These videos are looking GAMEY!
So we're kicking things off this week with something genuinely surprising and that I, personally, would be excited about in another context; Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy, which I believe is the first Mado Monogatori game since, like... 1991 and the first one to be translated into English. While the original trilogy were first person dungeon crawlers in the Wizardry vein, this here is more of a Mystery Dungeon. Which is fine but it's certainly the kind of dungeon crawler I'm less enthusiastic about.
I know that the Puyo-Pop games were a spinoff of this, and one of the ports of the original series featured a lot of hyperdetailed super gory sprite-work for a game about a kindergartener going to a monster dungeon for class. And I suspect that one of those elements is more likely to show up in this game than the other.
Now, if taking a small child to wizard school seems like it's entirely too stressful a passtime and you'd like to ratchet things down a bit, how about Lord of the Rings: Tales of the Shire, a game for everyone who said "This story really went off the rails when the unassuming l'il guys left their cozy farmland and went on an adventure."
What we have here is a Stardew-em-up where... you're one of the guys who is not involved with any kind of cursed rings in the Shire and there's a lot of Hobbit stuff to do. Make porridge and look at mushrooms and admire spoons and the like.
You WILL believe a man may hobbit.
So tonally distant from Tales of the Shire that the fact that it's being released the same week should be cause for alarm that they'll annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter colliding is Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, which isn't just *finally* a new 2D Ninja Gaiden game but it's a Ninja Gaiden game from the same peeps as what made Blasphemous! And Blasphemous was close enough to Castlevania, and Castlevania was close enough to the NES Ninja Gaidens so by the transitive property; it's a perfect fit!
Visit the scenic Ninja region of Japan with the help of your new, blue Ninja buddy Kenji (or a spider-ninja lady who is *technically* not Juri from Street Fighter, I guess) as they somersault and windmill-throwing star their way through some places with entirely too many monsters. I don't know if this is a troid, like so many other semi-recent 8-and-16 bit ninja throwback games have been, but either way the pedigree ie snough to make me say "oooh, I'll have me some of that!"
Speaking of iterating on the entries of a series I like more even though almost all of my affection is for the earliest games, we have Spy Drops, which is clearly a very earnest riff on Metal Gear Solid. Just straight up looking at MGS and saying "Well... why don't we just do that again?" And so they did.
I mean, there's *some* changes so nobody gets sued; like how Snake has been replaced with a buxom anime lady, and there's "random mission generation" (I don't know if that means its a roguelite or that certain areas get tweaked around like in Chasm or what). But the trailer made me say "Oh, that looks to recapture what I enjoyed about the first MGS. I am on board!
And here I am, waiting for it to release so I may play of it.
And speaking of games that look at other games I already love and said "I bet Octo would love it if we just did that again and changed, like, one thing" we've got Ion Shift, which looks a hell of a lot like Carrion, if, instead of a John Carpenters The Thing, you played as an HR Gigers The Alien! You're a xenomorph (lowercase X, the term is a literal description *not* the copywritten monster made famous from the Fox studios film franchise) who is in the lab of a mysterious evil corporation and figure you'd not only prefer to not be imprisoned but would like to murder everything inside and use their living corpses to incubate your young.
Luckily, you're a perfect organism whose structure is only matched by your hostility, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. I won't lie about your chances, but I think they're pretty good.
And finally we've got this weeks old Japanese PC port; Manhattan Requiem: Angels Flying in the Dark which is a text adventure game, so it's even harder to play than usual if you can't read Japanese. And it's a game where "It is truly ridiculous how much text there is in this game" is its main selling point.
Good title though.
OKAY, GO TO BED!
So we're kicking things off this week with something genuinely surprising and that I, personally, would be excited about in another context; Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy, which I believe is the first Mado Monogatori game since, like... 1991 and the first one to be translated into English. While the original trilogy were first person dungeon crawlers in the Wizardry vein, this here is more of a Mystery Dungeon. Which is fine but it's certainly the kind of dungeon crawler I'm less enthusiastic about.
I know that the Puyo-Pop games were a spinoff of this, and one of the ports of the original series featured a lot of hyperdetailed super gory sprite-work for a game about a kindergartener going to a monster dungeon for class. And I suspect that one of those elements is more likely to show up in this game than the other.
Now, if taking a small child to wizard school seems like it's entirely too stressful a passtime and you'd like to ratchet things down a bit, how about Lord of the Rings: Tales of the Shire, a game for everyone who said "This story really went off the rails when the unassuming l'il guys left their cozy farmland and went on an adventure."
What we have here is a Stardew-em-up where... you're one of the guys who is not involved with any kind of cursed rings in the Shire and there's a lot of Hobbit stuff to do. Make porridge and look at mushrooms and admire spoons and the like.
You WILL believe a man may hobbit.
So tonally distant from Tales of the Shire that the fact that it's being released the same week should be cause for alarm that they'll annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter colliding is Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, which isn't just *finally* a new 2D Ninja Gaiden game but it's a Ninja Gaiden game from the same peeps as what made Blasphemous! And Blasphemous was close enough to Castlevania, and Castlevania was close enough to the NES Ninja Gaidens so by the transitive property; it's a perfect fit!
Visit the scenic Ninja region of Japan with the help of your new, blue Ninja buddy Kenji (or a spider-ninja lady who is *technically* not Juri from Street Fighter, I guess) as they somersault and windmill-throwing star their way through some places with entirely too many monsters. I don't know if this is a troid, like so many other semi-recent 8-and-16 bit ninja throwback games have been, but either way the pedigree ie snough to make me say "oooh, I'll have me some of that!"
Speaking of iterating on the entries of a series I like more even though almost all of my affection is for the earliest games, we have Spy Drops, which is clearly a very earnest riff on Metal Gear Solid. Just straight up looking at MGS and saying "Well... why don't we just do that again?" And so they did.
I mean, there's *some* changes so nobody gets sued; like how Snake has been replaced with a buxom anime lady, and there's "random mission generation" (I don't know if that means its a roguelite or that certain areas get tweaked around like in Chasm or what). But the trailer made me say "Oh, that looks to recapture what I enjoyed about the first MGS. I am on board!
And here I am, waiting for it to release so I may play of it.
And speaking of games that look at other games I already love and said "I bet Octo would love it if we just did that again and changed, like, one thing" we've got Ion Shift, which looks a hell of a lot like Carrion, if, instead of a John Carpenters The Thing, you played as an HR Gigers The Alien! You're a xenomorph (lowercase X, the term is a literal description *not* the copywritten monster made famous from the Fox studios film franchise) who is in the lab of a mysterious evil corporation and figure you'd not only prefer to not be imprisoned but would like to murder everything inside and use their living corpses to incubate your young.
Luckily, you're a perfect organism whose structure is only matched by your hostility, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. I won't lie about your chances, but I think they're pretty good.
And finally we've got this weeks old Japanese PC port; Manhattan Requiem: Angels Flying in the Dark which is a text adventure game, so it's even harder to play than usual if you can't read Japanese. And it's a game where "It is truly ridiculous how much text there is in this game" is its main selling point.
Good title though.
OKAY, GO TO BED!
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