August 4 - August 10

Section: 

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

Oh, dear. Akiba's Trip. I had forgotten about that getting released.

Way to go, JRPGs. Way to go.

Darksiders Collection!!

garion333 wrote:

Darksiders Collection!!

Is it any good?

garion333 wrote:

Darksiders Collection!!

I appreciate the convenience of ignoring all of the games at once.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Oh, dear. Akiba's Trip. I had forgotten about that getting released.

Way to go, JRPGs. Way to go. :P

<- Googles it. Regrets it immediately.

- GamersGoMakers

Rip off much?

GameDevTycoonStory Development Simulator 2014?

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.

MeatMan wrote:
- GamersGoMakers

Rip off much?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

GameDevTycoonStory Development Simulator 2014?

Developer wrote:

@SuperFortress [FFP] so what you're saying is that Game Dev Tycoon was basically the first and only game that had this concept? No. Do some research and you'll find dozens of other games with this concept released even earlier. Game Dev Story, Game Tycoon, GameBiz etc. Heck, if we're a ripoff of Game Dev Tycoon then Game Dev Tycoon is a rip-off from Game Dev Story. The story line in GamersGoMakers is also different from Game Dev Tycoon, so that would leave one similarity: the graphics. We have a lot more content than Game Dev Tycoon does, and I'm not saying I do not like Game Dev Tycoon. I actually am pretty much one of the well-known people on their forum and I've played it for more than 61 hours. You still haven't answered my question about what you miss in this game that Game Dev Tycoon had, though. If you could tell me that I could actually take you seriously. Now we're back to the graphics: who gives about it? Are you playing Game Dev Tycoon to look endlessly at the graphics? Are you looking to when the guy moves his hands? Are you going to search for secrets? No. It's all about the gameplay. Now give me a proper argument.

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).

pyxistyx wrote:

Cloud Chamber could be either a REALLY interesting experiment or a REALLY terrible disaster. Not sure which yet.

[ videos ]

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.

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.

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:

During the first week of release in Japan, Akiba's Trip 2 sold 33,476 PlayStation Vita physical retail copies and 20,230 PlayStation 3 physical retail copies, ranking at fourth and eighth place respectively amongst all software sales that week in Japan.[13] Famitsu gave both the PS3 and Vita versions of the game a review score of 33/40.

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.

Early access to Crawl is also arriving tomorrow.

Crawl is the local multiplayer dungeon crawler where your friends control the monsters! It’s bullet-hell beat-em-up meets old-school RPG, in an arcadey party-game for up to 4 players.

One player is the hero, exploring a randomly generated dungeon full of traps and monsters - all controlled by the other players. If you slay the hero you take their place and it’s your turn to crawl!

ccesarano wrote:

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.

Google before you buy. Yeesh.

I loved Darksiders, but the sequel fell kind of flat for me.

Taharka wrote:

What?!? Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed isn't out for PS4?

The PS4 release is out later this year.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Google before you buy. Yeesh.

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.

ccesarano wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Google before you buy. Yeesh.

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.

I actually though he was referring to Darksiders. I mean, yeesh!

Hardly anything for me this week, other than the PS+ games.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Taharka wrote:

What?!? Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed isn't out for PS4?

The PS4 release is out later this year.

Oh good, I'll wait for that, then.

I think I'll take this week to listen to the score from the Victory At Sea documentary series.

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.

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.

ccesarano wrote:

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?!"

This is how my dorm started calling Evangelion "penguin porn."

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.

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.

wordsmythe wrote:

This is how my dorm started calling Evangelion "penguin porn."

Pen-Pen is just his pick-up artist name. That penguin is the only one gettin' lovin' in that show.

TheGameguru wrote:

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.

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.

ccesarano wrote:

Which, heyo, third thread in a week to potentially spill into the "Japanese games and media being made by and for Otaku" discussion!

A discussion you have been spearheading a bit in this thread.

ccesarano wrote:

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.

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.

garion333 wrote:

the more extreme edges of the genre

TheGameguru wrote:

For me its because the "JRPG's" tend to look like under-aged girls..

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.

ccesarano wrote:
garion333 wrote:

the more extreme edges of the genre

TheGameguru wrote:

For me its because the "JRPG's" tend to look like under-aged girls..

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.

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.