Another week of Summer, another week of... actually, it seems like a lot happened this week. No Man's Sky has seen polarizing reactions from the faithful and skeptical alike, Overwatch and the Olympics are getting their O-synergy on (which I think is also a sexual euphemism) and Nordic has changed their name to THQ Nordic to profit from the former publishing giant's impressive legacy of half-assed licensed platformers and wrestling games that still fill bargain bins to this day.

For me, though, it's mostly been more Metal Gear Solid V. Why didn't anyone warn me that it was such a big game? It's been two weeks and I don't know if I'm even a third of the way through it. It might be time to stop messing around and focus on the missions already. Or play around in cardboard boxes some more, who can really say at this pivotal time?

New Games!

Now that we've calmed down a bit after the unbelievable No Man's Sky build-up, let's take a look at what we can expect from the third week of August.

I think I'm not alone when I say that my most anticipated game this week is the follow-up to the 2015 sleeper hit Grow Home, named the somewhat-accusatory Grow Up. B.U.D. the botanical bot once again takes to vertiginous heights in his endless quest for scientific discovery, with some familiar and all-new mechanics for keeping aloft and reaching ever higher checkpoints. I suspect it'll be more of the same, but I have to wonder if the success of Grow Home didn't give that team the confidence to try out some of their more out-there ideas in a sequel.

Bound follows right after last week's Abzu as another dreamlike 3D action game full of colorful minimalist artwork and deep mysteries to solve. I remember being awed by the papercraft-inspired graphics during its E3 trailer; similar to the craft paper world of Tearaway but more fragile and origami-like in nature. I liked how everything seems to burst into confetti when destroyed. We'll have to wait and see if it's as inventive mechanically as it is visually - my big problem with Tearaway was that, for all its imagination, it was a fairly so-so 3D platformer underneath.

Hitman's fourth chapter, set in the bustling city of Bangkok this time, is due for a release next week. I'm already up to my knees in elaborate stealth mechanics with MGSV, but then I suppose most of us anticipate the new Giant Bomb content that follows each Himan update more than the updates themselves. It's a brand new city that Brad will only play once or twice beforehand, get horribly disoriented by once it's crunch time and gets shot after pulling out a gun in a busy street. So that'll be fun for anyone who enjoys awkward flailing around. Really, who doesn't?

The 3DS sees two big releases this week: Metroid Prime: Federation Force and Style Savvy: Fashion Forward. Not the FFs I've been looking forward to (when is XV out, again?) but I know the Style Savvy series has a huge following akin to Animal Crossing, and any new Metroid game - even one so far removed from the core tenets of the Metroid series - will no doubt invite a lot of scrutiny. The 3DS will soon see a new Phoenix Wright game and the Dragon Quest VII enhanced port too, so it seems like a good time to dust that thing off.

Finally, to keep my anime pals in the know, we have the PC port of the PSVita dungeon-crawler/visual novel Conception II, a game about finding a nice anime lady and creating star babies with her to use as fodder for monster-bashing. It's a Spike Chunsoft game, they of the Mystery Dungeon series, so here's hoping it turns out to be a decent enough port. We've had some issues with those of late, and it sometimes feels as if Falcom - traditionally a PC game developer - is the only Japanese RPG developer who is comfortable with the platform.

Wiki!

Oh boy. I think my declaration of intent to complete December 1995 by the end of this month was a little hasty. As I've mentioned previously, I only work on the wiki when I have podcasts to listen to, and now that the Bombcast has a live stream it's taken a big chunk out of my regular wiki schedule. What I didn't realize is that my favorite podcast about bad movies - We Hate Movies - is also taking the month off. I'm down to just the Beastcast and the two 'casts from the McElroy boys for wiki work listening material.

As such, I only processed ten new wiki pages this week. One of those is new, but since there's only ten I'm just going to go through them all alphabetically. Now you'll get to see the dross I usually leave out:

• American Battle Dome is the one new page this week, and it's a completely bizarre adaptation of Atari's Warlords that uses pinball flippers instead of paddles to block balls from the quadrant of the screen you're protecting from your three rivals. As balls enter your particular territory, the gravity changes so that "down" is wherever your flippers are waiting, creating a game that is very difficult to follow with its multiple gravity wells. It's definitely the sort of game I'd hope to see on an episode of UPF one day. Warlords plus Pinball seems like a custom-made combination for our own Jeff Gerstmann, and it's not like those guys haven't gotten attached to a few unusual multiplayer Super Famicom games in the past. I think the weirdest part is that it's an "American" Battle Dome that was never released in America.
• Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Super S: Fuwa Fuwa Panic sees the various Sailor Guardians in another puzzle game, this one roughly combining SameGame and Puzzle Bobble where you have to pop balloons to create chain reactions which then dumps trash on your opponent. Like the many other Sailor Moon licensed games for the Super Famicom, it seems a bit thrown together for the sake of cashing in on the anime's huge popularity at home, but at least Bandai experimented with a few different genres - even the last puzzle game, Kurukkurin, had a different set of rules. If they gave that property to Western devs, it'd be all platformers and brawlers all day.
• ClockWerx is one of those oddly common cases of an American PC game being licensed and adapted by a Japanese company for consoles, who then don't release the game in its region of origin for copyright or monetary reasons. This seems to happen more frequently with puzzle games, especially Brøderbund's Lode Runner. ClockWerx takes the frantic spinning gameplay of Clu Clu Land for the NES and adapts it into a more thoughtful puzzle game where the player has to carefully consider a route through a series of obstacles and nodes and execute on it. The game's a bit inexact for my liking, but apparently the CD-based versions for Sega Saturn and PlayStation have some neat claymation cutscenes.
• Doraemon 4: Nobita to Tsuki no Okoku is, perhaps obviously, the fourth game for the Super Famicom based on Doraemon, the loveable robotic cat from the future that was sent back to keep an eye on bespectacled loser Nobita Nobi, ensuring that he avoids the event that puts several future generations of his family in massive debt. I think this game was the first to introduce Dorami, Doraemon's more advanced sister, as a playable character. Definitely don't quote me on that though. There's hundreds of those games.
• I'm guessing Dragon Quest VI: Maboroshi no Daichi, or Realms of Reverie/Realms of Revelation as its known in Europe and North America respectively, is perhaps the biggest name out of the ten pages I looked at this week. The second and last game in the profoundly popular Dragon Quest series to come out on the Super Famicom, it drops the multi-character scenarios of DQIV and the generational shift of DQV to concentrate on a single hero who finds a way to pass between worlds, uncovering a plot that threatens the destruction of both. The game brings back the switching classes feature of Dragon Quest III, which would go on to be a major component of Dragon Quest VII and DQIX as well, and was one of the most graphically impressive RPGs of the 16-bit era. Of course, these days you're better off seeking the official English localization for DS.
• Masters New: Harukanaru Augusta 3 is a Japanese golf game from a Japanese developer that is nonetheless based on the Masters Tournament that occurs in Augusta, Georgia every year. It's even licensed by the Masters Tournament and Augusta National Golf Club, though none of the Harukanaru Augusta games ever left Japan. They're big on golf over there, but not so big on sharing I guess. As console golf games go it's a bit on the "dry and serious" side of the spectrum, with digitized photos for much of its golfers, backgrounds and courses for a limited sense of realism.
• Mickey to Donald Magical Adventure 3 is a sequel to Capcom's superb The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse and The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey and Minnie that was criminally never released outside of Japan. A GBA port would eventually appear ten years later which was graciously localized for all regions. Playing as either Mickey or Donald, you'd progress from one fantasy storybook trope to the next, each time changing costumes to fit the surroundings. What's impressive is that not only does every costume confer different power-ups that allow you to progress through the current stage, but that the power-ups are slightly different depending on whether you are Mickey or Donald. The Knight costume, for instance, makes Mickey sink in water but Donald float, because Donald is wearing a barrel like a big goof instead of Mickey's steel armor.
• Super Momotarou Dentetsu DX is yet another in Hudson's train management board game sim franchise, which started as a joke spin-off based on their earlier Momotarou-themed RPG series but quickly surpassed the original in popularity. The differences between this and previous Dentetsu games are known only to its fanbase. Or anyone who can read the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game, at least.
• Super Puyo Puyo Tsuu, or 2, is the sequel to the bean-busting puzzle game that proved to be Compile's most enduring franchise, rather than its many fine shoot 'em ups. A refinement of the extant mechanics of Puyo Puyo, rather than some bold reimagining, it nonetheless blew up the same way its predecessor did.
• Last, we have Tintin in Tibet, an action-adventure game based on the Belgian Tintin comics which, perhaps naturally enough, was only released in Europe. It's one of a handful of games for the system where English is a possible language, but not the default. As well as basic action sequences, like avoiding luggage falling from a train, Tintin would talk to NPCs in comic-book style cutaways and it closely followed the events of the comic of the same name. The animation isn't half bad, but the game has a reputation for its intense difficulty.

Lumo!

I took a chance on this isometric puzzle game throwback after watching the Quick Look, and I came away with an eerie feeling that you sometimes get when a piece of media is filled with obscure references and you picked up on every single one of them. It's almost as if there are secret video cameras all around my house of which I am incognizant. Steeped in a lot of British in-jokes (Trapdoor! Crystal Maze!) and even more British video game history, Lumo itself hearkens to the various pillars of the isometric puzzle-platformer genre, which was inexplicably popular in the UK and not so much everywhere else. Solstice seemed like the biggest point of reference - the hero of Lumo is also a diminutive sorcerer whose face is mostly concealed by a giant wizard hat - but the game invites a lot of comparisons to the ZX/C64 output of Ultimate Play The Game, presently known as Rare. You probably played a few of them if you bought that Rare Replay collection, albeit for about five minutes before saying "huh, neat" and went to load up Banjo-Kazooie or Viva Pinata instead. I wouldn't blame you. Thirty years is a long time in the ever-evolving world of video games.

Lumo naturally carries over a lot of the issues of those games too, most significant of which is controlling a character where north is actually northeast (the alternate control scheme alleviates this, but also creates another issue where the default four-way directional movement would make a few rooms far easier to navigate) and how it's not always easy to figure out where you are in a room via a limited sense of depth perception. A shadow beneath the character can help steer you on the right path, but it's not always visible if there's objects in the way or no light source overhead. The game has its little flights of fancy too, creating set-pieces inspired by the likes of C64 hits such as Marble Madness, Pac-Mania, Q*Bert, Nebulus and Zaxxon, and these can be hit or miss depending on the game in question. I really didn't care to play Nebulus again, not after the Game Boy port Castelian almost drove me crazy in the 90s. It's fair to say that, given the genre, these elaborate recreations and the references to Zzap!64, Your Sinclair! and the Pimp My Spectrum demo, the game is a love letter to the C64 and Spectrum ZX late-70s/early-80s era of British gaming first and foremost. It won't lose you if you aren't some British nerd in their late 30s, and it might be fun for an outsider to get a glimpse into a scene that doesn't get as much play as the usual NES/SNES callbacks, but if the game had a specific niche in mind that it caters towards it'd be them.

What surprised me is that the game has a very fair difficulty curve for its standard "Adventure" mode, and then ratchets up the difficulty to absurd (and unfun) levels with its "Old-School" mode (limited lives! Start over if you die!) and the various no-death and time-based achievements for its set-pieces. The game definitely has both casuals and the insane speedrun folk covered alike. Given that no room takes more than a minute to pass through, and that you always respawn at the last door you entered, you're probably not going to be stuck for long even if there's spikes and traps everywhere. Finding all the hidden cassettes and other secrets might take some doing though, and I don't think I even found two thirds of them. As such, even though the game's only about four hours long, it's got some legs to it if you want to try to find everything.

Ultimately, I might place Lumo in the same box in my mind that Life of Pixel and the NES Remix games currently inhabit. A game built by a retro gaming enthusiast for retro gaming enthusiasts, that's in some way intended to be an interactive monolith to video game history but also competent enough (with a handful of caveats) to stand on its own two feet and appeal to a wider audience who probably doesn't give two bumblebee cursors about the myriad technical differences between a Commodore Amiga and an Atari ST.

Metal Gear Solid V!

I feel bad that I once again don't have anything to offer here, besides pointing at the last two entries - Part 3! Part 4! - of Mento Snake's continuing misadventures throughout Afghanistan and Angola, and if we're going through the entire globe alphabetically we might be here a while.

Instead, I thought I'd give you a percentage update - 29%! Thanks for asking! Yeah I know that's not particularly high after playing for two weeks! - and leave you with this bonus comic. It feels like it's been a hot minute since I whipped up one of these bad boys: