Grasshopper Needs to Learn New Tricks

Killer is Dead is probably the last first-day purchase I will get for the PS3, in fact I actually had the game on pre-order months before it shipped as I was worried Play-Asia might revised their pre-order price.

The US edition came pre-packed with a bunch of goodies that are supposed to be limited so you never how fast these things tend to run out if you are waiting for a price drop. The bonus items turned out to be a little lackluster, the soundtrack disc is missing the ending theme song and the artbook is more of a pin-up book to be honest.

At least the game turned out to be pretty fun but in the end, Suda games are starting to show a trend of being unpolished and lacking enough good ideas to make it a truly great game.

Fatal Frame 4 Hard Mode Completion

There was a time when I would painstakingly write my game completion stats with a pen and notebook down to every last detail. It comes from my days of a NBA geek, always being fascinated with NBA statistics and scores.

Some things never change I suppose.

I recently finish the hard mode of Fatal Frame 4, something I started more than half a year ago but never quite got around to finishing it. This time, I decided to do the final few chapters all in one day over the span of roughly 3 to 4 hours with breaks in between, of course. Still a top Wii game in my opinion and one of Suda51's more mature and polished title.

Unworthy Sequel

It's ironic that Grasshopper Manufacture enjoy making toilet references in No More Heroes when it's starting to reflect the quality of their games, this sequel truly feels like a pile of crap! At first I wasn't really sure but now that I have finished the game I'm utterly convinced that the sequel is a poor follow-up to the first Heroes game.

The lame assemble of assassin is one thing, what happened to the cool introduction where their names splashed across the screen with a creepy silhouette of the assassin in the background? Also GHM clearly needs to watch more revenge movies because the vengeance plot in Desperate Struggle is about the lamest I have seen. This game took more than six months after its release to make its Japan release, perhaps GHM knew what they had in their hands with this game. Hopefully Suda 51 will be inspired by Nintendo forthcoming new hardware to come up with a better sequel as the first game was clearly inspired by the Nintendo Wii unique wii-mote.

Less Means More or Less?

No More Heroes was one of the early favourites on the Nintendo Wii platform but as time grows the "series" began to lose its charm with me. It's a real shame as the first No More Heroes still sits at the top of my longest playing time list on the Nintendo Channel, something I suspected will not change for a while until I find the time to pick up playing Monster Hunter Tri again.

It started when the game made an appearance on other consoles as a high -def port of the Nintendo Wii original. This was right around the time when Grasshopper Manufacture were about to release the sequel Desperate Struggle on the Nintendo Wii, a sequel which Suda 51 had earlier decided to step away from the directing duties and instead served as a executive director. Understandably, it caused quite a damper in my excitement for the game despite the glowing reviews early on.

Now that I have the game, I can finally see how much better this sequel supposedly is compared with the original. The most obvious difference when you first start playing is the world hub from the original is completely gone, every location in Santa Destroy is now a button click away with a loading screen in between. There are a lot of loading time maybe because the playing time on each mini-game is so brief especially if you fail, you spent very little time actually playing the "real" Travis Touchdown. A sequel is expected to have more content than the original but somehow I can't tell if that's the case for Desperate Struggle, a startling discovery considering how much content was in the first game.

Last Hurrah for Touchdown

Although there have only been two No More Heroes games so far the series has always been about Travis Touchdown to me. Kinda like how Al Pacino's Tony Montana made Scarface into one of the best mob movie ever, it hard to imagine how either one would fare without their central character. The first No More Heroes game was a very average game when striped to its bare-bones and mind you, there isn't even that much meat on the bone to begin with. It has a couple of things that made it stand out though like a killer soundtrack, good voice casting and of course, Travis touchdown.

Suda was mentioned that No More Heroes 2 will probably be the last one appearing on the Wii platform and also travis touchdown's final appearance. Any future installment will have to wait for Nintendo's next-gen console and will not feature travis as the central character. Things have changed quite a bit since the first No More Heroes game, there weren't so many third-party games on the Wii platform back there. Now that I finally have my copy of NMH2 I can finally see how it stacks up against today's third-party games, hopefully Suda and co have given travis a proper send off that he deserves...

...and have him killed off at the start of NMH3 in a totally-irrelevant manner like only Suda can.

Another Translation

Having skipped the PAL release of suda's flower sun and rain, i'm glad that US publisher XSEED has finally finished the localization of the game and scheduled to release it sometime in June. I did in fact try the PAL version very briefly upon its release and while the game is undoubtedly good, i found it a bit cumbersome to have to refer the hotel catalogue in-game all the time. I really hope that publisher XSEED will include the hotel catalogue as part of the game manual when the game ships as i'm sure that's how it's like for the japanese version.

It was rumoured that the US version will carry a complete new localized script compared with PAL version as XSEED was reportedly unhappy with the translation by UK publisher Rising Star Games. Suda completists who have finished the PAL version will do best to check this out as well to see if it's indeed the better version. For starters XSEED seems to have got things right by sticking with the japanese box art for the US version, while i do like the PAL cover art i tend to think all things japanese are superior and hence will gladly pick this up come June.

Power to the People

Nintendo Power v236 is the final issue for the year of 2008 and what an issue it turned out to be. Picking up a copy of Nintendo Power is always a bit of a gamble for me as there are usually no open issue for me to browse through first. Thankfully Nintendo Wikia provides a preview of each issue content for me to decide whether the issue is worth picking up and they usually don't disappoint. Nintendo Power is one of the few things related to Nintendo that have remained traditionally-hardcore. After all how many publications would feature Ninja Gaiden : Dragon Sword, GTA: Chinatown Wars and Madworld on their covers? I initially got this issue for the Castlevania poster included and the retrospective look at the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Power Profile feature on Shinji Mikami and also a nice coverage of the recent TGS 2008, complete with an interview with Suda51 on the upcoming No More Heroes 2.

Fearsome Combination

While debating on a local forum on whether multiple-disc games has already become a relic of past generation gaming, i can't help but to reminisce about Fear Effect on the original Playstation. Heavily influenced by the films of Hong Kong cinema which i also happened to be a long-time fan of, Fear Effect was probably my first love affair with cel-shaded games. Long before Suda51 was pushing the envelope on sex and violence portrayed in cel-shaded games, Stan Liu and his team of talented designers at Kronos Digital were already giving it their best shot on Fear Effect.

Aside from the eye-catching cel-shaded graphics they had another ace up their sleeves, pre-rendered backgrounds unlike any you have seen in the 32-bit era. Often critised for looking static, Fear Effect featured a looping-effect on their pre-rendered background where a bunch of effects could be incoporated into the background, making it lively instead of having your character just walking through a painting. That all came at a price of having to put up with four discs to swap through an essentially one disc long game with these looping-backgrounds taking up all the space. Fear effect had a trio of interesting and very likable leads and they would proceed to add another female to the mix in their follow-up prequel, Retro Helix also on the Playstation. With two successful outings on the original Playstation, Fear Effect was set to make the jump to PS2 and indeed, screenshots released indicated that a third title was well in the works however it never saw the light of day.

Apart from a movie adaption being developed with Uwe Boll and Stanley Tong participation very little is known of the fate of the Fear Effect series. However Fear Effect remains as probably the best game to pay homage to HK cinema, a generation before the likes of Jet Li's Rise to Honour and John Woo's Stranglehold. It has all my favourite elements which i still hold dear to me now; survival horror, cel-shaded graphic sand HK cinema so it's little wonder why i still reminisce fondly about Fear Effect.

November Rain

In the midst of the good news that suda51 is currently working on a follow-up to No More Heroes on the Wii, i discovered that the DS remake to his lost PS2 classic, Flower Sun and Rain has slipped out of the October release window and is currently scheduled to ship in November.

And that only in Europe region mind you as the game has yet to be picked up by any publisher stateside. This creates a problem, not many online stores carry PAL games and those that i know of have no current plans of bringing in this title. I haven't been buying much DS games since getting my new consoles but the upcoming Order of the Ecclesia has revived my interest in DS games. That coupled with the fact i recently stumbled onto a copy of grasshopper manfacture's Contact means that i'm running high for anything suda51 and Nintendo DS. Of course, all this craze is also partly attributed to GHM announcement of No More Heroes 2 during TGS 08.

Perhaps it's not such a bad thing that the game release date has slipped into November, i have way too many orders waiting to be ship out during the month of October and most are not even game-related. Given the current situation, i might just have to download the game to play while i continued my hunt for it. Chances are there might be game stores in singapore that will bring it in since the influx of PAL DS games into the region.

October Rain

October has always been a big month for me when it comes to games where i usually reward myself with a big purchase and by the definition of big, i don't just mean a new game. It's a trend i started about three years ago with the japanese version of Dante May Cry 3 which i bought at a local game store. Seeing that it was a local game store, you can probably guess it wasn't by any means cheap but i really wanted that cool handphone strap that came with it. Since Play-asia never discounted the japanese version anyways before it was eventually replaced with the special edition, i don't think it was that bad of a purchase.

Next was the PAL version of Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence, the standard edition for the PAL market comes with all three discs included while the US version only had two disc as the standard edition. While i won't mind the standard two-disc US version at that time, it too became scarce when i was about to purchase it so i have to settle for the PAL three-disc version. Most recently was the konamistyle edition of Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles, probably my biggest purchase so far. i thought about it for some time and even hesitated a while primarily because it wasn't cheap but since it happens to be close to October, i thought what the hell.


This year, the only release in the month of October which i'm interested in is Suda51's Flower, sun and rain but sadly, no US release date has been announced yet. The only other option is the PAL version scheduled for release this October, however shipping it from HMV is not going to be cheap, what with the postage rates they charge.

Wii love Suda

and Suda51 loves Nintendo. Sure it's probably a business strategy for Grasshopper Manufacture to develop games for Nintendo given its relatively low development cost and large user base but over the years, Nintendo has played host to some of Suda's finest work.

killer7, Suda's US debut was originally meant to be a Gamecube exclusive before Capcom started with their multiplatform strategy but the Gamecube version remained as arguably the definitive version of Suda's debut. No More Heroes, a sort of spiritual sequel to killer7 is Nintendo Wii exclusive and still reigns as one of the finest third party action games on the platform. Fatal Frame VI, another love child of Suda and Nintendo collaboration was recently released in Japan to favourable reviews.

Now, the Nintendo DS is about to play host to another Suda game, Flower, Sun and Rain, a Playstation2 title originally available only in Japan, completely remade from the ground up for Nintendo's popular handheld.I have seen the demo of the game and frankly, the 3D engine for the DS version looks like an early PSOne game it certainly looks like the developers are taking a lot of constraints in shrinking this Playstion2 title to the Nintendo DS. It still looks mighty enticing and being a Nintendo fan, it looks like i'm going to have to get used to being compromised as the Wii developers at Capcom are apparently facing major hurdles too in bringing Dead Rising to Nintendo Wii.

Don't Try This Home...

Back when i first played Resident Evil 4 on my Playstation2, i thought the whole idea of Leon being able to suplex enemies is rather odd in a survival horror game, let alone any action game. Later suda51 decided to take the whole concept of wrestling your enemies a step further in his Wii offering, No More Heroes. While No More Heroes doesn't offer you much control over your wrestling move due to the simplistic nature of the Wii controls, the array of wrestling moves that travis touchdown is able to pull off is simply staggering. Wrestling may be on a decline with the low tv ratings these days but they have certainly become the epitome of cool in japanese action games as demonstrated by both Resident Evil 4 and No More Heroes. Pretty soon even Solid Snake might be pulling off some niffy suplex move .....

Wii Need More Games Like These

Some say only Nintendo first-party games will continue to sell well on Nintendo Wii system. Well, we have the likes of Suda 51 to thank for at least trying to prove them wrong. Upon hearing that the game have finally arrived at my local game store, i "camped" outside of the shopping mall this morning in an illegal parking spot no less, waiting patiently for them to open their doors. I couldn't wait to play this game and more importantly i wanted to do my part and support the sales of this title. I can't think of a game i would rather play right now, in fact i was hooked pretty much when i first saw the teaser trailer of the game revealed. Of course, shortly after that the game went into hiding as development ramped up and since i thought i had little hopes of playing it then without a Wii, I just put it under my 'one to watch' list.

The game has been out for a few weeks in the states now having earlier debut in the Japanese market to poor sales about a month back. The sales figures in the US are much better, selling 100,000 units to japan's 40,000 units. Though better, those are hardly chart-topping figures to say and Nintendo non-believers are quick to point out that the game should have been released on Sony/Mircosoft system to ensure it reaches out to the right market rather than Nintendo's supposedly "casual" gamers. I disagree as Suda 51 has always had a track record of developing and releasing cult games to poor sales, if he was given the resources to develop this on a system like PS3 which required a lot more development cost, he would probably be reduced to selling toilet paper for real with sales figures like this. Putting it out on the Wii allows Grasshopper to keep development cost down while reaching out to the widest audiences of this generation's console. Well this game is on track to becoming Suda's best selling game so far and i look forward to playing it and seeing what else is in store for us from his Grasshopper studios.

Something old, something new, something doubled

Every year around this time, i will be away in Singapore to visit my relatives during the festive Chinese New Year. I will also find the time to dropby some of my favourite game stores (assuming they are opened for business) to pick up some games. This year is no different, my haul this trip consist of well, games that i have mainly played/owned already but decided nevertheless to upgrade my current existing copy. I got myself a Gamecube version of Suda51's cult classic killer7, having already beaten the game sometime back on my playstation2. This is basically to drum up some excitement for Suda's newest Wii game No More Heroes as well as to own the definitive version of this game as many have commented the Gamecube version is far superior to the playstation2 version. Not much of a surprise seeing that the game was originally announced as a Gamecube exclusive and development on the platform was well underway before Capcom decided to announce the game on the playstation2 platform. If you never played killer7, it's basically a surreal action-adventure with a lot of style and quirky memorable characters, which seems to be a prevalent style of Suda's now. The game received a lot of criticism back then for it's over-simplistic gameplay but kept fans and critics guessing with it's convoluted storyline and characters. In fact from what i seen of No More Heroes so far, a lot of the criticism for killer7 seems to be addressed in NMH as it looks like a gamey version of killer7 with the same blend of quirky off-beat characters. Speaking of No More Heroes, i did do some fair searching about for the game despite hearing rumours that the game was reportedly banned in Singapore for its violence. Heck i even tried asked some retailers just to see what kinda of response or reaction i will get. Amusingly enough, when asked most of the retailers just response in a whisperly voice "oh we don't have the game or no more stock" like it's a taboo to even talk about it in the open.

I also happened to pick up another Gamecube exclusive, Resident Evil Zero which i earlier played a pre-owned copy just before tackling Umbrella Chronicles. Call it rash, call it paranoid i just wasn't sure if i was able tofind a non-Player's Choice version of this game at that time and decided not to take any chances. I guess my opinion of the game was that i like it enough to buy a sealed copy to replace my existing copy, now i just have to figure out what to do with the other one....

One thing that wasn't on my list was UMD movie for my PSP, yes i have a PSP for close to two years now but have never used it to watch any movies before. Blame it on Sony's insistence to have region-lock on the UMD movie format, i just wasn't able to find any decent region3 UMD for my PSP up till now. The Gramophone in City Hall had a couple of UMD videos tucked away next to their Blue-ray selections and i thought it was too good of an oppurtunity to pass up. A bit implusive, but i can't wait to see King Kong on my PSP, especially since i haven't watched the movie before.

Finally i thought i closed my recap of my Singapore trip with a cover of the latest EGM issue Singapore edition. That's right, Singapore has a gaming community big enough to warrant a localization of the famous videogame magazine, though if you actually pay attention and read the contents it's hard to tell the difference. i always make it a point to pick up a copy whenever i'm there as a keepsake/momento of my trip and this month edition feature a 11-page on the upcoming Street Fighter IV, keep the faith everyone Capcom will deliver!

Rail or Not?

When Capcom first announced Umbrella Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii, fans couldn't be more happier. After all it's still a long wait till Resident Evil 5 and the last three Resident Evil games on the Nintendo Gamecube had been great. When they later revealed that it's going to be a shooter game, fans were less than excited about the prospects, since previous attempts to transcend into the shooter territory using the RE license had been less than successful. When it was finally revealed that it's going to be an on-rails shooter much like the gun-games in the arcades, fans just went nuts....have Capcom finally lost it?

Well after playing Umbrella Chronicles for a good six hours, I can safely say that this is probably the best iteration of the Resident Evil Gun Survivor series. Having the game running on rails really creates a lot of tension or atmosphere because you have absolute no control over where to go or which way to look. The biggest difference between games and movies is that games are a form of interactive entertainment which the player actually have to take part in the game in order for the story to progress. The problem is, sometimes gamers feel that by taking away certain abilities like camera movement or in this case player movement, the sense of immersion is reduced and the gameplay experience is compromised. The quality of a good game should not be judged on such merits as it's not what makes a good game great. As much as fans love the level of detail in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, it's not what made the game so memorable. In fact, it actually adds little to the actual game experience apart from allowing you to stray away from the main objective, having fun goofing around.

The point I'm trying to make is that games are as much of an art form as movies and that game developers should be treated with the same degree of respect and allowed the creative freedom to make decision to take away certain level of interactivity from the gamers such as this case. When was the last time you think to yourself, this movie would have been better if only the director/screenwriter did this instead of that? Would killer7 had be a better game if it wasn't running on rails? Probably not, maybe as games become more 'beautiful' and 'immersive', we gamers are becoming more 'possessive' and scoff when things are taken away from us? It's time to leave the reins to the people in-charge, have faith and ultimately they will deliver the best experience possible.... yes, we are looking at you too, mr. Suda.