[EXPRESSO] Jelly Boy SNES | Europlatforming Of Old

Figured i’d check in with the SNES and NES online measly offering and see if some obscure back catalogue title dropped while Nintendo forgot to say it or did but we didn’t care.

And Jelly Boy is indeed one of those titles you might have gone your entire life without knowing about as it blends perfectly into the humungous pile of platformers of the 90s, and only came out in Europe, to boot.

So, it’s one of those 16 bit platformers that wanted to jump on the bandwagon, so it has a Sonic style health system, and often very tight time limits for the levels…. which i guess were made to make it feel more like Sonic when it’s otherwise a more linear “europlatformer” of british descent starring a humanoid shaped jelly in baby pink that can morph in various shapes, including a duck… when you duck, so the game has a sense of humour.

The main issue is that you have to find jigsaw pieces hidden in the level to unlock the zone’s boss, bu beating bosses only nets you item needed to finish the game, but to actually enter the next zone/world you have to find out first that there’s a hub area to access each world’s map, and you need to find a key in each zone to access the next one.

The game doesn’t tell you about any of these, most likely on purpose to sell guides and avoid people from easily beating it while renting it in the day, even more because just the first world it’s so obtuse. Once you know what the hell you’re supposed to, the game is actually decent, looks good , has a lot of levels, i’d say it’s worth a play by platformers buffs…. with a walkthrough on hand.

Resting Them Bones a Bit

Sorry folks, no review today, it’s been hectic and there has been… well not a “lack” per se of new movie reviews, but a combination of the major releases getting dripfeed now, previous weeks having a lot of releases of italian movies that i just don’t imagine even having any appeal or significance on a international scale (with some exceptions, maybe) and a busy period.

I have some cinema catching up to do, indeed.

I’m almost done watching Squid Game on my own leasure pace, maybe i’ll write my own 2 cents on the matter, not that i really care too much to do so, as people have banged on about it and written about it in an obsessive manner, so i don’t think i can add much (or anything), but we’ll see, if need be i’ll just ramble on about in a non spoilery way.

Tomorrow we’ll get back to it by visiting an old, flesh-less friend…

Alice: Otherlands (2015) [REVIEW] | Uncertain Fate Kickstarted

While Alice Asylum (as said in the review of Madness Returns) is now officially in the pre-production stage of development, the path to this potential third game in the series hasn’t been a walk in the park for anyone involved, and it was bound to be full of bumps and by-products because a third game was never certain, so it makes sense that American Mc Gee tried to bring closure to his series back in 2015, with the project known as “Alice Otherlands”, made of artworks and two short animated films produced by Spicy Horse, funded via Kickstarter, as the owner of the Mc Gee’sAlice IP itself, EA, wasn’t interested in funding a third game, at all, so they had to pivot the project.

Fuck EA, btw. Just in case you needed more incentives to do so. You didn’t.

What came out of it where – mostly – the two aforementioned short films, Leviathan – A Journey Through Jules Verne’s Mind and A Night At The Opera.

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Oneechanbara Origin PS4 [REVIEW] | Blood Feuds, Zombies and Bikini Swords

So this finally went on sale on the PSN, i wanted to get to this sooner as it came out last year, but i refused to shell out 60 bucks for the whole enchillada since now D3 Publisher just releases these games digital only, and still tries to charge them the same.

Kinda, EDF 5 later got a physical release by Pqube, but i guess just because they already published a lot of EDF titles, and NIS – most likely – wasn’t interested in carrying this one westward like it did with Oneechanbara ZII Chaos.

But let’s get back on track, it’s the perfect time of the year after all.

This is the latest game in the series, but – as the title hints to – it’s not a prequel, but a remake-retelling of the first two Oneechanbara games, done to celebrate the 15^th anniversary of the series as a whole, i guess it was easier to do this instead of making a new one with new ridiculous looking scanty clad characters and ridiculous story.

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Resident Evil Umbrella Corps PS4 [REVIEW] | Dead On Arrival

Yeah, since the recent trailer for the new Resident Evil film reboot came out recently, it would be fine to look at something that even the most hardcore contrarian fans would agree upon, aka the deliberately forgotten Umbrella Corps, so bad Capcom didn’t even use the Resident Evil name on it.

I picked it up years later, for 3 bucks on the PSN, since the game received a physical release on consoles only in Japan, as in they sold a box with a manual, the OST on 2 CDS, but no disk, so there’s no point in importing it from Japan, even for collectors of retail releases, not that we’re gonna lose much when it’ll get unvailable to purchase.

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The Spooktacular Eight Cometh

Tis the season again, but due to the cursed nature of time itself, this year we’ll have a small horror retrospective for the “month of Halloween”, with 8 reviews sporadically released during the month. Hope you’ll like the selection of movies, and yes, there won’t a set release pattern, but we’ll start tomorrow, so look forward to that.

Parasite (2004) [REVIEW] | Not that one either

Not Bong Joon-ho’s. Not the Charles Band’s kind of Parasite either.

Not even the manga by Hitoshi Iwaaki, sadly.

With this one we’re reaching deep into the ass of forgotten crappy b-movies from the early 2000s, dumped among many of its brethren on streaming sites, i discovered it while browsing Amazon Prime Video, and i would wager it’s pretty much available on the service anywhere in the world.

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[EXPRESSO] Centipede Chaos ARCADE | Voxel Bug Blastin’

Atari in modern times is more garbage than it ever was, i don’t think i need to remind you of the previous incarnation of the company bearing this name actually wanting money for something called Alone In The Dark: Illumination.

Among other egregious crimes.

But what do you know, sometimes they manage to actually use the brands and franchises of old in new ways that aren’t unholy artifacts of shit, like actually making new arcade games of arcade series they own, like this Play Mechanix developed new Centipede game, Centipede Chaos.

Sporting a retro voxel graphics and a cabinet made for max 3 players, Centipede Chaos actually does things right and doesn’t try to reinvent Centipede into something else that’s not Centipede at all, it’s just straight, simple arcade shooter action with a decent soundtrack, fairly good looks and satisfying gameplay that stays true to the core formula, just throwing some limited use power-ups.

It’s a fun time even solo, but sadly it’s limited by own nature as a ticket redemption machine, meaning it’s fairly short even for an arcade Centipede game, as to not require a lot of work to get to the final boss worth the fabled 500/1000 tickets, but since this is arcade gameplay design, they throw in a dickish curveball by giving you one shot to kill the final boss, regardless of lives left or money put into the machine. Yep.

And that’s basically it, there are no extra modes or anything else to see, which it’s a bit disappointing considering the license used, but not too surprising due to the nature of redemption ticket arcade cabinets and the surrounding economy.

It’s just that kind of arcade money beast. Nothing that special overall, but definitely worth a go if you can find it in your neck of the woods.

Mega Snake (2007) [REVIEW] | Snake Of The Father

Things lead to things, and so i accidentally started out a Tibor Takacs mini-retrospective of sorts. It just kinda happened, i guess.

And sadly, no, he never made a TV movie about killer frogs or slugs to complete the “asian rock-paper-scissors” trifecta or the “Aesop fables’ bingo”, but he did direct this for SyFy the same year as Ice Spiders, and that would the last creature feature from him until Spiders 3D, as he preferred to do more disaster movies about tornadoes (regular ones) and christmas-family movies, which is – in a way – quite usual for older genre directors to end up doing in the later years.

But today is snakes, or at least one singular Mega Snake, and it’s a bit more interesting than Ice Spiders, more ridiculous but also less by the numbers, even if it’s another Nu Image joint shot in the Bulgarian capital for the same reasons already discussed in previous reviews, as it’s quite cheap.

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Arachnicide (2014) [REVIEW] | Going Digital On Yo Ass

This one is a bit special to me as an italian, as it fills a niche of monster movies that basically went extinct over time: the italian b-movie made for the international market.

Yeah, as you could ascertain from the poster (and the cast list) having almost exclusively italian actors on it, this is an italian movie, and if the look of the actors didn’t give it away (i’d argue it does, at the very least it’s obvious that these are not American), the english dub ABSOLUTELY will make that clear as day, and sadly you can’t watch it in italian with english subs, not only on the UK DVD release i imported, but apparently in all english languages releases on streaming as well.

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