Nintendo Wii Fanboy

He's got a weird name, he makes weird, violent games, and he's got really, really cool friends. He's also writing the Snatcher radio drama, which makes him our best friend. Grasshopper Manufacture's Suda 51 applies a punk-rock philosophy to game design, and the results are always interesting.

He seems to have made the Wii his home console for the time being. Do you welcome his contributions? Are you looking forward to No More Heroes as much as we are? The kind of stuff he likes to make is pretty far outside the usual Wii fare, but we feel that the Wii all about shaking up the norm. Is there merit to his disruptive game design ideals, or are they just disruptive for disruption's sake? If you're a Suda fan now, would you still be if he didn't have the glow of Wii association? Can we put some more question marks in here?

Last Saturday, Suda 51's company Grasshopper Manufacture held the coolest event ever, at least for game nerds: Snake vs. Zombie vol. 2, a series of informal panel discussions by big names in the Japanese game industry, including Hideo Kojima, Shinji Mikami, ICO's Fumito Ueda, and Tetsuya Mizuguchi. There were also musical performances from Metal Gear Solid 3/Portable Ops soundtrack composer Norihiko Hibino and Silent Hill series producer and composer Akira Yamaoka.

As if the mere existence of this event (and our non-attendance at said event) weren't causing us physical pain, now we have unbearable anticipation buzzing around in our heads. During a Kojima/Mikami panel hosted by Suda, Mikami, a man of taste, mentioned that his favorite Kojima game was Snatcher, to which the other two responded "Ah yes, Snatcher," followed by "Oh, should we announce it here?"

To sum up, in italics, there is a possibility that Hideo Kojima and Suda 51 are collaborating on some kind of Snatcher game. We do not care if it is a sequel, a remake, a port, an action figure, or an official recipe for Neo Kobe Pizza. We want ten.

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

We didn't intend to cover the same series two weeks in a row, but recent developments in the world of Virtual Console made a discussion of a Konami RPG for the MSX2 computer seem timely. Maybe, we thought, our prayers for Snatcher caused the universe to swing things our way a little bit. Well, here's another appeal.

SD Snatcher takes the violent, gritty, sci-fi detective story of Snatcher, and presents it as a turn-based RPG populated by big-headed "super deformed" characters. We choose to believe this decision was some postmodern playfulness from Hideo Kojima-- deliberately downplaying the dramatic aspects of his game and overlaying obvious videogame conventions on top of it, like when Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid read your memory card. Or it could just have been that Japanese gamers like RPG's a lot.

Update: screens!

Welcome to our new weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

This week, we'd like to talk about Snatcher, a Sega CD game from Konami released in the US in 1994. The game was also released in Japan for the MSX2, PC8801, PC Engine CD-Rom, Playstation, and Saturn.

Why the game hasn't been announced for Virtual Console yet: Not too long ago, the obvious answer to this question would have been "because it is a graphical text adventure." Luckily, however, the DS has changed that, bringing an era where graphical text adventures are the subjects of rabid fandom. What hasn't changed is that Snatcher is a Sega CD game, and Nintendo has made no announcements regarding support for CD systems. The size of the files may be prohibitive, although it would be possible to save space by compressing the sound and music.