Déjà vu to go Posted on Saturday 18Nov06, at 1:20 am. I am sure most if not all of you have experienced the bittersweet delights of the video game remake. On the one hand, remakes of great games are still great games, are sometimes more accessible (i.e. handheld) than their predecessors, and often have new features and levels. On the other hand, we already have these games, in part if not in whole. Yet, I still religiously buy these masterpieces of game design and marketing, and I do enjoy them.... The Wii comes out in two days, and we'll have a comic and (hopefully) impressions about it on Monday. (The problems with pre-orders and launch day purchases are for a whole other rant.) For now, though, I'd like to talk a little about the Virtual Console. The Virtual Console is interesting because it is an unprecedented opportunity for re-releases and remakes. And don't get me wrong, I do look forward to them. However, what I really want are new games. Actually, I really want new old games. They don't have to be new objectively, just new to ME; in fact, I think I'd probably enjoy them more if they had an old-school aesthetic. It would certainly cost less to do, as well. As you can see on Wikipedia's Virtual Console page, there are plenty of good re-releases planned for the Virtual Console. What I'd like to call attention to is where the different regional lists differ -- and where they may differ in the future. As far as I can tell, it appears that Japan is getting Legend of Kage, Ninja Jajamaru-kun, Shadow Dancer, New Adventure Island, Battle Lode Runner, and Necromancer... but North America is not. These are games that were not released or received well here in the U.S. Now, this is a preliminary list, and it could be a mistake, but it seems to me that it would be trivial to make some extra games available, and it wouldn't cost anything. So why not? (That's not even mentioning the raw deal Australia's getting.) I think the Wii and the Virtual Console are going to be great. But I think ignoring the possibility of a Virtual Console with Japanese exclusive games would be silly. Sure, I can -- and do -- emulate them and download translation patches, but not everyone wants to or can do that. Of course, I haven't played all of those games that Japan's getting, and I don't know if they're worth it, but it really can't hurt, can it?

Shrunken games, shrunken tennis Posted on Saturday 18Nov06, at 1:56 pm. I find ping-pong to be a sport very conducive to saying or doing strange or stupid things. As you can see in this comic, he completed Mario 64 by finally obtaining the 100 coin star from Dire Dire Docks, and ping-pong is the drug that that makes this situation make sense to him. The question is though: is it is strange, or is it just stupid? Only time and ping-pong will tell. Ping-pong may be a great source of stupid inspiration, and an otherwise fun game, but it gave me grief these past few days. Drawing this comic was slightly more annoying that most, and I can safely say blame rests with the ping-pong table. When you have a ping-pong table in a comic, you can't have the same hand-drawn gradient backgrounds. There must always be a ping-pong table. You can't draw characters doing whatever they want, because they always must be holding a ping-pong paddle. In the end, the comic as seen above was forced out of Photoshop, but it must always suffer the shame and humiliation of knowing that the table, both outlines and colors, were duplicated in certain panels. To some people, this is no big deal, and some comics even rely on the repetition of images to get them through a comic, but the dishonor nearly drove me to a webcomic-related Seppuku. Lastly, a rant would not be complete if it did not address the topics mentioned in the rant opposite mine, in the process I like to call, "Stealing His Ideas." Specifically, discussing the Virtual Console. The Wii seems to have everything accounted for: the price, the special controllers, the memory card saving thing, the download service, the web interface (from what I understand), and quite probably more. However, games run the console, and the Virtual Console is no exception. I really think they have a solid lineup, but the one thing I couldn't help but notice is that some of these games will be released for the seven hundredth time on the Wii. Take, for instance, Super Mario Bros. It first came out for the NES/Famicom, and as time passed, people wanted it remade. Over the years, we ended up with it bundled on cartridges with other games; released on obscure old computers; such titles as Super Mario All-Stars, which included the original; strange Japanese versions of the game; Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for the GameBoy Color; a game of the Classic NES games for the GameBoy Advance; it playable in Animal Crossing; ROMs all over the Internet; cameo appearances in Wario Ware games; the new Wii downloadable version; and undoubtedly more. My question is, how much longer can they continue to release the same game? I realize the "Classic Game" market is a big seller for Nintendo, with good reason, but they're running out of excuses to keep selling us the same things. They even seem to have dropped the idea of upgrading the graphics of the old games I heard about way back when. If they can make some online 2-player mode or something, they can have my money, but I'm not sure about buying the same game for the fifth time.