Mongo Nation

Awesome, seizure inducing fighting action that’s EVEN MORE Japanese than you’re already used to!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Of all the games I’ve ever thought I’d see for sale exclusively on the Nintendo Wii, a hardcore Capcom fighting game, imported from Japan, featuring a roster of characters most people here have never heard of was not chief among them.

It was with great interest, then, that I followed the story of Capcom Vs Tatsunoko: Ultimate All Stars, a game that may turn out to be exactly what the Wii needs for a number of reasons. The Wii is a hard system to develop for because you have two totally different audiences, the casual and the hardcore. Capcom Vs Tatsunoko appeals equally to both, thanks to a remarkably flexible control scheme. Veterans and purists will want to opt for a traditional joystick, or maybe even a classic Gamecube controller. Newcomers, on the other had, can use the wand and nunchuck for an experience that is less “Street Fighter” and more “Super Smash Bros.”.

When playing with the standard Wii controller, all of you basic attacks are mapped to the A button button. Likewise, all of your special attacks are mapped the Z button. All you have to do is move the control stick in the direction of the move you want to perform and pull the trigger, i.e. up for a vertical attack, back for a feint attack and so on and so forth. The question that this raises is, can you really play a fighting game with dumbed-down controls like this? Apparently, yes, you can, and yes, it’s also super fun.

I myself am a longtime fan of the Capcom fighter, and while I initially balked at the simplified controls, I soon found that it opened up a whole new level of fast and frustration-free gameplay. No longer reliant on quarter circle turns, that occasionally don’t register, I was free to focus on my combos, as were my less-experienced opponents. Essentially, the barrier for entry has been lowered for n00bs, wile still allowing hardcore players to flex their skills the old-fashioned way. And the more I think about it, the more I feel like I’ve done all the shoryken motions that I ever need to, and am totally fine with being able to pull off special moves without getting blisters on my thumbs. I’m over it.

Moving on from the controls, the most important aspect of a “Capcom Vs” is always the character selection. In case you’re wondering what a “Tatsunoko” is, it’s a Japanese animation company responsible for such beloved classics as Speed Racer, Robotech, Samurai Pizza Cats and Neon Genesis Evangelion… None of which are represented in the game due to licensing rights, I’m assuming. Instead, we get a bunch of unknown characters from the 70s wearing skintight jumpsuits. Thankfully, what the Tatsunoko side lacks in distinguishing features, they more than make up for in wildly disparate fighting styles. Yatterman-1, for instance, looks like Vince Noir from “The Mighty Boosh” and bounces all over the screen kicking the shit out of you with a ball-in-a-cup. Meanwhile, Casshern plays defensive while his dog, “Friender”, eats your face.

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Sorta like Event Horizon: The Video Game

By Jeremy Azevedo

The latest installment of the popular Shin Megami Tensei series is on it’s way to the states! Like it’s predecessors, it involves making pacts with demons to combat a plague of otherworldly monsters from another dimension.

Unlike its predecessors, it takes place not in a Japanese prep school or a fantasy setting, nor even a steam punk utopia. Instead, it takes place in space (sort of).

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is, stylistically, kind of a cross between Persona and Dead Space. You play as an elite space explorer tasked with investigating a disturbance at the planet’s South Pole. It soon becomes apparent that this disturbance is actually a black hole that opens into a universe of demons. Some of the demons can be negotiated with, while others have a bad attitude for which the only cure is a hail of bullets. This is where you come in.

Strange Journey plays like a first-person dungeon crawler, which, as many of you know, the Nintendo DS was practically made for. All the action takes place on the top screen, while the bottom screen is reserved for maps and stats. While many DS RPGs have been using really shitty, bubble headed 3D graphics that look like a bad PS1 game for some reason, SMT: Strange Journey instead opts to stick with traditional, hand-drawn 2D sprites. A wise decision.

Check out some of the pics here:

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for Nintendo DS is currently scheduled for release in Spring 2010.

…Are awesome!

By Jeremy Azevedo

We’ve all seen the Japanese import game shows in which people have to participate in potentially dangerous “Double Dare” type physical challenges…

…But did you know that there is an entire genre of game shows over there that are so sadistic that they were banned from Japanese television? Lucky for us, that ban doesn’t extend to the Internet. Today, those very same shows are available for you to watch in their entirety online! If you can imagine a show actually being banned from the air in a country that has coin-operated (used!) panty dispensers on their city streets, then you can probably also imagine that these shows live up to their reputation of being absolutely batshit insane.

Denpa Shonen: Like “Oldboy”, only without all the murder and stuff.

The first show I took a look at was “Denpa Shonen”, a program that’s more or less about kidnapping and exploiting people who are willing to do anything to be famous. Now I understand that the phrase “willing to do anything to be famous” is one that is bandied about quite frivolously these days. But believe me when I tell you, the word “anything” means more to the people of Japan than it does to the litigious crybabies that make up our population of reality television contestants here in the US.

The season of Denpa Shonen that I watched followed the life of a young man named Nasubi, who was locked in an apartment with no clothes and no means of escape for nearly a year. By himself. To make matters worse, Nasubi was forced to live on nothing but sweepstakes winnings, including food. It probably goes without saying that the dude goes completely bananas (but in a funny way!) Watching this show is worth it just to see how excited Nasubi gets when he wins a lousy bag of rice or an eggplant or whatever. Or how pissed he gets when he wins a catalogue or a poster or something for the 5th time in a row.

Closed captioned so you can read their cries of anguish as well as hearing them.

The second show I watched was called “Gaki”, and was about four guys, locked in a gymnasium together for 24 hours. Not particularly exciting, until you factor in that “Taggers” dressed in black from head to toe like The Gimp from “Pulp Fiction” can pop out at any minute to beat the shit out of them with sticks, put them into a figure-four leglock, burn them, stuff them into a tiny box or do pretty much whatever the hell they feel like. I shit you not, these dudes look like gladiators from “The Running Man” and suddenly fly out of the floor like super heroes with smoke and everything. It’s terrifying.

Check out Denpa Shonen and Gaki now and see for yourself what the totally awesome future of reality Television should have looked like. Once you’ve seen the kind of stuff that’s too extreme even for Japanese audiences, you’ll probably never want to see another vapid dating show or half-assed drama parade like “The Hills” ever again.

Dear God, why?!

The Neko Nyanbou is a fake cat paw with retractable claws that you can control with a switch in the handle. I’m not sure why anyone would want such a thing, but apparently these furries are lining up to get their twisted little mitts on one.

According to the informative Japanese illustrations that come with the Neko Nyanbou, it actually has many useful functions:

You can listen to it whisper sexy talk into your ear whilst talking to your mom on the phone, or use it to puncture and/or eviscerate the vertebrate of your sleeping co-worker! Pwned!

You can use it to make women grow ears and tails, who can then make million dollar (cat?) fur jackets magically appear out of thin air! You can start your own sex slave/freak show/sweatshop business! If you knew any women to begin with, that is!

You can use it to reheat coffee and attract mangy junkyard cats to do your bidding! Or is it “attract coffee and reheat mangy junkyard cats”? Either way, same difference.

You can keep the bully that sits in front of you in class cool on a hot day, and signal other furries that you too are a degenerate member of an abominable subclass of humanity!