SKELLO, BOILS, GHOULS and Non-BOO-nary CREEPle of STALKING CRIME, it's me, you're old Pal(lbearer) ECTOPUS SLIME, here to SLAY a few words about the new SLAYmes this week for the SINntendo WITCH, BONY FLAYstation and AXE Box Seer-ies EEKS
So we're kicking off this week with a video game about the oldest profession. Which is, of course, mammoth hunting. And what better way to farm mammoths than by swarming them with smaller animals until they're dead and converted to fertilizer to encourage the growth of more plants to lure in further mammoths? There's no better way, of course. And that brings us to Farmagia, the latest entry in the "Farm Game Except With Monster Hunting" genre, made popular by the likes of Rune Factory and Harvestella and the like. But in this one... you're doing all the combat Pikmin style, relying upon heaps upon heaps of smaller monsters to overwhelm larger ones and also converting dead monsters into better farm equipment because your monsters are all technically crops, and then overthrow a king while you're at it.
SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCE!
On the subject of using hundreds of small things to bring down large things, that's basically a bullet-hell shooter in a nutshell, and what is the first name in the shmup genre anyone would think of? Thats right; Raiden. The game best known as "The arcade cabinet I had to walk past because Caveman Ninja and Smash TV were on either side of it". Well, there's a new one and it's called Raiden Nova, and they must have gotten my notes from childhood because this time it's a twinstick shooter! Bridging at last the gap between Raiden and Smash TV!
I mean... this news comes 30 years too late to affect my video game financial decisions, but better late than never.
Now what if you want to throw hundreds upon thousands of bullets at your problems but wish there was a more seasonally appropriate way to do it. Well... GOOD NEWS, we've got Vampire Hunters, which is not to be confused with Vampire Survivors, but boy are they hoping you suffer from that confusion. For one thing, it absolutely is a VS clone, you against swarms of squidillions of monsters with nothing but a single wimpy weapon that rapidly evolves into an apocalypse factory. Except this time, the camera is tilted a bit so it's an FPS instead of a top-down shooter; so it looks more like a combination of VS and either Serious Sam or Earth Defense Force.
I'm... definitely interested but don't know if it's going to be an unplayable janky mess or Hella Damn Fun.
And heck, I compared it to EDF, so possibly both?
Speaking of blasting monsters to smithereens, how about a game that lets you do that but is about 90-100% more puerile than whatever comes to mind when I set up a thought exercise like that? Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered has you covered! It's the game that Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami collborated on and, as it turns out, if you split No More Heroes and RE4 right down the middle the end result is less than the sum of its parts. But if you wish nine-tenths of the dialogue in RE4 was dick-jokes, good news!
Visit scenic "Hell" as you shoot everything and makes jokes about nards while being haunted by the image of your under-pants'd girlfriend.
Everything else this week is a remaster/remake/re-release of an old game, EXCEPT, of course, for Vengeance Hunters, which is a BRAND NEW game built for BRAND OLD hardware. And that Hardware? Why nothing less than that newest of geologies, the Neo-Geo! But it's also been ported to other stuff, hence me talking about it here. It's a beat-em-up and the trailer gave me some Night Slashers vibes, which is high on the list of compliments to give a beat-em-up.
Now Halloween is of course a time for spooks and frights, and what's scarier than existential fear of the aftermath of a nuclear disaster? Admittedly, not as fun as being scared of a Dracula or a Yeti or whatever, but that didn't stop them form making a bunch of video games about it and throwing some monsters in there anyway; in STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl, and its follow-ups Clear Skies and Call of Prypiat. Visit scenic Chornobyl, in the year 2006 and discover that it's somewhat worse than its reputation since there's rather more cthulhu-y mutants poking their noses around making a big of mess of things on top of the nuclear bad-land raiders who ALSO decided that a irradiated wasteland was, like, a cool place to hang out.
Also I apparently had been spelling either the games name, or the cities name wrong for years, or they changed the spelling for the game because it was hurting the cities reputation to say that, on top of its other issues, that it was full of mutant squid-zombies.
Speaking of old video games that are scary, we've got Clock Tower: Rewind, a re-release of the original Clock Tower game which I *think* is the first time it's been released in the English tongue. Besides a port of the original Super Famicoms walk-around-and-be-spooked-by-a-guy-with-scissors gameplay, there's a new remix mode that adds a bunch of new stuff to the game.
Explore scenic "A house that sucks" and try not to get sliced to pieces by a guy with some novelty scissors. Honestly, I think he'd be scarier with a normal pair of scissors, the giant scissors are way too goofy of a tool for a murder-monster.
You know what the scariest part of Halloween is? Probably skulls, maybe fangs. Depends on who you ask. Maybe wolves. One of those three definitely, so a game that combined all three? Well that's too scary to even contemplate. But contemplate it we must as we've got Wolf Fang/Skull Fang a port of the Sega Saturns ports of Wolf Fang and Skull Fang! They're shmups where you've got a robot with a whole whack of possible weapon combinations, or, as the eShop description says "The steel wolf running across the earth x the sonic corpse that buries its prey".
And that says it all, really.
Phew, too scary. I hope the next game doesn't have any terrifying imagery like that.
...
Oh no, it does! It has a b-b-b-b-b-bat
Aero the Acrobat: Rascal Rival Revenge is a re-release of the GBA port of Aero the Acrobat, which I understand is considered to be the "good one" of the series, albeit with the caveat of also being one of those GBA games where the camera is zoomed in so far you basically can't see anything that's happening.
Oh Aero, will you ever win?
And finally we've got another NSO update, for the N64 this time! And moreover it's two games that are rated M... for Mature players only. That's right, while you enjoy a fine cigar and a copy of Forbes magazine, you can also enjoy both Shadow Man and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. Both also have VERY good remakes from Nightdive studios already on the Switch, but it is technically cheaper to get them this way. Anyway, Shadow Man I ain't never played, but I understand it to be kind of like Soul Reaver, except if you played as a Vin Diesel, and Turok 2 is the game that gave every single enemy a hilariously over animated death animation and you scream "I AM TOOOOOROOOOOOCCCK" when you get a 1-up, so that's worth the price of admission alone.
Oh, also there's a new Dragon Age game, Dragon Age Veilguard, but I constantly forgot that was even announced, let alone released this week, so y'know... that's where my hearts at regarding it. I enjoyed the series well enough, but I also haven't thought about it since getting about midway through Inquisition.
And that's all you're getting out of me. Go trick or treat or something.