Dynasty Warriors Origins [DEMO] [HANDS-ON] STEAM

I didn’t promise a hands-on first impressions on the demo of the newest Dynasty Warriors game, Dynasty Warriors Origins, because i don’t have a next gen console, and usually i play my musou games like that, but i figured out, there’s a Steam demo as well, maybe my relatively ancient rig can run it fine… and it did, actually surprised me that it’s good enough to run it decently.

So here it my opinions on the demo of Dynasty Warriors Origins, which lets you play one of the classic bouts of the series, The Battle Of Sishui Gate, where the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalitation attacks united and you also get to meet the demon in red, the mightiest among men, the one you do not pursue: Lu Bu.

So, in case you didn’t follow or knew of this new Dynasty Warriors game, the gist is that you play as a lone Wanderer, a skilled yet aimless martial artist that gets involved into the turbolent battles and political machinations of the characters from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, so you can basically decide around a bit, and interact and fight alongside the many characters fans of the novel and Koei series have learned to know, love and hate.

It’s not quite an OC or a CAW character similar to how you had a self-insert protagonist in the Samurai Warriors Chronicles games, as the Wanderer is a precisely designed character and so you can’t change much about his looks (nor you can choose for a female option, as far as i remember), not that it matters for the portion of game given by the demo.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath Of The Mutants PS4 [REVIEW] | Arcades In Times

Since it’s un-officially “ninja month”, let’s talk ninja. Mutant teenage turtles ninjas.

And while their popularity and games based on the series still doesn’t waver, so much that we recently got a tie-in game to the 2023 animated film TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, TMNT: Splintered Fate, and one about the Last Ronin spin-off series by the TMNT original creators coming next year.

But we’re not talking about those, or the well received Shredder’s Revenge.

Nope, we’re going back to 2017, indirectly, thank to the recent release of the 2017 TMNT arcade game by Raw Thrills, in this expanded port (gaining the “Arcade” moniker and a new subtitle since there are literally dozens of TMNT game just called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”) handled by Cradle Games and distributed (even physically) by… shovelware maestro Gamemill Entertaiment.

Though this is not shovelware, i had the pleasure to play this machine/arcade cabinet more than once in my local arcades, and it’s quite fun 3D side scrolling beat em up, obviously trying to arken back to Turtles In Time, as these arcade TMNT titles often do, for nostalgia but also because it was indeed a quality title worth trying imitation and the flattery that – ideally – that would imply.

It’s a pleasant surprise regardless, since i doubt anyone was expecting this, expecially given how some digital only TMNT titles have gone delisted entirely, especially made for smarthphones offering and arcade releases. The TMNT Cowabunga Collection is great but some titles will always be bound to being emulated, at best, like the Tiger handheld games and such.

This not the case, as we get the game seen and played in the arcades as well as some new extra levels, which is a good things since Gamemill still asks more than it should for a physical copy, but we’ll discuss that later.

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Grabbed By The Ghoulies (Rare Replay) XBOX ONE [REVIEW] | Analog Monster Bash

How i didn’t cover this one here yet i don’t know, but the spooky-ookie climate is here and now i feel there’s no escaping it, as a self-confessed Rareware/Rare nut, so time to dust off the X-Box One , insert Rare Replay in, and giving it another go after a literal decade and more since i’ve played and completed the game on the original X-Box. I’m not bustin that one out of its drawer/tomb, sorry.

Grabbed By The Ghoulies it’s more than the fairly obvious choice for the “Halloween game” feature review, as its still hails from the disastrous era when Nintendo simply sold Rare to Microsoft, killing a lot of the company’s projects…. or in this case making them shift the originally intended platform (in this case the Gamecube, as one could guess), as this one was actually the first Rare game to be shipped under the X-Box banner, and honestly i’m kinda sad that i pine for that era of Rare games nowadays, but i do, especially considering the post-360 stuff they did… or didn’t.

For better historical context, it was also the early 2000s, and more specifically, it was that brief period in gaming where – for whatever reason – action games wanted to implement a different control scheme for combat, as in, trying to simplify and skip the old way of combined button imputs to do moves… by making you control the melee combat with the right analogic stick, which since inception had been created to control the camera, a usual problem many 3D games had.

Actually, scratch that “for whatever reason”, as it was probably this game to kick off this short lived trend, since the very next year we had a Jet Li game, Rise To Honor, implement a similar control scheme, then in 2005 the Tekken spin-off Death By Degrees did too… and later Too Human, and also Neverdead, because some lessons are never to be learned by certain people.

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Seven Samurai 20XX PS2 [REVIEW] #meleemay

Technically this is a re-write, because i did review this game years and years ago in italian, but time gave me the distance needed to realize i could actually write an entirely new review from scratch for Seven Samurai 20XX still based on my experience of like 7 plus years ago, since the hatred i felt for this one never actually went away, and i guess festered on the back of my mind.

But i did replay it, and i can futher confirm that there are indeed many reasons to istinctually hate it, if nothing else for the fact it had the brass balls of being the closest to an actual videogame adaptation of Kurosawa’s seminal samurai film, as it actually had the rights by the Kurosawa production, and i wanna make it clear it also has Moebius (yes, THAT Moebius) as the character designer and music by another legend, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.

So yeah, it’s kinda impressive how Sammy (an arcade publisher that by the early 2000s fused with Sega in order to enter the home console videogame market, which i will always associate with my beloved Metal Slug clone called Dolphin Blue) got permits from the film studios, rounded up people of incredible caliber from different industries, and then managed to deliver such an obvious, steaming turd that was destined to haunt the 5 bucks bargain bins for a good decade.

So much for a product meant to celebrate the movie’s 50^th anniversary, as it did the anime series Samurai Seven, both curiously fiddling with sci-fi re-imaginings of the film but actually unrelated to each other besides both meant to attract younger audiences to Kurosawa’s story.

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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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Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae STEAM [REVIEW ] #meleemay

Since i did already cover The Initial and the “sequel” hasn’t yet gone on sale on Steam, i feel it’s time to revisit (so yeah, it’s technically a rewrite in the sense that some of my opinions didn’t change over time, but it’s also a revision i wrote from scratch) another Oneechanbara adjacent title from the indie tier of Steam “famous” japanese hack n slash games heavy on the “school uniform cum swords” anime-derived aesthetic, the kind where you’d expect the dutch wives looking characters to randomly start fucking in a robotic, unappealing fashion, if you didn’t already know this was just a fan service-y hack n slash.

This was actually a fairly popular release, as in it was a smash hit when released during Comiketto 84 (AKA the 2013 august edition of Comic Market, that huge japanese only event) by his developer-creator Zenith Blue, and in March of 2014 PLAYISM picked it up to distribute and localize it in English for a worlwide Steam release.

It received a limited physical PS4 release via Limited Run Games and it’s also available digital on PSN and X-Box systems, FIY, but i got it in a bundle playable via Steam years ago, so i’m reviewing the Steam release alone, sold at a MSRP of 10 bucks.

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Cold Vitae and the replacement review

I planned to review a Vita beat em up for this #meleemay but things are taking longer than planned, so my Vita is still in the shop and that review isn’t coming anytime within May or early June, apparently.

So instead i’m gonna review an obscure movie, since it has become somewhat rilevant for the hardcore Mamoru Oshii fans due to some recent restoration news.

I’m not gonna say anything else to avoid spoiling the surprise completely.

Also, FIY, i’m not gonna do an EXPRESSO review of the new Planet Of The Apes movie, i haven’t seen the last ones and i don’t particularly care regardless, really not feeling it to be frank.

Melee May will tag in for Musou May

So yeah, as promised, instead of the usual Musou May, this year will focus on the more typical beat em up games, going from some licensed tie-in “trash” to the more forgotten dephts of the PS2 backlog, and evena fairly recent entry in the “pants em up” subgenre.

Image is for mystification purposes only, covering Smash clones would be fun but i really don’t have neither the time or the expertise at the moment.

Dead Island: Retro Revenge PSN [REVIEW] #deadislandretrospective

So, we finally arrive at the last entry of the Dead Island retrospective, just in time for Dead Island 2 to finally release in stores, tomorrow actually, which sounds still kinda crazy to me after that memorable first teaser trailer with Pigeon John’s Da Bomb, but we’re almost there, for real this time.

The only game left is Dead Island Retro Revenge, which was originally released as a bonus game to entice people in buying the Dead Island Definitive Collection, with the main serving of that being the remastered/definitive edition versions of Dead Island and Dead Island Riptide, but can also be simply bought on Steam, PSN and X-Box Live for 5 bucks, and it’s actually well worth it.

Which is surprising, because while i do enjoy the Dead Island mainline games, i also fully understand why people hated them (i initially did too), but oddly Retro Revenge i’d say its the unexpected better one of the lot, as it keeps the series tradition of copying someone else’s shtick, but this time they chose One Finger Death Punch as the blueprint, and didn’t overcomplicate it.

But first, the plot, or the tiny narrative that exists to justify the game.

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Babylon’s Fall PS4 [REVIEW-FUNERAL] | Enuma Eloss

After previously touching upon the demo, and especially when the inevitable news of the sunset period before the servers would be shot down, i knew i had get Babylon’s fall, for cheap (which wasn’t an issue), actually play and finish before lights were out.

Other times i’ve put out these “funerary reviews” slightly before a game kicked the bucket, just in case, as both a courtesy and a way to let people that might be interested in the game itself, for whatever reason, so they could – potentially – try it or play it, i mean, Jump Force can still be played as second hand copies are still around.

But Babylon’s Fall didn’t even deserve that, so we’re talking about it the very same days its servers will close forever, 28^th of February 2023, not even 1 year after the game launched on the 3^rd of March 2022, couldn’t even held out for 3 days more, in such a hurry to kill to it Square Enix were.

Then again, that in itself it’s nothing special, the company does this to countless mobile free to play spinoffs of it’s own series, it’s like clockwork for many people to learn through these “end of service announcement” that many mobile games based on franchises owned by Squeenix…. even existed.

But it’s Babylon’s Fall we’re talking about, a game that indeed will live on infamy as a golden grease stain on Platinum Games’ record, when they had the bright idea to work alongside the company that once every 2 year lamented every non-japanese big franchise they owned and handled sold “below expectations”, the company of FF VII NFTs, that also later sold all its western-centric studios and properties for a pittance, all to drown more cash into the latest internet money scam.

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