The Week Ahead comes to you this week a day late and with a long list of games I've generally never heard of.
I was hoping that I'd have good cause to call out Sacred 3 this week as the Game of the Week, but instead I've read and heard nothing but bad news about the game over the past week. Your Spidey-Sense should immediately tingle when publishers embargo reviews until the day of the game's release. That same sense should start screaming when said game stealth-releases a day or two before the embargo lifts. Technically this is not even a release for this week, as it's already out and disappointing people around the globe.
There's a big list of releases this week, most of which I've frankly never heard of. Victory at Sea and Frontline: Road to Moscow seem like intriguing strategy options, but I think I'll give the Game of the Week Ultra Street Fighter 4.
PC
- Ultra Street Fighter 4
- Sacred 3
- Road Not Taken
- Darksiders Collection
- Red Faction Collection
- Jet Gunner
- Guns and Robots
- Mind: Path to Thalamus
- Rex Rocket
- Pe-2: Dive Bomber
- Back to Bed
- Amazing World
- Kingdom Tales 2
- Direct Hit: Missile War
- Cloud Chamber
- Heroes of a Broken Land
- Orbital Gear
- GamersGoMakers
- Victory At Sea
- Frontline: Road to Moscow
- Another Perspective
- Stonerid
PS4
- The Swapper
- The Road Not Taken
Xbox 360
- Sacred 3
- Ultra Street Fighter 4
- Darksiders Collection
PS3
- Sacred 3
- Ultra Street Fighter 4
- Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed
- Darksiders Collection
- Red Faction Collection
- The Swapper (download)
Vita
- Metrico
- Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed
- Table Top Racing
- The Swapper
3DS
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- The Mysterious Murasme Castle
- Xtreme Sports
Comments
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Oh, dear. Akiba's Trip. I had forgotten about that getting released.
Way to go, JRPGs. Way to go.
Professionally offended. Does not understand jokes. Needs a man to explain them to me.
Darksiders Collection!!
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
Is it any good?
Steam: [GWJ]MeatMan | "Now I know where to go if I have a hankering for testicles." –Higgledy
I appreciate the convenience of ignoring all of the games at once.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ― Howard Thurman
<- Googles it. Regrets it immediately.
Steam/Nintendo/Etc.: Danopian; 3DS: 3110-8616-9304
drdoak: "GIT GUD AT PETTING NOOB"
ClockworkHouse: "I think what you're really seeing is that coital monotony applies to gaming, too. ;)"
Rip off much?
Steam: [GWJ]MeatMan | "Now I know where to go if I have a hankering for testicles." –Higgledy
GameDevTycoonStory Development Simulator 2014?
Professionally offended. Does not understand jokes. Needs a man to explain them to me.
Cloud Chamber could be either a REALLY interesting experiment or a REALLY terrible disaster. Not sure which yet.
Also Sacred 3 was robbed....of its dignity, by its developers.
inactive here until further notice.
For my money, which is the only way I'll be able to tell if this game is a ripoff or just incredibly similar, this hews a bit too close to the way GameDevTycoon looks. I'll let the Steam horde figure it out for me though because GDT is definitely a template that can be improved upon (even though I really liked it).
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
Whoa. That looks cool.
*checks out Steam*
First review: "This interactive story is reminiscent of Gone Home..."
Ugh. Nothing in this looks like Gone Home except you aren't shooting people.
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
Gah, kinda bummed PS3 version of Red Faction collection is missing Red Faction 2, I might still get it when it drops down to 20 dollars or so as I would love to replay original Red Faction, was one of my favorite shooters on the ps2, me and my next door neighbors would spend hours digging tunnels with rocket launchers.
PSN id: Mustard9773
Steam Id; Fastmav347
3DS Friend Code 2595 1989 9877
What?!? Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed isn't out for PS4?
This is an outrage. I guess I have to get it on PS3 now (grumble, grumble).
Oh, and just let this sink in:
"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." - Cheshire Cat
Battle.net: Taharka#1475
I follow one of the localizers at XSeed and she seemed pretty keen on Akiba's Trip, so I'm curious to give it a look at some point. Don't know if I'll grab it, but curious as to what it is.
Otherwise, Darksiders Collection yo.
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Early access to Crawl is also arriving tomorrow.
GWJ Enhancement Suite
Google before you buy. Yeesh.
I loved Darksiders, but the sequel fell kind of flat for me.
Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.
I'm A Steam Curator!
The PS4 release is out later this year.
Professionally offended. Does not understand jokes. Needs a man to explain them to me.
Decided to YouTube some gameplay (NSFW I suppose?). Looks like a brawler where you pummel people and as you pummel them they lose their clothing. The thumbnails on YouTube are all female characters looking like they're pulled out of a hentai game, but from the videos I've skimmed there's no such content.
I can imagine the disgust everyone else has, but to me it just looks like a game with boring mechanics. Oddly enough, for a game of its nature there only seems to be one woman with too much boobage hanging out of her outfit. So even when it comes to the male-gaze fanboy element of gaming demographic I'm not sure this game succeeds at whatever it is going for.
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I actually though he was referring to Darksiders. I mean, yeesh!
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
Hardly anything for me this week, other than the PS+ games.
Oh good, I'll wait for that, then.
"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." - Cheshire Cat
Battle.net: Taharka#1475
I think I'll take this week to listen to the score from the Victory At Sea documentary series.
Words... are a big deal.
Jill Lapore wrote:Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.
Glub Glub.
Akiba's Trip is not an eroge (hentai game) as far as I can tell. It's got loads of fanservice, but it looks like it's closer to Baywatch than Debbie Does Dallas. I honestly can't tell why playing the game would be embarrassing, but going to see Transformers or (insert soft porn skinflick here) isn't.
"...mahal ko ang longganisa!" - Demosthenes
Assumptions, I think. When my roommate walked in while I was watching Knights of Sidonia, it happened to be when a female character undressed so that she could photosynthesize. If I were watching a live action TV show his response would have been "Um, okay... what are you watching?" Because it was an anime, however, it became an overblown hyperbolic "Oh my God, Japan is weird! What is happening?!"
If I'm watching a movie or TV show on my iPad and two characters start undressing, it's fine. If I'm playing a game on a PSP where people lose clothing during a fight, I'm a giant perverted manchild.
Granted, the latter is a bit silly in a lot of ways. But it's mostly an adherence to what are considered cultural norms rather than the content within the game itself.
Meanwhile, I played Project X Zone on a public train, fan-service and all, because I don't know those folks anyway and screw them if they judge me... well, except for the KOS-MOS special ability. I avoided that as often as I could because that was embarrassing even for me.
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This is how my dorm started calling Evangelion "penguin porn."
Words... are a big deal.
Jill Lapore wrote:Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.
For me its because the "JRPG's" tend to look like under-aged girls.. whereas that's difficult if not impossible to find on TV/Movies.
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
Delivering Truth while the 10% deliver lies.
Pen-Pen is just his pick-up artist name. That penguin is the only one gettin' lovin' in that show.
I have a feeling Japan's murky age of consent laws have something to do with that cultural chasm, though from what I can gather being a "lolicon" is still another one of those shameful Otaku things. Which, heyo, third thread in a week to potentially spill into the "Japanese games and media being made by and for Otaku" discussion!
Note that, with the exception of a character in Fire Emblem: Awakening, I'm having trouble thinking of a JRPG I've played recently that really featured anything quite to that extent. Maybe Bravely Default if you count Edea in the Bravo Bikini in that one scene, but honestly, that looked about as naughty as putting a gingerbread man in a bikini to me.
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A discussion you have been spearheading a bit in this thread.
What that tells me is you probably don't parlay* in the more extreme edges of the genre. Series like Mugen Souls and Hyperdimension Neptunia along with other titles from, say, NIS have quite a bit of fan service along the lines GG is talking about.
*I'm mutilating the English language today.
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
It's true I don't play games like Neptunia and Mugen Souls, but would those still accurately represent "JRPG's" as a whole when you note that they're extreme edges? Or perhaps the problem is, once again, hyperbolic, just like my roommate's response to anime just about any time I'm watching it. People see a few bad apples and then flail about as if they are representative of everything within that "genre". It's like ignoring Bioshock because of Duke Nukem Forever's crass humor, or even avoiding Bulletstorm for having a similar (though better executed) sense of humor even though it had better gameplay.
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Yes. There is nuance to any genre/artform/etc. and knee jerk reactions are simply that.
The games I mentioned are JRPGs though and the prevalence of what GG is talking about is easier to happen without live actors. Anime, games, manga, etc. have more of that than a tv show or movie will.
(Also they're mostly on the edges because of development and marketing budgets, not because they're hentai-lite.)
Just as someone might use a handful of animes to paint the genre as broken, so too can someone stand up and say that not all animes are like that. Does it help to reduce it to that level though? #notallgames?
Let me try this: name a game that accurately reflects the JRPG genre. I believe it's impossible as there are always caveats and compromises. Are certain games more emblematic of the rest of the genre? Yes, but it doesn't mean that there isn't a significant portion of games that give the genre its reputation.
Your roommate sounds like someone who doesn't care to have his mind changed. That sounds more like his problem than yours.
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
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