For disclosure, i pre-ordered the super duper deluxe edition of the game that came with the big Lim & Luffy figure, and the expansion content also included in the Deluxe Edition version, so i didn’t cash out extra to access the DLC story expansion for One Piece Odyssey that released in May 2023, Reunion Of Memories. Otherwise, to buy the DLC normally the MSRP is 25 bucks.
Keep that in mind because it will come back later in the review, but before beginning i will preface by saying while i will keep this DLC review spoiler free… i’d recommend either reading my full review of the base game or finish the game yourself before reading, because some plot details regarding the finale are simply impossible not to touch upon.
One Piece might not be a franchise that you would immediatly associate with RPGs, but like Dragon Ball its surprising how the genre is represented in their many videogame iterations, especially if we’re talking about older systems, and even more so if we’re talking about Japan-only releases, as the first One Piece videogame was a RPG on the old black-n-white WonderSwan, and more came out for both the Wonderswan family of consoles as wells as for Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and even on the original Playstation.
But sadly most western fans are not familiar with some of these quirky GBC One Piece RPGs where (among other things) the Straw Hats are turned into animals, no, most likely you’ve yearned for years for a localized One Piece RPG, only to find out that it exists, One Piece: Romance Dawn, and that it’s sadly a very shit game, even worse as it’s a port from PSP to 3DS, and a cheap one too, because knowing this it makes all sense for the game to look that much like old ass.
I reviewed that one as well, but today we’re here holding hope to finally retire this status and have a big budget mainstream RPG that can make the series some justice instead of wishing they wouldn’t have bothered to begin with, with the long anticipated One Piece Odissey, developed by ILCA and published by Namco Bandai (who else?) in January 2023 to celebrate the series’ 25th anniversary.
Available pretty much on all the platforms, old gen and new…. but not the Nintendo Switch.
For the record, this review is based on the PS4 version played on a PS4 Pro.
The new DC super hero film after the “MADE IN HEAVEN” treatment the continuity received via The Flash movie, Blue Beetle is here in theathers, and i’m so not familiar with this character at all, but the trailer gave me Deadpool-ish vibes, and more specifically of Guyver, as we have a sentient symbiotic suit that organicaly fuses with his host and gives it the powers.
Heck, here as the well the suit/armor is a relic from an ancient alien civilization, so the comparison is not that outlandish.
The plot involves a recently graduated teenager, Jaime Reyes, that while becoming disillusioned about his future work opportunities, unadvertedly get his hand on the Scarab, a powerful alien biomechanical armor that grants him enhanced exoskeleton and powers, turning him into the superhero known as “Blue Beetle”. But obviously, other, less well intentioned individuals also known about the Scarab and want its array of weapons and abilities for themselves…
In a way Blue Beetle is not what i expected, as in the titular hero is not “Deadpool but as teen The Guyver” personality wise, and it’s not trying to be edgy or grimdark, quite the opposite, as it definitely kid-friendly and plays a lot in the “latino family” theme for that, which isn’t original but its still quite fun, thanks to the endearing characters (especially Jaime’s family) and honest emotional moments they bring alongside some good laughs.
They do help make you care despite the very bog standard plot and type of origin story which offers nothing we haven’t seen before, and sadly this kinda applies to the Blue Beetle himself, which isn’t a very interesting hero in terms of either personality or powers or anything really, despite the good concept behind the Scarab suit.
Still, quite decent and very pleasing, enjoyable superhero film.
As one of that quite enjoyed the first The Meg (believe it or not at the time it had some very split reception from genre fans), i was waiting for its sequel arrive in theathers, pretty giddy about it too, though honestly shark movie fans nowadays pretty much HAVE to make do with anything in terms of theathrical releases.
After all, we are in such an ironic drought that even The Asylum has to commission their mockbusters to the Polonia Bros, so yeah, i’m quite glad we get more “megalomachia” as Jason Statham once again dons the eco-warrior kick ass action hero character whose name i honestly forgot, not that you’re gonna call him that (leave to a side-villain to scream his name when confronting him), and this time he ventures with a new submarine alongside his old and new sealab companions, with the idea to go even further below to where the “megs” prosper, but accidents happen as they also stumble upon an illegal underwater mining operations, and explosions let many of the deep sea creatures reach the surface and start causing the mess, including a giant octopus and what are basically abyss deep “varan-raptors”, frigging dinosaurs.
While the first one was fun, this one is arguably better, with more variety of locations, creatures and set pieces, since we don’t spend half (or all) the movie in the usual high tech underwater lab where the megalodons are kept, but we quickly move to the abyss trench and its peculiar fauna, the mining company installation, even some tropical resort island, and we even get monster vs monster action.
Honestly Meg 2: The Trench has pretty much everything you’d want from one of these dumb ass big budget shark/dinosaur films, very entertaining, with enjoyable characters and abundant over the top action.
If we’re talking about comics, we all known where Pinocchio comes to mind, though indirectly, as “The God Of Manga” Osamu Tezuka was inspired by Disney’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s book, and wanted to create a “reverse 21th Centhury Pinocchio”, a robotic boy already created to be as close as possible to perfection. I really don’t need to introduce Astro Boy, do i?
Tezuka would eventually do his own manga adaptation of Pinocchio, which would be interesting, but maybe too obvious, so we’re not reviewing that or Astro Boy.
Nope, we’re going for something far more recent, and pay visit to what i feel it’s an underestimated country in terms of comics, South Korea, that while it did get inspired by Japan’s anime/manga style and legacy, managed to create something distinct or similar but possessing its own personality and soul, dubbed as “manwha” for shorthand.
Though one could be forgiven to think that mostly it’s a matter of where its coming from instead of the content itself, given we had many distincly “manga” series come out from european or non-japanese artists (an easy example is Tony Valente’s Radiant), and the more successful/publicized often are aimed to the same age demographic as shonen mangas, or belong to popular genre trends.
But for each “God Of High School”, we have more unique work, like Hyung Min-woo’s western horror themed Priest, inspired by Monolith Productions FPS game BLOOD.
While a number of manwha series were and are given print editions in many countries (including Italy and France), the most common way to consume and access manwha in both its country of origin and international is “the internetz” and sites like Webtoon.
To celebrate the second return of Futurama on TV (even if i’m not expecting much given how these modern resurrections-continuations of beloved animated TV series-franchises, but who knows, i’m remaining cautiously semi-optimistic), time to take a look at its forgotten – and by now quite rare – PS2/X-Box tie-in videogame, simply called “Futurama”.
And what it might as well be the only Futurama videogame, since there’s not much to say about the mobile only Futurama: Worlds Of Tomorrow, besides it being a cheap and shallow cash grab akin to many other free-to-play tycoon simulators, like Simpsons Tapped Out, maybe a little more complete since it had a combat system in it from the start, but still, mostly a shallow time waster very heavy on aggressively try to make you fork out cash for anything of “substance” available.
Then again, it’s not like you can play it anymore, the servers were closed for real (as in they were announced to be closing in 2022) this year on the 9th of March.
To celebrate the release of the long awaited Pikmin 4, i’m revisiting Pikmin 3 in its Deluxe port (that does include all its previously release DLC) on Switch, after originally beating on Wii U (yes, i was one of those who owned the thing when it was yet “current gen”) years ago.
I could have chosen Hey Pikmin!, but i haven’t gotten around to play that yet, and after devouring the Pikmin 4 demo, i’m willing to get some proper Pikmin fix, so Pikmin 3 is it.
An introduction feels kinda superflous since by this point in time Pikmin is arguably a mainstay Nintendo series, not one of the most famous, but far from niche and obscure, yet i guess i could be utterly brief in describing them as a floreal theme space adventure-RTS hybrid where you control one of many “potato shaped” humanoids that explore space for some noble cause or desperate struggle, and crashland into planets where they get saved and helped by a weird breed of “planimals” called Pikmins, which become your little army, ready to pounce on enemies, destroy obstacles, gather resources and basically depending on your decisions to prosper alongside you.
Pikmin 3’s plot follows a new squad of characters (a trio this time around) that hail from planet Koppai and are on a mission to locate a new planet to combat the increasing caresty going on, as they keep scanning planets to no avail, until, at last, they find one that’s full of food, but their ship mysteriously crashlands, ejecting them in various parts of the planet.
Along the way to reunite and gather food resources with the help of the Pikmins, they also need to locate Captain Olimar (the protagonist of the first Pikmin) for a engine key, and stumble upon Louie (introduced as Olimar’s assistant in Pikmin 2) along the way, because this is also a direct sequel, oddly enough.
Robocroc left me feeling very meh and mildly bored, so Roboshark would have to pick up any pace in order to better. Or worse.
Regardless, it was originally one of the many shark movies making their debut on SyFy during the second annual Sharkenado Week of 2015 on the channel, and like most of you would have already guessed, indeed, it’s not a sequel at all, just shares the concept of something cybernetic getting into contact with predator animals and turning them into robotic-cyborg version of themselves.
But honestly the circumstances of the movie’s release it’s a perfect framing in what climate Roboshark came out, because it was indeed a time where everyone wanted to be in on the joke, ride the meta self-awareness sea train but deliberately doing it WITHOUT a “Don!”, engineering itself to be made fun of, to have people online live-tweet the shit out of it, to make you look at the freak, hoping that word of mouth and horrible reviews would make for unorthodox promotional material, because making that view counter go up is the only reason to make the thing in the first place.
Police officer Murphy is shot down while confronting a criminal gang, but his body is found by a brood of crocodiles living in Detroit’s sewer system. They nurse him back to health, let him partake of their radioactive flesh, which helps him grow back the lost limbs, and eventually he reemerges into the public eye as the hybrid man-croc vigilante Robocroc.
This is NOT the plot of Robocroc, not that the actual one has anything to do with the movie spoofed in the title. It would took to much time and effort, and this is just not the way these post-Sharkenado low budget killer animal flicks do it. It must be stupid, but within the itsby bitsy budgets, which overtime seem to have gotten smaller and smaller, closer and closer to the “Polonia-sphere”.
So it also means this has more in common with Metal Gear Rising Revengeance than Robocop, as the plot involves a missile launch that goes awry, with the ejected part landing in a zoo, nanomachines coming out of it and into a female crocodile named Stella that happened to be nearby the capsule’s crash site, and these slowly turn her into a cyborg bent on eating his way through the special forces called into the enclosure, then escaping the facility to feed on random people fishing in a lagoon, stopping on dry land to feast on people guilty of driving quad bikes, and finally going for the big feast of a nearby aqua park full of teens partying.
A documentary by Svedish director Erik Gandini (Videocracy) about a potential future where work is even further delegated to machines and automated in some fashion, while discussing the philosophical ramifications of a labor-less society and analizing the various realities around the world, from the Sud Corean culture of overwork as a badge of honor, to the unique case of Kuwait where people are handsomely paid to basically play pretend office work, passing by the testimony of an Amazon delivery driver employee, among others.
Relevant questions are asked, with various figures ranging from foreign ministries to philosophers like Noam Chomsky himself, average people with rents to pay and wealthy heirs alike, and as expect not many answers are given, since the topic at hand encompasses a lot of different realities and views on the subject of labor, how or if providing basic income for everyone without a job is the solution it seem, this documentary never wanted (or wanted to pretend) it could deliver definitive, simplistic solutions to complex problems of our age.
Problem is that despite its intentions and it being a very recent release, at the end it feels kinda slapdash, myopic and kinda outdated, as way too much of this 80 minutes documentary over feature takes from people that are willing to say “Hitler was efficient, can’t deny that away” on camera, rich or privileged in some manner, never properly looks into topic as the NEET percentage in Italy and Greece, ignoring the internet angle all together (so don’t expect mentions of stuff like IA “art”, despite chaggering of how this work-less future would give more time for exploring creative pastimes, etc), sometimes going for gross political indifference, or repeating some vague fears that one could have aired verbatim if this was made 10 years ago.
Wise Cafe (International) 