As the title says, use headphones or earphones to listen to these. This piece has been mixed to be listened with those on
Ah, free falling post time again.
The next few months, or rather the rest of the year, will be an interesting time for me that will decide few things how my personal future will shape up. Not to say much more about it, but as usual personal things can have an impact on the blog, even thou I will aim to minimise that.
Anyways, there’s already some plans for this month. It’ll be Langrisser Re:Incarnation. I’m dropping Tensei from the name, because Tensei (転生) would mean Reincarnation when translated. I understand that it’s there to explain to the Japanese the English in the title, but essentially for whoever understands both languages, you now have a title that says reincarnation twice. That’s just silly. To shorten it down even more, I’ll most likely start using Re:Langisser moniker for it. The review will be out whenever I manage to be comfortable with the progression of the game and write it as I play through it. It’s not my thing to blow strategy games open and play them through in just a few days, especially with a slow burn games like Langrisser. I have other things to do as well, I can’t just sit on my ass all day all day long. The music’s absolutely awesome thou, and a favourite track of mine, Neo Holy War, found its place as the Battle Results music. Langrisser has always been a place for rather energetic music, ever since the first game. No, let’s not talk about the Elthlead series, those should be a post of their own. A series that pioneered the fantasy strategy simulation genre should have a post of its own, thou first I would need to actually go through the games before saying much more about it. Much like a lot of 80’s Japanese strategy games, the first Elthlead is a bit hard to get into.
Metal Gear Solid V got released yesterday, and it’s a game series I’ve given a pass mostly because I have a same thing with it as with Mega Man. I’ve been with the series since the NES games, and while revisionist fans will cry out both the NES version and Snake’s Revenge, coming from those two I remember snickering at the first Solid game for doing the whole long lost brother, psychic Russian and you’re a clone twist. The more entries the series has seen, the more laughable has the stories gone, and now we’re at a point we’re at a point that story is largely irrelevant. The series had always relatively strong gameplay, and that’s something I’ve always been more interested than what pseudo-intellectual bullshit the writers are pushing. I have to say, if I would have to choose a game from the series that I would replay for the plot, it’d be GameBoy Colour’s Solid/Ghost Babel. It also has IdeaSpy 2.5, which is a fun little romp to read through.
I don’t have any plans to go through the rest of the Metal Gears designs this month, mostly because I haven’t pushed out any Tactical Surface Fighter comparisons out as of late. Then again, the podcast did keep me busy on Muv-Luv front.
Speaking of Muv-Luv, the Kickstarter is coming and we’re going to have to see how it’ll go. I’ll most likely going to have a live stream on Youtube or something with some of the Alternative Projects people when the Kickstarter goes online just to chat about it. I’ll most likely announce when it will go live on Twitter. If not that, then at least a celebratory extra podcast that won’t be edited at all.
The test podcast was fun to make, but it added quite a lot of workload. We need to discuss how we’re going to continue with it, and if we make it just simply about Muv-Luv, you won’t see any of it in this blog anymore.
With the news of Samsung wishing to get into some sort of game development, a question was thrown; why haven’t Europeans made a console? Well, the answer really is two-pronged;first is that at the moment there is no company that has the resources and the knowhow to develop one, and the second is that the flopped Phillips CD-i was an European console by all means. Sure, Nokia had their period of actually being good, but overall Nokia lost their in waywhat made their phones good and really screwed up with the N-Cage. There’s bunch of rumors that the N-Cage was demanded by the Russian mafia and I wouldn’t be surprised if these allegations were true. We’ve seen stranger things in the game industry than that.
However, there’s a more prominent reason why European companies have not ventured into the console markets any further in any other form than a developer. This simple reason is that Europe has always been far more into computers than consoles. Britain had Sinclair Research Ltd. which developed and produced their own computers for customers, and one of the most memorable was their ZX Spectrum line of machines starting from 1982. I personally remember 16k/48k model from my childhood with rubber keyboard, and that my godfather showed me some Aliens when I was some four years old after playing a bunch of games. Amstrad also produced their own line of computers, and later on purchased the rights for the Spectrum range and the overall Sinclair brand in the mid-80’s.
Computers were mostly used for gaming, and I do not know many people who actually used them as work machines. Computers back then were mostly game machines, even thou a lot of decent and useable programs existed for multiple things, but I never could see Spectrum as anything pleasant to work on. But the games were pretty awesome overall, and some names you should know started with the Spectrum, like David Perry of Shiny Entertainment (most well known for Earthworm Jim and MDK) as well as Julian Gallop of X-COM fame, as well as a bunch of others.
I’m sure I don’t need to go through what kind of machine Commodore 64 was, as its legacy still lives pretty strong in the modern pop-culture, especially up here in North. However, I do feel the need to mention the Amstrad CPC, which was developed in the mid-80’s to compete against both Commodore and Sinclair machines, and saw popularity in the UK, France, Spain and in some German-speaking countries that could get their hands on it. There are multiple varieties of the CPC, but it seems that the CPC464 is the most nostalgic to many. It should also be mentioned that Amstrad’s CPC line also gave birth to the Amstrad GX4000, which was a neatly designed game console based on the CPC technology. Outwards appearance isn’t everything, and in 1990 the hardware just didn’t really cut it. It was discontinued a year later with only 40 games, but it needs to be mentioned that the GX4000 it had its own port for light guns. None of the games developed to the system was what you would call good.
It might look RAD, but the games are all sort of abomination
In the later part of the 80’s Amiga and Atari were pretty big names in the European computer scene. I was personally always more invested with the Atari machines, namely the Atari 520ST which released in 1986 and was a pretty damn awesome machine on its own and very comparable to its Amiga counterparts. Commodore had purchased Amiga, so Commodore’s legacy could be seen in Amiga machines as well, thou a separate team from Amiga kept working on Amiga branded machines.
The 80’s video game crash affected the computers as well and for the same reason. So much garbage was coded for every machine out there that it just got out of hands and there wasn’t even a level of quality to speak of. Rampart piracy didn’t help either, thou later computers did have a bit better copy protection. There was a period where these computers were kinda frozen, much like the console games after the Crash, but that was a very brief period. The overall quality rose with the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System’s rise, but to this day there are computer enthusiasts who do not understand why the consoles overtook the spot as home’s main game device. Then again, neither does SONY or Microsoft.
Much like with any competing entertainment market, there were battling scenes between Amiga and Atari machines, and many demos of showing the awesomeness of both machines were made to ridicule the other. While Atari’s machines seemed to be weaker in direct comparison, it should be noted that the ST line, as well as the STE, TT MEGA STE and Falcon computers, saw large use because of its music-sequencer software and was used as a controller of musical instruments by both amateurs and professionals. Jean Michel Jarre, Madonna, Tangerine Dream and Norman Cook used Atari computers for their music, to name few. While Amiga had decently strong music support as well, it saw use as a more diverse multimedia machine in video production and show control. People at now bankrupted ADV started their subtitling with an Amiga machine, which kind of lead to the birth of proper to modern American anime scene. Amiga’s large memory also allowed for the development of several 3D rendering software as well.
Ah damn, I love that Atari sound. It has that *something* in there. It might be nostalgia
Overall, we could argue that Europeans always enjoyed tinkering with their machines rather than just play them. A lot of European developers started with the old machines like this, and the users have moved from making simple demos to have their own software and/or hardware companies. Still, these computers were used to play games quite a lot, and the chasm between these nearly console-like computers to actual consoles like the Mega Drive isn’t that deep. I never really used my Atari 520ST for anything but playing games, but then again I never really understood the potential the machine had.
In 80’s there was a generation shift between the consoles and the computers, where few years made a significant division deciding whether you started with consoles or computers. Still, the European computer scene as it were lived strongly to the mid-90’s. I’d argue that the scene, as it existed back then, sort of died with the death of Commode in 1994, and this can be directly blamed on Amiga CD32, which was a CD based home console rather than a proper computer. Nobody remembers that device for a reason, and the scene that flourished was mostly assimilated into other computer scenes. Nevertheless, there is still an undead scene that keeps using both Atari and Amiga machines and continue doing demos and games for the system, as well as exploring what they can do.
When the 90’s rolled over even Europe had taken by the storm of Sega and Nintendo. The Mega Drive had always been more popular of the two brands, and Europeans can feel Nintendo’s cold shoulder even to this day. It could be said that the first proper console to truly strike true with the European customers was indeed the Mega Drive, and later on the PlayStation.
Nintendo saw much more success in Japan and America, which they still see as the most important areas while neglecting the potential Europe offers. Because of these computer roots, and that Nintendo hates us, the 360 and PS3 havebeen the slightly more popular machine locally even thou the Wii has been universally more successful. Europe almost always saw game releases last from the big three (Japan, US and Europe) and we always suffered from bad PAL conversion because the companies were not interested to do proper recoding to use standard PAL signal. That, and Nintendo has little no care what happens in Europe and doesn’t even try to bring their games out here in similar fashion they do in US and Japan. WHy should consumers care if the company doesn’t? We’ll have to see what the next generation of consoles do here in Europe, but the situation looks rather grim still when you look at the past six years.
If Samsung indeed is starting a home console development, I can only hope that they will make a console rather than a dumbed down computer. We do not need anymore the likes of GX4000 and Amiga CD32, even thou the HD twins already are part of the legacy. Samsung has the knowhow and the resources to make a proper console, but I’m afraid the company is far too rooted to computers and mobile media to realize their potential.
Aaltomies 