It's Alive! ALIIIIIVE!

They're heeeere...

Well, this was some good news in a week starved for it. Capcom's releasing a fighting game collection for the Switch, Xbox One, and Playstation 4, with no less than five Darkstalkers games in it! While it's true that three of those games are just Vampire Savior with a handful of characters removed to lessen the burden on the CPS2 hardware, I'll be too busy playing the second game in the Darkstalkers series, NightWarriors, to notice. 

Other games in the Capcom Fighting Collection include Pocket Fighter, Red Earth, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (not technically a fighting game, but whatever), and Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition, which had previously popped up in an anniversary collection for the Xbox and Playstation 2.

So what have I been doing in the week since I last posted? Trying to get my Timex-Sinclair 2068 to play games, which has been a fool's errand. I've done everything but actually use a cassette recorder with it, and that's a bridge I'd rather not cross. Look, there's retro, and then there's just dated.

When not frustrating myself with that, I've been playing Lords of the Fallen, a somewhat lackluster Dark Souls clone developed in the West, starring what appears to be a bald, constipated Tom Selleck. Frankly, the market's been so glutted with hard-em-ups (mostly by From Software, the folks who "blessed" us with this genre in the first place) that it's hard to justify this one, with its obtuse play mechanics and sluggish swordplay. Yeah, it's repeatedly shown up on Xbox Marketplace for three dollars with all the DLC included, but unless you devour these games with all the rabid enthusiasm of the Cookie Monster, there's no point in buying Lords of the Fallen. Use that money on some horse armor or a Dead or Alive bikini instead.

I also picked up Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered when that was on sale, and that was more to taste. It starts out tough and only gets worse from there (the accursed "Do Take Care of It" event will give you nightmares...), but if you want to just drive without competition or time limits, you have that option. There's a track based on the back roads of Oregon, complete with driving rain and skinny pine trees stretching up to the heavens, and it's a pure delight to soak in the photorealistic scenery, watch as the day turns to night and back, and drive through tunnels, where the sound of rain is replaced with the roar of your engine bouncing off the walls. Now that's driving excitement, without the annoyance!

The Cut-Off Point

As I'm sure you've already heard elsewhere (I really, really need to update this blog more often...), Nintendo plans to shutter its online stores for the 3DS and Wii U at the end of March 2023. The company is especially eager to retire the Wii U... games for the unpopular hybrid console can no longer be purchased from a computer, forcing Wii U owners to dig up their long dormant systems and make their last minute purchases on the Wii U eShop. (A word of warning from someone who just did this: the Wii U interface is slower than you remember. Much, much slower.)

However, it will become increasingly difficult to buy games for either the Wii U or 3DS in the months leading up to their retirements. You won't be able to use credit cards to pick up anything you're missing by the end of May, and by August, you won't be able to buy eShop credit for the two systems at all, unless they're on the same account as your Switch. 

Does this suck? Yes, quite. Will Nintendo cave under customer pressure and reverse their decision? Not likely, no. When they said they were closing Miiverse at precisely 10:00PM on November 7th of 2017, it's exactly what they did, in spite of the outcry from members of the short-lived social network. Will there be any permanent way to own NES and Super NES games on the Switch after Nintendo drops the guillotine on the 3DS and Wii U? Nope, and that's probably the way Nintendo wants to keep it. 

The Nintendo Online subscription service ensures that Nintendo has total control of where, when, and how its customers play their games. Players can't pirate what's safely tucked away in the cloud, and when Nintendo is ready to put the Switch into retirement, they can deny access to legacy content with the tap of a key, forcing you to upgrade to their next console to regain it. Welcome to a brave new future of planned obsolescence and forfeited ownership! It's gonna suck ass.

Eyes > Stomach

It's been a while since I've posted, hasn't it? Better do something about that.

Nintendo recently posted a Direct presentation on YouTube, and while I didn't watch the whole thing, I caught the highlights reel from IGN and got a little extra information from my Twitter feed. We're getting a lot of Square-Enix games on the Switch, including a remaster of the loose sequel to Chrono Trigger and several Kingdom Hearts games that run from the cloud... provided your internet is fast enough to handle playing the game remotely from a distant server. (My internet service won't even download Switch games at more than a snail's pace, so I think I'll pass.) On the Namco side of things, we're getting welcome remasters of the first two Klonoa games (likely without the coupons for fish tacos) and another entry in the Taiko Drum Master series.

It's covered with rust and half-fellated by
a video game hero, but it STILL runs
better than my Buick.
(image from Know Your Meme)

Nintendo probably had the most exciting news, announcing a long overdue Rookie Mode in the ball-busting Metroid Dread, twenty four additional courses in Mario Kart 8, the resurrection of Nintendo Sports with a stunning new look, and Kirby half-swallowing machines in the upcoming Forgotten Lands. By the way, he can also pay to have his tried and true Copy abilities enhanced, turning Fire into Volcano and Cutter into Chakram Cutter. You know, like that metal doughnut Xena threw around in the action show from the 1990s. No, Kirby doesn't get a metal and leather bra while he uses this ability. Yes, I'm disappointed, too.

In closer to home news, I finally bought a high-capacity external hard drive for my Xbox One, more than doubling my storage and letting me actually download some of the games I've purchased over the last couple of months. Games are big these days, weighing in at 30, 40, even 50 gigabytes. The 500GB drive built into my Xbox One S just doesn't cut it anymore. I shudder to think of what I'll do when I eventually upgrade to an Xbox Series and am compelled to use pricey solid state drives to save its even more enormous games.

I've also ordered a ZX Spectrum cartridge for the Timex-Sinclair 2068 mentioned in my last post. While that supposedly arrived at the post office this afternoon, I sure as hell didn't find it there. Between that mailing mishap and a car that steadfastly refuses to stay fixed and a bunch of yapping mutts on either side of my house keeping me awake at night, I think I can safely count this day as a loss.

Oh! There was one other thing I wanted to mention before I left. Someone, or a handful of someones, is working on a sequel to Mega Man: The Wily Wars, that little seen and even less enjoyed collection of the first three Mega Man games for the Sega Genesis. Wily Wars was farmed out to a freelance team of developers and felt rather off in its execution, but there's very little wrong with the beta I've played of Mega Man: The Sequel Wars. The blue bomber feels like he did on the NES, firing at a brisk clip and making precise jumps... which are kind of important in a game where you're often forced to hopscotch across tiny vanishing platforms. Better still, the game is flashier than the NES games, flaunting a 16-bit level of polish with enemies that burst into pieces and robot masters who light up like the last firework in a 4th of July celebration.

One other nifty addition is that each Robot
Master gets his own custom introduction,
along with an ominous tune that plays
in the hallway before his lair. Bright Man
shatters a fuse in the background before
making his appearance.

The only downside is that with three games to include in the package, the design team has a lot of work ahead of them, and may not finish the project for years. They say good things come to those who wait, but anyone who lacks the patience for all that waiting crap ought to check out the Sequel Wars demo, which offers a substantial chunk of gameplay... roughly half of Mega Man 4, with a special extended mode for Skull Man. If you're a fan of the series, you definitely want to play through this, if only to realize how much better The Wily Wars could, and should, have been.