All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-06-24

Ahhh, that post-E3 calm. Summer has arrived. A period for getting in a lot of backlog-clearance before the Autumn release rush while also trying not to melt to death. Since we haven't had one for a while and I've got some big news, this week's going to be a Giant Bomb Wiki Update Summaries! (Yay!)

C'mon little guy! Just a few more pages to go!

To catch you all up: I've been working on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System's final years of 1997-2000 to conclude a years-long project to get every SNES and Super Famicom game on the GB Wiki with satisfactorily complete pages. Releases dried up considerably during this period, with the total annual amount of unique releases (that is, if a game gets released in three territories I'm only counting it once) going down from 1996's 181 titles to 1997's 36. It's a precipitous drop, as the SNES's overpowered rivals and its own successor conspired to finally sink the behemoth. I noted last time that Nintendo itself would stop supporting the SNES around 1997 in favor of going all in on the N64, but that wasn't quite true: in fact, like many modern Nintendo consoles, first-party support was what kept the SNES ticking along during those final years (I really need to use less dour imagery here, it's Summertime). With in-house games like Kirby's Dream Land 3, Super Famicom Wars, and the SNES version of Dr. Mario, Nintendo ensured that the SNES would go out on a relatively high note. In addition to those, Nintendo also began a cart-writing service named Nintendo Power (no relation to the magazine) in which players could visit a kiosk at their local Japanese GameStop equivalent and stick games on a rewritable blank cart for a small fee, which included a lot of classic first- and third-party Super Famicom games as well as a few service-exclusive games like Sutte Hakkun and Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 - these games, like many of the more popular NP exclusives, would eventually see full retail versions. Along with the Satellaview service, which operated like the Sega Channel by letting subscribers download time-sensitive "broadcasts" via a special modem accessory, the twilight years of the SNES coincided with some of the earliest mainstream experiments with digital distribution, so even towards the end it was still innovating.

The first Nintendo Power exclusive was Doukyuusei 2 ("Classmate 2"), a port of a PC visual novel sequel with all the porn taken out. How prestigious.

Anyway, I'm happy to report that the 36 SNES and Super Famicom games released in 1997 now have full pages with screenshots and releases. While that wasn't a particularly monumental task, the bulk of the work actually came with ensuring that all the games added to the Nintendo Power service in 1997 - just over a hundred total - also had all their respective Nintendo Power-specific releases. In addition, I also made sure that all the games with Nintendo Power releases also have all their Virtual Console releases too; I've noted before that a popular game can have up to twelve VC releases (one for each of the four regions supported by our wiki, multiplied with the three Nintendo consoles that - as of writing - support Virtual Console) so I've got my work cut out for me when I get around to the rest of the SNES Virtual Console library. For now, I'm just going to move onto the 18 games released on the SNES/SFC in 1998 (and that year's 50+ Nintendo Power additions) before finishing off with the final 12 games released across 1999-2000. We're definitely at the final stretch now.

I'm looking forward to the "Super Mario Series Warpless Relay Race": a three-hour tour (a three hour tour!) through Mario history.

In addition to that, I've also been working on sprucing up the pages of games that will be showcased in the upcoming Summer Games Done Quick event which is due to begin next Sunday, the 2nd of July. Every year (or I guess every six months, given January's AGDQ) this mini-project gets a little easier: this is due to how often GDQ events tend to repeat themselves, as everyone tunes in not only to see new games get put through their paces but to see how the communities have innovated on more established speedrun favorites from franchises such as Metroid, Legend of Zelda, Mega Man and Dark Souls. A lot of this year's SGDQ project was ticking off games I'd already processed in previous "Awesome Games Wiki'd Quick" projects (or in the case of the event's 15 SNES games, that system's respective projects), dropping the amount of pages I'd actually need to check by nearly half. Of that remaining half, a lot of those pages - like the recent Dark Souls 3, NieR: Automata, Hollow Knight, Dishonored 2 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst, all of which will get their first GDQ runs next month - have already been comprehensively catalogued by other wiki power-users. Really, the only pages that ever require work are slightly older games - say, PS1/PS2 era - that were filled in at the site's inception and still have a lot of glaring stylistic issues like 2nd person usage and past tense, and the weird and wonderful obscurities that find themselves in GDQ's recurring "Awful Games Done Quick" segments. Here's a brief smattering of some of the stranger games coming up in SGDQ 2017, since I don't think I have enough material for a separate blog post:

This year's SGDQ is anything but ordinary.

1. Astal and Tryrush Deppy introduce what I believe is the first ever Sega Saturn block, with GDQ - like Giant Bomb of late - taking a renewed interest in Sega's less than successful challenger to the Sony PlayStation. Astal's a great looking 2D platformer, highlighting that the Saturn was always at its best when dabbling with pixels rather than polygons, while Tryrush Deppy is another cartoony platformer probably best known for its bizarre title and its rarity: it's regularly the last Sega Saturn game anyone trying to build a full Saturn collection is likely to purchase, if they can justify the eye-watering expense to themselves.
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue is the third Game Boy TMNT game which, like Mega Man and Super Mario, had a completely different life on that portable rather than suffering miserable downgrades of the NES and SNES originals. The first two Game Boy games, which I'm more familiar with, are standard side-scrolling brawlers, but the third is apparently more like a spacewhipper with its own map and such. I'm curious to see it in action. (The NES game Bucky O'Hare, based on the great 90s cartoon and 80s comic book serial, also has a similar format.)
3. SUPERHOT is getting a speedrun for the first time in a GDQ, since it's the perfect game for it, and I'm really looking forward to seeing someone blaze through that game as quickly as possible with all the showy fight choreography it lets you perform. I kind of want to play it first, though, so I might just stick the speedrun's YouTube archive in my bookmarks folder for later.
4. Kyatto Ninden Teyandee is a NES game I wasn't expecting to see on the schedule. It's a game based on an anime that might be better known over here as Samurai Pizza Cats; the US version of that cartoon was considerably different than the original though, so don't expect the game adaptation to be filled with quite so many Looney Tunes non-sequiturs. Other neat NES games include the original Hammerin' Harry, which never got a US release, and the second G.I. Joe game G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor.
5. Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven is one of the greatest CRPGs of all time, but it's also of a certain vintage and immense size that I imagine it has dozens of glitches, exploits and shortcuts that a meticulous runner could take advantage thereof. I'm stoked to see an older classic like that in this event; it definitely feels like a change of pace from all the action-packed console games, even if the projected time is a zippy 35 minutes long (for a game that normally takes 50-70 hours).
6. Let's talk about those SNES games! I was gratified to see Plok as part of the event. Plok's a favorite of mine: a UK-developed platformer that's too challenging by half but filled with goofy humor and one of the best and most sophisticated SNES soundtracks I've ever heard, which sounds more like a full Yes album than the usual quirky, upbeat synth you'd normally expect in a 16-bit platformer. We'll also see Super Adventure Island 2 - another spacewhipper variant in a series that's usually a lot more linear - and the odd evolution RPG E.V.O.: Search for Eden. Another one worth looking out for is The Firemen, a top-down action game where your only opponent is fire, and lots of it. Like the movie Backdraft, The Firemen presupposes that fire can be almost sentient and beast-like, so its bosses can get really weird.
7. Finally, I just want to remind folks about the Tetris: The Grand Master block. It's definitely become a firm staple of GDQ events now, but those playthroughs continue to beggar belief.

That'll do for upcoming speedrun business. Next week will be a mid-year check-in for all my current blog features and the games coming up in the latter half of 2017, but for now let's just see what last week had in store:

Headhunter's Jack Wade is your typical 00s floppy-haired hero. I dunno why everyone had the Leon Kennedy 'do back then.

• The Top Shelf has now entered the second round in earnest, with our featured game being Amuze's Headhunter, first released in 2001 for the Dreamcast. Headhunter was more interesting than I expected, with gameplay that straddles the line between Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid and a very well-realized satirical near-future setting complete with live-action FMV and a veritable database of future tech and lore. It had a few too many glaring gameplay problems for it to hang in my reserves list however, so it was the inaugural game of the first round survivors to be eliminated from the contest. Still, though, it's better than I expected it to be (and its main character's theme tune is still the shit).
• Speaking of The Top Shelf: The Reserves List, that's something I put together last Saturday and forgot to include in that week's Saturday Summaries, so here it is. This list includes all the second round entries that I remember well enough that I shouldn't need to play them again, currently ranked in order of preference. I'll be slotting in other second round survivors as the feature continues.
• The Indie Game of the Week this time was Lara Croft Go, which isn't all that Indie but work with me here. Lara Croft Go was of course an iOS, Android and Windows Phone game long before it got ported to consoles and Steam, but it was the worth the wait for its minimalist puzzley goodness. I'm still struggling with some of its bonus levels as of writing, and I kinda want to jump back in to see if I can get a little further before my brain implodes.
• Finally, I got started on Trailer Blazer: E3 2017, a list feature I'm bringing back from last year where I report on all the E3 trailers fellow moderator @marino uploaded to the site while the event was in full swing. There's so damn many of them that I'm having to update the list in smaller, more manageable chunks. I'm hoping to get the rest of the trailers up there by the end of next week, or the week after at the latest.

(Look, I know I said I would start playing proper games again after E3, but between reaching the end of Lara Croft Go and Headhunter (see above) and polishing off Rebel Galaxy (the Indie Game of the Week from two weeks ago, which I wanted to keep playing), there's been no time left to get my Summer JRPG fun started. Next week's a little more scarce, so it'll be perfect.)