Another week goes by without anyone even *thinking* about announcing a new season of Samurai Pizza Cats. You dare call this a society?!?
Standing at a cross-light intersection wearing silver bodypaint and not moving this week are two games I neglected to mention LAST week; in one case because I just plum forgot about, and one because it was a SECRET SURPRISE! And the Secret Surprise of those two was, of course, Pikmin 1 + 2 (also available individually), a *slight* gussying up of the Wii Re-releases of the original Gamecube games! Visit scenic "Earth" with just a widdly weensy guy who has a healthy rapport with local plantlife, and uses that command to swarm over and chew up super-predators many times your size, and convert their corpses into more l'il plant guys all in the goal of collecting the pieces of your broken spaceship so you can get off this terrifying planet of hostile megafauna.
Then do it all again, but with the goal of plundering it of all its precious relics because you gotta get paid, son.
The other one is also technically a re-release with DLC, but it still bears mentioning since it's QUITE A LOT of DLC for a small mark-up; Sonic Origins +, which takes the already pretty sweet Sonic Origins (imperfect emulation, aside) and also added in basically every Sonic the Hedgehog Gamegear game to it for a mere ten-ski). Now, granted, the GG ports of some of those games are borderline, if not fully, unplayable and they could and should have used the Master System Ports instead, but I respect the sheer breadth of New Video Game offered here. Also they added Amy as a playable character in the main game but that's not... like... revelatory. Weird that it took so long though.
Now, as for THIS week releases, most of them are re-releases of Old Games, one of which being Soul Vars, which I have to assume was supposed to be Soul Wars, a port of a mobile game that, boy, the eShop is dedicated to selling the popularity of. I ain't heard of it myself, but here we are. It's a deckbuilder RPG where you've got a team of Ghost Busters what got a hankerin' to just PUNCH THE CRAP out of them fool-ass ghosts using randomly assigned abilities. I've tried it a little bit and deemed it "Lacking in a satisfactory tutorial option", but I approve of just absolutely destroying ghosts with your naked fists, so I'll keep at it.
Next up is The Lara Croft Collection, a collection of two of the better Tomb Raider spinoffs that came out about a decade ago; Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris. They're both top down Puzzle Dungeon-y affairs, like if Zelda were a twin-stick shooter, they've got co-op for up to four players and they both do a really good job of it, and are unintentionally pretty funny to play solo as the titular characters mosey up to Lara Croft and say "Geez, this sounds like a *you* problem, not a *me* problem" and then hecks off until the next cutscene where they yell at you for not doing their job.
Explore scenic "Monster and Vermin Infested Ancient Temples" and then gun down absolutely every friggin' thing inside them while figuring out logic puzzles. If people didn't want you getting your fingers all over their ancient artifacts they should have put more skeletons inside their tombs!
And on the subject of temples haunted by the supernatural evil of ages long past, we have Enclave HD, a port of a game I am about 60% sure I rented on the original XBox a couple of times, and if so, my memory is of a proto-Demon Souls. The trailer certainly... makes it look like a 3rd person Hack and slash game from about 2002 or so. I mean, it's not Darkened Skye, but maybe more interesting than Legend of Alon D'ar.
Next up is easily one of the games I was most excited for this month; and probably my favorite Shu Takumi game; Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. An upscaled MUCH FANCIER looking port of the point and clicky Un-murder Simulator that set my heart alight back on the DS. You're a dang ol' Beetlejuice what has the power to possess inanimate objects and also rewind time up to five minutes and the inclination to use those abilities to try to solve your own murder before the sun rises and you go on to the great hereafter. Which mainly takes the form of trying to figure out how to keep everyone near you from ALSO getting killed because this is just a night designed for cartoonishly lethal slapstick hijinx.
It also features what is arguably the best dog in video games.
I wouldn't argue it, myself, but an argument could be made.
Now if you were disappointed that Ghost Trick wasn't at all like the other, much more famous, Shu Takumi series, perhaps I can interest you instead in Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, which appears to be An Ace Attorney Game, except focusing on the bonkers-ass parts of it. Like; to a VASTYLY higher degree. You're a detective who is haunted by a sexy ghost and interrogating suspects takes the form of dungeon crawling and sword fights against their hidden biases and compartmentlized untruths.
It's... umm... it's a lot.
And just as unorthodox for a game about SOLVING WEIRD CRIMES AND MURDS, but far more accessibly so, we have Crime O'Clock, which I think is... a Where's Waldo game? Explore the scenery of a very large, densely packed mural and try to find evidence of no good stinkin' CRIME GUYZ plying their sinful trade, then weird up time to see if you can point a finger at those no good perpetrators.
And finally we have two two different Shmup compilations, covering the same series, but not all the same ports of them. It might well be the most bewildering release scehdule for this kind of thing I've ever seen. In any case, both of them represent the Layer Section/Ray ____ series; Ray'z Arcade Chronology contains the arcade ports of Ray Force, Ray Storm and Ray Crisis, as well as the XBLA HD ports of Storm and Crisis, while Raystorm HD Collection lacks Force, but apparently has everything else. Neither apparently have the PS1 port of Ray Crisis, which was pretty heavilly reworked which remains one of my favorite shmups ever, and the game that made me think "Oh, shmups are very fun, I bet I would like All of Them"
Anyway, they're colelctively Xevious, but MUCH fancier looking, and Ray Crisis also has an on-screen gauge that tells you how well you're playing and if you suck at the game levels get shorter and easier, and if you're awful you skip right to the final boss because plainly you ain't gonna get there under your own steam, hoss.
GO TO BREAD!
Standing at a cross-light intersection wearing silver bodypaint and not moving this week are two games I neglected to mention LAST week; in one case because I just plum forgot about, and one because it was a SECRET SURPRISE! And the Secret Surprise of those two was, of course, Pikmin 1 + 2 (also available individually), a *slight* gussying up of the Wii Re-releases of the original Gamecube games! Visit scenic "Earth" with just a widdly weensy guy who has a healthy rapport with local plantlife, and uses that command to swarm over and chew up super-predators many times your size, and convert their corpses into more l'il plant guys all in the goal of collecting the pieces of your broken spaceship so you can get off this terrifying planet of hostile megafauna.
Then do it all again, but with the goal of plundering it of all its precious relics because you gotta get paid, son.
The other one is also technically a re-release with DLC, but it still bears mentioning since it's QUITE A LOT of DLC for a small mark-up; Sonic Origins +, which takes the already pretty sweet Sonic Origins (imperfect emulation, aside) and also added in basically every Sonic the Hedgehog Gamegear game to it for a mere ten-ski). Now, granted, the GG ports of some of those games are borderline, if not fully, unplayable and they could and should have used the Master System Ports instead, but I respect the sheer breadth of New Video Game offered here. Also they added Amy as a playable character in the main game but that's not... like... revelatory. Weird that it took so long though.
Now, as for THIS week releases, most of them are re-releases of Old Games, one of which being Soul Vars, which I have to assume was supposed to be Soul Wars, a port of a mobile game that, boy, the eShop is dedicated to selling the popularity of. I ain't heard of it myself, but here we are. It's a deckbuilder RPG where you've got a team of Ghost Busters what got a hankerin' to just PUNCH THE CRAP out of them fool-ass ghosts using randomly assigned abilities. I've tried it a little bit and deemed it "Lacking in a satisfactory tutorial option", but I approve of just absolutely destroying ghosts with your naked fists, so I'll keep at it.
Next up is The Lara Croft Collection, a collection of two of the better Tomb Raider spinoffs that came out about a decade ago; Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris. They're both top down Puzzle Dungeon-y affairs, like if Zelda were a twin-stick shooter, they've got co-op for up to four players and they both do a really good job of it, and are unintentionally pretty funny to play solo as the titular characters mosey up to Lara Croft and say "Geez, this sounds like a *you* problem, not a *me* problem" and then hecks off until the next cutscene where they yell at you for not doing their job.
Explore scenic "Monster and Vermin Infested Ancient Temples" and then gun down absolutely every friggin' thing inside them while figuring out logic puzzles. If people didn't want you getting your fingers all over their ancient artifacts they should have put more skeletons inside their tombs!
And on the subject of temples haunted by the supernatural evil of ages long past, we have Enclave HD, a port of a game I am about 60% sure I rented on the original XBox a couple of times, and if so, my memory is of a proto-Demon Souls. The trailer certainly... makes it look like a 3rd person Hack and slash game from about 2002 or so. I mean, it's not Darkened Skye, but maybe more interesting than Legend of Alon D'ar.
Next up is easily one of the games I was most excited for this month; and probably my favorite Shu Takumi game; Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. An upscaled MUCH FANCIER looking port of the point and clicky Un-murder Simulator that set my heart alight back on the DS. You're a dang ol' Beetlejuice what has the power to possess inanimate objects and also rewind time up to five minutes and the inclination to use those abilities to try to solve your own murder before the sun rises and you go on to the great hereafter. Which mainly takes the form of trying to figure out how to keep everyone near you from ALSO getting killed because this is just a night designed for cartoonishly lethal slapstick hijinx.
It also features what is arguably the best dog in video games.
I wouldn't argue it, myself, but an argument could be made.
Now if you were disappointed that Ghost Trick wasn't at all like the other, much more famous, Shu Takumi series, perhaps I can interest you instead in Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, which appears to be An Ace Attorney Game, except focusing on the bonkers-ass parts of it. Like; to a VASTYLY higher degree. You're a detective who is haunted by a sexy ghost and interrogating suspects takes the form of dungeon crawling and sword fights against their hidden biases and compartmentlized untruths.
It's... umm... it's a lot.
And just as unorthodox for a game about SOLVING WEIRD CRIMES AND MURDS, but far more accessibly so, we have Crime O'Clock, which I think is... a Where's Waldo game? Explore the scenery of a very large, densely packed mural and try to find evidence of no good stinkin' CRIME GUYZ plying their sinful trade, then weird up time to see if you can point a finger at those no good perpetrators.
And finally we have two two different Shmup compilations, covering the same series, but not all the same ports of them. It might well be the most bewildering release scehdule for this kind of thing I've ever seen. In any case, both of them represent the Layer Section/Ray ____ series; Ray'z Arcade Chronology contains the arcade ports of Ray Force, Ray Storm and Ray Crisis, as well as the XBLA HD ports of Storm and Crisis, while Raystorm HD Collection lacks Force, but apparently has everything else. Neither apparently have the PS1 port of Ray Crisis, which was pretty heavilly reworked which remains one of my favorite shmups ever, and the game that made me think "Oh, shmups are very fun, I bet I would like All of Them"
Anyway, they're colelctively Xevious, but MUCH fancier looking, and Ray Crisis also has an on-screen gauge that tells you how well you're playing and if you suck at the game levels get shorter and easier, and if you're awful you skip right to the final boss because plainly you ain't gonna get there under your own steam, hoss.
GO TO BREAD!
