Folks… this might be the single most wallet-damaging DDL thread I’ve ever posted. Except maybe the one when the Switch itself was launched. Might want to consider robbing some stage coaches or starting an illegal casino to earn some extra scratch.
Throwing fistfuls of live ants into your back yard this week is something that came out last week, but I forgot about. And it’s also the least expensive thing beleased this week as you may already have paid for it, if you got the NSO expansion pass; Pokemon Stadium! Now, the original release of Pokemon Stadium drew a lot of its appeal from being able to import your party from the G1 games to a BIG CONSOLE and make battles much more visually dynamic than what a Gameboy could manage. But… this port doesn’t let you do that, so you just get a bunch of ringer Pokemon to make your way through the Pokemon league with.
But there’s also Mario Party style mini games; that’s something.
Disney Speedstorm is next, and, as you may surmise, it’s a Mario Kart game but with Disney IP. Which… I think is all of them At this point? Originally, I was going to list a bunch of obscure characters they could include, but, well, they put frickin’ Figment the Dragon in here, so clearly nothing is off the table. Is the Zachary Braff chicken in this? The Home on the Range cows? The very racist satyr from Fantasia?
Probably not that last one, but MAYBE?!?!
God of Rock appears to be something in the vein of Bust a Groove, a series I’m honestly a little surprised hadn’t reappeared since the PS1 days. Take your chosen resurrected musician and unleash PURE ROCK to defeat a series of opponents using naught but the power of your sweet-ass jams. Like Eurovision, but with more hadoukens.
The Mageseeker is a League of Legends spinoff, and, like the rest of them, they’re attempting to make that franchise appealing to me by slapping the world into a genre I care far more deeply for than MOBA-style RTS gameplay.
It’s a good strategy, fwiw.
Anyway, This’un here is a an action RPG that looks MORE THAN A LITTLE like Hyperlight Drifter, or Unsighted. And I loved the FIGS out of Hyperlight Drifter and Unsighted.
Take a phenomenally powerful wizard with whip-arms out around a city and beat the absolute hell out of capitalism and Wizard Racism in equal measure.
By an INCALCULABLY MASSIVE MARGIN, this weeks headliner is the long, long, entirely too long awaited console ports of Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster; collecting not one, not two, but SIX gussied up, rebalanced, Final Fantasy games. Which also represents what is possibly my favorite games in the series and also created my love of the franchise.
Take a half dozen, born of a dragon, and find and kill chaos, and the brand new and exciting manager of Hell, and a guy mad about his inheritance, and Uatu the Watcher, and a tree, and Star Wars, but with The Joker instead of Darth Vader, with the help of guys who hate Chaos, and some Star Wars guys, and some onions, and Sad Batman, and a pirate, and a human loving, fast-talking, SLAM DANCING moogle.
You know; final fantasy stuff
If that’s entirely too many old RPGs for you, how about one relatively new one? To that end; Lost Epic has been released. It’s a certainly Vanillaware-ish action RPG (albeit with the be-hornt art turned way down). It’s an action RPG where you’ve got an anime-y knight or wizard or the like tasked with going around pounding the bajeezus out of monsters and use the spoils of that monster bajeezus-pounding to upgrade yourself to better facilitate removing the excess bajeezus from monsters. Looks kind of like Dragon Marked for Death, if it was based on Odin Sphere instead of Mega Man. Apparently it’s from the same peeps as what made Earth Wars, a game so nice I deemed it “Okay!”
Now if that description made you say “Hmm, I like monsters, and do not wish to pound out their bajeezi, is there a video game for me?” Consider your needs SATED, because Coffee Talk: Episode 2 is precisely that! This is a talkey style yammer-em-up where you’re a barista at a coffee shop where your clientele trends towards the spooky or otherwise fantasy monster-y. Pour a tall cup of joe for an orc or a ghost and find out what they think about their ex dating their dad or something.
Assault Suit Valken came out everywhere except Canada a few weeks ago, now it’s out in Canada too! I don’t know if it’s out in France now, too, as I understand a lack of a French translations as what caused the delay, but I also have no skin in the game whether or not it’s released in France, so I logically would not know that.
ANYWAY… it’s a port of the SNES Cybernator, but with a lot of additional ephemera and less censorship, as the sight of the Space President blowing up his own head was a bit of an ask for an SNES game in 1991.
Legend of Zangetsu is a first person dungeon crawler where the main claim to fame is that it looks neat. But in fairness, it looks VERY neat, all Japanese calligraphy-y. Like Okami, but monochromatic. Explore a sucky monster-infested forest and depopulate the yokai population on the grounds that they’re all spooky dead guys and theyre the pesky kind, not the chill kind.
DNF Duel is next, and according to the eShop description, “the seeds of volition bring forth a new challenger”. And, you know what? They aren’t wrong, the game is precisely that. This here is a fighting game that… certainly looks Guilty Gear-ish, but if every character had a vague description of their profession instead of a grab-bag of rock and roll references for names.
Apparently this is a spinoff of something called Dungeon and Fighter. So… if you are already familiar with this then you have a leg up on me.
Molly Medusa: The Queen of Spit (That… is not a title you’d seek for yourself) is a puzzlatformer somewhat in the Zeld-em-up vein, but with a lot more of a focus on Moving Block Puzzles, since you’re not just A Medusa, but THE Medusa (or the Molly, since Medusa is apparently a surname) and correspondingly have a murderous petrifying gaze; most of the puzzles involve trying to figure out how to damage enemies and talk to people when you turn them to stone when you approach them.
You can also walk up walls like Spider-Man, which I don’t think was included in most parts of oral tradition, but maybe people kept leaving out that detail.
Next up are not one but TWO games I would describe as “Like Slay the Spire, except…” Arcana of Paradise (which is real-time) and Zoeti (which uses regular playing cards instead of made-up ones and you have to build poker hands to fight).
And finally, we have the long delayed Advance Wars: Reboot Camp; a gussied up re-release of Advance Wars 1 and 2, which continues the long tradition of Advance Wars 1 just having the absolute WORST POSSIBLE timing for release dates; the original GBA release was on September 11th, 2001, this remake was originally supposed to launch, like, a week before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and… well… in comparison, coming out a couple of days after the Final Fantasy pixel remasters is clearly not in the same category, but it still ain’t gonna help the sales.
Get embroiled in a massive world-war, only for everyone to quickly realize it was all a goofy misunderstanding and decide to collectively gang up on nazis instead. Who MIGHT also be aliens? I may have been misinterpreting some parts of the series plot.
It’s turn based strategy at it’s most immediately accessible, there’s SO VERY MUCH video game here and Advance Wars 2 is one of the best games in its genre, so it’s all PRETTY GOOD STUFF.
It’s also been over 20 years and I’m still bothered that in AW1 has two kinds of tanks, and one of them is called the Medium Tank.
Okay… surely that’s enough for one week, right?
Throwing fistfuls of live ants into your back yard this week is something that came out last week, but I forgot about. And it’s also the least expensive thing beleased this week as you may already have paid for it, if you got the NSO expansion pass; Pokemon Stadium! Now, the original release of Pokemon Stadium drew a lot of its appeal from being able to import your party from the G1 games to a BIG CONSOLE and make battles much more visually dynamic than what a Gameboy could manage. But… this port doesn’t let you do that, so you just get a bunch of ringer Pokemon to make your way through the Pokemon league with.
But there’s also Mario Party style mini games; that’s something.
Disney Speedstorm is next, and, as you may surmise, it’s a Mario Kart game but with Disney IP. Which… I think is all of them At this point? Originally, I was going to list a bunch of obscure characters they could include, but, well, they put frickin’ Figment the Dragon in here, so clearly nothing is off the table. Is the Zachary Braff chicken in this? The Home on the Range cows? The very racist satyr from Fantasia?
Probably not that last one, but MAYBE?!?!
God of Rock appears to be something in the vein of Bust a Groove, a series I’m honestly a little surprised hadn’t reappeared since the PS1 days. Take your chosen resurrected musician and unleash PURE ROCK to defeat a series of opponents using naught but the power of your sweet-ass jams. Like Eurovision, but with more hadoukens.
The Mageseeker is a League of Legends spinoff, and, like the rest of them, they’re attempting to make that franchise appealing to me by slapping the world into a genre I care far more deeply for than MOBA-style RTS gameplay.
It’s a good strategy, fwiw.
Anyway, This’un here is a an action RPG that looks MORE THAN A LITTLE like Hyperlight Drifter, or Unsighted. And I loved the FIGS out of Hyperlight Drifter and Unsighted.
Take a phenomenally powerful wizard with whip-arms out around a city and beat the absolute hell out of capitalism and Wizard Racism in equal measure.
By an INCALCULABLY MASSIVE MARGIN, this weeks headliner is the long, long, entirely too long awaited console ports of Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster; collecting not one, not two, but SIX gussied up, rebalanced, Final Fantasy games. Which also represents what is possibly my favorite games in the series and also created my love of the franchise.
Take a half dozen, born of a dragon, and find and kill chaos, and the brand new and exciting manager of Hell, and a guy mad about his inheritance, and Uatu the Watcher, and a tree, and Star Wars, but with The Joker instead of Darth Vader, with the help of guys who hate Chaos, and some Star Wars guys, and some onions, and Sad Batman, and a pirate, and a human loving, fast-talking, SLAM DANCING moogle.
You know; final fantasy stuff
If that’s entirely too many old RPGs for you, how about one relatively new one? To that end; Lost Epic has been released. It’s a certainly Vanillaware-ish action RPG (albeit with the be-hornt art turned way down). It’s an action RPG where you’ve got an anime-y knight or wizard or the like tasked with going around pounding the bajeezus out of monsters and use the spoils of that monster bajeezus-pounding to upgrade yourself to better facilitate removing the excess bajeezus from monsters. Looks kind of like Dragon Marked for Death, if it was based on Odin Sphere instead of Mega Man. Apparently it’s from the same peeps as what made Earth Wars, a game so nice I deemed it “Okay!”
Now if that description made you say “Hmm, I like monsters, and do not wish to pound out their bajeezi, is there a video game for me?” Consider your needs SATED, because Coffee Talk: Episode 2 is precisely that! This is a talkey style yammer-em-up where you’re a barista at a coffee shop where your clientele trends towards the spooky or otherwise fantasy monster-y. Pour a tall cup of joe for an orc or a ghost and find out what they think about their ex dating their dad or something.
Assault Suit Valken came out everywhere except Canada a few weeks ago, now it’s out in Canada too! I don’t know if it’s out in France now, too, as I understand a lack of a French translations as what caused the delay, but I also have no skin in the game whether or not it’s released in France, so I logically would not know that.
ANYWAY… it’s a port of the SNES Cybernator, but with a lot of additional ephemera and less censorship, as the sight of the Space President blowing up his own head was a bit of an ask for an SNES game in 1991.
Legend of Zangetsu is a first person dungeon crawler where the main claim to fame is that it looks neat. But in fairness, it looks VERY neat, all Japanese calligraphy-y. Like Okami, but monochromatic. Explore a sucky monster-infested forest and depopulate the yokai population on the grounds that they’re all spooky dead guys and theyre the pesky kind, not the chill kind.
DNF Duel is next, and according to the eShop description, “the seeds of volition bring forth a new challenger”. And, you know what? They aren’t wrong, the game is precisely that. This here is a fighting game that… certainly looks Guilty Gear-ish, but if every character had a vague description of their profession instead of a grab-bag of rock and roll references for names.
Apparently this is a spinoff of something called Dungeon and Fighter. So… if you are already familiar with this then you have a leg up on me.
Molly Medusa: The Queen of Spit (That… is not a title you’d seek for yourself) is a puzzlatformer somewhat in the Zeld-em-up vein, but with a lot more of a focus on Moving Block Puzzles, since you’re not just A Medusa, but THE Medusa (or the Molly, since Medusa is apparently a surname) and correspondingly have a murderous petrifying gaze; most of the puzzles involve trying to figure out how to damage enemies and talk to people when you turn them to stone when you approach them.
You can also walk up walls like Spider-Man, which I don’t think was included in most parts of oral tradition, but maybe people kept leaving out that detail.
Next up are not one but TWO games I would describe as “Like Slay the Spire, except…” Arcana of Paradise (which is real-time) and Zoeti (which uses regular playing cards instead of made-up ones and you have to build poker hands to fight).
And finally, we have the long delayed Advance Wars: Reboot Camp; a gussied up re-release of Advance Wars 1 and 2, which continues the long tradition of Advance Wars 1 just having the absolute WORST POSSIBLE timing for release dates; the original GBA release was on September 11th, 2001, this remake was originally supposed to launch, like, a week before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and… well… in comparison, coming out a couple of days after the Final Fantasy pixel remasters is clearly not in the same category, but it still ain’t gonna help the sales.
Get embroiled in a massive world-war, only for everyone to quickly realize it was all a goofy misunderstanding and decide to collectively gang up on nazis instead. Who MIGHT also be aliens? I may have been misinterpreting some parts of the series plot.
It’s turn based strategy at it’s most immediately accessible, there’s SO VERY MUCH video game here and Advance Wars 2 is one of the best games in its genre, so it’s all PRETTY GOOD STUFF.
It’s also been over 20 years and I’m still bothered that in AW1 has two kinds of tanks, and one of them is called the Medium Tank.
