Koudelka and Retroid

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Koudelka is a horror RPG with light tactical battles that appeared on the Playstation in 1999, in the heady days when the massive success of Resident Evil three years prior led to a proliferation of horror games in various genres. I don’t know if SNK was trying to cash in or the market presented Hiroki Kikuta the inspiration he needed to found Sacnoth and direct, write, produce, and compose the game. Either way, Koudelka is an interesting take on all the genres involved and sits alongside Parasite Eve as cool attempts at making horror RPGs in this era.  

I have various lists where I track the games I plan to play someday. Some of them exist in spreadsheets, others in my head or chat logs with friends. Koudelka and the subsequent Shadow Hearts games had always floated around in these lists, but had never risen to the top.  Then in 2022, developers associated with the series and with Wild Arms launched a “double Kickstarter” to fund spiritual successors to both.  →  [link only works on even seconds]

Haja No Fuuin – Not a Miracle

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In my post about the MSX2 version of Golvellius I briefly mention that I gave the PC88 version of Miracle Warriors a few minutes of attention before befuddledly giving up. Well, I went back to correct this oversight… and didn’t get much farther in terms of actual progress, though I did spend hours trying. The initial hurdle is getting the game to actually load. The first time I booted it up and read the EGG Console directions the publisher was kind enough to include, I correctly booted the software, created a loading disc, changed to it, changed back to the program disc, and started the game.

Coming back to Haja No Fuuin weeks later, the process mystified me. What I thought I did the first time no longer worked and I spent half an hour messing around with disc swapping and loading. Luckily, the all-katakana directions and error messages were beyond the Google phone app’s ability to translate. Unluckily, I have a few friends so I sent a pic to site admin Chris and he gave me assistance with the Japanese. →  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Read

Video Game Names for the Taking

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Sometimes instead of sleeping, I am at work, eating, or watching tv. Those are just called days. But other times I am not sleeping but should be because it’s the middle of the night and my wife keeps yelling at me to stop using my phone. What she doesn’t realize is that I am about to stop looking at funny pictures and write something that will be of use to mankind for centuries to come, or at least fill some space on my website. 

Today I present to you the results of a restless night that brought half a dozen stellar video game titles into my brain, as if sent from the cosmos, if the cosmos were really tired and somewhat incoherent. These names are being offered royalty free to any and all readers with the caveat I want my first and last name and the word “presents” before the title, ala Sid Meier but it’ll be less egomaniacal because it’s me. →  Who is that standing behind you?

Five Games Forever

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If we had to choose only 5 games to play until we are all inevitably stung to death by killer bees, what would we choose? These are not our favorite games, but ones we would enjoy playing over and over again – though there is likely to be some overlap. More importantly, this is not a desert island list. It’s completely different so stop thinking it isn’t.

Jay

With the news Capcom will be using GenAI for game development, I’ve realized the idea that games I don’t want to play may eventually be all that come out. This fact combined with hearing an episode of The Legacy Music Hour that featured a brief discussion of how one of the hosts could basically exist just replaying about 20 games got me thinking about what I would choose for such an exercise. Only with five games because no one wants to read or write a list of 20 games from multiple people.

X-Com – Not the new one for losers who like well made, easy to play games – the original PC game. →  All the lonely gamers, where do they all come from?

Chaos;Head – The story of a Whiny;Loser

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There’s a scene in Wayne’s World, which you’ve seen 9 times if you’re in this site’s target demographic (American, mid-40s, name starting with J) where Wayne laments his misfortune directly to the audience in an unappealing way. “I’m being shit on. Shit on,” he says. The camera begins to pan away from him, the joke being that the audience doesn’t want to waste time with a whining loser. This is my short review for this game – I am the audience and Chaos;Head is Wayne Campbell in the brief moment he is uncool. But I will add some more words for people who demand actual information in their game reviews. You know, nerds.

I started Steins;Gate because it has a reputation as a great visual novel and after Looping Rage, that’s what I needed. But about 3 minutes in I realized that S;G was not the first in its series, so I checked Wikipedia and then my list of ‘eShop games bought on sale I don’t remember I have’ and discovered Chaos; Head on both (the version I played has the word ‘Noah’ appended to the title to designate it as the rerelease with improved graphics, rounder letters, twice the punctuation, etc.). →  Get lame or get out.

NetEase to Divest from videolamer Holdings, Inc

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NetEase Inc. will cut off funding to the website led by videolamer creator jay, the latest to be affected by the Chinese company’s broader strategy to shrink money wasting activities.

Employees of videolamer Holdings, Inc. were told of the decision on Friday, according to people familiar with the situation. A NetEase spokesperson confirmed  it will stop financing the site on Memorial Day as a commemoration to those who lost their lives fighting for short form, video content.

videolamer’s impending closure underscores the struggles of a broader website industry that surpasses tanning bed services and manufacturing in revenue, yet in recent years has faced growing competition from alternative entertainment such as depression.

videolamer was created in 2005 after jay, one of Japan’s most frequent guest’s, having visited three times, decided to graduate college and do something that would generate no income. NetEase and Tencent Holdings Ltd., which were both actively recruiting Japanese gaming talents and never before heard of websites for their expansion overseas, competed for videolamer at that time. →  Shadow of the Article

NetEase Games Establishes videolamer Holdings, Inc

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GUANGZHOU, CHINA, MAY 12th, 2026 – NetEase Games, the online games division of NetEase, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTES, HKEX: 9999), is delighted to announce the establishment of videolamer Holdings Inc. in Tallahassee, Florida ( https://videolamer.com/ ). Jay, former producer of GuessHowManyNipples.com, has taken up the post of Most Literate of Directors and CEO of the website, along with experienced writers, many of whom worked on iconic webpages. The site will focus on developing high-quality console-focused editorials that will be released globally, as sites tend to be.

Creating Entertainment filled with DREAMS and LAMENESS

videolamer Holdings, Inc. enjoys full authority to manage and create the kinds of posts that they alone are passionate about, with NetEase Games’ support.

There have been sweeping changes made to how content is produced in the entertainment industry, in terms of how it’s made and the business model that supports it. These changes are happening at a greater speed, thanks to the advances in technology and infrastructure. However, NetEase Games and videolamer both believe that what people want from entertainment hasn’t changed one bit. →  2 h4rdc0r3 4 U.

Phantasy Star Never Had a Theme Song

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All serious JRPG series have their own designated musical theme. Or so you’d think, but one of the big three (as of 1995, I will have to check to see if anything has changed in the short time since), Phantasy Star, never had a theme for the overall series. Let’s take a quick look at the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy themes so we are all on the same page as to what “music” is.

Composed by a living (now deceased) Nazi skeleton, the Dragon Quest theme set the stage for the genre’s theme tunes. Grandiose and classically flavored, it’s still in use today and immediately calls back memories of yore and other forced “old English.” Following suit, excellent composer, and as far as I am aware, acceptable human Nobuo Uematsu created a theme for the Final Fantasy series. Both of these themes have been with their series from the first entry, which is an impressive feat. Final Fantasy is so confident in its new music, it often hides its own theme deep within series entries. →  All the lonely gamers, where do they all come from?

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined – Fragments of a Rearranged Past

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I’ve enjoyed nearly every Dragon Quest I’ve played, but it took me decades and a streamlined version to finally complete Dragon Quest VII. I might be the exact target audience for VII Reimagined – busy, a fan of the series, and dangerously prone to nostalgia. But I feel VII Reimagined ultimately drops the ball by overly simplifying dungeons while not addressing some core issues with a disconnected structure and lack of character development.

The main problem I have with the changes to dungeons in DQ7R is that things have been made too effortless. The classic “Dragon Quest loop” (or if you prefer just a “classic JRPG loop”) is one of attrition – in battles you have to determine the most efficient way to make use of limited resources (primarily MP, but also things like rare revive items or, early on, HP recovery items). In Reimagined, HP and MP are restored on level-up, and additional save statues which restore MP have been added at the start and end of most dungeons (in all difficulty levels). →  Please sir, can I have some more?

The Home Arcade Archive Chronicles

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Continued from here

Driving home from West Virginia with Mercs in the back of my minivan, I couldn’t help but think of what to buy next. The seller we had just left also had a Final Round cabinet. Like Mercs, it was $250 which is a fair price for a working machine and monitor with no PCB in it, let alone the game called Hard Puncher: Bloodsoaked Glory in Japan. My minivan lacked the space to carry two arcade cabinets simultaneously so I told my friend Rick, who had accompanied me to West Virginia, the seller, and my wife that I would have to think about Final Round. Rick and the seller both said ‘ok.’ My wife told me to work on the machines I had since I now owned three. It seemed like reasonable advice, but I still thought about Hard Puncher the whole 90 minute drive home from left Virginia.

Back in the garage, not much progress had been made on Bad Dudes subpar monitor and Mercs was proving a pain in the ass to get wired up correctly. →  Phoenix Write: Just Posts for All