- "Well, that just happened."Johnny Blaze, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Episode 82
Timecode: 7:02: More D3 budget magic with The Mass Hell
(PS 2). In this third person game, the player assumes the role of a high school girl who has to escape from environments such as a forest. Her main obstacles? The giant crickets, frogs, spiders, ants and butterflies. She can try to sneak past them and kill them stealthily with found weapons like a crowbar. A giant butterfly boss appears to be a green, half-human hybrid. The graphics look dark and dirty, and are too simplistic to project any real horror, but the enemies are gross.
8:46: The intro of Dragon Shadow Spell (PS 2, 2007), an RPG by Flight-Plan. It is reminiscent of a Tales game. Some of the characters, like a cowboy-looking guy with a gun for a right hand and a scruffy-looking guy with a BFS and a Bad Ass facial scar.
15:49: OMG, it's an Appleseed (PS 2) game! Specifically based on the first cel-shaded, CG theatrical movie. Features a cool song from the movie's OST. The intro features ESWAT heroine Deunan Knute and her cybernetically enhanced ex-boyfriend Briarios infiltrating a building to defeat rogue robots.
Episode 83
4:45: You know what the world could use more of? Cute, Super-Deformed games based on manga, like this one for the PSP based on Nana. I only read Nana from the first chapter preview in the short-lived Shojo Beat manga anthology from Viz, but I did have a volume of the creator's earlier manga, Paradise Kiss, and it was superb.
17:07: The intro for a game based on the boxing manga Ashita No Joe (PS 2), from... Capcom?! It uses the same intro as the anime adaptation. It is probably the only anime to ever render an intro entirely in silhouettes. The manga is famous for using The Hero Dies trope in a boxing story, long before Million Dollar Baby ever did.
Episode 84
0:34: You Don't Know Richard (PC), a dating sim that tells its story in live-action FMVs from the '90s. The intro narration purports the game to be a sort of instructional game on the subject of dating:
- What do you know about women? Probably nothing. What about having a great relationship? Yeah, right. No matter what it is that you want from a relationship with a woman, You Don't Know Richard is for you.
The titular Richard is the main character. He has to choose between four different women with whom to go on a date, and the outcome depends on the player's decisions. The acting is a little amateur, and the filming looks a little cheap. If Richard makes the wrong choices, the women tend to respond with... violence. One of Richard's bar buddies is named “Horn Dog”. The game does have the interesting observation, that“Your relationship with women is different from any other guy.”
8:27: The French broadcast ad for Resident Evil 4 (multiplatform). I have to warn you, it's NSFW due to a naked woman nursing her baby, and also for the ad basically being a screamer. It certainly shocked me when I first saw it. The editors then took the opportunity to cut to early gameplay and footage from the game in question, with some unfittingly cheerful music played over it, as if to take the sting off of that horrible, horrible ad.
Originally, I thought of just leaving a link to the French RE4 ad, to give any tropers who hadn't already seen it the chance to experience it cold, but I thought that would have been kind of a Jerkass move. Apparently, it was banned. Just as well, since it has approximately jack-diddly-squat to do with the classic game it allegedly advertised.
