Redhotchilimist

Aww, congratulations on Kirby!

Ninja Warriors Once Again is such a better name than The Ninja Saviors.

I bought this game the other day just from the trailers. It's really awesome that this team at Natsume, just these old devs that made the games in the first place, get to return to them and make them better than ever. They look so faithful you might imagine they did nothing, until you look at the SNES game and see that the spritework is entirely different and much improved. They did the same for Wild Guns Reloaded, and they just announced they're doing the same for another old game ( I hope Pocky & Rocky). I love it. Them putting in new characters is just icing on the cake, though I wish they'd added new levels as well, like with Wild Guns Reloaded.

I think there was room to make this game even better. Ninja Warriors is cool, but for a game about ninja robots, you fight relatively few cool enemies and bosses. Instead most of the enemies are effortlessly dispatched dudes and the big first level boss shows up many, many times.

The skeleton underneath this game is really old and arcade based, so don't expect more than like an hour of a playthrough. It's not a game to get if you don't like some simple-ass old beat 'em ups, Dragon's Crown this ain't. It is cool though. The flat plane and the weird moves you get make it feel pretty different from most of these games, even if you mash on that attack button a bunch. Like you can't even run, you instead have to somersault or super dash or whatever each character has got.

But it does make me wish that these devs, once they're done diving into the past, make something awesome and new with their know-how. Ninja Warriors is exciting for what it is but I definitely feel like it's been surpassed since it came out. A more involved 2d action game than these arcade-like titles with this team's skills would really be something.

I haven't dug a lot of games from this year(tho Sekiro is very cool and Ninja Saviors is a cool little game), but look

Devil May Cry 5 is like the best game that genre has ever produced. I'm fine with getting one game I love. That's better than some years.

Edit: I'm dying of all this talking around embargoes lmao

Tales from The Borderlands is funny where mainline Borderlands isn't not because the writing is all that different, but because of the change in genres. Borderlands can't really do that much besides an occasional cutscene, a buncha voiceovers and some gag names and item descriptions. Tales is like 5 two-hour, QTE-laden movies with minor explorative adventure game segments in them. It's a lot easier to be comedic when you've got all the tricks of a movie to work with instead of trying to add comedy on top of an FPS with loot. I always hated Borderlands writing, but because of that change in format I really dig tales.

I think you should totally try it out if the Borderlands 3 comedy isn't doing it for you, Mike. If you can get it, anyway, I feel like there was a news story about every Telltale game getting pulled from the online services a while back.

Death Stranding didn't sell itself super well in my opinion during the gameplay trailer. If the actual gameplay loop here is putting on some equipment and packages and then going hiking through an empty wasteland until you get where you're going, invading some bases along the way, then that's not exciting to me. That's some boring open world stuff with a layer of more bother on top. The sludge monster livened things up a little, but thinking about this being the Horizon Zero Dawn engine - fighting that huge tiger did not seem anywhere near as engaging as when Aloy fought it. And it was a pretty weird thing to get for being caught in stealth as well.

Kojima seems to put a big focus on the co-op aspects, but we've all played Dark Souls before. It's not some new type of strand game or whatever just because it's got white phantoms.

So I dunno. What's keeping me interested is the fact that it's Kojima. At his best I really enjoy his games' narrative, MGS3 being the peak for me. But that's a long time ago, and I'm seeing more MGS5 than MGS3 here. And Phantom Pain had one of the worst narratives.

Still, least it feels super wet. All the rainjackets and boots are taking me back to school excursions where we all had to wade through mud in the rain to get our weekly day outside. The Icelandic wasteland, while barren, looks very distinct in terms of videogame environments. It's got a unique mood, you know. That counts for something.

My complaint is not that some dudes wear skull masks lol. Interesting and fun design is one of the pluses of his games, not one of the minuses. MGS' having all this juxtaposition between serious military historical stuff with espers in gas masks and vampires and electric men is one of the things that make it fun as opposed to something like say Uncharted just having grounded-ass dudes that quip a lot. And it does treat it with just the right amount of seriousness. Compare how up its ass Horizon is about all the outrageous robotic dinosaurs and dogs to how much fun Metal Gear has with them. It's just like in my Japanese animes.

Look, Dan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu6gmQCljfo

The port had online from when it released in 2013 up until last year. Which was quite a while. Especially considering the original had online from release until 2012. I wonder if there are Deadlocked diehards who were playing online for all that time.

I can see how co-op would be the way to play this game. If I had a buddy to play it with I don't think I'd be bored through the second half of the game, and the story is so unintrusive it wouldn't get in the way.

There's a genderswapped everything.

Thanks for breaking down the Smash stuff, Ben. I think that's the smoothest any fighting game scene talk has ever gone.

Shoutout to Ratchet & Clank HD collection for letting me play those old Ratchet games conveniently. Those are the most recent old games I played and they're still cool.