When my girlfriend’s family and friends come to visit, the result is that we all end up spending most of the weekend at her friend Ryan’s, being force-fed a week’s worth of amazing food (and a month’s worth of wine) in the course of a few days. The resulting protracted food coma unfortunately prevents me from updating here in a timely fashion, for which I apologize. I’ve been sitting in a daze contemplating shabu shabu and homemade Vietnamese espresso ice cream. And lots of nigori.
But neither wind nor rain nor snow nor sake can prevent me from updating this week’s game release list. Although, geez, this week was hardly worth the trouble, eh? But soldier on, gentle readers. Things will get better next month. After reading my Mario Galaxy preview (it goes up in the morning), you may in fact find yourself incapable of playing anything else, so great will be your giddy anticipation. Did I say giddy anticipation? I meant frothing demand.
I’m secretly hoping that upon release there’s a huge cry that it’s derivative tripe, because I have to wait a month for it to come out here and analysing the reviews will probably keep me going for another week or so.
I’m almost embarrassed by how badly I want that Guitar Hero III demo. I say almost because I wouldn’t actually buy Tony Hawk to play it, but I would shiv a Gamestop manager or two. Jeremy, you’re an industry type, any idea whether or not this is packaged on the TH disc or does it come as a disc, all its own?
I would say that there’s no way to prevent drooling over Galaxy… but apparently someone saw fit to release METAL MARINES (one of the great lost SNES-era Underdogs) for the VC.
You can take your TG-CD and Ninja Gaiden II (okay, that’s the best one in the series and probably rules even more than MM*, but work with me here) and do what you like with them. Hell, if Metal Marines had two-player mode people would be talking about it like all the big gun strategy games (X-Com, MOO, etc.) of that era. It’s that good.
This is the easiest three-game thumbs-up sweep the VC’s ever posted, I think, and if not is certainly the one with the most variety.
-S
* – largely because someone at Tecmo decided “you know what, things might be a bit easier if this great Ninja wasn’t forced to stick to one spot on the wall like he had a Mysterious Ninja Glue applied to his hands.”
I may be an industry type, but any interest I had in Tony Hawk died years ago, and I’m incompetent at rhythm games. So combining THPS and Guitar Hero is pretty much an easy ticket to blissful ignorance for me.
If this week is really so weak then why didn’t the new Guilty Gear X2 win Game of the Week by default? I swear that’s like a huge troll.
Yes, it’s the fourth near-identical version of the game, I know. That’s because X2 was so brilliantly accomplished in the first place incremental upgrades are the best the developers could do to follow it up. They can afford to take their time. The rest of the genre is still playing catch-up.