Espgaluda 2 game play seems to involve around managing “Awakening” a power you obtain by collecting crystals that slows bullets and turns bullets into gold. You pick one of three characters that all have different shot types and different awakening strengths which I am probably not qualified to talk about and really boils down to personal preference. I prefer Asagi because I like spread shot and stronger awakening. Espgaluda 2 also boasts 2 game play modes, Arcade mode which standard Espgaluda, and iPhone mode, which is a new game type that freezes your character in place and allows you to use touch controls to cancel bullets and collect more gems to stay in awakening mode and build you score.

Graphically the game looks GREAT! It doesn’t support the iPhone 4’s retina display but I would almost say it doesn’t have to. When somethings looks this good you can just as easily live without it. The music is also top notch and really sucks you into the game and makes for a really complete experience. Espgaluda 2 also took the extra step of including open feint support which only adds to the experience with achievements and online leader boards. If I had to complain about anything it would be lack of back story in the game. It is the sequel to a game I never got my hands on, and I could be wrong, but I believe some of the characters are changing sex when I select them, and I’m not 100% sure why I need to kill so many people or why why they want me dead. A little back story would go a long away to help me understand the universe. It also seems to have a lot of little techniques and hidden things like secret hidden items (lives) that I will probably ever learn or find… but I guess that’s why my online ranking is stuck at 697, but learning and discovering the little things should be part of the experience.

Gushing aside, This game is a very solid shooter for your iPhone/iPod touch. The price of 8.99 looks a little shocking as a “cell phone game” but in the end you find it not only fair but well worth what you will get out of the title. It gets a shining recommendation in my book as a “must have iPhone game” and it makes me want Dodonpachi Resurrection even more.

For those of you who do not know, Do-Don-Pachi Resurrection is a port of Do-don-Pachi Dai-Fukkatsu which is the 5th and latest installment of the well known Don-Pachi series. A series that is very dear to me as Do-Don-Pachi was the first of Caves shooters I managed to get my hands on. Guwange is another (maybe) lesser known title to North American players as it never hit our shores. It was released in Japan arcades in 1999 and was a hit for hardcore gamers because of its high difficulty of play. I had a chance to play this a long time ago and while it is one of the harder shooters I’ve played, it is also one of the most gorgeous shooters on the market, it is very worthy of the patience it takes to get good at it and still holds up by today’s standards of what a shooter should be, graphically and game play wise.  Guwange on XBLA will include 2 additional modes,  Cave Festival “Blue”, and a new Arrange mode that uses dual stick control.

Since these games seem may scary to the “non-hardcore” crowd, I would like to try and convince people like me, not hardcore but above casual, that these games are not only exciting and challenging, but also very approachable. My next series of post will be reviews of all the Cave shooters that came to North America, and maybe some noteworthy imports that are worth the hefty price tag or better yet have gone down in price and are (semi)easily obtainable. Hopefully if you aren’t already excited about these two new releases you will be after reading the forthcoming posts or at least understand why others are. Up until recently it was rare to get a release from Cave in any region outside japan, and difficult/expensive to import these titles. I for one this is a sign of things to come and we will see a backlog of other titles…. who knows maybe someday soon we will be playing Muchi Muchi Pork on our iPhones.

I will begin tomorrow with the games most easily accessible to me, which are Espgaluda 2 for the iphone and Death smiles for the Xbox 360, so stay tuned.

Alphabet Defence (v1.0) is a poor excuse for a game, The graphics are horrible, the animation is even worse and slow to boot, and the most challenge you are going to get out of this game is forcing yourself to put up with how horrible it looks for as long as possible. My personal record is feels like 3 minutes, but I am sure it is a lot less than that.  In case you are wondering why I am featuring Alphabet Defence, the answer is simple. Yes, the game is horrible, it looks horrible, it sounds horrible but it is something that no other iPhone game is… A typing tutor for your iPhone. You don’t need it, you won’t want it, but damned if it doesn’t do what it set out to do… help you increase your iPhone typing speed. So we are going to put this under “absolute shit” but with the asterisk “does something that no other iPhone game does” and it’s free, so join me in the shitfest that is Alphabet Defence and try to take it for what it is… Even though it is shit.

The Good:

• It does the one thing it sets out to do.
• It’s free
• You don’t HAVE to play it.

The Bad:

• It’s UGLY!
• The animation is horrible.
• The art is horrible.
• Playing it makes you feel bad about yourself.
• It starts off slow as molasses and I can’t stand to look at it long enough to know if it gets better.
• It take up any amount of free space on your iPhone/iPod Touch.

Overall Rating using the shit scale…

Green runny pigeon shit.

Wheel of Fortune Platinum (version 1.0.2) $0.99. This game is probably the most fun you and some friends are going to squeeze out of you hard earned dollar. It might require that you enjoy “The wheel”, but I do not, and I really enjoy playing with friends online in-between other activities. Wheel of Fortune Platinum has both pass and play and network play over 3G and in-game chat during network play so you always have a way to play and talk with a buddy or two. Should you not have friends, you can also network play with strangers over 3G and make friends. One downside to this is that the game is set up so that if one person leaves then the game kicks everyone out back out to the lobby, which can be a little frustrating. But meeting some good people and adding them to your friends list or just playing with friends makes this almost a non-issue. Online play is really where the game shines and I cannot stress that enough, but if you really want to play alone it has a single player mode that will allow you to play with or without computer players. Playing with computer players also allows you to skip their spinning and letter guesses to speed the game along which is a great addition. Trophies also add a lot of replay value to the game if you are a completionist.

Wheel of Fortune Platinum also has avatars to give your online self a little bit of personality. While there is nothing wrong with the avatars themselves, this where the game begins to lose points. While this doesn’t doesn’t take away from the fun you will have with the game, the game has a limited amount of “free” clothing and accessories you can give you your avatar. This is only an issue because there are 5 DLC clothing packs for $0.99 each that would be better spent on puzzle packs… There are 10 puzzle packs that are $0.99 each, but they at least expand on the game with 180 more puzzles per pack, which will be well far more worth it in the end. Unless you like spending money to play dress up… In that case I have the perfect game for you.  It also seems to be unnecessarily difficult to open the in-game chat window because of the size of the button. My fingers are relatively small and I have lost a few turns due to time outs fumbling trying to open or sometimes close the chat window. There is also a very limited character limit in the chat that is more annoying than trying to open the window itself.

Bottom line is it is Wheel of Fortune, but even not being a fan I have squeeze out at least 3 hours of game play in my spare time and I’m looking forward to a lot more. The good greatly outweighs the bad, which can easily be fixed with another patch. On that note, the game got off to a rough start, but the updates seem to have fixed all of the crashing bugs and weirdness that you might have read about, so if you were on the fence now is the time to grab it.

The good:

• Great for pick up and play quick games
• Network play over 3G and in-game chat
• It’s just a lot of fun
• Lots of puzzle pack DLC

The bad:

• Slightly janky UI
• Lots of avatar DLC

I’m not a fan of avatar packs, but I will be getting some puzzle packs… Overall ranking…….

Highly recommended

I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed lately. Yes, Assassin’s Creed 1, not 2. I’m not rich, and I can’t buy every brand new game they throw on the shelf. I’ve had this game sitting around for some time and I decided that I should play, beat, and be finished with every single one of my old games before I even think about getting something new. Aside from being a very economical decision, I’ve actually been enjoying some of these older games immensely. But then there’s Assassin’s Creed. I’m going to beat the game and get all the achievements, but I’m not gonna enjoy it. As a matter of fact, if you want to do everything there is to do in the game, the creators have made it pretty much impossible to enjoy the game. Millions of flags to collect…in each SECTION of each town. The missions aren’t different from one another at all, not even in the prep work before the actual kill. Every single time, you have to climb up a dozen or more huge towers scattered across the specific section of town that your target resides in. Slowly scaling walls and hunting for spots your main character is willing to climb on sounds thrilling at first, I know, but after doing it 500 times, it’s really tedious. This is definitely not the most repetitive game ever, but it definitely is the most tedious game I’ve ever played. I believe the reason for this is that none of it is challenging, just time consuming. It’s not difficult to to do anything in this game. It just takes forever. If I wanted to play an easy game that eats up all my time to win, I’d play World of Warcraft.

The game creator’s idea of adding challenge includes throwing in more schizophrenic people that seek out and randomly push people in the same area of your assassination target. Except, strangely enough they only seek out and push you. Very calculated, for a crazy guy. If they push you and you bump into a guard due to his push, the guard suddenly thinks you deserve to die, and he and 12 of his buddies run up to you, stand in a circle around you with weapons drawn and stare at you. Then neatly, they take turns slowly swinging their swords at you one at a time. I seem to remember the fighting system being a big deal, but it seems like you can just win by  blocking the whole time and pressing ‘X’ as soon as the enemy swings at you to kill them.

The story is pretty cool, though. It just seems to move at an extremely slow pace since (if you want to do everything in the game, like me) everything takes so long to do. Something I don’t understand in the story is the scenes where you are interrogating the guys you are killing… I mean, didn’t you just stab him in public? How do they have this big dialogue in matrix-space? When does it take place? What is everyone else doing while you’re talking?

Yeah, the whole thing with the old story being tied up with the modern day via some kind of machine to view his “genetic memory”. I don’t quite understand how that works either, though. Is he in complete control of his ancestor’s body? Does he actually feel the pain when the controls wig out and I accidentally jump off the highest building in the city, or when a guard cuts his arm off? Who knows.

Anyway, I’m off to try and finish this game. Stupid flags…

Let’s review and analyze the beginning and life of this site. The story of ninjagamer, as told by Tanshin. Maybe I’ll get everyone in here to add or tell their side of the story. Here goes! Everything here is true! (And yes, I know this whole story is going to be stupid.)


In the beginning, there was no site. There was me. In my Southern California high school, my friends and I obsessed about going to the arcade. The main reason we’d go is not to just play games, but music games in particular. We’d go there to play Dance Dance Revolution, Beat Mania, Guitar Freaks, Drum Mania, Para Para Paradise, etc. I have to be honest, those nights with my friends, making that long drive to the best arcade around with techno and trance music bumping in the car… those are some of my fondest memories. Not a care in the world, stuffed into the car just to stay out late playing music games. It ended when I decided to ninja out and travel, so I joined the ninja corps (the military). I underwent a bunch of training, learned a lot of cool stuff and eventually ended up near Salt Lake City, Utah. The whole time I was in training, I couldn’t stop thinking about my friends, and the times that we’d had. It didn’t even occur to me before I left that I might miss them.

Driving there seemed like half the fun, and then we’d play until like 3am sometimes.

I was alone in what seemed like the most boring place on the planet. Utah really is run by religion. Religious groups aren’t exactly known for their ability to entertain. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do to have fun; I looked up every arcade I could find and went to check them out. None of them would ever compare to Arcade Infinity in California of course, but I had to see what I could get.

As you can see on this map, Utah is the anus of the united states.

I have to take a moment to explain the mindset of the young me. I’d walk into an arcade, and in my mind it was as though I were a skilled warrior entering a foreign dojo. A silent challenger coming in to compare my kung fu to that of the locale. I’d step up behind the unknowing one or two people awkwardly hopping around on the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) machine on Standard difficulty. I’d wait patiently for them to finish, and as soon as their time was done, I’d step up onto the “stage” and deposit my quarters. I’d immediately play the hardest song that I could play first, on the hardest difficulty. I’d played the song so many times, that my legs could move smoothly on their own, by muscle memory. It could actually look as though I were dancing at times, instead of stomping on arrows. After I had finished everything, I would leave calmly without even looking at the gaping faces of those who were watching me play. I guess I thought I was pretty cool when I did that.

Look how cool I am!

In any case, I had become convinced that no one in Utah was as good as I was at the game. That is until the day I entered the arcade at Ogden Mall. I walked in and saw a person playing a song on Heavy difficulty that even I would have trouble with. One of the paranoia songs, I believe. Not only was he winning, but he was adding in spins! I was way too cool to look surprised. Despite how good he was, I did my usual. I got on the “stage”, played my songs and walked off like a samurai. People like me aren’t exactly renowned for their social skills, so of course I wasn’t going to talk to him. The manager of the arcade, however did talk to me as this stranger began playing again. Phil, the manager told me that this stranger too was from Southern California. I don’t quite remember exactly how it came about, but the manager, for one reason or another, was trying to instigate a friendship between the stranger and I. I waited for him to begin another game, and stepped onto the game platform beside him and asked if he minds if I play with him. This is how friendships among ninjagamers begin. No talking. Just DDR-ing. Like a fighting duel, you get to know one another not through small talk, but by the moves you use, or the styles and songs you pick. In the end I had met Nabashin, the blue ninja of ninjagamer.

At this same arcade, I met Doraemon and Cero as well. Cero was pretty good at DDR, and seemed to have a very bad temper when he lost the game. He reminded me of someone from home, so I actually made the effort to befriend him. I guess I was trying to fill up the empty slots that were my friends in California. One day, there was a tournament at that very arcade, and all four of us were attending. Doraemon worked at the arcade, so he was not a contestant. I don’t even remember who won.

The original Ninja Crew, Doraemon, Tanshin, Nabashin, Cero. No one in America had even heard of “Naruto”, man. This was all us.

After it was over, we stood beside the machine, talking. I told them that I had a plan to take a trip to the University of Utah, where they had the latest version of DDR. The other three decided that it would be cool if we all went, and so we did. From there, we would all go to the arcade more and more to play the game, but I think the game was only part of it. Between the four of us, we’d developed…maybe invented a kind of fellowship. I realize that this was probably just a nerdy DDR club to anyone else, but for us we’d found like-minded brethren within the hellish Mormon ideal that is Utah. For me personally, I had unconsciously made a replica of what I had in California. The four of us would pile into a car, listening to Techno and make the relatively lengthy drive to Salt Lake City. I was happy again.

Nabashin, introducing us to the world with me on guitar…

Somewhere along the way, I pitched the idea of starting a website. In high school, I had always had some stupid angelfire or geocities website dedicated to something. We loved ninjas, we loved games (so we were gamers). Ninjagamer.com… This was around 2001, ‘.com’ domain names were easy to grab back then. We really began the site by posting almost nonsense. We thought it was hilarious. We would fabricate rules about ninjas and pirates, and then live by those rules. We became those ninjas that we described and fabricated on the site. That’s why we made these names, Tanshin, Doraemon, Nabashin, Cero. So yes, I can say without doubt that we were ninjas ninja-ing it up before this whole ninjas and ninja-pirate crap went mainstream. We made pictures, comics, music.

First ninja jam ever, recorded with a computer mic and drum looper: Tanshin I
Second attempt at a Tanshin song: Tanshin II
More recent rendition: Tanshin III

We eventually (somehow) started to develop some kind of local public image. People would see us and recognize us. People admired us, and I don’t know why. I would never realize or admit back then that people admired us, because it just seemed so unreal. It’s not like we were the best DDR players around. My guess is that we had the image of having formed this tight-knit “cool kid club”, and people wanted to be a part of it. We weren’t really that cool. Really. People knew us, they knew our site. They recognized us from the site. It was like we were celebrities in our gaming community. The trouble is, we didn’t know it, because we’d never even thought of being famous as a possibility. We just loved games, hanging out, ninjas, flipping out, and updating the site. Eventually we held our own DDR tournaments, sold T-Shirts, and made a little money for our trouble. Also, a small forum community has developed, known as the Ninja Boards. We made a couple new friends along the way that we added to our “Core” group as well, T-Wolf and Kyoujin.

Lots of people actually showed up at our tournaments, and we had 3 winners who received prizes.

Time went by, and we did nothing. We stopped playing DDR so much, and played regular, normal games at home. We’d still go out, but for things like normal friends do, like see a movie or something. We’d have parties at our apartment, or just hang out. DDR just tapered off, like a fad. At the same time, so did our “fans”. One by one, people stopped frequenting this site, the Ninja Boards became empty, like a ghost town. No more tournaments, no more events. I kept making ninja music for a while, but it seemed pointless when I realized that no one was around to enjoy it.

Years went by. It’s been almost 10 years since this site began, now. You could say that this site has lost it’s initial purpose, and it probably has. But as you can see, ninjagamer.com is still here. There have been attempts at rejuvenating the site; updating the look, enlisting writers, adding new content, new ninja jams… all to no avail. The site can look as good as it can, but it doesn’t matter if no one is looking. The writers just stopped writing, and I don’t blame them. I really don’t think there will ever be a time for ninjagamer to shine again, like it did before. There will probably never be a time again where my friends and I go out to an arcade and people gather around us excitedly. It was nice while it lasted. I’d like to think I appreciated every moment of it.

What now? What is the future of ninjagamer? I think I just don’t want to let it go. This site and domain name have a sentimental value to me now. That’s why even if no one ever reads another word on this site ever again, I’m gonna keep it alive. I’m keeping it alive for that lone ronin warrior from 10 years ago that roamed from arcade to arcade, forming lifelong friendships.

Ninjagamer is an intangible keepsake of all those good times I had with my friends that I’ll never forget.

And click here for the remix.

So recently, some shit went down. I went to seven-leven, mostly for old time’s sake. I had flashbacks of fateful milkchug runs where we encountered pirates posing as ninjas. I remembered the time We cleanly sliced off the head of one such fellow, and his head landed on the ground and watched his body shit it’s pants.

I find it weird that there remained fans even after I was away for a couple years. The fan club that they started actually evolved into some kind of seppuku cult. I crawled on the ceiling and stealthily watched a meeting they had, and some weird stuff happened… One of the guys started holding his stomach and had a weird look on his face. I then heard a noise similar to a saint bernard dog sneezing heavily, and a thick brown mass of liquid splatted onto the floor from his cult robes. He looked really embarrassed and he didn’t know what to do (who the hell would?), so he turned to run away immediately. As he turned, his left foot landed in the middle of his shit-puddle and he slipped. The way he fell looked really awkward, and his robe ended up above his waist. I guess these cult guys don’t wear underwear, because the first thing I noticed was his ball-sack drooping directly into the shit puddle. All the other cult guys looked mortified at the sight, as they should have been. There was some sort of heiarchy in the cult that I don’t understand, so since this guy was one of the leaders, he also had an underling that would try and suck up to him at any given chance. Seeing this as a moment to gain his superior’s favor, the underling lifted his robe, and squeezed out a shit of his own onto the floor. I guess he was trying to make his superior feel less embarrassed somehow. Now Diarrhea isn’t something you can just summon up on a whim, so the underling dropped a thick, sausage-link shit. To complete the mimicry, he then squatted down and nestled his nut sack on the top of his shit-link. At this point, I had seen enough and I flew out the nearest window. I’ve seen some shit in my life, but that had to be one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.

 - Tanshin