GTPU 2009 Cosplay Special

This weekend, I unexpectedly had the (mis)fortune of working at a convention for two days. While the people I was working for are great, the dealers' room is open for long hours and cons are generally a grueling test of endurance. I decided the best thing to do would be to bring along my phone and turn the weekend into a giant game of "spot the awesome game cosplayers", and it turned out to be the most fun I could possibly have while pushing stuffed toys, DVDs, and posters on nerds with a ton of disposable income. As an extra challenge, I tried to snap as many Persona 4 cosplayers as I could. Hope you guys enjoy it too, and don't forget to click for big!

Daisy, Peach, and Luigi from some obscure Nintendo game no one's ever heard of. I think it's called the Great Giana Sisters.

Irvine, Tifa, and Rinoa, three of the many Final Fantasy series cosplayers who made their appearance at the con. VII, VIII, X, and Advent Children are the perennial favourites, but any cosplayer who could pull off a convincing Kain or FuSoYa would get mad props from me.

May from the Guilty Gear fighter series, which, in keeping true to the theme of this blog, is in fact a pretty weird bunch of games.

Black Rose from .hack//a bunch of games I guess and maybe an animated series. I have to wonder if she got tired of carrying that gigantic sword around with her all day, but it sure is well done.

These guys were totally and unapologetically radical. They also couldn't walk more than a few feet without getting harassed for photos, which didn't stop me from doing the same. From left to right, Fei-Long, Cammy, Guile, and Ryu from various Street Fighter games. Check out the artistic liberty taken with Guile's tattoo.

Mitsuru Kirijo from Persona 3, complete with an adorable little stuffed Koromaru the wonder dog. :3

This girl somehow found a way to make Parappa the Rapper even cuter, d'awwww. It's tough to tell in the picture, but she even had the little frog decal on her hat. I GOTTA BELIEVE!

POKEYMANS was an absurdly popular choice for this year's cosplayers, and there were tons of Ashes, Mistys, Dawns, and Pikachus running around the con. Since most of them were about 10 years old, however, I decided to get a picture of these Team Magma members instead.

This creepy Silent Hill nurse was made kinda less creepy by her non-cosplaying friends heckling her while I took this picture.

PERSONA 4 PHOTO GET! It's the hero's lovable and vaguely homophobic BFF, Yosuke Hanamura! He was pretty much literally the first cosplayer I saw on Saturday morning. He also has a Raiho stuffed animal, which came with the recently-released SMT: Devil Summoner 2 (you should probably buy this).

PERSONA 4 PHOTO GET! It's my personal favourite, great detective Naoto Shirogane! For the record, this is a boy cosplaying a girl who dresses as a boy. We've come full-circle here.

PERSONA 4 PHOTO GET! Finding Teddie wandering around was awesome enough, but he happened to be with a friend dressed as Rise Kujikawa. Knowing that someone at this con took the time and care to make a Teddie costume pretty much made the weekend for me.

Last but not least: SONIC THE (furry?) HEDGEHOG himself. That's dedication. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

That's about it for this year's con. Sadly there were tons of great ones I missed, but thanks to all the nice folks who let me take their photos! Hope you all enjoyed it!

Pu-Li-Ru-La

Released: 1991
Published by: Taito
Genre: Beat-'em-up
Platforms: Arcade, ported to FM Towns Marty, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PS2

[Note: Sorry for the late update. It was a holiday weekend up here in the frozen tundras.] Well, looks like it's the second week in a row of Taito-developed games! But they do deserve to be in the spotlight, as this week's game Pu-Li-Ru-La is a short but sweet classic weird game. What starts out as a seemingly saccharine fairy tale story turns into a surreal mess (though still admittedly saccharine) in which the two heroes Zac and Mel fight robots, clowns, and angry bamboo shoots to save their homeland of Radishland.

The basic premise behind the game is that each town in Radishland has a key that controls the flow of time, and these keys have been stolen by an evil mastermind, subsequently stopping time. For some reason all sorts of bizarre baddies are roaming around in the frozen towns, and when you kill them they turn into ADORABLE little fuzzy animals that you can, uh, run into to collect points. The combat is pretty simple, Zac and Mel have only one attack (club dudes over the head with a Magic Stick) and can use up to three magic spells per life, which are randomly selected and usually pretty awesome—at one point Mel used a spell that one-hit KO'ed the stage boss and moved us right along to the next level.

If I could have only posted one screenshot to sum up the magic of Pu-Li-Ru-La, this would be it.

While it might sound like a pretty run-of-the-mill sidescrolling beat-'em-up so far, the fun of the game starts in around level three when the world takes a sharp twist for the strange and surreal. Levels are littered with photos of real people blocking the screen or interacting with the characters (for example, a room in which a sideways face on the wall licks your heroes with a giant cartoon tongue). Demonic mosaics replace the storybook towns of the beginning of the game. The game explains in broken English that Radishland is being twisted by a megalomaniac's dreams, and while it's allegedly referring to the final boss, we can probably safely assume it applies to the game designers themselves. It's amazingly fun wondering what sort of monstrosity the next level will hold.

Wait, wait, wait... I don't think this is quite what I signed up for when I started playing this game.

Pu-Li-Ru-La's certainly a bit of an anomaly in the gaming world. It seems, for all intents and purposes, to have been targeted at a pretty young audience, judging from the pastel colours, cutesy characters, and difficulty level—it only takes a handful of credits to beat. And yet, there's something so off about it. It was obviously a pretty successful venture for Taito, as it was ported to four different consoles (!) between 1991 and 1997. It's extremely short, taking probably less than fifteen minutes to beat, but there's just so much to take in that you'll probably find yourself coming back to it. It's a shining example of the really weird arcade games that were coming out in the '90s, perhaps because it's something pretty much anyone with a taste for the offbeat can pick up and enjoy.

Pu-Li-Ru-La gets 4.5/5 nightmare fantasy worlds on the GTPU weird-o-meter. Give it a try, I promise you won't be disappointed. Now if only Taito would get around to making a sequel...

Takeshi no Chousenjou

Released: 1986
Published by: Taito
Genre: Action/Life Sim (?)
Platforms: Famicom

I have a confession to make. I didn't exactly 100% complete the game in the review you're about to read. Don't get me wrong, it has been done--see the first episode of Game Center CX for an example of this--but unfortunately my patience could only go so far. Hopefully after reading the review you'll understand.

Takeshi no Chousenjou was released in the mid '80s, originally planned by Taito to be a tie-in product with a popular TV show. Western audiences may be familiar with that show, as it was broadcast in the UK and North America about a decade later as "Takeshi's Castle" and "MXC" respectively. There's nothing unusual about tie-in games--heck, some of them have even been downright playable. What makes Chousenjou special is the fact that Beat Takeshi himself, legendary comedian, actor, and star of the show, played a large part in the development of the game. The result had absolutely nothing to do with the TV show it was meant to adapt, and instead became a legendary kuso-ge (crappy game) that eventually earned cult status and managed to sell roughly 800,000 copies despite, or maybe because of, its frank unplayability.

If you can't read Japanese, you might not be able to tell, but I'm about to divorce my wife, and she's about to try to beat me to death.

The game puts you in the role of a disgruntled salaryman going about his day-to-day life. You start out at your workplace (where you can punch your boss off of his chair and through his desk), but you're free to roam the streets (to punch housewives and other passers-by), enter bars (to punch waitresses and old men), and so on. The game isn't all fun and punches though, as there are yakuza wandering the streets who'll turn the tables on you, and the game demands that certain things be done and choices be made in a really specific, astronomically unintuitive sequence. An example of this is the requirement that you choose a specific hobby early on in the game that you'll need to help you out later: choose to enroll in any lesson but "music", and then any instrument but "shamisen", and you're set up for failure right from the start. Through tedious trial-and-error, or a strategy guide, you may manage to get through the first part of this game, but the best is yet to come.

Hey, it's the main character's funeral. Hopefully you can enjoy this austere scene, because you'll be seeing it a whole lot over the course of playing this game.

Takeshi's sadistic tendencies shine through at several points from here on, in such unique challenges as having to passably sing karaoke at a bar with the rudimentary Famicom microphone, or having to expose a map to sunlight for an hour to activate the invisible ink it's printed in. This particular sequence requires you to leave the console alone for that full hour--pressing a single button will result in your chance being wasted and having to wait another hour. But in what's possibly the most frustrating challenge, your salaryman hero decides to set out to a secret island to find a buried treasure, and you're forced to go by way of hang-glider. Enemies assail you while you do your best to get to that island... but of course, since you're just gliding, you can dodge them by going down, but never up. This makes getting over the massive mountain towards the end of the course pretty difficult, to say the least. Once you're on the island, things don't get much easier, as entering the wrong hut will trap you, forcing you to reset the game.

You might be wondering by now why anyone would want to play this game, but trust me, there's something irresistable about it to a fan of unusual games. I heartily recommend that everyone give it a try, just to soak in the sheer absurdity of it. Takeshi managed to play a joke on the gaming community--and judging from the fact that people are still talking about it more than 20 years later, it was a pretty awesome joke. Takeshi no Chousenjou gets 4/5 henpecked salarymen on the GTPU weird-o-meter.

Zunzunkyou no Yabou

Released: 1994
Published by: SEGA
Genre: Shooter
Platforms: Arcade

How many times have you mused to yourself, "Boy, I wish there was a game out there where I could play as a Buddha on a religious crusade throughout the world--no, the universe"? Well, thanks to this bizarre mid-90s SEGA release, your wish has come true! Zunzunkyou no Yabou can be summed up in that one sentence, for better or worse.

The selection screen starts you off with four choices--Japan, Asia, Europe, and America. Each region is full of a goofy cast of ridiculously Japanese stereotypes: the Chinese are a fleet of acrobats and costumed pandas, the French are a bunch of effeminate, prancing ballet dancers, and the Americans are represented by a gaudily-costumed, steroid-fueled Captain America clone who regularly spams attacks in the form of the word "JUSTICE". Your mission as a happy little Buddha (or possibly a statue of one, it's never made quite clear) is to systematically destroy the inhabitants of every country you visit by shooting glowing manji at them. Are you committing genocide? Are you leading sinners to some sort of Nirvana or salvation? You aren't ever told why. There doesn't need to be a reason. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, which doesn't change the fact that the basic premise of the game is utterly insane.

Think of India as the birthplace of Buddhism and a rich cultural history? Sorry, Zunzunkyou no Yabou is here to show us it's actually just a big desert full of buxom naked ladies and dancing skeletons.

Each stage consists of three levels where you have to wipe out 40 -50 innocent people, and an appropriately-themed boss level. It's important to note that while most top-down shooters are pretty tough for the average gamer, Zunzunkyou is made harder by the fact that all the enemy sprites are gigantic and love firing fast-moving crap at you at all times. Furthermore, any attempts at a high score are pretty much moot since it resets to zero at every game over. You might notice from the screenshots that P1's score is pretty much solidly between 0 and 100 at all times, which is partly because I suck at shooters and partly because Zunzunkyou was explicitly designed to suck as many quarters from the arcade-going public as humanly possible. Really, it makes the entire Metal Slug series look like a cakewalk. Insult is added to injury by the time you reach the American stage and realise the game designers think of Harlem as a place for flamboyantly gay 80s sci-fi punk rockers to hang out on a basketball court.

Ah, France. Home to circus animals, Egyptian tilework, and of course, Pierrot the Clown. Where else could you find all these things in one place?

Once you've pretty much annihilated everyone on Earth (except of course people in Africa, South America, and Australasia, I guess), you may think you've beaten the game--but no! Our manji-throwing buddy's journey is much grander than that. Your journey next takes you to space, where you're given the chance to spread your pacifist philosophies through alien discotheques and bizarro-Earths full of clones of your own character. The final boss is Earth itself, which has sprouted a gigantic eyeball and decides to fight you by throwing little miniature Earths at you. Why Buddha wants to blow up the planet is kind of a mystery, but really, no moreso than anything else in this game. By the time I got to this point, I'd probably used up at least 50 credits, so you can bet I was hoping for an awesome ending animation, or at least a credit roll. Zunzunkyou being Zunzunkyou, all I was treated to for the wanton destruction of the Earth was a short message followed by the initial selection screen again.

Despite all this, Zunzunkyou has found a permanent home with me, and for some unknown reason I find myself coming back to it now and then. It gets 3.5/5 racist stereotypes on the GTPU weird-o-meter, mostly because if nothing else it'll make you smile, and you can beat it in about fifteen minutes.