[EXPRESSO] Fox n Forests NNSWDDL | Wink Wink Nudge Nudge E.T. Atari Cartridges

One of the older “good children of Kickstarter”, a retro-styled 2D platformer made by nostalgic gaming enthusiast for the nostalgia crowd that loves 16-bit style platformers for the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

And before you ask, yes, there are “Metroidvania” elements, Kinda. As in you’ll have to revisit levels when you get an upgrade allowing you to reach new paths and collect more of the items necessary to unlock the other batch of levels. The music does remind one of Castlevania, though, like a lot.

You play as Rick the Fox, tasked by the ancient talking tree to recover sacred bark and repel the mysterious “Fifth Season”. You’re given a bow with sword for close combat, but the main gimmick of Fox n Forests is the ability to change the season in the level to affect the level design: freezing rivers in winter to walk on the icy surfaces, changing to autumnmakes vines grow, creating extra platforms, and so on.

It’s a good game held back by how on-point it recreates the 16-bit platformer experience, despite otherwise finding good compromises to mesh old and new sensibilities, like retain checkpoints but having you fork over cash to activate them. The main problem is having the fodder (and sometimes stronger) enemies respawning ad infinitum, making exploration more difficult and grating than needed, in a game that wants you to explore (and revisit) the few big levels available as throughly as possible. And it’s pointless since enemies always drop coins, not the more useful health items.

Also, most boss battles are downright obtuse and become piss easy once you realize what you were supposed to do, and the videogame references… the less said the better.

I really wanted to like this more, but it’s still slighly above just being “decent”.

2021 World Wishlist

Yeah, i’m not asking Saint Nick (as i wouldn’t like to overburden the fella even further and its past-Christmas anyway) but the – JOJO MEME – itself what i would pleasantly welcome in this brave new year of real life, disgusting cyberpunk dystopia.

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Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity NSWITCH [REVIEW]

After the success of the first Hyrule Warriors, it’s no surprise Nintendo become more involved in this seconda Zelda X Warriors crossover project when the idea came about. Actually, even more than expected, the choice to make Age Of Calamity a story prequel to Breath Of The Wild is bold, as in most Warriors crossovers of series like this are non-canonical excuses to get many characters from the franchise together and let them fight in huge hack n slash battles.

Now that i’ve played the base Breath Of The Wild game (so i could give a better assessment) and i know the story enough, i can get to talk about Age Of Calamity and address the first, big question, as in, do you need to have played BOTW before playing this prequel? And it is really a prequel?

“Not really” for both is the answer.

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Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition NSWITCH [REVIEW]

This is like the 4^th time i review Hyrule Warriors overall (and the second i review the Definitive Edition), but it IS the first time in english, and it IS Hyrule Warriors, so….

Since i also wanted to review Age Of Calamity, might as well do the previous iteration of “Zelda Musou”, one that was conceived as most Dynasty Warriors crossovers with other IP are, as in this is just a spin-off where we have an original story made pretty much to have most character from said license/series/brand appear together and fight in a hack n slash manner through opposing armies, through the power of the usual convenient “dimensional portals”.

Still, even there Nintendo was involved in the project more than previous companies “crossing” their properties with Koei’s trademark style of hack n slash, even Team Ninja (which survived the Itagaki exodus better than Itagaki’s career) helped in the development alongside ol’ Omega Force.

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Dino Dicember #26: Aztec Rex / Tyrannosaurus Azteca (2007)

Thunder, thunder, thunder rex!

Actually, not quite, but i wonder why not also give the “rexes” magical elemental powers (since the Aztecs call them “Thunder lizards” in the movie itself), if we can stretch the imagination to have a movie like this, set in the 16^th centhury about a group of conquistadores going to Mexico in order to search for treasure and colonialize the “savages” while they’re at it, but end up captured by the tribes, whom plan to sacrifice them to their sacred gods, T-Rexes.

I mean, i do trust in Godzilla, but ….

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Dino Dicember #25: Turok: Son Of Stone (2008)

Taking some time to spotlight this 12 years old, fairly forgotten direct-to-video animated movie about the most popular Native American dinosaur-slaying character in videogame, Turok (yes you are he).

Which is fitting, since the games themselves were based on the Turok comics, the first one titled “Turok Son Of Stone”, but before going any further, i have to say i’m not exactly that familiar with Turok in general, and what little i know comes from the first Turok videogame, and some cultural osmosis. I didn’t grow up playing Turok games on the N64, when i got my very first console the series was already quite slumming as Akklaim itself was inching ever closer to bankruptcy.

This was released alongside the 2008’s reboot simply called “Turok”… which didn’t help in breathing some life back in the series, so the planned sequel to that was scrapped and the series layed dormant until Turok: Escape From Lost Valley released in 2019.

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[EXPRESSO] Bleed 2 PSN | They Watch The World Burn

After becoming “the world only and truest hero” in the first game (as in her fantasy videogame world), Wryn sat around playing videogames and all was well with the world. Until the usual gaggle of old rivals, new villains and alien invaders (some of them robotic) attack The City, for the usual reasons that this is a videogame and we need to shoot a lot of baddies. Not that it matters in any way, it is a videogame.

What has improved is the gameplay (graphics not so much), which was already good but has been refined, with better controls and a better control over the jump and dash manouver, and a new found emphasis on deflecting back projectiles and countering boss attack thank to the katana, already available in the fist BLEED, but now given as the standard melee weapon to compliment the usual twin pistols, making for faster, tougher and more satisfying encounters and ways to control the flow of battle.

Even the campaign levels are paced and flow better into each other, while also providing more variety, ticking all the classic arcade clichès, like riding and moving around rockets shot by the enemy airship, standing on moving cars while fighting in the highway, levating into the alien mothership, etc.

It’s still a short experience, but this one improves on replayability thank to the better gameplay, as it lends more to speed-runs or the Arcade “1 life only” run, but it also has more varied and interesting characters to unlock (including the Clawgirl from They Bleed Pixels), mutators and a mode that offers a set of 5 randomized levels. The Challenge mode is back unchanged, but at least they just outright say “it’s totally unbalanced”.

Short but quite sweet, i’d recommended getting the series bundle when it’s on sale.

Dino Dicember #19: Super Mario Bros The Movie (1993)

I could have waited until that animated Super Mario movie Nintendo commissioned Illumination (urgh) released… but sure as shit it isn’t coming out this year (not like it was gonna, it was slated for a 2022 release before the COVID-19 pandemic anyway), and i’m doing Dino Dicember… well, in Dicember, so it’s a pretty good “excuse” for me to watch and review the infamous Super Mario Bros live-action movie. And i do enjoy the challenge, it’s not like it’s this obscure adaptation nobody on the internet talked about, but let’s give the movie a fair shake with almost 2 decades of hindsight.

And yes, it totally counts, since it’s about a dinosaur dimension that originated from the meteor that hit Earth 65 millions years ago, which actually created two parallel dimensions of Earth, one inhabited by reptile people descending from dinosaurs, and ours of “human people” descending from primates. As the resources have dried up on the “dino end”, the leader of the dino-people, Koopa, sends minions in our dimension to search for a fragment of the meteor that split the dimensions to begin with, so he can unite the two and rule them under his scaly thumb.

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One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – DLC Pack 3 PS4 [REVIEW]

Here we are again, for the review of third and final Pirate Warriors 4 DLC Pack.

And i was gonna say this couldn’t be the last thing Koei has planned for the game, given how the company has generaly no shame in selling multiple Season Passes, like it did for DOA 5 or – to circle back – Dynasty Warriors 9. Which had 3 of the damn thing, 2 costing 50 bucks. Each.

But honestly i don’t feel this is case, since it’s also a Namco Bandai joint, and they used this pattern before, with a three-pieced season pass released seasonally for World Seeker, so it would be reasonable to assume we’ll have to wait 5 or more years for another Pirate Warriors title.

Who knows, maybe in that time One Piece will actually reach a conclusion and Koei won’t randomly sponge entire arcs from their videogame adaptation of the series.

Joking aside, i feel lukewarm at the idea of more playable characters for Pirate Warriors 4, like i said in the review of the last Character Pack, good, but i’m just gonna use them on old maps i’ve already played a lot, since i 100 % this game months ago.

And i’m far from a completitionist.

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Dino Dicember #17: The Lost World (1998)

This one was really a given (and yes, we’re reviewing an adaptation of Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot next), not featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in Dino Dicember…. just wouldn’t have been right. I would have kicked myself if i didn’t.

Then again, it didn’t immediately came to me as an obvious choice, since most people nowadays think about the second Jurassic Park movie, Lost World: Jurassic Park, loosely based on Michael Chrichton’s book The Lost World (sequel to Chrichton’s own Jurassic Park book), itself borrowing elements from (and paying direct homage to) the original 1912 novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, and even the 1925’s film adaptation of the book, which we briefly referenced before.

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