More Bleemcast! Pepsimannn~!

Yes, that infamous little emulator that could is back for more, folks. This time I come to you with one of the Bleem discs that was actually released commercially: Bleemcast for Tekken 3! I got my hands on it at Ebay, which is more addictive and money-draining than gambling, for £9 (well, £7 and £2 postage) complete with a copy of the game.

The difference between these commercial releases (of which there is only three) and the leaked beta is that they are specially made to play said game perfectly, complete with all the out-dated FMV cut scenes, rumble pack + arcade stick support and even the ability to save! Just one snag about the saving: it gobbles up an entire VMU (or one slot on a 4-in-1 memory card) to do so, which is the only gripe to have with these things. Otherwise, it works a treat for the Namco scrapper.

As for the game itself, it's certainly not one of the best fighters out there, when compared to some of the Dreamcast's fighter gems it feels a bit sluggish, but as far as Playstation games go this is very nice, especially with all the extra modes like the Tekken Force mode (Which plays like Streets of Rage, only without as much freedom of movement. Not being able to pick up he chickens because you're walking on a random straight line all the time can be infuriating) and the Tekken Ball mode (possibly the best thing in the game). There's also plenty of characters to unlock, although they don’t exactly take long to unlock (just beat the arcade mode so many times until you've got them all). These range from a panda, to a big goblin type thing (the game's boss, and possibly one of the easiest final bosses ever) to a little orange Dinosaur with boxing gloves called GON (if you don't know he is, I don't blame you, but find out here.) Below I've posted a clip (well, a bunch of clips stuck together) of the game running on Bleemcast.



Another development I've noticed is how people are now releasing Playstation games on torrent with the Bleemcast beta built in, so you don't need to do any disc swapping, which is nice. I'd rather own the proper games myself if I can find them cheap, but in some cases there are games that are mega rare that run brilliantly on Bleemcast, and you just can't resist giving them a shot. One of these games is Pepsiman.

Pepsiman, you ask? What the hell? Well, this is a true oddly of a game this. Pepsiman is the star of a series of Commercials Pepsi did in Japan, who looks like he has walked straight out of Terminator : Judgement day, has no face except for a rather creepy mouth that appears when he feels like it, and always seems to get into a lot of pain after saving the day by, you guessed it, supplying your everyday folk to cans of Pepsi. I've posted a youtube video I found of all the ads below. These are easily up there with the Segata Sanshiro commercials. (Submitted by Grimsato. Thank him.)



Now, onto the game. Well, before this Playstation game he was actually playable in the Japanese version of Fighting Vipers, for some reason. Soon after, this game was produced by KID (who normally only make dodgy anime dating Sims starring girls that are surely not of legal consent) for the PS. It's a very simple game in that you are constantly running forward, dodging any obstacles in your way and collecting cans of Pepsi. The game is in fact a whole lot of fun and not far off to what Sega was showing off with the new Sonic game on the Nintendo Wii in terms of gameplay. The game also features some rather excellent, English voice acting. Here's the Bleemcast footage. As you can see it works almost perfectly.



Finally, here's something I made when bored recently. Bleemcast covers! They are scans of Playstation covers, edited to fit in with the PAL Dreamcast games! Enjoy! PEPSIMANNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!