Seems like a pretty crappy week to me. I think there is a Samurai Shodown Anthology due out on the Wii sometime in the future, so it is probably not worth getting the first version for nine bucks. The other two seem kind of meh to me. If I want to fish I'll boot up Twilight Princess.

Woah! Cocoto Fishing came out of nowhere!

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I... am... curious...

Is that related to Cocoto Racers?

Hey I just watched the Cocoto Trailer on Nintendo Channel and it looked cool!! Someone check it out for me!

Multiplayer Breakout?! :D

Someone needs to tell me if the fishing game is any good.

Warlords is essentially multiplayer breakout and it's a fantastic game, so the concept isn't without merit.

I don't doubt that, insanolord. I have always been particularly fond of Breakout, and an added multiplayer aspect only furthers my excitement. Having watched the video on My Nintendo Channel however, the game's art style looked pretty cheesy. :P

I'm sorry, I thought that emoticon was to indicate you laughing at it mockingly. I, too enjoy Breakout, and if the game were 500 or 600 points instead of 800 and I weren't in the block crisis that I'm in I'd consider it.

An understandable assumption. That emoticon admittedly looks little like the wide, giddy smile that I was going for...

Damn it, I have been waiting for Samurai Showdown and here it is and I am broke. I have to remedy this right now.

I would urge restraint. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, Samurai Shodown Anthology will be out before you know it. And it'll have said title with all the others in the series.  This title is the turning point of Neo Geo games that stop to suck and begin to ..well, rule.

I don't know why SNK is doing this, aside to please some of the fans that only want that particular title. Same with the Metal Slug series. I'd rather see individual titles that are of high quality, and aren't in any compilations for the Wii.

except I would rather pay for the 2 SS games I want to own instead of paying full price for the rest of which I am not that interested in.

You can play Samurai Showdown for free on GameTap. Just sayin'.

Cannot...resist...urge...to buy...wiiware... GAH!!!

I'm warning you, the only impressions I could find of Fishing Master were that it wasn't so good in the controls department. But I'd love for someone to take the plunge around here.

Yeah, I liked that on the C64.

Well in Metal Slug's case Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii was crap so at the very least there is some purpose to releasing versions on the VC that actually support the classic controller.

I think it's just SNK trying to milk their titles for all they can.  Yeah WE know that there's a Samurai Shodown Anthology in the works but the average person doesn't know that and might ignorantly buy the titles individually on the VC.  I think it's very deliberate.

SNK also has released SNK Arcade Classics for the PS2 and it has overlap with their Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown and King of Fighters collections that are also all on the PS2 (or will be).  An SNK fan is going to want all of those but they aren't designed to compliment each other.  Again I think it's just milking it for all it's worth without any real thought about how it affects the consumer.

Does SNK really have much going for them anymore outside of old games they rerelease like mad?

Then you're talking to the right person.

That's a fair bit of hyperbole. My brother and I got tons of enjoyment out of playing through anthologies in the course of one night. Felt real good.

Fuck that, I don't play console games on a PC ever.

You seem to forget that

1)  The average person doesn't use the VC
2)  The average person doesn't know what Samurai Shodown is
3)  The average person hasn't even heard of NeoGeo

Erm, sure?

The Wii userbase doesn't just divide into clueless ignorants and informed hardcore gamers with no one in between.  I'm sure there are people who buy VC games that don't live and breath games and thus don't follow any gaming related news on the internet.  They check out the VC once in a while and notice a game and think "Hey, I remember playing that!" and buy it.  Meanwhile they have no knowledge that that same game is available on the Wii in a compilation.

That's what I mean by "average person".  If you really want to be literal the "average person" doesn't even own a Wii in the first place.

I could buy that reasoning for a "big" game such as Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat, but Samurai Shodown is pretty niche.  I don't think there are many people who don't follow upcoming game releases who are familiar with the game.

Also, congrats on using the Quote button!  When did this start?  ;)

I'm pretty tempted to just buy Samurai Shodown for the VC and skip the compilation.  I only have fond memories of playing the first one on the SNES, and I don't care about the others.  I am curious about whether this is the censored version or not, though.  The T rating suggests that it is, but the "Animated Blood" qualifier makes me wonder, since I think the blood was recolored white in the censored versions.

They have a successful Witch Touching franchise.

Got it, and after 20 minutes of fiddling around, I figured out the one specific section of the controls that were giving the majority of players problems.

The controls actually all work as expected until it comes to the "hooking/striking part" where you're supposed to move the wiimote when the fish bites. Each fish has slightly different timing on when you hook it, but the major problem is that "striking" will not work unless you intentionally do it: you don't just jerk the wiimote, or yank it, or whatever funny stuff I was doing the first 20 minutes. You have to start with the wiimote in a horizontal position, then quickly rotate it so it's pointing up and vertical, and only that specifc action, at the fish's specific timing, will trigger the hooking. Also, there may be a rumble clue to help with timing, I'm not sure.

After that, I was reeling in fish to upgrade my rod, catch one of each fish, catch the boss fish and then make it to level 2.

Sounds like it needs a tutorial really bad.

It's just that one mechanic really.

Actually, they needed to put just a modicum more design in it. Tell the player what indicators to look for, warn them of the timing differences, and tell them exactly what motion you expect (or just make the motion easier to do).

Damn that sucks, I was kinda hoping this was gonna be a day at the beach. My sis played OOT fishing forever, it'd be nice if we could find her something we could both play.

I know Daaaman64. It's sort of sad, but I'm STILL waiting for a fishing game like what they showed in the Wiimote reveal trailer. A game where grandparents and kids can play fishing together... a sort of Wii Fishing thingie...

Hmm... was there a good third party one? I cannot remember for the life of me.

NO

Block Breaker Deluxe's "theme" is bazaar. How do you get club hopping out of Breakout? Outside of that, the game lives up to the high standards of being a Breakout clone. The multiplayer aspect is pretty nifty too. Breakout (and its clones) is a game that would benefit greatly from always having a level editor included. It would be simple to pick up and use without having to be dumbeddown, given that it is such a simple game. I forget the exact name of the variant, but I have a Breakout clone on my Linux partition that has a nice level editor. It wouldn't be hard to include on a console.

When you say censored do you mean the SNES version or the Neo Geo version? Cuz I was unaware of Neo Geo games ever being censored.

Animal Crossing

Neo Geo games were sometimes censored. I think it was some internal hardware switch.

From what I've read, it was censored for the home version release even on the Neo Geo itself, but you could remove the censorship by switching your hardware to Japanese mode.  Or something.  I never actually owned one.

It does raise an interesting question.  Are the Neo Geo games on VC the arcade versions or the home versions?  There's not supposed to be a difference, but apparently they routinely censored the home versions for the U.S.


Edit:  Someone answered the question on Wikipedia:  "The Neo Geo AES version of the game was released for the Wii Virtual Console on October 16, 2007 in Japan; May 30, 2008 in Europe; and June 16, 2008 in North America."

MVS was teh arcade so that says it is the home version. But is it the US version or the Japanese version then?

Virtual Console Reviews says it's uncensored.

well good then, because it would be stupid to release it censored in this day and age.

I never understood why back in the day home console games were censored while arcade games weren't.  Arcade games are out in the open where ANYONE can play them.  And at that time they were EVERYWHERE.  When Mortal Kombat was big you couldn't go into a 7-11 without seeing it and there were people getting beheaded right where every minor could see.  The kid didn't even have to play it.  He could just be going to buy some candy and glance at it.  With home consoles the parents have some control, at least in theory.  The parents can decide what games to buy their kid.  But an arcade game is as public as a billboard.  Even if you don't let the kid play it, he'll see it.

It's like R-rated films being broadcast for free on a big screen in the center of a city and then those same films being censored when released on video.

Johnny can see all the blood in Samura Shodown while he's at the mall but when his parents decide to buy it for him you better turn all that blood white!  Hell, what minors even owned a Neo-Geo home console?  That was totally a hardcore game nut machine.  The games alone cost as much as other consoles.

And I thought people covered in white fluids get rated HIGHER than red fluids.

Except it was possible to censor the arcades. The first time I played MK it had all the blood turned off. I never even knew it *had* blood until playing the Genesis version and my friend told me about the "blood Code". It was a couple years before I found an arcade that had the blood turned on and by then it wasn't as shocking to me.

But that's the arcade operator's discretion, not the parents'.  Before I ever saw an R-rated movie I saw someone knock someone into the spikes in Mortal Kombat at 7-11.

the point was though that if the community was against the violence they did not have to let their kids go into said arcade either. Back then most arcade machines were in arcades, or game rooms, sure they had them spread out pretty much in every laundromat and 7/11 also, but those were usually Donkey Kong or Pac-Man machines.


All I know is in every town I was in, grew up in KS so it could have been different elsewhere, they did turn the blood off. It wasn't just the arcade operators choice, often is was his responsibility, I knew one arcade before MK came out that had Street Fighter II in it and a lot of kids parents would not let their kids goto that arcade as long as that machines was playable. Responsibly parents only had to mention to the vendor they would not allow their children in their establishment with such games in play. And where I lived they did this a lot.

The difference is in the options, in the arcade it made sense to have the *option* to turn the violence on or off, the home versions that had violence often had the same option to turn said violence off. The ones that didn't should have been censored because back then we didn't have a industry standard ratings system, MK launched that remember.