The first week of May, and thus May Mastery, is complete. While it's been a busy week for me, it looks like it was a busier week than anticipated for the site as well. Maybe it's because I have less time to watch it all this month, but it seemed like there was an incredible amount of content last week and for the week to come, in a month that I reasonably figured would be light on significant game releases. Ten Quick Looks/Unfinisheds, including that stellar Stellaris live Quick Look with the bravest bird aliens I've ever seen, a puroresu festu, more premium Hitman and the ghostly hi-jinks of UPF. Kudos to the Bomb Squad for making a feast with so few ingredients. And we're getting a new Ranking of Fighters later today, featuring yet another ridiculous SNES/SFC anime fighter. It's like they read my mind.

Before we start, however, it's time for the Mento Marvel Movie Minute. Caught Captain America: Civil War the past week, and thought it was excellent. A little dour as Marvel movies go, which is why I suspect that they made it a Captain America branded movie with the implication that it was a follow up to the more thriller-esque Captain America: Winter Soldier (a shared director/writer team helps), rather than an Avengers movie continuing from Age of Ultron. Captain America was in that lucky position for a comic book hero seeking a movie adaptation in that you couldn't really rely on a lot of his traditional backstory because of how antiquated and jingoist it was, but the character himself is still an important staple of the Avengers and of the larger Marvel universe. Some talented writers and directors (not to mention Chris Evans, who is doing phenomenal work) got carte blanche to craft a Cap that was principled and powerful, true to his character, but had more nuance beyond wanting to beat up Japanese soldiers with his vibranium shield while pausing briefly to tell the folks at home to buy war bonds with a wink and a smile. Creating the rift between him and Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark felt like the natural result of the multiple solo movies: Stark's long been wary of his inventions causing undue collateral damage, most recently with Ultron but even in the first Iron Man when he was forced to confront the devastation his advanced weapon tech was creating, while Captain America's refusal to bow and scrape to a UN oversight committee is largely due to his mistrust of governmental bodies, and how easily Hydra seems to infiltrate same (like S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Winter Soldier), as well as knowing deep down that they won't have his back when he tries to safely recover his friend Bucky, the sole remaining link to the world he once knew. Being a brainwashed Soviet assassin with the deaths of dozens of important US figures on your head will tend to put one on a government shitlist.

It did feel like two separate movies at times though; the brooding, thoughtful "Jason Bourne" style vigilante actions of Cap and the quietly vengeful (and kinda amazing) Black Panther felt like a Winter Soldier follow-up, but then you also have that excuse for a big, wonderfully silly battle royale between all the Avengers and a few guests in an abandoned airport, as well as a few other scenes where two or more Avengers are having discussions about their effectiveness as heroes where it seemed more like a direct Avengers sequel. They could sell that one airport fight as a separate mini-movie, Phantom Pain style, and I'd bet it'd see a fair amount of business. A lot of fun, though I'll obviously keep the details sparse for those who have yet to watch the movie (though there's no escaping the fact that a certain teenage wiseacre from Queens shows up to make everyone else feel old).

New Games!

There's two big releases this week, but the one I'm most itching to play is Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. I was one of the many that felt that Uncharted 3 was underwhelming, to the extent that I wrote a misguided blog about how all the sequels of 2011 felt a little lacking comparing to years prior and that we could use some new blood more than ever - man, did I get tarred and feathered for that one. Uncharted 4 seems universally adored though, getting five stars from Dan and similarly high scores everywhere else. I shudder to think how good it must look on PS4, given that the previous games (or The Last of Us) were no slouches visually speaking. There is some part of me that wishes Naughty Dog could go back to Jak and Daxter games, but that's just my starving 3D platformer fanboy side talking. Either way, sounds like it might be one of the very few PS4 exclusives worth picking up - about time too, given the Neo's soon to render it obsolete (and we all know it's happening, regardless of Sony's emphatic reassurances that it'll simply improve performance for games that will otherwise work fine on the base model. We'll be hitting a new technological/graphical level of quality way too soon, especially with these recent GeForce GTX 1070/1080 reveals and the lofty system requirements for VR, and developers won't want to ensure that there's still a crappy quality version of all their PS4 productions for the plebs to enjoy. I really ought to stop bringing this up, it puts me in a bad mood).

This Friday will also see the release of id Software's long-awaited Doom reboot. Reactions to the multiplayer have been tepid, though I'm hoping they get a good single-player campaign out of it. There's a lot you can do with a modern take on Doom besides make it more like Halo, so I hope whatever id Software is these days can work on its distinctive strengths as a franchise rather than shape it into something it's not to appease focus groups. Otherwise, why not just make your own new shooter IP and let the id Software name carry it? I mean, Rage worked out so well...

This week also sees a new Raiden game with Raiden V, oddly enough. Nope, not the Metal Gear Solid or Mortal Kombat guy, but the Seibu Kaihatsu/MOSS Arcade shoot 'em up series that began in the 1980s. (Doy, huh.) I occasionally encounter that series when working on wiki pages for 8-bit and 16-bit systems, so it's heartening (if a bit weird) to see that it's still getting sequels to this day. It's also a good week for Edmund McMillen fans: that The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth remake is coming to PS4, while Super Meat Boy is finally hitting a Nintendo console with a Wii U eShop release. Wii U's getting its own The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 port too, so there's even less excuse to play one of the best point and click adventure games ever made - though I sort of wish that any of these console ports bothered to include the (presently PC/Mac only) original game, since there's a lot of callbacks. Finally, we have Paradox's Stellaris on Steam, which @austin_walker made a fairly good case for this week, and the Vita game MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies which... well, you do you, Vita. I've managed to fill two lists on this site with Japanese RPGs of an often overly anime persuasion, yet even I feel intimidated by the Vita's immense library of games featuring -chans and -tans of all stripes (and maybe more Monster Hunter clones than I'm comfortable with).

Wiki!

June's complete, and so is the first half of 1995 for the Super Nintendo. I'm honestly surprised at my progress; that's less a humblebrag than a tacit acknowledgement that I don't work particularly hard at it - it's really more of a hobby to pass the time while listening to podcasts - and that I overestimated what the Super 1995 project might entail.

Any given SNES game made in 1995 tends to fall into one of two camps: A) Awful generic shovelware from Japan and North America, as talented developers continue their exodus from the system for greener pastures, B) Decent games that clearly saw a few extra years of work to perfect them, emerging as they did after the Super Nintendo's peak. Which, in terms of wiki work, means a page either gets the minimal treatment of "this is a shogi game. It lets you play shogi" because of how little there is to say about most shovelware, or the page was already filled out in loving detail by other editors because of its status as a stone cold classic. Hence why I've been moving through the year so quickly, I'd surmise.

The page total for this week, in spite of the fact that I should be focusing on the May Mastery feature, included the last nine games of June and the first seven of July, making sixteen in total. The three new pages of this week were Pro Mahjong Kiwame III, Super Kyoutei and Shiki Eiyuuden: Hito Ryuu Densetsu. Visit the usual place for more info on those. Abridged highlights of the rest to follow:

• Gamera: Gyaos Gekimetsu Sakusen is the first time the giant turtle who is friend to all children has graced the Super Famicom platform, though it's an unfortunately dull game that doesn't even let you play as Gamera. Way to whiff.
• Granhistoria is an RPG from Banpresto, which is usually a red flag that some anime robot crossover nonsense is about to occur, but it's actually a semi-decent original game with a really cool premise: as a spirit that hails from the destroyed future, you take over the body of a man killed before his wedding day and warp around space-time to avert all the catastrophic events that will lead to the destruction of the world twenty years later. I want to say that the excellent Radiant Historia for DS was probably inspired quite a bit by this long-forgotten game - one that doesn't even have a fan translation.
• Little Master: Nijiiro no Maseki strikes me as the SNES platform's best shot at a Shining Force competitor, Fire Emblem notwithstanding. It has that cute, cartoonish fantasy appeal that Camelot's series has, though I didn't play long enough to see if it has the necessary staying power.
• Super Fire Pro Wrestling: Queen's Special is a timely game to show up on the rota, given that GBEast's recent puroresu stream also featured some Fire Pro Wrestling action with female wrestlers. Uncommon for Fire Pro, this game actually features the names of the real-life talents of the Joshi Wrestling world of the 1990s, including Bull Nakano (who I think is an unlock) and Aja Kong.
• King Arthur & the Knights of Justice is yet another SNES license of a middling cartoon show I've long since forgotten about, alongside the likes of Stone Protectors and The Pirates of Dark Water. I think there's a SWAT Kats game later this year too. The game itself is a little unusual; the developers were obviously inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana, with a lot of navigating top-down areas while slashing at enemies and solving adventure game style puzzles. The mediocre quality sort of gives me more of a Young Merlin vibe though. Still, how many non-fighter games give you twelve playable characters right off the bat?
• Caravan Shooting Collection is a compilation of three NES games from the mid-80s, which is a weird product but really all you had to go on in the 16-bit era as far as throwback compilations went. Creating new 16-bit versions would've taken too much effort. This particular bundle includes three Hudson-produced games that featured in their "on the road" national shoot 'em up All-Japan Caravan competitions: the 1985 NES port of Tecmo's Star Force, 1986's original Star Soldier and the obscure NES-only shoot 'em up Starship Hector from 1987.
• Dekitate High School is one of those twofold games: Your tasks are to build an effective all-girls highschool, and also to tutor a girl of your choice from a selection of five anime archetypes to academic success. The latter has some creepy shades of "hot for teacher" which we also saw recently with Houkago in Beppin Jogakuin, but the former seems like an interesting spin on a SimCity style builder sim. I wasn't able to pick up how in-depth it was, but I like the idea of building a school in order to maximize student happiness and academic potential. Odd we never saw a "Theme School" or "SimSchool" back in the day, unless I slept on it.

May Mastery '16!

Needless to say, I won't be doing any in-depth game analyzes for Sunday Summaries this month, because I'm already getting elbow-deep (ew?) in various games for the May Mastery '16 feature. Instead, here's a brief summation of the games I've covered this week:

I wasn't sure what to expect with Croteam's The Talos Principle going in, beyond that there were a bunch of puzzles in little maze areas to solve, but I was pleasantly surprised by both the depth of its puzzles - which continued to add disparate, paradigm shifting elements right up to the end, including a machine that recorded your actions and let you solve puzzles with a time-lapsed doppelganger - and the depth of its narrative, which established itself on creating various mysteries about the nature of the world and of the fate of the human race to solve. My favorite aspect of this narrative is something I've had to spoiler block below. Don't read if you want to go into this game fresh and confused and mildly frustrated, like a newborn. (The way I'd recommend, easily.)

Supergiant Games's Transistor was a similar slow burn, both in terms of learning what the game's deal was and my own appreciation with what it was attempting to do. I've tremendous respect for the level of craft that the game exhibits, from its artistic and musical direction to its mature story to its in-depth ability-customizing gameplay. The combat felt a little too discouragingly inaccurate and unpredictable at times and repetitive at others, and there's very little opportunity to do some exploring as the game insists on an extremely linear path of encounters and story beats with no way to backtrack, but overall I can't say that I didn't enjoy my time with it. A similar case with Bastion, really. I hope Supergiant can eventually make a game where the core gameplay can match the creativity on show. Maybe a little less constant narration too; those two games have a bad case of the Navis.

Moppin's Downwell is not a game I could hope to beat in three days, as it wasn't a game I felt like playing for hours at a time, so while it might not have been ideal for this cram session of a month-long project I'm glad I found an excuse to play it. Its sheer Arcade nature didn't grab me like an Indie roguelike/roguelite might so I can't say I'll be revisiting it often, but I could certainly see why it hooked so many people.

You can read more by making your way over to this May Mastery '16 staging/contents area and perusing the entries. There'll be more to come as May continues. Thanks for stopping by, and may your week be filled with trap-filled temples, perilous climbs across falling masonry and pithy quips during gunfights. Maybe play some Uncharted 4 too, if you find the time.