Digital Down-Low for 07/04/2025: Jump Men Can’t Kick

[Octopus Prime]

Happy Canada Day to everyone north of Maine; make sure you salute every Maple Tree you see and give a ha’penny to your local Zamboni driver.

Luckily the good people at Video Games acknowledged it’s a holiday so they gave me a reduced workload this week, but we do have some corkers, and one of those corkers is Into the Emberlands! It’s a 4X survives em up where you’re a little… uh… Smurf/axolotl guy who has to explore the forest after a mysterious murder mist appeared and made the whole place randomize and kill you. So now you’ve got to rebuild society while also exploring the scrambled up forest for as long as your lantern stays lit. Because as soon as there ain’t no lamp, everyone dies.

So… uh… keep that torch going, eh?

Moving on we have another Touhou game, and what more, it’s one of the Touhou games that makes itself interesting to me by mashing a completely different game into itself; in this case we’ve got a Touhou/Shin Megami Tensei mashup; Artificial Dreams in Arcadia. I’ve been hoping this would get a console port since I first learned it existed and it looks like procrastinating was the winning move because now it’s here!

Take *that*, Initiative!

Visit scenic “Roughly the present day” with a smartphone that can summon Touhou characters and a whack of first person dungeons who are having a bit of a demon infestation problem and *beat their asses*

If a video game that purposely resembles a 16 bit game ain’t good enough for you, then how about an actual 16 bit era game? Still not good enough, *fine*, how about *three* of them! We’ve got Irem Collection 3, which includes Mr. Heli, Mystic Riders and Dragon Breed. They’re all shmups, but only one stars Mr. Heli! But only two feature a fantasy setting.

Correspondingly if you do insist on a fantasy setting in your shmups then Egg Console has you covered: Fray is this weeks offering and I think it’s one of the Egg Console releases that I assume doesn’t require a knowledge of reading Japanese to play. This here is. A spinoff of XAK, and it looks kind of like Pocky and Rocky.

And finally, we have a Switch 2 exclusive, as the NSO GameCube app updated with… what im told was a surprisingly good Mario sports game, but not one I ever actually played before; Super Mario Strikers! The game that said “Mario probably has strong legs right? He should kick stuff more.”

And then replaced the usual Mario art style with a completely different and really cool one.

OKAY, GO TO BED​

 

[Violentvixen]

Super Mario Strikers! The game that said “Mario probably has strong legs right? He should kick stuff more.”

This made me laugh.

 

[WildcatJF]

Wake up! We've got a dimension expanding plane-em-up coming your way!

Squid Alpha's on the case, and Hamster's cooking their second Arcade Archive 2 release (alongside a regular ol' Arcade Archive version for Switch and PS4), Namco's classic sequel Air Combat 22, a game where you plane and do what the planes do; shoot down other planes. You'd think they'd talk first.

Next week Hamster already confirmed another licensed Macross game that we'll likely not see is on the docket, so I guess I'll take a week off! Unless the rumors of Harmony Gold actually letting that franchise exist outside Japan are true...but I'll not hold my breath. Which is harder than you might think when you're a mollusk!

 

[Octopus Prime]

Is that at all related to Ace Combat?

Because it seems like it should be but I possess woefully little knowledge of the series

 

[WildcatJF]

Ace Combat started in arcades and 22 is the second in the series. I've not played any of them but I'm sure there's some connections to the console games.

I also wrote this at 5am and put Air instead of Ace. So

 

[Octopus Prime]

I think Air Combat was the original name before they changed it to Ace, like how Soul Edge begat Soul Calibur