[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.

The Callisto Protocol PS4 [REVIEW] | Ape Espace

When a beloved new IP is run into the ground and compromised by EA, that tried to squeeze Call Of Duty money out of a horror franchise and even had microtransactions inserted in the last mainline title…. seeing the publisher basically give up and do nothing with it for years is frustrating, even more so when the finale was followed up by a DLC retconning the ending.

And the inevitable homicide by EA of Visceral Games, after the routine danse macabre of shuffling them into developing completely different games of a completely different genre, lamenting how the star shaped peg doesn’t fit into the durian shaped hole, was the cherry on the corpse sundae.

So of course this leaves a specific hole in the market for “spiritual sequels” to fill, and mind you, this was announced before EA announced their own remake of the first Dead Space.

And on paper, The Callisto Protocol sounded exactly what fans of the series like me wanted, a “fuck you” to the vampiric publisher that wasn’t serving an audience starved for that action-horror sci fi dish, done outside of their control, with even some of the original creators of the series involved.

This is the kind of underdog story that we wanna see, as apparently everyone hates EA, and only EA for some stupid reasons, but alas this is not quite what actually happened.

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Pygmalion (manga) [REVIEW] | Ore Wa Cyprus Ou Ni Naru!

It’s not exactly encouraging to see the boxset for a 3 volume horror manga called “Pygmalion”… having on the back cover a pig amusement park mascotte drenched in blood.

(yeah, i bought this on a whim without doing any research while visiting my local comic book shop)

Not random per sé, as the story IS about a rampage by mascottes during the National Mascotte Festival in Japan, after a series of weird announcements that trigger the suited creatures to go on a massacre, and Keigo is separated in the following chaos from his younger brother Makoto…

Still, i feel a refresher about the myth of Pygmalion is needed, just in case.

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The Spooktacular Eight #19: Dead Trigger (2017)

Generic zombie movie with Dolph Lungren?

What if it’s THAT and also a live action adaptation of a videogame you’ve never heard of?

YAY.

Even YAY-ier when the videogame is a generic as hell mobile free-to-play smarthphone FPS, generic but popular enough to get a sequel… and a live action film adaptation.

There is a bit of wit in the premise as yes, there’s the usual zombie apocalypse, but it leads to the government making a videogame about zombies in order to recruit the top-players for real life zombie massacring military exploits, as they need to cut through the undead hordes to reach some scientists that may have found a cure for the zombie virus.

So it’s kinda, a bit, kinda like Ender’s Game, but way stupider, and also not that original as i’m pretty sure there’s at least another movie made earlier, i think just called Hunting Grounds (my UK DVD release has it retitled as Zombie Hunters”), with the same “recruiting the gamers for fighting the supernatural menace”, though without embarassing Twitch channels.

I still have to got around to that so i can’t say for sure but then again need i recall the 2009 film called “Gamer”? Let’s just say the Dead Trigger film it’s not entirely original, regardless of how you slice it, who cares, i doubt many even knew Dead Trigger was originally a game to begin with.

And the “let’s recruit people that play VR games” angle really isn’t used in any interesting or significant way, only to get some stereotypes and random ass characters into the suicide squad in question, it becomes quickly showed aside because the movie it’s more interested in being an off brand Resident Evil wanna-be, and just incredibly generic as hell in all regards for a zombie flick.

Hordes of zombies that are not silent somehow managing to sneak up from nowhere to the back of an elite trained soldier when the script wants to kill him off (or bite him so we can have him sacrifice himself by being blown up with the zombies or some self-sacrifice shit)? Check.

Dumbass, stupid and flavorless characters? The inevitable, seen coming from miles away double-cross at the hand of the evil CEO of the multicorporation set on betraying everyone and sell the potential cure for the virus? A super-mutant fruit of the very same company’s experiments?

For a bonus round, there’s also a priest that believes the undead are a punishment from God, just to completely fill the cliches bingo card, the cornucopia of stock conflicts, betrayals and predictable plot twist that you can easily all imagine and easily guess with a high rate of success.

Acting is mediocre, with even the top named actors in it just doing the bare average, at best, the other ones not so much, but at times the special effects, even some of the gore is quite decent, honestly it’s not a bad production but most of the time it’s hard to forget you’re watching basically a lesser version in every regard of Paul. W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil live action films.

those weren’t really good movies either, but this is the bootleg version, the one with less money, lesser actors, lesser anything, really, making Dead Trigger the subpar movie you’d expect it to be, just subpar, not atrocious but one i would skip still, since it’s so tiresome in its predictability too.

Hilariosly though it ends with a cliffhanger ending, like yeah, mate, it’s a miracle this one got made, Dead Trigger 2 with Jason Statham isn’t gonna happen, not unless you get a lot more money on the project or if by the time it happens Staham won’t be senile, bored and/or strapped for cash enough.

Resident Evil: Death Island (2023) [REVIEW] | Code Vendetta X

Since it’s still summer-ish and we won’t have time for it this october, i feel it’s time for me to complete (until a new one comes out) my coverage of the Resident Evil CG films, after tackling the Netflix CG series and then doing a retrospective on the previous CG animated films.

From the title i’d assume its either based on Code Veronica or RE Revelations 2, but nope, there are echoes of that, but this is actually a direct sequel of the last, Resident Evil: Vendetta.

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Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey 2 (2024) [REVIEW] | Farewell To The Flush

I was gonna delay this review… but i really don’t wanna have to put this one on The Spooktacular Eight (never gonna happen) this year or having to deal with it in 2025, so might as well catch up to the “Twisted Childhood Universe” and see how the story continues.

And i do genuinely mean “continues” because the first one didn’t so much ended as simply stopped, so half-assed was even in sequel-baiting itself, i guess because there was no more money to make it 90 minutes long, those mask really ate into the budget, or maybe not.

So yeah, in a stupid way there was even more reason to continue a story they didn’t finish telling properly (as if they didn’t planned like this, but whatever), so Blood and Honey 2 – i’m gonna use this short-hand from now – continues the merry tale that someone had make into a slasher, with Christopher Robin surviving and coming back to civilization to tell everyone of what happened…. with the expected and logical result of anyone – aside from some of its close friends and family – believing that he has gone cuckoo and maybe even murdered those girls himself.

Regardless, the incident is eventually dubbed as the “Hundred Acre Massacre” and they even make an horror film adaptation out of it, ruining Christopher Robin’s medical career and reputation even worse, basically making him a reject, a “pooh pariah” if you will.

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[EXPRESSO] Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) | Like Deets, Like That

I was a bit wary, given the current fever for having legacy sequels of every conceivable IP (fuck, even Twister got one), but i was pleasantly surprised with a sequel that (mostly) is Burton in peak form and demonstrates these kind of follow-ups can actually be done quite well.

The plot sees the Deets family return to their old home in the city of Winter River, after Lydia, while recording an episode of her supernatural TV talk show, sees the ghost of Betelgeuse in the audience (that caused trouble for them 36 years ago) and to hold the funeral for her father, Charles.

Lydia brings along her estranged daughter, Astrid, whom stumbles upon the diorama in the attic and eventually evokes Betelgeuse, also in need of help as he’s now being chased by his psycho undead ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci)….

And here actually lies the biggest issue in the film, it’ s as if they feared there were never gonna make Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so they crammed one or two or three too many subplots in there without elating the runtime, meaning some feel (and are) a bit undercooked, like the entire one about Betelgeuse’s ex-undead wife feels like it should receive more screentime, but doesn’t.

Despite the slightly messy plot, it’s actually pretty fun, the style is immaculate Burton (still using excellent practical effects and stopmotion animation, too), they even go a bit wilder with the graphic jokes since they now can, the tone and humour perfectly match the original and are still strong, even if more retrò, more quaint than actually edgy by now (which was kind to be expected, to be blunt), and the cast it’s great, for both returning and new characters, especially Keaton that seems to have never left the set of the 1988 film.

[One Piece: Side Pieces | Retrospective] Monsters: 103 Mercies, Dragon, Damnation (2024) [REVIEW]

To kick off this little retrospective about One Piece spin-offs and One Piece related stuff, let’s talk about Monsters: 103 Mercies, Dragon, Damnation, a short anime film adaptation of a 1994 Eiichiro Oda’s one-shot manga, simply – and terribly – titled “Monsters”, though most fans of One Piece have most likely read it when it was later recompiled in “Wanted!”, a volume collection of Oda’s pre-One Piece one shot mangas.

Apparently it was previously adapted in 2021… as a voice comic audio thing, but again, it was a “voice comic” affair, something made as part of the celebration for the series’ publishing its 100^th volume, so this 2024 anime adaptation for streaming services like Netflix might as well be the first.

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Zombie Shark AKA Shark Island (2015) [REVIEW] | #thesharksix

Of course this was already done, i would say i’m surprised it took so long for the obvious idea to actually materialize, but then again it came out in the mid 2010s, an all time high for cheap ass shark movies unafraid to lower the bar even further, this time with the brilliant “ “what if but zombies?” concept, but – again – we never had this specific flavor of shark movie, so whatever.

As even a blind rock could guess by now, it’s a TV movie for SyFy (retitled as Shark Island in some releases), and it’s from director Misty Talley, actually her first shark attack flick, before Ozarks Sharks/ Summer Shark Attack and Mississippi River Sharks (both previously featured here), but also starring Jason London, whom i guess he’s “shark movie borgeusy” since he also shows up in Dam Sharks, for one.

So we have all the ingredients for a mildly fun timewaster… and the result it’s exactly that.

I could end the review here, but lets talk about the plot, despite there being no real need to, since Zombie Shark it’s exactly what it says on the tin and what you’d think it would be.

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Samurai Maiden PS4 [REVIEW] #meleemay

I’ve been waiting to cover this one for a while, but i had to wait for it to go on a decent discount, since D3 Publisher went extra crazy and asked 50 bucks (70 for the Deluxe Edition that includes all DLCs, mostly costumes and music from other D3 franchise like Bullet Girls) for what was obviously another budget game of theirs.

Having played all Oneechanbara games and waiting for the Namco Bandai owned company to finally announce the western release for EDF 6 (which was supposed to be out this spring but was eventually delayed to late July 2024), i did want to play Samurai Maiden earlier, but the absurd price really held me off, i’m not fucking paying 70 bucks for a complete edition of a digital only release of a D3 Publisher budget hack n slash anime game.

Curiously, despite the publisher involved and the premise of hack n slash action using a japanese anime high school girl, this is NOT the fanservicey fest you’d expected, i guess after the “prude crusade” Sony went (for whatever reason, since they were the main platform for most Senran Kagura games before), niche titles like this had to tippy toe on their tits to see what’s ok now.

the plot sees regular high school girl Tsumugi transported back to the Sengoku period, isekai’d directly during the Honno-ji incident so she can chat up Oda Nobunaga and have three female anime ninjas explain she was summoned there because she’s a discendant of a so called “Miko Of Prosperity”, and a prophecy involving her and a Demon Lord was foretold, etc.

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