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Sunday Summaries 22/05/2016

As we head towards the final full week of May with the horrors of June's E3 on the horizon, we also enter the Summer slump in full. Fortunately, despite the comparatively low number of releases, there always seems to be at least one new game every week that captures our attention. Two weeks ago it was Uncharted 4, last week was Doom, and this upcoming week sees a little online shooter from Blizzard which I imagine will be catnip for many of us this Summer, at least until No Man's Sky finally shows up.

While I'm not particularly looking forward to moderating the always raucous chat for the imminent E3 evening stream shenanigans, I am happy for another opportunity to judge our artistically brilliant community's E3 banners again, so that's always fun. I think I've finally figured out what I'm doing for the "Alternative to E3" blog series too, but I should probably get May out of the way with first before settling on any concrete plans.

New Games!

Time Guns and Gradient Fill Pants. That's how you make a character.
Time Guns and Gradient Fill Pants. That's how you make a character.

I mean... Overwatch. The servers switch on this Tuesday, it sounds like. Is anyone going to be playing anything else? Besides maybe more Doom and Uncharted 4. I'm not going to get involved in some big online game that requires a moderately powerful system to play at the same speed as everyone else, but I certainly don't blame the legions of folks that this game has already ensorcelled with its promises of diversely talented heroes and a shocking amount of clever promotion and character work with those animated introduction mini-movies. I just wonder what their hat equivalent is eventually going to be. Don't half of them already have hats? That Ice Climber girl has a hood, and I don't know how much more you can do with one of those besides add cat ears.

Elsewhere, we have the TMNT game from PlatinumGames, which I imagine is probably going to be of a similar quality to that Transformers Devastation game they just put out (or that Legend of Korra game, god forbid). Seems like it might be a keeper for anyone in the Venn diagram overlap of Platinum fans and TMNT mainstays who haven't all died inside after watching that trailer for the new Michael Bay movie with the Run DMC cover. Weird that Platinum had both a Transformers and a TMNT project so soon after Bay did. Could a Bad Boys character action game be on the cards? Are air juggle combos about to get real?!

Rounding out the week there's the PS4/PSN release of the Neo Geo classic The Last Blade 2, that Total Warhammer fantasy war sim that is somehow not called Total Warhammer and the 3DS shop management sim Conveni Dream. I'm learning not to sleep on these cute and weird Japanese digital imports after my semi-dismissive take on Pocket Card Jockey last time.

Wiki!

It took me a moment to figure out why Super Gussun Oyoyo already has a complete page. It was on a GCCX episode!
It took me a moment to figure out why Super Gussun Oyoyo already has a complete page. It was on a GCCX episode!

Twenty-four games across July and August. Next week will see us taking on September, the second busiest month of the year, where I expect to be stuck for a while. Back to this week, two of those pages were perfectly fine all ready - both Yoshi's Island and Super Gussun Oyoyo were part of previous wiki projects - and only three required brand new pages: the horror visual novel Gakkou de atta Kowai Hanashi, the Hudson baseball game Super Power League 3 and the multi-board game simulator Game no Tatsujin (no relation to Taiko no Tatsujin, alas). Visit the usual list for more on those three. (I've actually filled that list up now, so... I guess I'll have to make another one.)

I've picked ten highlights from the pages I've worked on this week. Should be a recognizable bunch, since many of these were created in the US or are based on US games and US pop culture licenses:

I'm way better at Dr. Mario than Puyo Puyo, it seems.
I'm way better at Dr. Mario than Puyo Puyo, it seems.
  • Hebereke's Popoitto: Sunsoft's mascot character didn't make as much headway in North America as it did in Europe, which frequently saw EFIGS versions of the various puzzle games that Sunsoft used to promote their Sanrio-esque menagerie. Hebereke's Popoon was a Puyo Puyo puzzle game from 1993, and while Popoitto looks similar it actually plays more like Dr. Mario. Your goal is to remove all the face icons that are already on the playing field by creating lines of four same-colored objects. Unlike Dr. Mario, the pieces actually move around until you drop something on them or box them in, making it a little more frantic and unpredictable. The game also saw Saturn and PlayStation versions, both of which also came out in Europe.
  • Ultima: Kyouryuu Teikoku - The Savage Empire: Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire should be a familiar name to anyone with a GOG account: both it and its contemporary Martian Dreams were spin-offs based on 19th century literature that used the same engine as Ultima VI, and are given away freely to any GOG account owner who wants them. Like many Ultima ports for the SNES, Ultima: Kyouryuu Teikoku (which translates to Dinosaur Empire, a way better title) is scaled down but serviceable. Unlike the other Ultima ports, it never left Japan.
  • Demolition Man: Waking to a future with oppressive niceness, an obtuse bathroom system and a powered-up psychopath on the loose, John Spartan's adventures in San Angeles made for a pretty decent action movie. It actually made for two distinct video games as well: an FMV light-gun game for CD-based systems,that we're probably familiar with thanks to the Giant Bomb episode of TNT that covered the horrors of the 3DO, and a more traditional version for 16-bit systems with far less in the way of chroma key Sly Stallone in a beret. It is, like so many action movie licenses, a side-scrolling shooter/platformer that vaguely covers the events of the movie it's based on.
  • Killer Instinct: Presently in the capable hands of the game industry's own Belligerent Friendly Giant, Rare's Killer Instinct took the tech that allowed 3D pre-rendered models of gorillas wearing ties to go ape in Donkey Kong Country and used it to create a fighter game that, while lacking some polish, captured the imaginations of the 90s youth thanks to its brash techno music, comic book grimdarkness and our own surprisingly low standards. I think I still have my copy of Killer Cuts around here somewhere...
  • Primal Rage: Enormous prehistoric creatures beat the hell out of each other while tiny humans look on in awe (or get eaten) in Atari's ubiquitous dinosaur-and-ape fighting game. Primal Rage has enough problems being a fighter game also-ran without being released the same month as Killer Instinct for its SNES debut. Though, hey, going back to giant digitized ape models and their monkeyshines, that big Chaos guy sure loves to pee on his opponents, huh?
  • SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron: Once again, going through the Super Nintendo's library provides an incidental history lesson on the various cartoons of the 90s that we've all mostly forgotten about. Riding on the coatshells of a wave of totally tubular animal-human hybrids with sick combat abilities in contemporary urban settings, SWAT Kats depicts the adventures of a couple of feline vigilantes who protect the Megakat City by night with their tricked out aircraft and crimefighting gadgets. To everyone's great shock it's another licensed platformer.
  • Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: I know what happens to people who speak highly of Yoshi's Islands in these parts and it's not pretty, so I'll just say that this is a game that features Nintendo characters in a Crayola-stylized 2D platformer that was first released at some point in August of 1995. It's actually kinda weird that this is the first super high-profile SNES game we've seen since Chrono Trigger back in March - that's not to say the SNES didn't see anything decent in 1995, but most of the games we remember fondly were released closer to the system's dawn than to its twilight. After Yoshi's Island Nintendo would focus most of its attention on the N64 and Super Mario 64, so don't expect to see too many more first-party SNES games on these lists.
  • Ninja Gaiden Trilogy: This came up on the rota shortly after the recent GBEast stream for the Xbox Ninja Gaiden, which was an odd coincidence. All three of the NES Ninja Gaiden games were released here with some graphical upgrades in a Super Mario All-Stars-style compilation. It also made the third game slightly easier to deal with, which was probably appreciated by many. You can't go wrong with a package like this, but it's weird that it took so long after the NES went defunct before it came out.
  • Brandish 2: The Planet Buster: This awesomely-named sequel to Nihon Falcom's (the creators of Ys and The Legend of Heroes) top-down dungeon crawler did not unfortunately see a SNES localization like the original's, which is a shame because it's slightly better than its predecessor with more emphasis on story and NPCs and side-questing. The Brandish games take some getting used to - the world spins around every time you do, so that you're always facing up - but Falcom rarely puts a foot wrong. Naturally, moving from the PC-98 home computer to the Super Famicom meant cutting out a substantial amount of content to make the data fit on the cart, but it seems like a faithful enough port otherwise. It managed to retain the mini-map this time at least.
  • Donald Duck no Mahou no Boushi: Finally, we have this Disney platformer from Epoch. Disney properties were a lot easier to license in Japan than they were in North America and Europe, so we only saw localizations of every other game that was released over there. There was a Tokyo Disneyland Mickey Mouse game in 1994 that also avoided an international release, for instance. Mahou no Boushi (or "Magic Hat") is a little more open in structure, with Donald taking on odd jobs in any order the player wishes so that he can raise money for a present for Daisy. I didn't get any further than that, but I imagine it goes places once the eponymous magic hat shows up. Oddly enough, the game was compatible with Epoch's "Barcode Battler" toy via a SNES cable adaptor sold separately, with special content if you scan in barcodes while playing.

May Mastery '16!

Once again, all my video gaming this week has been thoroughly expounded upon in my daily May Mastery series, the growing contents page for which can be found over here. Here's a brief summation of the four Steam games I've played this week:

Burnstar was something of a disappointment, due to a fundamental flaw in its design that made it far less palatable than it first appeared. On the page, though, it's an imaginative spin on Bomberman and a demolitions simulator where you have a limited number of explosives and have to maximize their destructive power by studying the flammable objects in the environment for their chain reaction potential. Alas, with no way to reverse mistakes without starting the stage over, it gets exponentially less fun as the stages get larger, more complex and more exacting.

Props for the fire pigtails though.
Props for the fire pigtails though.

Mutant Blobs Attack might be a no-frills 2D Indie puzzle-platformer that borrows Katamari Damacy's mass-increasing mechanic to gate progression, but everything about it is so polished and enjoyable that it's one of those great Indie games that succeeds because it focuses on smaller, attainable goals with its game design and nails each one. I also like the Futurama-esque retro sci-fi aesthetic and the B-movie sensibilities of its plot about an angry blob with nothing to lose and everything to eat.

Well... it's almost perfect. I want to say that I covered up that
Well... it's almost perfect. I want to say that I covered up that "joke" on purpose.

Dreamfall Chapters: I fell in love with The Longest Journey a few years back as a late-comer, and despite the franchise's ups and downs I've stuck with it up to this, the most recent and still ongoing game in this mysterious and troubled adventure game series. An episodic game, I only got three "Books" into Dreamfall Chapters before the May Mastery-ordained three day time limit kicked in, but given that the fifth and final Book has yet to transpire I'm happy to put it on hiatus until I have the complete set ready to go. My PC can barely run it and each puzzle is exacerbated by the amount of geography the game spreads its hotspots across, but I'm anxious to get back to it before too long; as an adventure game big on establishing mysteries and cliffhangers, I don't want to risk losing any threads or forgetting the decisions I made.

If nothing else, it's the game that brought us Shitbot.
If nothing else, it's the game that brought us Shitbot.

Cargo Commander: I'm surprising myself with how much I'm enjoying this procedurally generated run-and-gun platformer from Dutch Indie developer Serious Brew. Drag cuboid space containers into range with a powerful magnet, raid them of their treasures and bail before a wormhole anomaly rips them apart. Maybe because it involves collecting things, or because it has an upgrade tree, or because it has procedural generation, or because it has some nuts gravity mechanics and an exciting hectic nature to its timed wave-based collect-a-thons. I don't think I could point to any one thing as the big draw. I just know that I'm sorry I slept on it for this long (it's a 2012 game! That most of us ignored, including this site!).

Even if the cel-shaded graphics are a little blocky and unappealing, the game has a great sense of lighting. Some container cubes are brightly lit, while others are operating on mood lighting or total darkness. It can be striking.
Even if the cel-shaded graphics are a little blocky and unappealing, the game has a great sense of lighting. Some container cubes are brightly lit, while others are operating on mood lighting or total darkness. It can be striking.
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