Game Reviews - SWAT: Global Strike Team (PS2)

I mentioned this game in one of my Recent Game Collection Finds videos. I said that it looked like a Rainbow Six ripoff, and that I'd make an update at some point if the game is anything worth mentioning.

Well, it is. It's actually a very good game. Surprisingly good, actually. I'm loving this game. It isn't really a Rainbow Six ripoff. I should have noticed at the time that it was a SWAT game made by Sierra. SWAT was a popular series of PC games that I've never played.

All I knew about the series was that it was a tedious, unforgiving mess of a game that Spoony made great comedic fodder out of. His Let's Play SWAT 4 videos are still some of my favorite things he's done, and I'm a huge fan of his so that's saying something. I was always sort of aware that he probably wasn't playing the game right, but that was what made it funny. The game took points off for "unlawful use of deadly force" whenever he shot a guy who was pointing a shotgun in his face, just because the guy hadn't fired yet, when I'm sure any SWAT officer would have sprayed that guy's brains across the wall the moment he pointed the gun at him.

I didn't expect this game to be fun. I expected it to be a lot like SWAT 4. But it isn't. The ally AI isn't stupid, or at least they don't get in the way, and instead of working in a precinct in a random city, you're playing as a
team of commandos that operates like SWAT dealing with a multinational criminal organization. That's not important, though. The plot just serves to put you in the specific scenarios the missions take place in, such as a bank robbery, a skyscraper in Paris or the London underground.

The goal here isn't like that of most traditional FPS games. You don't go in guns blazing. That gets you killed. You don't have a lot of energy unless you're playing on easy mode, and even then, you probably shouldn't play cowboy. You also can't go in stealthily dispatching each enemy. You're a SWAT officer, so you have to ambush the enemy, overwhelm them, incapacitate them and handcuff them. Or failing that, spray their brains across the wall. The game doesn't take points off when you do that, provided the enemy has opened fire on you, or has a hostage at gunpoint. If you kill a suspect when they're doing that, you're good.

You also get a tranquilizer pistol, which is very useful as well if you want to take a guy down, but still want to arrest him. Also useful is melee. A lot of the missions have you in close range, and occasionally, you will be face to face with a criminal. So, you can just hit him in the face with your gun and knock him out with one hit.

The most fun parts for me however are the sniper sequences. You use your team's sniper to get into position and take a group of goons out. For some reason, it's just very satisfying to do that.

The best part though, is that your teammates never inform you that you're in their spot.

Check it out if you get any enjoyment out of FPS games. The game goes for a very low price, and you can probably snag one on eBay for $5. It's also on the XBOX, and I doubt that version's any different. I highly recommend this game.

Blog Update: My First Youtube Video!

Several hours ago, I shot and uploaded my very first Youtube video, which is just me showing off some recent additions to my video game collection. I intend to make more of them. In fact, I intend to shoot at least one more video tomorrow, because I'm expecting a package of games that my mother bought for me when she was on vacation in St. Louis to arrive in the mail tomorrow. I might also make a few videos for my other blog which focuses on music. Who knows? In time, I might be making full length reviews of movies, anime, games and more.

As a little aside, I've been planning with a couple friends to make some gaming related videos, but nothing's come of that yet due to conflicting schedules.

But the point is that I finally took that plunge into video making, which I've been intending to do for years. I intend to do this along with blog entries. I found that shooting that video was a lot quicker and easier, since I usually labor over what I write for a long time, trying to get it to sound exactly the way I want it to, and with the video, I just found a functional camera angle, turned on the camera and talked for 13 minutes.

So, here's the link to the video. This is my first step in my journey from being an anonymous zilch on Blogger towards being an anonymous zilch on Blogger and Youtube.

Collector Stories - Great Finds - Xenogears (PS1)

Xenogears is generally seen as one of the best RPG's on the Playstation, and for good reason. It's a JRPG with giant robots using kung-fu. That's awesome. It provides more than that, which was completely unnecessary because giant kung-fu robots should be enough for any gamer, but it has a compelling story, a very well developed world and characters and gorgeous visuals in gameplay, and great animated cutscenes. It's a fantastic game and any RPG fan should have a copy of it.

On Pricecharting.com, the asking price seems to be about $25 to $40. I got mine for $18. How? Because I settled for things many collectors wouldn't bother with.

First off, it's a green label Greatest Hits reprint. A lot of collectors don't bother with those, and because of that, they generally go for lower prices. The game also didn't have the manual, and there were strange, small, black smudges on the back of the case that I still haven't been able to get off. I don't know what those are. I'm assuming that it's food residue, but it's small, and it ain't coming off, so I'm not worried.

Also, the eBay seller only had about 20 sales to his name. Another thing that any eBay user would be a bit iffy about. And I was iffy about it, but the deal was too good to pass up, and I wanted to play Xenogears.

I guess the moral of this story is that collectors are really obsessive about getting certain editions. I know one collector who won't touch a green label game, no matter how good the deal is. I don't understand this. There's no difference between the game if it has a green label or a black label, it's just a label on the side of the case and the coloration of the disc.

I'm not complaining, though. It makes collecting easier for me. It's not settling for less. It's accepting the fact that it's not perfect, and it's cheaper because of that, and sometimes good enough is good enough.

Collector Stories - My First Boxed Super Famicom Game

I just got my latest eBay purchase in the mail. It's complete in the box Super Famicom game - that's the Japanese Super Nintendo, for any readers who don't know. I don't own a Super Famicom, but I do have a Super Nintendo with the two plastic tabs inside the cartridge slot removed, and that's the only modification you need to play a Japanese game on an American Super Nintendo. I'm not sure about European ones, but I'd imagine that it's the same process. There's no region lockout function on the Super Nintendo, making it very convenient for importers who don't want to spend $70 on a Super Famicom.

The game is SD Gundam GX. I am a huge fan of the Gundam franchise and I'm a sucker for buying games based on the franchise. In fact, I bought a PS3 when it came out because one of the launch titles was Gundam Crossfire, which turned out to be one of the worst games I've ever played in my life. But there are good games in the series, and this is one of them. It's a strategy game with some action thrown in, and while it isn't a particularly deep game, it serves it's purpose well for a Gundam fan. You control an army of mobile suits and battleships and blow up another army of mobile suits and battleships. But this isn't a review of the game. That'll probably come later. This is a review of the packaging for a boxed Super Famicom game. I've never even seen one of these before, so this is a first impression.


This is the second Super Famicom game I've bought, the first being the Japanese version of Pilotwings, but that was just the game itself, so I really didn't know what the box looked like.

It's about the size of a VHS, and it opens from the top. This specific box is in slightly shoddy condition, but it's acceptable. It's twenty something year old cardboard. You kind of have to expect that.

Shown for size comparison

The case contains a piece of plastic to hold the game in place, and if I remember right, the Super NES games only used a piece of cardboard, which is a lot less likely to survive for a couple decades.

The game itself rattles a little bit when I shake it, but it works. In fact, my copy of Pilotwings rattles as well. Maybe Super Famicom games rattle more than their Western counterparts. I've only ever had these two Super Famicom games, so it could just be these two specific carts and not a general thing among them. But they do look a little less well designed. They're closer to the shape of a Genesis cartridge, and those tend to have a little more rattling than Super Nintendo carts. Maybe they're just not as well designed.

Also, the game leaves a little bit of space in the cartridge slot of my Super Nintendo when I put it in. That's sort of obvious given the difference in shape between the cartridge and the cartridge slot, though.

The booklet isn't in great condition either, but again, it's almost twenty years old. It's a lot smaller than the American Super Nintendo booklets, but it feels like it's made out of the same kind of paper.

The manual itself

On top of the manual for Clayfighter for size comparison

Also, the manual has some pretty cool drawings of super deformed mobile suits in it.

One of my favorites, the Kampfer from Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket on the left, and the Double Zeta Gundam from it's eponymous series on the right.

And a recreation of an iconic scene from the original Gundam. That scene didn't take place in open space, though. I'm not sure why it does here.

Honestly, the wear and tear doesn't matter too much to me. I'm just glad to have this game in this good of condition. Collecting Super Famicom games might be my next collecting vice and there are a lot of people selling them in North America, which makes it easier for me than if I had to rely on a seller in Japan who I might not be able to communicate with if something goes wrong due to the language barrier, not to mention the huge shipping and handling price and the time it would take to get a video game from Yokohama to New York.

In any case, I'm going to sit down and play this game for a bit. Expect a review at some point.

Video Game Review - Somari for the NES

Somari is an 8-bit version of Sonic The Hedgehog starring Mario.

What in the hell?

My initial reaction was that there was no way in hell that this game wouldn't be laughably terrible. After playing it for about ten minutes, my reaction was that this game is one of the most impressive bootlegs I've ever seen.

Apparently, nobody knows who made this game, where it was made or even exactly when it was made. It's more than likely from Asia, my guess would be China or Taiwan because of their active bootlegging industry at the time, but it's most likely from Taiwan. Apparently, somebody took out a trademark there in early 1994 for the name Somari. That's more than likely this game.

It's a shame that nobody really knows who they are, because these bootleggers could have been hired by Sega or Nintendo to make real games

I'm not going to lie - this game isn't as good as either of the games it ripped off. But it's very good on it's own merits.

Mario runs fast in this game. Maybe not as fast as Sonic did, but considering that this is an 8-bit game, it moves fast, and it feels fast for what it was. It also looks damn good. The colors are a bit dull, making it look more like a Master System game, but they look good for a Master System game. Here's a comparison between the graphics in Somari and Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Master System.

  

Sonic's colors pop out more, obviously, but consider that Sonic on the Master System had an actual budget and a team of professional, top of the line programmers and artists working on it. Somari was amateur hour, and I think they did a very impressive job.

The only problems with the game are that it has a very high difficulty, some control issues, a few glitches (it is a bootleg after all) and the music is bad enough to make your ears bleed.

If it sounds like I'm making excuses for the game, I am. It's a bootleg. The issues that Somari has kind of come with the territory. But bootlegs are rarely good games. There are exceptions - the Famicom versions of Chrono Trigger (an excellent backwards port, even if it did have Pokemon sprites in it) and Final Fantasy VII (which Kotaku editor Luke Plunkett called a "triumph of the human spirit," and Gamepro called "The video game equivalent of the human genome project") are the two big ones, and I think Somari is on the same level as those two. Consider what it is: a bootleg made by amateur Chinese, Taiwanese or Russian programmers who more than likely funded the project out of their own pockets. Don't expect gold from them. Expect silver, and you'll more than likely get that.

The easiest way to get it is on an emulator since it's rare to find it on eBay, but if you do, expect to pay anywhere from $20 to $60 for it. It might not be worth that price, and I really can't see how someone would have a problem pirating a game that was made and distributed illegally in the first place, but the collector in me definitely wants a copy, just because it would make a good conversation piece.

So emulate it. You might not like it - in fact, the consensus seems to be mixed on whether the game is good or not, but you have to give the anonymous programmers credit, because what this is a very impressive achievement for what it was.

Things That Annoy Me - Wartune's Advertisements

I've been seeing a lot of advertisements for an MMO called Wartune lately. Here's everything that these ads tell me about this game.

Wartune has half naked women in it.

So, this game apparently has boobs in it. That's nice, but is it worthwhile for gamers to pay their hard earned money to play Wartune? If so, how much does it cost? Is it free to play? What does the game look like? What genre of game is it? I assume that it's an RPG, but it could also be a fighting game, or honestly, pretty much anything. These ads say nothing substantial about the game that they're trying to sell. To be fair, I did find some that advertised the game...

MMO gibberish! And cleavage!

But I had to seek that one out with a Google image search. Most of the ads are shit like this...

That armor is ridiculously impractical. There's no joke here, I'm just pointing out the obvious.

This isn't an uncommon advertising tactic for low budget MMO's. Remember Evony? For those of you who don't, it was apparently a crappy MMO strategy game that stole graphics from Age of Empires that advertised with boobs, implying that you can "play discreetly on your browser," even though there was nothing to be discreet about, because there was no sexual content in the game, and was shameless enough to sometimes just have lingerie clad breasts and captions along the lines of "come play with me." This is the future of advertising, folks. Admittedly, I doubt they got an actual ad agency to work on this, because that's blatant false advertisement. At least Wartune doesn't get that bad...

Ha! I lied! And so did they.

Is anyone really even surprised by this? The game doesn't have an AO rating. As far as I know, it doesn't have any ESRB rating, because it's a browser game. It's no more required to get one of those ratings than the porn games on Newgrounds.com. Except this game isn't a porn game. As far as I can tell, it's just a dime a dozen MMORPG. That's the only thing I did research on this for. Truth be told, I didn't even need to do that. I've seen plenty of ads for pornography online before, and they all had one thing in common - they had pornography in them, and scantily clad women flashing a come hither stare isn't pornography. The Dead or Alive games are more pornographic than Wartune.

I don't have any problem with sexualized material in an advertisement. If that's the route you want to go, that's fine. The problem is that sex doesn't really sell nearly as well as you think. If we're talking about suggesting sexual material to someone, then they'll probably check it out, but they won't necessarily pay for it. It isn't hard to find free porn on the internet. It also isn't hard to buy real porn. We live in a time when it's really easy to get pornography. People are desensitized to this, and showing some animated boobs in an advertisement isn't going to result in too much interest.

If you're saying "Hey, we have an awesome game here, check it out," and showing a sexy woman flashing a suggestive glare, like in the following ad, it might work...

I doubt many female gamers would be interested. You don't need to put up the sign.

But it doesn't. No mention of the gameplay itself, just a scantily clad albino chick making fuck me eyes. I particularly love the "No girls allowed" message here. They're assuring people who click on the ad that women won't spoil the fun by being bad at video games and talking endlessly about how much they love chocolate, or whatever it is that women do.

I don't have any sort of moral problem with shameless cheesecake like this, in fact, I don't mind it at all if it's done well, like with Bayonetta. What I do have a problem with is being pandered to, as I find it highly insulting to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of male gamers everywhere. Most male gamers are of at least average intelligence and most of us aren't cave men who think only about boobs. That's not to say we won't turn into drooling idiots at the sight of an attractive woman, but the stereotype of us being one track mind neanderthals who only think about sex is highly insulting.

- Update! -

I was unfair to Wartune's ads. They're bad and I don't regret tearing into them one single bit, but in hindsight, comparing them to Evony was a little much. Here's a compilation of Evony advertisements, and they're much more pathetic than anything I've seen from Wartune. Also, at least Wartune keeps with the swords and sorcery theme. Evony took stock images from porn movie covers from the 1990's.

http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/a-history-of-evony-ads-the-insanity-continues/

So for what it's worth to the folks who made Wartune, I apologize for comparing you to Evony. Nothing else in this article, though. You deserve all of that. Also, from what I hear, Wartune isn't a bad game. I doubt I'll ever play it, as I'm not an MMORPG guy, but if I get bored of Star Wars The Old Republic and still want to play an MMORPG, I might give it a shot.

Also, I should point out that the art from Wartune's ads is very well drawn. There's a lot of attention to detail, it does a great job of capturing the feel of a swords and sorcery setting, and while the costumes are stupid and impractical, they're well designed. They'd just function better as lingerie than they would as armor. I sort of want to know who the artist is, because whoever he/she/they is/are, there's some obvious talent there, and I want to see more of their work.

Collector Stories - Verify Before Buying, Dumbass

You know how hard it is for me to not make stupid, impulsive purchases on eBay? Just before I started writing this, I had to talk myself out of a bidding war for a copy of Lethal Enforcers on the Sega Genesis - a game that I don't particularly like, but I wanted it because it came in the big box with the gun controller and everything. It's badass. But I had to force myself to say "No, I don't need it." But dammit, I want it. Anyway...

It's hard for me, as a collector, to pass up what I think is a really good deal. Especially if it's a friggin' awesome deal, like getting a game that's worth a thousand bucks for fifteen bucks because the seller doesn't know what he has. Let me explain...

Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Master System is a very common game in the European market, but given the commercial failure of the Master System in the North American market, there are very few copies of it made for the American market. Therefore, American copies of the game are extremely valuable. Like, a thousand dollars valuable. But European copies go for the equivalent of about five bucks, tops. And that's complete in the case, not loose. It's more common than dirt over there.

So, what's the difference between the two versions of the game? Nothing in terms of gameplay, or even the design of the cartridge or case. So, how can you tell the two versions apart?

The most expensive sticker ever.

You see that UPC sticker? That's the only difference. A sticker on the case. It's not even a part of the case itself. That sticker increases the value of the game 200 times over. And the kicker? That sticker is very easily counterfeited.

I bought this game on eBay, believing it to be the rare as hell American version of Sonic for the Master System. At the time, I had it confused about which version was the super expensive one, and after a small bit of research, I realized that I was an idiot. I bought it from a seller in England, and with the shipping, the price added up to about $13.

On one hand, I did see what may have been a UPC sticker on the back, exactly where it's supposed to be on the cartridge, and he didn't draw attention to it by mentioning it as the "SUPER RARE AMERICAN VERSION!!!" and his starting price was something like a single British pound. On the other hand, why the hell would an English seller have an American copy of this game? If it is the American version, it's unlikely that he counterfeited it, because why would he do that and then not draw attention to it while selling it and ask for a higher price?

I don't know. Regardless, it's not something I'm going to be able to sell, because it is so easy to counterfeit, that no collector would trust a seller's word on it unless they knew them, trusted them and could verify that the seller is the original owner. I can do none of that. Also, the seller is in a region of the world where the cheapo version can be found without any trouble.

At least I didn't get ripped off. Worst case scenario, I got a big name game for a console that I only have a small collection of games for. Best case scenario, I have a super rare game that I can't verify the rarity of, and therefore probably can't sell for more than a couple of bucks if I ever want to. I feel stupid, but I can't complain much. If I ever wanted the game, I wasn't going to get it for the market value. The price of shipping from Europe guaranteed that I'd be spending at least twice that price. I paid about the expected price.

I'll post an update when I get the game in the mail. The projected date of arrival is between the 15th and 17th of July.