Vidya Game News – January 14, 2016
“Please adhere to the following rule of the city square: No swimming, No swearing, No laughing, No crying, No talking out of turn, No line dancing, No moose calling, No sword play, No pumpkin carving, No mummified cat juggling, No wallowing in your own self pity, No circumstantial evidence, No walking on the grass, No pancakes on Monday, No dessert until you eat your vegetables, No slapstick comedy, No balloon animals, And absolutely, positively, No barking like a seal. It upsets me.” – Secret of Evermore.
While following the rules, enjoy this vidya game news.
– Cool old game news, as Natsume has their own eBay store now. This includes new, boxed copies of things like Pocky and Rocky, Lufia II and Harvest Moon. Check it out here.
– Nintendo has joined legions of teenage girls and the year 2007, as they have a Tumblr account now, per Destructoid. Check it out here.
– Also from Destructoid, the fresh screenshots from the PS4 remaster of Valkyria Chronicles!
– From Kotaku ’Stralia and some other sites, a gamer totally broke Secret of Mana the other week during his speedrun. Also, the original game of the series, Final Fantasy Adventure, is getting a re-release on phones and iOS devices, per Polygon’s Allegra Frank.
– Also, publicized on the Mary Sue, NES30 has released a wireless NES controller that works with modern systems. It’s a bit pricey, at $36.99, but pretty damn cool.
– UK site Digital Spy has 11 horrible realities of old school gaming.
– If you live in Barrie, in Central Ontario, congrats! There is a new board game and video game group you can join.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– In 2002, NBA Courtside 2002 was released for the GameCube. As you can imagine from this game being included, it wasn’t a great day for releases, historically…
– The fourth installment of the second .hack series came out in 2004. Quarantine was a weird game, even by Japanese RPG standards. The games go for a pretty penny now, so if you see them, snatch them up.
Video game history information comes from GameFAQs and Moby Games. And as always, if you’d like to support the show, do so via our Amazon link.
Episode 011 – Secret of Mana (1993)
Secret of Mana (1993)
This week in Your Parents Basement, we are playing one of the highest-rated RPGs of the 16-bit era, Square’s Secret of Mana! Follow along as we lavish praise on the fighting system and music, and do our best to overlook the truncated dialogue in the fight against ebbing mana.
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TIMESTAMPS
- 0:00 – The intro, which features music from the flying portions of the game.
- 47:40 – Emails. More dark thoughts from Butterscoot.
- 54:00 – Snifferoo.
SHOW NOTES
– We don’t get into heavy story spoilers for Secret of Mana, since the iOS and Droid versions are still good, and thus, hopefully some of you will be interested enough to give it a try. Basically, any story aspect we talk about comes up within the first five hours (about 10 percent) of the game. However, it should be said that at one point, you do get to save Santa.
– We somewhat on the development history of this game, which is pretty interesting and has been written about several times. In addition to the always-reliable Wikipedia, 1-Up has a column about how the series actually began in 1987.
– As far as the translation specifically, Wikipedia has a transcript of a September 1994 interview with Ted Woolsey, the poor bastard who had to do all of Secret of Mana in 30 days. In the 1990s, he was a controversial figure because his translations really morphed the intent of some text and plot, but opinion has softened on him over the years as people have become aware of the programming and time limitations he faced. He did the translation work on Mana, Final Fantasy 3, Breath of Fire and Chrono Trigger. He has his own page on TV Tropes, Woolseyism, and now works for Microsoft.
– On the show, I (Steve) said that I thought I could probably work my way through this game in 10 hours or so. Well, on YouTube, there is a speed run done in about 3 hours. Ye gads.
– Also on the show, as usual, we talk about how much the game costs now. As mentioned several times, the iOS version is well-reviewed, removes some translation errors and only costs about $10. On eBay, loose carts go for about $30 to $70, and complete packages (game, box, map and manual) go for around $100 to $200, depending on condition. There are also tons of Secret of Mana 2 carts on eBay in the $45 to $60 range. These are not official though; they’re simply the fan translation dumped on to a cart. They’re still playable on your SNES, though.
– We talk briefly about Secret of Evermore, which plays a bit like Mana, but is otherwise completely unrelated. We might cover it more in-depth on another show. Via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Super-NES.com has a great interview with Brian Fehdrau, the lead programmer for Evermore.
– Hat tip to co-host Todd Brisket, who found this story about the newest boss additions to the Japanese-only Vita game, Rise of Mana.
Your Parents Basement 