We're close to the start of March and the Switch/Zelda/NieR/Mass Effect/PAX East chaos to ensue, and about to say farewell to our blinking flaxen-haired friend at the video producer desk (pouring a 40 for my fellow pun wizard), so what better topic of discussion right now than the Giant Bomb Wiki? That's right, it's time for a semi-regular update on all the edifying edits and mollifying moderations that have taken place on the site's game database in recent memory.

Now, I wouldn't be talking about the wiki again unless I recently hit some sort of milestone target on the most recent project - that would be establishing full pages for every game released in 1996 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Family Computer - and that is absolutely the case here: I've just completed June of 1996, hitting the halfway point in the year and thus the halfway point of the project. Because 1996 had a conveniently small number of releases per month, around 15 on average, I've been cranking out pages for a full month of releases per week. If all goes according to plan, I should be done by April and have a small filler task to move onto before coming back for the Super Nintendo's remaining years: 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000 should all fly by pretty quickly, with less than eighty releases shared between them. It's the twilight of the SNES, and one of its most fascinating periods.

For instance, around this time Bandai put out a peripheral called the Sufami Turbo. I'd never heard of this device before, but it's essentially a plug-in that lets you play special smaller cartridges that Bandai would publish themselves - this was a means of getting around Nintendo's expensive cart production process, and Nintendo to their credit gave Bandai the go-ahead to create their own inexpensive, smaller carts upon which to ship their mediocre anime licensed games. There's actually thirteen games that were released in this form, with a handful of them coming bundled with the peripheral itself. A neat feature is that you could place two of these smaller carts in the device, and they could talk to each other: in some cases that only meant moving save files across the two carts, but in rarer cases you could add content from one game to the other. Thirteen games sounds like a lot, but for Bandai that's only about three months of releases - June to September. After this, they'd leave the SNES behind to focus on CD-based systems - which, turns out, is even cheaper to publish games on - including their own short-lived console they co-created with Apple, the Apple Bandai Pippin. They would come back to publish just one more game on the Super Famicom before its demise: 1999's Tamagotchi Town.

In addition to the Super Nintendo, this past week also saw the advent of a new episode of Chrontendo. Chrontendo 51 covers games in late November and early December of 1989, including one of the last Famicom Disk System games in Lutter and a few familiar oddities in the form of Shinobi clone Wrath of the Black Manta (I always assumed they meant "mamba") and the Rainbow Six spiritual precursor Rescue: The Embassy Mission. We had two fairly full wiki pages on the latter, which lead to an unfortunate Sophie's Choice moment on which to cut. I think we lost a lot of images there, so I'll have to talk to ZombiePie about re-uploading them. The video's a good one; it has a surprisingly short run-time of just over an hour, which believe me is relatively brief for Chrontendo, and features a few curious Famicom games like the super religious Tao, the bizarre (and unfortunately racist) early Squaresoft JRPG Square's Tom Sawyer based on Mark Twain's seminal work, and the obscure Nintendo-published Zapper game To the Earth. It also introduced me to Cosmic Epsilon, a not-terrible Famicom clone of Space Harrier that graciously gave me a doozy of a header image.

Anyway, enough of the wiki stuff for another month at least. Let's see what else is giving me RSI this week:

• The Top Shelf appeared with five new PS2 games to scrutinize as well as an announcement: I'm doubling the number of games getting covered each week, starting from the March 7th entry. It'll greatly expand the size of the weekly entries, but reduce the overall length of this feature, so I think that'll work out for the best. With the number of games I'm sending to the "Considered" pile, the second round of eliminations should take some time regardless. This week in particular saw three games pass through to the next round: Rez and Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land are old favorites that will still have to fight for spaces, and I'm giving EA's Agent Under Fire another chance to impress me since it's been a hot minute since I last shook but not stirred anything. Next week's The Top Shelf will see an exciting (?) first for the feature, so be sure to check it out when it goes up this Tuesday.
• The Indie Game of the Week is Oxenfree, which I've not actually yet completed but am keen enough to see its story through to the end later today. I originally bought that game close to the start of this year because of how frequently it was popping up on various staff/guest GOTY lists in December, but it seems a number of users have a few gripes with it, myself included. It certainly has a distinct look and approach to the adventure game genre, but it's far from perfect. Nevertheless, the game still appeals in a few subtle ways, and I hopefully got that across in the quasi-review above.

Yakuza 4

Presently, I'm pretty much sweeping up trophies before the big finale of Yakuza 4. Last week I discussed the game's structure and how it splits its time between four protagonists, each with their own story that is interlaced with the game's overarching plot about a potential yakuza war and a disappearing femme fatale, and each with their own fighting style and approach to resolving their problems. I talked about the smooth moneylender Shun Akiyama and the burly, tortured escaped convict Taiga Saejima, so let's move onto the other two before discussing the structure of the game's final act.

Masayoshi Tanimura is initially depicted as a dirty cop; his first cutscene sees him get chewed out by his superior, Sugiuchi, for gambling and the first objective is the find the snitch and beat some sense into him (in a cute twist, the snitch is revealed to be the same "artful dodger" scam artist that has frequently been the subject of a substory in previous games. Kamurocho's a small world, turns out). Of course, like Akiyama there's a heart of gold beneath a slightly sleazy exterior, and Tanimura's been making money on the side through gambling and shaking down illegal joints to pay for the care of kids left behind by immigration services busting their illegal alien parents. Honestly, that feels a little too topical a subject right now.

Tanimura's a fun character to play as because, as a cop, he tends to get into an entirely different kind of trouble while walking around Kamurocho. For one, he regularly gets radio reports of randomly-generated disturbances that he can resolve for rewards and experience. He can also help a foreign cop, Nair, with her investigation to catch a big-name gunrunner who is hiding out somewhere in Kamurocho. For whatever reason, this side-story only advances after training with her, and she fights the same way Tanimura does (and might be the series's first female combatant, unless I'm forgetting someone). Which brings me to Tanimura's fighting style: it's very counter heavy, with the block button also producing a short period of time in which Tanimura will catch the opponent's fist and turn them around, making it easier to land a reprisal attack. Tanimura's also more of a judo/grappler type, and has a number of Heat actions that revolve around armbars and headlocks. It takes a while to get used to the timing, but he's a hard guy to take down once he's in his element. I've probably had the most fun with his particular style.

The fourth and final protagonist is none other than Kazuma Kiryu himself, the legendary Dragon of Dojima and the protagonist of every previous game. He fights the same way he always has: like a runaway truck. With every character, you start with basic attacks and have to buy their advanced moves with the currency you earn from levelling up. Kazuma, meanwhile, starts with half of his special attacks already and simply gets ever stronger, including the all-powerful "tiger drop" counter which I tend to use liberally whenever I'm in Kazuma's shoes. Kazuma's overall attack style is the "all-rounder" composite of everyone else's, and he's easily the best fighter of the group. I guess the game couldn't really have it any other way, given Kiryu's reputation as the most powerful fighter alive - the game has some fun with this for one particular boss encounter, in which he fights Akiyama and Tanimura simultaneously. And wins. He's dragged into the game's story first by helping Saejima after he washes up on the beach of his orphanage, and later former foe Hamazaki after he washes up on the same beach. The latter brought some proof of the government's wrong-doing in the creation of the highly suspect Okinawan prison Saejima escaped from, and it naturally ties into events from the first Yakuza game, giving Kiryu ample reason to stick on his purple shirt and white suit combo and tread the streets of Kamurocho looking for answers.

After Kazuma's chapter concludes, the story is set up for one last big encounter on the roof of Kamurocho's monolithic Millennium Tower - which is pretty much where every Yakuza game ends - and the player is able to regroup at New Serena, the recurring bar that Kiryu uses as his home away from home, and figure out their next plan. The player can now freely switch between the four characters and complete any outstanding objectives they might have, such as Saejima's underworld arena career or Tanimura's investigations, before they head to the final objective and finish the game. That's where I'm at right now: there's a bunch of trophies I wouldn't mind earning - none of them are anything like the timesinks Yakuza 3's are, though I don't much approve of how the game requires three playthroughs to get all the difficulty-related trophies - and so I'm running around tying up a few loose ends before I beat the game and move onto something else next week.

As with any Yakuza game, it's been a draining but overall satisfying experience. Yakuza 4's probably the best game in the series so far, if only because its multiple protagonists help keep the combat fresh after almost 50 hours of gameplay, and it reintroduces all the Japanese-specific activities and content taken out of the localization of Yakuza 3, for better or worse. It's fun to waste some time in the mahjong parlor, but the hostess stuff is mildly creepy and goes on too long and I have no idea where to even start with shogi. You'd think after adding about thirty Super Famicom shogi games to the wiki I'd learn how to actually play it, but nope. At any rate, I'm now one step closer to where the Yakuza series is at currently, and I'll no doubt find time to play Yakuza 5 - which is sitting on my PS3 HDD - in the semi-near future. For my next few games, I might just switch to something less gigantic - it's a good thing I have that Indie Game of the Week feature, because between Yakuza 4 and Xenoblade Chronicles X I really haven't had a whole lot of time for anything else this year.