borgmaster

I keep eyeing Forespoken when it's on sale, and it hasn't quite gotten to my threshold yet.

This seems to be a rare confluence of multiple of the year's hottest messes. Microsoft had to put in a long, sloppy fight to acquire ABK and now they're going to have to pay out the nose cleaning up the rancid messes that made ABK affordable in the first place. How much is it going to cost to make the lawsuits go away? How much are they gonna take it on the chin for the impending MW3 disaster? All of Activision-Blizzard's big releases from the last 12 months are going to need triage and salvaging, with this being the first of many write-offs. Is this a Hot Mess Casserole? Maybe a Hot Mess Hot Dish.

@gtxforza:

Thanks!

@judaspete:

Primal Rage is better than the first Mortal Kombat, but it came almost a year after Mortal Kombat II what was wrong with you. Also, Street Fighter II was probably better than any of those games if we're being honest.

@judaspete: I never said it's good

@manburger:

Oh, I think you're overestimating the self-awareness of Iron Storm. The Japanese campaign talks a lot about Manchukuo in positive terms. Hell, the first few levels take place during the three-month long border war between Japan and the USSR in the Summer of '39. That was a campaign the IJA lost, but guess what you get to do in the game? It becomes even more apparent as imperial wish-fulfillment the further you dig into the details. I have a lot to say about the tendency of western nerds to cut Japanese media products too much slack, but that would be getting off topic.

Also, for as much affection as I have for Dong Dong Never Die, I will stand by what I said.

@cozmicaztaway:

I went through my list to find all of the upcoming Soccer games on the Saturn. First, the system launched in the US with a Sega Soccer game, that forgettable International Victory Goal thing. We have six Soccer games left, two of which are Sega joints coming in the next two Novembers like you said, two EA Soccer games, and two British Soccer games that likely won't be worth discussing. I'm hopeful that the Sega games improve on what that launch title was doing.

@judaspete:

What if I told you it's the best console version of Primal Rage

@judaspete: I haven't played any of the Colony Wars games (yet), but I did some research and it seems that trilogy sold slightly better worldwide than the Panzer Dragoon games and received high average reviews. That would qualify it to be in the same category of tragic failures.

Though, after digging a little bit into that critical response and going through some series overviews, I'm comfortable saying that the Colony Wars games are on a lower tier of technical and artistic achievement than the Panzer Dragoon series. So, it's a lesser example of the same pattern.

These kinds of failures are hard to identify because of how forgotten they are.

The Saturn was a lost cause by mid-'96 at the latest. There's nothing to romanticize about Team Andromeda working themselves to death to rescue something that had already failed. As ZP goes into, PD Saga is a one of a kind technical and artistic experience because no one who would have known what they were doing would have made it that way.

It's unique combat and avant-garde style make it a special game, but, again, there's just about no mechanical depth and the story gets by on vibes more than anything else. Now, the first two games were also carried along by their immaculate vibe and there are plenty of people who can be carried through a 20 hour experience based on that.

None of this would qualify it as being the best game of its generation. The mystique around this thing is very real, which translates into that horrifying resale price. That collector mania can turn anything into a "classic", but when looking at it qualitatively on the same level as its contemporaries, it's not going to make the top of any lists. Maybe inserting itself into the same conversation as Square's 90's output is enough of an accomplishment on its own, all things considered.

@arbitrarywater:

Nneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrddddddddddd

@manburger:

Imagine thinking the FMV you spent a bunch of money on was too cringe, so you spend even more money to make it 10x cringier. That has to belong in the top ten all time worst creative decisions in video games.

This seems like a crazy argument to me. The main Forza games have always been dry, and when they tried to add personality in the past it was stuff like that Jeremy Clarkson shit in 5. It's been a while so it's easy to forget that these games have always been in the same category as stuff like Project Cars and the F1 games. If anything, Forza is the warm and fuzzy version of that kind of game because of the wide range of difficulty options.

Don't forget that clinically sterile menus has been the series brand since Forza 3.

@manburger:

The difficulty in the first two Panzer Dragoon games are prohibitive by modern standards, but I would say they were extremely reasonable for their time. I'm still haunted by Microcosm; The Kids like to joke about sleep paralysis monsters but no nightmare could compare to having to play piece of garbage.

Anyway, you point out what is probably the biggest issue with the entire Rail Shooter genre, there just wasn't enough going on with them mechanically. Other than the poor quality of the ones not made by Sega, that was likely the reason they faded away. As console game design moved further away from arcade concepts, Rail Shooters just weren't worth adapting to the new standards around feature and content depth.

@judaspete:

I scanned back through the various ranking lists, and yeah I think this was the best week so far. The next closest weeks are Parts 8 and 20 of the PS1 series, but even then they don't average as high. SOA had very little to put on the Saturn, but they lucked into releasing three all-time classics, and only those, in the same month.

Also, I've been asking around if there was another game franchise as consistently good as Panzer Dragoon across multiple entries that completely failed to catch on. If any of you chuckleheads says King's Field I'm going to [REDACTED] your [REDACTED].