After all the controversy, you sucked so hard.

Found my old Japanese copy of Night Trap, for the Mega Drive. 

Interesting bits about this gem:

• Dana Plato`s in it. 
• Despite how tame it was, even by 1990`s standards, it sparked Congressional hearings on offensive video game material, and lead to the modern ESRB ratings system
• It was a horrid game. Horrid acting, horrid game mechanics, horrid concept - Please don`t ever play it. 
• Corey Feldman is NOT in it. 
• Like most other Sega CD games developed by Digital Pictures, if you put the game disc in a CD player, you'll hear a short redbook audio CD track of a phone ringing with a male voice answering "Good afternoon, Digital Pictures", followed by a backwards playback of several voices saying "number nine" ("enin rebmun"), a reference to The Beatles song Revolution 9. This odd recording was thought by some to also be a hint for another DP game called "Sewer Shark" - if the player turns left (referred to as "niner" in the game) three times the player will not hit a wall.

More gems from the game collection migration project :: Both NA and JPN releases of "Dark Wizard," for Sega CD and Mega CD Drives, respectively. I bought the US version on the left it at a CD store in Nelson BC for full price, not knowing anything about it, and it ended up being the only game I'd bought which rationalized my purchase of the Sega CD add-on.

It's an early turn-based strategy game (think Fire Emblem) with an epic soundtrack. 

And here's a review of that soundtrack.

The only other redeeming quality of the Sega CD, is the ease with with which you can burn games to regular CDs and play them on the console, meaning the games produced for this system will survive much longer than the millions of games on your iPhone, etc. I'd post a link to a torrent on "Underground Gamer," but "the man" took them down. 

Price of "Collector Games" Rising

I've been cruising around eBay the last few days, and most of my time has been spent perusing the price of games by a now defunct company called "Working Designs."

This little gem of an outfit was responsible for three or four of the only truly good games every produced for the Sega CD. Anyone who was ever silly enough to buy that overpriced system, (yes... yes I did) will know what I'm talking about:
* Lunar: the Silver Star
* Lunar: Eternal Blue
* Vay
* Popfull Mail

Well, in addition to making kick ass games, this company simply did everything right from a gamer's perspective. They included tonnes of extras in the packaging, they utilized hardware potential like full-motion video where it was useful, not where it was gimmicky, (yes Digital Pictures, I'm pointing at you.) And most importantly, they ported over tonnes of great Japanese RPG's against all advice, when no-one else dared take the risk. (a role now played less skillfully, but at least played by Atlus)

There were some hiccups with Working Designs' business approach. Kick ass packaging extras cost coin, and WD games never came cheap. They also suffered from a number of delays, largely due to WD's insistence on quality over expediency. (Yes Electronic Arts, UBISoft, you both suck balls)

Being a smaller outfit than many of the growth-mad behemoths today, WD's approach to development oozed collaborativeness. And not just between production managers and designers, but including the sound folks, the animators, the testers, etc. Everyone seems to have been given a great deal of opportunity to contribute to the creative aspect of WD games. The finished products were never overly flashy, or sporting groundbreaking graphics... but they were well-told stories, and how level of attention was always immediately evident.

This holds true even today, apparently. I placed a bid for the Playstation remake of the Lunar: Silver Star, (originally for the Sega CD) and confident that my $55 bid, (at least the cost of the game when released) would hold through to the end, was found with my mouth open as a couple of last minute battlers came in driving the price up to over $100 in the final 3 minutes.

Today, a greater shock caught my as a cope of "Dragon Force" for the Sega Saturn easily went for the asking price of $223.46(CAD).

The seller of both of these games, is claiming to be the writer/producer from WD, Victor Ireland, and is offering to autograph each item he sells, so this, I thought, must have been boosting up the price a bit, but not by much it turns out, as my search for the same titles from different sellers is seeing them go for similar prices.

As retro-gamers begin to develop as a strong subset of the gaming community, I think we'll begin to see more old classics fetch astonishing prices on eBay.

Makes me wish I'd kept all the old boxes for my NES titles!

Old Night Trap Mini-Documentary

Have been downloading, burning, and archiving Sega CD games all week. Trying to get all 148 official releases compiled, and Jesus Christ, is there ever a deficit of decent games for that system.

For those who were much smarter than I back in the early to mid-nineties, and resisted plunking down $400 bones onto this Genesis add-on, you may not be entirely aware of just how much of a dumping ground this system was for crappy experiments in full-motion-video. (FMV)

FMV, of course, never really took off in the gaming industry, since gamers prefer to play their games than to watch them, and besides some forays into PC gaming, as well as a few failed exploits on the 3D0, and CD-i systems, companies like "Digital Pictures" played and died almost exclusively on the Sega CD.

A few interesting titles did come out, however which played a role in shaping the video game industry. Perhaps none quite so infamously as "Night Trap."

This game provided a few wacky American senators their first fodder for what is now an ongoing debate on Video Game censorship. Though I'm not entirely opposed to a movie-industry style restriction system for video games, what was so funny about the roaring controversy over Night Trap was the sheer harmlessness of the game; by today's standards particularly, but even by the standards of the time in which the game was released.

The following mini-documentary shows a bit of the insanity that dogged the game. The disappointment, of course, is not that the game was unfairly attacked... but rather how no one ever really talked about how much the game actually sucked.

From now until the end of time, solely because of the disproportionate amount of controversy mounted on this steamer, gamers interested in the history of the industry will be forced to play a complete waste of their time, just to get a sense of the beginnings of the video game rating system.

What a waste.



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Rez played with Wii-Mote

So someone configured their Wii-Mote to work on their PC, nothing new. They then mapped the buttons to a Dreamcast emulator, and booted up one of my all time favourite games, Rez.



Now the project author claims that he's mapped the motion of the target to both the nun-chuck analog stick, as well as the motion sensor in the Wii-mote. There's no way to prove that he was actually successful in getting the target to respond to the Wii-motes movements, but I'm sure it's not impossible

The project is cool, if only to show what can be done with the Wii-mote, and how it has got some people to re-examine some of the old games, and see them in a new light.

More info here

B3 - No More!

Well... it was pretty goddamned inevitable.

Hadn't published a non-gaming-related post on this blog in months, so I decided to do what was far too long in coming: change the name and format of the old "Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks" blog... to what you've got before you now.

So welcome to the new-&-improved game-industry focussed, "Classic Controller!"

Hope you like the new renovations. It reflects far more accurately the content, however, all the old posts are still in the archive on the right sidebar.

Additionally... nothing has happened to the good ol' "Pacific Tribune" so if you're looking for more politically-related content, head on over there.

And as always, the "East-Van Cinephiles" is still operational for all your movie reviewing needs, although admittedly, it's not well maintained.

And if you're reading this as a feed through my FaceBook profile... just click on the "original post" link at the top to see the new layout I'm talking about.

beers!

~ekman

PS. The site address has not changed, as it was never name specific. If you're linked to this blog, I'll leave it up to you whether or not you want to change the name on the link on your own site. I'm easy either way.