Weekly Releases (10/1) +

[WarpRattler]

By the way, I'm sure those of you who are interested have heard about it, but No More Heroes 2 contains a mahou shoujo parody, even going so far as to contain a very simplistic vertical shmup. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars also contains a shmup, but for some reason it's an arena shooter where you can only fire in the direction you're actually facing. ???

Related to previous weeks' releases: I tried Chronos Twin yesterday, and I feel sorry for anyone in Europe (where the game received a physical release back in 2007) who paid full-price for it. Cheesy story (and not the good sort of cheesy), clunky controls (B to fire on the bottom screen and Y to fire on the top, which is almost as bad as Monster Hunter Portable when you consider how often you're alternating fire between the two screens), and the game is pretty much a Mega Man clone minus the power-copying.

At least you can duck and aim upwards, even if aiming upwards is more of a pain than it should be, and you have to duck to hit things that should be able to be hit with a regular standing shot.

I can't imagine how poorly this game would've worked on the GBA, which it was originally developed for.

[Lizard Dude]

Hadn't heard about that until now, because I avoid info on a game once I know 100% I'm going to buy it, but thanks anyways for the spoilers!

I thought the TvC thing was more like Capcom's Commando games, which I wouldn't call shmups. Also explains why you'd shoot in the direction you were facing.

What do you want from the Chronos Twins controls? If the same button made you shoot in both the past and present, the game would lose much of its point. Although the controls you said are different than how I play on the Wii Classic Controller, with y to jump, x for top-screen shot, b for bottom-screen shot.

Calling it a Mega Man-clone is very disingenuous. The game is about controlling a dude who is in two different versions of the level at once, which is a very interesting mechanic and I quite like the game.

[WarpRattler]

Other big spoilers: The game's title is No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Travis Touchdown is the main character of the game.

Commando is a shmup. Just a less traditional one. And there's a reason the mechanic of forcing a player to face the direction they want to fire in arena shooters died off.

And Eighting, who developed Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, owns Raizing, who was responsible for things like the Mahou Daisakusen games, Battle Garegga, and Armed Police Batrider (though those last two were by Shinobu Yagawa, who now works for Cave). So who developed Ultimate All-Shooters? Was it Capcom revisiting the days of old? Did Eighting forget about how they were once known for making awesome shmups? Or was it someone else?

Did I say Y to fire on the top screen in Chronos Twin? I meant X. Y to fire on the top screen would be far more convenient, as would the ability to configure your controls (because then I could just put it on a shoulder).

Beyond the fact that you're playing in two different versions of a level on both screens at once, which is admittedly rather cool, it's a Mega Man clone. Look, you even have his power slide.

[Lizard Dude]

Other big spoilers: The game's title is No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Travis Touchdown is the main character of the game.

It's not the same. The existance of a little shmup in the first NMH was one of the most delightful surprises to me about the first game.

Commando is a shmup. Just a less traditional one. And there's a reason the mechanic of forcing a player to face the direction they want to fire in arena shooters died off.

Commando is NOT an arena shooter! It's the same genre as Contra—shirtless headband-wearing men shooting lots of bullets and dying in one hit. I don't know what you're talking about facing the shot direction dying off, because Robotron 2084 had it in freakin' 1982!

Did I say Y to fire on the top screen in Chronos Twin? I meant X. Y to fire on the top screen would be far more convenient, as would the ability to configure your controls (because then I could just put it on a shoulder).

That would be much worse. You need jump to be next to both shooting buttons since it happens in both dimensions. The shoulder buttons jump in the Wii version, BTW.

Beyond the fact that you're playing in two different versions of a level on both screens at once, which is admittedly rather cool, it's a Mega Man clone. Look, you even have his power slide.

Disingenuous. That's like critiquing Multitask on its individual games. You're missing the entire point.

P.S. Dang I forgot how fun Multitask was.

[WarpRattler]

In reverse order:

P.S. Did you ever beat my Multitask score?

What's wrong with going, "oh, hey, this game has a lot of stuff that plays just like a Mega Man game, so I can call it a Mega Man clone"? If people can call Puyo Puyo and Columns "Tetris clones," I can legitimately call Chronos Twin a Mega Man clone.

Shoulder buttons jump in the DS version as well, as does Y. And it looks like my problem is less to do with the button positioning and more to do with trying to alternate fire between the two screens often ending up in pressing both buttons at once (causing neither to fire) in the DS version. (By the way, you contradicted yourself when you said jump needs to be next to the two fire buttons and then pointed out the shoulder buttons that aren't anywhere near the fire buttons.)

Commando is definitely a shmup. If it isn't, then neither are things like Pocky & Rocky or Twinkle Tale. And the main character of Commando definitely isn't shirtless - at least, not in the arcade version, anyway. And speaking of arcade versions, I loaded up Robotron 2084 myself, and guess what? Your firing direction is independent of the direction you're moving/facing.

(Regardless, it does look like Ultimate All-Shooters takes a lot of its influence from games like Commando rather than games like Robotron 2084, albeit with forced scrolling that doesn't come from either of those. So it's not an arena shooter at all.)

Existence. You should know better than that. And having not played the first No More Heroes, how was I to know that something that was freely covered by various games media outlets would be a ruinous spoiler to one player on a corner of the Internet?

[Lizard Dude]

I know Robotron has independent shooting. That's what I was saying. Arena shooters never had fixed-direction shooting. You were talking about how it "died out".

P.S. No.

I didn't know All-Shooters had forced scrolling. That makes it much more shmup-like.

Calling something a clone should imply a far greater level of similarity. Chronos Twins is a massively different experience than Mega Man even though, yes, you control a jumping man who shoots. I don't think Puyo Puyo should be called a Tetris-clone either.

As for the spoiler issue, I've been realizing more and more lately that media and marketing are grave enemies to enjoying games and movies. Movie trailers are nothing but MASSIVE SPOILERS. I haven't watched one in years. And guess what? It makes watching movies a way more interesting experience. Plots can go anywhere! It's so awesome. Do not watch trailers whatever you do.
Game media is easily as bad. For Mass Effect 2, there's been massive coverage of the fact that if you make certain choices, your Shepard can die (for real in the plot). No Russian of Modern Warfare 2 was massively ruined the same way.
Trailers and game coverage are your enemy. Do not watch them, ever. Do not read them once you know you're going to play the game. It's mindcrime and serves no purpose but to lessen your experience.

Marketing is the enemy of art; don't let it win.

[ShadowBrain]

Yeah, trailers are almost indescribably tempting--and without them, it can be hard to say whether a movie looks good--but I really am starting to think that they can damage my enjoyment of a film or its source material, from giving me the assumption that the Surrogates graphic novel would be heavily action-oriented to the complaint touched upon here.

[WarpRattler]

(The title is Chronos Twin. First word ends in an S, second word doesn't.)

Yes, and I admitted that I was wrong (indirectly about the arena shooter forced-direction thing and directly about Ultimate All-Shooters being an arena shooter, and directly about the former here). I know it doesn't happen often, so it's kind of hard to tell.

The forced scrolling in Ultimate All-Shooters appears to be really slow. It looks like it's a bit slower than forced scrolling in Super Mario Bros. 3.

I don't like Puyo Puyo being called a Tetris clone either, partially because the only real similarity is that you drop blocks to try to clear blocks but mainly because I consider Puyo Puyo to be more fun. But hey, I sort of treat Tetris like I do chess, so I won't say that Puyo Puyo is the superior game.

And Chronos Twin is still more similar to Mega Man than Puyo Puyo is to Tetris. I'll concede that I can't justify calling it a clone, though.

[Captain Jim]

I am such a mondo nerd.

[Weegee]

...Is that a Horsea beside the left cover's title?

[Captain Jim]

No. It's the Tatsunoko logo.

[ShadowBrain]

The average American's not supposed to know what Tatsunoko is, right? I mean, I (kind of) do, but...

[Lizard Dude]

The average American definitely doesn't know what the company Tatsunoko is, but probably recognizes a few of their characters (especially people who are a bit older).

[WarpRattler]

And on that note, I wonder why Jump Ultimate Stars, which most likely would've been easier to license than Tatsunoko vs. Capcom*, didn't get localized. Between younger players who would recognize characters like Naruto and Son Goku, older players who would recognize characters like Kenshiro and Kenshin, and nerds like me who just want to play as Don Pachi, Yugi, and Jotaro, it's also got a somewhat wider audience than Tatsunoko vs. Capcom**. It also gives Viz a reason to start publishing any of the slightly more obscure stories represented in some form in the game that haven't already been serialized in the US Shonen Jump or published as trade paperbacks.

*Pretty sure Viz holds the rights to all the Weekly Shonen Jump licenses in the US.
**Diminished a bit by the fact that it doesn't have the Capcom side at all, but then, consider how many of the characters on the Capcom side in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom the average American would be familiar with.

[ShadowBrain]

Yeah, that's a good point.