Welcome back to Sunday Summaries everyone. May Mastery '16 continues to be a thing - while I'm thankfully not quite in the "I regret that I forced this daily obligation upon myself" phase of the feature, there's still just over two weeks left to get there.

Elsewise it's been a quiet week around here, the regrettable closing of Disney Interactive and Avalanche (not that Avalanche) notwithstanding. I suppose you could call this the point in 2016 where the seas recede for a few miles before the tidal wave shows up, though maybe that's giving E3 too much credit this year. Developers are dropping out of the event left and right, or doing the barest minimum like Nintendo, and I'm wondering what the state of the E3 streams will be like. In fact, I wonder what my "Alternative to E3" series will be this year too. I'll have to start workshopping some ideas...

New Games!

Odd and limited selection this week, befitting the advent of the Summer slump. While there's a couple of new AAA releases, I'm going to have to give the spotlight to the North American release of the graphically remastered PS4 version of Valkyria Chronicles. For such an underrated game at the time, it's being given new leases of life all over the place: first with a highly publicized Steam release in 2014, and now with this PS4 remastered version. The original game already looked gorgeous - seamless cel-shading with muted colors and a watercolor effect that became more pronounced in static images - so I have no clue how they may have polished it further. Hopefully we get some footage of it from either coast of Giant Bomb this week - I remember Vinny and Dave checking it out a good few months after its release, once it became abundantly clear the game was something special, so maybe Vinny and Austin will give it its due with a timely video this time instead. Of course, what I'm really hoping for is that this leads to PS4 versions of Valkyria Chronicles II and III as well. The latter of those has yet to be released in English, and it sounds like we non-polyglots are missing out.

Other new games this week include that sequel to Homefront no-one asked for, Homefront: The Revolution. I suppose if you've spent a lot of money to buy the IP off the imploding THQ, you might as well make something with it. Lemonade from lemons, as it were. In other possibly misguided video game project news, we have the modernized Shadow of the Beast for PS4. I'm cautiously optimistic about that one: there's nothing about the gameplay of the first that's worth salvaging - that game was the Rise of the Robots of it time, where most of its goodwill came purely from its graphical advancements (not to mention the box art from British sci-fi surrealist Roger Dean, who would frequently work with Psygnosis for some trippy covers) - but with the right amount of inventiveness you could turn that game into something fun, like a weird open-world brawler in the vein of Zeno Clash II. Morbidly curious about it, as someone who briefly played the original some two decades plus ago.

There's also a PSN release of the PS2 JRPG Wild ARMs 3, which I can personally recommend. It's my favorite game from the Wild ARMs franchise; a series that features a Trigun-esque setting of a planet permanently locked in a Wild West period, with a whole lot of sci-fi ancient civilization business hovering just outside of view. There's also the attractive Shadwen, which appears to be the Trine guys making their own successor to Thief since Eidos Montreal evidently wasn't up to the task. That anime fighter that got Quick Looked recently, Koihime Enbu, is out on Steam this Thursday. Finally, we have Far Harbor, the first big DLC campaign for Fallout 4. I generally stay away from the DLC for any Bethesda game (if there's one type of RPG that doesn't need any extra content...) but I hear it's usually of a fairly decent quality and size, and those saps who bought the Fallout 4 season pass or had it included in their purchase of the game deserve more than just a bunch of robots floating around Boston and a new workbench. Rumors have it that Far Harbor has the biggest landmass ever included in a Bethesda DLC, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout both.

Wiki!

Nineteen pages saw some renovation this week, which takes a huge chunk out of July's thirty-two releases, though we're still firmly stuck in that month for one more week. I couldn't tell you why July of 1995 was so busy; Summers are usually too hot to do much of anything, hence why there's usually little going on in the release schedules. Of those nineteen, we saw five new pages: Shin Ikkakusenkin, Super F1 Circus Gaiden, Big Ichigeki! Pachi-Slot Daikouryaku 2: Universal Collection, DunQuest: Majin Fuuin no Densetsu and Shogi Saikyou. Isn't it odd that, despite having Japanese titles, you kind of already know what four of those games are about? As always, be sure to check my ongoing list of SNES/SFC pages I've added to the wiki here for more information - no point in repeating myself.

Of the remaining fourteen, we have some stand-outs to peruse:

• Mystic Ark is an RPG I've wanted to jump into forever, since it's a deeply strange scenario-based RPG from the developers of Brain Lord and The 7th Saga. These aren't exactly approachable games, even with English text, but they're some of the most distinctive and imaginative RPGs on a system that saw an immense number of uninspired Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy imitators.
• Castlevania: Dracula X is the second and last Castlevania game for the system, and is more or less a watered down version of the excellent Castlevania: Rondo of Blood for PC Engine CD (and, way later, PSP and Wii Virtual Console). Time will tell if Vinnyvania deigns to cover this one or skip straight from Bloodlines to Symphony of the Night. Actually, beyond Bloodlines, I'm not sure if there will be another Vinnyvania...
• Talking of PC Engine CD ports, Super Variable Geo is another one of those anime all-women fighting games of some notoriety. It's also one of those grossly porny ones where the girls who lose end up having to do something sexually humiliating as punishment, so it's for the best that the family-friendly Super Famicom cuts those parts out and sticks to the fighting.
• Kat's Run: Zennihon K Car Senshuken is a little more wholesome: a Super Mario Kart style mode 7 racer with an all-female cast in "kei cars" - what Japan calls its smaller vehicle class which include microvans and two-seat convertibles. It's a cute little racing game, in other words, and another case of Atlus going outside its demons and angels wheelhouse for something with a bit more levity.
• Ranma 1/2: Ougi Jaanken is a game I'm only bringing up because Ranma 1/2: Hard Battle featured in the most recent Ranking of Fighters. It's actually one of the few Ranma games for Super Famicom that isn't a fighter; it's a block-stacking game based on janken (rock-scissors-paper) instead. If Jason couldn't convince Jeff to check out Ranma 1/2 through playing Hard Battle, maybe he'll have better luck via a competitive puzzle game. We know Super Famicom-exclusive puzzle games have gone down well in the past...
• Chou Genjin 2 would've been known in North America as "Super Bonk 2" if Hudson managed to localize it, but unfortunately the one Bonk game to never be released outside of Japan might also be its best: the game goes full ham with its transformations this time around, and offers a great mix of surreal nonsense and competent 2D side-scrolling platforming.
• Finally, I want to give a special shout-out to Laplace no Ma, or Laplace's Demon. There are precious few horror-themed JRPGs out there, and this one seems to be a decent combination of an unnerving survival horror game and a solid turn-based RPG. Oddly enough, the game was originally a first-person dungeon crawler for the PC88 and, rather than being an up-rezzed port of that, the SFC game is completely different, opting instead for a top-down view with a different set of RPG mechanics.

May Mastery '16!

The second week of May Mastery '16 saw a quartet of Steam games from the past few years. I'd recommend checking their individual daily entries for a deeper cut, but here's the four of them in a nutshell:

Abyss Odyssey is a 2D side-scrolling procedurally generated action RPG "roguelite" with combat that feels like something out of Super Smash Bros and a trippy narrative featuring an evershifting labyrinth borne of a powerful warlock's dreams. Its combat didn't sit right with me - a little too chaotic for my tastes, and not in the fun way that ACE Team's earlier Zeno Clash games were - but the game has style to spare and I appreciated almost everything else about it. If you're in the mood for permadeath and weirdness, I might suggest you check it out. Perhaps you'll have better luck with it than I did.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a first-person horror game from TheChineseRoom, and a spiritual (and nominal) sequel to Frictional's Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It's very barebones compared to its predecessor, and I don't mean that in a spooky skeleton way; it feels like a lot of the integral mechanics like replenishing a finite light source and the insanity effects of being in the dark too long were stripped away, leaving what is essentially a spookhouse ride of jump scares and ominous voiceovers from a crazy British man obsessed with godly machines. It's fine if you're just in the market for some thrills and chills, but it feels more like every generic horror game on Steam than the trendsetter Dark Descent was.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: Critter Chronicles was so-so for the series, but probably still in the upper echelons of modern graphic adventure games overall. It had a pervading sense of superfluousness to it, as there wasn't a huge amount of impetus to know where Critter - a joke character with few redeeming qualities - came from or how he met the cowardly rogue Nate Bonnett prior to the events of the first game. The series' best qualities - the high number of wonderfully hand-drawn settings and the sharp wit of its often fourth-wall-breaking script - were a little lacking too, but then this wasn't exactly a full-priced entry and I should probably respect the difference.

Ronin is the most recent game I've played, a 2D side-scrolling stealth action game with a compelling turn-based structure that lets you plan out your next action in the middle of a frantic firefight. Despite a few glaring mechanical faults and a really dire format for its final mission, I quite enjoyed this one. I might prefer playing Gunpoint overall, but Ronin set out to make itself as badass as possible and I can't say that it didn't achieve that goal. With only fifteen missions and a handful of upgrades to play around with, it doesn't overstay its welcome either.