I've been thinking about doing a podcast for a long time, but have held myself back for multiple reasons. The main one is that I recorded three episodes of a podcast in college with some of my friends, which wasn't exactly what I would call brilliant. It is no longer on Itunes, but I keep it on my computer as a constant reminder of how not to make a podcast.
The second reason is that I didn't know how I wanted to do it. You can go to any video game website and hear them rehash the weekly news. So I came up with the idea to talk about a different video game related topic, or specific video games each episode. That kind of specific and in-depth conversation would be interesting to me, so I hope it'll be interesting to other people as well.
Today I actually went ahead and recorded the first episode of the Game Time With Manny podcast. This past weekend my friends and I went to a fighting game tournament in Philadelphia, PA. Fighting game tournaments aren't something a whole lot of people have context for, so I thought it would be cool to talk about the experience for a bit.
I have embedded the podcast below for your listening pleasure. This is the first episode, so any criticism, comments, or suggestions would be extremely welcome. Also yes, I realize the audio quality is kind of bunk. My mic sounded fine, but Willy and Noukeo's weren't exactly the hottest. Next time I'll try to find new mics and mess around with the settings a bit more.
I haven't written one of these in the two weeks since I've been back and for very good reason. The first week I skipped we played Birthday Party Bash as a belated celebration for my Birthday, after which we played Scattegories. The week after we were feeling rather lazy, so after eating ourselves to the brink of destruction we decided to watch videos of competitive Beyblade players, and some super hot advanced techniques. For those that don't know Beyblades is an anime where characters fight with spinning tops. There are toys of the tops, which people apparently get super into. It's super funny.
That brings us up to this past Sunday, where we would have played some games, but EVO was happening. I love watching competitive fighting game play, and EVO is the tournament to end all tournaments. I don't like using the analogy, but it's basically the Superbowl of fighting games. So inevitably Noukeo and I forced Landers, who doesn't know anything about fighting games, to watch the EVO finals. It was actually quite an educational experience. Landers asked a whole lot of questions and we tried to tell him as much about what was going on as possible. We specifically watched Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Ultra Street Fighter 4. If you've never played Marvel before it is basically incomprehensible flashing, so we had to explain a whole lot about that. Street Fighter on the other hand is two people beating down on each other much slowly, so he had a pretty firm grasp on it.
When my brother started getting way into fighting games about five years ago he started watching streams of tournaments all the time. This made it so that I also ended up watching a lot of tournaments, and quickly got to know all the prominent players of both Street Fighter and Marvel. It's one thing to watch a tournament online, but it's completely different to go to an actual tournament. Philadelphia, PA is a few hours away from where we live, so we go to quite a few tournaments there. It's surreal to see all the players who you respect playing in person. What's really nuts is how loud everything is. When people cheer it's earth shattering. When something amazing happens the whole room erupts and it's deafening. That's one of the reasons I love watching EVO, because it's on a whole different scale. When you can hear the crowd super loud on the stream, it's probably out of control in the actual venue.
Thousands of people show up to EVO every year.
I'm personally super terrible at fighting games, but I understand what I should be doing in order to do well. So when I watch competitive play I can tell what's super lame and what's going to bring the hype. Since I know the players it's easy for me to latch on to who I want to win a match and it gets me way more invested in it. Even when we go to tournaments I just watch, but it's incredibly fun for me. I scream fairly loud when things get crazy and watching EVO is absolutely no different.
When we were with Landers watching the finals nothing particularly bananas happened, but I still got a little amped up. In Marvel the only thing I want to happen is for Chris G to lose. I've got nothing against the guy, but he always wins with what I find to be a boring strategy. He uses the succubus Morrigan to fill the screen with colorful projectiles in order to lame out the opponent. Much to my pleasure he did end up losing to Justin Wong, who is arguably the best fighting game player in America. Watching Justin win is always entertaining, because he's just so damn good at everything. You can't dislike him. I always want my boy IFC Yipes to win, but he never gets far enough for me to cheer him on anymore. I had to settle for Justin winning, which is always a fine alternative.
I was so happy Justin won. He jumped onto the ground and rolled around for a bit.
Street Fighter was much more hype for me, because I didn't really know what was going to happen. Unlike Marvel, Japanese players actually do well in Street Fighter, so there were a bunch of them in the top 8. There were however two American players and a French player in the mix as well. One of the American players SnakeEyez is incredible. He's been doing super well for the last year or so and his play is only getting better. He didn't win, but he did have some amazing matches. The day before Party Game Sundays he had a ridiculous match where he won at the last second against a previous EVO champ. Take a look at the video below. As you watch the end imagine me losing my shit in unison with my brother, who was on a different floor of the house.
I bet that most people who watch this video with no context will think I'm crazy, which is how I feel when I watch most sports. For some reason fighting games are just exciting to me. When watching I yell, scream, and occasionally want to cry. Sometimes I feel like I'm alone in this excitement, but after going to tournaments in person, I know that I'll never be alone in my hype.
If you don't know anything about EVO or fighting games you should just search for some EVO videos on YouTube to see some people lose their minds over a video game fight. Next week I promise we'll play something new. I just had to watch EVO, or I would have missed the hype!
I've been a big fan of Japanese games for as long as I can remember. Over the years there have been numerous titles I've wanted to play, but had no way of doing so due to a lack of localization. A combination of the language barrier and high cost has kept me from importing games. It's especially a problem since the majority of games I would want to import are all heavily text based. On top of that most consoles are region locked and I'm not totally irresponsible with my money, so I can't justify buying a Japanese console.
This past June however, I imported my first game. It was Captain Rainbow for the Wii. The Wii is region locked, but if you use the homebrew channel you can play games from other regions. While I may have imported it I still have not played it. Captain Rainbow is very story based and pretty much incomprehensible without English text. The reason I got it was because there is an English fan patch in the works and the $20 price tag was too cheap for me to pass up. Hopefully I'll get to play it in early 2014, but that's not why we're here today.
Some time within the last year I began to see trailers for an all new Jojo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game developed by Cyber Connect 2. They're the studio behind the incredibly animated Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm games. Something about the trailers caught my attention and I hoped that it would be localized here. After a bit of research I found out that it had/has little to no chance of ever seeing a release outside of Japan.
What is it?
When I made the decision to buy Jojo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle I knew very little about the franchise it was based on. I had played the original Capcom developed fighting game on the Dreamcast, but it was just a weird novelty fighting game to me. I have now consumed a fair deal of the Jojo universe and know a whole lot more about it.
The series is a still ongoing manga (Japanese comic book) written by Hirohiko Araki that began in 1987. There are 8 parts each with their own protagonist. They all focus on the eternal battle between the Joestar family and the immortal vampire DIO. Each part takes place in the time frame when it's written, so the current part 8 was started in 2011 and that's when it takes place. For some reason each main character's name has Jojo in it somehow. For example the original main character's name is Jonathan Joestar. Both names start with Jo. It's a really weird series. Who knows why that's the case.
These are the 8 protagonists. They are all part of the Joestar bloodline.
Recently a new anime was started that has gone on for two seasons. It covered the first two parts of the manga. These are the two least known entries of the entire series. The characters use a special energy called Ripple (Hamon in Japanese) in order to do what are essentially magical karate attacks. The series started to gain most of its popularity during the third part. This is the part that the Dreamcast game was based on. Chances are if you've seen any Jojos it's from the third part since it's the only part that was translated to English in both manga and anime form.
Instead of using ripple the characters instead began to wield stands. Technically though stands are the manifestation of an individual's ripple. You could even say that it's their persona. A stand is essentially a ghostly figure that gives the user supernatural powers. So yeah, they're basically ghosts that stand behind a person and help them pummel others. It's all pretty confusing, but that hasn't stopped me from diving head first into the series. I've now watched the first season of the anime and just recently finished reading the third part of the manga in its entirety.
This is my favorite character Jotaro. He's the main character of part 3 Stardust Crusaders.
I really find the series to be interesting, because it's so off the wall crazy. DIO threw a steamroller on top of someone just because he could! That's why it saddens me that there is such a slim chance that the series will ever make it outside of Japan. It's quite literally a copyright nightmare. Perhaps you noticed that the bad guy of the entire series shares his name with the band DIO. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Characters throughout the series and their stands share the names of famous western bands and musical acts. These are just a few of the ones I can think of : Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Pearl Jam, Cars, Doobie Brothers, Lisa Lisa, Devo and Vanilla Ice. No joke, one of the villains in part three is named Vanilla Ice. Part three of the manga was translated into English by VIZ Media, but almost all of the names had to be changed. Araki the creator of the series is strictly against name changes, which is one of the main reasons why no other Jojo related things have left Japan. If they can't change the names then they're going to get their pants sued off.
Hong Kong Dollars
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle came out on August 29th. I had the game that same day. Leading up to the release I began to watch every single video about the game that came out. Everything about it was so unknown to me, which made it supremely interesting. The animation was gorgeous and the characters looked so weird. At that point I had only watched the first season of the new anime and had never even looked at any of the manga. It was about a week before the game came out that I made the decision that I had to have it.
This is the video that put me over the edge.
Originally I had pre-ordered a physical copy of the game, but as of the release day it still had not shipped. I cancelled my order and decided to purchase a digital copy. In order to do that I had to buy some digital PlayStation Network cards, because US credit cards don't work on the Japanese PlayStation Store. I quickly realized that Japanese PlayStation cards were ludicrously overpriced and bought some Hong Kong PlayStation cards instead. They were a fair amount cheaper and for some reason the Hong Kong PlayStation Store is in poorly translated English. It may have been one of the shadiest things I've ever done on the Internet.
A friend instructed me to go to the website Pcgamesupply.com, because he had purchased Hong Kong PSN cards from them before. I bought two 200 Hong Kong Dollar cards and an 80 Hong Kong Dollar card. This gave me enough to purchase the game for 449 HKDs. I gave the site my credit card information at which point they charged me the $79 for the cards. Yes, I paid $79 for a $60 game. That's how overpriced the stupid PSN cards are. Not even ten minutes later I was able to view pictures they had taken of physical PSN cards in order to get my codes. I punched them in and began downloading the game. I've had the game for around two weeks now and I regret nothing.
It's an All-Star Battle
I didn't read the third part of the manga until this past week. Despite a lack of knowledge I still managed to fall in love with the game.
All-Star Battle is a straight up fighting game. It is almost void of all story and the main menu is entirely in English. That means I can navigate to where I want to go fairly well and learning how to play isn't too hard because it's fairly similar to other fighting games. The weird game specific things I figured out as I went along. What's crazy is that it's not a very good fighting game. It's fairly unbalanced and broken in a myriad of ways, which makes it pretty fun. It probably helps that I'm not good at fighting games, so I'm not good enough to have issues with specific characters and game mechanics. It's an ignorance is bliss type of scenario. All I know is that it's fun to hit the other character and it's even more fun to hit them with a crazy floating stand.
The character doesn't even need to punch the enemy themselves if they don't want to.
As I said previously the game is beautifully animated. What makes it even better is that something insane happens all the time. When I was messing around with the game at first almost every single attack was mind blowing. I now know just how insane everything in the series is and this game captures that very well. Everyone makes super flamboyant poses and screams out craziness. It's especially weird to hear someone yell Red Hot Chili Peppers in English during a constant stream of Japanese. The entire game is pure unadulterated Japanese madness in a way that I haven't been able to experience in years. This kind of stuff doesn't usually make it's way to the West anymore.
There are just over 30 characters in the main game with more coming as downloadable content. It's nice that each character feels unique, so I might actually buy the additional characters. Apparently I'm not the only person who thought it was a good game either. In its first week over 400,000 copies were sold in Japan.
The characters and animation in the game look beautiful.
That isn't to say that there haven't been any complaints about the game. The story mode is terrible and I'd probably be more upset if I could read or speak Japanese. You basically go through a series of fights with spoken text in between. You can beat it in two hours maximum. It's kind of disappointing considering how much effort CC2 puts into the story for their Naruto games. The killer for a lot of people is the campaign mode though. In campaign mode you can unlock alternate costumes, colors, taunts, and poses for the characters. At first it sounds awesome, but for some reason progress is gated like a free to play game. You fight against computer controlled versions of other people playing the game and computer controlled bosses in order to unlock everything. Each battle uses one bar of a battery and when that battery runs out you have to wait real time for it to refill. As of right now it takes 55 minutes to refill the whole thing, but eventually that's going to turn into 3 or 4 hours, which is far too long.
These things don't bother me very much, because I don't know any better when everything is in Japanese. Sure it's annoying that I can't unlock everything all at once, but it's keeping me playing the game. Plus it's not like I'd be able to sell it back since I got a digital copy. For my first imported game I think that I did pretty well. I didn't have any problems getting it and I am totally on board with everything it has to offer. It was my gateway into the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure universe.
I think this game is fun. You should check it out.
If you find any of this interesting I highly recommend you check out videos of the game. It's complete and utter madness, but it's surprisingly fun to play and even watch. I'm going to be purchasing all the DLC and since this is an import game I might write up something new for each piece I download. People need to know if the characters are worth downloading or not!
Update: During the Toky Game Show it was announced that Jojo's All-Star Battle would indeed be coming to America. I can't wait to see what they change. I'm generally intrigued to see how well it will sell here. Looks like I'm going to have to buy it again. At least now I can get a physical copy.
