Let's Go Retro! Rescue Rangers (NES)

Let's Go Retro! continues with Chip N' Dale Rescue Rangers for NES, which I divided up into two parts, both are below for your viewing pleasure. I got a little silly on the opening to the second part, forgive me!

Miiverse makes drawing fun!

One of the big features of the Wii U is the Miiverse, a sort of social community built into the system that allows people to draw and write messages about different games and topics. I find it really fun to use, and unfortunately I think Nintendo has been really lax in getting the cool features of the Miiverse into the general gaming population heads. 

But I'm not here to complain about Nintendo's marketing strategies! I'm here to show some of crappy Miiverse sketches! While I used to draw a lot, as I've gotten older it seems to get harder and harder for me to put pencil to paper. But with the simple drawing system of the Miiverse, I've found it really enjoyable to do quick sketches here and there. It's also so fun when people reply with another drawing, or when I reply to someone else's! And now that the Miiverse is accessible through browsers, getting screen captures of the Miivese just became easier! So with that, I present some of my Miiverse creations, in no particular order. 

When I got to King Hippo while playing Punch-Out on the Virtual Console, I just had to post about the absurd rendition they made of King Hippo in the Captain N The Game Master cartoon, which found him colored blue for no reason!

When Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan) was released for Japanese Virtual Console, a lot of people took to the Japanese Miiverse to post in the Mother 2 forum asking for a US release. That is not at all surprising given how vocal Earthbound fans can be. What's surprising is that Nintendo listened and announced we'll be getting it in the US this year.

The great thing about communities for things like YouTube and Amazon Video is that you can pretty much draw anything and it can fit into the community. In this case, Fraggle Rock! 'cause I love Fraggle Rock, and that's reason enough to draw Wembly!

I drew this probably less than an hour after the "Zelda series" community opened. At some point a few days later it got popular with the Japanese crowd, getting quite a few "Yeah's", and a comment that I can't read. Cartoon Zelda Link for the win!

Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing (or whatever the heck that game is called) is surprisingly good, and fills the void nicely until we get Mario Kart U. My two favorite characters to use are Wreck-It Ralph and Vyse. What was really great about this post though, was one of the replies I got from Miiverse friend Waddles:

Nicely done!

Of course, people are making Miiverse creations that blow my stuff away, stuff that I truly do not know how they even make with the simple tools you're given. But I find it really fun to browse through people's posts, or spend a few minutes making a sketch of my own to put up. My Miiverse handle is Toad64, so if you've got a Wii U, make sure to add me as a friend! I love talking games on the Miiverse!

Let's Play Ducktales!

So PAX East has come and gone, and while there was a ton of awesome stuff I saw and played and sat it on, one of the biggest surprises was Capcom announcing their HD remake of Ducktales. People, I can not stress enough how huge of a Ducktales fan I am, even to this day. I have the cartoons on DVD. I have Scrooge figures, reprints of Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge comics, the hardcover collections of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. I was quite excited by this news, and stood in line for quite a while for the chance to try it out. 

So of course, when I got home, I just had to fire up the NES and play through the game again! Then I thought that maybe it would make for an interesting Let's Play video. I decided to try a live broadcast on Twitch.tv. The results were mixed, but basically, I don't think my computer is up to the task; I ran the game on an emulator, and the frame rate was horrible as my computer both tried to play this game, as well as stream it live. Maybe I can figure out a better setup in the future, but for now, I think I'll stick to recording first, then uploading later. But the result of my Let's Play is below. What do you think of this live format? 

Arcadecraft: Impressions

This week an indie game launched on Xbox's Xbox Live Indie Games channel that I'd been waiting for since the reveal trailer was posted some time ago. A sim game where you get to run an arcade during the 1980s? Sounds awesome! I've put a couple hours into the game at this point and can say that while it can be fun, it also has some issues that keep it from being great. 

First let's talk about the good. From checking out the trailer you can tell that this is one good looking indie game, with great lighting and lovingly crafted arcade machines to buy for your arcade. The machines don't have animated screens, which is kind of a bummer, but they have a single screen on their monitors, different control panels and unique art for the cabinet and marquee. The sound effects for the machines are all unique, and as time goes on your arcade will get machines that have much more sophisticated sounds than their predecessors. You can purchase decorative touches for your arcade to personalize it, coloring the walls, floor tiles, buying neon to run the perimeter of the arcade, etc. These touches not only add some personal touches to your arcade, but help with the popularity as well, which your customers will decide by a number of factors, such as layout, cost, new machines, variety of genres, etc. It does a good job of feeling like a real arcade.

Probably my biggest complaint is that, from my limited time playing so far, it seems like if you play poorly, you're pretty much doomed, but if you play well, you'll be doing so well that it becomes a bit boring. My first time playing, I made some bad decisions, and ended my first year (1980) with only two machines left, and I wasn't making enough money to purchase a new machine and afford my rent. I restarted and decided to blow through my loan money early, buying lots of machines to earn money. It worked like gangbusters, and now I'm in the early part of 1984 and have more money than I know what to do with.

Apart from that, there's some things that could use some tweaking. One of the things your arcades popularity is decided on is your diversity of genres. The only place I can see the genre listing for a title is in the menu where you purchase the machine. That becomes a problem when you've got 30 machines in your arcade and want to see what genres you may need. It's especially annoying because there is an info window you can bring up for each machine, but it simply doesn't list that. There's occasionally events that happen to throw some variety into the game, but they're few, far-between and will repeat often. Things like power-outages that require you go double tap each machine to reactivate them before they'll start making money for you again, champion players asking to use your machine to set a record score (you won't make any money on the machine but you may get a huge surge in popularity), things like that.

Is it worth playing? If your love arcades then I'd say look into it. The developers were obviously passionate about the topic and it shows as you do things like kick out players that are roughing up your machines (before they outright break them!), or showing how home console games can effect the popularity of your machines. I've just started 1984, and the 'game crash' hit during the holiday, drastically hurting the popularity of my arcade. I'm interested in seeing if they go anywhere with that, but at the same time I'm already feeling a bit burned out on the game. It's only $3, however, so I definitely feel like I've gotten my money's worth, but can't help but feel that this game is SO CLOSE to something I want, but doesn't quite hit it. 

I know it sounds like I'm being hard on it, but admittedly two evenings in a row I sat down with it to play for "just a bit", and that turned into a couple hours. So there's really something addicting about it here, and I did enjoy my time with it so far. I'm just afraid I may have seen all there is to see already.

Space issues - manga in the library

I was really excited to recently be able to buy some new additions to the library's manga collection. To date, most of our manga has been collected from donations, and as such there are very few complete series. However, space is extremely limited in my teen section, and as such I can't actually put all the new manga I've aquired on the shelf! (I've got a temporary fix by placing the new stuff in a different location by the entrance)

So now I'm left wondering, when space is such an issue, yet graphic novels and manga are so desired, what is the better option, to have complete series, but less overall titles, or have bits and pieces from different series but have a larger selection? I feel like right now I'm in a weird middle ground, with chunks of manga here and there, and then like almost 50 volumes of Bleach!