Well whaddayaknow. After Burner, eh children?

No, not the absolutely awesome Climax that no fucker bought except me, resulting in MS dropping the game to half price within a couple of months.

Nononono… We’re talking the original this time.

Did you know there’s a storyline to go with that game, cunningly hidden via special button inputs that you must press when your jet is refuelling?

Apparently so. It’s all about rescuing a girl called Lucy from some guy called Match, who apparently isn’t very good at Ma Ma Lemon. Whatever that is.

Until today, this 23 year-old secret appears to have gone completely unnoticed by the western world. In fact, searching for the phrase used in the topic in Google resulted in 1 solitary result, for an English speaking Kyoto-Based company selling After Burner T-Shirts.

Anyway – Videos. Here:

Microsoft casually avoid talking about the elephant in the room.

E3 2010 will go down in my personal history as the straw that has broken this camel’s back. I think I’m all but done with videogames.

Microsoft’s over-saturation of their new motion controller, watching obvious actors pretend to play obviously pre-rendered video footage of games, Sony… Well… Being Sony, and Activision throwing giant amounts of cash on a celebrity-filled music show, which was more concerned about telling the audience how much cash they have to throw about than ACTUAL FUCKING GAMES.

Nintendo’s showing has probably been the only one that remotely impressed me. Showing off games for old skool fans instead of the casual crap of the last few years – Being the rabid classic-era Sega fanboy I am, I’ve never been interested in those franchises, but still… And you can’t say that the 3DS doesn’t look like a spanky new piece of tech.

So, kudos, Nintendo. Not remotely fucking interested, but kudos, nevertheless.

Maybe this was just inevitable. I was already getting to the point where I was hard pressed to turn on my console for a gaming fix.

I’ve had Red Dead Redemption in my 360 for over 2 weeks, just waiting to be played, and just can’t be bothered. The last few times I turned it on was just to watch a film on Sky Player, and that’s only because of a bug in the PC version, that stops your PC being detected as the main computer (thus disabling some channels/programmes from being viewed).

At the grand old age of 35, I’m seriously starting to think it’s time for me to put away childish things

Mamotte Knight (Protect Me Knight).

A game on Xbox Live Indie games, produced by a company called Ancient.

Don’t know who Ancient are? let me fill you in… It’s a small, Tokyo based game development company, run by the Koshiro family. You might recognise the name of one of their top employees – Music composer Yuzo Koshiro. Yes… THAT Yuzo Koshiro.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or just aren’t that interested in specifics), Ancient were partially responsible for the Streets of Rage series, with Yuzo’s sister, Ayano, aiding in design and production. They also produced the Story of Thor/Beyond Oasis games.

They worked on a fair few games with Sega back in the day in fact, including Shenmue.

The best way to explain the game, is it’s a stupidly addictive, 4 player retro-styled cross between Gauntlet and a survival/defence game, all played very tongue in cheek with an awesome 8-bit stylee soundtrack.

It’s also worth looking at their website and comparing the Japanese version, and the “specially ruined for western audiences” version, styled like the packaging/instruction manuals of a bygone era.

Japanese version
Western version

Anyway, the game is 240 MS points. That’s 2 QUID in human moneys, assuming you’re buying 2100 points cards at the RRP of £17.50 (getting them straight from XBL is more expensive, but on the other hand there’s companies on the web that will digitally deliver the scratchcard codes for cheaper than RRP).

So if this in anyway grabs your goat, here’s a link to it’s marketplace page.

Link-me-do

It can also be found is you browse all Indie Games through your 360, but because it’s title is in Japanese, it’s right at the bottom of the list – Around 970 of 974, meaning unless we all spread the word around, this game will become tragically overlooked.