Chris and Joe kick off this episode by talking about the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short, which was really timely and topical when they recorded it but is old news now since Chris couldn’t be bothered to edit and upload this thing in time. Thankfully, lots of comics are discussed afterwards, including Snowpiercer, Celebrated Summer, Judge Dredd, Cannon (briefly) and Satellite Sam. So it’s not a total loss.
Oh man! Ikaruga! That's one of my favorite games from the Bullet Hell genre.
Goddamn, I played the shit out of it when it out and I would play it on Dreamcast at a friend's house. He modded his Dreamcast and I got to play a lot of Japanese games without knowing what the hell was going on because I couldn't read Japanese.
Speaking of Dreamcast: what an underrated console that outdid every console from that year. Shenmue was a game that I played non-stop and still play. The amount of research and meticulous world building that Sega AM2 brought to Shenmue has yet to be matched. I'm still finding new things and new schedules that NPRs are doing. I'm also glad that Jet Set got an HD release and was ported to the PC!!!
Dreamcast also had a great library of games: Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Time Stalkers, ChuChu Rocket!, Wild Metal Country, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, Skies of Arcadia, Phantasy Star Online and others.
I highly recommend checking out this Pod which they go in-depth on the Dreamcast: http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=42364
AND speaking of N64: Mischief Makers was another underrated game that was just a unique platformer. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon & Silicon Valley were some other criminally underrated classics.
Posted by: Larry B Vossler | 2014.03.08 at 17:27
Yeah, I probably liked the Dreamcast best out of that whole generation... never got into modding though, so I was confined to whatever got released in the U.S., which was a decent spread of stuff.
Ha, kind of the elephant in the room as far as bullet hell goes, but: I like Touhou? Like, when you say something like that - I mean, most people don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but those that do immediately assume you're into the fan art and the spin-offs and the weird, gigantic economy built up around these flickering embers of an niche subgenre, but: the games are actually good? I've only played two of them, but they're really well-done. I like how the most special patterns are introduced by name, like fighters shouting out their attacks... the fandom baffles me, though. Totally baffling!
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2014.03.09 at 21:28
Bullet games- surprisingly most the games in the genre are pretty good and hard as hell. There are some that take it to an extreme level that complete memorization of the entire game is needed; that's too extreme for me.
Niche- it is pretty fun and actually I came across one recently that totally baffled me: Procedural Death Labyrinths; it's a fancy way of saying Roguelike games. And Roguelike is a easy way of saying: games that have a dungeon crawl aspect to them and in which everytime you re-enter dungeon, the dungeon is randomly changed and there is a perma-death attached to your character.
God, looking at what I just typed, silly and baffling but I love it. The current gamut generations is thriving with these niche subgenres and almost baroque characteristics.
Posted by: Larry B Vosslee | 2014.03.11 at 15:12
This is the official Archie comics Tumblr: http://archiecomics.tumblr.com
Posted by: Alan | 2014.03.12 at 17:02