Ahh, it's Valumtimes Week, a time when little archer-babies are blasting people with arrows so people fall in love with them through brute-forced Munchhausen syndrome. So, whether you've got the wuv of your l'il sweetiedumplin, or the aaaaromantic love you'd have for a big bowl of popcorn, either way, We've got some FRIGGIN' VIDEO GAMES too!
And what better way to kick off this time of hugs and smooches than with a PS1 style survival horror game; Alisa. You're a British Lady Spy and it's the 1920s. And if that weren't bad enough, you dunn got yanked into a freaky nightmare dimension contained inside a dollhouse full of jacked up doll-monsters. The "PS1 Style Survival Horror" bit extends right down to the vocal performances and, not gonna lie, this went on my wishlist as soona s I finished watching the trailer.
And you know, this week is really full of New Games Disguised as Old Games and also Old Games Re-released after Far Too Long, so let's just keep that theme going with a revival of the most beloved games of the Philips CDi; Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, which is a spiritual remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon we've all been screeching for! Right down to the weird Ralph Bakshi With Mario-Paint animation for cutscenes.
Explore scenic Faramore in order to find enough magic triangles to seal away the evil wizard Daimur and bring back the peace that all warriors strive for!
And if a reasonable facsimile of the CDi experience is too fancy for you, how about a reasonable facsimile of the humble NES? Well GOOD FRIGGIN' NEWS, because Lords of Exile is next and it not only looks like an NES game, it more specifically looks like a Ninja Gaiden! Explore scenic "Monster-infested Samurai Times" and stab the absolute holy hell out of everything living inside it. The formula was basically perfected with Curse of the Moon and Cyber Shadow, but maybe this scrappy underdog can compete with the big boys of Not Quite Ninja Gaiden/Castlevania!
Moving on to re-releases of old games we're kicking things off with what might be the most significant from a game preservation standpoint, even if it's the one I'm not the most jazzed for; Cosmic Fantasy Collection; a collection of not one, but TWO games for the Turbo CD; Cosmic Fantasy and its sequel, Cosmic Fantasy 2. One of them ain't never been translated before, and the other was, but it was an early localization effort from Working Designs and had their signature liberties taken with the text and tweaking the games difficulty.
Now, Cosmic Fantasy was kind of dry, narratively, so stripping out pop-culture jokes kind of doesn't leave a lot of meat on the bones, so YMMV on whether that makes this a better release on that front, but rebalancing the difficulty is probably for the best.
And speaking of ports of basically forgotten games we have Valis: Fantasm Soldier Collection Volume 3, which collects the PC-88 and Famicom ports of Valis: The Fantasm Soldier, the MSX2 port of Valis 2, the Genesis port of Valis 3 and the SNES port of Valis 4. Which I think means that the whole series is finally represented outside of the horny mobile games from another developer.
Run from left to right and chop the absolute bajeezes out of every friggin' monster to come from a magical land into Modern Day Tokyo while adorned with a war-kini and a big ol' dream sword
And speaking of PC-88 releases, there's another Egg Console one; Egg Console: Ys! Which I believe is the original, ur-version of Ys, before they even though to add the back half of the game, which includes the titular Ys to every release! Heck, it's even before Adol knew he had to crash the boats he's on.
But it's still an Ys game, and Adol is a guy whose body is a machine that turns monsters into XP, and goddesses into romantic partners, so you head out into that verdant green fields around a big ol' Darm Tower and get to work.
Should be noted that the game is NOT translated from Japanese and it's pretty text heavy so... bear that in mind.
Next is the game I'm most excited for this week; Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered, and BY GOD, it's a collection of remasters of the first three Tomb Raiders. You can call me a lot of things BUT YOU CAN'T CALL ME A LIAR! I didn't play these originally, but I did play the Legends and Reboot trilogies, and I really liked them (and also Tomb Raider Go and the Zelda-dungeon-y ones, but that seems less relevant), so I'm excited to see how they all started. This version has a bunch of tweaks for the sake of modernity like nicer visuals and regular controls instead of tank-controls.
Visit scenic locals all around the world, ancient temples full of priceless relics and decide that while, yes, they should be in a museum, that's not as high of a priority as them being filled with bullet holes and partially demolished so you can get a foot-fold to get into a room that's just a liiiiittle out of reach, and maybe shoot a dinosaur or two.
Next up is a game that fits the criteria of "Valentines Day Release" a little better by merit of having the words "love" and "desire" right in the title; Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire, which is a spinoff of the Konosuba anime series, which I have been informed is something I would probably enjoy, but have taken no steps towards verifying myself. The trailer was of... absolutely no help in explaining the game itself, but from context clues, it seems to be like one of the Atelier games, except with Visual Novel stuff in place of RPG dungeon crawling.
I infer that the anime itself is of the monster choppin' dungeon crawling variety so can't say they weren't stretching for innovation here.
Now, you love River City Ransom, right? If you're reading this thread, the answer is, statistically "yes". And if you're anything like me, "River City Ransom as an SRPG" is all you'd need to hear to trip over yourself shoving fistfuls of money into your Switch. Well, hold up, buckaroo, that's not quite what we have here; instead Bancho Tactics is about as close as we're going to get to fulfilling that dream. You've got command of one of the gangs of BAD BOYS who is in charge of the local high schools Bully Population and a real hankering to fill the vacuum of power left when the previous Worst Kid In Town graduated, elevating him to the class of... I guess... Impolite Adult
And finally, we have another re-release of an old game Mario vs. Donkey Kong, which originally came out on the GBA, and was KIND OF a remake of Donkey Kong '94. Which was sort of a remake of Donkey Kong. I think this is just a gussying up of the GBA version and with some added difficulty levels and multiplayer and not as drastic a reimagining of the game of conceptual telephone that lead us to this point.
ANYWAY, Donkey Kong has stolen toys and BY GOD, Mario will get them back and bring Hell with him on his way.
OKAY GO!
And what better way to kick off this time of hugs and smooches than with a PS1 style survival horror game; Alisa. You're a British Lady Spy and it's the 1920s. And if that weren't bad enough, you dunn got yanked into a freaky nightmare dimension contained inside a dollhouse full of jacked up doll-monsters. The "PS1 Style Survival Horror" bit extends right down to the vocal performances and, not gonna lie, this went on my wishlist as soona s I finished watching the trailer.
And you know, this week is really full of New Games Disguised as Old Games and also Old Games Re-released after Far Too Long, so let's just keep that theme going with a revival of the most beloved games of the Philips CDi; Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, which is a spiritual remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon we've all been screeching for! Right down to the weird Ralph Bakshi With Mario-Paint animation for cutscenes.
Explore scenic Faramore in order to find enough magic triangles to seal away the evil wizard Daimur and bring back the peace that all warriors strive for!
And if a reasonable facsimile of the CDi experience is too fancy for you, how about a reasonable facsimile of the humble NES? Well GOOD FRIGGIN' NEWS, because Lords of Exile is next and it not only looks like an NES game, it more specifically looks like a Ninja Gaiden! Explore scenic "Monster-infested Samurai Times" and stab the absolute holy hell out of everything living inside it. The formula was basically perfected with Curse of the Moon and Cyber Shadow, but maybe this scrappy underdog can compete with the big boys of Not Quite Ninja Gaiden/Castlevania!
Moving on to re-releases of old games we're kicking things off with what might be the most significant from a game preservation standpoint, even if it's the one I'm not the most jazzed for; Cosmic Fantasy Collection; a collection of not one, but TWO games for the Turbo CD; Cosmic Fantasy and its sequel, Cosmic Fantasy 2. One of them ain't never been translated before, and the other was, but it was an early localization effort from Working Designs and had their signature liberties taken with the text and tweaking the games difficulty.
Now, Cosmic Fantasy was kind of dry, narratively, so stripping out pop-culture jokes kind of doesn't leave a lot of meat on the bones, so YMMV on whether that makes this a better release on that front, but rebalancing the difficulty is probably for the best.
And speaking of ports of basically forgotten games we have Valis: Fantasm Soldier Collection Volume 3, which collects the PC-88 and Famicom ports of Valis: The Fantasm Soldier, the MSX2 port of Valis 2, the Genesis port of Valis 3 and the SNES port of Valis 4. Which I think means that the whole series is finally represented outside of the horny mobile games from another developer.
Run from left to right and chop the absolute bajeezes out of every friggin' monster to come from a magical land into Modern Day Tokyo while adorned with a war-kini and a big ol' dream sword
And speaking of PC-88 releases, there's another Egg Console one; Egg Console: Ys! Which I believe is the original, ur-version of Ys, before they even though to add the back half of the game, which includes the titular Ys to every release! Heck, it's even before Adol knew he had to crash the boats he's on.
But it's still an Ys game, and Adol is a guy whose body is a machine that turns monsters into XP, and goddesses into romantic partners, so you head out into that verdant green fields around a big ol' Darm Tower and get to work.
Should be noted that the game is NOT translated from Japanese and it's pretty text heavy so... bear that in mind.
Next is the game I'm most excited for this week; Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered, and BY GOD, it's a collection of remasters of the first three Tomb Raiders. You can call me a lot of things BUT YOU CAN'T CALL ME A LIAR! I didn't play these originally, but I did play the Legends and Reboot trilogies, and I really liked them (and also Tomb Raider Go and the Zelda-dungeon-y ones, but that seems less relevant), so I'm excited to see how they all started. This version has a bunch of tweaks for the sake of modernity like nicer visuals and regular controls instead of tank-controls.
Visit scenic locals all around the world, ancient temples full of priceless relics and decide that while, yes, they should be in a museum, that's not as high of a priority as them being filled with bullet holes and partially demolished so you can get a foot-fold to get into a room that's just a liiiiittle out of reach, and maybe shoot a dinosaur or two.
Next up is a game that fits the criteria of "Valentines Day Release" a little better by merit of having the words "love" and "desire" right in the title; Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire, which is a spinoff of the Konosuba anime series, which I have been informed is something I would probably enjoy, but have taken no steps towards verifying myself. The trailer was of... absolutely no help in explaining the game itself, but from context clues, it seems to be like one of the Atelier games, except with Visual Novel stuff in place of RPG dungeon crawling.
I infer that the anime itself is of the monster choppin' dungeon crawling variety so can't say they weren't stretching for innovation here.
Now, you love River City Ransom, right? If you're reading this thread, the answer is, statistically "yes". And if you're anything like me, "River City Ransom as an SRPG" is all you'd need to hear to trip over yourself shoving fistfuls of money into your Switch. Well, hold up, buckaroo, that's not quite what we have here; instead Bancho Tactics is about as close as we're going to get to fulfilling that dream. You've got command of one of the gangs of BAD BOYS who is in charge of the local high schools Bully Population and a real hankering to fill the vacuum of power left when the previous Worst Kid In Town graduated, elevating him to the class of... I guess... Impolite Adult
And finally, we have another re-release of an old game Mario vs. Donkey Kong, which originally came out on the GBA, and was KIND OF a remake of Donkey Kong '94. Which was sort of a remake of Donkey Kong. I think this is just a gussying up of the GBA version and with some added difficulty levels and multiplayer and not as drastic a reimagining of the game of conceptual telephone that lead us to this point.
ANYWAY, Donkey Kong has stolen toys and BY GOD, Mario will get them back and bring Hell with him on his way.
OKAY GO!
