As the long awaited Godzilla VS King Kong finally is set to it theathers pretty much everywhere (where theathers are open, not a given due to the pandemic), it’s time to celebrate, with a selection of giant monster movies reviews to showcase mostly lesser known titles or movies that nowadays are not as well known as they once were, despite still being remembered by genre fans.
Sorry it’s not a month of non-stop reviews this time. Enjoy!
I didn’t expect to write another one of these posts, because the novelty of the EX-Arm anime being unbelievable crap wore off and i just got accostumed to its foul, robotic and uncanny fare. Oh well, it will avoid me having to note down another batch of odd fuck up, animation errors, bad camera angles and stuff.
Or so i thought.
(Gif taken from Twitter, from a fellow stunned viewer)
Continua a leggere “EX-ARM, the oddly shaped Manos of fate, and the invisible off-screen truck of doom”
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.
Continua a leggere “Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity NSWITCH [REVIEW]”
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.
Bot Vice’s story is basically a nostalgic mash up of 80 and 90s, with the animesque character designs, the heroine sporting a tank top, attitude and a bionic arm with weapons (heck, the application’s icon is a reference to Alita Battle Angel), as she fights an army of animal themed cyborgs at the orders of the villain, ready to blow up the Nakatomi Building (and quote Terminator, Robocop, AND Beavis And Butthead, because), symbol of the decadent cyberpunk Bot City.
Surprisingly, alongside a nice retrostyled soundtrack you get voice acting for the cutscenes (which could have been shortene), and decent voice acting as well, fitting the whole “self-aware, shameless reference spouting” glut so typical of this sub-set of retro indie games. It comes off as cute, but thankfully Bot Vice it’s also a very tough “gallery shooter” in the style of Cabal and Wild Guns, as in you move around the bottom of the screen, shooting and rolling to avoid enemy fire, collecting special weapons with limited ammo and also using taking cover, which can be destroyed.
And it is tough, quite merciless, even at the beginning, so you’ll need to master moving around, rolling and using cover, as each level is a short but intense battle arena, culminanting in a boss fight. Oddly, the game puts an overall time limit for you to finish all stages in, despite the stages being short and not that numerous, even more as the game doesn’t detract the time spent re-trying stages.
The developer Dya Games managed to do a lot with the “gallery shooter” setup, making for an intense, short but sweet experience, quite challenging and with enough replay value, thanks to its arcade perfect setup, extra difficulties and a bunch of extra missions.
Recommended, even more when it goes on sale.
As much as i loved the demo of the game to bits, as much as i frigging love Hyrule Warriors… i’m not gonna review it just after launch. It’s not that i couldn’t, more a combination of “budget constraints” hitting hard this month (as for many, given the circumstances) and… the fact i really got around to get and play Breath Of The Wild in the last months (i held off for years hoping in a GOTY re-release of sorts), and i took my time with it, quite, so much i clearly won’t be able to finish it in time to review Age Of Calamity at the end of november. I just won’t.
Doesn’t help this has been clearly designed as a prequel instead of a spin-off where the story is the usual “portal bonanza” so we can have multiple characters and locations from different installments (and/or different timelines) of a series in Warriors style hack n slash format, and be enjoyed on its own, like Fire Emblem Warriors… even if that did casually drop some spoilers from FE Awakening. Just saying.
And even less reason to pre-order it since this time they didn’t bother to make any sort of Limited Edition with some tat. Boggles the mind why don’t bother to bring the Treasure Box limited edition outside of Japan, they did it before, hell, not even a nerfed version with just the scarf like we got with the first Hyrule Warriors in PAL territories.
So… have fun if you pre-ordered or are gonna get it on launch, the demo i feel it’s telling of the complete base game, we will soon find out!
It’s on my priority list, rest assured, i’m always planning more Warriors and musou games reviews, and something special is coming next month, so… look forward to it!
Developed By: Japan Studio
Players: 1-2
The very existence of this game is big “?”, not only because it came out 4 years after the first Knack, bamboozling the gaming community at large, given how widely hated and reviled the first game and its titular protagonist were. Again, it’s worth remembering that the fist Knack was both a critical and a financial failure, and didn’t do worse in revenue because it was a launch title, so there wasn’t much else to play at the time on the newborne console.
In a way, i can understand why someone at Sony did ultimately greenlit this, as an underdog story for this pitiable franchise (and main characters) would have been nice, and proof you can turn thing around with a sequel; it has been done before, after all, so why can’t Knack be redeemed of his sins?
There are many reasons for that, but let’s start from the beginning, meaning the story.
(review based on a playthrough on Normal, for review purposes)
Continua a leggere “Knack II [PS4] [REVIEW] | Knack Me Twice”
Developed By: Japan Studio
Players: 1-2
With the next-gen at the doors, it’s time to revisit an interesting series. YES, Knack.
Continua a leggere “Knack [PS4] [REVIEW] | War Bandicoot Of Ancient Garbage”
Played via the SNES – Nintendo Switch Online’s service.
Since i reviewed the last game in the Rushing Beat trilogy (as in, what became of it when Jaleco brought it over as The Peace Keepers), might as well do the second one, or – more appropriately – the western release of Rushing Beat Ran. But since it’s an emulated game, the old code for playing the japanese version works here as well.
And if you go to The Peace Keepers back to Brawl Brothers, you’ll find it hard to believe this one came before, because it’s noticeably the better game, right away it’s obvious, as absurd as it is.
That said, while the gameplay is decent, it apes Final Fight , yes, it also has 4 stages, each being twice as long than usual, long for the sake of it, without the enemy variety to fully sustain it (even for the era)… AND if the pacing wasn’t hampered by the maze-like sections. On paper they should spice things up, make the game less mindless, but they are just obtuse and stupid, as the level design doesn’t comunicate or hints at the “right way”, but its quite happy to still tell you to “GO=>” even when it will lead you into looping into the same ¾ nearly identical corridors.
So 15 minutes in and you will have to either keep trying to access the sewer’s doors in random order or go look up a guide if you wanna save some time. More baffling, this “maze crap”, while it bogs down an other decent – if flawed – game for the time, isn’t even a complete deal breaker, as it applies to just 2 specific sections of the whole game … and it wasn’t even in the Japanese version to begin with.
21XX A.D.
Capitalization of vaguely remembered decades run rampant in the dystopian future where a war against “ze machines” is unfolding. As humanity last stand, the last survivors of a suicide mission, with the main characters designs clearly – “just because we like it” – made to evoke Appleseed’s Dunen and Briareos, you’ll have to attack the enemy HQ in a desperate, last bout of run n gun action.
From the developers of Oniken and Odallus comes a surprisingly good retro 2D run n gun, one that not only evokes the 16 bits days of yore via the usual (but also quite crisp) retro aesthetic, but also because it’s basically Contra III (the weapons will make it even more obvious), with an evasive roll manouver and a Metal Slug-style close quarters knife attack added for good measure. But still, a very good recreation of Contra with enough in it to not just make it a “clone”, made by people that know what to keep from the classics, and where concede to modernity in order to avoid fidelity over quality.
It’s a 6 missions/level affair, but they’re well designed, quite packed and keep the tradition of changing things up with motorcycle sequences, mechsuits, faux-3D shooting sequences, etc. It’s the kind of game that is by design not particularly long, but it’s also very challenging, hard but never soulcrushing difficult, you always feel you can win if you try again, learn and improve. It also gets the arcade type of replayability perfectly, and you’re given various difficuly settings that add or remove “comodities” suck as saving or extra lives. Add in extra playable characters, boss rush mode, and even options for speedrun, and i really can’t recommend this enough.
Shoutout to my buddy Chaosknight69 on Backloggery for recommending this one.
Loved it!
Wise Cafe (International) 