Lately I went and got myself a real tough Mankey on my back. Thanks to the Talking Time forum and a recent push to chip away at my pile of shame I started my journey through Sinnoh in Pokémon Pearl afresh. Now I’m irrevocably hooked like I haven’t been since the Gold and Silver generation.

I’d picked up Pearl back when it was released late 2007. I even pre-ordered it so I have the promotional Palkia stylus (which I’ve never opened not from a collector’s instinct but because these special styli are a tad unwieldy). It just didn’t grab me at the time. I meandered through 3 gyms or so, never got to feel attached to my team, and set it aside. I have far too many games just like this sitting on shelves not being played.

So I started playing it again and I started from the very beginning, picking the adorable “Piplup”:http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Piplup_(Pokémon) as my starter, and I’m considerably more engaged. So engaged that nearly all of my crafting endeavors have fallen to the wayside. I’m not wholly pleased about that part.

Thing is, I’m having fun. Actual fun. So I can’t be too hard on myself so long as I make certain to ensure that necessary chores around the house are still being taken care of. It has come to my attention that I far too often don’t allow myself fun, being a concentrated ball of worry and anxiety. So a little obsession should be tolerated in the interest of joy.

I’m still hard at work on your Robot Ninja Haggle Man buttons. My free time of late has been paltry and I’m not as far along as I’d like, but I’m continuing to crank them out at as fast a pace as I can manage. I sent a batch of them the other day. If I mailed yours you should have received an email. The rest of you, hang tight. It’ll get to you.

Haggle Man (alternate pose)

Reader Zachary Robinson took the time to draw some more sprites from Retro Game Challenge for which I am terribly grateful. In addition to other games like Guadia Quest and Cosmic Gate he sent along an alternate pose for my favorite robot ninja. I turned it into a pattern and if you haven’t heard from me yet and you’d like this one, give me a shout.

By the by, in case anyone was wondering where the name Haggle Man comes from, it’s a joke. It’s an intentional mistranslation of the Japanese word hagaruma (or if you want to be fancy はぐるま or even fancier still 歯車) which means “gear.” Like the gears that Robot Ninja Haggle Man throws as shuriken (or later installs as upgrades). NES era localization was shoddy at best. The name Haggle Man is a sly nod to lazy translators.

It’s been a week since I posted my call to arms regarding Retro Game Challenge. Call it bribery if you must. The response has been pretty great thus far.

Honestly, I wasn’t entire sure if I could convince anyone to part with $30 so quickly. Statistically speaking, nobody reads this site. I figured the chances were pretty even that I might put this up and watch it fade into nothingness.

A quick update: To those of you that have sent me your receipts I say thanks and I hope you enjoy your purchase. I’m working on the buttons during as much of my free time as I can spare. They don’t take long individually, but they do take a little time. I will get them mailed to you as soon as possible.

The “busted” Haggle Man style doesn’t seem to be all that popular. I’m not terribly surprised, but I did think he’d be a bit cuter than he turned out to be—he looks pretty cute on the DS screen. I won’t be making any of him unless someone really wants him. So if you didn’t or don’t say anything you will get normal healthy Haggle Man.

Here comes a new challenger!

That said, I sketched up two other patterns over the last week. One is Haggle Man running. The other is Haggle Man’s arch-nemesis Dark Haggle Man.

Haggle Man, "busted" Haggle Man, Haggle Man running, Dark Haggle Man

I’m making equal numbers of Haggle Man standing and running, if for no other reason to give myself a break for stitching the exact same thing. If you send me a receipt you’ll get one of those two. Dark Haggle Man, like busted Haggle Man, I will only be making by special request (and possibly once for myself).

In summary

It is starting to seem that attention is starting to fall away from this little project. The emails have dried up a bit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing altogether because it give me more time to craft. I have no immediate plans to stop doing this, so keep spreading the word.

1. Buy Retro Game Challege.
2. Email me your receipt.
3. Get a pretty awesome button.

Thanks

Thanks to Tiny Cartridge (twice!), Joystiq, GoNintendo, and especially Shaun Inman for sharing this article with the world. Thanks to everyone else who picked it up too. And if you tipped off any of those sites, double-plus thanks to you as well.

Listen up: I need your help. We need your help. You haven’t bough a copy of Retro Game Challenge yet and this is a big problem. The “we” I mentioned a bit ago is everyone who likes playing good games, ever.

See, it’s like this: There’s a sequel to Retro Game Challenge that has already been released in Japan. It’s called Game Center CX over yonder. As good as Retro Game Challenge is, Game Center CX 2 is even better. Like, a million times better.

But, RGC developer XSEED sees no point to localize Game Center CX 2 until it sells a bunch more copies. I really, really, really want to play this game. You do too, you just don’t know any better yet.

I will not go down without a fight. Though the task may be daunting—unwinnable even—I must do my part. Here is what I offer: for every copy of Retro Game Challenge bought between the publishing of this interview which is to say June 24, 2009 and the release of Game Center CX 2 or Retro Game Challenge 2 I will make a handcrafted Robot Ninja Haggle Man button. Absolutely free of charge. It will look rather a lot like this:

This is a pinback button. You know, like the ones those hipsters seem to like so damned much. Not, like, a button you’d sew onto a sweater or something. Although, if you really wanted, I could fix it that way.

All you need to do is a send me a copy of your receipt. Email is just fine. Blot out any information you don’t want to be shared with me.

Some rules¹:

• It has to be a new copy. Used copies don’t count towards the sales figures. New copies are available on Amazon.com and Best Buy. Probably elsewhere too. Any retailer is fine.
• It has to be a US copy of Retro Game Challenge. I want it to come to the US so you need to bump up those sales. You can live anywhere, but you need to buy a US copy of RGC.
• You get one button for every copy of the game you buy. Buy 12 copies for your entire office, get 12 buttons.
• You pay no shipping whatsoever, wherever you live. I want this game that badly.

I’ll do you one better. You get to choose from two different button designs. You can choose regular vanilla Haggle Man or his “busted” version—this is what he looks like when he takes damage. Here’s an approximation of the two:

Haggle Man (left) and his "busted" version (right)

Is it a little bit silly to bribe you with a crafted tchotchke of a game you haven’t played yet? NO Because once you do play it you’ll agree that this is the best game you’ve ever played. Why am I so sure? Because it is truth!

I’ll make as many as I have to people. Spread the word. Oh, and buy Retro Game Challege!

Update (02 Jul 2009): I’ve posted a follow-up to this article.

¹ After sleeping on it I decided I should probably issue a disclaimer that I reserve the right to rescind this offer at a future date should the cost of supplies, shipping, and loss of free time threaten to cause me irrevocable financial and/or mental harm. I have no intention of doing this, mind, I just wanted to put this out there. Oh, and I’d like to mention that I do run an Etsy shop if you’d like to, you know, pay me money for something like this.

Have you been playing Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS? It’s a remarkable game compilation. The central conceit of the game is that you as the lead character of the game have been transported back in time to the 1980’s—specifically to 1984-1989—and have been given the opportunity to play some of the best games of that era.

All of these “retro” games are fakes though. I suppose they’re real enough in a way, seeing as you can play them and all that. They’re not old, they just look like they could be.

The attention to period detail is spot on. Of the eight games playable in Retro Game Challenge three are in the same series. Robot Ninja Haggle Man, purportedly released in 1985, is a simple platformer more in the vein of an Elevator Action or a Lode Runner than a Super Mario Bros. It looks like it might be an arcade port, which is presumably the idea.

Later on in the game a sequel is released that follows the same basic rules but adds a bit more polish, difficulty, and abilities. It feels so much like an authentic sequel from the era. The level intro screens from the second game have a Mega Man feel to them where the first game had a bare-bones screen that had little more than a level number. The additions are a bit more than the original Super Mario Bros. 2 but less than Mega Man 2.

I really like this game. It’s clearly made by a group of people that grew up with the Famicom and love it dearly. Even the localization is spectacular, with appropriate misspellings for the year the game was supposed to be released—one game contains the text “You shooted ## asteroids” at the end of a bonus stage.

This morning I threw together a cross stitch chart for Haggle Man from the first two Robot Ninja Haggle Man games. Download it and make your own star of one of the best games you never played as a kid:

robot_ninja_haggleman.pdf

Through some careful bargain hunting I recently snagged myself a copy of a game that really ought to be right up my alley: Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker for the Nintendo DS. Except, somehow, it just isn’t.

Seeing as I just spent a year’s worth of free time assiduously cross stitching each and every monster in the first game in the series, you might think a game that actually stars a wide range of these monsters would be perfect for me. I thought so too. But there’s just something off about this one.

The devil’s in the details, and I think that’s what is killing me about Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. The art style is as close to that of Dragon Quest VIII as one can get on the Nintendo DS. All of the townspeople look just like those in the PS2 game. Most of the environments are quite similar too, and there’s where the first little niggling issue appears. The interior environments of Joker have many of the same elements from DQ VIII, yet you cannot interact with them.

In (nearly) every other game in the Dragon Quest series there are cabinets, wardrobes, bookshelves, and hanging sacks that can be examined for potential items. These same things are in Joker, but they’re only window dressing. I’ve only been playing for a few hours and yet I still cannot get it through my head that no matter how enticing that cabinet might look, there’s absolutely no way it will have anything or that my character will even be able to pretend to search it. I don’t know why this is so aggravating, yet it is.

The 3D nature of the game doesn’t lend itself so well to the Nintendo DS’s control scheme either. With only four cardinal directions and no sensitivity moving from place to place isn’t as easy as it ought to be. I certainly hope that Dragon Quest IX, which I assume to be developed by a different team, will do something to make 3D movement a bit less irritating. I’d have preferred the 2-and-a-half-dimension style of Dragon Quest IV for DS to this.

But, it does still have many of the monsters I’ve come to love and what promises to be a very aggravating yet intriguing monster synthesis option. Unless I get distracted—quite likely with Retro Game Challenge and Dragon Quest V both out, to say nothing of my as-yet-incomplete game of Dragon Quest IV—I might still putter around with it. I feel I owe it to the Slimes and Drakees.

I mistakenly turned off my DS tonight on my break, thus destroying a day’s worth of exploration. Etrian Odyssey can only be saved in town, necessitating a trip up, and I’d been merely closely the DS lid and letting the sleep mode keep my place. It isn’t a huge setback, but I’ve lost a full inventory’s loot, a couple of levels, and a whole lot of map.

Earlier tonight I wondered why I was writing this: a diary of a DS game from last year. Part of it is searching for a topic. Four years in, and I’m still struggling to find just what I want to talk about here. I’ve written about video games before, but I haven’t quite found my voice on the matter. It is likely I never will. The real reason I feel compelled to write about Etrian Odyssey is how personal I find it to be. I touched on this last time in regards to the map. Somehow, it just feels like my game.

Etrian Odyssey is very deliberately tailored to be personal. The characters in your party are blissfully mute. Any personality they have is based solely on the portrait and the player’s decisions. Somewhere in the director’s diaries on the official site there is a post that covers this issue¹. The director wants you to bring your own story to the game, filling in the unspoken camaraderie of the explorers.

What dialog that does exist in Etrian Odyssey is very Dungeons & Dragons. Flavor text that could come out of the mouth of a seasoned Dungeon Master is sprinkled sparsely around the labyrinth. Much like a well-planned tabletop campaign it gives you a sense of the world without telling you what you ought to be thinking about it.

So, my team is at about level 14 and had I not thrown out a day’s exploration I’d be at the 5th level of the dungeon. I get the sense that this is probably the last level of the first “Strata” (the dungeon seems to be divided into groups of levels eliminating the need to start afresh every time). I’ll need to be doing battle with a wolf named Fenrir before too long.

One thing I didn’t quite get about the game until some time into it is the importance of item gathering skills. Every character class in the game has a set of skills he or she can learn. Each class has at least one item gathering skill that can be used at certain point in the game. Depending on the number of points sunk into this skill that character can extract a certain amount of randomized material per day. These points come at the expense of boosted stats, special attacks, or magic. With each level I raised, I looked at these skills and thought I would do better with a boosted attack. Now I’m not so sure.

Item collection is important, because finding money is difficult. In a rather sensible break from RPG tradition monsters do not carry any money. Instead you sell the skin, teeth, horns, eyes, and other assorted parts carved off of their inert corpses. It’s a bit like a MMO. Likely, the MMO games borrowed this from the original RPGs. This loot is also the manner by which new items are added to the game’s one and only store. Using the monster parts and gathered resource you sell the shopkeeper can make new and more powerful weapons and armor.

What I’ve found the strangest so far is the Etrian Odyssey‘s insistence that your party is the last and least noteworthy of a teeming horde of adventurers to brave the dungeon. Everything about the game thus far has communicated a sense of loneliness. The dungeon hardly feels well-traveled. From the unfinished map to the filing of new monster encounters with the local constabulary, the dungeon of Etrian Odyssey feels like unexplored territory.

¹ I’d link directly to it, but Atlus is insistent on Flash sites for their games that aggravatingly eschew any sort of permanent link.

My copy of the DS game Etrian Odyssey arrived last Thursday — I finally broke down and ordered the damned thing on eBay. I’ve been playing it with some regularity since it showed up in my mailbox. Thus far I’m very, very happy indeed.

I’ve been wanting to write about it, but I’d rather not just dump yet another review onto the interwebs, particularly when I’m not even close to any kind of conclusion. Instead, I thought I might write a little about what it’s like to play it. I suppose it’s a bit like a diary.

First a little background: Etrian Odyssey is a DS RPG released by Atlus. The entire game is centered around a single massive dungeon. There’s only one town with a single shop for all of your standard RPG needs. Battles are turn based with the participants taking one action per turn roughly in order of their speed. It’s pretty much the very same system that has been in place as long as these sorts of games have been, well, video games.

And that’s just it: the most refreshing aspect of Etrian Odyssey is its dogged use of formula. It’s almost soothing, in a way. Now I can see why Dragon Quest has been such a consistent draw in Japan. It’s like video game comfort food. I know that when I pick “attack” my dude will attack as soon as he’s allowed. I can set down the DS at this point, leave it for as long as I want, and when I pick it up I won’t have missed anything. I didn’t need to play a little rhythm game to get more damage. I didn’t lose any actions because I wasn’t paying attention. I can sit back and contemplate strategy. Or not.

The other big thing about Etrian Odyssey is the map. You have to make it yourself. Because it’s a DS game there’s that second screen to do something with. Instead of using it to move or enter commands the touch screen always displays the map, which you draw with the stylus. Because everything is at 90° angles it’s not too difficult. It makes the labyrinth seem that much more sinister and rewarding. I really feel like I’ve found something when I peek around a corner and scribble it onto my map.

After naming my guild — Badger, after my rambunctious 3-legged cat who in turn was given this name due to the badger’s tenacity and burrowing prowess — I made one each of the game’s 7 character classes¹ and put together an expeditionary force of 5. My first team consisted of a Landsnknecht (what other games might just call a “warrior,” he’s a straightforward attacker), a Protector (or knight), a Dark Hunter (a debuffer), a Survivalist (woodsman type that uses bows), and a Medic (the necessary healer). I played this team for a little while before realizing that I was probably going to need some magic and swapped the Dark Hunter for an Alchemist (this one casts spells like the ubiquitous fire and ice). Then a bit later I swapped out the Survivalist for the Dark Hunter again. I thought those debuffs might come in handy. Her poison strike certainly does when it hits. I’m still not quite satisfied. Once I get those last 2 classes I’ll probably do some more rearranging.

¹ There are actually 9, but I’ve yet to unlock the others.

I was hunting for Etrian Odyssey after learning just how good it was. The thing is, I just know that I’d seen it before and recently. A while back Circuit City had a clearance sale that held the potential to provide me cheap copies of God Hand, Final Fantasy IV Advance, Final Fantasy V Advance, Elite Beat Agents, or Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. I was much too slow to find any of these games or, for that matter, any cheap games at all. I went to a bunch of stores though, as well as a bunch of other stores that just might hit my cheap games itch. Somewhere amongst all those stops I saw a copy of Etrian Odyssey but didn’t buy it because 1.) I didn’t know how hard it would be to find again, 2.) I didn’t know that I wanted it, and 3.) it wasn’t deeply discounted.

I was hunting for Etrian Odyssey, but what I settled for was Luminous Arc. I might have picked up Odin Sphere instead, but I was hell bent on getting a DS cart to play on the train so Luminous Arc it was. I thought, “It’s an Atlus strategy game, it must be pretty good. After all, they released Disgaea and a whole lot else.” Of course, I would come to find out that it’s actually developed by Marvelous Interactive, most famous for acquiring the Harvest Moon series, and not Nippon Ichi, who gave us Disgaea, LaPucelle: Tactics, and Phantom Brave. I was buying a game on the fly, based purely on the box and the pedigree of the publisher. It was like I was 12 years old and spending my allowance on NES carts all over again.

So, I picked it up and on my way to work that day popped it in on the Red Line. The opening cinema — a bombastic bit of anime J-pop crap — was worrisome. I chalked this up to a desire to cater to the opinionated forum lackey who wails and bemoans any significant localization effort for not being pure to the original in every respect. Besides, I could skip it by pushing any button (and believe me, I did).

Unfortunately, so much of the rest of the game falls right in line with that saccharine little intro. I swear, they must be able to buy these characters in bulk over in Japan. I’m picturing a catalog, distributed at trade conventions and by greasy-haired regional salespeople, much like a stock footage/photo catalog¹ wherein characters can be ordered by the pound. You need an earnest young hero with a secret past? Well, if you order him with an squeaky-voice, admiring younger brother you can save big yen! How about a love interest? We’ve got great rates on strong-willed mystics whose tough exterior belies a heart of gold! In fact, why not buy the box set which includes a confident ladies man, a soft-spoken young girl whose faith is tested, and an experienced mentor (whose an elder at the age of 18-22)? They go great with the kooky magic user pack. That one comes with a rambunctious child, an aloof and laconic warrior, a queen full of doubts, and a couple of wacky animal characters. Save big when you buy them all together!

And then there’s fucking Nikolai. Though not without precedent by any means — he’s the horndog weirdo nerd who loudly and inappropriately announces his boner to everyone within earshot, a staple of Japanese cartoons and other popular media — he attains particular attention by being the character most likely to make you wish the cut scenes were skippable and that there weren’t voice acting. Just look at him. This is the stupid fucking face he makes in every fucking cut scene in which he has a line. He has a hard on for witches, and no amount of violence can damped his ardor which is only exacerbated by his voice acting. My best guess is the actor was given the direction of “mincing caricature of homosexual, circa 1960” though I suspect his patter is par for the course with many popular anime titles. I’m tempted to attack him direct my own characters to attack him, except that would make him talk even more.

The cast of characters is nauseatingly familiar. They’re cliché. There’s not a single aspect about them you haven’t seen a hundred times before. Any supposed character developments have been telegraphed miles before. Light years before. The same goes for the plot. At the outset of the game your plucky young heroes are tasked by their church with destroying witches. Spoiler alert: the church is the bad guy and the witches are the good guys. Except, that’s only a spoiler if you have just awaken from your cryo-stasis pod wherein you have been resting for the past 30 years or so to take a crack at these newfangled electronic games the kids are so into these days.

As for the rest of the game, well it’s just fine. The battle system is just what you’d expect, because it’s precisely the same battle system you’ve seen since Final Fantasy Tactics and probably before that. You’ve got your long range and short range attackers and your healers. You’ve got your terrain and elevation and sides. You’ve got your turn order to watch. You can move and do something, or do something and move, or just do something, or just move, or none of the above (and it affects your turn order). You buy new equipment and potions or whatever. It’s the same damn game you’ve already played (unless you haven’t, in which case that’s great for you because you might not realize what a carbon copy it is).

This is not to say that Luminous Arc is a bad game. It isn’t. It just isn’t remarkable in nearly any capacity. All of the parts are solid, having been liberally swiped from established games. If you can get past the crushing sameness and god awful characters there’s plenty of game here to enjoy. Hell, I’m still playing it: the parts it does right it does really right, and most missions are just the right length for my daily commute (once I get past the interminable plot development). It’s exactly what I expected, and nothing more.

¹ I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these things, but once you have it’s like your eyes have been opened to a great secret of the universe. These stock photos and video are positively everywhere. All of a sudden you realize where every single “customer service” photo came from. That asian girl, smiling and turning slightly to camera with her headset on? You know where they bought her image. You see her in every commercial, on every website. She’s like some sort of Greek god of customer service.

In case either one of you is curious as to the recent dearth in articles posted may I present to the court exhibit A to the left of this sentence. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist the urge to speak in legalese. Phoenix Wright’s lawyer man powers are incontrovertible!

I haven’t had this much fun playing a video game since — well since Okami which dropped about a month ago and I’m not yet done with that anyway. That’s beside the point. Whether I had or had not played a fun game immediately prior in no way degrades the joy of Phoenix Wright.

Phoenix Wright might be called a “lawyer sim” though that’s only partually accurate. The game’s portrayal of law is tenuous at best and court proceedings are employed as plot points only when necessary. Phoenix Wright does not forge new ground but settles nicely into the established genre of adventure game, minus the maple-syrup-cat-hair-mustaches.

It feels fresh though. It’s a nice change of pace to play on the other side of a gun barrel, so to speak. Instead of shooting people you’re defending those accused of shooting people. Your only weapon is your steely cold logic.

The translation team deserves tremendous applause. As the court of law is primarily a spoken exercise it is crucial that this is done properly. The dialog is drop dead funny, and almost never feels stilted or awkward like many other fine games.

I don’t normally do this, but in this instance I will provide a rating. Not a numerical one, mind you, as those are still bullshit in my opinion. I rate Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney “steal it if you have to.” If you don’t have a DS, the same rating applies. You just need to play it.

If you’re already hooked like me you might enjoy this collection of game sprites and background as much as I did.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to clear Mile Edgeworth of murder.