I guess this concludes my tour of duty for Handheld Age. Goodbye, all. Thanks so much for reading. If you ever feel like you need a steady descent into hell, please catch me at 61 Frames Per Second.

Eat your vegetables and play with your Mario.

Post from: EveryJoe

Bite-Sized Bye

So ends my stint at Playstation Monger. Thanks for playing. I really enjoyed myself and I hope I have not offended and/or blinded most of you.

Not to say that this is the end of my writing. No sir, I’ve been chained to a career where they kick me until the words come pouring out. If you think you’ll miss me, ha ha, check out 61 Frames Per Second. I post there every weekday about gamey stuff. There are certain forums wherein I park my bulk, and of course I will continue to visit them.

I write for other sites too, like 1UP and Gamepro and What They Play and several others; go on a scavenger hunt, child. Grandma’s tired and she needs her cough syrup and Mother 3 fix.

Until we meet again (tomorrow, perhaps? Coffee okay with you?)…thank you all.

PS I love you.

Post from: EveryJoe

Red Ring of Death

No, you haven’t gone blind or senile, but I will forgive you if you think I have. Regardless, I can’t deny that I owned Lock n Chase for the Game Boy, and what’s more I was really damn good at it.

I preferred it to Pac-Man by far. The main character, whose name is Lupin (shhh), is an adorable orange dot with a hat instead of a pizza that the delivery man took a slice out of back in the car. There’s more than just one board to navigate, which means clearing away “coins” and thus passing the level can take some minor brain work.

Even the graphics have their own charm. Each cop who chases Lupin has their own personality: the plain cop waddles, the little cop hops and the big mustached cop just kind of lumbers. Lupin jumps for joy whenever he clears a level or scores a money bag (and when he scores a money bag, the cops stop and weep for a few seconds–I guess their pride is hurt, so I can’t blame them).

But the game’s best attribute by far is the music. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s some of the best you’ll find on the Game Boy. Scrounge up some old ’80s Walkman headphones (must include at least one missing felt ear piece to be authentic) and listen to the game through them. It is 100% worth it.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Lock n Chase

First off, the main character’s name is Vaughn. If you drive North of Toronto, there’s a city called Vaughn and its motto is, “The City Above Toronto.” Obnoxious, but somehow clever. It makes me feel conflicted every time I read it and that confusion kind of spilled over to the game’s Vaughn. No fault of the game, I suppose. The awful battles though, those were strictly the fault of the game.

Unlike Valve, Legend of Legaia never wholly admits it ripped off Stephen King’s mist that turns people inside-out. The mist that covers Legaia’s world is thick and mysterious, and there are things inside it, daddy. Things. It’s up to three heroes, blah blah blah, trees.

Legend of Legaia really tries to introduce a tolerable battle system with combos and whatnot. Fighting regular enemies isn’t too bad, even if they have a raging case of pallet-swap, but the bosses are horrible. The fights drag on and on and each token Big Monster seems to have an attack that can hit your entire party for massive damage. I got so tired of each boss battle being a losing war that I just gave up. It’s not like the characters or story were worth the aggravation.

Legend of Legaia did have one great line: “What’s a pimp?”

So I lost my copy and rejoiced.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Losing Legend of Legaia

I think, even if I end up playing this game twenty times (and I just might), I will never discover all the tiny details and love put into the sprite animations. Heck, it was only by reading the comments for this YouTube video that I discovered the door Wess dances in front of “laughs,” which allows them passage.

I think “Cattlesnake” is my new favourite word.

I’m on Chapter 4 right now, but I don’t want to pour my heart out over the game until I’m done. So my bouncing and screaming might not show up here, but trust me, it’ll be around.

By the way:

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Mother 3

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the Breath of Fire series, so I really enjoyed myself with III. Now, it had its flaws. Oh boy, did it ever have its flaws, but I could overlook them. There were random battles—still a mainstay at that point in RPG history—but there was no mandatory shift to a boring pre-rendered background. Enemies attacked you on the plain, which makes sense.

But why beat around the bush? A great deal of the reason I liked Breath of Fire III lies with its abundance of dragons. Protagonist Ryu returns for his typical role as a dragon-boy, and he can use the power of his reptilian genes to transform into some delightful-looking critters. Only a certain few forms are worth the amount of AP they require as fuel, but goodness gracious, they are such fun to experiment with.

Breath of Fire III had the weakest endgame in the history of RPGs (except for the battle against the Dragon Lord, which is kind of sad). Once again you are tasked to kill God, and she is a chick this time. Unlike Deathevn from Breath of Fire II, however, nobody ever gives you a good reason to kill her. She’s kind of sun-shiney and happy, whereas Deathevn…well, just look at his name.

Weak endgame, weaker ending. Blech. But at least building up faerie town is lots of fun. Then you can burn it to the ground.

Wait, you can’t? Shit, what game was I playing?

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Breath of Fire III

(Thanks, uh…do those energy tanks spell “Jew?”)

Canada is prone to massive snowstorms, which I’m sure shocks you. We had a wretched snowstorm in my first semester that kept all the sane students home, but everyone in my programme feared Professor Twat so much that we all waded through the snow to come to his class.

Of course, Professor Twat didn’t show up. But we were too scared to leave in case he did.

So I played some Mega Man 4 on my Game Boy and one classmate said, “Oh, let ME play!” and he promptly ran to the front of the lecture hall with my system. About five minutes later, I heard someone scream, “YES! Toad Man is NO MORE!”

Viva la Robot Rebellion.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Mega Man IV and the Snowstorm

That means I have a lot of games just sitting here and collecting spider webs. I never returned games I didn’t like—well, back when we were allowed to return games we didn’t like.

Only once have I ever tried to get my money back for a game I detested, and that was Final Fantasy VIII.

As my last post indicated, I really enjoyed the Final Fantasy VII experience. I picked up Final Fantasy VIII thinking, “Boy oh boy!” and was promptly stumped by the battle system. I wanted to fight, not do the Summon hokey-pokey every time I encountered a goblin.

I was pretty uninterested in the characters, besides. Someone—it may have been Solid Sharkey, and if not I’ll just pretend because he’s a superhero—said that one of Square-Enix’s best game openings was basically wasted on what was actually a bitch fight between two little boys.

One thing about Final Fantasy VIII counters all the bad stuff I’ve said about it, and that is Laguna. I loved Laguna, and I still do. He’s goofy, but he has a sweet, gentle personality that doesn’t come often in video games without an escort of festering lies and angst. Laguna is a soldier who seeks to do right by those he cherishes, even if it all ends in some slapstick disaster.

In fact, Final Fantasy VIII is just a game that I hate myself for loathing. After the mind-blowing success of Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft received a message from God and accepted their destiny of making the most pretentious video games possible. Regardless, there was a calm but dark atmosphere in Final Fantasy VIII that I really wanted to embrace, but that meant playing the game, which proved impossible.

Thank God the age of YouTube followed some years later, which let me cheat and skip straight to the ending. Which, by the way, I think is nice. That’s just my Laguna fangirl talking, though. The first half can hang, as can the…song.

So what does attempting to return Final Fantasy VIII have to do with good memories? It was a much-needed lesson in “Don’t try that again, son.” The store offered to give me five dollars for a game that cost me nearly eighty.

But then I picked up Suikoden II. A happy ending.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Trying to Return Final Fantasy VIII

:(

So, while I slowly breathe in the carbon monoxide, I thought I’d talk a little bit about good times with video games. Today, specifically, I’ll talk about my time with Super Mario Land for the original Game Boy.

The first Game Boy, she was a brick. I am confident I could build an effective bomb shelter out of Game Boys. My mom bought my brothers and I our Game Boy for Christmas, though I think she got it more for herself and Tetris.

I was not a fan of Tetris, and I still am not, so we’ll move on to Super Mario Land.

When I was a tadpole, Super Mario Land seemed so enormous. Granted, we did not own a Nintendo, so I didn’t realise how piddly the game actually was with its four worlds. Back then, it seemed to sprawl out for miles and miles.

As we see from this speed run, however, the game is quite short.

It’s also…well, as much as I loved Super Mario Land, I have to admit that it feels a little, um, counterfeit. Like, there are turtle enemies…but they aren’t koopas. There are man-eating plants…but they aren’t piranha plants. There are pipes, but they’re shaped more like flower pots.

Super Mario Land also has a much more Japanese feel to it than the original Super Mario Bros. The latter lacks head-throwing death robots, Chinese ghosts and Japanese enemy names. I remember my mother looking at Super Mario Land’s instruction book and exclaiming, “How the hell am I supposed to remember these names?”

Ah, well, we managed. Sort of. I remember “Tatanga” and that’s it. He was kind of adorable, though.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Super Mario Land

Come November 1st 2008 in this Year of Our Lord, I will be handing the reins for Playstation Monger to someone else. “Who(m?)” is undecided at this point, but I’m sure they’ll be fabulous.

That means our time together is limited–unless you catch me on one of the other thousand million Internet corners I hang out in–so I thought I’d do something special to wind down the clock. I thought I’d just kick off my shoes, forgo stuffy news posts and just talk about my favourite Playstation memories.

My Playstation experience began with Final Fantasy VII and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The game is deeply, almost fatally flawed but in 1997, it was unsurpassed. It dazzled us.

We don’t like to think about the days when we nuzzled up to FF VII; it’s like imagining our grandparents when they were young, spry and mating with youthful exuberance. But we can’t deny how we felt at the time.

I personally can’t remember what year I brought home my Playstation and my copy of FF VII, but I do remember it was on the (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend. I also remember how the grim music for the first Mako reactor sabotage mission continued to bong through my memory hours after I turned the game off (I had to share the television with my father).

Yeah, I apologise for spoiling the whimsical voice of this memory by using an example video uploaded by someone who renamed cloud “El Boner.”

Looking back at this, it’s so easy to see why we were impressed—and why we’d be unimpressed now. Nintendo had done so much to sanitise gaming for Americans that FF VII just seemed…well, rebellious. Grown up. Square left in kanji. Barret swore (poorly). Even the name of the game placed it miles away from our previous Final Fantasy experience, III.

We look at FF VII now and we feel awkward. It’s like meeting your middle school’s “coolest” kid after ten years—as he takes your order behind the counter of McDonalds.

But I still can’t forget how Final Fantasy VII first made me feel. I lost my copy long ago, but if I ever find it, I wouldn’t mind going out for a coffee and catching up on old times.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Have Good Memories: Final Fantasy VII