Happy ID4 to all you Yankees out there; may all of you be welcomed to Earth.
Standing near the chip bowl and double-dipping *constantly* this week is Gimmick! And while that exclamation mark is part of the title, it also represents my enthusiasm! This was a ne'er before released (or at least outside of Japan and... umm... Scandinavia?) NES game from Sunsoft when they were in the height of their powers in the early 90s; where you're a little... umm... dinoguy (?) what has to both hop *and* bop across a whole bunch of Platformer World staples. But also it's got a LOT more physics based platforming trickery than is usual for the era and is one of those Deceptively Hard Adorable Games.
Because, buddy, it's got a lot of Difficult and Adorable and because it was released in such staggeringly low quantities, it's also in the upper tier of Most Expensive NES games; And now it's less than $20 and has a heap of options to ease off the difficulty like savestates and rewind!
And speaking of pixelated games full of grim death and undoing it by reverseing time, we have Sentimental Deathloop, which at first I was going to skip past on the grounds that I don't know what to say about visual novels without sounding dismissive, but NOPE, this a neat one. It's a Groundhgogs Days Em Up where you're visiting your best friend, but things turn sour when she up and stabs you entirely to death and then you get up and say "Well, let's hope that isn't going to happen again". But I just said it's a Groundhogs Day deal, so you know it will. It sounds a lot like Happy Death Day, but far more anime and more of a point and click survival experience than a bunch of Yammerin' Heads.
Trails into Reverie is next, and it's the next Trails game! I think it's the most recent one but that's not based on documented facts because I am unfamiliar with this series beyond "Boy howdy, lots of yammerin'" and that it's fans universally agree "It's Very Good! But it IS Yammer Heavy".
Anyway, this version has the Trails to Walk system, if that sweetens the pot. And it includes the "L'il Slaughterer" outfit DLC.
A brand new game that looks like a Brand Old Game is Full Quiet, which is another one of those games what made me go "Oh... oh what's *this?!?!*" before the trailer was even half over. It appears to be built for actual NES hardware, and the rest of the publishers output seems to indicate that this is their particular wheelhouse; and the trailer definitely brought to mind something like the NES Rambo; just set in the backwoods of rural America instead of Vietnam. And also with more cthulhus.
Run and Gun around some open world forests and farmlands trying to find your son what got disappeared by repairing radios and gunning down local fauna. And then also some less localized fauna since these woods frickin' SUCK, yo.
And while that was designed to look like an old video game, you know what's even older? Pinball. Pinball FX if you want to get all precise about it! And I'm honestly more than a l'il surprised this wasn't already on Switch; figured it would have been there from, like, day one. Anyhoo it's Pinball, and it's both new tables created for this release and also realistic recreations of classic ones and Pinball FX is kind of the best you've got going for you in terms of virtual pinball.
And less old than Pinball as a concept but older than most Pinball FX releases is, of course, the library of the Sega Genesis; and we had FOUR surprises releases in it last week in the NSO Plus. And... they're all good! Like; really good. The worst one is just one that I personally don't have much affection for; we've got The Revenge of Shinobi (the one with the... just staggering amount of copyright infringement; not sure to what degree that affects this version), Ghouls 'n Ghosts (quite possibly the strongest arcade port on the system?) Landstalker (isometric Zelda, made infinitely more playable thanks to savestates and rewind) and Crusader of Centy (the only time it's ever been re-released and an easy contender for being one of the best Zeldos of the entire 16 bit era)
That's all I know about!
Standing near the chip bowl and double-dipping *constantly* this week is Gimmick! And while that exclamation mark is part of the title, it also represents my enthusiasm! This was a ne'er before released (or at least outside of Japan and... umm... Scandinavia?) NES game from Sunsoft when they were in the height of their powers in the early 90s; where you're a little... umm... dinoguy (?) what has to both hop *and* bop across a whole bunch of Platformer World staples. But also it's got a LOT more physics based platforming trickery than is usual for the era and is one of those Deceptively Hard Adorable Games.
Because, buddy, it's got a lot of Difficult and Adorable and because it was released in such staggeringly low quantities, it's also in the upper tier of Most Expensive NES games; And now it's less than $20 and has a heap of options to ease off the difficulty like savestates and rewind!
And speaking of pixelated games full of grim death and undoing it by reverseing time, we have Sentimental Deathloop, which at first I was going to skip past on the grounds that I don't know what to say about visual novels without sounding dismissive, but NOPE, this a neat one. It's a Groundhgogs Days Em Up where you're visiting your best friend, but things turn sour when she up and stabs you entirely to death and then you get up and say "Well, let's hope that isn't going to happen again". But I just said it's a Groundhogs Day deal, so you know it will. It sounds a lot like Happy Death Day, but far more anime and more of a point and click survival experience than a bunch of Yammerin' Heads.
Trails into Reverie is next, and it's the next Trails game! I think it's the most recent one but that's not based on documented facts because I am unfamiliar with this series beyond "Boy howdy, lots of yammerin'" and that it's fans universally agree "It's Very Good! But it IS Yammer Heavy".
Anyway, this version has the Trails to Walk system, if that sweetens the pot. And it includes the "L'il Slaughterer" outfit DLC.
A brand new game that looks like a Brand Old Game is Full Quiet, which is another one of those games what made me go "Oh... oh what's *this?!?!*" before the trailer was even half over. It appears to be built for actual NES hardware, and the rest of the publishers output seems to indicate that this is their particular wheelhouse; and the trailer definitely brought to mind something like the NES Rambo; just set in the backwoods of rural America instead of Vietnam. And also with more cthulhus.
Run and Gun around some open world forests and farmlands trying to find your son what got disappeared by repairing radios and gunning down local fauna. And then also some less localized fauna since these woods frickin' SUCK, yo.
And while that was designed to look like an old video game, you know what's even older? Pinball. Pinball FX if you want to get all precise about it! And I'm honestly more than a l'il surprised this wasn't already on Switch; figured it would have been there from, like, day one. Anyhoo it's Pinball, and it's both new tables created for this release and also realistic recreations of classic ones and Pinball FX is kind of the best you've got going for you in terms of virtual pinball.
And less old than Pinball as a concept but older than most Pinball FX releases is, of course, the library of the Sega Genesis; and we had FOUR surprises releases in it last week in the NSO Plus. And... they're all good! Like; really good. The worst one is just one that I personally don't have much affection for; we've got The Revenge of Shinobi (the one with the... just staggering amount of copyright infringement; not sure to what degree that affects this version), Ghouls 'n Ghosts (quite possibly the strongest arcade port on the system?) Landstalker (isometric Zelda, made infinitely more playable thanks to savestates and rewind) and Crusader of Centy (the only time it's ever been re-released and an easy contender for being one of the best Zeldos of the entire 16 bit era)
That's all I know about!
