[EXPRESSO] A Working Man (2025) | Baba Yogurt

I know what you’re thinking, what everyone was thinking after seeing the trailer: why isn’t this The Beekeeper 2?! I mean, i’m sure there’s a sequel on the way for that one, but this plain isn’t, it’s just another Jason Staham movie where he’s some ex-soldier or super assassin that has retired but he’s pulled back into his older life of violence due to some criminals hurting someone close to him, etc.

This time around he’s a construction worker and they kidnap the daughter of the family that owns and operates the construction company he works for, so he swears to get her back… which would be fine but he also has his own biological daughter to look after, as his wife is dead and the grandpa believes Jason Staham (again, not bothering to remember his character’s name, nobody will) isn’t a good parent. His quest brings him to find out a human trafficking ring, piss off the russian mafia, and accidentally become a John Wick-esque figure to them….

Honestly it feels like they mashed two scripts together, now only due to the plot feeling like it should be less convoluted (it’s not complicated) as the new characters that keep showing up just increasingly feel like they should be in a completely different Jason Staham movie, even more as they keep getting more cartoonish, like the foppish pervert that “bought” the girl just missing a Dracula cape, or the psycho super assassins under the big russian mafia honcho giving off strong vibes of videogame minibosses.

It’s just kinda weird, untentionally funny, and yes, makes the whole thing longer than it needs to.

It’s not awful or the worse, but let’s be honest, it’s just a stopgag release until The Beekeeper 2 or Fast And Furious X Part 2 come out.

Rabio Lepus/Rabbit Punch (Arcade Archives) NSWITCHDDL [REVIEW] | Cho Usagi

This year we won’t review crappy horror no-budget slockfests about killer rabbits, i’m quite fed up with killer easter bunnies and we can done those next year, anyway.

So we’re instead digging up a fairly obscure 2d spaceship shooter/side scrolling shoot ‘em up from the late 80s arcade resurgence, and as i guess it’s almost mandatory for forgotten games of this genre, its only home console port was on the PC Engine… in Japan, North America did get this released in arcades, localized as Rabbit Punch, but we Europeans never did in any shape, not until the recent Arcade Archives rerelease, in this case the Switch one (it’s also available on PS4).

The plot is fairly simple and starts off the “ol’ fashioned” (as in “putting cats in bags and throwing them in the river to drown” ye old fashioned) royal kidnapping by a mechanical army of space aliens that come down to the peaceful planet of Bunnyland, taking awat the rabbit themed king (he has a rabbit onesie), the princess and her sister (which are just Playboy bunny girls… to commit to the theme, yes), so it’s up to the rabbit shaped mecha unit to save the monarchy.

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Demolition Girl PS2 [REVIEW] | Attack Of The 50 Foot Dutch Wife

Tamsoft today might be working on big licenses like the Captain Tsubasa game they did for Namco Bandai, or the upcoming new Bleach fighting game, but i will never forget that they cut their teeth and for most of their career they were hacking out a lot of budget games for D3 Publisher, eventually making franchises with Oneechanbara, curating various hack n slash spin-offs of series like Neptunia (also, the cancelled Hinomaruko project, i remember) and working on pretty much all Senran Kagura titles in some fashion, even the later spin-offs.

But today we’re reminiscing (this is a rewrite, FIY) about one of their absolute worst titles ever, with Demolition Girl, one of the many titles they cranked out for PS2 in D3’s Simple 2000 Series, some already reviewed in these pages like Shogun’s Blade, others that might be worst revisiting and talking about again, as with the horrendous Deep Water (AKA The Daikaiju) and Zombie Attack, or freshly feature here, stuff like “Taxi Rider” or “Pink Pong”, i feel like i should clarify yes, they were brought over in NA and-or PAL territories with those titles for real, i’m not altering them for a lark.

As to why this one over so many shitty games from that era of the company… you’ll soon see.

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[EXPRESSO] Awaria STEAM | Ghostsmoochers Inc.

After taking the internet by storm with “Johnny Bravo goes to hell for a demon girl harem” AKA Helltaker, vanripper is back with a new game on Steam, Awaria, sporting a new original soundtrack by Mittsies, and being more of a bullet hell- action puzzle game thing “about working in a haunted maintance tunnel”, which yes, means ghost girls to talk, interact and sometimes kiss, though, the Steam page content warning makes it clear by saying “it’s all tame”. It is. Pretty cute designs, still.

It also has the same business model as Helltaker, as in it’s free, but to support the developer you can buy the optional DLC as a “thank you”, which also nets you a digital artbook and a Babezki (a kind of Polish muffin) recipe, but again, you can also unlock the same content in the in-game gallery.

Gameplay is pretty frantic, and has you move your character about to collect items, activate item printers and interact with broken generators, requiring certain items to be fixed in a limited time, while avoiding the ghost girls attacking you, as you die in one hit, a drone will take a hit for you and respawn every 10 seconds, which are lot more than they sound given you’ll need to be constantly zipping around the level.

It’s a 2 hours affair, a bit more if you want to finish the game on Hard difficulty and unlock everything, but it’s quite intense, the gameplay is easy to learn but actually challenging and rewarding, the final boss levels this time around are better designed (as is the game overall compared to Helltaker), Mittsies soundtrack is another banger, pity for the sometimes laggy performance, but it maybe be my old rig.

Once again, i highly recommend playing it and supporting everyone involved.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember #39: Dinosaur From The Deep (1993)

Don’t worry, this one has dinosaurs in it.

Most likely, anyway.

Didn’t think about that being a required feature, but that’s why you should do some research first, just in case, otherwise you get duped into watching a cannibal movie, somehow.

No my friends, this time we’re in for some semi-notorious lower case Z-grade filet from France, with Norbert Moutier’s Dinosaur From The Deep.

After all, the success of Jurassic Park wasn’t an USA thing only, at all, so here comes a low budget film done to capitalize on Spielberg’s dino opus and hopefully trick enough people (especially younger dinosaur enthusiasts) into renting or buying it on VHS, only to realize it’s basically a “shot in shitteo”/”home video film” of French people with no budget.

What were they gonna in 1993/4, look up the metascore on sites that didn’t exist yet, or required anyone in the household NOT to use the phone?

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Ye Old Remaster Wsihslsti (for Saint Nick)

A bonus round, meant for the previous “draught”, but it still isn’t Christmas, as Mr. Wright would point out, so enjoy!

Since the industry is experiencing the inevitable resource creep and is eventually forced right now to reap what they sow, as the new consoles “have no games” because mainstream big budget videogames have pigeonholed themselves into a situation where is too expensive and takes too long to even make one of these (emulating the big budget cinema industry they wanted so much to be to a tee), remasters have been the way too go.

Old crap with new paint or fixes to the rope itself takes still less than making a new game from scratch, is easy as you can cater to the evergrowing nostalgia market (due to the gaming populace aging because natural entropy is a thing and your flesh will fail you, eventually) longing for ages long gone, be it the Atari early days or the mascote platformer craze of the 90s, you can safely bet on an already established name, and the market is big enough that even obscure shit like Felix The Cat videogames of yore and Bubsy can get a collection with improvements, quality of feature, and shady publishers like Piko Interactive can publish in 2022 (on Steam at the moment, with console releases coming) a somehow buggier, worse looking version of Glover than when it launched on Nintendo 64. In 1998.

Be it collections of enhanced ports or remasters that just update the graphical side of things, the public craves and buys these for a variety of reasons, publishers are more than happy as it cheaper all together, so in the spirit of the time i will be dotting down my own wishlist of remasters/ports/re-releases that i would like to see.

Order is casual, btw.

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Elves (1989) [REVIEW] | Nazicest Gobbo-Grizzly Conspiracy

This is a quasi-well known one, it has a certain reputation, but i’m willing to cover it anyway because it’s still one of the strangest fuckin horror film i’ve ever seen, it’s still unique, as in “who the hell comes up with this stuff” kind of unique, sure as shit there’s nothing quite as absurd, even with the plenty batshit delirium that comes with vintage holiday horror films, Christmas related or not.

It’s just not everyday you get a movie about Christmas elves that’s also about Nazis, has a demonic conspiracy to breed the Aryan “Master Race” which involves incest and blood rituals, and just calling it “Elves” it’s a great Trojan-horsing manouver, how the fuck can one expect this level of obscene and absurd with such a simple, direct title?

It’s a deranged mish mash in many ways than you both and would not assume, because you’d expect a creature feature movie following in the vein of Gremlins, like Critters, Ghoulies, Munchies… and to an extend that is correct, as we’ll see later.

Strap in, because we’re in for quite the ride, one that Dan Haggerty (of The Life and Times Of Grizzly Adams’ fame) wasn’t happy to partake in one bit, despite being the protagonist, as sometimes you can almost see his genuine stunned yet unamused, baffled reaction to the dialogues he’s forced to hear coming from the other actors’ mouths.

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The Super Ninja (1984) [REVIEW] | “Do You Remember, The 21th Night Of September?” Ninjas

Since this is also kind of a “ninja month” for me, time to dwelve deep back into the cut n paste ninjaexploitation we love to discuss here so much…. or is it really this time?

I mean, the movie it’s called The Super Ninja( but you can also find it titled as “Ninja Force”), it does have a different and confirmed director name on both IMDB and the Hong Kong Movie Database, it does fit the bill of a primo subject for the “Godfrey Ho cut-n-paste” treatment… but it’s NOT mostly made out of a different yet similar Taiwanese or Korean chrime thriller, there’s no stock footage lifted.

So, did i make a mistake, assuming this was another Godfrey Ho/Joseph Lai joing when it’s a completely random, stock footage-free ninja flick from the era that just happened to exist and get paired with IFD Films International’s output of super cheap ninja regigs of older, random asian films about crime, guns, or whatever

Because it was distributed under the other company name by Ho and Lai, Filmark International… and then just watching will trigger every flight or fight response by ninja film buffs, because it looks, feels and it’s even edited like the cut-n-paste colored ninja collages, but there’s no recognizable name in the credits that would make the connections made sense and obvious.

Then i found the name “Thomas Tang” attached as producer even in the “recent” italian DVD release by Freak Video, and all made perfect sense, because that is one of Godfrey Ho many film pseudonyms, stuff like the beloved “Elton Chong”, BUT that credit was just added in the international releases because – as already said – Filmark distributed the thing.

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[EXPRESSO] Metal Slug Awakening iOS/PC | Heavy Gaching Gun

Finally someone decided to show its face globally, with a Metal Slug game that’s actually a run-n-gun shooter and not some tower defense or strategy-lite card thingie, Metal Slug Awakening (previously announced as Metal Slug Code J and available for years in SEA markets), aka the closest thing to a new, proper mainline Metal Slug title we’re gonna get with the new SNK.

In an unsurprising yet fitting fashion, it’s very similar to Contra Returns – also on mobile smartphones – not too surprising since it’s from the same developer, Timi (which also worked on Mega Man Dive X), it has an original storyline about a pharaoh and 4 gems, nothing worth committing to memory, as is the kinda rubbish and arguably random english voice acting.

I think they did a decent job at translating the art style to 3D models, though the new character designs really reek of “chinese gacha shit”, they do.

That aside, gameplay is traditional Metal Slug, with actually quite decent touch controls and some controller support (more for the Steam version), some concessions to modernity and a LOT of concessions to mobile gacha freemium design, from exps books and materials for upgrades, multiple tiers of rarity for everything, mini and normal bosses being more spongy so to incentivate using a weapon/character that inflicts more damage or status effects to certain types of enemies.

It’s not bad and the levels are new, but both level designs and foes dip heavily in nostalgia, so expected to see A LOT of old faces from the series’ long history.

Shame the F2P bullshit add various layers of faux complexity to deal with, and can make the difficulty fluctuate heavily.

It’s worth a try, but you actually wanted a proper Metal Slug 8, this ain’t, nor was ever gonna be.

[EXPRESSO] Metal Slug Attack Reloaded STEAM | Freemium Free

So, yeah, this was unexpected, not unprecedented, but definitely unexpected, especially due to how quickly modern SNK put out and closed these free-to-play Metal Slug spin-offs.

But yeah, now the second tower defense Metal Slug title (Metal Slug Defense was a bit too old and kinda left unsopported for years, so it made sense to bring this one out of the freezer) is back as a 10 bucks single purchase, no microtransactions, timers or limited energy to play, none of that.

I’ve actually played quite a bit of the game when it was free-to-play on iOS, so it’s both kinda cool and weird to see it back as an actual game, you know, the ones you pay once and are actually meant to be played without the serpent of Eden asking for your credit card info.

I find it’s actually playable now, as the original release was notable worse in fighting anyone that didn’t wanna pay up, incredibly aggressive, a lot worse than Metal Slug Defense was, too.

Still, it’s a fairly mindless tower defense title, somewhat enjoyable despite very little strategy and little depth to it (which was also true of Metal Slug Defense, btw).

That said, it’s not a remake and it serves as a testament that nothing is actually free in free-to-play, because the design is untouched, meaning that the game is still unbalanced, heavy on difficulty spikes and grinding, holdovers that make littles sense without the F2P monetization, like the gacha to recruit units for which you’re given a fuckton of what was the “premium currency”.

Kinda odd as they also kept in the PvP online battles, but i guess why not, it’s not like they were gonna even try to balance this thing, it would have required pretty much making a new game from scratch.

P.S.: This review was made after playing the game a little after launch, pointing this out because this review has been (coincidentally) posted just before SNK announced in late November a vague free update coming in the future.