Just What I Needed

Pokemon Sword and Shield was released for the Nintendo Switch, in spite of the bitter complaints and death threats of thousands who refused to be satisfied by anything less than every monster from the past twenty-three years of games. I have my own beefs with Nintendo, but it's nice to finally see a game company that refuses to knuckle under to petulant, unrealistic demands. 

Besides, we all know those characters will be coming back, probably in an expansion pack that fixes all the other issues with the previous games. Maybe they'll call it Pokemon Armor, but I call it another sixty dollars sucked out of the pockets of poke-marks.

Now this is more my speed.
(image from Game Informer)

Honestly, I'm not all that concerned about Pokemon. What does interest me is the reboot of Samurai Shodown, released early this summer. I bought that a couple of weeks ago during an Xbox Live sale, and I'm been pretty happy with it so far. EGM writer Mollie Patterson describes it as the authentic sword dueling experience envisioned by the original design team a quarter of a century ago, and I'm inclined to agree. It offers some of the features of the fourth game (background dodging, rage explosions, and lightning strikes) without letting them clutter up the defense-oriented core of the gameplay. You can get hit five, maybe six times in a round. Get careless or greedy and you'll get sliced into lunch meat.

Critics have complained that the story mode is lacking compared to offerings from Bandai-Namco and Netherrealm Studios, but all the dross in Soul Calibur VI and Injustice 2 doesn't necessarily enhance the experience for me... it just complicates it. I'm not here for angsty, convoluted plotlines and I'm not here to play dress up with Superman... I just want to fight. The new Samurai Shodown gets that, and gets straight to the point. There are several styles of gameplay, including a welcome wealth of offline options, but there's a katana-sharp focus on combat in all of them, as it should be. Recently, there's been an alarming amount of bloat in video games in an effort to broaden the experience and boost replay value, but if all that fishing, dating, and bowling comes at a cost to the core of the game, well... what's the point?

Before I go, I should mention that John Champeau of Champ Games managed the impossible (again) and released a port of Galaga for the Atari 2600. The game, rechristened Galagon, is arguably closer to the arcade game than the conversion released for the Atari 7800, marred only by flicker and the system's prehistoric sound chip. I'm just sour that I didn't know about this sooner, because AtariAge seems to have a stranglehold on classic gaming news, and I gave up on that place when its forum turned into a cross between Fox News and this.