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This Week in Games - Hungry Wolves, Alluring Ninja, and a Stingy Hedgehog




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malvarez1



Joined: 17 Nov 2008
Posts: 2094
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 9:17 am Reply with quote
I’ve mostly been happy with my LRG orders, but the issues are becoming harder to ignore. Might just be the latest example of a company that got worse once they became more mainstream.
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LinkTSwordmaster



Joined: 23 Dec 2005
Posts: 532
Location: PA / USA
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 9:34 am Reply with quote
Were they to put Xenoblade X on Switch or its successor, I'd hope they give it the treatment they gave the original Xenoblade & add an extra story section - XCX feels like they left it off intending to have an expac or quick update/sequel, but one that never came. These days, Xenoblade 1&2 don't really catch my attention, but I'm vaguely interested in giving 3 a try since it looks more akin to the sort of Xenogears/Xenosaga aesthetics that 2 was waaaaaaay lacking in. X is probably the only RPG on my mind these days that I would specifically drop everything I was doing to go replay instantly if a better version were released - extra points if the ENTIRE game is made co-op online/couch and not just a few random quests.

I very much have been criticising the Monster Hunter trailers. Been hearing from a lot of the web personalities that got to have a private preview of Wilds a while back saying that the live game was much more impressive too. The trailer with the spider was definitely a step up, but actually seeing people filming their play live on the show floor looks instantly better than anything Capcom has focused in on for trailers. They should have just led with freeform gameplay. I'm still on the fence - Sunbreak really left a bad taste in my mouth and I have some big issues with how Dragon's Dogma 2 was handled recently by Capcom. What are the chances Wilds hits PC and all cloth movement is CPU-calculated again per each individual NPC in settlements?

Some of the really stupid-looking armor sets (Rathian comes to mind) are somewhat iconic to the series. I personally tended in Sunbreak to lean towards a Fist of the North Star cosplay that mixed Silver Rath and the Black Leather gear - it seemed gender-neutral enough to me at the time. I'm hoping that eliminating gender-locked outfits means the sort of thing it does in FFXIV - that you can have a lady in a butler suit and a guy in a ballerina outfit. If some of the more recogniseable stuff like the Rathian hoop skirt were to be gone entirely so that everyone gets pants, I'd be sad.... not that I actively use it. If anything, the guys' armor on a MH game is usually too bulky or has an obnoxious helmet covering up their face. I'd rather see the option to pull off a chestplate and show abs & not just remove a helmet entirely. Will have to wait for the game to release to see how Capcom handled armor designs.
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Lord Geo



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 2665
Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 9:40 am Reply with quote
malvarez1 wrote:
I’ve mostly been happy with my LRG orders, but the issues are becoming harder to ignore. Might just be the latest example of a company that got worse once they became more mainstream.


Yeah, and LRG's way of dealing with mistakes is to avoid acknowledging them in any public fashion. For example, there was the whole issue of LRG's re-release of D for the 3DO, which used burned CDs for the game discs themselves, while the soundtrack was still properly pressed. However, LRG only ever acknowledged the situation via e-mails to people who ordered the release, never publicly acknowledging it, and most people don't even know that there was even an update to it, which was that LRG would be working with World of Games (which had recently released a new 3DO game, BioFury, last year via pressed CDs) for all future 3DO releases, like the re-release of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

Even when it's something even remotely positive, LRG doesn't want to acknowledge a mistake they made. It's a shame, too, because the people who are on the production side of LRG (Jeremy Parish, Modern Vintage Gamer, Audi Sorlie, etc.), i.e. the people who do things like write articles & books, handle the programming for in-house-produced games, & whatnot, are generally reputable & respected people, yet they have to have their good names associated with a distribution side that continually hurts the company's reputation.

Meanwhile, a quick addendum:
Quote:
Great news, Macross fans! MACROSS Shooting Insight launches on PS5 and Nintendo Switch this December 6th in the US! The US release also comes with several quality-of-life improvements like difficulty options, a Continue system, and others.


It's also worth noting that, due to the current deal between Big West & Harmony Gold, all of the OG SDF Macross characters are removed from Shooting Insight outside of Japan, because HG owns the rights to those specific characters abroad.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 28 Oct 2018
Posts: 635
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 11:00 am Reply with quote
Lord Geo wrote:

Meanwhile, a quick addendum:
Quote:
Great news, Macross fans! MACROSS Shooting Insight launches on PS5 and Nintendo Switch this December 6th in the US! The US release also comes with several quality-of-life improvements like difficulty options, a Continue system, and others.


It's also worth noting that, due to the current deal between Big West & Harmony Gold, all of the OG SDF Macross characters are removed from Shooting Insight outside of Japan, because HG owns the rights to those specific characters abroad.


Yeah, we've touched upon that. It really sucks for a number of reasons, but it's also hilarious because the American packaging now has this massive blank space dead center where Lynn Minmei should be.
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Silver Kirin



Joined: 09 Aug 2018
Posts: 1223
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 11:24 am Reply with quote
- City of the Wolves: at last, Mai has a completely new look, I think she was the only SNK character that never had a design change, aside from her short-lived Fatal Fury 3 look, which wasn't that different. I'm pretty excited for what SNK is going to reveal about CotW in the coming months, but so far the game looks great. I for one was hoping for more playable characters for the base roster, but I understand that developing a fighting game is difficult and SNK saved themselves some work by reusing some models they already had from KoF XV, which isn't that different from how they used to recycle sprites. I just hope the remaining Mark of the Wolves characters come back, but I also want to see some characters from previous Fatal Fury titles, like Rick Strowd and Li Xiangfei, and I also want to see new original characters or those who were planned for the cancelled Garou 2 on the Neo Geo.
- Street Fighter 6: the amount of details and references Capcom included in Terry's gameplay trailer were amazing, you can tell the SF6 team did their homework.
Quote:
the original Fatal Fury games had a system where each arena had three "lanes" (the background, foreground, and middle)

Only Fatal Fury 3 and Real Bout: Fatal Fury had three lanes, all of the other games had only two lanes, save for a couple of stages in Real Bout 2 which only had one, before they abandoned the concept in MotW.
Quote:
so when we get stuff like "Who is Terry Bogard?" or people wondering why so many of us older folks (or the Latin American fighting game community) holds SNK's fighters in such esteem

I'm from Latin America, but it always confuses me why people keep mentioning that SNK games are only popular in Latin America, and by Latin America it seems people mean Mexico since most of the memes that I saw when Terry was added to Smash Ultimate always seemed to made references to Mexico, ignoring the fact that SNK is popular in other Latin American countries like Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, or that outside of Latin America games like The King of Fighters '97 are a big deal in China, so much that a Chinese company sells an officially licensed soft drink with KOF '97 characters printed in the drinks' cans.
Still, I hope that City of the Wolves can become a breakthrough hit for SNK in the U.S., just how Guilty Gear: Strive became one for AcrSys.
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Blanchimont



Joined: 25 Feb 2012
Posts: 3561
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 11:35 am Reply with quote
Quote:
For one thing, LRG's model meant that it could take months for your physical release to arrive at your home if not years. Looking through my records, I can find an order I made for several Shantae games I made on October 1st, 2020. My emails show that order didn't get shipped out until the following May 15th (a whole seven months later). My ordering of the Blaster Master Zero 1 and 2 sets were worse--those took a whole eight months to ship out.

Glances at my kickstarter history No, I'm not jelly! grits teeth with envy...
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Fluwm



Joined: 28 Jul 2009
Posts: 1012
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 12:04 pm Reply with quote
As a Macross fan, Shooting Insight is just about the least exciting thing I can imagine.

Remember when they used to make actual mech games? Man, I miss the PS3 days.
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Lord Geo



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 2665
Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 12:39 pm Reply with quote
Silver Kirin wrote:

I'm from Latin America, but it always confuses me why people keep mentioning that SNK games are only popular in Latin America, and by Latin America it seems people mean Mexico since most of the memes that I saw when Terry was added to Smash Ultimate always seemed to made references to Mexico, ignoring the fact that SNK is popular in other Latin American countries like Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, or that outside of Latin America games like The King of Fighters '97 are a big deal in China, so much that a Chinese company sells an officially licensed soft drink with KOF '97 characters printed in the drinks' cans.


It also ignores the simple fact that the Neo Geo wasn't some obscure & rarely seen thing in the US, either. Throughout the 90s any place that had arcade machines more than likely had an MVS cab of some sort, & usually it was a two or four-game variant. Sure, the local supermarket or bowling alley usually didn't keep up to date with the newest Neo Geo games, but SNK was by no means some forgotten company in "North of Mexico" when it came to the arcades.

Even on console SNK had a notable presence during the 16-bit era, as the Genesis & SNES has plenty of ports. It really wasn't until the 32-bit era that SNK's presence dwindled at home in the US & Canada, mainly because the Saturn had bombed & SCEA seemingly had pure hatred for SNK after it gave KOF '95 & SamSho III a go, so SNK had little to no console presence in English again until the early 00s, when Agetec threw a lifeline by bringing over some Dreamcast & later PS1 ports, followed by SCEA allowing SNK to release its games in (mostly) twin-packs on the PS2.
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Traptrix Lover



Joined: 17 Dec 2022
Posts: 102
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 1:44 pm Reply with quote
Regarding Mai's outfit. A recent dev interview seemed to imply her original outfit is not selectable and usable as an alternative costume. It's only a temporary thing with her Hidden Gear.

Regarding Limited Run Games, I've never used them but I never particularly liked them after hearing how they censored some games under the guise of being a throwback to the 80s and 90s era of game censorship. I never particularly felt a need to use their services though since I mostly play on PC rather than consoles so I can't talk about their quality or other companies offloading the work to them. I was kind of tempted to pick up that Monkey Island collectors edition a few years ago but didn't seem particularly worth it to me but it was cool to see neverheless.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 28 Oct 2018
Posts: 635
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 3:40 pm Reply with quote
Traptrix Lover wrote:

Regarding Limited Run Games, I've never used them but I never particularly liked them after hearing how they censored some games under the guise of being a throwback to the 80s and 90s era of game censorship.


When they say "some games", it was only one ("Amazon's Running Diet", which was a mini game attached to a Gotta Protectors game), and not only was developer Ancient in on the joke, none of the changes in Running Diet were in the main game proper.

I know people like to throw around a lot of misinformation about "censorship", but let's not do that here.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2340
PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2024 5:38 pm Reply with quote
Mostly been checking out the episodic Emio demo which really sells the creepy urban legend vibe

Also, for "WTF" stories, IGN just published an article about several gaming disability advocates who might have been entirely manufactured. It's a rabbit hole: https://www.ign.com/articles/a-prominent-accessibility-advocate-worked-with-studios-and-inspired-change-but-she-never-actually-existed
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MagicianMan



Joined: 28 Jun 2020
Posts: 125
PostPosted: Sat Aug 24, 2024 2:07 am Reply with quote
LinkTSwordmaster wrote:
Were they to put Xenoblade X on Switch or its successor, I'd hope they give it the treatment they gave the original Xenoblade & add an extra story section - XCX feels like they left it off intending to have an expac or quick update/sequel, but one that never came. These days, Xenoblade 1&2 don't really catch my attention, but I'm vaguely interested in giving 3 a try since it looks more akin to the sort of Xenogears/Xenosaga aesthetics that 2 was waaaaaaay lacking in. X is probably the only RPG on my mind these days that I would specifically drop everything I was doing to go replay instantly if a better version were released - extra points if the ENTIRE game is made co-op online/couch and not just a few random quests.


Personally I think 3 is the weakest of the Xenoblade games, though that still makes it a decent game in it's own right. The story starts strong, peaks early, then kind of fizzles out hard. The world is also a bit of a comedown from "standing on the bodies of living gods". Even though spoiler[it's the first two game's worlds put in a blender.] it doesn't give the same feeling. The DLC was great though, and I strongly wish THAT story had been the base game.
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funkfoot



Joined: 22 Feb 2023
Posts: 82
PostPosted: Sat Aug 24, 2024 4:01 am Reply with quote
FinalVentCard wrote:
When they say "some games", it was only one ("Amazon's Running Diet", which was a mini game attached to a Gotta Protectors game), and not only was developer Ancient in on the joke, none of the changes in Running Diet were in the main game proper.


"Just one time" is all it takes to break someone's trust. I can't really say people aren't riight to distrust a company after it happens especially with all the modern problems LRG has been having as well. Gotta Protectors had it's own issues with the localization from what I remember seeing about it.

MagicianMan wrote:
Personally I think 3 is the weakest of the Xenoblade games, though that still makes it a decent game in it's own right. The story starts strong, peaks early, then kind of fizzles out hard. The world is also a bit of a comedown from "standing on the bodies of living gods". Even though spoiler[it's the first two game's worlds put in a blender.] it doesn't give the same feeling. The DLC was great though, and I strongly wish THAT story had been the base game.


The last time I checked sales numbers 3 was the weakest so that doesn't appear to be an uncommon feeling. 2 still remains the peak of Xenoblade in terms of sales numbers and my personal enjoyment. I enjoyed X as well and it's probably my second favorite of the games and in some areas I prefer the gameplay of it over 2. I hope the next game goes back to what made 2 so great.
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Nate148



Joined: 24 May 2012
Posts: 507
PostPosted: Tue Aug 27, 2024 4:38 am Reply with quote
http://blog.beforemario.com/ is a great source for pre-Mario Nintendo toys and his book is great
Also the S.P.G mode restores heath as does just defense that makes were you set it interesting
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