Episode 65 General
Footage from the opening cutscenes of Blue Dragon (Xbox 360, 2007), one of the RPGs by Hironobu Sakaguchi's independent company Mistwalker. The music (composed by Nobuo Uematsu) and graphics are pretty nice, and I was more entertained by this footage than the long trailer they showed for Lost Odyssey (Xbox 360, 2007) several episodes back. But ultimately, BD was a much safer, more traditional game from Mistwalker, making it more of a disappointment for me than its Darker and Edgier counterpart, Akira Toriyama designs or no. The class system was intriguing, but learning new abilities was such a slog, it lacked the dizzying possibilities of games with similar systems.
But at least it had “Eternity”
, the awesomely bad boss theme song!It's really quite a thing to behold. Sure enough, it's one of the top results when you search for the game on You Tube.
The footage shows The Hero, Shu, attempting to stand up to the Land Shark, which regularly lays waste to his village. With the help of his clever friends, Jiro and Kluke, he succeeds in trapping the beast in a net, only to be dragged off to a flying fortress with it... and that's where their real adventure began.
Timecode: 0:55: Surveillance Kanshisha (PS 2, 2002), an anime FMV game from Sony Japan. The animation was done by Production IG, and greatly resembles some of their other efforts from the same period (Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, IGPX). The gameplay has the player remotely directing a squad of soldiers through obstacles and dangers, akin to the SCAT team in the notorious Night Trap.
1:44: A montage of clips from Blood Storm (arcades), the Captain Ersatz to Mortal Kombat. It was already featured in this liveblog before, but the strange audio they put to the montage is deserving of a mention. I don't know if it was a part of the music track or not – it seems to fit with the other part of the audio, a quote from what sounds like George W Bush:
- ” We can win ...the first war of the 21st century... and that is the war... of cold-blooded killers... versus cold-blooded killers.”
What. Was that the show's attempt at political commentary? That's pretty dark. I don't recall ever hearing that quote from Bush...
An older episode of the original Cinematech show tried political commentary via game montages, but that's for another liveblog...
2:53: Yoshinoya (PS 2), a cel-shaded game based on the popular Japanese restaurant chain. The game has you playing a Yoshinoya server using the face buttons to give patrons their orders. I remember Adam Sessler saying that the game was “the most boring thing I've ever seen in my life”, which was pretty funny. The game does look awfully repetitive, but hey, not every restaurant can have excitement like Marshall Law's.
8:26: Slightly distressing footage from Karnov, a side-scrolling action game starring the large Russian. It displays the game's Nintendo Hardness by demonstrating that, if green-clad bandits don't get our rotund Russkie, than simply standing still and being killed by deadly plants that sprout next to him will!
You may remember Karnov from a later 16-bit fighting game, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter's_History Fighters History]]. It was so similar to Street Fighter II that Capcom USA sued the game's creators, Data East. Some of the characters were awfully similar to the cast of SFII, but Capcom USA ultimately lost the suit. But hey, at least DE didn't outright plagiarize, unlike the “creators” of one of gaming's most notorious disasterpieces, Limbo Of The Lost (PC).
Before finally getting on the internet for the first time two years ago, the only time I'd ever heard of LotL was a blurb in Game Informer magazine, explaining how the game had stolen graphical assets from The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and the Spawn movie, among others. IIRC, I recognized the background in a still from LotL to be originally from Oblivion.
Of course, there was more to the story than just that. LotL also stole assets from Silent Hill 4 The Room and one of the Thief games. It's just one part of the story of the developers' unconscionable laziness and the insanity of their “original” ideas. I highly recommend that, if you haven't already, to watch the game's ending on YouTube, and to also read TV Tropes' very own article on the game.
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