Part of the reason for that failure is the dire state of PSN in Europe. Its clearly the poorest online offering here, with few PSP or PS1 games available, in fact I recently heard that no more PS1 games would even be added. Also the pricing model is stupid, downloadable games must be significantly cheaper than the ones in stores to convince people to download them, but often they were more expensive. Its almost like they knew PSP Go owners, who spent a too much on the console, would be willing to also spend too much on downloadable games.

Where the PSP is similar to the Saturn is that in Japan its a totally different story. The PSP has an extensive library of top games, which are selling extremely well. I don’t know, or care, about sales figures but last I saw it was selling nearly as many units as the Nintendo DS. Even today I saw that Persona 2 – Innocent Sin is getting a PSP remake, plus I saw recently that Valkyria Chronicals 3 is coming soon. Fortunately quite a few decent games are getting a US release, if not a UK one, I recently picked up Ys Seven and Valkyria Chronicals 2, and Ys Oath in Felghana is out on Tuesday 2/5/2010.

PSN wise I use the Japanese store, where I got some great PS1 games like DonPachi, DoDonPachi and G-Darius, although it does cost a bit more buying the PSN cards in Yen. The US store also has some goodies, like Cho Aniki and Alundra, not to mention the various Final Fantasy games, plus they are 60hz as they should be unlike the European store.

I think its a shame so many people are missing out on the PSP as its got a reputation on the internet as having no games, and being inferior to the DS, but maybe like the Saturn people will look back in years to come and wish they’d paid attention.

Should I put a PC in my Arcade – Part 2

This is a continuation of my thoughts about putting a PC in my arcade machine. The main attraction of doing this is that it would obviously allow me to play many more games on it. Its quite a common thing to do these days, well in arcade circles, and really doesn’t require too much in the way of kit. If I ever did do it the first thing issue would be that I do not want to physically change my cabinet in anyway, as I’m quite anal about keeping it all original. I think its a real shame when you see pictures of cabs that have been totally butchered to make way for inappropriate controls, or LCD monitors or other such sins.

There are devices to solve this problem though, for example this JammASD v2 allows you to connect a PC directly up to the Jamma connector in the machine, and the controllers should work fine. The only issue I can see with this is that I’d need a motherboard for the PC with a PS2 slot, which I imagine would be pretty difficult to find.

There are also some issues around putting out a signal from the PC to the arcade machines 15khz monitor, Windows and most video cards do not support this, although there is the option of Soft 15khz software or a specific card like the ArcadeVGA. All of the hardware could get pricy though, its not simply a case of finding some old duffer desktop and stuffing it in the machine, noise would be a consideration, as would size and potentially heat.

As far as the actual games go I have no particular issue with roms, or emulation. Of course the emulation is not perfect in a lot of cases, but I think I could live with it when say I could buy a board for £50-£100 or play the rom. In some cases, for example Battle Garegga, a game I really want, the board could be much more expensive, £200+, although I believe there are issues with the emulation of this.

Its not just the cost though, often if you want a board, and can afford it, you still have the issue of tracking it down as there are just not that many about. I’ve found in the past its often a case of waiting for months for one to come along at the right price. I have no problem with the legal aspect of playing roms as the way I see it the companies who made the games would get no money from me whether I owned the original or played the rom, plus my favourite companies like Raizing and Toaplan don’t even exist anymore. As a rule though I’m pretty anti piracy.

I guess the last benefit of a PC in the cab would be that I wouldn’t have to store all the PCBs, and go through the hassle of changing them, which isn’t that bad, but more fiddly that changing a console cartridge. The biggest downside as I see it is that PC’s in general are pretty crappy unreliable things, plus it would most likely have some horrible front end to navigate the games. Also a major reason for me getting the arcade machine in the first place was to pick a few games I really like and concentrate on them, rather than having a massive collection that I barely play.

The jury is still out on whether I will do this, but if i do I’ll try and keep it classy, plus I’ll still have PCBs for some of my favourite games. There is just something nice about owning the original hardware.

The above pictures were shamelessly stolen from the Arcade Otaku gallery of ****.