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[rdennison7]

Entry the twentieth - August 7th, 2025

It’s a Thursday once again! Can you believe it?

Today I did two --wait, just two reviews? …seriously? Ahem, yes, two reviews were accomplished today, and I didn’t even know it! That really shows that the power of Japanese fluency is already coursing through my veins.

@Asher mentioned the gachapon elements in Shenmue a few days prior and it led me to thinking about that deeper than a normal person thought possible.

It reminded me of the last time I went to Japan. I was obsessed with these little proto-loot boxes.

But, as predicted, not the way you probably thought.

I want you to look at this:

That’s right, if you so desired, you can have entrance gate turnstile toys for 300 yen each! Or, if you look to your left, you can have one of four different barcode scanners for 400 yen each.

Now, I thought about this for a while --why on God’s green Earth would anyone want to buy this?

Then…I realized something…I would be the one who would buy this! Why would I buy it? Because I am a simple man who would laugh really hard telling people a wonderful tale over the existence of entrance gate turnstile toys and how I would be the proud owner of one.

But that’s just me. Certainly there is a trend, an audience beyond just me wanting to buy things for the lulz.

Here’s another one:

Thats right, your eyes shan’t deceive you. This is a Denny’s capsule machine! I don’t even like Denny’s, I can’t imagine anyone with their head screwed on straight would pay 400 yen for a Denny’s capsule toy.

But that’s the magic behind it. That’s a story I want to know. Someone out there is probably a huge Denny’s otaku or an entrance gate turnstile otaku. I would love to know why they feel such a way to drop approximately $3 USD on a toy that is more or less a meme to my monkey brain.

Each time I see one of these curious machines in Japan, I will pay closer attention and observe each one. See how many toys are left, see if I can find anything on X, formerly Twitter, if there’s any mention of its existence.

Consumerism, in excess, can be vapid, meaningless and even harmful. But even God’s lowliest of creatures, the gachapon, we can still learn about ourselves.

Why did I spend my entire allowance in Shenmue for figures that do…well, nothing in the game?

Maybe I just wanted to live out a fantasy where Sonic the Hedgehog existed in Japan five years before he came out. Maybe I just think they’re neat!

Spend all your money frivolously, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-first - August 8th, 2025

It’s a Friday once again! Can you believe it?

In addition to three grammar reviews, I started fooling around with Bunpro’s vocabulary decks. Maybe something interesting will come of it. But as of now, grammar is the main villain in this story arc! Maybe there will be a tournament arc between the various points of Japanese learning? Maybe one day I will collect all five of the JLPT balls.

I think I will need a JLPT ball radar because I have quite a journey before I reach the first one.

Speaking of anime tropes, I bought the game Enchanted Arms a few years ago and recently finished it. It was quite a game! You have wonderful creatures such as this:

And fun fact! This game has an early model of the The Vanguard Demon from Demon’s Souls as a character you can summon/fight with. Boy, those Japanese sure love reusing assets!

But I didn’t want to talk about Enchanted Arms, you see --I wanted to chat about what came in the box of my game. I purchased this game used from eBay. Now, as a curious creature, I love to open the box and see the contents --usually it’s just manuals and on rare occasions the receipt/cheat codes left behind by the previous owner.

This time, I received something extra curious in my box of Enchanted Arms.

This is…interesting and NOT in Japanese, so sadly I cannot attempt to read this. But it looks like it’s in French and the card is in German. All of this stuffed into my North American box of Enchanted Arms! What a well traveled game box, eh?

Now, I put this through ChatGPT 5 (Wow a new model!) and this is what it gave me:

“Dear Sébastien,
I always think a lot, a lot about you! And when I saw this card, it was exactly what I wanted to wish you!
Confidence in yourself! You are surrounded by the affectionate thoughts of the whole family who love you very much!! Yes indeed!!
Big kisses from Grandma, and may God keep you!”

This deeply saddens me! Was this game a gift to Sébastien from gram gram? Did Sébastien not like the game and sell it on eBay? Is this even the first owner of this game?

It is a mystery! I feel it is my duty to give Sébastien back his card…not the game tho, it’s mine, so I struggled to find out anything that I can use to identify this man. The other side of the card had no personal identifying material, so I turned to eBay to help me out.

I looked at the seller name for Enchanted Arms that I purchased years ago and searched online to find anything that I could that could link to Sébastien to give him grammy’s card.

Enchanted Arms, you see, released on August 29, 2006 in the US. This might’ve been a present to Sébastien nearly twenty years ago. I fear that if that is the case, grams may have crossed the rainbow bridge.

I searched high and low for Sébastien’s information based on what little I had to go on, and sadly nothing.

Sébastien, by any chance you are learning Japanese and you are reading a thread that is 40+ posts deep, I have your grandmother’s card and it’s in safe hands. I’ve cherished it deeply like you would have while it awaits its return to its proper owner.

I will send this to you at no cost to ensure that you have this back in your possession.

Also, uh, thanks for Enchanted Arms. It’s kinda a dumb game with shounen anime tropes. There’s a character in the game who is wildly a product of its time, so much so that my next image of it will be in a spoiler tag to shield the eyes of the most sensitive of readers:

Hilarious and potentially outdated character trope below!

If you can read this, you probably got it, right? I won’t translate it, but if you know, you know!

All in all, I would give Enchanted Arms an 11 out of 17 hats. It has decent gameplay saved only by a random French-speaking grandmother.

Be brave, everyone!

[distantflower]

@rdennison7

This video is very NSFW and might be traumatizing as you’re witnessing true candy-on-candy violence. If you have a weak stomach, you may wish to stop entirely.

Half-way through, I was expecting some dragon candy to appear I think I watched my husband play Skyrim too many times to count.

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-second - August 9th, 2025

It’s a Saturday once again! Can you believe it?

Today was a monumental day for my Japanese reviews and overall Japanese progress. Five reviews. They underestimated my power level… and paid the price. One grammar point. The prophecy spoke of this, the day I would defeat a grammar point just by the power of friendship.

But also, I decided to work on a new Vocab deck for Bunpro! I took a look at the N5 vocab list and was largely disappointed by how at odds it is for users who know zero Japanese and are learning the grammar and vocab for the first time.

Essentially, this deck introduces vocab as you see it in the grammar lessons and the example sentences.

Nooooow, I know Bunpro can be sneaky and change the example sentences on a whim, so think of this as a proof of concept. I want to finish at least all vocab seen in N5 grammar points, and I am about halfway there.

It would be interesting to see how much N5 vocab is in this deck when you finish the N5 grammar, as if there is at least 90% overlap, it may be worth looking into for the Bunpro team.

Here’s a link to those that are interested (note, I may make decks that are grouped by JLPT level in the future): Decks out for vocab learning

Now for something tangentially related!

I learned about something utterly fascinating today called Shouryuuma (精霊馬).

“What on Earth is that?! This wasn’t in any of my manga training!” Now, settle down theoretical person. This is a Buddhist thing where families honor the spirits of their ancestors…but most importantly, there’s this weird thing that I noticed that I thought was cool:

Wow! What is that? Those, my friends, are Japanese horses and oxen. Am I being sliiiiightly misleading? Possibly, but these little creatures are offered to the spirits of gram gram… I am not exactly sure why, but I prefer to let my imagination fill in the gaps. Let’s go on a journey.

Behold! A pale…green horse?

Imagine the spirit realm! A world beyond our comprehension. On occasion, there is a bridge between their world and ours.

You, yes you, are a young child in modern Japan. One day, you are visited by the spirit of your ancestor from 1000 years ago. Your ancestor teaches you about life, harmony and wisdom. You pay close attention and absorb each word the kind spirit says.

The spirit asks merely in return to provide a great horse to provide to him in the spirit realm. You wish to honor the noble spirit, and you get to work.

When the time comes, you bring your animal, the most firm and ripe eggplant you could find. The legs are adorned with the sturdiest toothpicks money could buy. You lay the humble creature to journey to the spirit realm where your ancestor awaits.

A world…beyond comprehension? Your ancestor…he’s in trouble and has been for a while. Horse races are a common issue among the spirits and his gambling debts are piling up.

You see, he only buttered you up to get you to make a great horse so he can pay off his debts. That stuff about love, kindness, and respecting your elders? All garbage. Pointless platitudes to get you to do his bidding.

The races are about to start, and your animal is about to appear at the starting gate. Your ancestor feels confident. You were a good child after all, you listened and made the best offering you could. Much better than that neighbor kid’s.

There’s…just a slight problem. That eggplant? I didn’t mention this, but that resembles an ox. Uh, oops? Maybe your ancestor should’ve spelled out the need for a cucumber. Oh well, maybe in another life.

The race starts and the horses are off! But…yours, casually grazing as best an eggplant could. Your ancestor felt as if he died --er, well a second time.

That’s it, his last chance. As the crowds clear from the arena, he is greeted by spirit Yakuza that would humbly like to meet his spirit kneecaps…

Be sure not to listen to your elders, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-third - August 10th, 2025

It’s a Sunday once again! Can you believe it?

Today I added more N5 vocab to my First Principle vocab deck and along the way, I noticed that…well, the vocab is hmm, half baked? Let’s be kind and go with that!

As I am entering the vocab into this deck, I am testing it to see how Japanese learners going from zero would fare, and you would be SHOCKED by the results.

Well, perhaps not, but my finding is that the onboarding process is grosser than the smell of Natto.

From a pedagogical standpoint, I find it hard to convince me that filling in the blank using context sentences for beginners is the right way to approach this. Warning gross light mode ahead!

Look at this sentence. You probably got it right instantly. Book is highlighted in red and the rest of the sentence? Easy peasy!

But for someone who is just learning Japanese and has never even seen ten Japanese words out in the wild, this is overwhelming! They don’t know most of this sentence!

This is the second vocab word they are learning using the N5 Vocab deck.

Context-based learning has merit and is useful for the upper-beginner/intermediate phase of learning. But Bunpro’s default method of learning is quite horrible for new learners.

BUT Bunpro has a fix…well, kinda. You see, it’s messy and unreliable.

In my First Principle deck, I added a nice all-cap disclaimer in the description: “FOR NEW JAPANESE LEARNERS: Go to Settings → Reviews. Scroll down until you see the setting “Default Vocab Review Type”. For Question Type, select: Translate. For Answer Type, select: Reveal & Grade.”

Essentially what this does is recommends new learners to go into the settings and change the vocab to give you a Japanese word and use the trusty ol’ honor system to judge if you got it right or not.

Ideally it would look like this (warning gross light mode ahead, again!):

But in reality, its reliability is…well, poo. I updated the vocab settings to reflect such, but when adding new vocab or reviewing some still reflect this:

At least I don’t have to type the answer! But this is bad and doesn’t reflect what settings were changed.

Jonathan Blow, despite being a cranky and miserly old programmer, has a lot of wisdom on the topic of teaching new players how games work. But…games and learning apps aren’t the same!..right?

Well, shockingly enough, there’s a great amount of overlap between the two.

Blow’s take, based on the numerous talks and presentations he has given through the years, is that complexity can naturally arise from mastering simple fundamentals. Now, how does that reflect on what I am saying? Well, if I learn the word for book, let me test my knowledge on book. Give me context for what I know for book and everything else I already know.

The “Reveal & Grade” setting should be default for those who choose zero Japanese as their baseline for learning Japanese. Maybe as their knowledge and experience grows that can change into context-based learning and beyond.

Overall, I think the current setting and UX for Bunpro’s site for absolutely new Japanese learners is bad. Not in an exaggeration bad, but in terms of a lacking a core philosophy and caring for new learners kind of bad.

It’s so bad, that I would completely overhaul the system and rethink the model from scratch.

If you may recall from a bunch of posts ago, I did a deep dive on the referral system and then one on the onboarding process for new users. I tapped out like a chump! So embarrassing.

Sadly, I did that intentionally as if I kept going the way I analyze games, I would’ve torn this to shreds, which wouldn’t have been fun to read as I would’ve repeated myself a lot, and I think the overall point was made early on: it’s bad.

I will merely say this: If you need to give paragraphs of text to the user of the app or player of a game, you have offloaded the UX/designer’s job onto that user/player. That’s really, really bad.

I was playing Resonance Of Fate last week. If you haven’t played it, please do so, it’s weird. In fact, here’s a funny video with Nolan North in it as a palette cleanser:

Resonance of Fate - "All we have are raisins"

Great, eh? The combat is quite quirky too! You can play it as a typical turn-based RPG, but you’re doing a great disservice as it’s quite a chaotic and deep game.

…but sadly that beauty in the complexity is hidden in dozens of pages of tutorial text. You have to not only read a ton of text, but you have to remember what all of that does and it sucks! Learning from doing is beauty. Learning from reading is boring.

The onboarding process for Bunpro has me reading paragraphs of text, needing to juggle all of that, and the process can and should be eliminated in favor of a user-centric philosophy.

Think of the user in Bunpro as the main character of the story the Bunpro developers are telling. The onus is on Bunpro to make that story as interesting and engaging as possible. Currently, at least for new users, it fails completely on that goal and it deeply saddens me.

It’s very easy to pay attention to what users on this forum are saying. We are the survivors and we have data points that can be valuable. But from what I have learned through my experience in data science is that the best data is usually the data you don’t see.

What do the kids call this? Survivorship bias! Did you ever see the plane picture? Oh, boy, if you haven’t, I will show you the plane picture:

To understand the context of the classic plane picture, Wikipedia sensei has you covered.

Perhaps understanding the desires and feelings of those who haven’t made it very far in their Japanese journey is worth exploring.

Gosh, this was a rant, eh? Hardly any jokes, but that Resonance of Fate video? That was something. Bunker busters? Did that put a smile on your face and make your eyes roll at the same time? Me too!

Anyway, food for thought for a post deep in a thread where I ramble a lot.

Appreciate raisins, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-fourth - August 11th, 2025

It’s a Monday once again! Can you believe it?

The First Principle deck now has all of the N5 vocab in the order in which you see them. Here’s some interesting data from using one of my good ol’ sockpuppet accounts.

This…doesn’t look impressive, right? I mean, this deck has less than half of the total N5 vocab than the official Bunpro deck! Well, that’s a valid comment.

When perusing through the N5 vocab deck from Bunpro, I noticed considerable overlap of them using grammar words and variations of words used in the First Principle deck.

After a painstaking amount of time comparing each word to this deck, I estimated that, if excluding redundancies and filler words, that the First Principle deck has about 750-800 out of the 1100 words from the Bunpro vocab deck.

What does this mean? Well, if Bunpro took a more user-focused take on learning, that they can use a First Principle approach to vocab learning and use the missing words from the First Principle deck as additional example sentences in N5 grammar.

That would be a pragmatic approach that would work, but ultimately I think it would be a band-aid but an approach that would correct the ship for new Japanese learners in the long term.

If I have time, I could consider making an N4 variant of the First Principle deck, but it was of great importance that newbies can get a better foothold on learning Japanese without being overwhelmed.

Japanese is hard!

Anyway, that’s all for today, hopefully my Japanese focus will be more minimal tomorrow, as admittedly, it was a pain in the ass making this deck as I had to go through every single word through every single sentence and use the Bunpro vocab search (btw, you guys should just copy how jisho.org handles search).

Hopefully tomorrow will be mundane!

Stay sane, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-fifth - August 12th, 2025

It’s a …Tuesday…once again? …I don’t believe it.

I am cheating a bit! Today is still Monday, but I am posting this early because sometimes it’s okay to break the rules.

Boy howdy, those last two posts were wild, eh? Writing rants are usually the least fun for me to write! Needs a high joke to ramble ratio and that was lacking in both!

To make up this grievance to you all, I will share with you something that is totally not a waste of your time.

I have to warn you, this is unbelievably long and uses naughty language on occasion. As such, posting it blindly would be…unwise.

Thus it’s in a spoiler tag. It may take an hour or two to read when all the pieces are together. You will not learn anything about Japanese language, but you may learn about the power of friendship along the way.

Behold! A Profound Waste of Time Part 1

Oh, boy! Lost Planet, now that’s a Capcom franchise that is dead and buried for at least ten years. Anyone remember that? No, well that’s fine and dandy. I am going through Lost Planet 1 for the first time since 2009, or so.

While waiting for this Xbox download to finish, I suppose I can write up a brief summary of my experience with it. So, I have only played Lost Planet 1 and 2. I have the third game along with the weird Japanese-exclusive spin-off “EX Troopers”, but I don’t have much experience, nostalgia, or really sentimentality for this game at all.

I remember that each game, probably unintentionally, is quite different from the last. But for this, I am playing just basic Lost Planet.

But this is a bit confusing, as Lost Planet, at least on Xbox, has two SKUs. We have vanilla Lost Planet, then we have Lost Planet: Colonies Edition. Remember how Capcom used to love re-selling and repackaging their games with little bonuses? Well, Lost Planet got that treatment.

If memory serves correctly, you cannot buy the vanilla version off the marketplace, just Colonies, which is a bit odd as both are backwards compatible.

Actually, I had a bit of an issue getting the Colonies edition of Lost Planet, as I believe that was only relegated to the “Platinum Hits” version of the game, but whenever I went to Game Stops in the mid 2010s, they only had vanilla Lost Planet. Even when I got the Colonies box, they would sneak in the vanilla disc. It wasn’t until a few years ago, I had enough of this nonsense, so I decided to go on eBay and purchase it myself. I was extra paranoid and made sure the disc and box matched the Colonies Edition.

Now here I am with my empire of Lost Planet games…well, okay, it’s just five games in total, one being a re-release with bonus features, but I love being dramatic.

So let’s just take a look at the parameters for this playthrough.

This has multiplayer and I will not be touching that. I understand and realize that there was a decent following of this game’s multiplayer, but due to the age and the fact there are 2 SKUs fragmenting the player base, it’s safe to assume it’s dead. Also, I am a miserly man and didn’t renew my Xbox subscription. So I don’t even think I can check the lobbies or leaderboards unless I renew that.

So, with that being said, I think focusing on the single player portions would be more of my jam.

If I ever do decide to play Lost Planet 2, that would be a bit harder, as I think that game centered itself around its multiplayer even with its solo modes. But one thing at a time. The download is finished and Lost Planet: Not Colonies Edition awaits!

Okay, whenever I play these pesky games, I always try to see how much friction there is with the intro title cards. There were four intro title cards, three of which couldn’t be skipped but the others could. It looks like the timer was about four seconds per card, so about twelve seconds before we can get to the main menu screen.

I am not sure why only one of which could be skipped, huh. Is it a legal thing? I remember Jon Blow talking about something like this, but I wish I remembered the details.

After waiting a period of a few minutes, an attract video started playing. It was short, showcasing the vibe, enemies, and generalities of the game. I always pondered why relatively modern games still did that as it seems a bit out of place.

Below the press start shows “Character Wayne by Lee Byung Hun / FANTOM Co., LTD”. Sounds like Capcom hired their own Tetsuya Nomura to design the main character…at least, I think Wayne is the main character. Hold on a sec, I am gonna do a bit of digging on Mr. Hun.

Boy was I wrong! Turns out that Mr. Hun is a pretty famous actor and Wayne was modeled after him. According to IMDB, Josh Keaton was the voice actor. It definitely sounds like a Commander Shepard ordeal. Odd, as his name or company he was associated with was not on the intro title. Perhaps Korean companies are a bit anal with those details.

Can we start the game now?

NO we cannot have fun, what even is that? We’re looking at the menu! Okay, the menu for Lost Planet is simultaneously interesting and uninteresting. We have a live background showing a video of the world. Maybe it changes depending on which mission we are playing? Who knows!

Judging from the compression artifacts, it doesn’t seem to be playing in-engine, so just a video of a camera flying through a landscape.

It seems to cycle through various videos one showing a desolate…highway with an unmarked facility? Okay. Next is a video featuring the little dudes. I forget their name, but they are in a cave or hive or something…I know, painfully exciting.

Is it okay if I go through the various options in the menu and randomly interject if there’s a new video in the menu? I think I shall.

As soon as I said that a third video started. Looks like a hentai creature emerging from the snow working to wreak havoc on the chastity of anime girls.

So, starting with the very bottom, we have RECORDS, caps intentional. This is broken down into three segments: Campaign, Online Battle, and the adorably Engrish, Achievement.

Campaign shows the…well, records of your playthrough of the single-player. I have a save record from when I briefly touched this game a few years back, so I can review details, at least of the first two missions.

It logs your Thermal Energy, which I am unsure if it’s the total amount you collected or how much when you finish the mission.

Play time is also logged, again unsure if this is cumulative or a best achieved in the level.

But going down, we have Akrid Killed (the aforementioned little dudes I blanked on), Humans Killed, VSs Destroyed (I believe those are the mechs), and Target Marks.

Oh boy, Target Marks? Are those the arbitrary collectibles found in each mission? Yes and it gets better! There’s Target Marks for each difficulty too! So if you want to be extra meticulous you have to play each mission on four different difficulties and find each target.

Curiously, I see that I got one in Normal that has the letter “R”…does it spell out a word? Does each difficulty have its own word? Does getting each target in each difficulty spell out a cryptic phrase like “Be sure to drink your ovaltine?” I could Google this, but I shan’t. I prefer to raw dog it, at least for the first play.

HUH. I backed out of the Campaign section in RECORDS and a random video played. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason. Perhaps it wants to keep the dynamism and have a random video play whenever you change out of and back into a menu?

Next section in RECORDS, again, caps intentional, is Online Battle Results. This mouthful contains your records from the multiplayer. It seems there is a rudimentary leveling system in place. I never played it online, so there are no records. But it shows a level bar, with some icon and a flag showing your region.

Below that are four medals with a number next to it, again everything here is zero. I have no idea what the medals are, we have a medal with a…star medal…trippy. The next medal has a flag, the next medal has…I dunno, a rook or something? The last medal has what I believe to be a T-Rex. No words describing them, so please excuse my artistic license.

To wrap this up, this contains stats for: Online Matches, Players Encountered, Enemies Killed, Deaths, Rampage Ratio (Kills / Deaths), Thermal Energy (Total), Elite Enemies Killed, Max Killing Spree, Head Shots, and Friendly Kills.

Okay, I have thoughts. How quaint that they have players encountered as a stat. I always wondered in some multiplayer games like CoD how many people in total I have seen while doing lines of G-Fuel in between sessions during Double XP Weekend.

Also, Rampage Ratio? I have no idea if Capcom created that term specifically for Lost Planet, but it sounds so adorable.

What even are elite enemies? Isn’t this PVP? Is there a PVE element in the multiplayer? I guess the world shall never know.

Lastly, friendly kills…how…brave to have them put that as a stat in multiplayer. Friendly fire is on, and we track it, and we can AND will shame you.

Oh, hey, I forgot. The menu for the RECORDS page is a bit different. No animated videos, or anything like that. I suppose that’s taxing the system a bit too hard.

Next up in the RECORDS is my favorite: Achievement. Picking this will merely bring up the achievement menu in the guide. A bit…boring. But I suppose if it works, it works. Achievement!

We’re movin’ on up, to the OPTIONS side. This contains two parts: Game Settings and Xbox Live Marketplace. Sooo, Phil Spencer personally took the Xbox 360 Store back behind a shed and introduced a shotgun shell to it last Summer. I feel like this option might not work, but we’re exploring, dammit! Let’s see anyway.

But before we do that, one thing is bugging the HECK out of me. At the bottom of the menu is “gamertag :” then following my gamertag. I hate how it’s in lowercase despite the fact that so much is in ALL CAPS. Maybe this was before the age of UX specialists ruining modern UI in games.

Game Settings time! Boy howdy are there settings. We have two sections to the Game Settings, the left-hand side shows us the controller layout. Seeing the image of the Xbox 360 controller is giving me some uncanny valley symptoms. But this simply shows the button layout for the controller. I will describe the default layout with its button format a bit later.

But for now, let’s focus on the actual settings. Settings are on the right-hand side and into four segments, and at the very bottom is the handy “Reset to defaults” option when you accidentally fuck with the settings so much that you inadvertently made it unplayable.

First section is Aiming! We have an interestingly detailed, well for its time, array of selections.

Inverted Controls allows you to select inversion on either the horizontal, vertical, or both. If you’re a normal human being, this will be set to off, or None in this case.

This next option is very, very interesting. Speed. My assumption this is how fuck with the response curves. This is a bit detailed: We have Accelerate, which goes from Accelerate 1, all the way to 8, Fixed, which again, goes from 1 to 8, and Cruise from 1 to 8. The default being Accelerate 3.

Allowing you to change your aiming speed hasn’t been in many console games during this era, let alone the response type you get from each. I have no idea what these do, but I assume for Accelerate there’s a rate of acceleration that changes depending on how far the stick is pushed and the speeds change the acceleration rate?

For Fixed, I think the movement would be equivalent to linear? Where no matter how far you pushed the stick the rate of movement is the same.

Cruise…this might be tricky. It might be something of a mix of Fixed and Accelerate where up to a certain boundary, you move X units per frame, but once you go beyond it, there’s a high acceleration factor?

Might be worth experimenting to see what’s the best feel. But this is pretty cool seeing this in a 2007 game.

Next setting is a bit confusing, but I am curious. View. Default is: Normal. But we have Zoom and Wide as options. Is this the FOV? If true, this would be pretty wild for a 360 game.

Last up in the Aiming section, we have Aim Assistance. Pretty straightforward. ON and OFF, caps intentional.

Next Smegment, typo intentional, is Xbox 360 Controller…sigh, I suppose this is the time I have to painstakingly describe the button layout. Welp, someone’s gotta do it.

But first, we have two parts in the Xbox 360 Controller segment: Control Pattern and Vibration. Vibration is easy: ON and OFF. Simple, right?

Now it’s time for the Control Pattern. I will try my best to make this interesting. There are three layouts titled: PATTERN A, PATTERN B, and PATTERN C. I don’t know about you, but settings in all caps hurt my eyes.

So…I purposely left out one little detail that I will mention now. I deeply apologize for being intentionally deceitful, but I had to do it. Please understand. You see there’s two control modes, one is Human and the other is VS display. I think the VS display is for when you use the mechs.

But let’s look at the default control scheme for the Human then the VS. Then we can look at how the control patterns differ. I hope that’s a clean way to organize this via text!

Human:
LT - Grenade
LB - Turn 90 Degrees Left
RT - Shoot
RB - Turn 90 Degrees Right
Left Stick: Move, CLICK: Crawl
D-PAD: UP/DOWN: Zoom, LEFT/RIGHT: Light
Back: PDA Menu (Holy shit a PDA what is this 2004?)
Start: Pause
Right Stick: Aim, CLICK: Reload
A: Jump
B: Action (Press the action button, Snake!)
X: Anchor (I think that’s the grapnel hook)
Y: Change Weapon

VS:
LT - Fire L-Weapon
LB - Turn 90 Degrees Left
RT - Fire R-Weapon
RB - Turn 90 Degrees Right
Left Stick: Move (No crawling!)
D-PAD: LEFT/RIGHT: Light
Back: PDA Menu (Ever had a PDA before the iPhone? I always wanted one)
Start: Pause
Right Stick: Aim, CLICK: Crawl (Just kidding, it’s Reload)
A: Jump
B: Action
X: SP Attack (Not a clue what that means)
Y: SP Function (No idea either here!)

That was fun and not a slog to write. I bet the feeling was mutual to read, eh? Well, we’re not done yet! What’s the difference between the other control schemes?

Well in PATTERN B, we swap the LB and RB for the Human, so instead of those right angle turns:

LB - Zoom
RB - Reload
D-PAD: Loses the ability to zoom up and down.
Right Stick Click: Turn 360 degrees.

That’s right 360 degrees! Fits the platform quite well. Curious how well that works. Like if you can interrupt it with moving the stick.

For the VS, same deal, except you can manually reload each weapon:

LB - Reload L-Weapon
RB - Reload R-Weapon
Right Stick Click: Turn 360 degrees.

Already, we’re seeing some interesting, but minor mechanical changes to how you operate the game. It’s already weird having a post-Gears of War-style game using quick turns. But having a quick…spin? Interesting.

Almost done! Onwards to PATTERN C! This one looks the weirdest, but let’s dig into the differences for the Human compared to PATTERN A.

LB - Change Weapon
RB - Reload
Right Stick Flick: Turn 360 degrees.

Flick: turn 360 degrees?! Whaaaaat does that mean? I am curious how this can be done or how often it could be done in error. Interestingly, the Y button does nothing. That’s…a choice

Nevertheless, almost done, here’s the VS:

LB - Reload L-Weapon
RB - Reload R-Weapon
Right Stick Flick: Turn 360 degrees

Very same-y, right? I am curious in trying all three out to see what would be a good choice. I find it refreshing seeing a game with a reload button not being on the face button as I think it’s more important having your hands on the controls and aiming as much as possible, even between reloads.

But I find it so curious that they give the ability to reload manually for the VS per weapon but only in patterns B and C.

ARE WE DONE? Not quite. Ten pages into this and we’re still not even playing the darn game. We have two more segments and they will be quick, I promise.

Sound segment has two parts: Music Volume and SFX Volume. Both are bars, with, it seems, 100 points of articulation. It’s pretty hard to fine tune them. I would prefer a number, but what do I know?

Last segment is Screen/Other. I love how descriptive Other is. It has Brightness and Subtitles. Brightness is the same type of bar, and Subtitles is a simple ON and OFF toggle. Sometimes I feel like I put the caps on just to fuck with you, kind reader. Just kidding. You’re a trooper if you somehow read all of this!

Btw, these settings don’t save automatically, when you make a change and back out, it has a confirmation screen asking to save. I feel indifferent to having it save automatically versus it asking me. I guess I would grind my gears if I had to change the settings all the time, which would probably be rare for this game.

Remember how we were in the OPTIONS part of the menu? Well we’re still not done, if you can believe that! Next up is the Xbox Live Marketplace!

I thought this wouldn’t work, but…it does! This is a trip, I will tell you. There are currently 19 items listed…you know what? Fuck it. We’re doing all 19:

Main Character 1M Theme for 63 cents! Okay, tangent time. Microsoft used to do MS points which were a ridiculous conversion from dollars to points. 800 MS points was $10. So this theme was a whopping 50 MS points! This theme was to celebrate Lost Planet and Dead Rising hitting a million sales. Not separately, together. What simpler times…

Snow Pirates 1 1M Picture Pack again, 63 cents or 50 fun bucks. This shows three snow pirates. Also the 1M stuff is the 1 million sale celebration for two games released five months apart from each other. Does that imply that Dead Rising slacked or Lost Planet slacked between them?

Snow Pirates 1M Theme for 63 cents or about 50 V-bucks.

Snow Pirates 2 1M Picture Pack for 63 cents. I wonder how many CoD Points that equals? Capcom surely loves snow pirates.

“Theater” Trailer (420p) - okay, one thing you will notice, is that during this time, many trailers released had a 420p version and the super cool, super trendy 720p version. So if you really wanted to, you can own the standard def trailer.

“Theater” Trailer (720p) - hey, look, it’s the 720p trailer I mentioned.

LOST PLANET Online Demo - less than 200 MB for a demo! Crazy, eh? Also what’s with the obsession with the caps? I mean it is CAPcom after all.

Lost Planet “Snow Pack” Theme for 63 pennies or about 96 Yen by today’s conversion. This is the first non 1 million celebration whatever pack. Also, no caps this time for the title!

Lost Planet Picture Pack 1. Even inflation hits 2007 games, with this one at a whopping 75 cents. That’s like, what 60 Monkey Scrotum points? This shows renders of…characters? I have no idea who any of these people are. Curious who actually bought them and decided to be NPC number 4 as their online avatar for Xbox Live.

Lost Planet Picture Pack 2 is next. I actually didn’t look at the listing, just guessed and I was right! For 75 cents what does this get you? Well, one of them is of the Akrid, Dongo. I will just move right along…hehe…Dongo.

Secrets to Keep Trailer. Looks like the next few trailers don’t have SD or HD listings, I hope your bandwidth can handle the 70 MB of trailer.

Awakening Trailer. Yes, we’re really going through all of this.

Cold Reality Trailer. If you’re still paying attention, please let me know. This is driving me mad too.

LOST PLANET E3’06 Demo. Hold your horses. TWO demos? With this being half a year prior to launch? I might wanna look into this. I am curious if they changed anything. Slight, small, or insignificant, it’s right up my alley!

LOST PLANET Theme. Wowzers, this is the most expensive item yet! $1.88 for a theme! That’s highway robbery. That has to be at least 150 MS points.

LOST PLANET Pre-E3’06 Trailer (480p) - I am getting really tired of typing that title in caps. No copy/paste here!

LOST PLANET Pre-E3’06 Trailer (720p). Ever wonder which version of the trailer was more popular? Someone has the stats somewhere.

Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions Trailer (480p). No caps, this is great. I am curious what the motivation is for styling it with and without caps. Like, someone had to make that decision somewhere. Team Caps or Team Normal. Which do you represent?

Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions Trailer (720p). We’re done! That’s it. If you read all of this so far, I salute you.

3500 words later and you may be wondering to yourself, “Can you please, PLEASE talk about the game?” My response is…not quite. We still have two more segments in the main menu to talk about, and fortunately it’s not bad.

So, I know it’s impossible to tell here, but I took a break and decided to load the game up again. Well, game is an interesting word, as we did nothing in terms of playing it.

But I find it curious when starting up the game, after pressing start on the title screen, it says that no storage device is selected by default and asks me to select storage or throw caution to the wind. Is this a curio due to the nature of me playing this on the Series X? I wonder if this is like it on the Xbox 360 version. Maybe going back and playing it on 360 along with the demos should be something I should try to replicate and see if it happens again.

Now, where was I? Should I even say that as you have no idea of my absence? Oh well, you can spare to indulge a few sentences if you manage to make it this far. Oh, yeah! Just finished going through the Xbox Live Marketplace arrangements. Wasn’t that fun?

Right above the OPTIONS segment, we have ONLINE BATTLE. It is greyed out, so I cannot select it. Well, I can, it just chastises me for being poor.

Moving right along, we have CAMPAIGN, I feel like we’re going to be quite familiar with this one. Three options here: New Game, Continue, and Mission Select. Standard fare, honestly a bit boring, but we gotta work with what we got.

What’s in Mission Select you ask? Glad you asked. So this is a bit abnormal that your standard mission select than you’re used to. There are two halves to the screen, and the easiest one to describe will be the one on the right.

The right-hand side is a map of this supposed lost planet, which is a bit ironic as how can it be lost if they clearly mapped out the topography? Plot holes aside, each mission shows an icon on the map of where it takes place along with an image of the mission. I am truly curious on who selected the image for some of this as the image selected for mission one is nondescript.

But, I think it’s a bit neat, a tad contradictory in showing this map on the mission select screen. A bit more exciting than just the mission along with an image.

On the left-hand side we have our mission select screen. This is a bit weirder than how I am used to seeing things. Each mission is structured as so: Mission 00: Mission name. Then below it is the difficulty you finished it with the lower difficulties being selectable. Below that to the right are the medals you’ve obtained per difficulty.

It’s really odd to me seeing the difficulty being selectable on the mission itself on a per mission basis. But I suppose that makes sense, as you can start a hard mode play, finish mission one and then not do mission 2. That means only mission 1 would have hard mode selectable and not the others.

Also, I am curious about the medals. Why medals? Why not just do something more…interesting? Is there a lore or gameplay reason we’re doing this? Very confusing to me.

Okay, enough is enough. We can finally start the game.

I will play this on the normal difficulty. If I do decide on a harder play run, I will notate this, but everything will have normal as the default mode of play.

It seems if you select New Game and you already have save data, it will nuke it from orbit. Soooo, if you’re going to start this over again like I am, maybe just stick with Mission Select for future runs.

Only three difficulties are available, Easy, Normal, and Hard. Suspiciously, there’s space for one more difficulty at the bottom. I feel like this is gonna be the super-ultra-fun mode of play.

The game begins with a pretty long exposition dump setting the world and blah blah blah. Humans left Earth to establish E.D.N. III, which I suppose is the third E.D.N., well that looks like an acronym. Does it stand for anything? No clue!

We’re in the year, -80 or something TC. Terminal something or another. I am sorry they were throwing a good amount of things at me at once so my little peanut brain couldn’t juggle it all.

The first cutscene starts with those crazy kids leaving the front door open so a bunch of gigantic creatures from Monster Hunter arrive. No idea who thought it was a good idea to let those things in. But apparently they are the Akrid and inside they have a creamy center full of thermal energy.

Goodness, what other narrative tidbits were there? Oh, humanity established a colony, then got the boot when the Akrid fought back. Then humanity came up with mechs called VS called…uh, something suits.

There’s a guy named Gale. Not sure who he is, but the character Wayne said “Dad!” so I assume that’s his dad.

There was another colony established and existed for 20 years…okay, I am going to say this. Don’t fucking give me so many things to juggle all at once. I combed through all of your options and while going in blind, I have a better idea of what’s happening and even I am lost in this planet of lore dumping.

I know the game has a manual, and was I supposed to read and memorize that? Do you really want me to do an entire analysis on that? You want me to pause the game and just go through the manual? I will do it, dammit!

Anyway, while starting the game, your Thermal Energy constantly decreases, which is annoying as I really like to mess around with the feel of the controls. I find it odd, as in the very first mission you are indoors, so why does the Thermal Energy, or as the game lovingly calls T-ENG, decrease?

The aiming feels off. Like, really odd. You move the reticule a little bit and the camera doesn’t move until you move far enough in a certain direction. This goes at odds with third person games.

I find it a bit odd that the 90 degree turns overshoot it. Perhaps this is just me getting used to the controls, but I will write more of my discoveries.

Anyway, the game starts with you testing out your grappling mechanic, and I need to test how that functions more. There was an amusing scene where a dude, maybe Gale, was opening a hatch on the floor to rappel below. A soldier put his hand up specifically for me halting my progression and an invisible wall was preventing me from goofing off.

But once you did have full agency to move, you were supposed to fall down and automatically you would grapple down. I reached the bottom and had no idea which button it was to detach, so I pressed A and it catapulted me to the top, I jumped, fell down the same hole and crashed down. Luckily for me, there’s no fall damage.

But as soon as that happened a rollie pollie Akrid cruised in and my dudes opened fire. There’s no fall damage, but there is friendly fire…for some reason as I stood in front of my supposed ally as he unloaded a magazine into my back.

After doing that, a huge wall of text appeared, which was more terrifying than any foe I’ve encountered thus yet. Weakened from the lore dump a few minutes prior, I found it nigh impossible to continue paying attention to more explanations. But I soldiered on.

This text box, in painstaking detail, explained to me what Thermal Energy and the Harmonizer do. Remember when I said those Akrid have a creamy filling inside? When you kill them, their creamy goodness oozes from every orifice, pooling on the floor. You collect that to increase your T-ENG which is constantly decreasing, because it’s cold outside and apparently a jacket ain’t gonna cut it.

But when you get damaged, the Harmonizer comes into play, the Harmonizer is what facilitates the health regen, I guess. It takes whatever creamy goodness you gathered from the Akrid and spends it to restore your health from a friendly fire incident.

What happens when you reach 0 T-ENG? Well, your health bar decreases, which this game happens to call your life gauge.

Let’s talk HUD. Your HUD, at least so far, is pretty basic. On the upper left-hand side you have your “Life gauge”, called Life with a short, nondescript green bar. Below that is your constantly dwindling T-ENG, which is annoying that I have to constantly pause the game to talk about this.

Upper right-hand side, we have our compass, which rotates as you move around, with the north side highlighted in red so you don’t get lost, I guess. Inside the compass, I assume this will show friendly and enemy icons. Need to see if it shows items or VS mechs.

The bottom right-hand side shows your active weapon and the ammo.

The bottom left-hand side is blank, but if I remember correctly, this is for grenades.

Our aiming reticule resembles a little X, but with a circle in the middle. Below it is a meter showing how much ammo we have in our current magazine before needing to reload.

The aiming reticle turns green whenever you can grapple on to something.

Jumping is…interesting to say the least. You can jump quite high, maybe 1.5x your height? But when you land, there’s a brief pause, so spamming jump while playing may not be a wise speedrun strat.

I noticed that the default aiming is a bit too sluggish for me. Like it’s too slow initially, but the longer you hold it in a direction the acceleration gets higher?

It’s also odd that the only way to change the aim settings is not via the pause menu, as that only has: Back, Restart, and Quit. You need to go into your PDA and select the Configuration to change it.

Oh, jeez. All this goofing around and I am almost out of energy. Oh, well. Let’s see if I can tweak the settings to make it easier to aim.

It looks like the View option does change the FOV in a weird way, the zoom option narrows it, but for the life of me, I cannot tell the difference between Normal and Wide. Is this to accommodate widescreen TVs? As at that time, there were many gamers still rocking the standard def units. In fact, this kinda made Dead Rising a bit hard to play as a result. So is this Capcom’s way of fixing that?

When shooting enemies, I noticed that it highlights the enemy with two triangles? I suppose to help guide you when shooting as the enemies may blend into the environment.

Also, it looks like the aiming has pretty healthy auto aim, or more specifically bullet magnetism. I was shooting in the general vicinity of an enemy, my reticule wasn’t red nor reticule not on the enemy and the bullets made contact.

Y’know I have not a damn clue what my objective is in this level at all. I activated something called a Data Post, and another text box of death appeared. It said that these data posts give me thermal energy, not sure how, but after doing so, I can use the map on my PDA. This also tells me the direction of the next data post.

Maybe these posts are the little markers telling my dumbass where to go. It seems linear so far, maybe things blend into the environment?

After vanquishing the text box from bad tutorial hell, I am greeted with a cutscene showing a huge Akrid, which Gale, remember him?, called a Green Eye. For creatures with creamy thermal goo in their bodies, this creature confused me. Here’s something the size of a building, yet it could breathe ice blasts and freeze things? I guess I shouldn’t think too hard about it.

I accidentally changed my aiming sensitivity to the highest on Accelerate, so it would be interesting seeing if I goof this sequence.

Pressing back does in fact show a map. If it paused the game, I would be more inclined to give a better analysis of this, but the Jolly Green Giant is chasing me, maybe later.

After a daring escape from the Green Meanie, I changed my aim sensitivity to Linear 5. It looks like this also affected how the reticule moves, as it is fixed similarly to how a typical third person shooter operates. Very weird how this game is operating.

Payback time? So after hopping into a VS, which in this case is the PTX-140, another text box appeared! Sidenote, you think the X stands for Xtreme? I hope so. This goes through the basic controls that I listed earlier, right? Well, not quite! This VS mech has special powers?

The A button is to hover, you jump and then press A again to hover. One more time to cancel. Y is to dash. It says in the direction of your Left Stick, but we shall see. X is the VS Saw, so I assume that is the melee attack.

Ah, there’s a catch! Jumping increases the rate of T-ENG consumption. With hovering keeping the rate of high consumption steady. A bit lame, but can’t have fun all the time, I suppose.

After putting some rounds into the Green dude, we get about a three minute cutscene that drastically changes things, adds weird plot elements, and introduces new characters! Yay, that’s going to be a mess.

So we failed in killing big Greeny, and in turn killed our dad, who was Gale. Oddly, during the cutscene, it showed the VS mech that I used to be quite agile, which it most definitely wasn’t in the game. I wish this sucker could skate around like those cute lil robots from Ghost in the Shell.

With dad dead, we get ominous voice over about…actually I don’t remember other than there might be a secret plot or conspiracy. I suppose it doesn’t matter a whole lot.

We then get to a scene of Wayne walking around in his mech in the snow, it failing, and then in another scene he is in bed with a UV of Thermal Energy linked to his right arm.

The dude administering it, finds it odd, which I do too, as this makes me think his right arm has magical Shonen Jump powers. Then two more characters are introduced…uh, I actually don’t remember their names. Guy with goggles and girl with cleavage. We do things that aren’t important.

The next scene starts, and I don’t remember anything from it.

The next scene starts after that and the three characters mention their goal in destroying Akrid and how they need a VS pilot. The characters are confused when Wayne said he can do it despite the fact they found him in a destroyed VS.

If you’re confused like I am, then that’s okay. All of this information was conveyed in what it feels like three or so minutes. No build up, just sharted out on a plate for us to consume.

Thus, ladies and gentlemen, the prologue.

After this, Mission 1, or stylized as Mission 01 begins. Our task is simple: kill Akrid and destroy a hive.

Did you read it all? I don’t blame if you skipped it. Will I actually start the first mission?! Find out tomorrow…er, Wednesday or whenever/if ever you read that!

That was probably the palette cleanser this dumb blog needed and probably the longest post on Bunpro by at least one magnitude. Fun fact! This Profound Waste of Time has to be broken into several chunks! I learned the character cap is 40,000 characters and my post is only…uh a quarter of a million.

Sooo, you know what I will do? Break this sucker up into chunks each day and share it along with my typical posts in a spoiler. Yes, we’re not done!

To those that read it all, I salute thee!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-sixth - August 13th, 2025

It’s a Wednesday once again! Can you believe it?

Today was an action-packed summer blockbuster type of day for my Japanese reviews. A total of 12, yes, 12 reviews had to be finished. After doing those in a record time of some undeterminable amount, they were vanquished. Not one but TWO grammar points decided to bite the dust by my might.

Yes, yes, I am turning into a Japanese man right before your very eyes.

As such transformation needs to be made manifest, my girlfriend and I have spent this week planning and finalizing the details of a Japan trip for later this year. (Did you know there’s a Mister Donut museum in Osaka? Maybe one day I will do a post on how amazing that store is!)

But this got me thinking of airports. If you have done any type of flying, you know how hard it is to relax and be at peace, so it can be hard to pay attention to what’s around you. However, this flying planning got me thinking about something a bit more specific than airports. The people working there, specifically.

Well…okay? So what? People have to work at airports, Tesla Optimus robots haven’t replaced us all yet. What’s interesting about that?

Think about it. You have the essential staff at the airport to check you through security, get the logistics of flights, etc…but what about the people working at those restaurants? What about them?

I will give an example, at the Houston airport, there is a Wendy’s. Nothing special, right? Well, maybe the cost of a meal is like 25% more, but…who wants to work there? Well, granted who really wants to work at a fast food restaurant? But more specifically who wants to work at an airport fast food restaurant?

If you’re in the US like me, you can quickly find fast food in any given direction, so the people working there most likely had to go out of their way to work at an airport.

Maybe they get paid more? If so by how much? How do you find a job at an airport? Do you have to go through security each time?

So many mysteries about the process of working at a fast food restaurant in an airport. I almost want to submit a resume myself just to see what it’s like.

But we’re not done! Part two of my epic journey through the land of the lost is below:

A Profound Waste of Time Part 2 - Still Lost

Curiously, this is labeled as “Intermission”. Which I guess makes technical sense as we are in between missions.

Before we start Mission 01, I want to mention that the horizontal and vertical sensitivity are not uniform per axis. The vertical speed, at least on Linear, is much faster than the horizontal. Really puts into question why give me so many options but not have the ability to change the axis.

Checking out the Cruise aiming option and it feels like Accelerate but with zero acceleration when you reach full tilt, like it has a bit of initial acceleration that is high but peters out immediately. This might be a better option than Accelerate, but I think Linear might be better. I dunno, I am gonna fiddle with this a lot, I think. Which is great as there totally isn’t a timer constantly counting down.

Pressing up and down on the D-PAD, as famously mentioned several thousand words ago, does a zoom. But there is a twist! There’s three levels of zoom. You have your normal, default perspective, pressing up zooms and doing what you would expect, but pressing up again goes into a faux first person view. It doesn’t show a weapon or anything like that in a typical FPS, but it is a super zoom.

Curiously, pressing up repeatedly cycles the three options, where pressing down does the same but in reverse. I say curiously, as you would think it would stop you after going to the highest zoom level. Personally, I don’t think there should be three levels of zoom, but maybe I am an idiot and am wrong. That’s totally possible.

Checking out control Pattern C and remember how that mentioned 360 degrees of rotation when you flicked the stick? Well that’s not entirely true. Flicking the stick right, only rotates to the right 90 degrees. It doesn’t do a full 360. It doesn’t feel that bad! But the speed of Linear 5 seems fast enough where the quick turning in general doesn’t feel useful.

I am very curious about the general consensus on quick turning in Lost Planet. As I feel that having optimal movement speed for aiming is preferred.

Let’s check out the PDA! Oh, boy, games during this era LOVED PDAs. They are the future after all! Well, until Apple destroyed that with their pesky iPhones. Pressing back gives the PDA, and there’s some housekeeping we need to do to get up to speed.

The PDA has three tabs: Mission Details, Mission Logs, and Configuration. Accessing the PDA does not pause the game at all. While using the PDA think Dark Souls! You can still move your character around, so using the Left Stick will only result in disappointment. The D-Pad is your friend, in PDA navigation. Using left or right when highlighted at the top of the tabs will allow you to swap between the three.

Mission Details seem to have the exact wording used during the pre-mission …sortie screen? I dunno what to even call it that. On the bottom right shows a screen for your map…well, it would appear if you activated the data posts, as famously mentioned previously.

One thing I might want to add is your Life Gauge and your T-ENG are constantly visible during each tab in the PDA.

Another thing I noticed is that on the map if you haven’t accessed a data post says, “Outside data post range” curious if the map will disappear if you don’t activate more while progressing the level. I kinda want to experiment what it’s like when you’re in between in-range and out-of-range.

Message Logs shows the tutorial boxes from hell that I encountered during the first sequence. I guess this is a decent place to put them. Do you think it would have other goodies there later in the game? Oh, I hope so!

Last is Configuration. This has a truncated version of the same in the main menu. We have Inverted Controls, Speed, View, Aim Assistance, Controller Pattern, Vibration, Music Volume, SFX Volume, and of course the Reset to Defaults option for your tinkering pleasure. However, if you change the controller pattern, it will not show the controller layout, so I hope you memorized that!

I don’t like how changing the layout and play of the game is done in this option. I think it would’ve been better to pause the game and have the same exact configuration layout for you. I completely forgot what Controller Pattern B does. But thankfully, I documented it like the lunatic that I am.

The melee attack feels slow as once you start it the time it takes before you have full control is about 1.5 seconds. Does this mean the melee is strong? Because it would be total lame sauce if it was weak and had such a long windup and cooldown.

LT is the grenade button, but I tried to hold it down to see if they cook, at least the default frag doesn’t do that. Running off Halo rules, I see.

Your Machine Gun has a 50 round magazine. Finally we have a gun without a 30 round magazine!

Speaking of Halo, this game runs off the two guns at a time rule. Where you can carry two, but it did something a bit cheeky. Remember in Halo 2 where you could carry two weapons, but the other weapon wasn’t visible until you swapped it? This was fixed in Halo 3 where your other weapon was either on your back or holster. Guess what? Lost Planet did that nine months before Halo 3. So get rekt, Bungie.

I really wish I could stare more at the environment, it’s not super ugly for an early 360 game, but the timer for T-ENG doesn’t help here.

The game loves invisible walls. I tried to enter a building in which the VS mech could enter, but I think the game is not-so-subtly telling me that this is gonna be an on-foot fight.

Welp, this allows me to test the magazine capacity of the Gatling Gun. 36 bullets. Judging from the sound of the gun, I thought it would be more from the rapid firing going on. But nope! Just 36.

But you can remove the Gatling Gun from the VS mech for Wayne to use it on foot. Unlike Halo 3, this does take up a slot in your two weapons. More confusingly when you swap from Gatling Gun to say Machine Gun, you drop the Gatling Gun down. I gotta give Bungie credit, their implementation is much less cumbersome. But to Lost Planet’s credit, you can reattach the guns back to the VS, albeit in a slightly clunky way.

Also, it’s so hilarious seeing Wayne being agile with this gun clearly bigger than he is.

When swapping weapons, I am not a fan of the slight pause of movement Wayne makes. It’s brief, yes, but it takes all sense of fluidity out the window. Is this Capcom saying with their mechanics that they want this game to be a slower-paced game?

Also, when exiting the VS mech past the anti-VS mech invisible barrier, I am inside a parking garage. I am left with two impressions. Boy, the barrels here are very weirdly placed. Like they give the feeling that they are floating and are not a natural part of the environment. Also, I think the Akrid AI might be special needs. I destroyed a tiny nest, killed some of their pals, and some just don’t react at all to me.

The Shotgun has a very meaty sound. It sounds like a gaming shotty should. It looks like there are 8 shells per… well not a magazine, but I guess this game treats it as such. Also the reload times for both Shotgun and Machine Gun are fast.

Also, I have 18 Grenades in my inventory. I don’t think I have played an action game that allowed me to carry that many. Speaking of inventory! The Machine Gun has a limit of 999 bullets.

The flashlight is mildly interesting, it gives slight survival horror vibes with the constant but faint flickering.

The explosions from those totally unnatural barrels is mildly amusing. It seems they play a 2d explosion image that might be an asset reuse from Dead Rising. Which would make sense as both are the same engine and Capcom loves recycling assets.

Items might be buried under the snow, eh? Well, to dig an item out of the snow, you have to mash the B button repeatedly to dig it. I wonder if it’s based on the number of presses or time pressing the button. I should observe that.

Hey, lookie here. I found a medal while going slightly off the beaten path. It has the letter ‘A’ on it. Secret code?! You must shoot it to activate it. Walking over it does nothing. Neat little effect of it disappearing into the aether when you shoot it.

I wonder where this little medal goes? Is it canonical to the Lost Planet lore I was given at a break-neck pace?

When you grapple on something, it looks like the game automatically moves your character a bit forward, so you can land on what you’re grappling towards. You can alter this, but you really can’t change much distance, rather the direction. Also, you must be standing while grappling, you cannot be jumping…well, that’s lame. I suppose this fits in the seemingly slow-paced mantra that Capcom is trying to give me. If that’s true, then it’s a bit ironic that this game has a timer.

Okie dokie made a bit more progress, and I do say a bit into Mission 01, I went into an abandoned warehouse, and noticed that when a bigger Akrid arrived the vibration set Wayne off balance and it made me lose control over moving him. So this game seems to be okay with taking full control over your character during moments where enemies can arrive.

The Rocket Launcher is powerful, but slow. Taking out the bigger, I have no idea name, Akrid in only two hits. Each reload seems to be about three seconds long.

Wowzers! Going slightly off the beaten path by going up stairs in the abandoned warehouse netted me another medal, this time with the letter ‘R’ on it.

I am really digging the sound design so far, everything has a meaty, almost impactful feeling. Slow, but powerful. Is that the theme described through its sound? Curious.

Hand Grenades max out at 20. I am thinking I should be liberal in my usage. Typically in these types of games, I am quite stingy with them.

God, I love how comically large the explosions are. Just destroying one barrel at a medium distance completely covers the screen in that cheap 2d explosion effect.

This shotty has some range. Curious about the spread, but about 20 meters it shattered a frozen rolling Akrid. I should come up with names for these if this game doesn’t give me any. So the Akrid I defeated were the rolly ones, so I think Rolly Polly Olly, shortened as Rolly would suffice.

If you leave T-ENG on the ground, it will eventually disappear. I guess how it works is this: when T-ENG is left, there is a numerical value tied to it, let’s say 100 for this example. Then it decays like it would when you have T-ENG. When you pick it up, let’s say it’s at 80 when you do, then the 80 is added to the total T-ENG pool you have?

It looks like the data post gives a range of X units or encounters before it turns off and you need to activate another. There’s no gradual fade, the map just turns off immediately when you are out of range.

Man, Wayne walks so slowly. I get it, but maaaaan, I wish he could move faster. C’mon dude, just drop the 20 grenades for a speed boost. I won’t tell anyone.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Monster Hunter, like I played less than ten hours total with the series, but boy this game reminds me of Monster Hunter. The giant Akrid, the slow but almost comical movement. Gives me the vibes of Monster Hunter. I bet the director either worked on the series before or at some point in his career.

Activated another Data Post, I forgot to count, but it looked like it was based off time, but if you stopped inputting the B button, it would cancel activating the data post. However, cancelling the data post does not reset progress made towards activating it.

Welp, confirmed, enemies are as dumb as a box of rocks. Ol’ Rolly Polly Olly charged at me with his classic spin dash attack, what he didn’t account for was the gap in the mountain, causing him to fall to his doom. Shame, I could’ve used his creamy T-ENG.

Okay, with more banter during the mission, I believe the 3 characters introduced are Yuri (not that kind), Luka (the boob woman), and Rick (the goggle guy).

Yuri mentioned something about boulders. I shot one at close range with the shotty and it crumbled down the mountain. Curious if this is a one off type of deal or something revisited a decent amount.

When shooting the boulders, I noticed the asset disappears and immediately spawns several smaller boulder objects with physics.

Maybe the rate of T-ENG decreases changes per difficulty or environment, but it looks like it decreases at a rate of 3-4 per second?

I think I found a weird inconsistency. Is the MT Framework, at least the early version of it not capable of rendering larger environments? As I went through a cave shooting Akrid, which I will call Mr. DNA from Jurassic Park, and it transitioned to another level. I didn’t see a loading screen but it did transition.

Also, before the transition, I noticed that the sound reverberated in a…well, not realistic manner but at least in a convincing manner while in the cave. I guess that’s the feature of the next gen of consoles! Well, for something about 20 years old. It might’ve been a trigger or some sort of volume which caused it. As I was firing the gun quite frequently before going into the cave, and when I did the sound effects immediately changed. If that’s the case, then I think even the previous gen could do that.

I get the impression the Machine Gun has a set range? I was shooting at a small nest and it didn’t seem to do anything until I got closer until the reticule changed to red. I will have to keep this in mind if that actually does anything.

When firing the Gatling Gun while on foot, you cannot move. Decent trade off, I suppose. It looks like the range for the gun is higher than the Machine Gun.

Found something called the Energy Gun. It has unlimited ammo, but what’s the catch? Does it use T-ENG? You use it by holding the trigger down, and it fires a huge ball of…well, energy! It seems to just keep going in one direction until it hits something.

Also, not fully convinced that the Machine Gun has long range, as it can hit the Mr DNA Akrid from a distance without the reticule turning red. Is there a damage falloff and Mr. DNA only has like one health point?

It seems that the Energy Gun does use T-ENG. When firing it, I see a decrease of around 13 T-ENG.

While in the cave, I guess we’re going into a giant wasp nest. Oh, is this the nest that we need to destroy. How…EDF of you, Lost Planet. Wait, is this game just a combination of Monster Hunter and Earth Defense Force? Huh, never thought I would say that before.

Entering into the hive wasn’t a good idea! We have a boss fight! Fortunately there are multiple VS mechs conveniently placed…for some reason. I entered one called the GTF-11. I only know that because another game-pausing text box magically appeared. This only can hover and dash, no chainsaws today.

Whoever made the pick up weapon with the VS the same button to exit the VS needs to be fired out of a cannon and into the sun. You can see why this poses an issue, right?

The boss fight was with a Rolly Polly Elder. Meaning that he’s functionally like Rolly Polly Olly, but with an extra part to it.

The boss arena is a dome with several VS mechs, and it heavily implies you should use one, and you should! You pick up an extra gun and it seems there is a rocket as well as Gatling Guns for the VS.

The idea is simple. Rolly Polly Elder rolls around the dome from top to bottom in an attempt to confuse you because of his rapid movement. Fortunately, an easy win is to jump in the center and hover. Sadly, the hover for the GTF-11 is only for a few seconds (more like WTF-11, ammirite?) before you come down to the ground. But after a few rounds of the Elder spazzing like a special needs child, he pauses for a few moments allowing you to get some shots in.

The tail is glowing for the Elder, so it’s a safe idea to assume that it’s his weak spot. Shoot until it dies! After a few minutes, it comes to an end. Very easy encounter all things considered, but man did the exiting the VS button and picking up weapon button being mapped is so dumb. More like the BS button, ammi- okay, I will stop for now.

I want to experiment with Controller Pattern B, as it seems that this might be the better option, as since moving from the default aiming scheme to Linear 5, it made the quick turn solutions rather…obsolete. Also, I want to be able to reload the dual weapons individually for the VS which isn’t an option with the default setting.

After killing Rolly Polly Elder, a mission complete screen abruptly appears giving me my stats.

Despite all my rambling, it took only 28 minutes exactly to finish the first mission and 148 Akrid kills.

Oh, god. Not another cutscene! Okay, so in this cutscene, it’s not bad! We discuss the group the Crimson Unity, snow pirates who…stole a trailer. The cutscene implies that the three characters are also pirates and they are rivals. Uh…let’s see, oh they need the trailer to destroy more nests. I guess that’s the plot, eh? Lame.

Another topic that’s slightly confusing. So the planet of lost was first colonized 150 years ago, but the Akrid and their band of misfits stirred so much shit it caused the colonists to abandon their homes. The rich going offworld and the normies adopting the cool moniker of pirates. This is confusing as Wayne has been on this planet but never heard of them? Does he have memory loss? The game mentions it, but he doesn’t have any indication of memory loss. So which is it? Also, if he was on the planet, doesn’t that make him a pirate also?

So many mysteries, but that’s Mission 01 in a nutshell!

Tangent time! Well, this whole thing kinda feels like a big tangent or at least an elaborate shitpost, and if somehow you read all of this from top to bottom, I am proud and slightly concerned over your mental health.

If for any reason you didn’t get filtered through the last 9000+ words describing in painstaking detail the various mechanics of Lost Planet, then I have a challenge. Remember when I jokingly said I was gonna go through the manual because all of this felt like a fever dream? Well buckle up. I have the manual and it’s 37 pages of fun. Each page will get an explanation. I will try my darndest to make it interesting. Let’s consider it a challenge. If I can make a manual entertaining, maybe I can make watching paint dry entertaining too.

Let’s dive in, amigos!

Wow, it sounds like next entry might be a true profound waste of time! Will I actually go through the manual arc and observe each page in painstaking detail? Will I ever find true nirvana from this game? Find out next time!

Like, Subscribe, and hit that stupid bell icon, Everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-seventh - August 14th, 2025

It’s a Thursday once again! Can you believe it?

Today was a crazy day for my reviews. The total number of reviews I have done was a prime number. That makes me feel great. Prime numbers are grossly under appreciated. Unlike a non-prime number, this review count stands alone. As for what that number is, maybe I will give some obscure hints during my tangent. How far will you go to learn the truth to something that doesn’t matter?

Speaking of obscurity and profound wastes of time (we’ll get to that soon!), I was looking at the rules of the card game Yu-Gi-Oh, and I was shocked at how many rules there were! One card had over a paragraph of text!

Oh my goodness! Did you read all of that? Why would you? Why would you waste your time reading this? There’s thousands of cards from Yu-Gi-Oh that have a crazy amount of text.

I thought to myself, “At least Magic doesn’t have this.”…or…does it?

Allow me to introduce to you: The Comprehensive Rules of Magic

This crazy thing is over 250 pages of pure, unadulterated rules. We’re talking boilerplate that you would see in Bunpro’s Terms of Service page.

There’s no pictures, no funny comments, just…this. To fully understand Magic:The Gathering…do I really have to go through all of this? Is that a failure of the game?

In my humble opinion, YES!

I remember playing Baldur’s Gate 1 a few years back and I jumped into the game without doing anything. I had no knowledge of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, didn’t read the manual, had no idea of the lore of Forgotten Realms – none of that.

Would you be surprised to hear that I was lost and tapped out after an hour? Yeah…So what did I do? Did I quit? Well, not immediately! I read the manual.

The manual of Baldur’s Gate 1, at least on Steam is over 150 pages long (fortunately, it has pictures!)

Who…in the world would do a deep dive on this? An insane person surely, and so I went in…but…as soon as I tried to understand THAC0 was, I tapped out. I didn’t want to do homework when I played games. I wanted to relax after a long day!

Why are many games like this? But surely, this is just a weird coincidence. Sid Meier’s Civilization V! That’s a game I liked a lot, didn’t quite understand all the bells and whistles. Let’s see how many pages are in that game’s manual?

This is worse than Baldur’s Gate!

Doing a deep dive into a manual to understand the game’s mechanics can lead you down rabbit holes you never thought possible. And thus I present you Part 3 of the Profound Waste of Time Epic:

Yes, I will do a deep dive of each page of Lost Planet's manual.

The manual of Lost Planet is mildly interesting, not the fact that we have a manual with pages, but for the fact that it’s in color. I also have a boxed copy of Colonies Edition, and for giggles briefly looked at that. It’s in black and white! Crazy, isn’t it? Maybe that can be a piece of trivia you can have for your weekly Lost Planet trivia game nights you host on Discord.

Let’s start things off with even more trivia you can add! So the cover of the manual is just the cover of the normal box art, but tinted blue. This is actually the artwork used for the limited edition of the game. I actually knew this but it was one of those things locked inside your brain for years. I saw this at a Best Buy when the game came out, thought nothing of it until just now when I saw the manual. Front and back of the manual is just the front and back of the steelbook case used.

I hope I don’t casually find the bonus disc of that game and dissect it, that would be something of a tangent later, wouldn’t it?

Actually tangent within a tangent. I did some perusing on this limited edition on the internet and found some quite puzzling and amusing tidbits.

Here’s the weirdest one: there was an exclusive multiplayer map for the limited edition. I may have mentioned earlier that Colonies Edition and vanilla split the player base? Can you imagine this, however small, further splitting up the player base with this map? What on Earth was the thought process for that? Why did Capcom think this was a good idea? How many other limited edition games did something equally as moronic.

Either way, I am loving this as a 20-something year post mortem. I am trying to find details on this map, and I stumbled across the “LOST PLANET Multiplayer Maps #1!” along with two other map packs similarly titled with exclamation point included. All of which are delisted on the 360 store. This wasn’t listed when I listed the Xbox Live Marketplace items, but was visible when looking at the Xbox website.

Digging deeper into this, I found the limited edition map, it was called Battlegrounds. This was given away for free on June 7th, 2007 almost 6 months after the game’s launch. I am quite curious how such a move would fly in today’s gaming landscape. Capcom around this time was quite…exceptional with their DLC practices. I for one remember Resident Evil 5’s Mercenaries Mode being on disc yet costing money to unlock.

Also, each map pack that was released cost 400 space bucks or $5. With two of the packs containing two levels and the third pack containing three, one of which was an 8-bit reimagining.

Wow, tangents within tangents? I mean, if you made it this far, all hope has already been abandoned.

Anyway, what else is in the limited edition? Well, we have an exclusive art book and CD that contains, and I quote, “soundtrack, trailers, wallpapers, and more”. Curious what resolution those wallpapers are. I somehow doubt they won’t match a 1440p monitor, maybe 1080p? I can only hope. Also, what’s the “and more”?

In my journey to find the contents of this disc, as sadly I don’t have the disc nor a disc drive for my PC, I saw the soundtrack! Why mention that? It is so…short. The longest track is only 4 minutes and 35 seconds. Most of them are barely two minutes long. What kind of half-assed soundtrack is that? Are there any fans, like legit fans of this soundtrack? What I have heard thus far is mediocre Hollywood slop. Maybe there’s a banger.

I tried searching up and down for the contents of this disc without resorting to buying it and a disc drive to figure out the “and more”. I had no other course of action, but I left a comment on a 15 year old unboxing video with a little more than 2000 views asking the poster if he can list the contents. If I ever get a reply, I will be sure to add an addendum to this writing.

Where were we? Oh, yes, the manual! Look at me, saying we would talk about it and just at the cover I got sidetracked. I will try to minimize that going forward.

But looking on the back, I see a website, www.lostplanetcommunity.com …what on E.D.N. III is this? Putting this into my web browser gives me an unsecure website, (good sign!) that has “OK” in text. That’s it. Nothing else. Even checking the HTML shows just OK in between the body tags. How ominous.

But the journey does not simply end there. The Internet Archive hasn’t been destroyed yet, and looking at archives of the website from January show a basic promotional site from Capcom…or it seems like it’s from Capcom. I am a bit weirded out by adding community to the URL, but hey, maybe it’s just a quirky Japanese thing and I am thinking too deep into this.

Going through the archived site is a mixed bag, the forum doesn’t work, but at least I can snag a 1920X1200 resolution wallpaper for three out of the four available wallpapers! But I stumbled across a section called “Blog”.

In my naivety, I thought this would be nonsense published by Capcom, but it turns out this is not just nonsense published by Capcom, but a fellow by the name of Brian Dunn publishing it in proxy!

But not all of the articles are shilling, there’s one article that teaches me various forms of curse words in Japanese. Now that was unexpected! If I was learning Japanese, I would be sure to share that with all my Japanese pals.

Whatever happened to Brian Dunn? He has a LinkedIn page, but alas I don’t have one. It shows him with proficiency in Japanese and English and mentions video games, so this has to be our guy. He seems to be living his best life sharing game-related stories on one of the most vapid and fake social media platforms in the modern age. Makes me wonder if he actually believes what he is sharing. Is it all a charade? To make the right people happy to further his own goals?

Brian, if you ever read this, I would love to know who won that Lost Planet swag contest. The fact I had to be one of the first ten people to beat the game, get every medal in ranked play, complete 100 matches, and then comment to you with images of my achievements is quite the task. If there’s a spot open, do you think I can still enter?

Also, I found your phrasing slightly confusing, you have it listed as “A ) Beat the game on any difficulty level B ) Play 100 Ranked matches online C ) Get a medal in each game type in Ranked matches online”

Does this mean I have to do one or all three? It was never specified in the post.

Actually, I found the archive of the forum post for it, and it has over 35 pages of replies, which is crazy to me! However, the most important element of note was the “APPROXIMATE RETAIL VALUE (ARV)” of the prizes. $5 for the poster and $15 for the shirt! Signed! Boy, all the legal mumbo jumbo for a silly prize is a bit ridiculous. Someone in the legal department definitely had their work cut out for them.

But anyway, that’s a little bit of what I found from the www.lostplanetcommunity.com link I found on the back cover of the manual. Didn’t have that on your bingo card for this review, I bet.

So after about a thousand words talking about the front and back cover of the manual and how they are…somewhat related to the game, we can finally open the manual and see the very first page.

Page 1. Of course the most fitting way to start things off is a legal warning about Photosensitive Seizures. I am very curious if there actually is a rule or law explicitly telling games that somewhere in their game, there needs to be a long, explicit warning label on how video games WILL kill you. You would think that if a game made you shake and convulse on the floor like an insane person, that would be the sign of a good game, right?

Page 2. Now we’re talking. A manual that’s in color?! Talk about indulgence! What’s this page you ask? It’s the table of contents. You see a manual with over 30 pages, a gamer can get lost, and the best way to get him back on track is with a table of contents. Looking through this shows to me that I am already quite familiar with the topics at hand. Don’t worry, you will be too.

Page 3. Confusingly enough, this is considered the 2nd page in the manual. I guess Photosensitivity Seizure warnings aren’t real pages! But I will eschew from the norm and call it a page.

This page shows a tone setting piece saying “You are about to embark on a journey to a new frontier of snow and ice…” but does so in a very hard to read font. So the art shown is the typical snowy setting with a white/blue-ish background. The font used for the text is weird. It’s a dual color font, the top half being white where the bottom half is a reddish/orange color. You would think this would contrast nicely, but the top half blends into the image and thus makes it hard to read.

The image used, however, is quite quaint. It reminds me of a diorama.

Page 4. This page shows you how to use the power of the information superhighway to connect to Xbox Live. Curiously, I have to meticulously connect my modem to my router and have my router connected to both my PC and my Xbox 360 console. I am not sure why my PC is involved, but I guess he’s now part of the journey.

To top off the page, it gives an explanation on how to enable family features on our Xbox. If you were too dumb to ignore the ESRB rating, here’s something you have to go out of your way to implement!

Page 5 and Page 6 are a double-sided prologue explanation. Finally some lore I can read and digest on my own terms! We’re gonna analyze this, so buckle up, buttercups.

Humanity left…what I assume is Earth in the year -80 TC. Yes, negative 80. Which is 80 years before the Trial Century. What is a Trial Century? Well, I know what a century is and trial is in isolation. Together? Well, perhaps they will explain it!

It further explains how humanity colonized E.D.N. III, also curious what that means, and all was well until it wasn’t! Akrid came, ruined a few birthday parties, the humans in the vanity didn’t bring guns, so an age of darkness fell upon them.

While caught with their tail between their legs, somehow humanity realized that in each Akrid, there’s a supply of Saudi Oil buried in their brow. With this stunning revelation, this kickstarted the desire for humankind to fight back.

Humans created mechs, but we wanted to be unique and call them Vital Suits, or VS. Finally, I paid attention this time to what VS meant! Using the power of the military industrial complex, humanity started to recolonize E.D.N III…Were there other E.D.N colonies? Oh, boy, you think that prequel, Lost Planet 3 will describe that? Maybe we can even figure out what this mysterious acronym is.

So, that basically described Page 5. Now, Page 6 on the other hand makes a pretty interesting jump. It says those who stayed at the birthday party after most have left became Snow Pirates.

Then a group of Snow Pirates find some poor sod frozen stiff inside a VS, wait…that’s us! Well, Wayne. This finally explains the memory loss shenanigans. So Wayne apparently only remembers two things: His name, which I assume is due to him writing it down on his undies. And that his father was crushed like a bug by that big Green Eye Akrid. Odd how you lost your memories and that’s the only thing you remember. I assume the manual didn’t go into granular detail like if he forgot how to tie his shoes or the many years of toilet training went down the drain from the amnesia.

Wayne has this amazing suggestion that if he kills the big Greenie, he can get his memories back. Logically, I don’t think that’s how it works. So why don’t I just retcon this internally and make it about revenge. That seems more appropriate considering it killed you dad, eh?

Ominously, the last sentence says that Wayne’s past and his future on this planet are linked. Remember that incomprehensible cutscene where I alluded to some sort of conspiracy? Maybe the planet really isn’t lost after all?

Pages 7 and 8 are another glorious two page spread showing a picture of the Xbox 360 Controller and list of inputs. I find the image of the controller used, as it’s telling me what the X button is, which is the X button. Same for the other buttons. I guess they want to make sure even the dullest tool in the shed can pick up and play Lost Planet. I am not sure what that implies from Capcom’s end, but I remain optimistic!

Below the confounding controller picture, we have the layout for the inputs for Control Pattern A for both the Human and VS controls. To respect your time, and mine (looks at word count), I will skip that. But isn’t it cool that we now know the Start button is in fact the Start button?

Page 9, which is also called Page 8 in the manual, but I digress, is the Main Menu page. This lists off every option in the Main Menu, but not in the painstaking detail that I have recorded for posterity.

Oddly enough, it lists off Game Over and what happens when you reach zero for your Life Gauge. But I guess it’s tangentially related as it shows options when you get a Game Over: RETRY, RESTART, and QUIT. All of which does what you expect. But RETRY, says that you start over from a waypoint. Is this a world before checkpoints became mainstream?

Page 10 is the Game Screen page. I think they mean, HUD, which I already went through. But I did miss out on several key points:

The radar, which is stylized as RADAR, is active only when you are in range of an active data post.

The weapon you have equipped, on the bottom right-hand screen, which is called RIGHT TRIGGER WEAPON in the manual. When you have another weapon, another icon appears and is called RIGHT TRIGGER SECONDARY WEAPON. The game really needs to cool it with the caps, I get the impression some angry Salaryman is yelling at me.

Lastly, and this was so foolish of me to miss this: the player, or rather PLAYER. This is you. I usually assume some level of intelligence from the reader, but I guess Capcom doesn’t make said assumptions.

Page 11 is the Basic Controls: Movement page and there’s some pretty interesting insights as well as some painfully obvious ones. I completely forgot that clicking the stick allows your character to crawl. I wonder if they mean to crouch or perhaps even go prone? I hope to test this in ten years when we start the second mission.

But there’s actions that so far have never been told to me at all. Clicking the Left Stick and moving it in a certain direction while pressing A allows for an EVADE (ROLL). Clicking while moving the stick in the direction along with A seems so clumsy. Will have to test it out myself.

The X button, commonly called the X button is used for your ANCHOR. It says that we can combine this with “various other buttons” to “reach inaccessible areas and execute Special Attacks”. So does that mean we can grapple on Akrid or maybe even jump and use our Anchor at the same time?! I hope this doesn’t turn out to be lame. Sadly, it cock blocks us from knowing until Page 13, which is Page 14 for us.

Finally, there’s a little segment on quick turns which elaborate what they do for each controller pattern. Pattern B is very curious. Clicking the Right Stick while moving it in the direction to quick turn seems…backwards. Why not just allow me to move faster? I find this a bit ironic that Capcom seems to have issues with third-person shooting controls after making Resident Evil 4 two years prior.

Oh, what were the painfully obvious Basic Controls for Movement? Well, fun fact: you can move your character with the Left Stick.

Page 12 bestows us the sequel to Basic Controls: Movement, with Basic Controls: Combat. This has your basic controls for combat that I gloriously went over about ten thousand words ago. One minor detail of note, is for the ZOOM, they call that first-person mode I described as the Scope Screen. Has a fancy title with capitalization, so you knew Capcom cooked with this.

Pages 13 and 14, conclude the trilogy of Basic Controls with Basic Controls: Action Button. Who knew a single button would get so much screen time? Page 13 starts with educating on the actions the Action Button allows us to perform various actions all with a single button! Those actions are: PICK UP, ENTER ACTIVATE, ATTACH, and REMOVE.

Remember when I got frustrated when trying to ATTACH a weapon to my VS and instead performed the opposite of the ENTER command? Well, this little action button is the culprit!

Curiously, topping off Page 13, it has a short paragraph telling me that normal weapons and VS weapons are found on the map and to use them to match the enemy’s weaknesses. How…hmm, pointless? Like this feels like the GamePro tip: shoot it until it dies meme but half baked.

Page 14 is the big Endgame-style conclusion. This is where we find out what the supposed Anchor secrets are. What inaccessible areas, what Special Attacks can we do? Let’s find out!

Okay, most of the page talked about how it worked. Its basic function…so was that the inaccessible areas thing it mentioned? So much build up and hype…all for nothing! Well, what about the Special Attacks?

Anchor Shot is this special attack. If you Anchor an Akrid or wall and press either LT or RT before landing, an attack will happen. It mentions that there will be an appropriate attack for the target. So does that mean that Mr. DNA and Rolly Polly Olly would have a different attack animation if I did the Anchor Shot on them?

Before we finish the trilogy, I want to mention, the image used shows a character, maybe Wayne, maybe a generic Snow Pirate on a VS. So maybe you can do that to VS as well, not just Akrid and villainous walls?

Page 15 is Aiming & Camera View. Maybe I can finally get some details on that possible FOV slider I speculated earlier?

Well, before we do that, we have to see what Aiming Style does. I gave a long, pseudointellectual spiel about how I think they work, but the manual will explain EVERYTHING better than I could.

ACCELERATE does what I thought it did, the further you push the stick down the faster the reticule moves.

FIXED is…surprisingly straightforward. The reticule is fixed on the screen. It doesn’t move around like it would in the other settings. Doesn’t mention speed being linear, but it certainly felt so.

CRUISE is …linear? Huh, the manual states that the speed is the same no matter how far you press the stick. CRUISE…like…cruise control in a car? Is that the naming inspiration?

In short, I was pretty wrong! Shows what I know. You can feel free to direct all hatred towards me for this gross observation.

Well, what about the Camera View? Can I redeem myself there? Well, weary gamer, if you made it this far, why not find out with me?

NORMAL changes the viewpoint depending on the situation…As to what situation, I have no idea, but don’t question it, just trust the process.

ZOOM is straightforward, it…well, zooms into the character. I cannot picture this being useful in any capacity and I deeply question the purpose of its inclusion.

WIDE is the camera always being zoomed out from the player. Which…still doesn’t really explain things. So far, NORMAL and WIDE are…the same? Will there be cinematic moments you can do like in Gears of War later in the game? God, I hope not!

If anything, I think I earned back all credibility I lost in the prior paragraphs. If you wish to send an apology after sending me some hate, please feel free to use the same avenues you contacted me with.

Page 16 is the Thermal Energy [T-ENG] page and it starts things off with a bang! The manual tells us that this new form of energy replaces fossil fuels. Instead of using dinosaurs that have been dead for millions of years, we use living creatures and harvest their entrails! What a flex by the colonists of E.D.N. III and I commend them for it.

It further goes into detail the basics of T-ENG that we learned by defeating one of those text boxes during the first mission but with some extra tidbits. Did you know when your T-ENG is below 100, you cannot move a VS? Or how about when it reaches 0, you need to exit one? I guess T-ENG is kinda like paying for cab fare. Can’t pay? Hit the bricks, pal!

How do we get T-ENG? Well, fortunately, the manual restates what I describe like: defeating an Akrid, destroy a tank or drum, activating a data post…but the last one, I will have to push back a bit. What on E.D.N. III is “…and many other actions.” Is this some invitation to go off the beaten path and learn on my own? If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t be reading the manual!

To top off this page, it discusses the Harmonizer, which is basically our health regen system. Interesting they added that mechanic as a piece of lore, but yet I still don’t know what E.D.N III is or what happened to the other E.D.N. colonies!

Page 17, which is page 16 in the manual, if you somehow forgot, is the Vital Suits [VS] page. This page teaches you for half a page that walking up to a VS and pressing the B button will allow you to ENTER and use said VS.

The only thing of note, is when your VS reaches zero Life Gauge, you will be prompted to rapidly press B to do the opposite of ENTER. If you fail the button mashing sequence, you will die.

I am still a bit salty about leaving the VS instead of using ATTACH during that boss fight in Mission 01.

Page 18 looks to be a good opportunity to learn more about the lore of Lost Planet. I assume it was lost and is now E.D.N. III…wait, why is this game called Lost Planet? Did MGM still own Forbidden Planet?

Oh, uh, this page is the VS Details & Controls page. It goes over the VS mech things we use in the game.

First up is the beefy GTT-01. This classic VS was introduced early in colony life. It has the ability to ATTACH up to two weapons. That’s right, one on each arm! Sadly, this has gotten out of style in favor of the GTF-11, but hold your horses, we will get there soon enough.

You may be asking yourself, “Wow, this GTT-01 is quite neat-o, are there any Special Function?” Special Function? None for the GTT-01. No SLIDING DASH or chainsaw arms for this. You might have to look at the higher trims for that package.

Next up is the luxurious, single-seater GTF-11. This puppy specializes in zero gravity environments which is why a HOVER functionality is added with the base models. Why have a zero-g VS on a planet that is supposedly lost? Well, why drive a sports car to work if a standard sedan does the job just as well? It’s all about preference.

If you purchase the SD package, it comes with an advanced SLIDING DASH feature for your convenience. HOVER AND SLIDING DASH? No need to yell, as my ears are already bleeding with excitement!

Last up we have the recent military-turned-civilian model, the GTB-22. This sucker can’t fly like our luxury brand, but boy can it run? If life is making you run from your problems, why not do it in style? Because of its leggy frame, it allows for not one jump, but that’s right a DOUBLE JUMP. If you think that’s crazy, we’re not even close to being done. There’s a special LONG JUMP.

How does the LONG JUMP work, simple! Take your Xbox 360 controller, look carefully for the Y button. If you cannot find it, it is the button with the letter ‘Y’ on it. Press it. It will hurl your ass around the sun and back. Press it again to cancel it.

But we have one more special trim for this amazing GTB-22. Remember those problems we talked about? Why not give yourself a headstart when you start running with a SMOKE SCREEN. This Special Attack allows you to get the edge you need to run away from any of your issues. Simply press the X button and you’re on your way…or more like away!

Page 19 takes us back to the year 2004 with the Personal Data Assistant [PDA] page! Not much to say that I haven’t already covered.

Although, I have a bone to pick with the description of the MISSION DETAILS tab saying it has access to: Maps, Mission Objective, Secondary Objective, …and more! What is this “…and more!” business? Why am I seeing this repeat in the manual but also in the Limited Edition packaging as well? Is there really more? Should I keep notice of this and see if there is truly “…and more!” in this PDA in the MISSION DETAILS tab?

I am wary of you, manual. Your spells aren’t working on me.

Page 20 tells us all there is to know about the Data Post, which I guess isn’t much as two-thirds of the page tells us about the Radar and the Target Mark.

Fortunately, the only thing about the Data Post is what I covered, and not to toot my own horn, I covered a bit more than pressing the B button fast and you get more T-ENG.

Radar does exactly what I described earlier, but it gives us handy icons and what they do.

The Green square with a hole in the middle is the Human, of course! Green means good, after all.

Red circle with hole in the middle is…can you guess? Akrid! I am so proud of you.

Upside down blue triangle with hole in the middle is for VS. Very subversive with the upside down nature of the triangle.

Yellow…uh rook shape object with no hole in the middle is the Data Post!

Last Icon is, I guess an orange chevron with a smaller triangle below it, again with no holes in either is the Next Data Post icon!

Wouldn’t it suck if there was no visuals and you had to rely entirely on my description to know this?

To top off the Data Post page, we of course discuss the Target Mark. These are those little collectibles that you shoot that may or may not spell out a secret word. Is there an ARG hidden deep below Lost Planet and these Target Marks are the cypher? What if they were and hidden just until now when this project came along obsessively going over each item in Lost Planet?

Moving away from rampant speculation leads us to page 21, the Saving & Loading Game Data page! Unironically, out of all the copies this game has sold on all versions. Do you really think a single person who bought this game, actually read and analyzed this page in particular?

If they did, then they would know information that was only described in this page such as you only have one save file per account or per storage device. So the game actually recommends that if you do want to use another save file, use a different storage device…or screw it, make a new account. I love how pompous and ridiculous that advice is.

At the bottom of this page is an image of an abandoned city block. Rotting buildings. Forgotten homes. Dreams lived and died after a point in time. One of the buildings in this image in the Saving & Loading Game Data page had “Grapes 1L $5” followed by text that was too hard to parse. What is 1L? Was it 1lb and the artists at Capcom had no idea the pounds are named after the Latin word, “libra”? Did they assume that this forgotten, abandoned planet was colonized by Americans? As last I checked we use the dollar sign.

Also, how could they get grapes if the temperature is so low? So many lore ramifications racing in my head coalescing into one. Maybe there is an answer. Maybe the Target Marks are the key. I am convinced.

The Target Marks have to mean SOMETHING. They surely can’t be just mere collectibles. Why do they have letters? Why are they hidden? It means something. Maybe it’s tied to the grapes, maybe not. But there’s something fishy here.

Page 22 might be the least insightful page as it’s the Game Settings page. Remember how I went through all of that and even every iteration of controller configurations? Well, this page is a truncated version of that.

Making up for the sheer disappointment of page 22, page 23 gives us more opportunities with lore with the Right Trigger Weapons page!

Dare say, do I find the weapons page to be the most lore heavy segment in all of Lost Planet? I say all, when I mean all of Mission 01 and the manual up to this point. It lists off the main weapons and goes into surprising detail with them…well, surprising for what this game has shown thus far.

MACHINE GUN. Now that’s a generic name. If you ever had the most boring name of a gun, this sucker would be it. But did you know it has a bullpup design and fires 5.56mm rounds? I bet you are all the wiser for that. This description is far more detailed than the name implies. Why not just come up with a cool, in universe name for this gun? Is it to assume that gamers are paste-eating dorks and can’t figure out what weapons do? Let’s press on!

RIFLE. You can see a trend, eh? This semi-automatic fires 7.62 ammunition. Notice how I said “5.56mm” just a paragraph ago? I used the exact phrasing then and am using exact phrasing now for the RIFLE’s ammunition type. What size is the 7.62 ammunition? Meters? Kilometers? I am a paste-eating dork, Capcom. I don’t know this.

Curiously, it mentions that this gun has a scope, which allows us to target distant enemies with the Rifle. So we fluctuate from being opaque to being too detailed with what the Rifle does.

SHOTGUN. One of the few weapons that are worthy of all caps is packed with a snub barrel and detachable stock. So much lore in something with such a boring name. But what I find quite amusing is the idea that even the writers of this manual seem to be fans of the SHOTGUN. “Its destructive force at close range is awesome.” That it is, manual writer guy. That it is.

I wonder if this manual has a credits page. I want to look this up and try to find the individual behind it.

ROCKET LAUNCHER is also one of the weapons that is worthy of the all caps moniker. No bizarre lore drops about its firing systems or cost of launching the rocket here. Just a barebones basic description of what it does and how long the reload time is. How long did I guess it to be? Around three seconds? It’s hard to check as this document is already longer than a novella.

ENERGY GUN. There’s that weird, unconventional gun. Fortunately, the flavor text is back for a brief spell, telling us that humanity abandoned the gunpowder-based weapons of old…wait, that’s just a bold-faced lie. What on E.D.N. IV were the other weapons we discussed? Y’know I used those a lot more than I used you, Mr. ENERGY GUN.

It makes mention that the gun fires beams of compressed Thermal Energy, but doesn’t actually tell me directly that when firing it will take away from my Thermal Energy reserves. You’d think with a manual that tells me where the Y button is on my controller would tell me that detail directly.

PLASMA GUN. Still in the realm of science fiction for our science fiction game, eh? Well this sucker sadly doesn’t have any lore information we can grasp on, but it tells us that it functions similarly to the RIFLE, but more powerful and with a longer reload time.

This makes zero mention if this uses Thermal Energy or not. Oh boy, can you imagine if it did and the manual just seemed to gloss over that detail? That would be rather unfortunate!

Overall, I was pretty surprised by the level of detail put into some of these weapon descriptions. Are you? No? Well, I suppose my bar was lowered somewhere around the Anchor Shot disappointment. Inaccessible areas, my right testicle.

Page 24 brings us to the other side with the Left Trigger Weapons. Wanna know what triggers the left? Apparently grenades do and boy, we have a few to go through.

Wow, an entire journey through the game’s manual? If you read through it all, you would of course know I am testing the “fake fans” out there. We’re not done! Still have more of the manual to see. The journey continues next time!

Remember the sacrifices of Brian Dunn, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the twenty-eighth - August 15th, 2025

It’s a Friday once again! Can you believe it?

After one-billion and twenty three days of non-stop grinding of Japanese, I managed to be 26/127 of N5 vocab. Initially I had very lofty, far out predictions of when I will be finished, but I think being about a 1/5 of the way there is good progress.

Hopefully it doesn’t entail that it would take four-billion more days to get the rest, but I am a patient man.

But this makes me reminisce of my younger, more vulnerable days. People change with time. Some people you were with you from the beginning naturally drift away. Some people you were never close with grow closer.

I guess a simple analogy is appropriate. When I was a kid (about several million years ago), I used to love Lego. I would get a model set and just build. I wouldn’t even bother with the instructions. The exploration and failure from my imagination was what satisfied me.

You see, I had a friend. We were very good friends and connected over video games. But at his core, when he was a kid and played with Lego, he would follow the instructions and just keep the model as-is.

Despite the fact that we shared a deep bond over games, the core aspects of our personalities grew more prominent over time and we just drifted away. Now, I am not saying one perspective is inherently better than the other, but maybe those were mere inevitabilities.

I used to play games a lot, to an unhealthy degree. Perhaps it was an unfocused, a treadmill of consumption type of fashion and it left me deeply unsatisfied. I realized that the influence of the “build by the instructions, not out of curiosity” perspective my friend had bled into how I approached games.

But since I have approached games how I do from my baseline, just innate curiosity and fearless exploration. It’s stupid to many, I assume but it leaves me wanting to explore games with a perspective that is rather unique to my tastes.

Perhaps that’s the healthy way of taking things. Making things work for you. I think the way I approach games is a healthier way of going about things. Maybe finding ways you can discover who you are through curiosity.

I don’t like looking anything about a game online that tells me how to beat it, I like stumbling in the dark to try to determine how it works. The mystery is most of the charm!

If that doesn’t make sense to you or perhaps you think it’s ridiculous, that’s the beautiful thing about it. We’re all different. The same creatures but of vastly different natures.

But enough rambling, let’s do a deep dive and maybe, just maybe we can finish the Lost Planet manual!

A Profound Waste of Time Part Four

Page 24 brings us to the other side with the Left Trigger Weapons. Wanna know what triggers the left? Apparently grenades do and boy, we have a few to go through.

But trigger warning aside, I wanted to mention something cute, almost innocent I noticed with these trigger pages. The first sentence of both gives a stern, but sincere piece of advice that it’s so crucial for us to not only know of but understand how to use these weapons…and the fact that the triggers activate said weapons. With care and prudence, let’s carry on.

HAND GRENADE. It’s fair to say that grenades should be worth of caps, right? I guess I will bite my tongue while typing these names out, as typing in all caps is annoying.

This HAND GRENADE is noted by the manual as unapologetic, which is expected of inanimate objects. Can you imagine if there was a game where your weapons talked, but not only that apologized? That makes me just shudder at the thought!

The last sentence of this description has me a tad confused. “To increase the chances that an enemy is within its destructive arc, aim, and then throw this grenade with proper power.” This reads like a Dark Souls weapon description of a weapon that has the power to kill gods and make even them tremble before its might. What do they even mean “with proper power”? You just press the damn trigger! You can’t even cook the grenade or toss it further by holding the trigger.

DISC GRENADE. This reminds me of those lil’ frisbee grenades from the first Mass Effect. Oh, man those were so weird in the original Xbox 360 game. Bioware had this absolutely bonkers idea to map it to the Back button…the Back button can you believe that?!

Back to Lost Planet, these lil’ frisbees seem to be long-distance high explosive grenades. I am not sure how good those will be in the game, but I am more curious if Wayne will throw them like frisbees like in Mass Effect 1. Why did they never bring those things back?

GUM GRENADE, spelled with the letter ‘G’ for those who are hopelessly lost in the gutter. These seem to be the standard fare C4 type of equipment. Throw distance is nerfed, but you can plant multiples. No clue on the explosive radius. I certainly hope it will be the one with the largest damage, at the least.

PLASMA GRENADE. Not to be confused with the Plasma Grenade from Halo, which is completely different in function! This grenade acts more like a counter to enemy VS that you may stumble across.

The grenade seems to have a timer and detonates with a field of plasma. No idea the range. More importantly, no idea if this uses Thermal Energy, also called T-ENG for short, which I should’ve typed just T-ENG but you are probably used to long explanations by now.

DUMMY GRENADE (Online Battle Only). This mouthful of a name is something I won’t cover in this playthrough, but I figured I would go over it as it is in the manual, after all.

The DUMMY GRENADE (Online Battle Only) is… “a bomb disguised as a human-shaped balloon.” Confused by that sentence like I am? This is supposed to act as a decoy, so I guess you plant it and it shows on your enemy’s Radar during Online Battle.

In my humble opinion, maybe just call it the Dummy Grenade. No caps as it doesn’t explode, and no parenthesis needed. Makes everyone’s lives easier.

Overall, I am quite saddened here, I expected some lore drops on this page, and all I got was a human-shaped balloon of confusion. Maybe there are more nuggets of wisdom in the next part. After all, we have about another dozen or so pages to cover!

Pages 25 and 26 are a classic two page spread showcasing the VS Weapons. Will there be lore? Will there be needless under/over explaining? Let’s find out!

GATLING GUN is the first in our list, and boy does the lore not disappoint here! It lovingly describes how the GATLING GUN has three rotating, electrically controlled barrels firing 7.62mm Full Metal Jacket rounds. Curiously, it says that it is in fact the same ammunition type as the RIFLE, which means I finally pointed out a legitimate inconsistency from Capcom, and I could press for an apology if wanted.

To further add some world building here, this GATLING GUN received much fame on the battlefield. Wow, this weapon alone and we have more lore than probably anything in this manual. Possibly even the entire game.

See? I wasn’t hyping this for nothing…but let’s see if this trend continues.

ROCKET LAUNCHER, not to be confused with ROCKET LAUNCHER is a rocket launcher for the VS. We get some more lore sprinkles here and it makes me shiver with delight. It mentions that it is specifically used against the biggest Akrid threats. Which makes sense, as Akrid are enemies in the game!

The manual paints a love letter to the ROCKET LAUNCHER saying that its “been tuned to fly with increased stability at close to mid-range distances, and a direct hit by one of the missiles is one of the most devastating attacks a VS weapon can deliver.”

Oh, man. Can you imagine that description? That is something that some guy with a British accent would say analyzing the lore of this mysterious Lost Planet universe. What is this ROCKET LAUNCHER? How does it work? What is its motivation? This. This right here is what we need. More pretentious Brits discussing lore on a deep, intimate level.

LASER RIFLE…however is the disappointment. This weapon uses Thermal Energy, but again doesn’t specify if it is used from yours, which I assume it does as Capcom is all about sucking the fun out of things like a hooker on a mission.

This weapon is basic in function, press button to charge, press button to fire. So boring. Where’s that British twat who does lore videos?

SHOTGUN is the last weapon on page 25 and this adds a little bit of flavor for the function of this beloved shotty. Limited in range? Of course, it’s a shotgun, but you know what’s cool? Not needing to reload after each shot. But how can such a thing function? Surely there’s an explanation? Fortunately, the lore comes back and with a vengeance. “…the blowback from the shotgun itself triggers the reloading mechanism.”

Oh, yeah…that’s the good stuff. But one minor inconsistency here. “shotgun”? Not “SHOTGUN”? What’s the deal?

GRENADE LAUNCHER. Now this one is gonna be amusing, perhaps to me. I think you are a bit comatose by now. A shame as we’re not even close to being done.

This weapon seems to have the ability to fire multiple grenades at once, presumably into the air as the manual so desperately wants you to do.

I feel as if this manual might’ve been a direct translation from the Japanese manual or design documents as the wording here is…well, take a look for yourself: “The impact of the grenade on the ground causes it to fragment, spreading explosive bomblets over the immediate area. It is this ability that enables it to confront enemies over a wide area.”

So, my comatose friend, did any of that sound like natural English to you? “It is this ability that enables…” Is a weird line, does it imply there are other abilities from the grenades or those delicious bomblets that do something else? If so, I think the manual would be a great place to put that. But alas, I think it’s just Engrish translated for our amusement.

EM LASER is a bit of an oddball. Remember how I disliked the LASER RIFLE for not doing anything? Well, this EM LASER is the next generation of the Laser Gun. Wait…hold on…Laser Gun? What’s that? I had to check through the weapons again. There’s no…Laser Gun. Do they mean LASER RIFLE? Did I find another inconsistency in the manual? This is unacceptable. I could shrug off the grapes fiasco, but “shotgun” now “Laser Gun”? Something is clearly up here. Is this code? Is this deliberately put here so I could find a code by the manual scribes?

Oh, uh, what does the EM LASER do? Well, it exceeds the …Laser …Gun… in almost every way. The only downside is the slower attack speed. There’s always a catch.

HOMING LASER is the last one and sadly there’s no lore or manual inconsistencies brewing. It’s a very powerful, long range rifle with a “severe” drawback. There’s a blind spot immediately in front of the weapon in the short range of it. A fair trade off, but the hype of how powerful this weapon is, is getting me excited. “Astonishingly powerful”. Now that is powerful. But I am not easy to trust now, especially after the Anchor Shot controversy of like 2000 words ago.

From all of these weapons, we got lore, inconsistency, and disappointment wrapped in two pages. There’s a decent number of weapons and VS mechs available which give the impression that the on-foot combat and VS combat are on equal terms. From the level I played in Mission 01, it seems to reflect that and the manual further shows proof. Curious to see if that trend continues with the rest of the game, if we ever live long enough to reach it.

Pages 27 and 28 are a doozy for us lore nuts. This double-ender is all about Characters. Page 27 is dedicated to just one character it’s…hold on, I gotta flip the manual on its side. Wayne! I am not sure why they stylized the text for the characters to be from top to bottom as opposed to…uh, normal. Maybe it’s the manual’s way of embracing Japanese culture in a very confusing way for me to digest.

Wow, Wayne. You are on most of the page! There’s just a tiny paragraph about him, most of which we know, but we do get some added lore nuggets. The Harmonizer, remember that? Well, that was given to Wayne by his dad, Gale.

To top it off, it says that Wayne is in excellent physical condition. Aren’t most game characters in excellent physical condition? When you think about it, most of your characters run when you control them. That intense running for hours on end would make anyone in excellent physical condition. More like Lost Planet: Excellent Physical Con-

So, the next page features the other characters who I forgot about. There’s that cleavage chick. Oh, jeez, I have to flip this around too? Ah, this is a UX disaster! Not only are the names flipped 90 degrees, like a quick turn, the text is on the characters directly!

To recap, we have:

Luka, the boob woman. She specializes in being the token female.

Yuri, who you would think would be the boob woman due to the name, but get your and my head out of the gutter. He’s the dude who put an IV of T-ENG into you in that one scene…I hope there’s more to that.

Rick, the goggle guy. He was on a computer in one cutscene, so that automatically makes him the tech expert. The texpert?

Oh, would you look at that, there’s a paragraph explaining all of them…wait just one for all three? Is this really all the characterization we’re getting?

After reading this paragraph, shockingly, my explanation is more detailed than what was given. “Their leader is level-headed Yuri, joined by the spirited, vibrant Luka and gadget wiz-kid Rick.” That’s it. Nothing else really describes these characters other than they saved Wayne from being a meat-flavored popsicle.

Lastly, page 28 concludes with telling us who the Snow Pirates are. Well, this is…confusing. It mentions Snow Pirates as a group who live outside the colony…but wait, it mentioned earlier that rich people left the planet and those that stayed behind became Snow Pirates. Is this a contradiction or just an inconsistency? Is there no lore master for Lost Planet during the development of it?

However, it does further solidify that the Three Stooges who rescued Wayne are in fact Snow Pirates, and there are other groups of Snow Pirates that are numbered in the hundreds. This group of three as a single band of Snow Pirates reminds me of when you make a guild with you and a few friends in an MMO and it’s no more than five people. That’s the vibe I am getting here. But unlike MMO guilds, Wayne is not only the main character, but also has plot armor. A cheat code, if you may.

Oh, one more, slight tangent. Did you know this game has cheat codes? Early Xbox 360 games actually had them. It’s weird…actually screw it, let’s go into it for a bit.

So cheat codes, what are the cheats in Lost Planet? To keep the spirit of the mid 2000s, I decided to go on cheatplanet.com. I was quickly defeated as that redirected me to GamesRadar+, formerly GamesRadar…

Okay, another side note and this kinda bugged me. It’s related to Capcom, so I get a pass on this. I used to listen to TalkRadar, which was the GamesRadar podcast. It was great, edgy humor from the 2000s. I dropped off around 2010, but when I listened, they would have guests on the platform. One of which was Seth Killian, who used to be a former Community Manager at Capcom. He wasn’t just a one-time guest, he made several appearances on the TalkRadar podcast.

A few years passed and two of the editors who used to review games at GamesRadar became Capcom employees. I often think about that as it makes me think of the conflict of interest in having a dude from Capcom hang out then having those two editors potentially review Capcom games. I don’t know if they did review games from Capcom, but that always stuck out with me.

Maybe don’t trust those reviews? Maybe trust reviews where a man painstakingly goes over every page in a manual on a whim and then goes on tangents like these.

Oh, cheat codes, that’s right. So after finding GamesRadar+, I decided to use the Internet Archive to get the version of Cheat Planet from mid 2007. Apparently during this time, Cheat Planet was merging with the other Future US online publications like GamesRadar and Official Xbox Magazine. Isn’t it sad to see a staple of your childhood die? If you’re too young and have no idea what I mean, don’t worry, things you will love will die. Usually things, then it moves on to trends and even people!

But during my journey in finding Lost Planet via archived pages on CheatPlanet, I ran into a snag. The Lost Planet page from the mid 2000s was not archived.

But GameFaqs swooped in and saved the day. I have no way of testing the accuracy of them, so we’re trusting the kindness of strangers here. Apparently, the cheats can only be used on Easy mode. Wait, was it Easy or EASY? I forget. Anyway, this is posted verbatim:

T-ENG 500 points added
Control Camera Angle in Cut Scenes X360
Control ending sequence
Control intermission sequence view
Unlimited ammunition
Unlimited health
Use a VS during ending credits X360

I didn’t type out any of this, so let’s try to understand these.

“T-ENG 500 points added” this one is pretty simple and straightforward, but I dare wonder why only add 500 and not make it unlimited like the other cheat codes for ammo and health?

“Control Camera Angle in Cut Scenes X360”…wait, are the cutscenes in-engine like in Dead Rising? So does that mean we can boundary break during those moments? The description on the GameFaqs page never said anything in detail. So, what happens when there is a scene change? Are we left in a limbo state or do we teleport to the scene?

“Control ending sequence” I have no idea what any of that means. Even more confusingly the GameFaqs writer put the code in with buttons from the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Which really questions the validity of these cheats! Does this mean I control the credits?

“Control intermission sequence view” another weirdly-named cheat that again has button inputs from both controllers. Darn you, ZeroCool000111, what cryptic nonsense is this! After inputting the code, “during an intermission sequence to control the view.” What does this even mean?! Do people really post things on the internet and lie about it?

“Unlimited ammunition” and “Unlimited health” are straightforward. Weird how this shows the PS3’s button inputs, but I will let it slide.

“Use a VS during ending credits X360” so do you control what happens during the credits? I know some games do that. So instead of being on foot shooting Akrid, we’re using a VS. What a weird place to put a cheat code, but I guess it’s something.

Ah, the internet during this time. This was the last few years where you could just lie and suffer no true ramifications for your actions. I will have to test these cheats, perhaps not from ZeroCool000111. If I can get unlimited health to work, maybe I can explore this planet and see what interesting goodies I can find.

Wow, two tangents in one, and I said it would be brief too. Let’s get back to the manual, which was also a tangent. Mission 02 still waits!

Page 29 is all about Akrid. Which is lovely, as Rolly Polly Olly and Mr. DNA are horrible names. The page graciously starts by telling us that Akrids are the strongest native threat on E.D.N. III, but then it drops a bomb. Akrid, a simple five-letter word, is shortened to just AK. This is a curveball to me. The word is already short, why shorten it even more? Can Wayne be WE? Can T-ENG be TE?

Sadly, this is where the lore dies out. It gives us three names for Akrid, but it doesn’t show all of the Akrid.

Trilid, those flying Akrid, I lovingly called Mr. DNA.

Chryatis, an Akrid I forgot to mention. It’s an Akrid with long insectoid-like features. I suppose Weevil Underwood is an appropriate name for you.

Dongo, which is our Rolly Polly Olly friend and by God, Capcom? Really? Dongo? That’s hilarious. I dunno if that was intentional, but y’know what? I will keep it and make some alterations of my own. Dongo, you will be the Big Donger from here on out.

Before we leave off on Page 29, it gives us wonderful advice to shoot at their weak points. The giant glowing spots on their body are their weak points. Shoot it. They will die. Usually faster than if you didn’t shoot them. Man, I would be perfect for writing manuals. I hope they are prepared for the tangents.

Okay, let’s take a deep breath and do a little bit of a pulse check. We’re almost done with the manual! Page 30 out of 37. Technically, this is page 29, but I think I am starting to think the manual is an unreliable narrator. Now, this next section is going to talk about the Online Battle parts of the game. I am not going to cover this, as I firmly established that I didn’t renew my Xbox Live membership. Even if I did, I would be hard pressed to either find people or play. The DLC map packs have been delisted for some reason, so this may even compromise matchmaking if there were even people playing.

But we’re almost done and I am so proud of you for making it this far. If you randomly scrolled down and found this segment and you’re taking credit for this praise, you lost major respect in my eyes. Please don’t accept this respect until you read through every part until this section.

Page 30 brings us to the Online Battle section. This will be very irrelevant to this playthrough, but for the sake of thoroughness, it will be done.

Because Online Battle is a new, novel concept in the realm of video games, Capcom generously highlighted what they call the Online Battle Flow.

What is this Online Battle Flow? Well, once you connect your PC and Xbox 360 to your router and then to your modem, you are linked to the information superhighway. There’s a series of protocols you, your sanity, and your Xbox 360 console must follow to engage in Online Battle. Let’s get started:

A. Choose Online Battle from the Main Menu. Well, darn. I guess I already failed that one as I cannot select it. Filtered on the first step.

B. Select your character (see page 30). You may be wondering, “Wait, aren’t we on page 30?” To that I must slap you silly as we’re playing by my paging rules not the game’s. But selecting a character is interesting. In this day and age, I would anticipate skins for the low low cost of one third of the value of the game.

C. Choose your battle from the Lobby Screen (see page 30). Now this is where this flow really comes into play. This step is further broken down into numbered bullet points, not lettered, and then those are further broken down into generic bullet points. Nesting upon nesting! For what you may ask? Well, let’s eschew the bullet points and use paragraphs for a moment.

This step is broken between Player Match and Ranked Match. Player matches allow you to host a battle by setting a game type and the rules. Ranked Match is similar but it only says you can join a match. But you can refine it to join certain Ranked Match games.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, how needlessly complicated it is to join matches and you would be right. However, lot good this will do for you, as the population is either dead, fragmented upon two SKUs, or further fragmented with users with delisted DLC and those who do not have it.

I wondered if this Ranked Match play uses TruSkill, which was Microsoft’s internal implementation of ranked play. Actually, I would love to do a deep dive on that, but sadly, I cannot warrant a tangent on this deep dive to do so, maybe next time!

D. Match Room (see page 33). Oh, boy, is this the pre-game lobby where you can use colorful language from strangers around the world? Just remember, most Xbox 360 consoles came bundled with a headset during this time, so you could meet any weirdo playing Lost Planet online.

E. Team Selection (see page 33). Wait…so instead of the game randomly assigning you a team, does it allow you to select a team? Even for Ranked Match play? I hope page 33, or page 34 for us will elaborate on that.

If so, then I guess this really dulls the MLG competitive edge Lost Planet could’ve had, eh?

F. Go to Battle! Some of you may not return, forever lost on this planet. But that’s okay, you died for your planet. Is there a lore as to which factions are fighting and why? Any resources that are scarce? Weapons? Food? We have so much potential, but Capcom’s philosophy seems to be centered on fun rather than having a believable world. Gross, isn’t it?

G. Results ( see page 34). I hope you survived! If you did, I bet you have some trauma and some medals to back that up. I for one am proud of your service, now hurry and adapt back to normal civilian life, soldier!

This covers the Online Battle Flow. I never knew that I needed a diagram on how to not only find the multiplayer screen but everything else in the middle. I feel very well-rounded for a mode I will not play.

Page 31 is a continuation of the Online Battle saga. In today’s episode, we’re covering Character Selection and the Lobby.

Character Selection is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t tell you what characters are available, but rather how to unlock new characters when you rank up. Remember how I said this used a basic leveling system? Is this the reward we get for playing?! I only play games for the rewards, so this is perfect.

In the Character Selection, it sounds like you can select the model along with the pattern. Is the pattern supposed to be the color palette or something? Capcom loves that with their Street Fighter games. Perhaps this innovative palette swap feature is now in Lost Planet? Sadly, I will never know, leaving it a mystery for every man, woman, and child.

The Lobby is the interesting part of today’s episode, as it has the confusing title of Lobby. I always thought of Lobby as the place you are in before the match starts, where you can say colorful words pertaining to minorities and women. But it sounds to me that this is merely the menu to access multiplayer.

You have the options such as: RANKED MATCH, PLAYER MATCH, VOICE MASKS, CHARACTER SELECTION, and MAIN MENU. Wait, VOICE MASKS? What’s that?

VOICE MASKS are a relic of an older era of Xbox multiplayer. This allows you to change your pitch and tone during play. I feel like this is the proto VTuber angle if you look at it. It feels so foreign and Japanese, you can be as feminine or as masculine as your vocal chords couldn’t naturally allow. I really want to hear my voice in every combination of settings. Maybe this can be the catapult I need to get my career as an anime waifu on track!

Before we leave today’s episode, I want to mention the image used to describe the Lobby page. It uses an image of Earth for the lobby, which to my record, is in fact a found planet. Does it do the Halo 3 thing where it highlights where players are on the map while playing? That would be pretty cool, but I fear it would be quite dim today.

Today, on page 32, we have Player Match/Ranked Match and Game Types. Strap yourselves in, kids. The seats are only $5, but you’ll only need the edge of it.

Player Match/ Ranked Match is broken down into four categories. You know me, we’re going in!

QUICK MATCH. You know what this is, I know what this is. You click it, and boom, you’re in a match faster than you can say your mom’s credit card number. I feel like QUICK MATCH might be a bit of a lie now, as it might not even work at all! Maybe it will quickly time out?

CUSTOM MATCH. Maybe you don’t like a map or maybe you just have certain, undefined preferences to play Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions Not Colonies Edition? This is right up your alley. All you need to use this is a time machine back when this game had a player base.

CREATE MATCH. Tired of being told what to play but still love rules when it caters to your needs? Use CREATE MATCH! Take control of your destiny and play Online Battle on your terms.

LEADERBOARDS. Wanna see how badly you suck at this game? Shamed at your 0.1 K/D? See how you stack up against the other Lost Planet addicts. Just remember, comparison is the thief of joy.

This leads us to the last part of today’s episode: Game Types. Get ready, as this is gonna be a doozy. We have four game types, but a lot of snark to cover here.

TEAM ELIMINATION. Is this team deathmatch? Hmm, maybe not? You win when the enemy team’s Battle Gauges are zero or whoever has the greatest Battle Gauge when the time is up. What’s a Battle Gauge? That’s a great question and the manual has yet to explain it! Hopefully when the stunning Online Battle saga has been completed, we will know every aspect of Lost Planet there is to know. But for intents and purposes, let’s assume this is team deathmatch.That’s fair, I guess.

ELIMINATION. Take TEAM ELIMINATION and toss TEAM right out the window. This is all about me, myself, and I. This selfish game mode is what I assume to be a free for all mode. Without knowing exactly what a Battle Gauge is, I am forever lost in a vortex of confusion.

POST GRAB. Oh, is this capture the flag? Apparently not! You have to find and initialize all Data Posts on a Mission Map. I love how official and corporate this all sounds. What’s even a Mission Map? Are the Data Posts labeled on your Radar? Do they change position after each game? Can you deactivate the ones a team has activated? Kinda like how domination from games like Call of Duty works?

FUGITIVE is the last mode on offer, that’s right only four modes of play here. Boy, are we spoiled in this day and age. This mode has the host becomes the fugitive, not FUGITIVE, and other players hunt this fugitive down. The goal for the fugitive is to evade other players or to build up the Battle Gauge…oh no not the damn Battle Gauge. Winner is determined by either time running out, or if the fugitive has a full or empty fugitive.

This reminds me of the Juggernaut game mode from Halo, but only the host is the Juggernaut? Does it not change who the fugitive is or something? I hope it at least selects the fugitive at the beginning of the game to be a random player.

Overall, the game type modes are kinda weak sauce and not very original. It would be cool having interesting modes that fully take advantage of the VS mechs or even the T-ENG stuff. Like a proto-Titanfall would be pretty cool. Alas, I have no idea what multiplayer is like and have never played it before. It is a mystery to all.

Pages 33 and 34 in the Online Battle saga are a two-parter! This is essentially the climax of the Online Battle series before the last episode. I hope you’re ready.

Rules are first up and boy there’s a lot to go over. I guess that makes sense, the Japanese are quite big fans of rules.

TEAM. Yes, we’re back to using all caps, and TEAMS are used to select the number of teams. Which is interesting to me. I am assuming that there’s a 16-player cap on the multiplayer, does that mean you can have 4 teams of 4 players? That’s an interesting twist to a team deathmatch. Original? Eh, maybe not, but interesting at the very least.

TIME LIMIT. Hate having rules for time in your multiplayer games? Well, you too have the power to change the laws of time. Except in the Fugitive mode, that’s capped at 10 minutes.

INITIAL EQUIPMENT. Maybe having ROCKET LAUNCHER as your starting weapon is your thing, then you have the power to make the game as chaotic as you wish.

STAGE. This allows you to select the map! Interestingly it calls it a “battle stage” and not a “Mission Map”. Capcom really needs to have consistent terminology.

LAYOUT. Initially, I thought this was giving us unrealistic power over the layout of the map. Sadly, this is not Halo 3’s Forge but more akin to Halo 2’s customization where you can alter the weapons on the map. I wonder if it allows you to change each weapon type like in Halo 2, but we will never find out. For all seven of us Fugitive fans, this isn’t available. Tough cookies, partner.

BATTLE GAUGE. Does this tell us what BATTLE GAUGE does?! Nope! It allows us to edit the strength of the gauge, which is even more confusing to me.

FRIENDLY FIRE. Maybe adding rockets to all your games made it a bit too chaotic and strained your friendship? Well, you can alter this. Amusingly, you cannot select this for Fugitive and Elimination modes. Fugitive really is the red-headed stepchild, isn’t it?

TEAM CHANGING. Wanna jump ship because you’re losing? Well you can with this selected. Fugitive and Elimination are snubbed of this option. Why would you even mention that a free for all mode would even have this option? Isn’t that implied?

PLAYERS. Want to have pure chaos with a bunch of strangers or an intimate affair with you and your battle bro. This option will be what you need to set the mood.

PRIVATE SLOTS. Special reservation for those special gamers in your life. When the randos join, there’s always a spot for the ones you care about. Capcom is about cultivating deep, intimate relationships with players and I respect that.

HUNTERS. This last option is exclusive to Fugitive mode. After being forgotten about for seemingly years, Capcom finally listened by allowing you to select the number of Hunters hunting the fugitive down. 15 on 1 possible?

The next part of our double-ended journey is In the Lobby. We already covered the lobby, but what’s life as a Snow Pirate while in a lobby?

This lobby has everything and I do mean EVERYTHING. If there’s any Quick Matches or Custom Matches available, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be listed.

Once you join a match, a new world of opportunity is available at your fingertips. Gamertags, Game Types, Rules, Voice Chat Conditions, and even the ability to Invite your battle bro all being accessible to you. Wow, do you even need anything from life any more? No, Lost Planet’s Lobby and Match Room is a one-stop destination for all of your desires.

To top off this special double feature of an episode, we have Team Selection. An odd choice to end an episode, but trust the process. When you play Team Elimination or Post Grab, you can select which team to join. Pressing the X button will put you on the blue team. Why the X button? If you check your Xbox 360 controller, guess what? That sucker is blue. B button for the red team.

I never knew I needed this innovation in my time playing games. What games allow team choosing based on the color of the button? Is a potential yellow team for the Y button? Same for the green team and its respective A button? The game did mention multiple teams. I sure hope they didn’t mean two teams. That would be lame, but not completely unexpected.

Page 35 brings everything together with the epic finale of the Online Battle saga. We’ve come a long way, but it’s now endgame territory. There’s three parts in this finale and I hope you’re just as excited as I am to go over them.

Results starts us off and this is the post-game summary of your fight against adversity. This sucker shows YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS, YOUR PERSONAL STATISTICS, and OVERALL STATISTICS (for all participants)

I am curious about the difference between PERSONAL DETAILS and PERSONAL STATISTICS. Does STATISTICS contain your accuracy, K/D ratio or something of that nature? Whereas DETAILS include kills, deaths, score? I wish the picture that was shown had more detail as I cannot see anything!

Maybe it’s an allegory for how there are only three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and PERSONAL STATISTICS.

Leaderboards are up next and we are told that they are split among two types of leaderboards: POINT LEADERBOARDS and AWARD LEADERBOARDS.

POINT LEADERBOARDS are pretty straightforward. You get points from matches and the number of points total is the position you are in on the leaderboard.

AWARD LEADERBOARDS are similar in that it tracks based on the awards you get from Online Battle. I am aware of the Awards from my excavation of the menu. Is this where the T-Rex-looking medal comes into play? Does it count all of those and positions me on the leaderboard accordingly?

To top off this thrilling saga, nothing could fit more appropriately than Leaderboard Navigation.

That’s right, if you wanted to quickly scroll through the leaderboards, you have some tricks up your sleeve. Pressing the LB and RB buttons allows you to scroll 100 spots. Doesn’t say which direction that they go, pretty bold assumption from Capcom given the nature of this manual thus far. Let’s assume LB is backwards and RB is forwards.

Finally, the LT and RT triggers are used to scroll between 1000 spots at a time. With just a few thousand pulls of the trigger, you can potentially see every position to ever be on the Lost Planet leaderboard. Are you sure you will be okay with that much power?

That covers the actual game portion of the Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions Not Colonies Edition manual. There’s still three more pages to go. I may have said there were 37 pages initially, but in my hubris, I miscalculated. So we can treat the extra page like a super secret bonus!

I am proud if you made it this far with me, as you are now a Lost Planet expert just like I am. Let’s face it, if you read over 20,000 words of a Lost Planet deep dive, you’re probably one whether you like to or not.

But just because we’re done with the manual’s content doesn’t mean the story is over! This is now the epilogue of the manual and this will not disappoint. Let’s dive a bit deeper, shall we?

Page 36 and the first page of our epilogue is dedicated to the winners of the Lost Planet Fansite Winners. Looking at this today, sounds a bit…propagandic, wouldn’t you think? Here’s some stuff to populate a site, go spread the word to promote our game, and maybe you too can be immortalized in the manual.

Let’s go over these sites and see what stuff we can find. I told you the epilogue is a doozy!

Wow, two long posts and we’re still not done with the manual? Spoilers: the next episode will be amazing. Trust me.

That’s all from me today! It’s getting harder writing these posts, I’ve noticed! I’ve been very busy wrapping up the last few weeks before graduating college, so I haven’t had much time to go out and let my mind wander. I’ll try doing a better job!

Embrace boredom, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the thirtieth - August 17th, 2025

It’s a Sunday once again! Can you believe it?

I feel so proud of my progress. 8 reviews and 1 new grammar point. Each day I get closer to transforming into a Japanese salaryman who has to beg his wife for an advance on his allowance to shake hands with his favorite idol.

That’s right, only 99 more grammar points to go!

Mister Donut.

I heard of Mister Donut through my 30-hour a day immersions of Japanese television. The Mister Donut jingle is permanently etched into my brain.

If you have never heard of Mister Donut, you’re probably familiar with Dunkin’ Donuts, right? Well, Mister Donut is the Japanese take of an American take of an another American Donut business’s donuts. Well, that’s confusing!

To put it as a Chinese proverb: Born in America, rival to Dunkin’; failed at home, yet flourished in Japan. Dead in the West, alive in the East.

Still confused? Well, they make damn good donuts. My favorite is what I like to call the “Pompom Beauty Mark Donuts”

Okay, maybe calling a donut from the backside of a cute Sanrio character isn’t the most appetizing thought in the world. But rest assured, these donuts will change your life.

In my time in Japan, I have spent an uncomfortable amount of time at Mister Donut. Maybe it’s the novelty? Or maybe…maybe everyone just loves donuts:

'Splosion Man - Donuts Song [HD]

Deep 'Splosion Man cut! But they serve more than just donuts. Some locations have all-you-can-eat donuts…ramen…and pizza?

Yes, you can have ramen at a donut shop. Is it donut-flavored? Well, there’s nothing stopping you from replacing your naruto with a glazed donut. Maybe it tastes good!

Also, they love collaborations, just last month, they did one with Disney:

Donut for Smile! I dunno how I should feel about eating Mickey and Minnie’s pants, but I am an adventurous man.

If you’re ever in Japan, forget whatever your plans were and make a stop immediately to a Mister Donut for a donut or two (This is not a paid endorsement from Mister Donut LLC…but I wish it was…)

Speaking of shillery, we’re on part five of my epic journey out from the bottom of a downward spiral --I mean Lost Planet!

A Profound Waste of Time Part Five

Let’s go over these sites and see what stuff we can find. I told you the epilogue is a doozy!

www.lostplanetx.com by Avalanche087

www.lostplanet.us by CriminalOrigins

www.lost-planet.info by jingato

You probably tried visiting each of these before I explained them and realized that all of them are dead. That’s right. So put on your detective cap, as we’re going on a deep dive to uncover these sites and perhaps who these creators are.

Starting with lostplanetx.com, I thought this was an official Rule 34 site either by or approved of by Capcom directly. But I realized this was during the time when adding the letter ‘X’ after a word was that generation’s version of a special character.

Fortunately, the Internet Archive saved the day with archives saved from 2007 through 2008. I suppose, Avalanche087 didn’t have too much faith in this fan site to run it for more than a year.

Looking into an archived version of this site from January 16th, 2007 all the way to July 11th, 2008, I have several feelings just from looking at the home page.

The website is arranged as a fanatical blog site detailing every minor thing about the game. I mean, what sane person would even think about doing that? Irony aside, I appreciate the detail, as Avalanche087 covered many details I never saw in my short look at the development of the game. The small text that plagued SD TVs were addressed and fixed by Capcom. Did that ever get fixed on the original Dead Rising?

Our Friend Brian gets a mention from a post about the Limited Edition of the game. Sadly, still no mention of the contents of the “and more!” but I remain hopeful.

But this looks like a total rugpull. If this was a crypto scam, then it looks like Avalanche087 might’ve been the mastermind here. The July 11th, 2008 version of the site has had absolutely no updates since the January 16th, 2007 post. Nothing about the DLC, the PS3 version, the Colonies Edition…Was Avalanche087 truly a fan of the game or did he do this specifically to earn whatever prize was dangled in front of him?

I really wish the pictures of this site were archived as I am left with mere text to navigate my way through.

The website is broken down into several components: Home, Game Media, Gameplay, Story, Downloads, and Forum. Wow, Capcom didn’t have to make a proper website at all for this game, Avalanche087 did all the shilling for them!

Game Media is a showcase for all the screenshots. Sadly, not a screenshot is visible to see, but I am picturing they are real screenshots from Capcom and not pictures taken of the television screen.

The Gameplay section is a weird amalgamation of details from the manual as well details I never saw anywhere. Neo Venus Construction Corporation?! I am a bit disappointed that Avalanche087 didn’t get the memo and use my naming scheme for Big Donger, formerly Dongo.

Very weird to me that this is the Gameplay section, but doesn’t actually tell me much about the gameplay until the very end, where it reads like a series of back of the box bullet points. Let me share one with you:

“11 pulse-pounding, single-player missions and 8 intense multiplayer maps” Doesn’t that sound like something some underpaid Capcom marketing manager would write in between shots of Red Bull during crunch? This is on a fan site? Or a propagandic mouthpiece? It feels like I am in a fever dream from seeing all this corporate cock sucking.

Corporate astroturfing aside, the next part of the site is the Story! Actually, let’s dig deeper into this website, just for fun.

We actually get a bit more lore from the game, which is great. Not sure why this is isolated to a fan site and not something like the manual, but I digress.

In the 22nd century, we goofed. Big time. Earth is in ruins. I am gonna blame those pesky nukes. I knew it would get us into trouble one of these days.

“Amongst the chaos one man fights to remember his past, buried deep within his memories lies the key to the future. Frozen and alone his battle begins”

This is weird. This quote is immediately after telling us that the Earth was in ruins. In the chaos of what exactly? Earth being a pile of radioactive rubble? The frozen tundra called E.D.N. II? Is Wayne someone who was from the past and somehow brought from Earth to this other shithole?

The section describing Wayne is equally weird. As in the game, it implies that Wayne lost part of his memories during the Green Eye attack. Okay, that makes sense and matches what we experienced, but who is NEVEC? I saw it as a sign in the very first part of the game, but never mentioned explicitly by any of the characters yet. I get it, I am only starting the second mission (we’ll get there someday, I swear!), but why is the fan site telling me lore details that weren’t even mentioned in the manual?

In the miasma of confusion, it does give us some more details about the three characters, fortunately.

Luka, the boob woman, is actually the leader of the three stooges! Rick is her little brother and…that’s about it. It just re-emphasizes that the goal of their clique is to eliminate the Akrid nests.

Rick has more detail too! Uh…not much. He is enthusiastic and cares about his sister’s safety! Didn’t know that about him, but now I do and you do too. Excited?

Yuri, who I thought was the leader, is not the leader, but rather the heart according to the fan site. So, is Rick like the appendix or something? The description gives a wink and nod to us, the players that Yuri knows more than he leads on. Is he gonna betray us? Does he have a deep, dark backstory? Time will only tell.

The Downloads section of the website is still a work in progress. There’s a helpful “Comming soon!” letting us know that eventually there’s going to be more added to the site. If you’re also wondering, yes, that is a typo.

Lastly, the forum page. This is actually a link to Capcom’s old message board, and not an internal forum for this fan site. There are some juicy details that I would like to explore. Sadly, the forum itself was not archived, so I only have some pieces to work with.

Well, we’re already in too deep, doesn’t hurt going a bit deeper. Capcom forum analysis time! We’ll go back to Avalanche087’s site in a bit, but I just wanted to cover just a few findings of the forum.

This archive of the forum was from February 8th, 2007, so this is already past peak Lost Planet hype. Meaning this might be a great metric of how popular this community became before the hype truly died down.

Looking at the number of posts, I would say there were around 7000 total forum posts dedicated to Lost Planet. The most popular topic being the General Discussion board with almost 3800 posts. There are some smaller, more prominent boards with between 300-400 posts: Clan Central, Strategies and Game Help, Wish List, and Ask Capcom.

Very curious what Ask Capcom is all about, but no archives exist, so it shall remain a mystery.

Three topics stick out to me: Fansite Contest Submissions (Closed), Fansite Discussion, and Brian’s Blog. These three topics are the least popular in the entire Lost Planet forum (sorry, Brian, I guess nobody cared that much about what you had to say).

The Fansite Contest Submissions (Closed) topic had only 9 threads and 36 posts. Does that mean only 9 sites at maximum were submitted and from those 9 only 3 were chosen as winners? So statistically, there was a 33% chance of winning just from submitting alone.

Fansite Discussion had only 8 threads and 41 replies. This gives me the impression that maybe there were only 8 fan sites made in total. The sheer lack of replies, around 5 on average per thread shows to me that this astroturfing on Capcom’s end wasn’t very popular.

Finally, Brian’s Blog, a topic with 12 threads and 29 replies, so an average of around 2-3 comments per thread was equally less popular. Meaning, whatever Brian was talking about was more or less being thrown into the ether. I guess you could say that Brian locked the comments down and updated some of his posts, and that could be the reason why the numbers are low…but this is all starting to add up.

This gives the impression that this fan site idea was a low effort PR ploy to get fake engagement from fans to promote Lost Planet. The lack of fan engagement also gives credence to the lack of updates from Avalanche087 on his fan site. I don’t want to call him a shill, but it’s not looking too hot for him, either.

What did Avalanche087 and the others even gain from all of this? Was it money? Prizes? Well, we’re still not done. We have to check out the rest of his website along with the others and actually see what’s left on page 36… yes, we’re still not done here!

So the structure of Avalanche087’s website is fairly consistent. There’s a submenu that has: Marketplace Content, Achievements, Wallpapers, Game Guides, Videos, and Lost Planet Icons. I will get to those in a bit.

There’s a sidebar on the right-side of the website that has a sound button…wait, did this play sound when you entered the website? Gross. A little icon letting us know Lost Planet is in stores keeping us fully aware of the shillery going on.

Below the shilling is a box that has all the news and reviews about Lost Planet.

I randomly clicked on an IGN preview from November 1st, 2006. The first thing the article mentions that the game is a mix of Bionic Commando and Panzer Dragoon on a snow-covered planet…I never would’ve even attempted to associate those two together. Bionic Commando because of the Anchor? Panzer Dragoon because of…what? I don’t understand the relationship with that game.

I won’t touch too much on this IGN preview, but it mentions Mission 00, which I never saw. I suppose it’s referring to that prologue segment where Wayne has wild adventures with the Green Eye.

Also, this preview mentions that your T-ENG will decrease faster in colder environments, which I didn’t notice a difference nor see mentioned in the manual. I will have to check back on that at some point.

Back to the fan site! Below the box of news, reviews, and previews, is another box containing the latest Lost Planet videos. There are webisodes that have at least 2 episodes. I see that the dates for those videos are all dated as “00/00/00”

Earlier, I mentioned that this website had a submenu containing:Marketplace Content, Achievements, Wallpapers, Game Guides, Videos, and Lost Planet Icons. Let’s dig in!

Marketplace Content. Remember when I made a joke suggesting that the screenshots from the Game Media page were taken of the television? I guess I wasn’t too far off from the truth. It looks like Avalanche087 took photos of the Marketplace Content with his camera phone. A pre-iPhone camera phone! Sadly, I wish I had access to those photos, as that would be a trip to see.

Achievements. This page is weird. Avalanche087 only lists off 10 achievements from Lost Planet. He graciously adds a link to view all of the achievements, which sends us to an external website “achieve360points”. I feel like this is a cop out. You’re just adding stuff just to add it, Avalanche087. Where’s the heart?

Wallpapers seem to be the same wallpapers that I found on the Capcom community site. Even the weird 1600x1200 resolution ones are on there. I cannot 100% confirm that they are the same wallpaper as I cannot see an image, but I am willing to bet they are.

Conspiracy theory time: What if the wallpapers on the Limited Edition CD are the SAME EXACT wallpapers on this abandoned fan site and community site? Wouldn’t that be so scummy? First the exclusive multiplayer map being given away for free months later and even the wallpapers aren’t exclusives anymore? That would be something!

Game Guides does not have a clickable link. I guess this is just a lie to pad out content on this fan site. Hopes and dreams, Avalanche087. Shattered. I hope you’re happy.

Videos brings us to a page with text saying, “Select a video on the right to view it” Remember that sidebar on the right-hand side that had the videos with the mysterious “00/00/00” dates? Guess what? This page too is a sham! More padding for what!? For what, Avalanche087?

Lost Planet Icons is the last part of this fan site, which contains an array of icons you can use for AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger. If you ever wanted to chat with strangers and share your “ASL”, you can do it while shilling Lost Planet!

I feel very dirty after diving into this site. I feel as if Avalanche087 promised the world and when Capcom gave him his prize, he vanished like a thief in the night. Nothing, not a single thing post Lost Planet’s release was ever discussed. The Downloads page? Comming soon, according to Avalanche087. Achievements? Only 10 here, sucker! Game Guides and Videos? Just absolute padding of an ego built upon a pyramid of lies!

But at the very end of the web page. We see a bunch of corpo legal bullshit, but slightly above that, I see Avalanche087’s contact information, showing me a Gmail address. I decided to reach out to Avalanche087’s email to see if I can get some details on his prizes, and if the Downloads page or even the Game Guide are still comming. I am not particularly hopeful, but I will attempt to give some closure to this site.

The next fan site is www.lostplanet.us from user CriminalOrigins. I suppose CriminalOrigins is a fan of the first Condemned game. I was more of a F.E.A.R. fan, myself.

Fortunately for my sanity, the archived version of this site not only works, but most of the images are fully visible. I decided to peruse the January 13th, 2007 archive of the site as the game would’ve already been released.

This is already more impressive than Avalanche087’s website, perhaps I am biased from the images on the site. However, the sheer shillery is in full effect.

Let’s go over what’s on the navigation bar: Homepage, Game Information, Downloads, and Preorder Now!

The homepage is a narrow, concise state of affairs. Truly not much going on, but do we really need a lot of detail on a piece of marketing propaganda?

The main content part of the homepage strikes a sense of deja vu. I see options for Screenshots, Storyline, Characters, Downloads, and to Preorder. Asides the preorder option, all of these mirror the last site. Typically, I would throw caution to the wind and say to jump in, but I will hold off on it for good reason.

To the right side of the homepage, we have a whopping four news stories, which never get updated at all post launch, which again questions the motivations of these “fans”.

Further to the right, we have a nifty survey asking which character is your favorite: Wayne, Boob Girl, Yuri, and Rick. Paraphrasing, of course. Checking the results of the survey, a whopping 402 votes were cast and Wayne won with a resounding 57% of the vote, followed by Boob Girl with 29%, Yuri with 10%, and Rick with a disappointing 4%.

Personally, I am not shocked by the results of the poll, however I am shocked that 402 votes were cast. I question the validity of the vote, as what’s stopping one person from refreshing the webpage and doing it again. This is a 2007 website after all, so I doubt proper validation protocols were adhered to.

Below the survey are a variety of screenshots.

The footer of the webpage shows the same legal mumbo jumbo verbatim from the last page. Is this Capcom’s way of covering their butts? What’s the exact point of having this for a fan site?

Remember when I said I wouldn’t go over that deja vu moment I had? Well, this is why, the next part of this fan site has just repeats of the last site. Not quite, there are some variations.

The Game Information section has a submenu with: Characters, Storyline, Screenshots, Trailers, Marketplace Guide, Artwork, Achievements, Strategies.

Characters and Storyline are word-for-word exactly the same description as the last fan site. It really feels insincere and a half-assed attempt to push marketing in an astroturfed fashion.

Fortunately, the Screenshots page actually shows screenshots! It’s…well, painfully generic, but at least they seem to be an accurate representation of the game.

The Trailers page shows similar videos to the last fan site, but we do get news of Webisode 3. So now there’s at least three of these things, whatever they are.

I am feeling a bit weird, and slightly violated. The Marketplace Guide mirrors quite oddly with what I put as my description for the Marketplace about 20,000 or so words ago.

Next up is Artwork, this mirrors the Screenshots page but decides to go with art shots of the characters, VS, and Akrid. This is starting to feel like a mindless dump of marketing assets, strewn across a website in an organized manner.

Achievements is a more impressive showing than Avalanche087’s offerings. This shows all 35 achievements. Sadly, more than half of them are secret achievements that don’t tell you anything.

Lastly from the riveting Game Information tab is the Strategies page. This time it’s clickable and not a site of lies! Because the game wasn’t out, this “Strategies” page shows only tips for the E3’06 demo. But I gotta hand it to CriminalOrigins, he actually wrote…well, something about it.

I find the gravitas and sense of drama to be a bit excessive, however. The “The energy gun has no ammo, and it’s crucial to your survival.” line is a bit excessive, as when you get this weapon in Mission 01, it’s only a few minutes until you reach the boss fight, which you would prefer to use the VS and not the Energy Gun.

I feel the overall strategies offered by CriminalOrigins have heart, but perhaps they are only summaries of the various beats of the level. As mentioned by his summary of the boss fight at the end of Mission 01. He states “This boss is quite difficult to defeat.” If you listened to my advice, which is not a guide or strategy, but rather my observations, you would know the optimal strategy is to go into the center of the room and Hover when the boss rolls around.

Overall, I am glad that there’s something as opposed to nothing for a “Strategies” page. Better to be disappointed than to be lied, right?

Moving to the Downloads tab, we sense more familiarity, but a pinch of excess, but in a good way, if you’re a simp for Lost Planet during the marketing push for the game.

This has a bit of a disappointment with the wallpapers as the 1600x1200 option aren’t on this site, but the actual images are visible for once, which is refreshing.

But we’re not done! If you wanted to shill Lost Planet as your forum signature, this site has you covered. AIM icons? Has you covered, which I assume is the same as the Yahoo Instant Messenger icons. And to top it off, a Lost Planet-themed Windows Media Player skin.

I have two observations here. Who in the world rocked this Windows Media Player skin? Like, unironically. Maybe CriminalOrigins for a few months before he moved on to the next fan site conquest. Also, the AIM icons…are they the gamerpics that were on the Marketplace? So you can use the AIM icons for free but you have to pay 60 fun bux to have access to them on Xbox? What type of insane crap is that?

The last part of this fan site is peak shill. The Preorder Now! Page. This page provides a series of links to online retailers for you to get your copy of Capcom LTD’s Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.

This may be an error with the archive, but there was a countdown at the bottom of the Preorder Now! page that is no longer visible in any capacity.

Overall, I dug CriminalOrigin’s site more than Avalanche087’s, but frankly speaking both absolutely disgusted me. The sheer lack of self awareness to shill for a game using Capcom’s wording and marketing material is peak shilling. I am not sure how this didn’t get any noteworthy pushback from gamers or outlets? This wouldn’t fly at all today, and maybe we’re better off?

The fact that both of these “fans” just ditched these sites immediately after the game’s launch is hilarious. They don’t come across as a grassroots movement from Capcom’s diehard fans. They come across as opportunists who made a site to earn a prize. What was the prize? I will find out eventually.

www.lost-planet.info by jingato is forever lost media. I checked numerous archives of this website and couldn’t find anything about this site. This is sad, but I suppose I am grateful, as I am not sure I could stomach another insincere “fan” site.

But instead of doing another ridiculous deep dive on more propaganda websites from Capcom’s marketing , I decided to do one on another type of propaganda from Capcom! This is the Lost Planet First Look from IGN I stumbled across while randomly looking for sources on the game.

This article is one of the earliest write-ups I could find about Lost Planet, dated February 17th, 2006 - almost an entire year before its launch. There’s some interesting tidbits and what’s this? Cut content? Let’s dive in.

The IGN preview notes that as the presentation started, a bunch of models handed the audience jackets as Capcom lowered the temperature of the auditorium they were using by a few degrees. Now these jackets, were they used as promo material for the game? Can I find them? Unfortunately, my sleuthing showed nothing.

The article displays rather tiny screenshots throughout, but I noticed that the in-game hud had an extra element on the upper-left hand side. “Air Temperature” being right below your T-ENG. This…was not in the final game.

I will get back to this, but the last thing of note was Capcom shooting for 32-player multiplayer. This didn’t happen, as what shipped was 16-player multiplayer.

But back to the Air Temperature thing. What exactly was this? Well, fortunately, the E3’06 Demo has us covered! This demo showcases the first level of the game and there’s only some minor tweaks. The Life Gauge being orange rather than green, using the VS earlier in Mission 01…but that darn Air Temperature meter is there.

What is it? What does it do? Why was it removed?

Earlier, when I mentioned a different IGN article, the one saying Lost Planet is a mix of Bionic Commando and Panzer Dragoon, it said that your T-ENG decreases faster in colder environments. Perhaps this is what the Air Temperature monitored?

If you were indoors, it stands within reason that it’s warmer than the frozen hell that is the planet’s surface. So maybe the Air Temperature was a modifier that altered the rate of T-ENG being decreased.

Looking at a video of footage from the E3’06 demo, the temperature fluctuations during the mission never changed more than five degrees total. Perhaps the reason why this was removed is that it didn’t offer much variance in T-ENG change and to keep things simple and to clean the HUD, it was removed.

I wish I had access to the source code or some debug version of the game to test this theory, but alas, we have mere speculation.

Before we leave off on this IGN article, this part I found is…odd, “Wayne is able to move his arms to fire his weapon, as well as his torso, allowing for more precise aiming.” I have no idea what this IGN writer meant by moving his arms as well as his torso to facilitate aiming. Are you talking about the animations Wayne makes while moving? I wish it was more precise, but maybe the writer is the target audience for Capcom’s manual?

Now thinking about it, I think they might’ve meant the running and gunning aspect in Lost Planet. A third-person shooter where you can move and shoot simultaneously was…rare. In fact, Gears of War released only two months prior to Lost Planet and Gears was a huge push forward for the innovation of the genre.

Can you imagine a world where Lost Planet came out before Gears of War and was heralded as a revolution in third-person shooting? That’s a wild, but technically possible scenario to consider.

Well, I guess that covers the three fan sites. Remember how this was supposed to be about the manual? Well, we’re still not done! I want to figure out what those prizes were.

Going back to the manual, there’s two more areas to cover on page 36. Capcom graciously gave a link to check out other fan sites… Well, okay. Going back to the Internet Archive, I found… oh no…oh, oh no. Three more fan sites. But fortunately, I found what the prizes were for the fan site contest!

1st place - Avalance087 received a “40” LCD HDTV valued at approximately $2000”. Wowzers. That must’ve been incredibly heavy to ship. This is a pretty great prize all things considered. It reminds me of my launch copy of Dead Rising on the Xbox 360 and how there was a leaflet in the case advertising an HDTV contest or something of that measure. You best believe I will cover that if I ever do Dead Rising.

2nd place - CriminalOrigins received a “5.1 Surround Sound Home Theater system valued at approximately $400.” This too is not bad at all. Sound is highly underrated in a home theater set up. Personally, I hate wearing headphones, so this is pretty great.

3rd place - jingato received a “brand new 30GB Microsoft Zune portable music player, valued at approximately $250.” Remember the Zune? I always wanted one, not sure why I wanted one, but they looked nifty. I never had a portable music player or PDA, the closest I got was a PSP. But thinking of the value proposition for making a website and you get a Zune? A little lame, but I can’t be too upset about it.

Okay, those three other sites. So those honorable mentions didn’t get jack. But remember how I found that there were at least 8 threads from the Lost Planet fan site discussion board? Does that mean out of at least 8 only 6 got recognized by Capcom? Were the other two so awful that they didn’t even get a nod or any praise from Capcom?

Before I list off the other sites and their creators, I find it endlessly amusing seeing this line, “(In case you didn’t notice, this list is also immortalized on the back pages of the Lost Planet manual.)” Like who’s going to look into a manual, check this page and see your website? Don’t give me that look. But I love how this is almost an added bonus of being immortalized in a game, but in the very back of a manual.

Alright, what were the other fan sites? These are the honorable mentions that didn’t even get mentioned in the manual. What an unintentional burn from Capcom.

www.lostplanetfan.com by padawan

www.xtremecondition by Carv (Whoa, hey now. Is that a typo? Is it .com? .net? .gov?)

www.akridhunter.com by avid

I checked all of these websites, and numerous combinations of Carv’s website and don’t see any are currently active. Might as well check the Internet Archive again.

Boy, just when you thought we were done with this crap, I drag you right back in.

Fortunately, two of the three aren’t archived by the Internet Archive, so we have even more lost media pertaining to the Lost Planet fan sites.

But akridhunter.com by avid does have an archive and it’s not what you expect!

I couldn’t find anything at all about Lost Planet from the archives. A December 21st, 2007 archive shows the URL already abandoned and taken by 360Style, which seems to be an Xbox 360 fan site. Anything before that date is some French blog.

What an unexpected twist! I was all pumped and ready to analyze more astroturfed fan sites, and I can’t, even if I wanted to.

Last part of page 36, and boy I hope it truly is, has a blurb about the contest rules for the fansite. I am deeply confused as don’t you already have winners for the contest? Why would you need to spell out the rules when it was already over? But, why don’t we try to see what these rules actually were?

Looking into the archived version of the rules, we have the full terms of the contest.

For starters, this was only valid for US residents but not those in Puerto Rico. Sorry, guys. The contest ran for a month from November 1st, 2006 through November 30th, 2006.

In the DESCRIPTION OF CONTEST part of the rules, it says that Capcom will provide “artwork, story, and game information”. This explains the repeated crap from the two sites I examined. Also, it mentions that each week in November, Capcom would feature one site on their forum. So four weeks in November, right? That means not all of the honorable mentions were showcased by Capcom. Ouch.

In HOW TO ENTER, it mentions that you need to start a thread in the “Fan Site Contest” forum. When I discovered it, there were 9 threads. So at least 9, but my thoughts are 8, perhaps one was a thread detailing the rules. But at the very maximum, there were only 9 submissions, 6 of which are documented for posterity.

The REQUIREMENT section has a lot of legal mumbo jumbo that says that those who enter the contest have to sign their life and soul away to Capcom blah blah blah and the winners can be used by Capcom in game materials without any compensation.

WINNER SELECTION is a bit more interesting, well as interesting as a legal document can get. Winners are determined in a very shill-centric fashion, “Capcom shall evaluate all fan sites based on overall design, functionality, and best representation of the Lost Planet”. This reeks of Capcom having to outsource a website for a game to fans for measly sums of compensation.

Lastly, this section mentions, “January 12, 2007 inside Capcom.s Lost Planet. video game”. Is being on the manual technically being in Lost Planet? Are they in the credits? Also, what’s the deal with using a period as an apostrophe?

The PRIZES/APPROXIMATE RETAIL VALUE (ARV) in U.S. Dollars. merely re emphasizes the monetary value for each of the prizes, which we covered earlier.

I am yawning through all of this, how about you? We’re almost done! The ELIGIBILITY section basically says you are 18 and not a Capcom employee. Sorry, Brian Dunn, looks like that 40-inch HDTV isn’t for you.

RELEASE AND WAIVER has a bunch of scary looking text and since I am not a lawyer, I have no idea what it means. So I asked an AI LLM to summarize it using Iambic Pentameter:

In contest bold, I waive all claims to thee,

Dear Capcom and thy kin, forever free,

From loss or harm, my prize’s use decree,

In courts of Santa Clara, disputes agree.

Still confusing, but boy is it at least beautiful.

Lastly, we have the WINNERS LIST. Where I can get a name of the winners if I write a self-addressed, stamped envelope after January 17th, 2007. I really want to know if this is still on the table, so I will mail out this and hope for a reply back.

And look at that. We’re done! Not with the manual, but page 36. We’re just two pages away from being done so we can finally go back to the game proper. That’s a lot about a single page of a manual, wouldn’t you agree? I feel it gives context for any manual where you just glossed over the pages, you truly have no idea what you can find unless you just dig into it.

Wow, STILL not done with the manual, but that rabbit hole? Beautiful. Beautiful just like you, reader. I mean --I am taken, so I wasn’t implying anything, but you have a beautiful soul, I bet.

Get your beauty sleep, everyone!

[rdennison7]

Entry the thirty-first - August 18th, 2025

It’s a Monday once again! Can you believe it?

Today was textbook. Well, not a literal one, but a figurative one! Five reviews and ONE new grammar point. I might be fluent sooner than you realize it!

One thing I have noticed about Japanese culture is the embrace of collaborations. Where two businesses get together and share intellectual property of their characters for some promotional event. Remember from yesterday that I shared the Disney X Mister Donut collab?

Right now, 7-Eleven Japan and Yu-Gi-Oh are doing a collab!

You get these nifty cards just for buying three Hi-Chew products.

I am not entirely sure about you, but I didn’t need a trinket to order three Hi-Chew products as those are some darn good candies.

My sweet tooth aside, I noticed that in Japanese culture this embrace of the collaboration is really heavy and is something we’re just now starting to see in the US.

Yes, yes I know the US has done this before and you could argue is the originators of this whole ordeal, but lately I have seen such a huge push by companies to make it a part of their identity.

Oh, god…I mentioned Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering twice in two different posts…but let’s look at Magic: The Gathering.

Right now, their collaborations with Final Fantasy, Spider-Man…and yes, SpongeBob Squarepants are a hot topic in the Magic TCG community. You see, before, these collabs weren’t part of the main TCG. That cool Fallout or Assassin’s Creed boxset you purchased? Not tournament legal! But now the game has changed…

The result, at least for Final Fantasy products are insane prices:

Yikes! But the weirdest thing is that these collabs are part of the main event. You can’t skip this if you wanna play the most-current version of Magic.

But I digress on Magic, this is something that I noticed in the US that I have never seen pushed so hard before! Maybe it started with Fortnite where you can have Hank Hill as your main character.

I even found a video some crazed maniac forcing Hank through all the dance emotes in the game

ALL FORTNITE ICON SERIES DANCES & EMOTES! (Hank Hill)

What’s the end goal? Honestly, it’s just money. If customers didn’t respond well to it, companies wouldn’t do it. Maybe American companies took note at the aggressive action the Japanese have used collaborations and amplified it.

Personally, I find it amusing and I am curious to see what wild combinations can come from this.

Speaking of shilling, it’s time! Another stunning entry of the Profound Waste of Time epic. Sadly, no twerking.

A Profound Waste of Time Part...Uh, I think Six! I won't check to confirm that!

And look at that. We’re done! Not with the manual, but page 36. We’re just two pages away from being done so we can finally go back to the game proper. That’s a lot about a single page of a manual, wouldn’t you agree? I feel it gives context for any manual where you just glossed over the pages, you truly have no idea what you can find unless you just dig into it.

Page 37 is a promotion about a mobile game called Lost Planet Trag Zero. When you think of mobile games, I would forgive you for thinking games on your iPhone. Well, this is before the iPhone, so this was probably some game in Java for your snazzy Motorola Razr.

The advertisement eagerly tells me that the story for Lost Planet begins with this game. Which is great as I am already very confused by the narrative of the game, and perhaps this will answer all my lingering questions.

I sent a text message LOST to 227266 and patiently awaited for a reply to no avail. Immediately, I received a response saying, “Sorry, this service is not available.”

Fortunately, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, a website www.capcommobile.com on the advertisement promising me a limited time offer. I wonder if being over 18 years late matters?

Shockingly, the mobile site had nothing.

In my frustration, I decided to load up Mission 01 on Normal again. I found a few interesting insights, most of which were minor.

I found a Target Medal very early in the mission and it corresponded to either the fourth or fifth letter placement in the secret word per level so far I am at _ARTH. Hmm, any idea what that one can be?

Another little tidbit is that if you accidentally fall off a ledge, Wayne will catch himself with the Anchor so you can bring yourself up.

When redoing the boss fight is how ridiculously easy it is, at least on Normal when attacking the tail with dual Gatling Guns on the VS. I am starting to seriously question CriminalOrigins’ gamer cred if he had issues with it. Maybe he played it on Hard?

Oh, you cannot select Hard mode as a replay. I actually wanted to do that for this replay and it wasn’t available. I guess I need to beat the game first to have that option available.

I also tested the dive mechanic by clicking the Left Stick, pressing A and moving in a specific direction. It seems that I may be able to move faster as a result.

However this comes at a cost! I noticed whenever you jump or roll, it increases the rate of T-ENG expenditure.

As I couldn’t play it on Hard, I decided to do another play of Mission 01 on Easy. As suspected, they move the Target Mark locations each difficulty. I mean, I guess it’s the least they could do, as that can’t even be hard to implement.

The Easy difficulty is as you would expect, easier to kill enemies, less damage taken. T-ENG might be slower to decrease. It looks like about 3-4 T-ENG per second, but looking at what I wrote earlier, that seems to match. Hmm, interesting.

Played it a third time on Normal, making it a grand total of four plays for this level and managed to get the last medal, spelling EARTH. Which also netted me a nifty achievement, the first unlocked for this game in about 15 years.

When you get all the Target Marks, there’s a little medal icon next to the difficulty in which you collected them. I collected all these medals and all I got was a…medal? Y’know, I am not even going to complain here as I walked into that.

Doing just one more play of Mission 01 on Easy just to get the medals and to compare the T-ENG decrease. Maybe it’s closer to 2 T-ENG per second? It seems very similar to Normal, but I feel it is a bit slower on Easy. Maybe it’s the same per difficulty and I am just going crazy?

The Chryatis Akrid, I lovingly named Weevil Underwood has a mildly interesting gimmick. He has two insectoid-like arms that he uses to support himself, which you can shoot and chop off like in Dead Space…but before Dead Space! If you lob off one of his arms, he can still attack, but if you manage to chop off both, he will wiggle around helplessly until you put him out of his misery. I like the attention to detail. So unnecessary, but very nice.

Finished the mission for the fifth time, this time on Easy. All the medals spell out EARTH…again, sadly it’s not a different word per difficulty. I noticed that this time, the letters appear in order as you find them.

I am further annoyed by the baffling decision to pick up weapons with the VS being the same as exiting the VS, this happened at least three times during the five times I fought the boss. To further compound the frustration, you can apparently pick up ammo if your VS is on the side where the weapon is, so instead of having dual Gatling Guns in this run, I had double ammo for one gun, so I had to find another Gatling Gun in the boss arena.

Another thing that kinda grinds my gears, is the emphasis of movement over fluid gameplay. If you are on uneven terrain while moving, there’s a good chance you will just stop shooting. There’s these bizarre “cinematic” moments in game where you just no longer have control over your character for a brief spell as Wayne tripped from the vibration of an Akrid falling into play. I know I covered that before, but jeez, this really irritates me.

If Lost Planet had fluid gameplay, I can truly see this being a different flavor of Monster Hunter. Guns, sci-fi, and giant creatures being a good contrast tonally and in terms of gameplay to Monster Hunter.

Before I go back to the manual and finish it, I just want to say that I tested the crawling, it’s just a crouch. Similar to Halo, press and hold the Left Stick to crouch. You can move while crouching. When you are no longer clicking, you are back to a standing position.

Back to the manual! Where were we? Oh, that’s right, the Lost Planet Trag Zero game. Sadly, I don’t have a pre-iPhone phone nor do I want to emulate and experience the game in a sub-par manner. I mean, I get it, it’s an old phone game on Java, the thing isn’t going to run well period, but just like the Limited Edition disc, I know when to pull out of a losing fight.

If by any miraculous odds I get my hands on a Motorola Razr, you can bet that I will do a full write-up on Lost Planet Trag Zero.

Back to the www.capcommobile.com website! I see that this URL was recently abandoned, like it was active as recently as 2024. I see the archive has it in Japanese, so maybe the emphasis was a local mobile market on Capcom’s end.

But going backwards to the January 22nd, 2007 archive of the site, I am greeted with a rudimentary animated promo banner of Trag Zero in all its glory. This is probably the most marketing this game ever got.

The only interesting tidbits I can find about Trag Zero from this site is that you play as Gale, Wayne’s father. T-ENG still plays a role, presumably as the timer. Oh, and there’s a submachine gun. That definitely wasn’t in the game.

Lastly, our last page. You soldiered through a lot of my crap, read a series of tangents that would make anyone go mad, and here you are. Page 38, the…uh, let’s call it the Miscellaneous page.

There are five segments in this final page: CREDITS, 90-DAY LIMITED WARRANTY, REPAIRS AFTER EXPIRATION OF WARRANTY, WARRANTY LIMITATIONS, and ESRB RATING.

Who in their right mind would even think of going through this? Let’s go!

First up are the CREDITS. The credits finally give kudos for everyone who helped me go into this downward spiral of manual analysis. I reached out to the Manual Translator, JP Kellams to see if he had any input from his experience working on this project.

Surprisingly, I received a response, saying that he didn’t remember anything and it took him about a half a day of work to get it out the door. Welp, not much of a lead.

However, the title of Manual Translator is a curious one. That implies that this may have been a direct translation or localization of the original Japanese manual. As much as I would love to compare the differences between the two, I don’t have a Japanese version of the game to go over.

But this would explain some of the weird Engrish that carried over into the English version of the manual.

Next up is the 90-DAY LIMITED WARRANTY section. This basically covers that Capcom will attempt to fix any issues with the disc within 90 days of purchase. Usually, whenever I had an issue with a game disc, I just returned it to the retailer, not contacting the company directly.

I truly wonder how common this was? How many people called Capcom, had some poor soul diagnose the issue and offer to send a new disc. But there’s a bit of a twist, something I never knew existed in the next section.

What happens if I had my game for 91 days, and a solar flare caused my game to stop working? REPAIRS AFTER EXPIRATION OF WARRANTY has you covered.

This basically says that if you contact Capcom and the disc isn’t working beyond the 90-day warranty period, that they can offer a replacement disc if you include a check or money order for $20. No stuffing the envelope with a $20 bill! Has to be one or the other.

In the off chance that Capcom no longer has the disc in their inventory, they will refund you the $20 along with your broken disc.

I never knew such a service existed, as that’s so weird. Did every publisher do this? Or is this Capcom’s internal means of processing replacement discs? Is this a service still offered today?

There’s a phone number on the warranty page, I gave it a ring and it’s been disconnected. Maybe there’s a newer number? Maybe they moved offices?

Checking online, I see that the Sunnyvale, California address they used is now occupied by another tenant. Checking the official corporate website shows their headquarters are now in San Francisco.

Doing an even deeper dive, I can see that Capcom still offers disc replacement warranties even to this day. I couldn’t find any information about them taking action beyond 90 days, but just the fact they still offer it is interesting.

Next up is WARRANTY LIMITATIONS and this is pretty straightforward, the warranty offered is limited only to US and Canada. Sorry, Mexico, I guess you get the shaft.

Last up, and this is big as this is the LAST part of the LAST page of this godforsaken manual. It’s short and sweet, I swear. ESRB RATING. This simply states that this game has been rated by the ESRB and gives the website if you want to know more about their rating process or even comment on how appropriate their rating process is.

Can you imagine reading each page of this manual diligently and then finding the last part of the manual specifically about the ESRB rating to just tell them that you thought this game deserved an M rating as opposed to a T rating due to the lack of prayer or something ridiculous that would’ve fit the cultural norms at the time?

Anyway, you did it! I did it. We both accomplished something that probably hasn’t been done before in game analysis. What a historical and equally stupid moment.

Does this mean we can finally go back to the game and do Mission 02? Yes, and believe me, I really want to go back too.

Mission 02 is now. I should probably tell you the name of these missions, right? Mission 02 Stronghold Assault is the next conquest. The nifty map on the Mission Select screen shows that it’s a bit south of the location of Mission 01 A World of Ice. Fun Fact: this is the first time I ever used the word “ice” in this entire document.

But I had one thing I was curious about, under RECORDS, the Campaign Results had me wondering if the results were cumulative or a best play per mission and it’s cumulative.

Also, the prologue, what IGN referred to as Mission 00, is inaccessible. Maybe it’s replayable after finishing the game, but the only way to currently start it, is to start a new game and delete my save data.

Mission 02 a-go-go!

A short one for today! But we finished the manual. WOW. Took like what, four days? Congrats, if you actually read that.

Until next time, twerk your brains out, everyone.