What is your most RECENT import? Post often!

[Julio III]

In the past few days these have arrived making me very happy. Wish I had a digital camera to take some pics

Real Sound: Winds Of Regret - Dreamcast
Haven't played it but I doubt that I'll get anything out of doing that though. Comes in a brilliant package, nice cloudy slipcase, 2 GD-roms, D2-Shock GD-rom, braille sheet, some cards with clouds on, no seeds for me though

Under Defeat - Dreamcast
Got the SegaDirect limited edition. So the game is in a DVD case with a different cover to the standard edition and comes with a soundtrack CD which I've yet to listen to, a small sticker and a really lovely poster. Its a great game, so far got to stage 1-4 boss, hopefully get further these next few days.

Tetris DS
Its an import for us Europeans, and its a really great game of Tetris. The other modes will have to work on me though. A ridiculous amount of booklets in the pack. I liked the one saying "if you liked Tetris DS, you'll love Nintendogs, Brain Age and Big Brain Academy". I'm definitely purchasing the brain games anyway, but not Nintendogs, unless one day i can pick it up for dirt cheap

[Von-Zipper]

I haven't been importing for ages he he

[Von-Zipper]

[Beefy Hits]

Bleach for DS. It lags like crazy online.

[davidbrit2]

Outrun 2006 Coast 2 Coast for PSP, which brings me to like a grand total of 3 European games. PS1 Beatmania was the first, followed by Dance: Europe for PS2.

[noriaki_kakyouin]

Just won the Famicom "Mother" on ebay for $11. It comes with the box (in surprisingly good condition).

[Lord Contaminous]

My first Super Famicom game in 3 months.

[cbroddy]

Here is a collection of Sega Megadrive games I just won on Ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...e=STRK:MEWN:IT

[MrSmiley381]

Just won the Famicom "Mother" on ebay for $11. It comes with the box (in surprisingly good condition).

The best part about that game is that it'll actually work with a converter, unlike Megami Tensei II.

Also, it appears we've another joJo's Bizarre Adventure fan. Huzzah!

[Spartacus]

Chikyuu Boueigun is a 3rd person shooting game about an Earth Defense Force
(EDF) soldier single-handedly fighting off an alien invasion force attacking
Earth. The alien invaders are drawn from some of my favorite sci-fi films
like Them, War of the Worlds, Tarantula, Earth vs the Flying Saucers,
Godzilla, and Independence Day!







They attack in huge swarms very reminiscent of Starship Troopers.


Most of the scenerios involve facing several types of attackers and the
numbers of the attackers can be simply astonishing! Sometimes these are
dropped from large hovering carrier ships that will endlessly deposit alien
forces until the carriers themselves are destroyed. Other times you'll
discover that swarms and swarms of attackers are coming out of mounds and
hives that are hidden about and also must be found and destroyed. These
create the classic "It's hard to drain the swamp when you're up to your ass
in alligators" scenarios.
The insect aliens swarm over everything and can walk up the sides of
tallest buidings and sheerest cliffs with ease and it's pretty cool to see!
What suprised me is how deceiving the attacks were. It looks like mindless
head on "alien wave" assaults, but in reality the aliens are always
attempting to send several of it's "soldiers" to the left and right of you
in encircling flanking manoeuvers. If you allow yourself to be lulled into
concentrating fire into the center of the mass of the attack and chew up
the easy kills (thinking of waiting for the just the right moment to turn
and run) you'll often discover that the flankers have gotten behind you
and trapped you in a classic anvil and hammer situation!

Fortunately for the EDF soldier the destroyed aliens often deposit health
packs, armor upgrades or new weapons on the field. The health packs can be
put to use immediately, but the armor upgrades and the new weapons will
only become applied/available in the next mission. When the last alien has
been destroyed the mission ends and any items not already picked up are
lost.

Starting out with a submachine gun and a bazooka, the EDF soldier is
limited to carrying two weapons through the entire game, but it's possible
to acquire over 100 different firearms. The weapons include many types of
rifles, machine guns, shotguns, bazooka's, rocket launchers, grenades, and
flame throwers.




Tanks, helicopters and hoverbikes can often be found and these can be
commandeered by the EDF soldier. The hoverbike is armed with machine guns
and is extemely fast, but damages incredibly easily. The helicopter is also
armed with machine guns and takes quite a long time to even get it off the
ground! It handles poorly and is rather difficult to control and use
effectively. The tank was my favorite vehicle. It fires a single main
cannon from a turret that can be swiveled independent of the direction of
the tank. The barrel can be raised and lowered and the shell fires with a
trajectory that was reasonably realistic and made firing at long range
moving targets a dicey proposition. It's speed allowed it to outrun
anything that wasn't airborn and it's armor could survive attacks from
several ants for about 3 to 4 seconds if they were allowed to chew on it.
It's main draw back was it's view being locked in with the sight of the
barrel, making it difficult to drive it while firing in any direction
other than forward.

The fights take place in cities and in the countrysides. The cities are
quite large with tall downtown skyscrapers, major highways, overpasses,
rivers and bridges mixed in with a myriad of small streets, alleys and
residential areas. Every building, bridge, overpass, in fact EVERYTHING!
is destructable, including the many trees that line the streets and fill
the parks. The countrysides include beach estuaries dotted with sand bars
leading up to sand dunes and cliffs. There's also a valley area surrounded
by mountains and rolling hills and intersected with a deep gorge spanned
by brides and train trestles that has a few foot paths leading up and down
it's sides. Many places contain areas of very tall grass that both conceals
the type of aliens attacking you and makes finding a much needed dropped
health pack difficult.

The game music is a foreboding 'giant monsters roaming about the
countryside' kind of stuff you would hear in classic horror/sci-fi films
and is very appropriate, even though it just loops endlessly. The sound
effects were adequate. The EDF soldier never speaks, but panicked civilians
running away stumble, fall down, get back up and start running again and
scream appropriately. You'll hear radio chatter of (police officers?) who
shout excitedly, fire bursts of weapons and then scream as they are being
torn apart. It adds to the effect decently enough.


Destroyed buildings produce shattered glass and clouds of dust that
temporarily obscures your view and can produce moments of anxiety and if
you happen to be standing on one when it goes down you can see girders and
such falling to the ground all around you. The destroyed building's leave
pile's of debris that provide little cover but are difficult to navigate
thru. A few missions are in the city after it has been destroyed by the
aliens firing thier primary weapons from large motherships. The city
looks eerily like old photo's of post atomic Hiroshima, with a few tall
buildings left standing and everything else reduced to rubble. The EDF
soldier now has to pick his way carefully among the debris completely in
the open while the aliens enormous size allows them to stride easily over
it.


Explosions can be pretty spectacular and bringing down saucers and major
sized spacecraft are a sight to see. They erupt in multiple fires and
billow smoke as they slowly crash into the ground. Large LP storage tanks
in the city can be ignited and produce a hell of a show!


The entire game and all it's menu's are in Japanese, but I found I could
get around pretty well with a reasonably short learning curve. The first
thing you'll probably want to do is to change the controls over to
"technical mode", which allows you to aim the crosshairs with the right
analog stick. The missions must be completed in order and you may prefer
to check out the mission menu first to take a peek at what you are going up
against before backing backing back out to make your weapons selections.
The missions menu will give you a small pic of at least something you'll
have to go up against. It also shows you what difficultly level you managed
to beat the mission on in the form of medals and any mission you've
completed can be replayed at any time on any setting.


The weapons menu can also seem confusing until you realize that there are
only a 7 classes of weapons and they are grouped according to type. If you
recognize one weapon as being a shotgun, then all the weapons in that
category will be shotguns, ect. Selecting any weapon will show you all of
the important stats to consider before choosing it. This pic shows you have
selected a rifle with a 2 round capacity and a firing rate of 1 round per
second, delivering 170 points of damage per round. It takes this rifle 1.5
seconds to reload and it has a 10m range with good (B+) accuray.


There's currently two Chikyuu Boueigun games available on the PS2 from D3's
Simple 2000 Series of games and both can be played with two players via
split screen. My opinions of them follows....

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 31: The Earth Defense Force (Chikyuu Boueigun)
In Chikyuu Boueigun there are 25 missions that are played using only a male
EDF soldier.
GAMEPLAY: 9
GRAPHICS: 8
SOUND: 8
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 0
OVERALL: 9

What I Liked: I had a ball playing the game because I love killing monsters,
especially when I'm given a lot of weapons to choose from. Best of all was
that you are never given any type of super weapon that blows away
everything. Each has it's tradeoff's and makes your selections a major
factor in your chances of surviving each different mission.
There's really nothing quite like fighting off hordes of gigantic ants! If
they get you surrounded, you can barely see out between the hundreds of
towering ant legs as they shove you about and jostle you between them, then
suddenly you'll see some huge ant head diving towards your face with it's
pincers opened wide as it tries to grab you and toss you about like a rag
doll! Pretty cool and more than a little bit unnerving! Then they mix in
flying ants that spit acid on you and these things spiral, turn and twist
constantly, making them very tough to get a bead on! The ONLY thing you can
outrun on foot are the towering War of the World's machines that are slow,
but have long range weapons that can hit you from any point on the map!

Finally, I'd have to say the spiders are what I loathed the most. They
shoot thick sticky spider webs at you that suck your health out while they
are attached to you. They can even destroy the vehicles you're driving! If
you are hit or run into even just one or two strands of it, you'll move
as if you were attached to a giant bungie cord. 4 or 5 strands will
practicaly immobilize you and can even stop the tank in it's tracks and
bring down the helicopter! And they don't just crawl after you, these
things leap across terraine like fleas! God, I hated those bastards!

What I Disliked: There's no human blood in the game. In fact, you can't
even kill the civilians! What a shame! Sandlot, the developer of these games,
decided that they were willing to tradeoff slowdown for huge numbers of
aliens. The slowdown could get pretty choppy at times, but always managed
to stabilize itself eventually and you could always help out a little by
blowing away a few things. And as much as I admired the explosions, I didn't
care for the way the game would lock in your view sometimes when large alien
spacecraft blew up! Because while you were being forced to watch it crashing
into the earth, all of the other aliens were still attacking you and you
couldn't see to shoot back at them!


Simple 2000 Series Vol. 81: The Earth Defense Force 2
In Chikyuu Boueigun 2 there are 71 missions that are played using either
a male or female EDF soldier. The new female soldier wears a recharging
jetpack that prevents her from using any of the vehicles. She has an
entirely different selection of weapons that lean towards the sci-fi ray
gun variety. Any weapons and armor acquired while playing as the female EDF
soldier cannot be used by the male EDF soldier and visa versa. But you can
freely switch back and forth between them for any mission and can play any
mission twice using each of them.


GAMEPLAY: 9
GRAPHICS: 8
SOUND: 8
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 0
OVERALL: 9

What I Liked: This game takes place in London, introduces several new types
of aliens and even throws in a few night missions. It also has some of my
favorite missions that were deep underground in gigantic ant hive's riddled
with criss crossing tunnels that often broke into underground subway's.
They featured several large cavernous areas that were spanned with ant made
bridges and could be several stories high. Very eerie down there and quite
well made, I thought.

What I disliked: This version seemed to do a little better handling the
slow down generated by hordes of insects, but Sandlot just kept pushing the
limits with new ENORMOUS force field protected spacecraft that covered the
entire city and launched waves of saucers. It got even choppier than the
first game! Again, no human blood!

If you think you might be interested in the Chikyuu Boueigun games you can
check out D3's webpage http://www.d3p.co.jp/top/special/s20_special.html
There's a lot of pics and some short movie clips of the gameplay.

[StealthLurker]

Great reviews there Spartacus. Definitely looks entertaining! That shot w/ the godzilla looking beast got my attention.

.

[JWKobayashi]

This showed up yesterday:



I picked it up from play-asia while they were having it on sale for $20. Cool game, especially if you're a fan of the Seiken Densetsu series (which I am).

[drwily008]

That Seiken Densetsu looks excellent. Does anyone have an idea about the U.S. release?

I looked around and couldn't find anything.

[JWKobayashi]

That Seiken Densetsu looks excellent. Does anyone have an idea about the U.S. release?

I looked around and couldn't find anything.

Squeenix hasn't announced anything yet, which is why I couldn't pass on the import (especially for $20!)

It's a cool game, and while it would be helpful to be able to read the text, it isn't really necessary. There is already a partial translation up on Gamefaqs.

Just don't go buying it expecting it to be Secret of Mana. It's got that feel to it, but it's much more a dungeon crawler than anything else. Still fun though.

[KJN]

Oretachi Geasen Zoku Sono anyone?

Got a pretty good deal on the first 12 games in the series (Scramble, Crazy Climber, Karate Michi, Moon Cresta, Time Pilot, Sonic Wings, Burger Time, Super Volleyball, Terra Cresta, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Quarth and Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun).

Of course five more (Nekketsu Koukou Dodge Ball Bu, Rabio Lepus, Pooyan, Castlevania and Contra) was reasently released.

[blue lander]

I just managed to get all these MSX carts for about 30 bucks, so I'm pretty happy about that. There's around 47 of them, but I assume not all of them are games.

[JWKobayashi]

[Pictures of a bunch of MSX carts edited out for room]

I just managed to get all these MSX carts for about 30 bucks, so I'm pretty happy about that. There's around 47 of them, but I assume not all of them are games.

Holy crap, that's like $0.67 a game. Nice deal. Who cares if they're not all games?

[Damaramu]

A couple of days ago, I received:

Oops, see below!

[MrSmiley381]

Guilty Gear X2 Slash

Interesting import. It's Guilty Gear X2 tweaked yet again, with A.B.A. from Guilty Gear Isuka and an a version of Sol from when he was a holy knight with Ky. Story mode has been removed. Mission mode has been revamped. Each character has three sets of objective based matches. There are times when you can't jump, or use specials, have no health, etc. The game is overall English friendly except for the goddamn mission mode intros. It drives me crazy sometimes.

Note: Survival Mode unlocks EX characters and at level 400 and 420 Kliff and Justice show up. Beating arcade mode unlocks the #Reload version of the character. So does Mission Mode 2 for each character. Mission mode 1 is just some art. These are just a few of the unlockables.

[Dire 51]

Just got ahold of Akumajo Dracula XX (cart only, but hey). Compared to what I would have paid for a cart only Castlevania Dracula X, I got XX for a mere pittance.