『 Sam & Max: Season 2 goodies 』

Today, after many weeks of waiting, package containing my Sam & Max: Season 2 stuff had arrived. To my surprise it wasn't a cardboard box like the usual Telltale packages, but a regular envelope with bubblewrap. Fortunately nothing got damaged.


I was lucky this time around and I didn't get slapped with additional tax fee. I've also noticed that instead of the usual green declaration sticker, they used a different one. Well, the customs declaration information is basically the same, buy maybe it was the different look that threw customs off. Again, lucky me.


The way things work with Sam & Max these days is that the game is split into episodes which later become seasons. These episodes are released once every two months or so and are distributed via Telltale's website. You can buy a single episode or you can buy a whole season, which is of course cheaper in the end and you also get a disc release, once the season is complete.


The disc contains all of the episodes that you can also download via your Telltale account, plus some extras. We have trailers, outtakes, special movie features and hours of developers' commentary for the ingame cutscenes. The disc is a hybrid, so you can pop it into any DVD player and watch the extras. Stick it into a DVD drive and you can access additional goodies like wallpapers or a soundtrack sampler.


In other words, there's a ton of content to keep you entertained. It will take some time to play through all of the episodes and add to that many hours of extras and you have a game worth everything you paid for it. If the game and extras aren't enough, Telltale can supply you with some additional junk.


The case file. It's basically an envelope filled with items you see in the game. It's rather cheap. For $5.99 you'll get some neat collectibles so if you're a fan, imagine how neat it would be to have a napkin from Bosco's or a postcard from the moon [both of these came with season one case file]. If you're unsure whether you should get it or not, let me just tell you that season one case file is already sold out and people are paying $50 for it on eBay.


So, what's in the case file this time? Telltale really did a great job, surpassing what they did last time, and I was already impressed back then. You get a punch card, a Tiny Tiki coaster, a Soultrain token [made of metal and really heavy for its size], The Friendly Demon Song mini CD [which contains six tracks plus a hidden message - a definite highlight of this eclectic item package] complete with vinyl print on the disc and scratchy vinyl sound and a postcard.


I am really happy that Telltale is doing this. There was little to none merchandise sold when the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road game came out back in '93. Plus if you didn't live in the US, there was no way of getting a hold of anything. Today we have internet and everything is easy, so buy your collectibles while you still can. If you delay, you might regret it in a few years.


The soundtrack, as usual, doesn't disappoint. Jared Emerson-Johnson did a great job composing some fine jazzy beats and catchy tunes. This kind of music won't appeal to everyone, so of all the items here, this is the one you should buy only if you really enjoyed the music while playing the game. Or if you're a collector and you just have to own it along with every single piece of Sam & Max merchandise.


We get two CDs packed with audio directly from the game. One thing I've noticed is that some of the tunes loop a couple of times. That's fine, but the second CD has some additional audio stored on it in mp3 format. I'd rather have the looped tracks shorter and have as many of the mp3's as possible present on the disc as audio tracks.


There is plenty of additional mp3 music on the disc two. Music from cutscenes and trailer is included here, along with an explanation why Telltale chose to include compressed music. The fact of the matter is, there was simply too much music composed for Season Two and Telltale had a two disc limit for the soundtrack. That being said, I still would have preferred the loops being cut down to size so at least one more track could fit.


At least the mp3's are encoded in 320 kbps and the bitrate is constant. Let's hope that for the next season, if the amount of music will be equally huge, the two disc limit will change to three. I'll pay the extra buck, Telltale. Don't worry. I'm a loyal customer and a loyal Sam & Max fan.


So now I have two seasons, two case files and two soundtracks before me, and even though I have damn cold and a headache, I'm happy as a peach. Season One for the Wii is out, so if you haven't bought the PC version and you feel that pointing and clicking with the wiimote is more up your alley, buy it, play it and laugh, laugh, laugh.

『 A cartridge without a home 』

I've been willing to write about this for quite some time, so I'm glad I finally got around to it. What is it that I am going to complain about this time? Cartridge cases. It seems that nowdays nobody bothers to include a game cartridge case, even though games aren't cheap and manufacturing a case out of a few drops of plastic doesn't cost much.


It's funny how a copmany such as Nintendo, who could manufacture cases for their games back in the GameBoy and GameBoy Color days, can forget so quickly about the customers who brought them to the top and focus on the cash. It's obvious that the lack of casings is just another way to lower the production costs, but I'd gladly pay the extra dollar just to have some protection for my game when it's not in the box.


When Nintendo took over the handheld market completly, after killing both Neo Geo Pocket and WonderSwan, they decided that protective cases won't be happening during the GameBoy Advance era and this theme continues even today, with Nintendo DS. The funny thing is, people want protection and plastic cases are being manufactured. Of course you have to buy them separately and someone will make a profit because Nintendo doesn't care about its customers.


In the past there used to be some form of protection for every cartridge type. Neo Geo Pocket games always came with a small case, just like the old GameBoy games. WonderSwan games had a neatly designed plactic cover. Even PC Engine games came in protective sleeves, not to mention N-Gage titles, which had a special case in every box, with not just one, but four places for MMC cards.


Back when PlayStation premiered, during the first two years or so, every console box came with a case for the memory card, even though there was no memory card supplied with the console. Later however, Sony forgot all about this nice custom and stopped including these handy plastic boxes. When PlayStation 2 came along, we could forget about the memory card cases because clever midgets at Sony designed a memory card holder present in every single game box, even though nobody used them.


Nintendo duplicated the idea in GameCube game boxes, equipping them with a memory card holder and not supplying a case with the expensive, separately bought memory card. I don't know about you, but I can't be bothered to look through hundreds of game boxes looking for a damned memory card. I'd rather have a special casing for it.


When you buy a memory card for your camera, phone or PDA, it usually comes with a casing. Even the cheapest ones. I bought some SD cards that were so cheap, I didn't even believe they would be working once I plugged them in, still they had the protective case [and yes, they worked. Still do]. I bought a Nintendo DS flash cart and it came with a special protective case with rubber lining. If China can do it, why can't Nintendo and Sony?


It's sad to see once respectable companies sinking lower and lower, focusing on making more and more money. Forget about the customers, just get the product out and they'll buy it. After all nobody can say to Nintendo "Hey, why aren't there any cases for DS cartridges? Competition has them!" because there is no competition. I don't see PSP as competition, but even if I did, their UMDs have no protective covers either.


We can always hope for the better and in the meantime, buy third party products to protect our games. Shame on you Nintendo and shame on you Sony. Oh how I wish for Namco Bandai to make a new WonderSwan and whoop your asses.

『 No homebrew for you! 』

It's official. Nintendo DSi does NOT support any presently sold flash devices. Not that anyone thought otherwise, but there always is that small spark off hope. Well, that spark of hope just got pissed on by Nintendo and their new firmware.

I guess this means back to the drawing board for flash cart manufacturers. They have a new challange ahead of them now. Make a flash device that will allow to run Nintendo DS games, but hopefully also feature support for dedicated Nintendo DSi apps and games.


Piracy is of course the driving force behind the flash cart market, but with backup devices comes the ability to run homebrew software that I'm very fond of. I wasn't planning on getting a DSi for at least a year, and I hope that something developes until then.

『 Happy New Year 2008? 』

Ok, so I've managed to screw something up while messing with some of the blog settings and this old entry from New Years Eve 2008 got moved up the list somehow. But hey, at least now I can write something here, since I never bothered to do it back then, and all this entry contained were the pictures.


I probably never wrote anything, because the two WonderSwan games I purchased weren't particularly exciting. I've never been a fan of slow-paced, turn based strategies and that's exactly what 信長の野望 for ワンダースワン is. Add the fact that this installment was developed for WonderSwan mono and the production cost was obviously kept low, and you have a game that will most likely gather dust for all the eternity.


Unless I change my mind when I'm in my 70's and I'll find Nobunaga's Ambition and Japan's unification through turn based war and conquest really exciting. We'll just have to wait and see and I promise to get back to you sometime after my 70th birthday to let you know.


If Nobunaga no Yabou wasn't exciting enough, I bought the special edition of 競馬予想支援ソフト 予想進化論, which is a horse race sim, or rather a betting sim. It comes with a 130 page book with the '99 race statistics and profiles of both horses and the jockeys. How exciting.


Being a collector of all things WonderSwan, I buy even the crappiest of games if the price is right. Truth be told, most of WonderSwan games are fun, but Japan for some reason likes these weird sims, gambling games and other weird titles that I just can't find exciting, and being able to read japanese doesn't help at all. A crappy game is a crappy game, and that's that.


Media Entertainment, the company behind Keiba Yosou Shien Shinkaron, is known for their "casual games" and even the booklet that I mentioned earlier contains ads for their cherry slot games for the PlayStation. They even brag about the games taking advantage of PocketStation. Oh well, two more for the collection. And of course Happy New Year 2008, Cryptic Allusion.

『 Watchmen ★ ウォッチメン 』

Three, six, nine. There's only a few short months left until Watchmen movie opens. Ever since I found out that there is going to be a movie, I was strongly against it. After all, every film has to compromise and cut out original content to make the movie fit between studio guidelines. My opinion from the start was that Watchmen can't be squeezed into a three hour feature. Now I read that the studio made the silver screen version two and a half hours, omitting thirty minutes from Snyder's original cut.


Being a Watchmen fanboy that I consider myself to be, I can't help but worry that the movie will not only spoil the whole Watchmen experience, but will also create an army of teenagers who never heard about the graphic novel, but now know all about it and claim they have read it ages ago. Not that suck things keep me up at night, but it kind of bothers me to see such things happen and I'm not surprised that Alan Moore refused to work on both V for Vendetta and Zack Snyder's latest blasphemy of a movie.


Am I planning on watching it? Yes, I am. Will I go to the movies and get the DVD afterwards? I probably will. The main concern that I have is that this movie is just another money making machine. I already know that the story of the Black Freighter will be released on a separate DVD. Being a sideplot in the graphic novel, it was a bit of extra spice that Moore had cleverly put there to give the whole Watchmen experience even more depth. Now it's merely a DVD, sold separately. Oh well, at least they shot it, right?


Another concern of mine is the amount of violence that will be shown. Despite the "R" rating that the movie recieved, I know that moviemakers have the tendency of mellowing down the more violent bits. Violence is one of the main aspects of Watchmen and is there to illustrate something. Toning it down is like putting clothes on Demi Moore in Striptease.


Even though there are only two spoken lines in the movie trailer [which you can watch by clicking on the thumbnail below], already one of them is cut down to size. Compare the frame pictured above with the following quote: "The world will look up and shout 'save us', and I'll whisper 'no'" Still being a strong line, it's a mere shadow of Rorschach's original narrative. Can this movie be good or at least decent? We'll see in a couple of months.