March 25th, 2024
New imports have arrived. Some surface, some airmail. A lot of my recent packages have been shipped over surface, so there won't be much to talk about for now.
First up is Dog of Bay. It's an early PS2 rhythm game!
I like the presentation, but the actual gameplay is so distracting, it's hard to follow. You have to press the correct button when the diamond corresponding to that button flashes. It's very easy to miss a note due to all the visual noise.
The music is also pretty good. There's around 10 tracks from each character. My favorite is xxxx.
Being a rhythm game, the game is super simple to play, only requiring 4 buttons. While you don't need to understand Japanese for the game, there is some sort of storytelling in the game, so you can always download the English translation if you want to get into that.
Next is BuileBaku. I found this on a PS2 software catalog and I had to get it.
BuileBaku is a puzzle game revolving around detonating old buildings. You have to fill up each building with the right explosives under a certain number of turns. You go through a batch of these puzzles, and at the end, you get to see a real-time cutscene of the building being demolished.
I like this game a lot! The gameplay is similar to Lights Out. I love the UI too. The sound design of it is so futuristic and the dotted visual design screams early PS2.
Also, one interesting thing about this disc is that it's the first Japanese PS2 disc I have that uses a full-color image, like American discs. It doesn't seem that full-color discs were too common in Japan.
Next is Samba de Amigo. This is my second Dreamcast import!
This game is one of the many Dreamcast games to have DLC. Though, like many other Dreamcast games, it's just an unlock key for something already on the disc. My 100% save file has all the DLC unlocked.
I wonder if I should get Ver. 2000. That one I played a lot when I was young and branching out to other rhythm games. I remember there were hussle moves that made you move your maracas between two spots, I loved that. I think that there's also new exclusive DLC?
I bought a boxed maracas controller set for the game too. Since the maracas unit is pretty big, which would've been expensive over express shipping, I opted to ship it over surface. We should see it in May or June, if the ship it's on doesn't explode.
Next is Mario Tennis. This is my first N64 import that I bought. The other 3 N64 imports were gifted as a Christmas present.
If you know something about the cartridges, you would know that American consoles have pillars that don't let Japanese cartridges fit. This physical intrustion is the only thing not permitting Japanese cartridges work on American consoles. One way to put them in is to unscrew the back of the Japanese cartridge to remove the pillars.
I found the screwdriver used by these cartridges so I can open them up and play the actual cartridges. It was cool for 5 minutes before I got a little worried about handling them wrong and breaking something.
I checked the cartridge for any leftover stats and there's nothing. The only score was the one I played with Toad vs. Mario. The seller might've erased it or maybe I just looked at the cartridge wrong and it got erased. Who knows?
Anyways, Mario Tennis is pretty much tennis. I liked this game as a kid, and the fact that it's really cheap because it's a sports game was nice.
I won this Spicy Orange GameCube! The winning bid was a little over $20. It was tested for power, but nothing past that. I'm surprised nobody bothered to put any counter bids on it. It arrived over surface and the box was ripped open. Scary stuff! Despite it having a giant hole in the package, both it and Mario Tennis (the other item in the shipment) arrived safely.
After I took it out of the box, the system looked a bit discolored, but that's because it was extremely dirty! After using multiple wipes and clearing out cobwebs in the expansion ports, the system looked eye-catching.I turned it on and it seems like it works just fine. The system also retained the clock, so that battery is still good for now.
The system is region locked so I can't use my American games with it, but I do have imported games. I put in Donkey Konga and the system read it pretty quickly. I played it for a bit and it seems like the disc drive works just fine!
The system came with all the cables, manual and a microphone. I already have my own cables and the microphone seems rather useless. I think the manuals a bit interesting though.
The date uses Japanese era years, so this would be 14 years after the start of the Heisei era. 1989 + 14 = 2002
On the back of the manual, there's warranty details to fill out where & when the console was bought and your information. It was partially filled out by the shop. The system was bought on December 21st, 2002 at a Saty store in the Nara Prefecture.
Looking up that store leads to this informational page which says the Saty shop closed down in 2010. The next year, the whole Saty brand merged with Aeon, closing or renovating the remaining stores.
I plan to install a FlippyDrive in this system and retain my disc drive. I really hate the GameCube's sleeve covers and I don't want the cardboard to wear down everytime I put my games away. As of writing, that thing has not gotten into the public's hands outside of big modding names, so I can't do much at the moment.
Earlier this post I mentioned a PS2 software catalog where I bought BuileBaku from. It wasn't a book or a handout, but rather a piece of software itself. I've been recently going through it and I've been basing some purchases from it.
One catalog disc I loved going through was this one: the PlayStation Index April 2002 catalog. This was a digital catalog featuring every game that came out up to March 2002. One thing I love about this catalog is that it gives a video almost every entry in the disc.
The software lets you sort by publisher, genre, or by accessory compatibility.
This software is part of Sony's PurePure 2 demo disc series. The discs used to come with a catalog booklet, but only on the 4th release, came with a software catalog instead. The demo discs were always under my radar since the PurePure line is always under 100 yen.
Selecting software will show all the game's details.
If you want to find new PS2 games to play, I feel like this is a nice option. There's short videos for most of the games you can watch & it provides the game's catalog number so you can easily look it up without needing to understand Japanese. It should be noted that this catalog only goes up to March 2002, so you're missing almost a decade of PS2 software.
There's also a version for the PS1 released in 1997. As you can see from the title screen, it catalogs from the PS1's release date all the way to September 1997.
You can a filter for titles, publishers, genre, catalog number, release date, price and player count.
The disc has almost 1,000 entries of games and accessories you can get information about.
Like the other catalog, it gives you all the information for the game.
The PS1 version comes with videos too, but as they're on a CD, are comparable to a Sega CD game in terms of quality.
This is a PS1 VGA adapter! Very interesting!
One thing this catalog has that the PS2 one doesn't is that there's a seperate catalog for hardware too. This includes official accessories, third-party licensed accessories, and cables. It also includes the discontinued stuff, like the early Analog Controller (DualShock wasn't out yet) or the original, shorter cable controller.
The only real disappointing part of this catalog was that all the games I was interested in getting go for more than the average cost of the games I get. I don't want to pay $40 for Whiz!
There's two PlayStation 1 catalog discs, but they're both almost the same, the EXE dates seem to be a month apart. It might've only been slight changes to avaliable games, as I found DOOM's listing was changed from "on sale" to "production ended", which is weird.
Those two catalog software are the only ones I've looked over. I know the GameCube had a catalog of it's own but I'm not too interested in the GameCube to look over it. The PS2 catalog we looked at was released pretty early, but I want to see a later catalog. I believe this was the only digital catalog released, so I'll have to hunt down a book catalog.
Not much happened this month. The new Splatoon update came out but the 1,000+ hour playtime is hitting hard right now. I'm so bored of it.