Tour: Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX

Kicking off this review with a Puyo Puyo reference? You betcha.

For those unaware, Hatsune Miku is a “Vocaloid,” basically a piece of Japanese software produced to emulate human vocals for music producers, and given an avatar to represent them; in the form of an anime-style character. There’s more Vocaloids than there are bloody Pokemon nowadays, but the ones I mostly know are the ones from Crypton Future Media; those being Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin, Kagamine Len, Megurine Luka, MEIKO and KAITO. Miku is by far the most popular Vocaloid with an insanely huge fan following in Japan and nowadays across the entire world; to the point she’s performed live concerts (using holograms) and even performed on David Letterman in the US. Hot damn.

3D Out Run – Don’t Mind Me, Just Taking A Magical Sound Shower

“Can’t hold me down! Spinning, spinning and turning, oh!”

In the time it’s taken for me to write this, the 3D Classics series ended, and then 3 extra Mega Drive titles were announced for it. That, and Shenmue 3 got announced. Shit.

Out Run needs little introduction at this point. Yu Suzuki’s revolutionary driving game is well-documented amongst the halls of video game legends, and overall is considered a beloved title amongst SEGA’s arcade library. I was surprised when I heard it was to be ported to 3DS; mostly because of the rights issues the inclusion of the Ferrari Testarossa in the original arcade version provided. I was plenty aware of the ways around the issue other ports had taken, but before the announcement I wondered; would the SEGA of today bother porting the game?

I should have remembered it’s M2 handling these ports. Alas, Out Run is on 3DS, and I can immediately say it’s pretty bloody essential.

Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins – A Different Kind of Mario World

A review on this blog that isn’t a SEGA game! Exciting times, these are.

I’ve been meaning to play Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins for quite a bloody while now. My only prior experience with it was back when I was seven or eight and someone on my estate had it in the back of their Gameboy Advance. My initial thoughts weren’t “this is cool” or anything; I was just angry at the amount of classic Gameboy games I’d passed up on in the past, as I suddenly realised they worked on the Advance. But alas, I’m now 16 and recently I finally grabbed a copy of Mario Land 2 for collection.

So, Mario Land 2. The original Super Mario Land was quite the departure from the average adventures of the portly plumber, with various oddities such as exploding Koopa Troopas and the bizarrely named “Super Balls” replacing the Fire Flower. That, and the game’s plot has Mario fighting an alien; he’s not even saving Peach! Compared to all that, Mario Land 2 is slightly more down to earth; the Fire Flower’s back in full force, Koopas are back to normal (although those exploding ones do make a comeback, and there’s a few other odd enemies); for the most part, everything checks out. The story still isn’t the standard Mario fare however, as rather than saving Peach, Mario must get back the castle he suddenly owns from the dastardly new villain, Wario.

SEGASonic Arcade – An Adventure In Early Sonic

It’s everyone’s favourite needlemouse! And some rejects!

Oh good, my first article on here is Sonic the Hedgehog themed. We’re off to a great start, aren’t we? I’ve already banged on about why I love Sonic and the like, so let’s cut to the chase; June 1993 saw the release of Sonic’s first foray into arcades outside his cameo in Rad Mobile courtesy of AM3, and that was SEGASonic Arcade. I have no idea why SEGA is incorporated into Sonic’s name for this outing, nor do I care; point is, the game’s remained somewhat elusive over the years since SEGA hasn’t really bothered giving us a way to play it legally. SEGASonic used a trackball as it’s method of controlling Sonic, which isn’t exactly fun to emulate with modern controllers; indeed, this is why it never showed up on the Sonic Gems Collection, as was apparently intended. Saying that, after dabbling about with the ROM settings in MAME a bit, I did actually manage to make the game at least playable with an Xbox 360 controller, and so I could finally experience this thing in a way at least slightly closer to how SEGA intended than with the default emulator settings.