Weekend Update (without Colin Jost or Michael Che)

Been a little out of sorts this month, but I do want to drop a brief post to let you know what I've been doing game-wise. The most important of these is that after months of going without, I finally bought the latest title in the King of Fighters series, and aside from some aggressive trimming of the cast, I'm thrilled with it. KOF XV is the best damn game in the series since 2002 UM, in my opinion. Even the announcer is loads better, interacting with the fight in the same way the Capcom vs. SNK 2 did, and offering color commentary on the captain of your opponent's team when the fight begins. Battles are swift and satisfying, with massive combo potential for those into high level play, and the DJ Station offers not only a vast selection of excellent tunes, but lets you unlock music from pretty much every King of Fighters release, and even games SNK released before the Neo-Geo existed.

Thanks to the infinite possibilities of the
Multiverse, Ash Crimson has survived his
brush with the time paradox that should have
ended his very existence. Gee, lucky me.
(Image from Steam)

In short, it's really good. My only beef is that while its predecessor offered too many characters, KOF XV goes in the opposite direction, paring down the selection of fighters to about forty. Nobody's going to miss the likes of Alice, Mui Mui, and Ruby Love Heart, but the likeable South American team, comprised of a slick afro-Brazilian ninja, an optimistic gymnast with a toucan sidekick, and a boxer with a metal arm that could shatter concrete, has also opted to sit this one out, with no indication that they'll be back in a DLC pack. What we get instead are a second flavor of the New Face team (uhh...) and three heroes from the Samurai Shodown series, which don't fit in King of Fighters for so many reasons. Nevertheless, KOF fans are going to be quite happy with the overall package here. I've been playing this series since its wonky beginnings in 1994, and XV is as good as King of Fighters gets.

Oh yeah, I also picked up a handful of clearance priced titles from Wal-Mart, because I'm cheap like that. The biggest surprise was Biomutant, a game that was coldly received by critics but I found to be rather entertaining, in its own charmingly odd way. When the dastardly Toxenol corporation leaves the Earth an irradiated mess, new species of furry whatzits rise to fill the ecological niche of humans, and fight among themselves to either save the world from destruction, or hasten its demise. 

Biomutant comes with a free, extra-challenging
bonus game, "What the Fuck is It?" Even the
designers at Experiment 101 don't know for sure!
(image from PCGamesN)

Like the fuzzy but not quite adorable creatures alluded to in the title, Biomutant is something of a misshapen freak itself, going in several vastly different directions at once. Sometimes it's The Matrix, with your hero leaping through the air in slow motion, slicing through hordes of rival tribesmen and emptying clips of ammo into monsters many times his size. Sometimes it's Fallout, with your character navigating the post-apocalyptic landscape and speaking to the eccentric locals. Sometimes Biomutant even takes a sharp swerve into Winnie the Pooh territory, with a friendly British narrator providing translation for the game's cast of freaky fauna, and occasionally poking you in the ribs to remind you that you're dangerously low on health. 

It's a confusing mélange of gameplay and narrative styles and it shouldn't work at all, but Experiment 101 gets a lot of credit for somehow making the various incongruent pieces of Biomutant fit... even if a few whacks of a hammer were occasionally necessary to get that square peg inside that round hole. I would cautiously recommend this one... it's not going to stand toe to toe with a juggernaut like Horizon: Zero Dawn, but Biomutant is certainly worth your time, as well as the sawbuck I spent on it.

What else? AtGames just released a firmware update for its Legends line of home arcade devices. Now if you want to play your own ROMs, you can just do that, without having to ask AtGames for permission every five times. You don't even have to be online at all, a boon for anyone who has their cabinet tucked away in the corner of a concrete basement. Sega also released the sequel to the Sega Genesis Mini, and it's been getting expectedly positive reviews, with one highlight of the package being a more smoothly scrolling version of Space Harrier II. It's hard to overstate just how impressive it is to see a passable imitation of the SuperScaler technology on a Sega Genesis, and just smoothing out the animation goes a long way toward making Space Harrier II a respectable entry in the series, rather than the early embarrassment the original game was when it launched with the Mega Drive in late 1988. 

Look, it's really, really good scaling. Maybe you

had to be there, but if I'd seen this as a teenager,

I would have wet my pants. Wet at a minimum.

Yes, there's excessive flicker, and yes, the number of onscreen objects are kept low to reduce the burden on the system, but this is a Sega Genesis we're talking about here. There's no room for Mode 7 at this inn. Its previous high watermark for dynamic 3D environments was Road Rash 2. Conventional wisdom suggests that Space Harrier shouldn't look anywhere near as good as it does here, yet here we are! Props go to M2 for once again wringing the impossible out of the Sega Genesis hardware.

Oh, What a Tangled Web Atari Weaves

And now, a low-poly, AI-generated drawing of Atari
founder Nolan Bushnell, because I paid thirty frickin'
bucks for a month of Midjourney, and I might as
well have something to show for it.

We interrupt this extended hiatus for this important message! Thanks to SlickDeals user Simoleon, we now know the full list of games that will be included in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, set to be released on November 11th. I regret to say that if you were looking forward to the Jaguar and Lynx games in this collection, you will probably be a little disappointed. You're getting just nine of the former and a measly six of the latter, with the high points of the Lynx's library being ignored in favor of Basketbrawl, Malibu Mammaries Bikini Volleyball, Scrapyard Dog, Super Asteroids & Missile Command, Turbo Sub, and Warbirds. 

"Why no Gauntlet or STUN Runner or RoadBlasters?," my readers would exclaim, if I had any of those. Well, here's the problem. Those were all by Atari Games, the half of Atari that was split off from Atari's home division after the video game crash of 1983. That company would start its own home division, Tengen, and punch out games for the NES and Genesis until eventually getting consumed by Time-Warner Interactive (yes, the company that used to own Atari in a past life) and ultimately being swallowed whole by Midway, which would also get gobbled up by Warner Brothers.

Confused yet? Wait, there's more. The Atari that's releasing this collection was first owned by Warner, then former Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel, then hard drive maker JTS, then toy giant Hasbro (oh man was this ever a bad period in the company's life), and finally French company Infogrames, which would eventually adopt the name because Infogrames sounds like a breakfast cereal for nerds, rather than a proper video game company.

Epyx gave us some pretty sweet
game covers. Also, they invented
the concept of the procedurally
generated dungeon crawler.
Yeah, all those Rogue-likes and
Rogue-lites you've sank hours of
fruitless gameplay into started
right here. You can blame Epyx
for all that wasted time.
(image from Wikipedia)

So that in not so short is why you're not getting the better games for the Atari Lynx. What's really peculiar is that the launch titles for the system, created by Epyx, are nowhere to be found either. You'd think that the current Atari would have purchased the likes of Blue Lightning and Electro-Cop along with the Lynx, but evidently those games are still the property of whoever owns Epyx at the moment. Google says that's Bridgestone Multimedia Group Global, but whoever these guys are, it seems they weren't willing to play ball with whatever we're calling Atari these days.

Things are a little more encouraging on the Jaguar side of the fence, with Tempest 2000, Cybermorph, and Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy all being included, but you're not getting the goofy Mortal Kombat clones Kasumi Ninja and Ultra Vortek, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Alien vs. Predator won't be included either. Hey, you try to negotiate with 20th Century Fox's corporate parent Disney for the rights to these classic horror movie icons and see how well that works out for you. You'd probably have more luck wrestling with a face hugger.