Here at the occasion of the FGC reaching a little over 700 articles, I feel it is time to talk about the state of the site again. In looking at previous instances of this kind of essay, I have found that these articles are for my edification more than anyone else. So, with that in mind, I am going to begin with a universal story about pizza.
My freshman year of college, I was comically poor. After having a part-time job all through high school, I was going to “focus on my studies” and not exert myself outside of school (this also had the added bonus of, ya know, not having to work). Unfortunately, I was 100% aware that this meant I would have exactly zero dollars coming in for extraneous purchases, and my savings had to be preserved for important things like the release of Final Fantasy 10. So, while I have often been a fan of “treats” of the eating-out variety, I spent the year sticking to my school’s pre-purchased meal plan as much as possible. And the cafeteria food I sentenced myself to for a pair of semesters was… Well, I’ve had worse. It was not fine dining by any means, but it was not particularly bad, either. It was passable, and there was enough variety that it only moderately felt like a punishment compared to the McDonalds down the street.
But there was an exception to the rule of “passable” food normally found across campus. I was (and am) a night owl, and it was not unusual for me to get hungry around midnight. And what was left open at that hour? One random spot in the basement of the student center, The Rathskeller. Or, as it was affectionately referred to by students, “The Rat”. And, yes, gentle reader, I can confirm that, “back in my day”, the food was just as appetizing as you would expect from a place nicknamed The Rat. But they had pizza! And pizza can’t be that bad… Right? Nope! Rat Pizza was a sin against flavor, texture, and the entire country of Italy. “Rat Pizza” was practically the only edible substance available on campus until breakfast at 6 AM, and it was always a struggle to consider whether it was worth waiting until morning, or chance that flavor bud genocide. More often than not, I took the risk, as I was a teenager, and such hunger meant that eating literal Styrofoam would be next on the menu. The burden of youth…
But! I made the best of a bad situation. History’s greatest scientists have yet to determine exactly why Rat Pizza was so bad (was it leftover and reheated after a whole day? Were the ingredients insufficient for actual consumption? Did it just come out wrong?), but one element could save this eating experience: hot sauce. Honest to God Tabasco brand tabasco sauce was one of the few condiments available at The Rat (salt, pepper, and some manner of dandruff cheese were also on hand), and I took to slathering my Rat Pizza in it. And that worked! It wasn’t good, but at least a pizza slice was now up to the standards of edibility as your median shredded newspaper or Taco Bell meal. Oh! And it turned out that this worked even better with the white slices of pizza. The tomato sauce on a regular slice did not add anything to the experience, so transforming a slice of Rat White Pizza into a spicy cheese sandwich worked well. Again, this is not food that I would have willingly eaten at any other time or place, but it did make “a midnight snack” something that no longer needed to be noted in the Geneva Conventions. Ideally, no one would ever have to eat Rat Pizza for any reason, but a carefully measured amount of hot sauce made it bearable.
Now, it is about 25 years later. Such a period is long enough to have produced offspring that could now be experiencing their own freshman year delicacies (but not at The Rat, as such an institution has now been wiped from campus). Thus, a thought occurs to me, “Wow, that Rat Pizza was bad. But I’ve never had anything like it before or since. It would be neat to try it again.”
That is why this website keeps going.
To follow one anecdote with another, I was talking to a friend recently about videogame preservation. We were discussing the very real problem of disc rot, cartridge degradation, and the general sadness at how many videogame collections are going to be little more than useless plastic in a few years. Once, these discs contained entire worlds that had to be saved by scores of noble heroes! Now they are all as equally useless as INXS: Make My Video. Time makes fools of us all, and it makes fools of that precious Dreamcast copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 most of all.
But do videogames lose value if they stop being videogames? My grandmother had a collection of foolish, fragile figurines, and no one ever expected those things to boot up in a Playstation. They were just objects that had to be dusted; it was the memories associated with the items that were cherished. Should we expect eternal reliability out of something that cost $40 at Electronics Boutique? And we should be honest about the gaming bugbear in the room, too. While I have already lived through a number of events that were never predicted in fiction or fantasy (that time “work from home” was temporarily discovered because of the deadly virus was unforeseen), assuming reality continues on its current course, it is unlikely (if not impossible) we will ever reach a point where even the rarest of videogames is completely unplayable. It may not be perfect, it may not be immediately accessible everywhere, but it is doubtful we will ever live to see a world where a ROM collection of literally every game for any given system is not obtainable somehow, somewhere. So, yes, that beloved copy of Chrono Trigger may not function any longer, but let’s not pretend you could not play that game immediately if you just shuffled over to your PC. And we live in a world where Radical Dreamers got an official translation and release! You will see Janus “Magus” Gil again.
And this means I can tell you about a random arcade game I saw on a multicade at the mall.
Alright, maybe not the exact same game. This was my introduction to today’s title:
There’s Street Fighter 4! And Chaos Code! And (to a dramatically lesser extent) Yatagarasu! I know those games! What’s this [incomprehensible] Anastasis all about? Another 2-D fighting game? When I am not blowing all my tokens on trying to win a Monkey Ball plush, I should check that franchise out! If it is even half as fun as that neighboring Ryu game, it should be awesome!
So I got home, and could not easily find a way to play (what is apparently called) EN-Eins Perfektewelt: Anastasis. However, I was able to find its next closest ancestor, EN-Eins Perfektewelt.
And… uh… Well, I have no idea how to judge this game.
It is a 2-D fighting game. There are a number of cool “effects” that would be impossible in the old days of Fighter’s History or alike, and the whole thing is definitely visually pleasing. There is an individual block/parry button for dedicated defensive maneuvers. There is a sentient tank…
… And I know that tank! It appeared as a guest character in BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle! With the cast of RWBY and Persona! Those are some cool bonafides! Maybe there is more information about this universe online…
And, of course, I spent a longer period of time than I ever held a controller diving down the various wikis of this game that had previously been a complete mystery. Some wiki pages were not all that useful…
But some offered lovely insight into this universe…
And now I know that that whole “parry system” is called a “reflector”, the Blitztank is a roaming nazi experiment inhabited by the soul of a human, and the nun with guns doesn’t even get a name. And, oh yeah, there’s a nun with guns. That’s solid gold! She sucks to play as, and the wiki even notes she’s the worst at what she does, but she is still and always will be a nun with guns.
Here in 2025, we have no lack of 2-D fighting games available. I am probably not going to revisit EN-Eins Perfektewelt any time soon. That would be eating up valuable time I could spend stomping around Metro City as Beef Not Afraid. But I like what I played. I like the oodles of lore on display here. I like now knowing the origin of Blitztank. I like the Chinese mafia boss that seems to be Chun-Li’s evil twin (and, according to some wikis, some versions literally name her Mary[lyn] Sue). I respect what is going on here. Even if it was only a period of approximately 48 hours, I liked playing this game, reading up on it, and now typing out this section of this specific essay where I talk about the silly thing.
And now we return to the original point of this essay: I like the excuse that this website grants me.
There was a time in my life when I was moving toward “wrapping up” Gogglebob.com. But, as much as I told myself, “oh, just a few more articles,” there were always more videogames to write about. Sometimes it was a classic that I realized I had never covered on the site, sometimes it was a brand-new release, and sometimes it is exactly what happened today: some game I hadn’t heard about from years ago pops up on my radar, and I had to try it. And does that process take time? Of course! Fishing out a copy of the game, finding a way to play it that works with recording, taking that recording and chopping it into PNGs and GIFs, and, of course, actually playing the game. It all takes time. And sometimes it seems like a lot! Because it is! And sometimes these games aren’t even “worth it”, because they’re just kind of there. What’s the angle on this one? What is it that makes it special? Sometimes literal hours are spent on a game, and my final verdict is, “Uh… it’s nice.” And that isn’t a very good essay, so it gets dropped into the dustbin of Gogglebob.com history, with the only possibility of returning assigned to a random item on one of those list articles. Maybe I can salvage a couple of paragraphs out of those hours of my life…
And, yes, now we approach the twist of this essay: you may have been expecting me to compare bad or forgettable games to horrid Rat Pizza from that opening tale. But, no, gentle reader, the pizza that I can only stomach with hot sauce is this entire website. It’s hard! It is not easy to swallow! I often fantasize about either gracefully culminating the site, or outright abandoning it entirely. Website over! I have other things to do in my life! Maybe I can keep it going “in spirit” with a stream writeup or two, and keep the little train chugging along while I get off at the nearest stop. That five-minute video I cranked out for article 700.2 two weeks back? That took months. I could have at least caught up on some sleep during that time, but, no, I was finding new and exciting ways to diss Ifrit. There is something wrong with me.
But I know I would miss it. I know if I stopped, I would come back to it. I know I would still capture video from every new release. I know I would say “that would make a cool GIF” every time some animation looped. I know I would start overanalyzing the plot practically from the moment the power turned on, and I know that kind of thinking would have to go somewhere. I know that despite everything, despite the fact that I 100% tell everyone I am only eating this damn pizza because it is the only thing available right now, I know I would want it again later. I am spending 2,000 words to tell you I am addicted to the smell of my own farts. That is why Gogglebob.com will endure, and why this website, the FGC, and similar projects will continue.
But, hey, it gives me an excuse to play a unique fighting game. So it can’t be all bad.
FGC #702 EN-Eins Perfektewelt
- System: This is more or less arcade exclusive, but there are official and unofficial ways to play it on one of those computer dealy boppers.
- Number of players: One on one fights mean two players.
- Favorite Character: Kati is bright pink, and brought an enchanted club to a fight with a bunch of soldier-looking jackasses. I appreciate her dedication to being a magical girl no matter the circumstance.
- Keep it Simple: As someone who has a long history with most of the fighting games that are popular nowadays, I never noticed how much Darkstalkers has turned the entire genre into some manner of spectacle party cannon. In Street Fighter 2, you knew when you performed a special move, because, wow, Ryu is straight up launching a ki blast across the arena. Now it is hard to say if you performed a standard or special attack because every single motion generates rad blurring effects while seventeen rainbows pop out of nowhere. What that a crouching kick with some added range, or some kind of special slide attack? Was it a super? I have no idea! And the round will be over before I have a chance to figure out if chip damage is happening or meter is being wasted. What I am saying is I am about to become a Retvrn guy for straightforward dragon punches.
Sexual Dimorphism is a Scourge: We have wall-to-wall fanservice available for this title. Kati reveals panty shots in about half of her moves, and Marilyn Dajie is the rare example of sprite-based jiggle physics. It is amusing to consider that Skullgirls deliberately dialed back the exploitation of its “girls”, while EN-Eins has it cranked to eleven.- You don’t have to hand it to ‘em: So Skullgirls also eventually edited some sprites and imagery to look less… Well, no other way to put this… “fantasy Nazi”. And if EN-Eins Perfektewelt adopted a similar tactic, there wouldn’t be any game left. The plot for the first title in the franchise (Akatsuki Blitzkampf Ausf. Achse) is distinctly about a lost fantasy-Nazi sub resurfacing after decades, and that starts a fight with the modern techno-magic society of the day. And it is superficially implied that this “modern world” is one where the Axis Powers won World War II. That’s not great, guys! Whatever is going on here, at least the clearly Nazi-inspired characters are not presented as good guys. I mean, as far as I can tell through the language barrier, at least. Blitztank is a talking skull, and that is not usually an indicator of trustworthiness (sorry, BEAT).
- Did you know? En-Eins is the title of the game, and the name of its main character. It basically translates to “The One”. So you’re in the Matrix, now, Neo.
- Would I play again: I hope to see this at an arcade in the future, as I would like to try it in its natural habitat. Unfortunately, that also means I don’t want to pay more than about fifty cents on the experience, so that probably tells you about where I am at on this one.
What’s next? So, after all that, I am going to say I’m taking a few weeks off from writing about videogames. EWS posts will continue, but Friday will be blank until June 6. A brother needs some time to breathe! After that, Random ROB will add hot sauce to my life and has chosen… Golden Axe Warrior! I am pretty sure Golden Axe has always featured warriors, but, whatever, we’ll go with that. Please look forward to it!
