Ninety Nine Nights II X360 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

In many ways this should be featured here… or refeatured, since i did review both the Ninety Nine Nights games on the old italian blogs, but since i did a new full review of the original game (which i’m gonna abbreviate as N3 from now on, mostly) i knew i “had” to do the same for N3 II.

Even if it kinda shouldn’t, with extra hindsight making it extra obvious, BUT i’m gonna argue it fits the rubric for reason i will explain a bit later.

I mean, i do have to wonder what possessed Konami to get publishing rights for a N3 sequel, let alone that the niche audience of the first game liked it enough to want a sequel, but then again i’m not even sure nobody told Tak Fuji about what the game even was before deploying him on stage during the now legendary Konami E3 2012 Conference, so absurd it seems like a late night live-action show you’d catch on Adult Swim, but nope, it’s real and was actually a worlwide live event.

An “EXTReeeMEeee” one, some might say.

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Earth Defense Force 3 AKA Earth Defense Force 2017 X360 [REVIEW] | #summerofedf

When of i think of when the series officially, globally managed to “hit it big”, Earth Defense Force 3 is when it actually happened, after word of mouth did its thing and helped reach the audience for a more arcadey and un-serious gaming experience, almost a pure one, if you want.

Sorry, Earth Defense Force 2017, as it better known, which is a fitting title for another reason besides keeping in tone with the 50/60’s style of sci-fi cheese, and the obvious hiding of this being the third entry of the series (the main one, anyway) to make the new potential audience of the previously Playstation centric IP not feel like they were missing out.

The reason being curiously a story one, as with EDF 2017 will start what would become a recurring approach to the plot, as in this does not follow up from the events of EDF 2, nothing from that game is ever mention, because EDF 2017 it’s a remake of the first EDF, which was set in the…. back then still not that far away year of 2017.

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Green Lantern: Rise Of The Manhunters X360 [REVIEW] #meleemay

During the 7^th generation of console, there were still movie tie-in Marvel and DC games for each of the heroes/movies (though mostly for what is now known as Phase 1 of the Marvel MCU) , mostly under the Sega brand, and there was a 70 % chance of it being a beat em up because God Of War was still the new cock of the walk, leading the market to lots of imitators crafting up 3D hack n slash/beat em up in where to fisticuffs dozens of foes while playing as a digital Hollywood actor in costume. Yep, years ago, it was economically pheasable to pay for the actors’ likenesses without that alone costing more than the budget for the game itself. Looking at you, Square Enix’s Avengers.

The Green Lantern movie released in 2011 (starring a yet-to-bloom Ryan Reynolds) and… was definitely one of those, bad but not as bad as i expected. So after finally watching on a whime the movie last year on Neflix , i’ve decided to finally bother unearthing the disc from my 360 library. Hope you hankered for some tie-in movie trash of yore to be reviewed.

A shame DC is most likely never gonna touch the idea of a Green Lantern reboot in terms of live action film, so engrained is the stigma the 2011 movie has, because it would still make more sense than the Black Adam movie they did make, but who knows?

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Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce PS3 [REVIEW]| #musoumay

As most Warriors fans know, once a main numbered entry in the Dynasty or Samurai series is released, Koei and Omega Force don’t follow up them up with another numbered either, no siree, but basically squeeze the foundations and assets of the newly made entry for many spin-offs, alongside the expected Xtreme Legends and Empires versions.

And Dynasty Warriors 6 was no exception (thought the poor reception had a lot less derivative titles spun from it, not even a proper XL expansion), so back in 2009 they made another one, Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce (Multi Raid in its japanese release) to also ride on the “online co op” frenzy the industry was pushing wish during the PS3/360 era…. on the PSP, initially.

Then HD ports on consoles that touched up the graphics, added full in game voice acting for battles and non-battle events. Though worry not, most of the cutscenes are outright recycled from DW 6, with just a slightly different hue overlaid to disguise the fact it’s stock footage.

The story is basically the same as always, there’s really not much to discuss, aside that this time magic, mystical beasts and the such plays a lot more into it, leading to some alternate or new events alongside the classic confrontations like Chi Bi, Wu Zhang Plain, Xia Pi, etc.

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Dead Island: Definitive Edition PS4 [REVIEW] #deadislandretrospective

I started playing this mid-summer for kicks, but what do you know, in early september Dead Island 2 actually resurfaced after 8 years of radio silence, multiple developers change, and it’s coming out… in February 2023. Odd date, but i guess Deep Silver isn’t keen on waiting for a timely summer release, after the game overlong stay in development hell, so much that Techland spun another zombie series after basically being denied work on any Dead Island game after Riptide.

Perfect time for a retrospective of the series as a whole, so let’s start from the original Dead Island, in its Definitive Edition form (which on PS4 and X-Box One came packaged as a collection with the direct sequel Riptide and the spin-off Dead Island: Retro Revenge included).

We’re reviewing this version also because i’ve played Dead Island on PS3 when it was new… and this was indeed one of those games that could have used some enhancing and overhauling, etc.

I guess some history won’t go amiss, but if you happened to… not exist in 2012, you missed one of the most perfect example of misleading, bullshit hype trailers ever made, as originally we were fed a non-gameplay trailer that went for shock value (depicting a dead zombie child, among other things), trying to make you believe the game would treat the topic with some seriousness… only to find out Deep Silver were just being the deceitful liars they are, as we had a game where you combine shit to make fire-laden blades and battery-powered electrical pikes, with a slow-mo effect for when you decapite the plentiful undeads, or crush their rotten brains under your foot.

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Ninety Nine Nights X360 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

In the 2000s, the Dynasty Warriors series (and most of its subseries) was not well received in western grounds, often maligned by people that never even gave the formula a real chance but eager to play them for 5 minutes, stop and write some half-baked “review”, because it was cool to bash musou games, and they’re a niche interest anyway, who cares.

But that didn’t stop various other company from having a go at the formula, often proclaiming that them alone knew how to “fix” musou games… and then churning out shit that only demonstrated how people genuinely misunderstood the formula and the appeal of these games, often thinking that they just needed to beef up the enemy IA… leading to crap like Spartan Total Warrior.

One of the “musou pretenders” from that era was definitely Ninety Nine Nights, or N3 because we’re cool like that, dawg. Drop the beets for the l33t.

A X-Box 360 exclusive launch title, developed by Q Entertaiment and Phantagram, Ninety Nine Nights also had a fairly rushed development cycle, which you can really tell from the story perspective. It’s the usual “Light VS Darkness” bullshit set in a medieval-ish looking world with all expected high fantasy races and tropes: goblin, trolls, orcs, dragons and all dat shit.

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Alice: Madness Returns PS3 [REVIEW] | Swimming The Seas Of Sanity Lost

11 years later, American MacGee brought back his flawed cult game for a direct sequel with Alice: Madness Returns, and as EA (and other publishers) were big on fighting the used game market with the “online passes”, this time they wanted to discourage from buying the game used by inserting in new copies a code to redeem the original American McGee’s Alice, basically treated as DLC.

Thankfully now the older game is free DLC on both PSN and the X-Box store, you still need a copy of Madness Returns to access it, but still, better than on PC, now available only through Origin (it was on Steam as well but got delisted), it doesn’t seem to include the original American MacGee’s Alice game. At least not anymore. I’m not throwing cash away to find out for sure.

A re-release of both titles might be in order, i guess as soon as MacGee can buy back the rights from EA or when we’ll have some news about that hypotetical Alice: Asylum, who had a tentative date of 31 October 2021… but in 3 years we didn’t hear anything aside from the fact that the title is in pre-production, meaning clearly that release date is not gonna be final, so for the meantime these are the options to visit (or revisit) the series.

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