Game Club 199X #17 - Blue Stinger (DC)

[Deleted]

I finally started the game for reals after a bunch of false starts. I was going to try doing some captures but fuck it, I'll mess around with trying to get the capture device set up later.

Starting with the US version, and if I have some time I'll try to play as much as I can of the Japanese version before the podcast. Anyway, at the second vision with the Nephilim I just had a terror flashback to childhood traumas; the monster they showed totally looked like the Dinosaur god/Dinosaur Satan from "Dinosaurs Attack!":



Oh, and here's this one for good measure


Suffer like G I mean I did!

[Snarboo]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed parallels with those Dinosaurs Attack! cards! I have to wonder if that was purely coincidental or if they were familiar with them.

[kal]

Since the Monster design was done by that Robert Short fellow, who worked on Bettlejuice and that was of course directed by Tim Burton who's an avowed fan of Mars Attacks!/Dinosaurs Attack! If I remember correctly he probably made every artist on that film look at that them.

[Deleted]

kal: I'm debating emailing the guy about it. Can't go any worse than him not replying (coincidentally, no response from Masaki Segawa, oh well).

Anyway, just died for the first time by drowning in the underwater maze. Ugh. Anyway, I'll give it a try again later. This game feels a lot like Deep Fear on the Saturn - they're not really survival horror, since you've got an unlimited supply of ammo at your fingertips. Still, they both play like survival horror games and have horror trappings, although neither are particularly scary.

EDIT: Also, just changed my avatar to the only worksafe part of the only hentai image I've managed to find for Blue Stinger.

[roushimsx]

Beat this game this evening with a final time of 9:01:01. No idea how that compares to "back in the day" because, for the life of me, I can not find my other VMUs to see if I still have my old saves somewhere

Slightly larger than normal post this time around since I got more time to play (so more shots!). Need to get around to cleaning the screenshots up, cropping out the overscan, and maybe submitting some stuff to Mobygames. Haven't sent them any shots in a while

The erratic camera became a pretty big issue on the last bit while going up the tower. Holy hell, bring life hooks when you're playing the Japanese version unless you like failure and frustration. Noticed the voice of Janine is the same lady that voices Nancy Drew in Her Interactive's Nancy Drew series of games and Stealth Elf in the Skylanders series. Crazy.

My absolute favorite voice acting bit in the game had to be the botched attempt at doing the southern belle researcher there in the labs. Holy fucking hell. That had me in absolute stitches. It's like she mixed a heavily mentally challenged voice with a fake southern accent and just rolled with it. Like, hell, it's not like anyone that actually speaks English is ever going to hear it, so it's all good!









Gotta say, going back to that game after all of this time was really interesting. Worse than I remember in a lot of ways, but it's a nice footnote in the evolution of survival horror. Wish I could go right into the US version and do some direct version comparisons while the experience is still fresh and the localization differences would be more prominent (you know, other than the camera), but I really don't want to start another game up and risk not having ti finished by the time Bioshock Infinite comes out. Perhaps afterward.

[kal]

Roushimsx - She has the same ridiculous voice in the English version, absolutely bizarre.

[Deleted]

Yeah, her accent was WTF....

I'm at that point; I'm at the "countdown" sequence in the lab, and I'm not sure where to go next. I'll have to try again tomorrow.

[Deleted]

I must be on the final stretch based on Roushimsx's photos. I just left Janine's place with the sniper rifle, but I'm tired so I'll continue tomorrow.

Man, I hated the lab. That was such a clusterfuck trying to find out what to do or where to go next. I had no idea about the pipes and stumbled upon it randomly.

[kal]

Mar 27, 2013 4:01:23 GMT -5 Joseph Joestar said:

I must be on the final stretch based on Roushimsx's photos. I just left Janine's place with the sniper rifle, but I'm tired so I'll continue tomorrow.

Man, I hated the lab. That was such a clusterfuck trying to find out what to do or where to go next. I had no idea about the pipes and stumbled upon it randomly.

The pipes bit is a little odd but you get locked in a room with absolutely no other way out so I guess they wanted to force you to try it. Except you never see any of the monsters climb ever.

[roushimsx]

That was the clue that got me. Couldn't use the tube, couldn't exit the door, and the pipes were the sole prominent feature of the room. After that it was a matter of figuring out which pipes to take...there was one point there where I was crawling along the pipes and it wouldn't let me progress into another room (before I engaged the piss lake monster), so I had to go back that area, get the key from the tank, and then head back. A bit of a pain in the butt!

You've got an hour or so left, but you can stretch it out if you want to abuse the prime grinding opportunities in the apartments. You can build up some scratch pretty quickly there, run back to the market 2f, and load up on whatever WMD you want for the final encounter. I kind of wish I had sprung for the SP Bazooka

[Deleted]

Speaking of pipes, man, I hated the escape from the lab...what sucks is that the items on the pipes actually blocked your way, and if you were like me and already had max bazooka ammo for instance you couldn't pick it up....so I turned around to go fire off some bazooka ammo and made a mistake and ended up wasting a lifeline. Ugh.

[Deleted]

Mar 27, 2013 7:22:15 GMT -5 Joseph Joestar said:

Speaking of pipes, man, I hated the escape from the lab...what sucks is that the items on the pipes actually blocked your way, and if you were like me and already had max bazooka ammo for instance you couldn't pick it up....so I turned around to go fire off some bazooka ammo and made a mistake and ended up wasting a lifeline. Ugh.

That was my most hated part of the game too. The detection on the pits is really dicey, but I can only wonder if that bit was better or worse with the Japanese angles...

But on the upside, you're almost to the end. And it just... gets... stupider. XD

[Deleted]

I'm bummed because I don't know that I have the time (or the patience) to go back through the Japanese version before the podcast, or to that point anyway. I imagine some parts like that being harder in the Japanese version, but others like the boss fights being a LOT easier (I agree with what xerxes said earlier about not being able to see shit during some of them). I also imagine that my difficulty finding certain things would have been toned down with the original camera angles.

I liked the totally shocking story development

SPOILER: Click to show

ok, not really, but they finally admitted that Janine is Dog's daughter. I also liked the awkwardness after the reveal between Dogs and Eliot, who was like "motherfucka have you even be LISTENING to my passive-aggressive comments over the past 10 hours? I wanna be up in that gurl".

By the way, I thought that doll in the one apartment was funny. I'm wondering what she said, I couldn't understand it all (I know one of the quips had to do with her skirt though, and it said "class representative" on her lanyard).

Also, I like that the sumo shirt says "Akadebu" (red fatty).

Other random thoughts - roushimsx, any chance you have a save near the Gigadent video presentation? I'd love to see a screenshot of the lovely engrish in that (i.e. "HOLIZONTAL LINE").

[roushimsx]

I don't have a save near there, but you can bet your ass I nabbed a shot of that beauty



Watch out for "Dinasaur Isle"!

I'm equally bummed I won't have the opportunity to play through the US version before the end of the month, but we'll see where I'm sitting once I mow through the Bioshock series again (after finishing Bioshock Infinite). I figure after three awesome games, I'm entitled to wallow in a B game for a few hours. While the boss fights are generally easier in the japanese version (the camera angles don't always like to be pointed in areas that correlate with the location of the bosses), I can't wait to tackle the final tower on relative easy mode.

[Deleted]

I think you get Tipzzzzmasta of the month just for that. Thanks!

EDIT: Just beat it (12:50:23)...man, I'd have hated to have done the "falling beams" part with a far away camera. Overall, those parts of the game were the worst...precision platforming in 3d sucks...

I'm kind of wondering about the ending -

SPOILER: Click to show

So was that basically Nephy's reproductive cycle, shooting the "spores" out after the dinosaur egg, having it mature, then having a kaiju battle to consume it to perpetuate the cycle? Those empty shells mean it had happened multiple times before, presumably millions of years apart? Am I thinking too seriously about a silly topic? Hahaha.

Ok, question for you roushimsx; at any point in the Japanese version (like the credits) did they have the image song "Sting Me"? I'd read that there was a theme/image song for the game released on a single, and there's even advertisements in the AV room for it in the market (and credits for the singers and composers), yet it wasn't present in the US version.