Although arguably not as popular now as in years past, trading card games still attract a pretty large crowd. Many pretenders have attempted to usurp the role that Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic: The Gathering have filled for over a decade. One card game, however, is trying something new.
Phylo, or Phylomon as its lovingly referred to by its community, is an altogether unique trading card game for several reasons. First of all, it does not revolve around fictional creatures, demons, monsters, or other fantastic creations. Instead, Phylo is a game about the very real creatures already in existence on Earth. The game explores the theme of biodiversity by incorporating tons of species form each kingdom of life and across the far reaches of the globe. The second reason that Phylo is unique is because it is an entirely open-sourced project. Each of the cards created for the game are designed by members of the Phylo community and each drawing is created by volunteer artists.
Everything about Phylo depends upon its community from the creation of the cards to drafting of the rules. Because of this, it is obviously not commercialized like the card game behemoths mentioned above and is more suited to volunteer organizations, schools, universities, or environmentally minded card game enthusiasts. Anyone is free to download a deck of cards (or build a custom deck), print them out, and play. While some people might not find the idea of a card game with regular plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms too exhilarating, it is definitely a unique take on the genre. While most trading card games task players with defeating an opponent’s creatures, Phylo requires players to build a stable ecosystem while attempting to sabotage that of the opponent. This can be done using different event cards, parasite cards, or invasive species cards which will negatively affect the opponent’s ecosystem, scoring the player points. There are also other rule sets for players who want to mix things up, and players are encouraged to create their own rules or submit other game types to the Phylo community.
In the end, however, what it really comes down to is any card game with a Bacterial Growth card (above) is alright in my book. If you’d like to give Phylo a shot, you can head over to their site, where you can print cards, learn the rules, or even contribute to the game if the mood strikes.
With the recent release of Nintendo’s 3DS, and all of the excitement and hype (mixed with some disappointment) surrounding it, the subject of today’s post seems very fitting. It almost seems like the Guardians wanted things to fall into place the way they did. Or maybe I’m just looking to much into things.
As you can plainly read in the title, this time out of the proverbial hat I drew a game for the ill-fated Virtual Boy. Most people probably wouldn’t be happy about that, but I was perfectly ok with it for two reasons. First of all, I’ve always kind of liked the Virtual Boy. I first rented it from a Blockbuster back in 1995 and had a good run with Wario Land. Sure it was awkward to use at times, but I love Wario Land and I think the system has some real charm to it. The second reason is that I only own 4 games for the thing. Seeing as how I have no interest in collecting the entire library (can you really call it a library with less than 2 dozen games?), I’ve only got the few games I like and would want to play. Therefore, I knew there couldn’t be anything disastrous about this one.
This is still what comes to mind when I think of virtual reality.
The random game I was all set to play on my prototype 3DS was Teleroboxer, an interesting little title that is essentially Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots in first-person black and red 3D. Not only have I absolutely loved Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots since the days when I still wasted my time with games that weren’t electronic, but Teleroboxer is the only game I can think of off the top of my head that is controlled with two D-pads. I hadn’t played it previously because ever since I bought a Virtual Boy a couple years ago Wario Land hasn’t been removed from its cartridge slot, but I was looking forward to it.
Remember how I said I knew there couldn’t be any disastrous consequences with my Virtual Boy games since I liked them all? Well unfortunately fate makes fools of us all, and it turns out that the Virtual Boy wasn’t going to let me get away scot free. I started by getting everything set up: dusting a thin layer of dust off of this monstrous “portable” system, hooking up the AC adapter so I wouldn’t need batteries, switching cartridges, and finding a sitting position that would enable me to look into the eye-pieces with contorting too much.
Try holding this brontosaurus pose for more than a few minutes.
As I power on the Virtual Boy, it gives me it’s usual health and safety warning (which on the Virtual Boy comes across as more of a slap in the face than a warning), the VB logo, and then Teleroboxer title screen. Oh boy, here we go. I wish I could capture an image of what exactly it looks like, because no amount of description can really do it justice. It’s not that Teleroboxer is an ugly game, but for some reason, the screen was so ridiculously garbled that it looked like I was staring at a screen of code from the Matrix, although in red. I could still make out the title for the most part. I thought, “Well, maybe I can still play and it will just look kind of glitchy”. I told you the Virtual Boy wasn’t going to make this easy on me.
From the title screen it brought me to what looked like some kind of instructions I suppose. It showed a diagram of someone punching, and some lines, and that’s about all I could make out through the distortion (the picture is somewhere below). At this point I was trying to figure out what the problem was, and as I peered through each eye-piece individually I noticed that the left was far worse than the right. A brilliant idea came to mind: just use the right eye-piece! It might ruin the 3D effects but at least I’ll be able to play it. So that’s exactly what I did, and at first it seemed to be working. While the left eye-piece just showed a scrambled grid of solid red, the right showed a pretty clear picture as I navigated through the save file menu and selected my first opponent.
After all of that trouble I was finally into the game. The Virtual Boy had tried to keep me from playing my 3D Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots, perhaps even tried to keep me from writing this post. With perseverance, however, I had outsmarted the machine, which as I look at now it more and more reminds me of Wall-E’s head on a pike. Is that morbid? Anyway, I was in and it was time to start the game, or so I thought. At first it wasn’t so bad, I thought. I could really only make out the left half of the screen (possibly having something to do with the stereoscopics of the Virtual Boy and the busted left eye-piece) but I thought, well maybe I can work with this. It’s just robot boxing after all.
Imagine this little guy after a run-in with Caligula.
So far, I’d say things haven’t quite gone according to plan. I’m sitting hunched over on my bed balancing a pair of red goggles on my legs, craning my neck to see into it, squinting my left eye and straining my right eye to gaze into the eye-piece, looking at a garbled, unintelligible screen with half of a robot opponent’s body sort of visible. Yet I persevere, attempting to block and throw punches using the two D-pads. I may not have been the best at Punch Out, but I was at least decent. Let me tell you though, I don’t think I landed even a single punch. Meanwhile, even while blocking (I think I was blocking, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with less than half of a screen) my mechanical opponent was steadily dropping my health bar.
As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m not able to play Teleroboxer on my Virtual Boy. I suppose 15 years is all of the life this little bipedal headset is getting, but that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up. That would be too easy. My first thought was to simply borrow a Virtual Boy from someone so that I could play Teleroboxer and do this thing right. It was at this point that I realized that I don’t have any friends who own a Virtual Boy, a side effect of the system’s obscurity and low esteem.
Talk about oscure. The Adventure Vision, released in 1982, used basically the same technology as the Virtual Boy and had only 4 games.
Next I decided to try emulation. As much as I would prefer playing it on a real system with 3D effects and a controller in hand, I’m sort of down to last resorts here. I wasn’t even sure if there were any Virtual Boy emulators floating around. I mean, I know that there is pretty much an emulator for everything, but the Virtual Boy is just such a strange beast. It was pretty easy to find Red Dragon, an emulator suiting my needs, and the appropriate rom for Teleroboxer. Once I started everything up, I was greeted by the familiar screens, albeit with distorted colors, set the controls to keys I was comfortable with, and hit start.
Or at least I tried to hit start. At the title screen it clearly had written, “Press Start” right under the world Teleroboxer in huge letters, so I did. Then I hit it again. About a second later, the game went to the demo, and I watched as two robots punched each other’s lights out in super speed. So now I had two apparent problems on my hands: I couldn’t press start at the title screen, and the emulator was clearly running too fast. The first problem I solved quite easily. When the game instructed me to press start, what it really meant was to press the A button (although I don’t know why it couldn’t have just said “Press A”). As for the super speed, I decided to just live with it.
This is what the Terminator would see when watching Karate Kid.
Now would it really be as exciting if I was able to just play the game without any more issues? Of course not. This one however is an issue of a different variety. When it really comes down to it, I have absolutely no idea how to play Teleroboxer. I know you’re supposed to control your hands with the D-pads, with each one controlling the respective blocks and punches, but I can’t seem to land a single hit or successfully block anything. Within seconds I had fallen (it was only seconds because the game was running at about 2 or 3 times regular speed, but I was still a complete failure).
We’re coming up on 1,500 words that I’ve written now and I have still yet to discuss gameplay at all, mostly because I have yet to really play the game, but I hope that this has given at least a little insight into the difficulties one can encounter with retro gaming. Sometimes troubleshooting an older game is not as easy as just blowing in a cartridge. It can often take a lot of work, and in some cases a lot of money, to enjoy retro gaming as a hobby, and that’s part of the reason why I filled you in on how I encountered just about every problem that can arise in attempting to play a game, between faulty hardware, physical strain (ok, so that one is kind of specific to the Virtual Boy and Sonic Free Riders), imperfect emulation, and a lack of instructions.
I eventually found out that the reason I wasn’t landing any punches is because in order to control the game you need to use the L and R buttons in coordination with the D-pads, a point of which I was unaware. I discovered this thanks to a guide on GameFAQs.com written by BHodges (Thanks dude, but seriously? A Teleroboxer FAQ?). Without a controller, I’m pretty sure I lack the mental faculties to coordinate my fingers to manage 8 directional buttons and 2 shoulder buttons on a keyboard, so that’s not going to happen on an emulator.
Although I didn’t get to play Teleroboxer, and I probably won’t until I decide to replace my Virtual Boy, I think this was still a worthwhile experience. It definitely had its share of frustrations, but I suppose most people would have expected that from a Virtual Boy game. Perhaps I’ll revisit this one day when I find myself with working hardware, but for now I think this case is closed. I already know what the next game to be played is (I got a little antsy and rolled the dice while writing this) and I’ll give you a hint. It has a very close relation to my favorite Virtual Boy game. So I’ll see you all next time, when I’ll actually get to play a game!
Also, if you’d like to catch up on parts 1-4, you can find them at the links below:
While Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights certainly has resembled a certain popular Professor with the information we have seen in the past, Konami’s new trailer for the upcoming 3DS game gives off a whole new vibe which certainly makes this title seem like it has a lot to offer for any fans of adventure or puzzle titles. The trailer itself shows very little of the actual puzzle-solving gameplay, but it does introduce the whole main cast for the game.
The whole plot revolves around Lautrec as he and his young assistant Sophie search for relics belonging to Louis the XIV. While the voice acting did leave a little to be desired just from seeing the trailer alone, Doctor Lautrec is actually catching my interest with it’s overall theme and setting as it seems to be a very visual world that Konami have created. Check the trailer as well as some new screens out below and let us know what you think of this brand new series. Doctor Lautrec won’t be hitting the 3DS until later on this year, but I am sure we will be seeing more details surface in the future to fill us in on just how this mystery will unfold.
For those misers out there who have yet to pick up Behemoth’s Castle Crashers on Xbox Live Arcade, you now have one less excuse for missing out. Today (or tomorrow depending on your location), April 15th to be more specific, Castle Crashers will be reduced in price by 50% on XBLA. That brings it’s price down to 600 Microsoft points, the equivalent of $7.50 American.
If you need more convincing then you probably haven’t seen the game in action. Either that or you hate fun. So do yourself a favor and head on over to the Xbox Marketplace, pick up Castle Crashers for a pittance, and give yourself something to be happy about on tax day. For more information, head on over to Behemoth’s developer blog.
Gaming and charity go hand in hand once again because the famous Humble Indie bundle is back. The Humble Indie Bundle games are all made by Frozenbyte makers of such games as Trine , Shadow Grounds, and many others. You can choose to support either the Child’s Play Charity, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the developers themselves, or even the Humble group.
The price is however much you want it to be any where from a cent to a bazillion dollars. Another cool thing is you can decide how much money goes to each group if you decide to give to more than one group and the games are DRM free. All you have to do is go to the website and download. This is but for a limited time so you will need to hop on it. Now for the best part here is the games you can get with The Humble Indie Bundle:
Final Fantasy VI is regarded by most fans to be one of the best that the series has to offer. Many of the older games have seen a ton of re-releases and remakes such as 1,2, and 4, but it seems that poor Final Fantasy VI hasn’t seen a re-release or a reboot since back in 2007 on the Gameboy Advance. Japan however just got the PS1 version released on their PSN store today.
Post from Square-Enix Members’ twitter account posted that it is now available on the PSN store. Also as a side note they recently released Final Fantasy V on there as well so there maybe a very good chance that us English speaking folk may get our hands on on it. We already have Final Fantasy VII-IX on PSN it seems more than likely that this will happen to although no official word was given. Till then if you want to play you may have to check out local flea markets and dust your old console out of the closet to get your fix. As for me I’ll hold on to all my 3 versions of the game.
Huh… well I knew it was coming, you knew it was coming and it certainly didn’t take a whole lot of time before it happened. Japanese game developer Marvelous has announced that they are working on a new 3DS game that is being called Senran Kagura. Senran Kagura will be a side scrolling action platformer and will allow players to choose one of five different ninja students to battle against the enemy ninjas.
Now while this sounds like your standard affair for a side scrolling platformer, the kicker is what is coming up next. The five characters you get to play as are all women and all have unique abilities of their own. While this may not be a big thing on it own, that is where the 3D effects will take place. Andriasang was able to get the scoop from Famitsu that the 3D capabilities will focus on cinematic scenes that show off the girl’s bodies during combat and specific parts of the game. No word about whether or not this will ever see the light of day outside of Japan, but it will be released this Summer in Japan nonetheless.
Feel like doing battle in the name of a greater being than yourself? Well you missed the crusades by more than a thousand years but Atlus is looking to give people a chance to enter their own crusade, a cursed crusade that is. The title was mentioned only briefly in the past but it has now received plenty of attention as Atlus has launched an official website for the Cursed Crusade.
On the website you see plenty of screenshots and even some footage of the game itself. The site shows only a Summer 2011 release date, but a quick check of Amazon and Gamefly shows the title sitting at a July 26th and July 28th release. Of course this type of date can be taken as merely a place holder or something that has yet to officially announced.
Looks like playing as the bad guys may be more exciting than we thought it would be. In the latest trailer released by Capcom for Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City we are treated to plenty of gameplay footage and we are also introduced into some of the enemies that we will be facing in the upcoming zombie apocalypse shooter.
We are shown an out of control Tyrant that looks like the same one that we see in Resident Evil 2, the Spec Ops team that was sent by the government and of course plenty of zombies. Also shown off is the team members of the Umbrella team sent in to clean up any evidence, including killing Leon Kennedy. We are shown Spectre who appears to be the sniper of the team, the invisible turning Vector, Bertha the female soldier and possible tactician and the heavy weapon user Beltway. Catch the trailer below.
Fans of Tackle Alley mode in the first Backbreaker game should rejoice because NaturalMotion has unveiled a trailer for what they are calling Backbreaker: Vengeance. Now NaturalMotion and 505 Games has already created a game of the same form for the iPhone and iTouch which focuses entirely on the Tackle Alley gameplay mode.
Apparently that is what will be the case this time around. For those who don’t know, Tackle Alley gives players a chance to make it across field as a single runner and must dodge various defenders and obstacles that have been placed in the way. The title looks to be an XBLA exclusive title and will be released some point this summer for a currently unknown price. You can catch a trailer for the game below.
