The Iconic Maintenance & Content Arrangement Break

As i said i would, i’ll be taking a break from full length reviews for a week sometimes near mid-May in order to properly flesh out the blog with more than rudimentary pages, updating rubrics, hopefully doing some cleaning of the PC itself, stuff like that.

While a bit earlier than anticipated, i will be doing so from the 9th of May up to the 16th (included), EXPRESSO reviews as already said will happen regardless, the one for Mortal Kombat II is actually planned to drop on the 9th, coincidentally so.

Also, i had to make a last minute change to the line up for Melee May, and since i didn’t happen to have something already prepared that could fill in/fit with the genre, i will be doing a completely unrelated, different review to close off the month.

Also no, i do not plan to do a review of the Mandalorian film that is coming out late this month, if it happens i guess you’ll be reading an unplanned EXPRESSO review.

As a last, last note, i saw the teaser trailer for the new Resident Evil movie that is gonna be directed by Zach Creggers (Barbarian, Weapons, Keeper). Looks good, and while there’s nothing very “Resident Evil” about it…. that might actually be for the best, let’s be honest, not that the fans deserve it (they didn’t even deserve the decent Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City), as they really want stuff like the crappy old Paul W.S. Anderson ones, just with the plots being 1 to 1 the ones in the games.

And asking for the series they allegedly like to keep pumping out shit on the same quality as Return To Silent Hill… is definitely a hill to die on.

But i guess we’ll see about that, once the frothing stops and we actually get to see the actual film.

Peace.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed X360 [REVIEW] | Starkilling It

This is a revised rewrite, but it has been so long since the old review that back then the Sequel Trilogy had just begun, and Disney wasn’t quite drowning people in Star Wars related projects and series up the wazoo, and to be honest while i still don’t consider myself a Star Wars fan… fuck if i know what a “Star Wars fan” actually means nowadays.

Nor i do care to properly find out.

I did like it casually enough to play some SW games like this and the sequel, and – as i said before – i would love a Star Wars Musou, which sadly will never happen, and in general i do like people fighting with lightsabers and magical space powers, i’m not above it, absolutely.

Also, while this isn’t the first hack n slash/beat em up based on the property (i remember the home consoles versions of the Episode III tie-in game being that and mostly well received), it was certainly one made because God Of War became popular, so Lucasarts wanted in, as everybody did.

Namco even resurrect their Splatterhouse series to get some of that violent 3D beat em up action.

Continua a leggere

Bujingai: Swordmaster PS2 [REVIEW] | Wuxia GACKT Action

You think you know the depths of the Playstation 2 library.

You don’t. You just don’t.

If this wasn’t the case, a title like Bujingai: Swormaster would have been covered by gaming Youtubers as a “forgotten gem” to the point it’s not forgotten at all anymore.

And yet, 99 % of you before know never knew there was a PS2 era hack n slash in the vein of Devil May Cry but where you play as sci-fi wuxia Gackt.

Again, the PS2 library is so big we still are finding more obscure titles to showcase.

Personally, i remember seeing this one a lot in bargain bin cases after a while, since it was distributed here by 505 Games/Gamestreeet (figures since they are an Italy based distributor), which back in the early 2000s were famous for mostly peddling ol’ budget games/shovelware by the bucketloads, so that didn’t help, but at least a PAL copy is fairly cheap and easy to find still today.

Can’t say the cover helped because sure as hell the general public wasn’t gonna go “is that Gackt?” after looking at the box art.

But yes, he gave right to the teams to use his likeness for the main character, Lau Wong, a wuxia hero that has to do the usual: sky surf on an ethereal cloud while doing the usual wuxia ballet-combat aerobics and eventually go back to Earth, 100 years after an apocalyptic event wiped out most of the population while giving survivors powers, to rid the planet of a demonic army that has holed up in the asian city of Bujingai.

And since it’s a martial arts inspired game, it just happens the head of the demon army is a former fellow martial arts student turned rival that has gone evil, as you do in these.

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30 Years Of ROCKET LAWNCHAIR, Kombat In The Street and The Shark Summer Parter

SNK released an official video celebrating the Metal Slug’s 30th anniversary a few days ago.

The video itself it’s nothing too special, just a thank you using footage from all mainline Metal Slug games (and Metal Slug Defense-Attack too), but it ends with a message displayed on a NEO GEO cabinet: “MISSION REBOOT”.

Obviously a teaser for a potential new mailine game in the future, i’d argue about damn time since the new Saudi prince-owned SNK had been pushing out a plethora of F2P gacha titles using the Metal Slug license, ranging from crap to ok, MS Awakening was actually ok as in it was as close as you could get to a proper MS title…. for a F2P thing, so getting an actual, proper Metal Slug game would be nice.

I mean, given the current nostalgia-driven market and how it has been almost 2 decades since the last mainline MS game, Metal Slug 7, released for the DS in 2008, then ported-expanded on PSP, Metal Slug XX came out in 2009, and that version was rereleased on modern consoles back in 2018, almost a decade ago already.

So the fans have been starved enough, and this comes alongside PlayOn rereleasing a new version of the home console version of the Neo Geo hardware, the NEO GEO AES +, which will have newly made carts for the console but also will be compatible with the old ones.

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The Post-Easter Food Coma Rehab Post

So, if you survive Easter, congrats, and to better digest the lamb and chocolate induced coma, i’ll soapbox about some things about upcoming reviews and the blog as a whole.

First, i would like to spend some time and then review in EXPRESSO form Arknights Endfield, i have it installed on PS5 but i wasn’t sure, despite me quite liking the original Arknights… as long as i could since i’m a F2P player that doesn’t spend money in microtransactions, period, so eventually i reach the “bottleneck” where they expect you to pay to actually get some progress done before you expire, i get bored and move on.

Still, i have been curious about it, so we’ll see.

Despite earlier planning to do Melee May in a redux fashion, it will happen, though i compromised with a rewrite.

This as i planned to slow down output in order to do some maintenance, organize the reviews proper in categories, that stuff, which i still plan to do during the usual mid-August hiatus, but i would like to do some during May, so if there are less reviews than usual, that will be the reason.

As you might have notices since we’re almost at the two digits mark, i’m committed to keep Platformation Time Again going and hopefully be somewhat costant of a featured rubric, and eventually i will expand the rubric with a specific tier/type about collections, since these are becoming more and more common, as the industry and publishers are scraping up anything that might have nostalgia value to it, heck, they even did remaster-port the Zool games.

On a closing note, One Piece Month will still happen but most likely in a redux fashion, due to how some other returning rubrics will happen, as i will explain later down the line.

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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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.

Early April Hiatus + Musou May Swapparoni

As mentioned at the start of this year’s Giant Monster March, i’m gonna take a break of two week starting from early April for educational reasons (uni and related stuff), and will resume on the 15th of April with my reviews of the last (and i assume final) batch of DLC contents for Pirate Warriors 4 and maybe a Ghostbusters related thingie.

As usual, during the break EXPRESSO reviews might still come about, and to a certain extent will.

ALSO, might as well put out that there won’t be Musou May this year, for schedule and reality reasons, but there will be Melee May instead, as look as various beat ‘em ups/hack n slash games that aren’t musou or musou-like, for a change.