I’m not sure what triggered this, but tonight I started jonesing to play with video on the DS. Did a little googling to find out what the best methods/programs were, and it seemed to me that Moonshell (which I already have on the R4) is the best bet. DPG is the format of choice: or should I say the only choice.

While they tout the fact that the file specification of DPG is open to the public, at the end of the day I don’t really care about that or the rest of the technical “blah blah blah blaaahhhhhhh” that seems to be the bulk of the information out there on using it. So here’s the very short list of what you need to get this bad boy up and running. (The .NET Framework 1.1 is also a prereq but I’m assuming you already have that, right?)

• AVISynth – Prerequisite to installing BatchDPG.
• BatchDPG – The encoding GUI I used for making the DPG’s.

Trial #1 was the latest episode of Family Guy which I grabbed online. The original AVI file was 178.8M, and the DPG file was a slender 49.2M. Then again the movie does get a bit neutered when encoding for the DS since programs like BatchDPG know that it doesn’t make sense to encode anything higher than a resolution that you can watch on one of the DS screens anyway (256×192 is max res), and I didn’t use the max audio bitrate either in my conversion. End result: I was pretty happy with the results. There seemed to be just a little bit of visual lag but I couldn’t tell if that was a result of frames being dropped (DPG movies are 24 FPS according to one source I read) or perhaps if the audio was ever so slightly out of sync. Whatever the issue was, my brain auto-adjusted pretty quick and it wasn’t more than 3 minutes in that I didn’t notice any issues at all.

Trial #2 was a full-length live-action film. I wanted to see how the encoding process went on a longer piece of video, plus I wanted to know if there were any sync issues here because I felt it would be much more noticeable with real actors (and potentially make the entire experience unpleasant). On a throw of the dart, I picked Casino Royale. 802M turned into 411M… not quite the 4:1 ratio I got off of Family Guy but still smaller. That said, the 2:1 ratio was totally worth it. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the source feed of the film (which was a DVDRip) compared to a recording off the television airwaves, but the image looked a lot cleaner and even the sound didn’t seem as muddled. Overall nice conversion, even if the letterboxing was so prominent on the film I picked that watching the full movie probably would have proved painful on this size screen.

I don’t see myself using this feature all the time, especially when this single full-length film takes up just over 20% of the capacity on my MicroSD card: I’d rather use that storage for games/homebrew/music. But if I have something like jury duty, or a flight, or any other point in time where I know I may have a good amount of time to kill and I’d rather just “veg” instead of playing a game? At least now I have the tools at hand ready to prepare some mobile entertainment. Since I don’t own a laptop or a portable DVD player, I’ll work with what I’ve got thanks.

Being a kid who enjoyed video games more than he got to play them while growing up, I have to admit up front that I have never played any titles from the Dragon Quest series. That said, I make no claim about the standard DQ games since I know that ‘Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime‘ is more of a spin-off game rather than a continuation in the series (similar to the direction the Final Fantasy series has been taking lately… and hey whaddya know, Square Enix owns both).

Rocket Slime can best be described by the term “RPG Lite”. It’s not an RPG in the strictest meaning of what most people think of when they think of RPG’s… there is no Leveling system, there is no expansive world to go out and explore. In fact, Rocket Slime has only very minor upgrades you can get as a character (a stronger Elasto Blast attack, and additional containers of health similar to the Hearts system in Zelda games). The real forward progress in the game comes from going to the levels that are unlocked to rescue fellow residents of Boingburg, your hometown which was attacked by The Plob.

As you explore the levels, you will occasionally come across moving rail carts which you may throw items/enemies onto in order to send them back to Boingburg. This is also the primary way you send Boingburg residents home after you rescue them from the treasure chests you find them trapped in. And at the end of the day, the Pokémon-style “gotta catch ‘em all” mindset is what Rocket Slime becomes centered around. You rescue residents, you find items and send them back to town so that you might be able to use them in your Tank Battles (see below), and you send enemies back to town simply so you don’t have to worry about killing them or because you’re still trying to collect enough so that a certain enemy might offer to help you in the Tank Battles (again, see below). Making it through each level is a fairly straightforward path however, with little skill required to keep making progress. Then again, how much skill does a game ask from the player when the one and only move available to you is an Elasto Blast; where you stretch yourself out and then let go of the button in order to shoot into an enemy, knocking them up into the air so you can catch them on your head and put them on the next cart home?

Tank Battles occur at numerous occassions throughout the game, and are the primary form of “battle” that you will encounter throughout the game which help keep the game moving forward. Sitting in the Schleiman Tank, a sort of giant fortress on treads, you go toe to toe with enemies as the tank spits out ammo from your reserves and you launch them high or low in an effort to cancel out your opponents’ ammo midair and try to connect with as much as you can to whittle your opponent’s tank down to 0hp. Once their tank is at zero, you then have to infiltrate their tank and make your way through to the core, where you have to take the time to bash through the final defenses and land a killing blow to the heart of their tank. While fairly simple in essence, the strategy involved in the battles and the pacing keeps you coming back for more – especially as the core gameplay continues to build the available ammo at your disposal.

In order to put ammo in the Tank, you can either use items that you have sent back to town (and become available in your item list) or, after a certain point in the game, go to Krak Pot’s cart in order to partake in a little alchemy where you can combine lesser items to make better ones. Better items have different effects when used in battle and/or cause more damage when they hit an opposing tank. It can be extremely rewarding getting better ammo for battle, but there again lies more of the “gotta catch ‘em all” mentality. Want to make a bunch of really tough iron balls? You’re probably going to need a few dozen of the smaller ones, plus other items, in order to cook up that much of the good stuff in the alchemy cart.

During Tank Battles it is also possible for your character (or your teammates, once you are able to add them into your crew during battle) to “die” while fighting. When you “die”, you have to go back to your tank’s mini church altar where you can be resurrected and jump back into the fray again. First of all, this is a mechanic that I never had to use since the game is so obviously scaled back in terms of difficulty that I not once was afraid of dying. Secondly, it really detracts from any penalty there could otherwise be from dying. Where you die, you become a “ghost” version of yourself until you can make it back to the altar. I would have some teammates die repeatedly during battle, but it was never long before they were back fighting by my side again. Which I will say is a good thing since the AI is so pathetically bad in Rocket Slime, both on friendly and enemy sides. Enemies never defend their tank as properly as they should, will waste countless pieces of ammo while your tank may be shooting fire (which destroys anything in the air between the two tanks while it is going), and can easily be distracted from more important tasks by running interference in their tanks (a job I always set to one of my computer-controlled teammates). The friends are just as bad about wasting ammo, and I would typically stand by our cannons while we were shooting flames and be forced to attack my own buddies just to force them to drop their ammo so they wouldn’t load it into the cannons. Stockpile that shit, guys! Come ON! And let’s not get into the fact that comrades are none too shy about throwing ammo into the cannons even if there is someone else standing right in front of them. I can’t tell you how many times I saw friendly AI end up bouncing one of our teammates into a cannon, wasting god knows how much battle time waiting for the poor sap to come back to base. And nothing infuriates me more than the 2 or 3 times that I was the player bounced into the cannon.

The real inherent flaw of tank battles was never so blatantly realized until I reached the final boss of the game. My tank had a mere 1000hp against the boss’s 1500hp, but I made a valiant effort to win the battle. My own character was teamed with a sole teammate, going heads-up against the sole boss in the other tank. Try as we might, our tank reached 0hp while the boss still had about 850hp in his tank. Game over, right? When it happened I wasn’t surprised, really, since being able to cruise to the end of the game only to have your face kicked in at the end is a feeling I’m used to when playing Square’s games. But when that happened, the boss came over to our tank and I attacked him until he was dead. As he went back to his own tank to resurrect, my partner and I hurled ammo as fast as we could through the air, whittling away at the HP of the other tank. Once the boss was resurrected, I ran ground interference again and once again I killed him. Wash/rinse/repeat a few times and suddenly both tanks are at 0hp with their cores exposed.

I jumped out between the two tanks and waited for the boss to resurrect again. When he came out, a quick skirmish later and I had once again put his face in the dirt. I made a dash for the core, and as I was trying to smash through the defenses he showed up to try and stop me. I took a few pot-shots to get him away from me, but focused on the primary objective. Hey, at least with him trying to stop me I didn’t have to worry about my own tank. And finally, confusingly, I was watching myself destroy the enemy tank’s core and I had won.

But wait a minute. I couldn’t have really just won the game, right? That seems too easy, it just doesn’t make sense. There must be a second level of final boss, or this really isn’t the end of the game… right? Right?! No, sadly, in fact I did beat the game, with plot wrap-up and hints at a sequel and everything. Sigh. At about a 12-hour playthrough, which included my fair share of mucking around wasting time, “RPG Lite” indeed.
Sure, the game does open up a few things in order to keep some longevity. There is a “Tank Battle Tournament” that you can play in once you have beaten the game, rising through the ranks to fame and glory as you face tougher and tougher competitors. And at least the one nice thing about that is you are given the ability to fight in any tank you wish from the game. But beyond that, all you really have left in front of you is to track down some elusive recipes for the alchemy cart, go Pokémon hunting to continue building a better arsenal for your tank, and play local wifi multiplayer if you know anyone else who bought the game.

I hate to sound so overly negative of the game, but the longer I have chewed over my playing experience the more I realized just how hollow the experience was. Is Rocket Slime fun? I would vote yes, but only if you are ever looking for a game that won’t challenge you and won’t drive you to sit and play for hours at a time. If I did know anyone that I could play local multiplayer with, that would probably give me more incentive to beef up my tank’s arsenal (assuming that you bring your actual tank from in-game into the multiplayer battles). But for now I just don’t have a reason to play the game any more. The Tank Battle Tournament? No thanks. Maybe if it had been included during the core of the game as a sort of side quest I would have had incentive to distract myself by it more, but with the main game over it just doesn’t appeal to me.

Again though, if you’re looking for a game in the vein of “light reading”, I would definitely recommend ‘DQ: Rocket Slime’. With that sort of mindset I wouldn’t hesitate to give the game somewhere around an 8/10. If you’re looking for a true RPG or a game that you will really be able to sink your teeth into, however, ‘Rocket Slime’ is going to leave a sour taste in your mouth.

Or is it “R4tw”? Anyway… When I haven’t been busting my ass at my new job, my time lately has been spent hanging out with the wife & kid, sleeping, or playing around with any given game on the R4DS. Inspired by ruumis‘s microreviews that he posted a while ago, I thought I would post a few of my own. However, each of these are games that I have tried and exclusively not enjoyed. There is a lot that I have enjoyed playing, but I always find it more enlightening to talk about the bad rather than the good. I’ll save some of the good for another post.

Daigasso! Band Brothers (J) – Also known as “Jam With the Band”. Ever since this title came out in Japan, I have wanted to give it a shot. I’m a big rhythm/music game fan, so this one seemed like a no-brainer. *BZZZZT* Oh how painfully, painfully wrong I was. First of all, the language barrier is horrible in this game. There could be tons of options that this game has which potentially make it not suck, but damned if I can find them. Half of the audio in this game is actually English, and this game has to go against the grain and make all of their menus in Japanese only? Still, the language barrier is only the initial frustration. The worst part is the actual gameplay. As the song plays, you have to hit either a direction on the d-pad or one of the YXBA buttons as appropriate. But that’s it! It doesn’t matter which direction you hit on the d-pad, as long as you hit the d-pad when the blue marker comes into the target zone. And you can hit any of the 4 buttons on the right when the time comes for those and the red marker is “active”. Are you kidding me? I know we’re using the DS as a platform here people, but at least games like FreQuency & Amplitude used three buttons, had usable powerups, required you to switch tracks while you played and came with much better music.

Devilish (E) – It’s like Breakout, but without the fun. You try and make your way through a level that looks like a castle, filled with skeletons and treasure chests, bouncing a ball off a floating paddle to clear the way. Oh, and the paddle can separate vertically, where at the bottom of the lower screen is, in essence, your “backup paddle” while you can push your front paddle damn near all the way to the top of the upper screen and annihilate everything. Would be completely forgettable if it hadn’t been so bad.

Konductra (U) – A puzzler that wants you to drop 2×1 pieces onto a rectangular playing field and continue to try and match the same colors next to each other until you choose to clear them from the playing field. You “conduct” electricity through pieces of a like color (occasionally able to cross colors through connector blocks) to remove them from the playing field, at which point you keep dropping pieces onto the field and do it all over again. Totally boring, does not get nearly up to speed fast enough if you are good at the game (Tetris masters don’t have to wait long to get up to speed by starting at Level 1… Konductra masters would age 5 years before the game got fast enough for them), and just about the only thing I saw done right was allowing players to “sign” their name onto the high score list (why do more DS games not allow for this bit of customization? It really was kind of a nice touch). Oh, and in line with the game’s theme of dragging your stylus through the blocks while “connecting” them for removal, each and every menu option requires you to drag the stylus across all the letters in the name rather than just letting you click it. That “feature” almost prevented me from playing the game entirely since I couldn’t figure out how to get away from the title screen (which looking back at it, may not have been the worst thing in the world to have happened).

Mini RC Rally (U) – If you’re looking to re-live the good times had by playing R.C. Pro-Am on the NES, go fire up an emulator or hook up the old system to play the real deal. Sluggish menus, a race car that doesn’t want to move (I couldn’t win the very first race, trying 3 times, and there was not a tutorial to be found on how to play if I was doing something wrong. Did my RC car have a stickshift I didn’t know about and I was stuck in 1st gear?) Throw in horrible blocking objects that exist nowhere near the drawn object on the track (getting stuck on a soda can nearly a full car’s width AWAY from said soda can is never fun) and this one is one to avoid at all costs.

Ys Strategy (E) – I have never played the other Ys titles that exist, but I have heard good things about them. Ys Strategy, on the other hand, I would not add to the list of quality Ys games. Shoddy controls, slow pacing off the bat, and while this game may have gotten better if I sat down with it longer, it lost my attention quickly. I’d be much faster to recommend A Touch of War from the homebrew scene than this production piece. AToW doesn’t even have any in-game instructions yet still somehow manages to be more fun (not to mention the graphics are better).

Sudoku Mania (U) – How did this game make it to market? This as well as the recently released Essential Sudoku DS (E) are two of the worst stabs at Sudoku that possibly could have been made. Sudoku Mania gives you “options” in the sense that you can change the background on the level you play. Are you kidding me? No difficulty options, a terrible handwriting recognition engine (how hard is it, really, for these companies to program something than can recognize all of NINE digits properly?!?) and this one got quickly kicked to the curb. I think that to this day you are still best off turning to Brain Age for the most enjoyable Sudoku experience on the DS yet.

World Championship Poker (U) – Wow, you must really like poker to put up with playing this garbage. The premise starts off almost akin to Drug/Dope Wars… here’s some money, go make some cash so you can pay off your loan and get rich. While I will say that at least WCP doesn’t just offer up Texas Hold ‘Em, unfortunately the gameplay is too slow for it to be any fun. The camera during the game sits in the middle of the table and turns to each person (a la the “basement” scenes from That 70′s Show) when the action is on them. At which point the game feels the need to play some little animation with the person saying something before they act. “Boy, you really got me there.” Yeah, great, that’s nice. Shut the hell up and put your money in or don’t. The worst part of all that tripe is that you’re forced to sit through it even when you’re already out of a hand! If you fold pre-flop for a few hands in a row while playing Hold ‘Em with your buddies, you may not overly mind. You can talk with your friends, go grab a drink, whatever. This game forces you to sit there while grandma (I wish I was kidding) goes on about how she doesn’t think she’s going to win this hand before putting $3,000 in the pot.

There is a lot to enjoy about owning an R4, but perhaps the worst part of owning one is the ease with which you can access all of the piss-poor games that have been made. I can’t even speak to the amount of time in my life that has been wasted by subjecting myself to these games. Even when I really, really try and give them a chance, I just end up disappointed anyway – so there’s a good handful of hours down the toilet.