PSP import day (Every Extend Extra and Ultimate GnG)

The UK is not the only country that gave birth to a retro magazine! There have been, for instance, at least three different magazines dedicated to retro gaming in Japan.

-Kitsune

thats cool, I wish I could read them. Unfortunately I don’t speak japanese, or read japanese as it may be

I wouldn’t worry about it. If memory serves me correctly, fenegi once talked about a very short-lived retro magazine in the US that was cancelled after several issues in the mid to late 90s. I imagine the market is much more receptive to gaming magazines these days, having grown since then. And the US market has mimicked the Japanese market in many, many major ways. I can’t imagine one won’t pop up eventually.

I’ve actually wondered if anyone here is interested in translations of the more interesting spots in the Japanese retro game scene, but I’m guessing nobody would so I never gave it a try…

-Kitsune

Actually, you are right on that count.
But PGR3 was reviewed last year, so I was partially correct.
A few UK magazines have reviewed games like Mushihimesama and other Cave games.
Of course the comment was not derogatory- I just don’t think it’s true. The UK supports a plethora of different magazines, so a retro magazine or two is hardly a surprise. Aside from GamesTM with its retro section, they tend to fade into partial obscurity.

Are you the same Kirian that writes for Eurogamer? If so i really enjoy your site.

Yeah, except for the part where THEY BROKE IT. What the crap is with the huge latency in button press to suicide??

I wanted to cry when I played the final version and it was just as (IMO) busted as the e3 build.

Please tell me that I’m on crack and missing that you have to time your suicides to the beat or something.

I really really wanted to like this game…

Ha ha ha. Every Extend is an incredibly simple game and the PSP version still managed to get fucked up somehow. Hilarious.

I played it for another 2 hours last night and haven’t run into a single instance where I wanted to blow myself up and failed due to button latency. I don’t have any idea what you two are talking about.

Ok, I just checked to see if I was crazy or possibly more latency tolerant than others.

It turns out there is a slight lag between when you press the button and explode - but it was nothing that affected my gameplay. HOWEVER, there is a reason for the lag, you don’t detonate when you press the button, you detonate when the button is released. You can charge yourself up and make your detonation even larger. Holding the button down will slow your ship, eventually the aura around your ship will go from yellow to orange to red, each color letting off a larger explosion.

Thanks for your cries of “TEH GAME IS TEH BROKEN!”, it helped me find a new feature which adds more depth to the game :)

(ps, don’t worry, I did the same thing the other day in the street fighter 2 thread when I claimed quarter mode was broken and didn’t allow spectating).

Ha ha ha. You spoke too soon.

Thanks!!! I’m very happy to be wrong.

I will go buy a copy today!

It does indeed work as Angrycoder describes.

I respectfully change my opinion from “busted” to “a design decision that I wouldn’t have made”. IMO, action on button-release doesn’t feel snappy and is generally non-intuitive. I’d say that here it was specifically non-intuitive, based on the small sample set of: me, Angrycoder, a game-designer friend, and cough someone who worked peripherally on the game. It’s compounded here by it being the primary action button and having poor feedback on the charge-up. Playing original mode confirms my opinion.

YMMV…

Completely unrelated, 10 minutes of Rhythm Tengoku (Kingdom) has me grinning like an idiot.

Toastyfrog brings the hate on UGnG

I’m afraid I might be agreeing with this guy after I put a few hours in. I’m not sure why “incredibly difficult” is seen as a virtue in UGnG, whereas “increadibly easy” would not be, both of which strike me as evidence of bad designing. Arbitrary death, bottomless pits, one-hit kills…these things are all easy to pepper into your level design and don’t demonstrate great gameplay to me. As Spector likes to say, bad AI and perfect AI are both very easy to do - human AI is very difficult. I think the analogy is fair when it comes to difficulty setting.

Having said that, this blog entry also slams the game’s graphics, which from what I’ve seen on the movies online look fantastic.

I don’t know if the difficulty is as much a virtue as its just part of what makes the game GnG. It would be like making the Godfather 4, but not having any mobsters in it.

If that were true, Ghouls n Ghosts would not be good. It is good. Well, Super Ghouls n Ghosts is good - Ghosts n Goblins and the arcade version are pretty bad, and do have numerous unavoidable death traps purely to eat your money. That’s shitty game design, whether it’s a definig characteristic of the game or not. I’m going to have to play UGnG to make my own mind up, looks like. Parish is right and wrong about the graphics - it’s really patchy. Some of it is the most beautiful 2.5D ever created. Some of it looks like an ugly PS1 game.

Hardcore Gamer, sir. We reviewed Radilgy in our April issue and Ibara in our May issue.

Part of the reason that UK has a retro magazine is that with a denser population, and less places to distribute, it is much easier to have niche magazines. You don’t have to pay for shipping to 3 time zones away.

On the other hand, several things toastyfrog says in that blog are factually wrong, and he’s a giant ass in the first place to be leveling out what kind of people are by their opinions on a game, much in the same way he was with his whiny FFVII rant.

If you’ve ever put stock into toastyfrog’s opinion before, I recommend you sell it.

-Kitsune