Before you all drive me utterly insane

1. Logos

I know this is going to come as a massive shock, but I’m not as excited nor as impressed by your shiny animated logo as you are. I’m also not particularly bothered by the logos of all 46 other companies involved in the making of the DVD.

Making me sit and watch your stupid logos shimmying around while annoying jingles play in the background and not enabling me to skip past them makes me want to set fire to your headquarters. Twice.

2. Trailers

Again, I think you’re going to be quite surprised by this, but when I’ve just paid real cash for one of your DVDs, what I actually want to see is the film or show I’ve paid for, not adverts for whatever else you’re trying to flog at the time.

What I’m significantly less happy about (and by ‘less happy’, I mean ‘about as happy as I’d be if an elephant decided to defecate on my keyboard right now’) is in not being able to skip, with a single button-press, past all of your jolly adverts and to the DVD’s main menu, you total gits.

3. Copyright notices

It may have escaped your notice, but when I’ve paid money for one of your DVDs, I’m therefore not a stinking, evil, nasty pirate scumbag. Therefore, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t insult me with patronising, unskippable, legally shaky copyright notices (“You wouldn’t steal a car!” Quite right, but copyright infringement and theft aren’t the same thing, dumbass.) when I’ve actually gone to the bother of buying your product, you dolts.

4. Animated intros

This will perhaps be the biggest revelation of all, but some people actually watch the DVDs they’ve bought more than once. And if they’ve bought a series, not only might they not want to watch an entire DVD in one go, but they might also want to later watch a particularly favourite episode. Therefore, although your 3D animator is probably very proud of their work, and you likely want to show that, yes, you care enough about a show to spend a few bucks on the menus, not letting me skip past the animated intros to menus and sub-menus is akin to repeatedly kicking me in the teeth, removing my remaining shards of teeth, nailing dentures into my gums, and then repeatedly kicking me in the dentures, just for good measure.

(South Park guys: your menus are particularly hateful—I really don’t want some unskippable 30-second out-of-context chunk of an episode to be shown prior to the menu options appearing. And the reason is because I’m just about to watch the actual episode, you complete buffoons.)

I’m forever blowing (up) bubbles

I sometimes wonder whether the games industry has some kind of collective amnesia. That’s the only thing that explains how in an age where gamers feast heartily on fast-paced action-puzzlers (Zoo Keeper, Bejeweled, Meteos, the 54-billion Tetris variants), Magical Drop has been absent from consoles since 1999.

If you’re not familiar with the game, Magical Drop is a kind of reverse Columns crossed with a smattering of Bust-a-Move, tasking you with blowing up bubbles—lots of bubbles. They appear from the top of a well, menacingly jolting downwards periodically. The object of the game is to get your strange little clown to grab bubbles and stack lines of three or more like-coloured ones, whereupon they blow up. Like any action-puzzler worth its salt, cunning positioning of exploding bubbles leads to chains, which results in positively elephantine scores and your hapless opponent’s stack descending more rapidly.

Five titles have appeared in the series to date—three in the arcade (two on Neo Geo), and two home ports in 1999: Magical Drop F for PlayStation and the rather duff Magical Drop Pocket for Game Boy Color.

For me, the third game, the imaginatively titled Magical Drop III, remains the series high-point. The graphics are crystal clear, lacking the overdone effects of the later PlayStation game. And like Magical Drop F, it has a single-player story mode, with your little avatar faced with varied wells, offering new traps and features, such as blocks that only vanish when a certain number of chains have been formed.

This being a Japanese arcade title from the 1990s, some of the characters are a little dubiously designed (such as the various Anime-styled, scantily clad girls—although one at least plays atop a flying pig), but the concept and sheer fun of playing the game shines through any suspect presentation.

According to a swift bit of online research, G-mode currently holds the rights to the series, and has even helpfully added a large ‘contact’ button under the slightly ominous ‘Serious about licensing?’ bit on the relevant page of its website (so come on, publishers—what are you waiting for?). That said, this is alongside a chef-like cartoon character that’s either showing you how to press a button or emitting tiny red lasers from his forefinger. If the latter is the case and represents G-mode’s actual staff, I guess that explains why Magical Drop PSP and Magical Drop DS have yet to appear.

 

Taking a bow when your clothes are that flimsy = not a good plan.

Here’s something Edge staff should bookmark—a thesaurus that only provides shorter synonyms: http://ironicsans.com/thsrs/

This is a public service announcement

Feeling low? Life getting you down? Tired of being force-fed yet another pointless, dull and tedious brain-training game when looking for something great for your Nintendo DS? If so, you need Space Invaders Extreme!

Reviewed on this here site back in April, Space Invaders Extreme is out today in the UK, and you’re a total banana if you own a DS and don’t pick up a copy. (And if you’re from the US, you’re a double banana, seeing as you’ve already had over two weeks to get your copy.)

We now return you to your usual programming.

Can you play Last Ninja 2 on Wii? Shuriken!

In the second game of System 3’s once-lauded series, the last ninja finds himself mysteriously dumped in modern-day New York (well, the New York of 1988, hence the distinct lack of dozens of Starbucks). Once again, his mission is to defeat the evil shogun Kunitoki, with only his wits, weapons and a dreadful control method to aid him.

Plot-wise, this is the kind of high-concept garbage that makes for dodgy Hollywood movies (“Hey! Let’s put a caveman in 2008! No, wait! How about a rap star in the 1800s?”), but the juxtaposition of ninja and New York somehow works, resulting in the best title in the Last Ninja series.

The refined graphics go some way to help, and the variety of locations—Central Park, downtown, sewers, an opium factory, an office block—offer a sense of variety and real-world wonder that the original game and its sequel can’t match. Sonically, the game also appeals, with Matt Gray’s thumping SID tunes driving you on.

Where the game fails, much like the original, is in its lack of gameplay. Combat is tedious and borderline canned, and gauging distances for numerous fussy jumps is regularly made problematic by the isometric viewpoint. On the C64, this is bad enough, but Wii owners will likely find the game an exercise in frustration when playing using the Wii remote.

My advice is to leave your happy childhood memories of the game alone, along with those for things like Thundercats, Bagpuss and The A Team, which are also rubbish in the cold, harsh light of the modern day.

The Last Ninja 2 is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish). As Nebulus came out at the same time, you should get that instead. It was also glossy and visually exciting in the 1980s, but it happens to still be a decent game.

No, I’m the last ninja! No, I’m the last ninja! Etc.