The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I. Love. Space Channel 5. If you have any doubt, I offer this image of furry me cosplaying as Ulala as proof. So yeah, love the game.

Sega has recently put out an incredibly shitty Dreamcast collection. Seriously, of the four Dreamcast games they could have picked, they picked Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and Sega Motherfucking Bass Fishing. What the hell? So, so many great Dreamcast games, and that’s what they chose. That’s not what I’m complaining about, though.

I rented this collection because it gave me an excuse to play Space Channel 5 Part 2 again. I own it on PS2, but I recently tried to play it, and the spiffy HDTV made the timing go a bit off, which I hoped this collection would fix. I had also heard there were Xbox avatar awards in the game. Now, I’m not going to spend money on avatar stuff, but I do think they make amazing awards. As someone who has played this game a million times, I figured I’d be able to pass whatever challenge they were tied to, and get some cool something or other. I mean, one of them might be an Ulala outfit, which would be fantastic.

Well, I played through the first run-through of the game the moment I got it. It took me about an hour and a half. I haven’t played the second “Extra” playthrough yet, but it’ll probably take me about as long. I played a little Ulala’s dance mode. Then I went to check how to unlock the avatar awards.

Unlocking the Ulala costume requires you to play this game for 10 hours. That’s it. No skill, no nothing, just 10 hours of play. These aren’t hours in the menu. These are hours when the game is actually running. A game that takes less than 2 hours to beat. A game that won’t run unless you are hitting the buttons and not failing.

What the fuck.

Now, I’ve logged TONS of hours into Space Channel 5 and it’s sequel. Seriously, I can’t count the number of times I’ve beaten the first game. I probably put at least 30 hours into that silly game, and it has a length similar to Part 2. I beat Part 2 tons of times as well. Even I think this requirement is insane.

Space Channel 5 is a success because of its incredible passion. It loves it’s stupid world, and shows it. You can tell every inch of the game was crafted with vision. The result isn’t great, perse. There are much better music games out there. But Space Channel 5 just does what it does with so much style, you can’t help but smile at it. But it was never about having a lot of gameplay. Certainly not 10 hours worth.

All the games on the collection apparently have similar rewards. These times maybe make more sense with Sonic Adventure and, I guess, the Bass Fishing, if you are one to actually play a fishing game. They make no sense for Crazy Taxi either. It’s obvious that these requirements were just thrown together by some intern because people were too lazy to make actual requirements. If they were going to just turn in something, I wish they would have made it attainable.

I am gaming the system to get my Ulala costume. Stage 2 will run for 15 minutes without you having to hit a button, and I’m letting Ulala fail that report over and over to run up my time. I’m not proud, but I am doing it. That doesn’t make this little achievement okay. It’s not. It’s kind of bullshit. It’s bad game design. It’s punishing fans who likely have played the game to death before this collection and are most likely to want this little reward.

Or at least it’s annoying me. And let’s face it, it’s my blog, that’s all you have to do to get me to complain about it.