Although I didn't get around to it this week, I'm excited to try out Hitman finally. I must've seen at least three Giant Bomb staff members go through the early sections now, discovering the projectile prowess of the modest fire extinguisher and learning what you can and absolutely cannot get away with while trying to be inconspicuous. Getting through those early tutorial missions and the Paris map myself, finally, will seem all too familiar. All the same, it feels like this was the game to watch this year, along with Doom and a handful of other surprises.

2016 has definitely been a year of surprises in the grander scheme of things, almost all of them bad to potentially apocalyptic. I'm glad the video game industry reversed that trend, with the surprises as the highlights and the straightforward sequels and certain overhyped games slightly underwhelming in comparison.

I'd still love to try Dishonored 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Watch Dogs 2 and Uncharted 4 at some point next year - or maybe slightly earlier, depending on what I get for Xmas - but 2016 belongs to the games no-one saw coming. I'm eagerly anticipating the GOTY discussions next month: it's going to be hard to choose a list, and it's going to get heated.

New Games!

It's been an incredibly busy month for releases, and this week is no excep- just kidding! There's nothing coming out this week. Well, almost nothing.

• There's a remastered version of the original Darksiders called Darksiders: Warmastered Edition. Y'know, because it has a character called War in it. It's no "Deathinitive Edition".
• Dragon Ball: Fusion is yet another Dragon Ball Z game, this time for 3DS. For an anime series that ended twenty years ago, it sure is an active IP.
• The Amnesia Collection is coming to PS4, which bundles together Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. It's sort of like that Tales of Symphonia Chronicles set, where you're buying a stone-cold classic and getting the sub-par sequel thrown in for free.
• Samurai Shodown VI is out this week on PS4's PSN, the first time a home version has been made available in English. The original Arcade version came out in '05, apparently, and it was ported to the PS2 in Japan early the following year. I didn't even know the Samurai Shodown series went all the way up to VI, but that's what I get for underestimating SNK's propensity for sequels. Just goes to sho, I suppose. I do think it's rad that we're getting freshly localized PS2 games for PS4's PSN - their PS2 Classics selection has been pretty great so far.
• Aqua Moto Racing Utopia certainly sounds like a blast from that title. Can't say I have much experience with the Moto Racing series, but if they're still producing them then someone must be buying them. Look at me, with my fancy book-learnin' knowledge of how supply and demand works. Jetski racing games and their water physics should be one of those litmus tests for the graphical/physics hardware of new console generations; like Triple H's (old) hair, but even more wavy.
• For Steam, we have... a new Dragon Knight game? For real? It doesn't seem to be related to the infamous eroge RPG series though, just cribbing off its uninspired name for a dull looking anime hack n' slash. Oddly, the Steam page has tags for nudity and the like, but there's nothing to suggest that in the screenshots (its heroines don't appear to be wearing much, but that's every anime game). Maybe the person who added those tags assumed it was a sequel/remake too.

I was going to look for other Steam games, but then I noticed there were three anime visual novels being put out by the same company on the same day. You want an update on what Steam is like presently, there's your answer.

Wiki!

Current Wiki Project: NES 1987, general clean-up and header images. I've theoretically processed this year already, but there's a few gaps that needed filling in.

1987 is proving to be a busier year for the NES than I remembered. It was a significant twelve months for the console, make no mistake, with its European launch (well, for the half of Europe that matters) and the introduction of major franchises like Final Fantasy, Metroid and Mega Man - though Alex will be the first to tell you that the original Mega Man had room for improvement. In my head, though, I have this weird idea that the NES was still testing the waters for its first few shaky years and only hit its groove around 88/89. Yet I suppose that wouldn't make much sense given how close the SNES would be at that point.

It's still a relatively modest list of releases compared to something like the recent SNES projects, but I'm getting sidetracked by games with multiple Virtual Console releases, since I'm probably going to be adding those eventually and might as well bash them out now. With some of the more popular games in particular, we're talking four separate region releases for all three consoles that support their own Virtual Arcade: Wii, 3DS and Wii U. And then there's all the fussiness inherent to the currently busted release editing tools. So that's taking some time.

All the same though, I hope to have this catch-up task completed before December sneaks up on us and it's time to knuckle down with GOTY stuff and holiday-related chores, and then AGDQ shortly into the new year. Not that I'll have much to write about for GOTY given I've barely played any 2016 games, but I'm sure I'll throw something together. Like a "2016's Best of 2015" feature, maybe.

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight

For whatever reason, my gaming this week was dominated by two challenging 2D platformers. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, the first of these, is an unfairly overlooked Indie SpaceWhipper from a small studio who have been putting out these anime-inspired action games for a while but have only recently entered the big leagues. Well, the Indie big leagues, which is getting a game added to Steam with a $10 price tag. I realize it sounds like some janky Touhou Project doujin, but it's legit. Honest.

I've said my piece about this game in the review I wrote last week, but the skinny is that while it's not the most elaborate Indie SpaceWhipper ever made nor the longest, there's a great deal of craft and attention put behind it. Its Souls-ian flair wasn't something I anticipated, and the game is fairly rough from the offset due to how much damage you take and how few healing items are available at the start. It becomes far more manageable as your stock of curative increases, though you still have to be on your toes throughout.

I'll sweep up games of this genre every so often because I find it relaxing to comb an ever-increasing map of squares and backtrack for collectibles and the like, and Momodora is a fine one of those. I'm tempted to try some of its freeware predecessors at some point.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

This one was just a bummer. When Donkey Kong Country Returns came out, there was plenty about it I loved as a fan of the SNES trilogy of Donkey Kong Country games. I loved the music, which celebrated the great compositions of David Wise (even if this site's owners seem to have a beef with him) with many a modern remix, and I loved its colorful presentation with the various non-2D flourishes - like how barrels would launch you into the background and foreground - or how certain stages would be rendered entirely in silhouette. Unfortunately, the game also carried over some of the faults of that series too, in particular its inkongruous difficulty curve for such a cheerful series. I've no problem with platformers being challenging - there's a time and place for masocore, but even something traditionally soft like Mario needs to throw you for a loop now and again - but DKCR was unnecessarily so, to the extent that its developers appeared to believe that the appeal of the original games was in a large part because they were so difficult. That was more the result of Rare being a developer unused to crafting a family-friendly 2D platformer and the awkward, sluggish movement of its giant simian hero, both of which were apparently kongsidered sacrosanct by Retro Studios and transported over wholesale instead of any attempt to alleviate them.

With Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, the developers have doubled down on both the wonderful presentation - now in HD! It really does look incredible - and this underlying user-unfriendly gameplay. Companions are now simply upgrades for Donkey Kong: they sit on DK's back and assist him with his platforming. Diddy expands the amount of horizontal distance DK can travel with his backpack, Cranky can use a Scrooge McDuck-style pogo hop with his walking stick to increase DK's jumping height and allow him to safely move across spikes, and Dixie provides a middle ground between the two with her Yoshi flutterjump-enabling helicopter hair. The player can collect Banana Coins and spend them for single-stage power-ups too, like a health increase or hiring the secret-finding acumen of Squawks the Parrot to find certain well-hidden collectibles. You would think with all these bonuses that the game would be challenging but fair, right?

Well, no, not really. What the game is really fond of doing is forcing you to start levels over from the very beginning. It either does this by having a collectible right at the end be impossible to reach without a companion, and then refusing to put any companion barrels between the collectible in question and the last checkpoint you hit. Ditto for secret exits, of which the game has many. Another fond trick is to take all the checkpoints away, or ensure there's no healing items or companion barrels to give you a reprieve at any point thus forcing you to complete the entire level nigh perfectly. Without a companion to aid his leaps, Donkey Kong moves and jumps like molasses on a Monday, and it's rarely adequate for some of the game's trickier precision jumping sequences. Tropical Freeze will do this with the hardest stages it has just to make them even harder. Why? Well, I can only surmise it's because the designers aren't copacetic on how to make the game more challenging without mean-spirited artificial methods like the above.

But it gets worse. There's another gameplay hurdle that was carried over from the previous game: the way each stage has exciting dynamic events that create obstacles that are almost impossible to predict ahead of time. Floors start collapsing, lava starts erupting, or rubble kongstantly drops down from above in some levels, and others resort to the Flappy Bird rocket barrel or minecart all too frequently. In those fast-paced auto-scrollers, this "cinematic unpredictability" issue is exacerbated severalfold, and you'll often sacrifice lives by the dozens to memorize what happens and when so you don't crash into something you couldn't possibly have anticipated. The game is generous with 1ups, at least, though that does nothing to mitigate the forfeiture of your finite time on this Earth.

Even boss fights, which are often the highlight for this series, go on far too long. Rather than figuring out a boss's moveset and hitting them the traditional Nintendo Three times, or a more reasonable five times, bosses take anywhere between nine and fifteen hits before they finally give up. The only reason they take this long is to chip away at your very limited health. Again, this feels like something preserved from the originals, but was never necessarily an aspect worth keeping around.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze is a fantastic platformer in most respects, easily the rival of Super Mario 3D World, Shovel Knight or Rayman Legends. If you just intend to play it casually without worrying about KONG letters or puzzle pieces, have at it with my blessing. However, if you were to make an earnest attempt to beat every stage with all collectibles and unlock all the secret levels, you'd soon be tearing your hair out over how patently and deliberately unfair it all is. It's not just difficult for the sake of channeling the SNES trilogy - its reputation for ape murder makes the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden seem like a safe haven in comparison - but done so with a level of cruelty so callous that I'm not entirely sure what was going through the heads of Retro's designers. Maybe they're resentful that they were stuck working on another Donkey Kong sequel when the Metroid Prime series, easily their magnum opus, grows stagnated. It's not good form for a critic to dwell on kongjecture though, so I'll just warn folk ahead of time that while this game has a bright and colorful facade, inside beats a heart of the coldest, blackest night.

Hey, guess what happens if you beat the game with 100%? Hard Mode! No items, no companions, only one hit point. Go fuck yourself, Tropical Freeze.

For an anime series that ended twenty years ago, it sure is an active IP.

To be fair, there's that new anime series currently going on that seems to have made Dragonball sorta relevant again.

As someone who got very close to getting all the everything for Super Mario 3D World, it didn't take me very long to decide that I didn't want to hurt myself enough to get all of the collectibles for DKC Tropical Freeze.

@arbitrarywater: Oh Christ, they started making new ones? Didn't Toriyama say everything he wanted to say with that fat purple alien baby who turned everyone into candy and ate them?

I was aware of the semi-recent movies though, so really I'm just being flippant. Not sure why they're continuing to flog a dead Krillin when there's so many other new manga properties that guy could be creating. Like Enormous Forehead Patrol, or The Mysterious World Where Every Male Character Looks the Same.

I was sort of ambivalent about 3D World at the time, but I much prefer the restraint it had about collectibles where they were key to the level's real challenge rather than a means to torture OCD players with a capital-C Condition. In DKC:TF's defense, the puzzle pieces stay "got" as long as you then complete the level, but the KONG letters are a different matter. But even the puzzle pieces weren't always easy to grab, especially the ones that forced you to collect a string of bananas on those hard-to-control rocket barrels. I think I'm just going to try to block it all out from hereafter. That's been kind of a thing in 2016.

I think there's a pretty easy answer to that question, the answer being "Akira Toriyama likes money and it has been long enough that he can come back to his baby without seeming opportunistic. Plus he gets to make GT non-canon along the way." I'm not going to type here and tell you that what I've seen of Dragonball Super is some sort of grand eloquent masterpiece for the medium of anime, but if you need some comfort food in the form of spiky-haired martial artists yelling and charging up for 4 episodes straight, it does alright for itself. Also, it immediately starts with Goku fighting deity-level opponents, and thus represents the perfect amount of stupid escalation from Z.