The fact that it doesn't doesn't have one of those disclaimers that its a work of fiction and any similarities to any people places etc is a coincidence must mean that Pac-Man really happened.
Well I skipped last week, since the release list was kind of thin, and so, we're starting by playing catch-up, first by bringing up the single most buckwild NSO update yet (and as a point of comparison, they're mostly *kind of wack*); On the NES, well, Famicom, we have Downtown Nekketsu March: Super-Awesome Field Day! (the precursor to the actually localized Crash n the Boyz Street Challenge), Joy Mech Fight (it's what we had before your fancy pants Armored Core 6s, but it's also entirely in Japanese, which is a bit of a hindrance for a game with this much text), Kirby Star Stacker (also in Japanese, but it's a Tetris, so NBD), and on the Gameboy Color; Quest for Camelot (like... based on the Dreamworks movie. The one nobody remembers. I'm as confused as you)
Next up is a words-em-up style adventure game, Anonymous Code! It's from the Steins Gate peeps.
I have absolutely no gal darn idea what the hell this game even is beyond those facts; the screenshots don't even look like they're from the same game and the description is no help whatsoever.
It's a game with a plot!
Rune Factory 3, on the other hand, is much easier to sum up; it's a Star Man Farm Game, EXCEPT it's part of the Rune Factory series, so that means there's just as much dungeon crawling and monster whacking as there is cattle rustling and turnip marrying. This one has the reputation of being the best in the series, so don't let the threat of orc attacks on your potatoes discourage you! This one has some extra stuff added in over the original DS release, like new sidequests with your new bride after you marry them and somewhat fancier graphics as modern consoles are a weensy bit stronger than the Nintendo DS.
Gunbrella is the second game from the peeps as what made Gato Roboto, and I loved that so I'm already on board here! Much like beloved literary character, Oswald Cobblepot, you're some kind of a guy with a gun umbrella. But, unlike Oswald Cobblepot, you're not fighting the Dark Knight Detective of Gotham City, but a whole friggin' whack of dang ol' Cthulhus in a town that is... well, otherwise basically Gotham City.
Run and Gun your way throught he ichor soaked streets, and stay dry while doing it!
Next up, we have the return of the once and future king of the Party Game genre; Super Bomberman R2, the sequel to the launch Switch title, Super Bomberman R! Bomberman is very much an "If it ain't broke" kind of series, so it sure doens't look different, and I'm still salty that they released a Battle Royale Bomberman game and then pulled the plug on it. This one also has a Battle Royale mode, so I guess that's something but I don't want to pay full price for it when I already had it! That's RUDE!
Anyway, ruin all your friendships by exploding people with bombs. Then play single player mode because you have no friends left after you've successfully blown them up with bombs.
Speaking of rendering people to smoldering ash and also Friendship, we have Mortal Kombat 1. And don't let that Arabic numeral fool you; it's actually the twelfth mainline Mortal Kombat, not the first one! It is, however, a full continuity reboot since Liu Kang reset the universe following the canonical ending of MK 11 where he chopped the Goddess of Time to pieces and stole her hat.
It was in all the papers. You need to be more aware of the world around you.
The MK games have been getting steadily better since 2008 or so, and MK11 was an all timer, so I have suitably high hopes for MK1; you should "get over here" and play it!
And speaking of MURDER, we have Love Love School Days. Which I understand sounds like a weird segue, but hear me out. While the title, and, like, half the screenshots imply this here is an anime AF game about vying to get a smoocharino from your crush, things take a bit of a turn when it turns she's the kind of person who crushes back; like how a pneumatic compactor would. So it's half dating sim and half survival horro as your psychopathic would be girlfriend is attempting to stalk you through the school and completely end your life.
Also speaking of murder, as presented in text form, but in a far less horror-focused backdrop, is Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1, which is a collection of bite-sized text adventures that look at the likes of Portopia Murder Files and says "Well... let's just do that again; that's a good template.
And they ain't wrong.
What's weird is that they're supposed to be throwbacks to the 80s, and they take place in the 80s... but there's a "Use Smartphone" option in the games menus and I think they missed the mark there by, like... twenty years or so.
Another spiritual remake of a beloved, but neglected series is Thunder Ray, which is Punch Out, except with aliens instead of with broad ethnic stereotypes. Which, granted, already exists (at least twice), but this one looks... substantially better than the previous attempts.
And where else are you going to get authentic Punch Out gameplay in 2023? Certainly not from Nintendo, dagnabbit!
Next up is something that would BY FAR be the most important release, but, well, it's out this week so HERE WE ARE, with it not even being in the running. A damn shame, but a historically accurate one; Baten Kaitos 1 & 2 is out for all and sundry to see. And among that sundry are you and I! They're both easily among the Gamecube games I most wanted to see re-released; being Weird for Weirdness Sake RPGs that have some genuinely cool (if wild as hell) implementations of their mechanics. 2 is apparently much more refined and just as bugnuts.
Sadly, only Japanese VA is available, so the superlative English performance of the first game is nowhere to be found. Nor is the Actually Fine one for the sequel.
Solar Ash is the game that made me go "WAIT WHAT?!?!" the hardest this week; the spiritual sequel to Hyperlight Drifter, where you're a rail-grinding parkour skellington who has to dash, basejump and grind your way through a weird broken up nightmare-scape in order to take down huge Shadow of the Colossus style monsters.
The trailer, and every screenshot made me go "OH HELL YES!" even before I saw that it was from the HLD peeps. But then I saw it WAS from them, and I said that even more emphatically.
True story!
And finally, we have Another Crusade, which looks a lot like Super Mario RPG. Like; a LOT a lot. And you don't want to have to wait another two months to get to play Mario RPG again, do you? Of course not.
Well I skipped last week, since the release list was kind of thin, and so, we're starting by playing catch-up, first by bringing up the single most buckwild NSO update yet (and as a point of comparison, they're mostly *kind of wack*); On the NES, well, Famicom, we have Downtown Nekketsu March: Super-Awesome Field Day! (the precursor to the actually localized Crash n the Boyz Street Challenge), Joy Mech Fight (it's what we had before your fancy pants Armored Core 6s, but it's also entirely in Japanese, which is a bit of a hindrance for a game with this much text), Kirby Star Stacker (also in Japanese, but it's a Tetris, so NBD), and on the Gameboy Color; Quest for Camelot (like... based on the Dreamworks movie. The one nobody remembers. I'm as confused as you)
Next up is a words-em-up style adventure game, Anonymous Code! It's from the Steins Gate peeps.
I have absolutely no gal darn idea what the hell this game even is beyond those facts; the screenshots don't even look like they're from the same game and the description is no help whatsoever.
It's a game with a plot!
Rune Factory 3, on the other hand, is much easier to sum up; it's a Star Man Farm Game, EXCEPT it's part of the Rune Factory series, so that means there's just as much dungeon crawling and monster whacking as there is cattle rustling and turnip marrying. This one has the reputation of being the best in the series, so don't let the threat of orc attacks on your potatoes discourage you! This one has some extra stuff added in over the original DS release, like new sidequests with your new bride after you marry them and somewhat fancier graphics as modern consoles are a weensy bit stronger than the Nintendo DS.
Gunbrella is the second game from the peeps as what made Gato Roboto, and I loved that so I'm already on board here! Much like beloved literary character, Oswald Cobblepot, you're some kind of a guy with a gun umbrella. But, unlike Oswald Cobblepot, you're not fighting the Dark Knight Detective of Gotham City, but a whole friggin' whack of dang ol' Cthulhus in a town that is... well, otherwise basically Gotham City.
Run and Gun your way throught he ichor soaked streets, and stay dry while doing it!
Next up, we have the return of the once and future king of the Party Game genre; Super Bomberman R2, the sequel to the launch Switch title, Super Bomberman R! Bomberman is very much an "If it ain't broke" kind of series, so it sure doens't look different, and I'm still salty that they released a Battle Royale Bomberman game and then pulled the plug on it. This one also has a Battle Royale mode, so I guess that's something but I don't want to pay full price for it when I already had it! That's RUDE!
Anyway, ruin all your friendships by exploding people with bombs. Then play single player mode because you have no friends left after you've successfully blown them up with bombs.
Speaking of rendering people to smoldering ash and also Friendship, we have Mortal Kombat 1. And don't let that Arabic numeral fool you; it's actually the twelfth mainline Mortal Kombat, not the first one! It is, however, a full continuity reboot since Liu Kang reset the universe following the canonical ending of MK 11 where he chopped the Goddess of Time to pieces and stole her hat.
It was in all the papers. You need to be more aware of the world around you.
The MK games have been getting steadily better since 2008 or so, and MK11 was an all timer, so I have suitably high hopes for MK1; you should "get over here" and play it!
And speaking of MURDER, we have Love Love School Days. Which I understand sounds like a weird segue, but hear me out. While the title, and, like, half the screenshots imply this here is an anime AF game about vying to get a smoocharino from your crush, things take a bit of a turn when it turns she's the kind of person who crushes back; like how a pneumatic compactor would. So it's half dating sim and half survival horro as your psychopathic would be girlfriend is attempting to stalk you through the school and completely end your life.
Also speaking of murder, as presented in text form, but in a far less horror-focused backdrop, is Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1, which is a collection of bite-sized text adventures that look at the likes of Portopia Murder Files and says "Well... let's just do that again; that's a good template.
And they ain't wrong.
What's weird is that they're supposed to be throwbacks to the 80s, and they take place in the 80s... but there's a "Use Smartphone" option in the games menus and I think they missed the mark there by, like... twenty years or so.
Another spiritual remake of a beloved, but neglected series is Thunder Ray, which is Punch Out, except with aliens instead of with broad ethnic stereotypes. Which, granted, already exists (at least twice), but this one looks... substantially better than the previous attempts.
And where else are you going to get authentic Punch Out gameplay in 2023? Certainly not from Nintendo, dagnabbit!
Next up is something that would BY FAR be the most important release, but, well, it's out this week so HERE WE ARE, with it not even being in the running. A damn shame, but a historically accurate one; Baten Kaitos 1 & 2 is out for all and sundry to see. And among that sundry are you and I! They're both easily among the Gamecube games I most wanted to see re-released; being Weird for Weirdness Sake RPGs that have some genuinely cool (if wild as hell) implementations of their mechanics. 2 is apparently much more refined and just as bugnuts.
Sadly, only Japanese VA is available, so the superlative English performance of the first game is nowhere to be found. Nor is the Actually Fine one for the sequel.
Solar Ash is the game that made me go "WAIT WHAT?!?!" the hardest this week; the spiritual sequel to Hyperlight Drifter, where you're a rail-grinding parkour skellington who has to dash, basejump and grind your way through a weird broken up nightmare-scape in order to take down huge Shadow of the Colossus style monsters.
The trailer, and every screenshot made me go "OH HELL YES!" even before I saw that it was from the HLD peeps. But then I saw it WAS from them, and I said that even more emphatically.
True story!
And finally, we have Another Crusade, which looks a lot like Super Mario RPG. Like; a LOT a lot. And you don't want to have to wait another two months to get to play Mario RPG again, do you? Of course not.
