The Capcom Five – Video Memorial

NEVER FORGET

Before they cancelled Mega Man Legends 3, before they ignored Wii Pointer controls in Monster Hunter Tri, before they rewarded Resident Evil fans with rail shooters, before Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop could handle 6 zombies at once, before they announce Resident Evil: Revelations including the free Mercenaries HD for PS Vita launching simultaneously with the 3DS version (hi-ho 2012 release date) – Capcom presented… THE FIVE.

Never one to forget 3rd Party achievements, I put this little post together to help last generation’s players and this gen’s newcomers remember the pain for years to come. Actually, before rambling about the quintet’s history that everyone’s heard before, I want to bring attention to the titles as they were announced: by sharing nice-quality versions of their debut trailers (well, 4 out of 5 of them). If we’ll remember ANY of it, let’s at least see clean copies of them; one last face-to-face before closing the casket. I know you can search for the moldy Flash videos originating from Matt C.’s IGN, but try to have some respect for the departed. Those videos came from a time when magazine, internet, and even Nintendo’s own coverage made “good” GameCube games look crappy.

Tracking down known copies of these trailers a couple years ago took some time and $rupees$. My search was narrowed to a couple auctions for rare promo DVDs from Japan, eventually making some sellers very happy. In addition, I managed to gather almost all the promo videos for these games since their announcement. One last step (took forever), each video was processed piece by piece – deinterlacing, cropping out blank borders, scaling the frames for consistency – whenever reasonable, trying to help them look their best. It’s only these past couple months that I seriously sat down to finish converting this junk. When hobbies start to feel like work… I tend to avoid them. Recently feeling an urgent sense of justice, I could delay no more.

So here’s what I got: a few custom screencaps, my personal thoughts/description of each game at inconsistent degrees of relevance, and links to the DivX-formatted media on my homepage. But seriously, I went overboard, so don’t read all of it.

This first one up was the first one to go down

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When Old Speculation is Frontpage News

UPDATED AT THE BOTTOM!:

Stepping up to the plate today is Eurogamer’s Fred Dutton, perhaps best known for breaking the Earth shattering news that Dead or Alive: Dimensions made the Japanese sales charts, coughed up some extremely exciting news an hour ago. Fred Dutton revealed, through his sources of typing in a search on the ESRB website, the existence of a mysterious title known as ‘Zelda Universe’.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-05-26-what-is-zelda-universe

Holy shit! I immediately ran to Adium to tell Pro all about this incredible discovery. Pro was much more level headed and said it was just a website. I didn’t want to beleive him though and went back to my trusted Fred Dutton for clues to Zelda’s Universe

Given its title and that small collection of facts, an online Zelda MMO is the obvious guess, but that seems highly unlikely given Nintendo’s attitude to both online play and developing games for platforms other than its own.

Guarded speculation! He makes a bold claim but then quickly backs away saying it’s unlikely. Fred goes on:

Zelda Universe is the name of the franchise’s official website, but then the ESRB doesn’t rate web content. Some kind of game embedded in the site then? Again, that doesn’t really some like something Nintendo would do.

And then it all came flooding back to me. Ten years ago I played a game on the Zelda website.

Zelda.com2001
I'll join you Link!

Look there’s the little ESRB rating and everything! E: VIOLENCE! Everyone can be violent! Does anyone else remember this? This game? Here’s a reminder.

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Wii Sniper Rifle Video – Gameplay Montage

(DivX video link at end of post; watch the new video here)

A follow-up to my previous The House of the Dead: Overkill videos, this time focusing on the two affordable current-generation last-generation games that handle aiming calibration properly: Ghost Squad and The House of the Dead 2&3 Return. The video is a series of quick gameplay cuts trying to get the point across: with the appropriate gun+game combo, everything works “great”, not perfectly, but sometimes better than I expect. The footage says a lot, but there’s more I want to add.

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Shit article about nothing

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/playing-ds-on-a-3ds-is-less-than-ideal/

That’s what this is. The guy somehow finds a way to complain about a feature that’s been implemented to the very extent it can be. 3DS and DS have different screen sizes, and different resolutions. The 3DS is not a DS. SO therefore, DS games can be played on 3DS either -STRETCHED- to fill the screen, or in their original resolution with some empty screen space. Nintendo GAVE US BOTH OPTIONS. There is nothing more they could do other than to physically shrink the screens through vudu magic whenever we press a button. Not only this, but 3DS lets you,

1) Use the new analog nub on original DS games

2) Tracks DS game playtime through the Activity Log

If anything, it’s a BETTER way to play DS games. Yet, this article complains and spins it into a bad thing, by IGNORING the positives, and posting something that isn’t even a negative, without explaining why it’s a negative.

“It’s not great”

“WHY”

“It’s just not”

Shit article.

Wii Sniper Rifle Videos – HotD: Overkill

Live gameplay footage of The House of the Dead: Overkill using my “CTA Digital Sniper Rifle Gun for Wii” with calibrated aim. I checked a “popular” internet video site to sample other players using the accessory, and came back underwhelmed. I didn’t find any legitimate gameplay videos. Gamers, industry, you all suck. No wonder most rail shooters and accessories are designed for “dumb” customers – there’s no motivation/demand to advance the software or hardware, just an endless cycle of publishers assuming everyone is lazy while gamers REALLY ARE too lazy to aim a casual non-gun and instead complain about 12-digit codes. Even Sony’s Move is a broken, lag-plagued alternative with even dumber-looking accessories exclusively designed for gullible customers (has it been used in “regular” games yet?), and they’re willing to charge more for all of it.

(HotD: Overkill video link at end of post)

Gameplay from “Ghost Squad” and “HotD 2/3”. See Wii Sniper Rifle Gameplay

I’ll save my serious “review” of the accessory for later, but I will say it’s the best Wii rifle I’ve tried so far – the printed crosshairs on the fake scope do a good job of sighting targets, and the main trigger works great like some of the better handgun shells (the awesome part is it’s a RIFLE); on the downside, the main grip SUCKS (it’s not really shaped for a grip), but the trigger is still reachable with some improvisation (oh crap, I started reviewing it). Actually, these videos were made to address the shortcomings of Overkill’s gunplay. Please excuse the audio quality: it was late at night and I didn’t have the game volume up very high and my camcorder was literally inches away from my hands so the clackity noise of the trigger seems way louder than it really is.

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Mario Sports Mix Impressions: Basketball

Yesterday I took us through the dreadful hockey component of Mario Sports Mix, today I played all the way through the game’s basketball campaign, which is probably a sign that it is slightly better quality than hockey. What is not better though are the ‘screenshots’ of me taking photos of the screen with the worst digital camera on the market (iPhone 3Gs). After receiving positive feedback on yesterday’s shots for their clarity and resolution, today I present you with this:

Mario Sports Mix Basketball match.
Live gameplay screens are not hard to take when you're this far ahead.

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“Durp!” – David Jaffe: [Insert not-so-classy comparison here]

Hello, and welcome to another edition of “Durp!”  This time we cover our favorite developer (to make fun of), David Jaffe.  With the NGP announced, surely he’s had time to come up with some sort of riveting, yet orthodox, opinion on the “Next Generation Portable” (that happens to just do things that current systems already do, but worse), right?  No.  No he has not.

So let’s make this a little game.  Can you guess what David Jaffe compared the NGP to?  CAN YOU POSSIBLY GUESS?

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Mario Sports Mix Impressions: Hockey

So being the (field) hockey superstar that I am, when I jammed the Mario Mix disc into my Wii’s slot I went straight to Hockey. Over the next 4 days I’ll try out the other sports and give impressions of them but all I’ll say right now is that if the rest of the game is anything like hockey, then Mario Sports Mix has forever ruined Mario’s good sportsman-like reputation. Since I know some of you don’t click the ‘continue reading’ button on our site, this picture which I’ll leave on the frontpage shows everything wrong with hockey in Mario Sports Mix. The photo was taken on my iPhone because that’s the only image quality you weak scumbags deserve.

mariosportsthrashing

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The 3rd Party Wall of Shame

Editor’s note: This project was initially presented on January 27, 2010 and finalized on April 4, 2010 somewhere in Former Nintendo Fan Report Planet (FNFRP). FNFRP staff said its community was being too “positive” about Wii and Nintendo in general, so we decided to deliver some fresh, steaming negativity. “Why do you hate 3rd Parties so much?” they asked. “Did you not read the damn post at all?” I pondered.

Visitors making the pilgrimage for the first time:  Read The Text, or you will miss the context – this difference easily exposes the internet morons in your community. The specific order of the box arts and items in the text don’t match 100%; it was meant to read casually and maybe quickly, so the idea is what counts. This WAS just an overblown forum post on some fansite, after all. Caution: contains language most foul and intense 3rd Party imagery; some graphics are known to cause birth defects, depending on the laws in your country/state/community.  Kids, ask your government’s permission before buying 3rd Party software.

You might be thinking of the Vietnam Memorial, or the stars of the World War II memorial, or the wall of fallen operatives at CIA headquarters — THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF WALL. This wall has its own significance, and its name below is exactly what it recognizes.

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Donkey Kong Control Rectology

The game is fine. Many “vocal” gamers are simply ape-shit awful players who’ve lost their quick-learning intellectual gamer edge over years of “soft” action games holding their hands thru non-challenges and waterfalls of rewards that celebrate their mediocrity. You have the displeasure of identifying them cuz they still go to the forums and blogs you go to and whine about “moving the controller” being something inexplicably difficult. “I just don’t get it,” one might say right before his 2,000 word essay (a waggle complaint; rather, his failure to waggle) used to exert the might of his lifelong gamer cred, the same cred that crumbled with his preceding statement.

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