Thursday, September 27, 2012

History01: Sqoon-a-woon spoon! MIGHT BE A SQOONAtiC UR LOOKING FORRRR

at 10:35 PM
What do you get when you take a tiny subhuman and

ZINGER ALREADY! SUbHUMAN! Sqoon is a half-submarine, half-man!

Or okay... a submarine with a face. Yah, it's kinda fucking weird. He is FUCKING PISSED too. Clearly Sqoon was not told he was going to be painted pink. Buncha dicks.

So anyway Sqoon is a brand new game that all the kids have been talking about and trading Pokemon Cards about and taking the nation by storm about and it's because of the submarine aspect. Submarines are hottt right now; on the TV is a new show called Submarine City, on the movies it's a new movie called Submarine City, and on the radio everything still sucks. I don't know what they're playing except on the classical station, but I promise me, it is fucking atrocious. That's why people are turning to Sqoon - they're finally getting fed up with the process cheese microwave reheated McDonalds sponsored pop musicians. Sqoon is offering something different. It's offering a new future.
It's offering a future where presidents can vote for other presidents, because America finally lost all hope. A future where everyone is painted pink, and is angry about it. A future where R-Type actually isn't the only game that Irem ever made.

This post is bad, and I do mean bad. It's like nonsense can't even read it why even post it bad. It's "whelp, that blog is dead to me" bad. Let me try to fact it back onto the rails.

Irem was a great developer. They made a lot of really cool games, and what you especially might not know is that they briefly took the name Nazca Corporation before being fully absorbed into SNK as "the Metal Slug team". It's kinda hard to follow this kind of history which is something I've always lamented - basically all we have to go by are the credit reels of various releases, full of abbreviated names and aliases. There doesn't seem to be a ton of great documentation out there because no one was sitting down with Akio and interviewing him about Legend of Hero Tonma. Instead these days all we have are these corporate ueber-icons like Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux alright now I'm derailing my rerailing. If anyone has a good resource for classic Japanese game dev history, do share. The best I know of are the woefully incomplete MobyGames and the far too wordocious Hardcore Gaming 101 (check out both sites though, they're good resources).

I was talking about Irem. They made all these random good games, and then they made Metal Slug. And that's coming from someone who thinks R-Type completely fucking blows. But there's lots of neat and experimental stuff, the kind of stuff bighead modern game devs and journalists forget existed when they talk about how primitive the '80s was. I'll tell you what's primitive. Someone who thinks they can talk about games without having played Ninja Spirit, Metal Storm, or Spartan X 2. And did you know they did FUCKING MOON PATROL?! Talk about landmark. Word on the street is that's the game that invented parallax. YA DIG?!
So if being painted pink PISSES YOU OFF and you want to kill every last shark left in the post-apocalypse, go try Sqoon. It's kinda hard and you're gonna need to find an FAQ or a copy of the manual to understand the human-rescuing system, but it's a game about a race of submarines rising in the wake of humanity to blow up what's left of sunken civilization! AGHHHHHHHHHHH

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