(Not to be confused with Mega Man X)

Can’t wait. Though I will be avoiding easy mode, its existence will appease the people who thought Mega Man 9 was way too hard. Kids these days. They wouldn’t last more than 5 minutes in Battletoads before

And for the first^H^H^H^H^Hsecond time, Proto Man is playable! First not counting DLC. Or spin-off games. Speaking of which, why haven’t I bought the Mega Man 9 DLC? I really should. I just….haven’t. Don’t know why.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Proto Man’s character was supposed to be the original design for Mega Man, but the NES color palette didn’t have enough reds in it to make him look good, so the designers made him blue instead, and saved the red design for Proto. But, I can’t find a source for this fact, so take this with a grain of salt. I also don’t know much about the NES video hardware, so it’s entirely conceivable that it supports a customizable palette that can handle several shades of red at once.

Ok, so the Blue Bomber is back in town this March. Awesome. But you know else is back in town? The Blue Blur:

There was a pretty awesome leaked video showing actual gameplay, though that was quickly brought down by Sega, so I’ll have to settle for the interesting-but-not-a-lot-of-juicy-content official video above.

For the first time since the Genesis days of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic finally comes back to his roots for some good old-fashioned 2 (and-a-half) D speed platforming. I was a huge fan of the Sonic series back in the day, but nothing after the Genesis has been good enough for me. Though I hear that Sonic Rush was fairly decent; maybe I’ll get around to that some day, but it’s fairly low in my queue.

Yes, spring-summer 2010 is shaping up to be a fine, fine season of neo-retro-gaming.

Not included in the announcement was the fact that Demiurge Studios was working on Green Day: Rock Band. And I gotta say, it’s pretty freakin’ awesome working on it. I’d love to tell you more, but NDAs, yada yada yada, so I can’t say much else.

It’s strange, though, that I didn’t realize how big of a Green Day fan I was until we started working on this game and I listened to all of their albums. I loved a lot of their songs beforehand, but I didn’t know that those songs I loved were Green Day songs since I pay next to no attention to the artists behind particular songs. I don’t really buy much music, so most of the songs that I like that I’ve only heard on the radio, at parties, etc., I have no idea who plays them.

This makes the third Rock Band title I’ve worked on, the other two being Rock Band Country Track Pack and Rock Band Metal Track Pack. [Aside: Metal was originally announced to be released on Rocktober 13; we'd wrapped up work on it long before then. Then, lo and behold, on September 22, an email went around with "hey look, we've got a game on store shelves". Turns out the release date got pushed forward by 3 weeks, and nobody at Demiurge realized it]. But this ain’t no wimpy little track pack — it’s a whole new game that’s an order of magnitude more challenging, and we’re working as hard as possible to make this game as awesome as possible.

Rock on!

Enough with the blatant advertising. Rock Band Country Track Pack was a joint venture between Demiurge Studios and Harmonix Music Systems that I’m proud to say I was a part of. I had a blast working on it, since I was already a huge fan of the Rock Band franchise. But prior to this past Tuesday’s release, we couldn’t tell anyone we were working on it, even though the game had been announced in May, thanks to some bigwigs in upper management who decided it wasn’t in their interests. Of course, now that the game is on the street and our logo and names are in the credits, we can talk freely.

Rock Band Country Track Pack now joins Brothers in Arms: Double Time in the elite class of retail games with my name in them. Mass Effect (PC) also has my name in it, as Demiurge credits all people in the studio in its products, although I only worked on that game for about two weeks. Word-Fu (iPhone) was another game I worked on, but it has very minimal credits. You can still find my (first) name at the top of the built-in high scores table — of course, that’s not my real high score. If they’d let me put in my real high score, that would have just been too depressing to people who bought the game who aren’t very good spellers.

What’s next for Demiurge? Only time will tell. Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Each day, four games battled it out in the Poll of the Day, with the top two advancing in the bracket. In the final battle, Ocarina of Time edged out Final Fantasy VII. With the third- and fourth-place games from that match removed (also Zelda and Final Fantasy games, incidentally), Ocarina held onto its title in the bonus match, taking in 52.69% of the 155,838 votes cast.

GameFAQs has held some sort of tournament-style contest every year since 2002, with some years hosting multiple contests. There have been seven character battles, one game villains battle, two games battles, and one game series battle. The other games battle prior to this year took place in 2004. That battle was a 64-game 1-on-1 single-elimination tournament, in which Final Fantasy VII emerged victorious over Chrono Trigger in the finals, after defeating Ocarina of Time in the Division Finals [full bracket and stats] [bonus poll].

What does this turnabout mean for GameFAQs? I’d say it’s most likely a shift in user base demographics towards Nintendo. Nintendo games absolutely dominated the contest, what with a whopping four Mario games, four Zelda games, two Super Smash Bros. games, and a Pokémon game comprising 11 of the 16 final games, the other five being three Final Fantasy games, Resident Evil 4, and Metal Gear Solid 4.

Another surprises was Chrono Trigger getting narrowly defeated by Super Mario 64. There were also a few times where one game beat another in one round but then lost to it the next, such as Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow and Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy X and Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Metal Gear Solid 4 and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. There were a lot of other results that differed greatly from something which happened in 2004, but I won’t continue boring you with statistics.

All in all, it was a fun contest with a number of surprises, but I’m starting to question the value of these contests. They were fun and exciting at first when they were completely unpredictable, but now they’re starting to get dull as people get better and better at understanding what GameFAQs visitors like. It was refreshing to have a games contest this year after not having had one for five years. I suspect, though, that the contests will continue so long as they continue to attract more visitors to the site. So what will see next year? I’m hoping to see something completely new and different, but odds are it’ll be Character Battle VIII, with some mildly interesting gimmick.

My personal Best. Game. Ever. is Final Fantasy VI. What’s yours?

So what is Word-Fu? Word-Fu is a Boggle-like spelling game, where you’re given a bunch of dice with letters on them, you shake them up with the iPhone’s accelerometers, and then touch them to spell words. Unlike Boggle, there is no constraint that consecutive letters must be adjacent—you can use the letters in any order. If you happen to get a particularly good set of letters (such as ACEIKORTS) and you know a lot of anagrams, you can just keep spelling more and more words. You get extra time for each word spelled, so you can keep playing for quite a long time and rack up your score.

You can even reuse letters in the same word, so if you get an A, an E, and an S, and you spell long words like ASSESSES with just those three dice. There were some discussions during development with very strong opinions regarding this feature—I was in favor of not being able to reuse letters—and we ended up supporting both modes of play. The mode where you can’t reuse letters is called Shaolin Style, and it can be turned on in the Options screen; it is disabled by default.

So if you’re a word game freak, what are you waiting for? Go check out Word-Fu in the iTunes App Store today! It’s currently $1.99, although there was a special promotional price of $0.99 for the first couple of weeks after the game launched.

It’s about two years old now, and there weren’t really any warning signs.  I went to turn it on, and….it didn’t.  Most RRoDs are caused by overheating; I generally keep my 360 well-ventilated, and I definitely don’t leave it running for long periods of time when I’m not playing it.  I’m going to chalk this one up to poor hardware design and workmanship.

I immediately called 1-800-4MYXBOX.  Boy were they unhelpful.  The automated voice-activated menus were a pain to work through, and I had to repeat myself several times to get what I wanted.  Why can’t we just have a plain old “Press 1″ instead of say “Three flashing red lights”?  It’s easier for everyone.

After wasting my time with that, I instead went to xbox.com/support and had a much easier time.  It took me less than five minutes to file a support ticket and print out a pre-paid shipping label (I also had the option of getting a box shipped to me, but that would have taken longer obviously).  No human interaction required.

The next morning I brought my 360 down to the UPS Store and had it shipped off to the repair center in Mesquite, Texas.  It took about a week to get there, a couple days to get fixed, and another week to come home.

Now it’s back to Mega Man 9!  I’ve completed all 12/12 achievements (200 points) and 34/38 challenges.  All I have left are “Beat the game without getting hit”, “beat the game while picking up only 8 energy capsules”, “beat the game 30 times”, and “beat every boss with 1 hit point left”.

The Green Ring of Life is back, but for how long?

And if you do so, you’ll notice that the programming team at Demiurge is listed alphabetically by first name, except for me. I was added to the project midway through development. The credits had already been (mostly) done before I joined the team, and then they slapped my name onto the end of the list; nobody ever bothered to resort it afterwards. Was it intern bias? Nah, I think they just didn’t think to resort it.

Double Time is a port of the two games Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood to the Wii. The two games were originally made by Gearbox Software for the Xbox in 2005; they had been previously ported to the PS2 and Windows. Gearbox contracted Demiurge to do the Wii ports. If you’re into war games, you’d probably enjoy Double Time, since it’s not your typical run-and-gun shooter — you (gasp) have to use tactics to beat it.

You should all go down to your friendly neighborhood video game store and buy Brothers in Arms: Double Time! Two great games for the low price of $50!

Mega Man 9 will be coming out for the Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network in the near future; I’m going to wait until it does so to get it. Not only is the Xbox 360 controller far superior to the Wiimote for platformers, but the XBLA version comes with some of the most hardcore achievements of almost any Xbox 360 title to date.

Being an XBLA title, it’s already at a disadvantage compared to regular Xbox 360 games — only 200 achievement points instead of 1000. In most games, you can often get about 1/4 to 1/2 of the achievement points by playing through the game and beating it once. Some games, though, especially the ones that came out early in the 360′s life, are pathetically easy – if you pick the right games, you can get 6000 points without really trying.

But Mega Man 9 is different. Beat the game, and you get a paltry 5 points out of 200. Scoring all 200 points is worth some serious bragging rights, but you’re playing the wrong game if you’re a Gamerscore whore.

Each world has a different way of controlling time, making for a plethora of unique and interesting puzzles. The first world has no special gimmick, time just goes forwards and backwards. The second world introduces objects which are immune to going back in time, so when you go forward, everything goes forward, but when you go backwards, those objects continue going forwards. And so on.

Braid only has about 3-5 hours of gameplay (or less, if you’re naturally really good at these time puzzles). It does have a little replay value in its time attack mode, where your goal is to beat certain levels under certain (real time) time limits. The hardest one is to beat the entire game in under 45 minutes, which is the final achievement for the game, worth the last 15 gamerscore points out of 200.

My review:

Gameplay: 10/10 — I wish I could give it a higher score

Plot: 5/10 — It’s a pretty simplistic “save the princess”, but with a twist; besides, it’s a puzzle game

Graphics: 10/10 — I’ve never seen a more beautiful platformer

Sound: 9/10 — The music is very pleasant, and the way it goes backwards when time goes backwards is awesome (and doesn’t sound like crap)

Overall: 10/10 — Gameplay trumps everything else

Braid is currently the highest rated Xbox Live Arcade game on Metacritic. But with a score of 93, it’s also the #8 Xbox 360 game of all-time. Pretty damn impressive for a game with a budget of a paltry $180,000. Now do yourself a favor and go download Braid.

I just finished beating Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty last night, and boy is it a fantastic game. I played the first Metal Gear Solid during the summer of 2005 (yeah, I know I’m a little late to the party). Before then, I’d never played it nor seen it played, but I had heard a number of rave reviews. After finding the original PlayStation version in the bargain bin at EBGames (now GameStop), I decided to pick it up, and I was not disappointed. In retrospect, I should have just picked up Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, the GameCube remake, but I didn’t realize at the time that it was a remake as opposed to a whole new game.

Some time passed, and I found myself interning at Google in the summer of 2006. I was once again picking through the bargain bin at another GameStop, and lo and behold, I found MGS2 there for real cheap. I remembered having really enjoyed MGS, so I picked it up. Why I didn’t go out and get MGS2 immediately after beating MGS, I don’t know, maybe I was too busy with other games and schoolwork or something.

I started playing MGS2 that summer and got about halfway through the Tanker chapter, up to beating Olga Gurlukovich. And then I stopped playing, for no good reason. I hadn’t gotten far enough into the game where it had a hold on me, and at the time I was really obsessed with Guitar Hero. So I put MGS2 on my backburner and forgot about it, intending to one day pick it up again and beat but never quite getting around to it.

And that brings us back to 2008. As you should know (if you follow video games at all), Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots released this past June 12. I was drooling after seeing the trailer. But I couldn’t just skip MGS2 and MGS3, that would leave holes in my understanding of the plot of MGS4 and surely spoil the plots of MGS2 and MGS3 for me. (Side note, after watching that trailer again after beating MGS2: Hey, that must be Raiden (the ninja) fighting Vamp! He’s sure gotten good at using that sword.)

So a couple of weeks ago, I started playing MGS2 again. I decided to restart from the beginning, since it had been almost two years since I’d last played it and I was only a couple of hours in. The tanker chapter was exciting and got me hooked. Seeing Ocelot steal Metal Gear RAY, blow up the tanker, and run off into the sea was chilling.

After that, I was no longer Solid Snake, I was Raiden. It shocked me to learn that Raiden’s name was pronounced RYE-den, not RAY-den as I had originally thought, even though it’s pretty obvious if you realize it comes from Japanese.

Anyways, I played through the game over the past few weeks, taking careful steps not to spoil anything for myself. I played it on Normal difficulty with Radar Type 2 (radar normally available but not available in infiltration mode, or whatever it’s called when guards are searching for you). My score wasn’t that good; I don’t remember how many kills, deaths, continues, and saves I had, but they were all two digits. I attempted to go to konamijpn.com to enter the code it gave me at the end, but that site seems to have been taken down and replaced by some Chinese parking site as of at least September, 2007. I didn’t collect any dog tags because, well, I just didn’t know about them. I avoided FAQ sites like the plague, and they don’t really mention dog tags in game. I know about them now since I checked out the FAQs to see what I missed on my first playthrough. On my next playthrough (which probably won’t be for a while), I’ll probably play on Expert and try to get all of the dog tags.

I’m not going to bore you with all of the details of my play through, but here are some points of note:

• As soon as Iriquois Pliskin opened his mouth, even before it displayed David Hayter as his voice actor, I knew it was Solid Snake. He just had to be. I’m sure everyone figures this one out pretty quickly, though, it’s pretty darn obvious.
• Running around naked in Arsenal Gear was rather entertaining
• The Colonel going crazy at the end was also rather awesome. He was spouting out all sorts of ridiculous things like “I hear it’s amazing when the Purple-stuffed worm in Flap-jaw space, with the tuning fork, does a raw-blink on Hari-kiri Rock! I need scissors! 61!”
• Hideo Kojima is brilliant. He managed to put in an Internet meme. During the fight against a ton of enemies in the bright blue room near the end, I appeared to have gotten a Game Over screen for no obvious reason. Except instead of saying the usual MISSION FAILED, it said FISSION MAILED, and the game continued in the top-left quadrant of the screen. The Exit and Continue buttons were replaced with Emit and Continent. After some time, the game returned to normal. This reminds of the fight against Psycho Mantis in MGS, where the screen goes black with only the green text HIDEO in the corner at the beginning of the fight, making you think your game console stopped functioning or something.
• The second-to-last boss fight made me drop my jaw. I thought that a fight against a single Metal Gear REX at the end of MGS was pretty crazy. When seeing that I had to fight a whole army of Metal Gear RAYs here, I couldn’t believe my eyes. And yet, it was a surprisingly easy fight. They only seemed to engage me one at a time, with an occasional RAY shooting a missile from the sidelines. It was just equip the Stinger missile launcher, shoot a RAY in the leg, quickly shoot it again in the head, and always move when not shooting to dodge its attacks.

Final review:

Gameplay: 10/10
Plot: 7/10
Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 5/10
Overall: 9/10

Yeah, I know that 9 is not the average of those other numbers, but it was a really damn fun game. I highly recommend it to anyone that hasn’t played it, although if you’re still reading and haven’t played it, I’ve unfortunately spoiled some of it for you (though hopefully not too much).