RPG Experience Project: Prologue

Watching all the movies is a hard prospect, there's just so many.  No matter how well versed you are in film, there are those movies you have not gotten around to seeing.  As a person who loves to discuss movies, there is always the "OMG YOU HAVEN"T WATCH THIS?" that happens every time.  Unless your job is to review movies, you've had this said to you.  Anyways, as much of a film buff as I am, it is JRPG's that are my true media fascination.

I have a rather large list of JRPG's I have beaten.  Not only have I beaten them, I can generally walk someone through them and discuss the game on many different levels.  My mind can remember details about these games really well, its a part of my brain that didn't rot in my 20's.  Still, I have gaps, just like everyone, and I want to identify what I need to play to feel "satisfied".  After the millennium, I have hit many of the high notes of the genre, but nowhere near as many as the decade before.  I do not even have playing experience with many of the RPG's that are renowned of the last generation because most of them are on handhelds, or at least that's how it feels.  That's one of the points of this.

I'm not bragging or showing my credentials.  I'm going through and discussing things and expressing my opinion and finding what I have missed and what I want to work on.  Much of this is already in note form, I wanted to get a "big picture" of my experience over the weekend, and so over the course of a few nights I made a list and figured out how I'd split up "eras" and what exactly I would include.  For the most part, with the exception of the earlier time periods, I have split time up into a period of 2 years.  Some of you might think "well that's not a lot of RPG's in just 2 years" and I have to say you are vastly mistaken.  While in the past 5 or so it has slowed down, the amount in the 90's was staggering.

What will you get out of this?  I have no idea.  Maybe its a good time waster to help you wake up in the mornings, or something to read on your coffee breaks.  If you are an RPG fan, you'll learn some history, and maybe find some games you did not know about.  Maybe there is a game you do know about, but do not realize its importance.  I am sticking with mainly the big "3" of any period(Sega, Sony, Nintendo), but will make deviations for particularly important Western developed RPG's.  I plan to talk about action and tactical RPG's, and those that defy classification.  Mainly though, I focus on the "classic" JRPG style.  I'll also keep some "in Japan" posts of the time, because a lot of stuff got started well before we got exposed to it.

Gaming Memories 06: Metroid School-mate

Gaming Memories 06: Metroid School-mate

So now we have the internet, and a little before that we had video game magazines.  In the late 80's, my relatives had none of that.  They had a Nintendo, they had a Metroid cart, and they had a lot of time on their hands to do goofy shit.  You see, back in the early days of the NES, they had no battery backup chips built in to the cartridges.  You could not save your game, you got a numerical code you had to write down in a notebook.  Then when you wanted to continue you had to sit down and input these sometimes ridiculously long sequences of numbers into the game.

Now, spoilers, but when you finished Metroid in a small amount of time, you would get to see the main character, Samas, without armor.  The big twist was that you were playing a girl the entire time.  Even though I did not see this game beaten till over a decade later, I knew Samas was female because of a coincidence that no one will believe.

While at my cousin's house, they were getting ready to play some Metroid.  I was all intent to watch, I was probably around 5 years old at the time and so all I ever got to do was watch them play.  They were getting ready to put the code in to continue their game when they started goofing around, seeing if they could change things and have the game accept them.  Now, I swear this is TRUTH, this is REAL.  My cousin's friend was there that day, and his name was Justin Bailey.  I KNOW!  People that know about this are already calling "BULLSHIT!", but go ahead with your disbelief.  When you enter JUSTIN BAILY and blank out the lower lines, you get a special Samus to play.

Believe me or not, it makes no difference to me, but its a cool memory to me.

Gaming Memories 05: Breaking Vega

Gaming Memories 05: Breaking Vega

That man is a monster.  The name of the monster(outside of Japan) is Vega and he's one of the original sub-bosses in Street Fighter II.  In the original Street Fighter II you had to defeat the 7 opponents and then there were 4 bosses to the game.  My cousins and my sister's boyfriend were able to get through the first 7 pretty easily.  The boxer, named Balrog, was tough, but not impossible.  He was very weak against projectiles and Ryu was my main character at the time.  But then we all hit the wall that was Vega, which is kind of ironic, seeing as a Wall had a lot to do with it.

You see, on Vega's stage had a cage wall.   At first you might not think anything of it.  Vega is super fast, and extraordinarily strong for his speed.  This is overcome by a good defensive play style, blocking and taking your time to whittle away at his life bar.  This works... until he starts using his wall.  It was TOTALLY unfair.  No one else could interact with this wall, and no other stage had anything like this, it was full on unfair and I thought really cheap by the developers(but memorable).  Vega would climb on this wall and be completely immune to attacks for while he is on it.  Then, he would jump from the wall, grab you and slam you against the ground for an incredible amount of damage... then many times he would jump right back on the wall and do it again!  For a long while this was our block for finishing the game.  Could we have lowered the difficulty?  Hell no, not an option.
Finally I came up with a plan.  I put Ryu on the bench and I switched to playing Guile.  Guile had a special ability that only he and Chun Li shared, and I was no good with Chun Li.  I played a long time, learning Guile's moves, overcoming his painfully slow sweep kicks, and got good enough to finally meet Vega with Guile.  After a few games I was able to get Vega down in life enough to start his wall climbing bullshit.  I waited and waited, and as soon as he jumped toward me, I would jump back and press the grab buttons and catch him in the air to perform a back breaker.  It worked!  Vega was not able to reliably grab me, and eventually I was able to defeat him.  Yep, the first ending many of the people I know had ever saw was Guile, not Ryu.  Eventually we were able to get good enough to beat Vega other ways, but for a while we would switch to Guile, beat Vega, then lose against Sagat and change to the person we wanted to see the ending of.  We saw all the endings and we owed it all to Guile.

Arcade Project 12: Tally

Arcade Project 09: Tally

Ok.  So here we are.  I started this blog series about an arcade because of the people getting press for making $30,000+ arcade rooms in their apartments, and my lack of being impressed by them.  I thought I could do comparable with much less money.  Note: I did not say "Better" as these rooms are a personal experience for their owners, so there is no "better" because that's changes from person to person.  Was I surprised at how expensive things did get?  Yea, I would say I underestimated by about $2000, which means if I built the room I probably would be underestimating by $3000.  Arcade games are becoming a speculation market, and like the baseball and comic book of the 80's, we're approaching a fevered high end for very popular items.

So for the room itself, I did not factor in a lot of labor costs, as for the most part I feel like this is a DIY project.  Painting a room is not very hard work, and applying trim just requires you to have good measuring and leveling tools.  The carpet though, I'm a stickler for good carpet installation, so I'm going to go with full on padding, removal and installation fees.  For the carpet I chose it came out fairly expensive for the room, but it is really great quality carpet that will last a very long time and stand up to food, stains, moving of heavy items, and the casters I want on the Sit-Down arcade.  For moulding, paint, tools and materials I have an estimate of $300.  This is for a not-so-fancy moulding for the ceiling, floor and chair-rail area.  The paint is a real high quality primer, which I believe in and most people skip, and a solid stain resistant paint coat.  Probably twice what someone really going for economy stuff would pay.  Then the carpet installation services run $850 with advertised prices, which means you can get that lower in a number of ways.

Total to this point $1150

As for the accessories we have $1502 without factoring in shipping costs.  This is for a 4 set of gumball machines custom made to require no money to work, and painted in red, with 2 different size configurations.  A two column sticker machine that will match the gumball machines.  A high quality, spring loaded booth seat complete with custom table.  Two ottoman "storage" seats for gaming and extra seating.  A matching counter top for placing things like snacks and the popcorn machine.  A 4oz popcorn machine to give the room a nostalgic smell and also for a nice cheap snack.  Assorted utensils, and stuff like pizza serving trays.

Total to this point: 2653

Now we have the machines.  The racing game: Pole Position.  A Neo-Geo 2 slot MVS machine.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Konami.  Included also is a "catch all" MAME arcade cabinet with a high quality monitor and a decent sound set up with sub-woofer, also X-arcade controls.  Next to that is a Sit-down arcade mainly for fighting games, powered by a PS3, and a couple of X-arcade single sticks, with a $500 flat screen budget.  An addition to this set up is a highly rated racing wheel and a decent joystick for games like Afterburner.   All of these are prices calculated at the time of this writing, and will vary over time and with work the arcades could probably be gotten a little cheaper(its all luck with those).  With all that in mind, we come at a whopping

Total to this point: $8977

However, if I was budgeting things, I would add 10% to this rough total for leeway(even though I've added 10% to most budgets for the room already, I'm just extra cautious)

$9872 for a 10x12 arcade room.  Well under the $30,000 in a recent article.

Gaming Memories 04: Advertisements 01

Video Game magazines were big back in the 1990's.  There was a lot of competition between them.  There were those that loved Nintendo Power, but I never really read them because of course all the Nintendo games were going to have great reviews, right?  I did not realize till way later that the quality of the magazine was why people liked it.  Anyway, I was much more an EGM and Next Gen fan, and at one time I had Gamepro and Sega Vision subscriptions.  Somewhere along the line, advertisements started going with "what can we get away with".  Magazines really needed the money, and so a lot of stuff got through that was crazy.  Here's a couple from my personal memory list:

I really really thought this add was funny as hell when I was... let's see, 12? 11?  Well anyways this is probably my favorite of the "shocking" advertisements of the era.  It did not have to be gross, it did not have to have a ton of naked women on the advertisement, it was just a simple phrase for a game named Ballz.  The game is unplayably horrible by today's standards, but back then it was a way to get the 3-D fighter experience on 16-bit consoles.  I played several versions back in the day(rented), and the main memorable thing was a winning song I still get stuck in my head today that just simply goes "boink... yea,    boink yay, ba ba ba boink yea".

This has to go down as one of the worst ideas ever.  Earthbound frankly sold for shit here in the USA, one of the reasons its worth so much now is because it only got popular afterward and everyone decided they needed the game.  Unlike Chronotrigger, its price is actually due to rarity of the cart.  Never forget that Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 sold millions and millions.  Earthbound probably never got past 100,000.  Anyway, the advertisement campaign was abysmal and it was EVERYWHERE in magazines.  It consisted of a stinky scratch and sniff card that did not really need to be scratched to be sniffed.  For like 3 months everyone's magazines smelled like horrible spicy incense.

Gaming Memories 03: Nintendo Cereal

Gaming Memories 3: Nintendo Cereal


When I was a kid, my mother would go to where my dad worked and pick up his check so that she could go to the grocery store.  I had relatives that lived right near where my father worked, so we would always stop by there and pay them a visit.  They always had some form of the "mascot" cereals and we'd always be there around breakfast time.  It was there that I found Boo-berry and Count Chocula, Fruit Bruit and Yummy Mummy cereals.  But it was also there that I first saw this:

Some say that rampant and reckless consumerism hit its peak in the 1980's... and I say those are people that grew up in the 70's.  Everyone thinks their childhood era is the "correct" one, and I happen to have fond memories of all the marketing directed at me in the 80's.  Everything from McDonalds to super sugary cereals, it was all magical and fun and since it was MY childhood, I think its better than the garbage they have now(waves his cane stick around).

Stale old boxes of this still show up on Ebay from time to time.  I'm not much of a collector myself, so I'd be happy with a reproduction box full of Styrofoam, just so I can take it out and remember when I wanted it more than anything else in the world lol.  You have to hand it to the people that made this stuff though, they look like they were actual fans of the series.  Even the music in the commercial is some Super Mario Brothers music put to some of the greatest lyrics of all time.

Check out that top right corner.  Its healthy!  They still do that today.  Load up 3x as much sugar as a can of soda, and sprinkle some vitamin dust into the batter, and we got ourselves some health food!  Still, ever since the 1930's, trashy kids cereal has been a part of "American" childhood.  I see no reason to force shredded wheat down a kid's throat.(weird aside, I've always preferred boring grown up creals, to this day my favorite is Product 19).

I guess in 30 years we'll be having people remembering Angry Birds chewy fruit snacks.

Arcade Project 11: Game: Neo Geo MVS

Obligatory Arcade Purchasing Paragraph
Admittedly the choice of what arcades to get is a personal taste.  If you look at refurbished and well taken care of arcades, you will find that they cost well over $1000.  If you go to reputable websites that specialize in selling arcades, you will find them very much expensive.  Ebay and Craigslist are a crap shoot.  Sometimes people will try and give you junk for $2000, and sometimes little old ladies want to clear rooms and sell you pristine Pacmans for $200.  Its the risk you take for the rewards.  My choice in games is my own and will be different from yours.

Neo Geo MVS

I feel like I have to explain a few things before someone new to arcades will understand this.  You see, the Neo Geo arcade was basically a "console" in an arcade cabinet.  In fact, later they would release a home console version that was literally the same insides of a Neo Geo.  If you see the old Neo Geo cabinets, they never added new upgrades or chips throughout the years they existed, all the games ran on the same hardware.  Inside the arcade cabinet was a cartridge slot just like what you would find in a Super Nintendo.

The arcades came with 1, 2, and 4 slot arcades for most of its life time.  While at home you can expect to pay $300-$500 for most games that will work on the home version, the kinds that work in the arcades are actually more numerous and less rare.  You can get top games for under $30.  You simply plug them in and you're ready to go.

So for the $700 it costs to buy the average 2 slot machine, you get a multi-game cabinet.  For $100 you can get several games depending on what's on EBay at the time.  Right now I can get Metal Slug 5, Samurai Shodown 2, and Bust-a-move all together for under $100.  If you are looking for the arcade games, you need to look for "MVS" cartridges.  The home versions are called "AES" and you can typically find them due to the high prices.  If you find MVS cartridges for AES prices, then you're trying to be duped by someone.  MVS's are cheap and much more abundant.