Bye, July!

And good riddance, you miserably molten month. Don't come back for another eleven months, or much much later than that if it's at all possible.

I cannot play this game to save my life.
(image from CDRomance)

Anyway. (Ahem.) Some pretty good news to report for the Dreamcast, which hasn't seen much in the way of excitement since the pandemic, when two hackers brought the bulk of the Atomiswave library to Sega's last game system. Not only is there an English translation of SNK's Cool Cool Toon, but Atomiswave titles like KenJu and Rumble Fish now have sensible button layouts, and... okay, here's the one that's really got me excited... King of Fighters Evolution finally offers support for VGA monitors. It probably should have had that support from the start (cough... cough... SNK), but better twenty-three years late than never!

Okay, onto the ever present rumors of a Switch successor, given credibility by reports from more trusted sources than the usual shady customers on the internet whose predictions are right 52 percent of the time and wrong 48 percent of the time. (It's still a better batting average than Michael Pachter. Yes, I'm going with a joke ten years past its expiration date.) Tom's Hardware, GameSpot, and Game Revolution all claim that the Switch 2 is arriving in the middle of next year, and that third party developers already have development kits in their hands. 

Not too much is known beyond that, which means that we don't know if the Switch 2 will be backward compatible with the original Switch, and if so, by what degree. Developers have already made it clear that they don't want backward compatibility because it would stifle "innovation*" (ie reselling us the games we already own as whoop-de-doo remasters, a tactic we first saw in 2013), but personally speaking, I don't WANT a second Switch if it's not compatible with the first. I've got umpteen million classic collections and Arcade Archives games on my Switch, and I'm quite insistent that they remain available to me. 

Much has made made of the report that 87% of mass market video games are not currently available for purchase, but look, the Switch went a long way toward filling out that remaining thirteen percent. There was no way to buy an authentic version of Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. prior to 2017... your only options were piracy or some weaksauce NES port with dull colors and gameplay that just didn't feel right. Compared to what had come before, the Switch is a wonderland of arcade goodness, an Aladdin's Castle you can fit in a backpack or a purse. Pac-Man? Crystal Castles? Double Dragon? Terra Cresta? Moon Patrol? Vs. Super Mario Bros., the arcade one with the harder stages? Street Fighter friggin' III? A decade's worth of King of Fighters games? They're all right there in your two hands, and they're yours to keep, legally, forever.

Or depending on the whims of the console manufacturer, perhaps just the life of the system itself. When you buy something in the Xbox ecosystem, it tends to stick around for a while. The digital copy of Crystal Quest I bought for my Xbox 360 in 2006 is still available to me, seventeen years and two console generations later. Sony's commitment to past purchases is a little spottier, but you can still play PSP games on your Vita, or PS4 games on your PS5. 

Unfortunately, Nintendo has not fared so well in this brave new world of digital downloads. Games purchased on the Wii eShop could be ported to the Wii U (sometimes at an additional cost to the user), but once those games were on the Wii U, they were stranded there. You couldn't take them back to the Wii, and you couldn't push them forward to the Switch. As a result, I have dozens of games that I love, trapped on a game system I've grown to hate. I'd like to play Metroid Zero Mission again. I would not like to dig out my Wii U and its senselessly oversized controller to do that, and I would very much not like to pay Nintendo a subscription fee for access to a game I've already purchased. Hello? This is already mine? You got your money, now where's my damn game?

For me personally, compatibility with the original Switch is an absolute must, a higher priority than anything else. I've tied too much money into the first Switch to abandon that collection and start anew. Just give me what you already made six years ago, boost the performance so old games run better on the new hardware, and ensure that the backward compatibility is as close to 100% as you can make it (without burdensome conditions and limitations) and I'll be happy. Hey, it worked for the Xbox Series.

* Tech companies to customers: "Bend over and drop your pants! Here comes five inches of innovation!"

It's All Over But the Digestion

That's game, set, and match in the legal skirmish between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission. The final score? 2-0 in Microsoft's favor. The spoils? A little video game publisher you might have heard of, called Activision. Or is it Activision-Blizzard? Or maybe Activision-Blizzard-King? Whatever. It's all just Microsoft now.

Whenever I hear the name "Activision
Blizzard King," this is typically what
comes to mind.

What does this mean for gamers? Probably not much at first. It'll take a while for Microsoft to fully subsume the first third party video game company, and the software giant promised both the FTC and the gaming community that the Call of Duty series would remain cross-platform for the immediate future. One change we should expect sooner than later is the ouster of former Activision CEO and corporate shark Bobby Kotick, who vowed to leave the company after the deal was finalized. Well, it happened Bobby, so get 'ta steppin'. Don't let the door hit you in the Moneyballs on the way out.

What I would like to see happen is a revival of Activision IP that had went into hibernation during the reign of Kotick. Now that Microsoft is in control, I'd like to see Activision Anthology make a comeback. This was one of the better classic collections for the Playstation 2 in the early 2000s, ranking up there with Capcom Classics Collection and Atari Anniversary, and a sequel on the Xbox Series (and the Switch, and the Playstation 5) would be deeply appreciated by old-school gamers like myself.

There was speculation that the Activision merger would bring more Xbox and Xbox 360 games to the Series, and while I don't think this has a realistic chance of actually happening (when was the last backward compatibility update, anyway? 2019?), I would certainly not mind it happening. In fact, I'd be happy to offer suggestions for Activision-published games that Microsoft could make compatible with its current generation console. How about Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, the parallel universe-hopping action game with four classic Spider-Man voice actors returning to the role? Or what about Blur, the strange but enticing racing game that's a hybrid of Need for Speed and Super Mario Kart? Even better, why not Bloody Roar: Extreme? I've got a physical copy of this ferociously frantic fighter, but I'd love to see it make a comeback on modern consoles, with a sharper resolution and improvements to the already spiffy graphics.

If you're not going to do any of that, at least give us a new Activision Anthology. Heaven knows we've waited long enough for one. 

Semi-Sweet Nothing: Clockwork Aquario

Better late than never. But not
much better.

Westone's Clockwork Aquario is the quintessential arcade game... loud, colorful, and unapologetically dumb. Perhaps a little too dumb, considering that it missed arcades entirely and was instead ported to modern game consoles like the Nintendo Switch. While it's great from a preservation standpoint that Clockwork Aquario was finished and released, the game itself is a distressingly empty experience, even by the standards of a 1994 arcade title, and certainly now, nearly thirty years after Westone started designing it.

As one of three heroes (the distinctly average, verdant-haired Londo, his panty-flashing female counterpart Elle, and a derpy walking scrap pile named Gush), it's up to you to destroy the mechanical island fortress of the sinister, fish-faced Dr. Hangyo. As you might expect from the title, most of your enemies in Clockwork Aquario are robotic sealife... fire-spitting clams, hungry pikes, and balloons bearing Hangyo's Piscean likeness. The balloons are harmless but nevertheless irritating, getting in your way as you try to fight schools of flying fish and hop to nearby platforms.

Clockwork Aquario tries to bring technique to its simple gameplay... punching out a fish stuns it briefly, letting you toss it into clusters of nearby enemies for a big point bonus. Alternately, you can hop on stacks of Hangyo's balloons to reach distant items and further boost your score. The problem is, the collision detection is a little sketchy (prepare to swear as you're somehow injured by the creature you tried to stomp), the sprites are too large for precision platforming, and crowds of monsters guarantee cheap and frequent deaths. You "get" what Westone was trying to accomplish with Clockwork Aquario, but the play mechanics just don't hold together well. You'll think you've got the hang of it, only to credit feed in frustration as the flat level designs become more annoying and you're overwhelmed with fishy foes.

On the plus side, Clockwork Aquario is colorful and cartoony, a pleasant throwback to the good old days of video games when the extreme violence of Mortal Kombat was more the exception than the rule. At the end of every stage, Dr. Hangyo appears in a marine mech, ranging from a shell-clapping otter-bot to a bulbous penguin that can't seem to keep its pants around its waist. (Do penguins even have waists? Talk about mission impossible.) It's a treat for the eyes, but as a game, Clockwork Aquario wouldn't have been good in 1994, and isn't particularly good now. It's one of those coin-ops you would have walked away from after feeding it a handful of quarters, and it's just barely worth the three dollars it costs now. Don't even think of paying the full retail price for this one.

This review was also posted on Cohost and Kbin! Support federated social media, because the corporate stuff sucks.