Now, I have been making these threads for... over 15 years now. And I try to use a unique forced pun or reference as the title in every one of them. And for all of that time I have had one thought "Man, some day, Ninja Five-O is going to ge re-released, and I'm going to title the thread 'Book 'em, Ninpo'".
Now I finally have.
And let me tell you... the feeling is everything I ever dreamed it could be.
Well, no sense be-labouring the point; we're kicking things off with Ninja Five-O, the prohibitively expensive GBA collectors item now available for all the unwashed masses who weren't lucky enough to pick it up from the Best Buy discount bin in 2004 (technically it was a Future Shop discount bin, as I am Canadian, but they've since rebranded). And, yes, it's kind of incredibly overpriced for a copy of a GBA platformer running off a barebones emulator (savestates and rewind, that's about it) *but* it's *way* cheaper than the game goes for on the secondary market and Ninja Five-O is a *really* fun game.
This here is a combination of Bionic Commando and Shinobi, where you're a ninja with a grappling hook assigned to free hostages captured by... a variety of sundry Bad Guys depending on the level and figure the best way to go about that is to go *ham wild* with wild-ass bungee parkour and sneaky-stabs. It's like is Spider-Man solved all his problems with a katana!
Speaking of Konami GBA games I sunk a lot of time into but couldn't make much progress in because of surprising difficulty bump; we've got Yu-Gi Oh: Early Days Collection, which is a compilation of not one, not two but *fourteen* Yu Gi Oh games spanning the GB to GBA. And 13 of which are presented in the incredible language derived from Latin, Galic and west Germanic sources; English. One of them ain;t, but the eshop helpfully indicates that there's another series release that's a localized port of that same game so you're still sorta covered.
Anyway, there's a boatload of games here, and most of them are of the card games with various adjustments to what rules or cards are employed, but there's some of the weirder variants like That Dice One and... I'm assuming some others; the titles are not especially evocative of the gameplay beyond the franchise name.
One involves a Reshef of Destruction, I'll tell you that much for free.
And heck we ain't done with re-releases of old games so let's move on to another one that it's statistically probable you've never played, and heck, I've never even heard of, with Justice Ninja Casey! It's a beat-em-up that appears to be leaning on the likes of Goemon or River City Ransom, but with a more Generalized Cartoony Anime aesthetic than an overtly silly one.
Well, one more old video game this week. One named after a gentleman who is, also, too old for this shit. That's right, it's Glover, the long forgotten N64 platformer most famous for having a mascot that looked enough like the Hamburger Helper mascot that General Mills himself said "Oh... no, we won't be having that." Well, he's back and better than ever! Meaning he's been redesigned so he doesn't look helpful to hambugers anymore. He may even hinder them!
It's a 90s 3D collectathon platformer that wasn't Mario, Banjo or Spyro so it *probably* wasn't very fun then, and I doubt time has treated it kindly.
Now we're on to actually NEW games this week, though one of which is still targetting a very specific kind of 90s nostalgia (and, importantly, one I am receptive to) is Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, a Princess Tomato-y text-em-up adventure game in the far future where you're a couple of space robots solving mysteries in order to settle a down-payment on a new planet. And occasionally have to *beat ass* via high stakes rock paper scissors combat. More importantly, it's based on the manga from Takaya Imammura, the guy who handled the art direction on Star Fox and F-Zero.
And probably some other stuff, but I look at the screenshots and say "Oh, those are Star Fox and F-Zero peeps".
And finally, we have the game everyone is most jazzed for by a mile *even though Glover is right there*, Monster Hunter: Wilds. The latest entry in a series I am just not able to really get into despite trying a whole lot, many times. It really should be something I love but I just can't! Well... sixth or seventh times the charm, maybe it'll click this time...
Anyway, visit scenic "A place with too friggin' many dinosaurs" and beat their asses savagely and turn their carcasses into pants. I think this time you can actually lock the camera on to enemies, which, honestly... would got a long way to making me enjoy the game more.
OKAY GO TO BED.
Now I finally have.
And let me tell you... the feeling is everything I ever dreamed it could be.
Well, no sense be-labouring the point; we're kicking things off with Ninja Five-O, the prohibitively expensive GBA collectors item now available for all the unwashed masses who weren't lucky enough to pick it up from the Best Buy discount bin in 2004 (technically it was a Future Shop discount bin, as I am Canadian, but they've since rebranded). And, yes, it's kind of incredibly overpriced for a copy of a GBA platformer running off a barebones emulator (savestates and rewind, that's about it) *but* it's *way* cheaper than the game goes for on the secondary market and Ninja Five-O is a *really* fun game.
This here is a combination of Bionic Commando and Shinobi, where you're a ninja with a grappling hook assigned to free hostages captured by... a variety of sundry Bad Guys depending on the level and figure the best way to go about that is to go *ham wild* with wild-ass bungee parkour and sneaky-stabs. It's like is Spider-Man solved all his problems with a katana!
Speaking of Konami GBA games I sunk a lot of time into but couldn't make much progress in because of surprising difficulty bump; we've got Yu-Gi Oh: Early Days Collection, which is a compilation of not one, not two but *fourteen* Yu Gi Oh games spanning the GB to GBA. And 13 of which are presented in the incredible language derived from Latin, Galic and west Germanic sources; English. One of them ain;t, but the eshop helpfully indicates that there's another series release that's a localized port of that same game so you're still sorta covered.
Anyway, there's a boatload of games here, and most of them are of the card games with various adjustments to what rules or cards are employed, but there's some of the weirder variants like That Dice One and... I'm assuming some others; the titles are not especially evocative of the gameplay beyond the franchise name.
One involves a Reshef of Destruction, I'll tell you that much for free.
And heck we ain't done with re-releases of old games so let's move on to another one that it's statistically probable you've never played, and heck, I've never even heard of, with Justice Ninja Casey! It's a beat-em-up that appears to be leaning on the likes of Goemon or River City Ransom, but with a more Generalized Cartoony Anime aesthetic than an overtly silly one.
Well, one more old video game this week. One named after a gentleman who is, also, too old for this shit. That's right, it's Glover, the long forgotten N64 platformer most famous for having a mascot that looked enough like the Hamburger Helper mascot that General Mills himself said "Oh... no, we won't be having that." Well, he's back and better than ever! Meaning he's been redesigned so he doesn't look helpful to hambugers anymore. He may even hinder them!
It's a 90s 3D collectathon platformer that wasn't Mario, Banjo or Spyro so it *probably* wasn't very fun then, and I doubt time has treated it kindly.
Now we're on to actually NEW games this week, though one of which is still targetting a very specific kind of 90s nostalgia (and, importantly, one I am receptive to) is Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, a Princess Tomato-y text-em-up adventure game in the far future where you're a couple of space robots solving mysteries in order to settle a down-payment on a new planet. And occasionally have to *beat ass* via high stakes rock paper scissors combat. More importantly, it's based on the manga from Takaya Imammura, the guy who handled the art direction on Star Fox and F-Zero.
And probably some other stuff, but I look at the screenshots and say "Oh, those are Star Fox and F-Zero peeps".
Anyway, visit scenic "A place with too friggin' many dinosaurs" and beat their asses savagely and turn their carcasses into pants. I think this time you can actually lock the camera on to enemies, which, honestly... would got a long way to making me enjoy the game more.
