The process: twenty-eight of the best Sega properties from the best Sega years are shrunken beyond all conceivable limits, and pressed entirely intact (almost) to a pint-sized PSP disc, or in the case of the PS2 version, a still unbelievably thin DVD-ROM. What took up no less than 28 cartridges not so long ago and contained so much goodness within is now all the good, and none of the cartidges. What more do you need to know? Just look at that box-art, at its achingly CG-less drawings, all the characters bursting forth and promising unadulterated retro delights. I hear there’s a science to cramming all that graham kept jealously guarded by the God of Wheat, but we mortals aren’t privvy to his methods…

The best games on here are some of the most obvious choices. Sonic, Golden Axe - yeah, we all saw that coming. Something you won’t know is that Kid Chameleon alone presents a size paradox, in that the game that boasted 400+ levels and near-infinite play pathways is somehow, again, just ONE of tWeNtY-eIgHt on this disc! For a long time, the real thing has beckoned me from my game drawer, along with Vectorman, Comix Zone, Phantasy Star IV, and the other great unsung heroes of The Genny. The only fluke is that some voices and sound effects are substituted in some games with entirely inappropriate results (like the women in Golden Axe uttering a barbarian’s deathcry), but these are minute inaccuracies in the presence of… TWENTY-EIGHT GAMES.

Playing the subject of my last post brought to mind another, much older Capcom game, whose cartoonish charms and rogueish outcasts I swear must have come from the same minds as Zack and Wiki. Albeit one part free-for-all, arcade beat-em-up, one part zany action-platformer, and no parts puzzle, I’m convinced this is Zack’s next-of-kin, and I should notify him - and all of you - that it’s in seriously neglected condition.

Power Stone was a series of two on Dreamcast plus one on PSP, which was just a remake of the first. The original Power Stone was only two-player and lacked many of the crazy locals and locales of the second game, but I couldn’t find it from any sellers, so with the first you must settle with the game shown adjacent.

Good in their own right, its arenas, including scalable bamboo gazebos, Mexican mineshafts, the city of ‘Londo’ and yes, a pirate ship, set the stage for hand-to-hand combat, with the occasional appearance of a 100-ton hammer and the like. But the real key to victory lay in collecting three of the titular stones and turning into your character into his or her raving lunatic Power Stone form, and for as long as your power should last, pummeling the living sin out of
your opponent.

Power Stone was a hallmark of graphical and gameplay achievement in its day, and reminds us why so many crazies have lobbied for a Dreamcast revival in 2009, year of its 10th anniversary. Personally, I’ll always like 2 better, and could do very well with a third. Cause let’s face it - at this rate, that’s going to happen before Smash Bros. Brawl ever gets released!

Alright, so they may not talk like that, and I don’t remember the last pirate who swapped out a parrot for a whirlybird-equipped monkey and swashbuckling for puzzle-solving, but the FUN part is certainly true of Zack and his companion Wiki, and their Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure.

The title of this Wii game may sound like some Jak and Daxter code cross-compiled with an online encyclopedia and Disney showed up to film it, but don’t let your eyes and my cynicism fool you. Zack (crap did I just type Jak first?) and Wiki is all about looking beyond the obvious, using the Wii remote in the most unthought-of ways I’ve ever seen (read: a flute), and also as thoroughly as possible in just navigating and interacting with the world. By putting your mind and your controller to tasks of logic and observation, you’ll make your way in each stage to the treasure chest containing a part of the knavely and snidely old pirate Barbaros, who promises to grant your greatest wish once reconstructed.

The game succeeds marvelously in bewildering you stupid at some points, while keeping up the laughs with an amical cartoon exterior. Perfect for the young and old, and more players than one, who can join the forces of many cursors to help guide our heroes.

And again if you like Brain Age 2. Now take that number, add 5, mulitply it by 8…

I have a shameful confession to make: it’s not often I buy a new game.

It’s not often I buy a new ANYTHING. If I were a character from that book The Animal Farm, I wouldn’t be the in the camp of capitalist pigs - I’d be eating out of my holy old slop bucket and complaining all the way.

With just such a reputable literary reference, I can perfectly introduce one game I DID recently plunk down for:

Brain Age 2: More Brain Training in Minutes a Day! Even if speed-reading passages from books is a test from the first game only, this time musical comprehension and a Rock-Paper-Scissors reasoning test have been added to the stock of math, memory, and linguistics.

After winding my cerebral clock back a few years, I’ve outsmarted the Site Search enough to find some sellers of this game on PriceGrabber.com. It’s hard enough to find things to write about when rich soil makes you look cheap, and I wasn’t about to give up. Evidently, the person who keyed in the title as “Braining Age” could use a little training of their own! Fun and fulfilling again, this is a bargain for your brain and your bank to boot.

O Megaman, so great wert thee,
before ZX, Legends, and EXE,
and Battle Network Blue Moon With a Side of Cheese,
that I’ve composed this eulogy.
Although you’ve well outlived twenty,
None were so fine as your sorties
Whose bits numbered 8 and 16.
With sliding dash, robot buddies,
A charged shot, and so many tanks labeled “E”
I fondly recall your difficulties.
Blue Bomber, here’s to your memory:
Megaman: Powered Up on PSP!*

Mario Party DS is the 9th installment in just as many years in Hudson’s Mousetrap-meets-Mario star-collecting competition. Has it gotten tired? Yes, in fact, pretty damn near-comatose about midway into the veritable sequel orgy (remember board-design-challenged 4 and “what the hell is this?” 5), but its unshakeable formula always rebounded with the addition of jaunty new minigames and modes like board-game bingo. While recent years have seen the resurgence of Mario as a force to be reckoned with outside of sports and fighting games, the inexorable march across blue and red spaces never ceased and remained nearly unchanged through thick and thin. Let’s have a round of applause for Mario Party, the one that never lost the faith.

Mario party DS gets extra kudos for one special achievement: full-game single-card multiplayer. The traditional party of 4 doesn’t have to break up because not everyone has the game, and no one is relegated to using one crappy character for their lack of a copy either. Graphically comparable to 1 through 3 back in the N64 days, its visuals and style are full of the panache and clever pith we’ve come to expect from Hudson’s.

Remember, please drink play responsibly.

Well, I suppose I was duped along with everyone else into believing that Nintendo might adhere to its most recent release date for Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Lesson duly learned: the launch is now scheduled for no earlier (but probably later) than March 9th. Pushing it back AGAIN with less than one month to the date does not give fair warning to deluded writers like myself, who write things like the previous post and then have to apologize even though they’re equally angry–

Sorry. Stifling that tangent now. Today, I bring you news relating to a previously-covered game. Sega’s Virtua Fighter 5 on the Xbox360 has received an update for its online play, widening its lead on the PS3 version. Hooray! This is my segue into a post on the Xbox Live service proper, and encouraging you to buy your subscription from one of our vendors.

I’m sure anyone who got the free one-month subscription with their system purchase knows as well as I do that it’s pretty fun. I’ve been using Live for a the past couple months quite happily, for everything from making hands-free “calls” from my console, to playing head-to-head games and downloading obscene amounts of demos. If you haven’t made the leap into a paid subscription, one option is the supercalifragalistic Microsoft Xbox 360 Live Vision Camera Bundle, pictured opposite. Even current subscribers can benefit from the inclusion of the Live Vision Camera and free arcade games, plus the 12-month prepaid card, usable whenever you need to renew your service. And special milestones like the recent 5 year anniversary of Live have seen Microsoft offer free arcade games, which could happen again at any time.

That’s all for today. See you online!

This is obviously a little early to be celebrating, but seeing as the official Super Smash Brothers Brawl home page launched in June last year with updates every waking weekday, people have been following this one for a long, lonely time. Then there’re the numerous release-date delays that preceded and prompted those very efforts to placate the livid, but I digress. The fact is that SSBB is now officially under one month away from being in as many Crazy and Master Hands as there have been seconds in recorded history, and then some.

There is one thing you can do to while away the lengthening hours (whether the days are getting longer or not, they’ll surely feel it to many). Break out the ol’ N64 to brush up on your classic Smayhem! … even in the devastating wake of a terrible pun, you must march on. The first step is to click here or, incidentally, on the item itself pictured at right. This is a guide to the first game, which would make good memorabilia or bathroom reading material, and might even provide insight if you’re still playing the 8-year-old game. I’ve spied this happening across campus, so don’t deny it.

Happy anticipatory insomnia.

Having played Phoenix Wright games 1 through 3 on the Nintendo DS and gotten quite sucked into the whirlwind of legal drama and the fight for justice, I started looking forward to the game adaptation of a Hanna-Barbera TV show unbenownst to me, called Harvey Birdman. Surprisingly, I find now that instead of a Wii game showing up here on PriceGrabber, there’s a PS2 version! Not that I mind, but something that made the other bird-man’s game more interactive were the touch screen controls (and it really needed all the help it could get, there). A Wii version would preserve that feeling to some extent, but I’m sure that I’ll cave and try out whichever one shows up for rental sooner.

Giving a little info about the game requires what little knowledge I have of the show. The comedy stars a lawyer-slash-superhero, whose side luck isn’t on nearly as often as it is off. Playing as the super attorney who best plies his trade when it becomes apparent that his clients are guilty, or stupid, or are having hot tubs installed in the courtroom, Harvey Birdman sounds like an opportune property for Capcom to use to parody itself, attracting fans of the stern-faced, righteous Phoenix fellow in the process.

Let the gavel fall and the good times roll, I say.

At the rate the world turns these days, talk of the Gamecube should seem pretty old to most eyes. “Where did you dig up that old fossil of a topic?” I can hear some say. People who only tuned in to the media circus around video games at the launch of Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii might even be wondering what this game site-acronym ‘GCN’ stands for (it WAS always a tricky one). I’m not exaggerating when I tell this story, though - a friend of mine who worked retail once had a customer ask him for a ‘Gamebox’. We’ve all been the perplexed person on the receiving end of such a question.

All this when, waaaay back in 2006, the system with the handle that earned it the moniker ‘lunchpail’ was still getting games, doncha know, if only a few. It was underexploited, underrated and undersold, a fact that came to light with the release of such powerhouses as Resident Evil 4 in its closing days. We’re not here to speak of that well-known, much-ported wonder, though, but of another - one of the very final mini-disc-sized droplets to trickle onto game store shelves, Baten Kaitos Origins.

I long for RPGs that respect a player’s intelligence. Ones that are not full of convenient contrivances of plot fabricated to push you in the right direction, or to wish away inconsistencies.

And in the name of holy hellfires, if your game is coming from Japan, do NOT skimp out on the translation.

Baten Kaitos Origins is nearly innocent of all the predictable console RPG offences. A soothing game, its visuals shining and its music haunting. An exciting game, sometimes utterly humiliating in its difficulty, at other times, full of the shameful pleasure that comes from doing battle with cards. A serious game that involves the player with direct addresses, with writing like I’ve never seen before and voice-acting that doesn’t suck, nay, but - dare I say it? - is mostly REALLY GOOD. Screw the current generation - this old-school effort is nearly the best any new RPG can hope to be.

I’m going to be playing the first game some day too, at which time I expect you will hop in the time machine and set the year for 2002ish with me.