WTF is with the DRM on Final Fight: Double Impact Capcom?

Posted Friday, 30th April 2010 under New old games, Soapbox rants
Comments Off on WTF is with the DRM on Final Fight: Double Impact Capcom?

So, Capcom recently added what I previously thought was a great release of the arcade versions of Final Fight and Magic Sword as a two-game pack on PSN and XBLA. Owning a PS3, I was tempted to grab it as I really like both games and thought it would be fun to play them in the main living room of the house.

However, I just found out that the game pack has DRM built into it, part of which requires you to have an internet connection at all times when you want to play the game (thanks to Kotaku for the great writeup).

What… the… #$%@?

So let’s get this straight – I’ve bought the game, I’m using it on my PS3, my internet connection drops out (very much a frequent thing in Australia, despite the hard work of ISPs like iiNet and Internode, there’s only so much you can do given the infrastructure), and BAM – no game for me.

Or what happens if my ADSL modem kicks the bucket and I have to wait a couple of weeks between grabbing a new one – I can’t play a game I legitimately downloaded?

Or, as one of the comments left by a reader on Kotaku pointed out, in 5-6+ years time and PSN changes or whatever (or for the sake of retro gaming, 10+ years – the PS3 won’t be Sony’s primary platform forever), I can’t play the game?

It’s… beyond rational.

For the record, I have Final Fight on Mega CD, have previously had it on the SNES, enjoyed playing it on the Capcom Classics Collection releases on the PS2 and even own an original CPS1 Final Fight PCB. Despite this, I was still happy to launch more money over at Capcom (and I am a big Capcom fan) to grab this so I have the convenience of being able to play it in my living room with Wifey, who loves a good scrolling fighter.

But not now. No way am I supporting this kind or behaviour from a company that should know better.

The worrying thing is if this viral attitude that presupposes every user is a pirate starts to infect other PSN releases – I actually have quite a few titles I’ve happily purchased over PSN and think it is such a fantastic service, and as a platform it is fulfilling a niche market of simpler, old-school and retro-inspired titles that aren’t commercially viable via a packaged release.

But this is the wrong way forward.

I respect the rights of a developer and publisher to protect their IP. But in return, I expect the developer and publisher to respect me as a consumer. I also expect that, despite the game being a digital release, that I’ll still be able to fire up my PS3 in 10 or 15 years time and play it. I figure that if I can still fire up my Atari 2600, where some of the carts are probably around 30 years old, why shouldn’t I have that same expectation of a game I have purchased for my PS3?

Capcom have some interesting titles on the way, one of which includes a new entry in the Bionic Commando ReArmed series. I bought Bionic Commando ReArmed within minutes of playing the demo because of impressed I was with it, and thoroughly enjoyed playing through the game. The sequel will potentially be a day-one purchase. However, if there’s even a hint that this kind of draconian DRM is going to be present, I’m walking away.

Shame Capcom, shame.

The Rocket Knight Adventures revisit looks promising (new trailer!)

Posted Wednesday, 14th April 2010 under New old games
Comments Off on The Rocket Knight Adventures revisit looks promising (new trailer!)

Rocket Knight Adventures on the Mega Drive was/is awesome. When I was reading up via 1up and heard via their awesome nerd podcast Retronauts earlier this year that it was getting a revisit via PSN/XBLA, I was mildly excited. Some of the early promo artwork looked like it had potential, but I was still sitting on the fence.

However, after checking out an update over at PALGN and watching the trailer, I’m pleasantly surprised by how it’s shaping up:

I’m really loving the visual aesthetic here – there’s a classic storybook fantasy feel to the visuals that looks great, and the animation and particle effects are spot on. I didn’t have the speakers on while watching it though, so not sure on the direction with the audio. Hopefully it’s not poxy!

The original Mega Drive game in the series featured everything that made Konami such a powerhouse back in the 16- and 32-bit eras, with loving attention to detail on the visuals, great music perfectly suited to the hardware, plenty of colour, passion, spot-on controls, innovation and even a little story to boot! While the sequel on the Mega Drive was in comparison pretty disappointing (I’m guessing a different team handled it), the concept was still fun. The only game in the series I never got a chance to play was Sparkster on the SNES. I really should track it down though, Konami made some brilliant games on the SNES.

So yes, new Rocket Knight Adventures game for May. Can’t wait 😀

Unofficial piano nocturne – themes from Streets of Rage or Street Fighter on the piano

Posted Monday, 5th April 2010 under Video game music
Comments Off on Unofficial piano nocturne – themes from Streets of Rage or Street Fighter on the piano

A while ago I grabbed the piece of awesome that is Sega Piano Nocturne – as the world’s worst piano player despite loving the instrument dearly, I absolutely loved hearing a lot of my favourite Sega tracks rolled into the piano and bring out some really interesting melodies from some great tunes. I think there should be more piano renditions of classic chiptunes and game themes, I absolute love a good arranged version of a classic song from a game. Because I’m a tragic nerd 😀

Anywho, after checking out some footage of Yuzo Koshiro doing his thing in a Tokyo night club, I did the usual click-click-click-click YouTube thing you normally do to see what other Streets of Rage stuff was on there, and I stumbled across the following – it’s from the third stage in Streets of Rage 2:

Awesome, huh? The same user (Yuzoboy) has an upload playing the ending theme to Streets of Rage 2 which was really cool… but again, YouTube/Web2.0 strikes again, and I found the following interpretation of the ending theme from Streets of Rage 2:

This one’s from mymorningjackets, and is an amazing, bittersweet piece of awesome, lead by piano with a bit of classical guitar thrown in for good measure. There are also a couple of other great interpretations in his list, so might have to come back to him in a later post after I’ve had a chance to check out his blog.

So, with all things “street” on my mind, I started seeing results for Street Fighter 2 gear on the piano! Here are a handful of videos I found that I thought were worth a look into!

First up we have Ken’s theme from SF2 – this one’s a pretty “standard” interpretation of the song without too much embellishment, but you know what? It’s still played beautifully and with more skill than I can ever dream of having when I sit down at my piano 😀 Plus, given how awesome Ken is (yes, I’m a Ken scrub!), it’s all good 🙂

The day my mate McAdam and I accidentally unlocked the vocal theme of Sakura’s song (in Japanese at that!) on the PAL version of Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo on the Saturn was a glorious day, because she has such an amazing theme song (I got goosebumps playing through Sakura’s story in SF4 with her theme recurring throughout!), and this one’s a great version of her theme. Nothing’s embellished, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Remember, Sakura is awesome. Very important fact.

If Ryu’s theme doesn’t go down in the history of awesome of chiptunage, there’s something wrong with the world. If need be we can get rid of Sephiroth’s theme, as that’s starting to annoy me, but that’s because I’m an irrational fan of Phantasy Star and have yet to play through a Final Fantasy game based purely on principle. The exception to this is Final Fantasy III on the DS, which I really enjoyed (thanks Hamez!), and Final Fantasy IX always looked fun, as did FFVI. Anywho, enough of that – Rastapulse is responsible for the above, and I’ll be referencing him again too, as his interpretation of Ryu’s theme is brilliant. There’s a deliberate slowing of the tempo and some great phrasing in there – very expressive, and the little intro/outro he’s added is cool!

Fun fact – I used the melody of Cammy’s theme in an early megamix I made when I was first learning how to program stuff in a MIDI-sequencer. It was actually completely rubbish, but good fun at the time. MIDI sequencing programs confuse me now, I was quite happy with Evolution MIDI back in the day, it was choice. Now, if I was able to program something akin to the above on the aforementioned program, I would have been much more proud of myself. Akin to the Ryu theme that Rastapulse was responsible for above, this one’s slowed the tempo and emphasised the melody really nicely – again, great phrasing and execution. I haven’t checked out the rest of the material in his YouTube channel yet, so might have to get onto that later.

Last one – Guile’s theme, and I left this until last as it has elements from each of the styles I’ve linked to, with some of it emphasising 1:1 phrasing compared to the original with lotsa piano-passion, and then there are other moments where the melody’s been played around with a bit of artistic license and takes on the languishing character of the themes Rastapulse did above with just the right amount of melodrama to make things interesting.

Raving to Yuzo Koshiro in a Tokyo club

Posted Monday, 5th April 2010 under Video game music
Comments Off on Raving to Yuzo Koshiro in a Tokyo club

A friend posted a link to this in a discussion we were having via a message board online, and since I’d never heard of this being possible, thought it deserves some linkage:

For those not in the know, Yuzo Koshiro is an absolute genius when it comes to getting the Mega Drive’s Yamaha YM2612 chip to do some amazing stuff (though to be honest, Koshiro had a habit of making the entire chipset do some amazing stuff). The music for Streets of Rage 2 is probably my favourite of his work, though big ups should go to the amazing work he did creating a symphony out of the Mega Drive for Story of Thor, and for some amazing early work on Revenge of Shinobi.

I always thought back when I was younger that the quality of the audio in Streets of Rage 2 demanded more attention. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, it’s nice to see it was a success 😀

Sally in… Sonic 1???

Posted Friday, 2nd April 2010 under Game hacks
Comments Off on Sally in… Sonic 1???

I’m on a roll today 🙂

Whilst hunting for the footage on YouTube on Sonic 4, I started doing the whole click-click-click thing you do on YouTube when looking up related videos, and came across this little awesome Sonic 1 hack:

Isn’t that cool? I used to watch the Sonic cartoon when I was a kid that had Sally and all those other weird auxiliary characters, and this is a really cool hack of the original Sonic game! Might have to see if I can find a copy of it to cram onto the cart I use for playing imports on my Mega CD since it can also act as a quasi-gimped flash cart.