Well, I still haven’t been able to get my grubby mitts on it, but I doubt I’d have much to say that isn’t obvious anyway. Videos are starting to make their way onto NicoNico though, and while the majority are of funny glitches or silly infinites (I’m a fan of Senna’s corner face-slam one in particular), Kinako’s the last character not from BBB, so I figured one of her combo videos was worth tossing up one an otherwise slow pair of days. Other Comiket stuff… eh. I do recommend checking out the full version of Age of Ethanols if you like Age of Empires, but I’m a Civ guy. RTSes will never replace my OCD need to tweak every single specialist for half an hour each turn. They did give it a massive graphical overhaul from its earlier days and has netplay already built in to annoy your friends.
Yes, yes. I’m aware that it exists, and that it has a tanuki. Yada yada, etc etc. I’m still waiting for the Touhou leprechaun. It’ll keep until I have a day free where I haven’t spent most of the evening staring at Photoshop.
When it rains, it pours. Tasofro put up a couple videos of Grief Syndrome in action. It does look a little more simplistic than I was hoping, but the spritework and (magical girl) animations do look up to Tasofro’s usual quite good level, and you know how I adore sprites. Hopefully the multiplayer will be hectic enough in that Gunstar Heroes kind of way to make up for it. The music’s often the best part of Tasofro’s stuff anyway, which makes it all the funnier to me that one of the clips they put up doesn’t have sound. Oh well, c’est la vie.
In continued mystifying Type-Moon fashion, MBAACC is FINALLY getting a return to the PC this December packaged as a bonus item as part of Carnival Phantasm’s third episode Limited Edition Box (episode 1 of which is out now… like, literally probably went on sale within about an hour of this post). I… do not understand why it’s like that, but it’s one of my favorite fighters and that makes me happy. I barely remember back in this blog’s genesis when I counted down to MBAC PC’s release date. I think those were all purged from the archive in the great cleansing of 2010 though. Now I just need to reteach myself how to play the bloody game before I get to abuse all the fun changes to Len… like an overhead! And momentum preserving ice spikes!
Frontier Aja’s put up the supposedly final version of BBR’s trial, which unfortunately adds Ren instead of Kinako, as well as the full voicing, music, etc, although it’s weird to hear Erika voiced by someone other than Shizuka Itou. The main tweaks to note introduced at this stage is a semi-return of the enhance system doing double-duty with the super button. Rouga’s got limited recharging cancels, Kunagi can charge her super bar, and Senna can recover her life. Ren and Erika seem to have gotten the shaft here, although Erika does have the silliest infinite combo ever with her new command throw. Ren in general seems to have taken a huge nerf but I never really played him anyway. His old chained shoulder-charge into Super grab does pitiful damage and even completely whiffs against Erika. Also, I included trains because that game only gets more hilarious when its creators mistransliterate its title as "Barning Stage."
Some years back, Taito thought to themselves, "You know what Japanese arcade goers want to do…? DRIVE A TRAIN! Brilliant!" Thus they set up an arcade cabinet to resemble a train… uh… cockpit? And Densha de Go! was born. Then there was a doujin comic mixing Densha de Go! with Initial D, which has now apparently inspired an actual doujin game. About racing trains. With multi-track drifting. And then they decided to make a sequel. And here we are. The world is a strange, strange place. Well, it could be stranger, as their April 1st train RPG shows.
Honestly, I didn’t really have much luck finding almost anything that looked particularly interesting game-wise for this upcoming Comiket by browsing through the catalog. It didn’t help that everything Touhou related is off in its own area these days. I almost miss when every other game was based on Kanon instead. There are a lot of trials, as well as the occasional thing that makes zero sense whatsoever, but Ten Desires, Tasofro’s Grief Syndrome and Aja’s Big Bang Beat Revolve are really the only full games that’ve caught my eye so far. Even for Touhou Sky Arena, I’m more interested in the OST than the Panty Shot Tengu and Sanae expansion… and Aja’s Scarlet Symphony 2 artbook for that matter. Hopefully something will surprise me.