The first Axiom Verge was this awesome Metroidvania, with the first Metroid having the largest influence for a lot of the game. It had lots of cool movement abilities, cool bosses, a fun map to explore. It kinda did everything well.

So when a sequel was announced, I was pretty hyped. I liked the first one, Tom Happ was obviously also making this one, clearly it should be pretty good. I saw it getting lots of negative comments in different places, but people tend to have wrong opinions about games. So they should be good, right?

Let’s go and talk about it!

Back in the Wii days, NMH was the shit. It was quirky, but had pretty fun gameplay to go alongside the quirkiness. After the Wii, the series went largely dormant, other than a top-down action game that I’ve heard nothing good about (and the gameplay I saw looked shit) so I didn’t play it.

So this one finally came out, People were a little bit excited for it. I was too. I just took a while to finally jump into it. So let’s talk about it! This might not be a long review.

Kinda funny to be posting this right after the Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl review… I want to be clear, Smash Ultimate is very much the better game, but Nick Brawl is a cool new alternative that has a lot of potential if Nickelodeon decide to keep it going past the first game.

Well anyways, Smash Ultimate is done. We finally got the last DLC in the second and last Fighter Pass. No more speculation, no more big updates for the game (just some possible balance patches), this is the final Smash Ultimate.

I’ve done a couple Smash-related posts on the old website, mostly speculation/wishlist stuff for the DLC, alongside my review of the game. I figure, why not talk about all the DLC characters now that they’re all released.

In my mind there’s 2 important things about DLC characters in Smash specifically: what they represent (historical importance in gaming, and to Nintendo specifically), and how they play. If they’re fun to play, that’s good. If they’re also an interesting choice as far as representing something important or interesting in gaming, that’s even better. I think most of the DLC here does at least one of those, which is good.

So I will talk about those aspects of each of the 12 DLC characters.

This is all just for fun, I do think the DLC is worth getting if you’re a Smash fan either way, though it is a bit on the expensive side (I think DLC characters should be a bit cheaper than they are, I will expand on that idea later).

Let’s go!

I have no idea what happened with this universe that I’m actually reviewing this game. I’d usually  just straight up ignore this licensed rip-off kinda deal. But this game, it got my attention.

And I wasn’t the only one, as it got the attention of the competitive Smash fanbase in a pretty big way, and the Smash fanbase overall. The moment it got peoples’ attention is when the dev was revealed to be Ludosity, who previously made Slap City, a Smash clone that I hear is pretty okay, but also with the gameplay demos (including in-depth moveset showcases for all the characters) we were shown a game that looked way better than you may expect from something like this. As in, it actually looked good.

So yeah… let’s talk about this one! I don’t think it will be a super long review, but we’ll see.

*EDIT: As I was writing this review a patch came out for the game and I didn’t notice, it does fix some things I mention, mostly as far as character balance*

So I’ve reviewed games like this before, on my previous site. I was actually pretty positive about them. Specifically I had looked at the first Fitness Boxing, as well as Ring Fit Adventure. Both are solid workouts. One I didn’t review is the sequel to Fitness Boxing… I wanted to, but I just kinda forgot. And now I’ve moved over to this game, for now, so it would be a bit weird to plop out a Fitness Boxing 2 review now.

I do like having some workout games, because I’m a big boy and I need to be healthier and move around some, you know. Just working out normally bores me, but doing it in the context of a game definitely helps.

This is gonna be a short review, and I’ll have a portion to talk about Fitness Boxing 2, as they’re similar games stuff to talk about. Let’s go!

Oooooooooooooooh boy. There it is. THE most hype game of the year.

The previous game in this series is Metroid Fusion, in 2002. Prime is a separate series, both in gameplay and story, while Other M is a spin-off (despite being a direct sequel to Super Metroid and it has references to things that happen in Fusion and contradicts… stuff from Prime… it’s for sure non-canon despite what Sakamoto says). But even counting Prime and Other M, the Metroid series has been rather dormant for a good long while. The only other Metroid games since Fusion were Zero Mission, a remake of the first Metroid on NES, and Samus Returns, a remake of Metroid 2 from the Game Boy. THAT one is important, because it is made by MercurySteam, the developers that would go on to make Metroid Dread, and adds some plot context that the original version of it didn’t have. It feels like a “if this game is good you can make the next one” kinda thing.

I’m a big fan of the Metroid series, and it’s great to finally get closure to the main storyline of the original series, after 19 years without a new mainline Metroid. My favorite of the series is Super Metroid (and probably still is), but the desire for more normal, non-3D Metroid (alongside more 3D Metroid, of course, Prime 4 getting its development reset was unfortunate) is always there. Metroid is a series that should be bigger than it is, and maybe Dread will be the breakout hit.

Nintendo seems to have gone all-out as far as spoiling this game before release, but thankfully for me all I had seen before release is the E3 announcement trailer… and one very spoilery screenshot. It’s nice that they were advertising it a lot, but they could’ve done so without… showing what seems like everything.

So yeah, this just came out, I finished it, and it’s time to review the game of the year (probably), let’s fucking go.

This was such a surprising release. It just popped up randomly in a Nintendo Direct without ever being announced first but, not only that, it also came out right then and there. For those who don’t know, Actraiser is one of the ultimate SNES classics. A game that combines side-scrolling action platformer gameplay with city building simulation and is good in both aspects. It’s great. The sequel was great too, but very different, focusing entirely on the action segments and making those really cool and unique, but having no city-building.

My headcannon for why this even exists is that Yuzo Koshiro, the amazing composer that made the music for the original game (and a lot more, look him up), recently made an Actraiser-inspired track for Korone of Hololive (which is awesome, btw), and decided he wanted to make one more, but had nothing to put it in, so he bullied Squeenix to remaster the original game and add a level to put the song in. Prove me wrong (yeah this is probably not real but I think it’s funny so that’s what I’m going with).

Well, this is a remake of one of my favorite games, so let’s see if they did it justice!

Actually got several posts out in September, that was decent. 2 of them were reaction posts, which is fine. I don’t always do these, but sometimes I feel like it makes sense. I wouldn’t do a reaction to the Smash showcase on october 5th, for example. That’s not really worth reacting to. As far as future posts, I do still have a so-called “backlog” (i.e. games I want to play but haven’t bought yet), I haven’t bought No More Heroes 3 yet, or Axiom Verge 2 (amongst many others), and I was made aware that Deathloop may actually be an okay game so I just started that. And there’s obviously upcoming games I’ll write about. So I still have plenty on the go writing-wise.

So this month I’m highlighting: 17 multiplats, 2 Switch games, 2 PC games and 1 PS4 exclusive for some reason. For me, in all that, there’s only 2 “getting for sure” games, 2 I’m probably getting, and a couple that are going on the maybe list. It’s actually a weirdly quiet month despite having the hypest game of the year, so I might be able to get into some backlog games.

Let’s go!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, small interesting ones I may notice and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

My history with WarioWare is pretty limited. The only one I’ve played is a bit of the Wii one at a friend’s place, and otherwise I have purposely avoided the series. My reasoning was pretty simplistic: I liked Wario, specifically the Wario Land series, and saw this as a joke/insult to that series. Maybe it was undeserved, but I never “liked” WarioWare, despite never really playing it.

So this is my first WarioWare. I went into it with no idea if I’d like it. I do like this team’s other series, Rhythm Heaven, but I know they’re very different games. And this seems to be a pretty different take on WarioWare too.

So let’s go! I think this will be a short one.

I really liked Ace Attorney when the first one popped up in the Americas. It was a pretty cool mix of the classic point-and-click gameplay and some visual novel-style storytelling. Which is funny because I don’t like visual novels. As far as Ace Attorney, I played the first 3, Investigations 1 and Apollo Justice. I didn’t play the second and third Apollo Justice games, or the second Investigations.

This is a collection of 2 games in the series, a prequel spin-off series that takes place at least a hundred years before the first game, featuring an ancestor of Ryuichi Naruhodo, known to us as Phoenix Wright. These 3DS games didn’t previously come out in the west, so this collection is the only way to play these in english.

Considering the gameplay of Ace Attorney, this won’t be a super long review, especially since I don’t want to really spoil the story.

So let’s go!