It’s really a shame that reactions to Stellar Blade are more focused on the fanservice or the coomer reactions. You got one group of people who just focus on the fanservice and hail the game to be the savior of sexualized women in gaming, and then you got the other group who view the game in a negative light because of the first group. And you know what? I can’t even blame them because the first group is really insufferable.

I don't care in the slightest about Stellar Blade having a "sexy" protagonist. I saw a trailer for it once and was immediately interested, because of how fun and unique it looked.

But coomers saw the female Protagonist’s butt and were obnoxious about it ever since. Like come on, it’s bottom of the barrel fanservice you’re going all crazy for. Literally everything I've seen about this game online is people with underaged anime character avatars cream their pants over how this game is "destroying wokeness" or whatever. Nothing against Eve, because she is really pretty and I actually really like her, but she looks like every female character in every korean MMO ever made. It's like people going to war over white bread. Apparently, these guys are now whining about censorship, signing petitions, and making videos of themselves (they look about as you'd expect) about why their cause matters lmao. These pathetic gamerbros will never not be incredibly annoying and cringe to me.

Because Stellar Blade is just so much more. Picture all those apocalyptic gachas and their really great world-building, fantastic atmosphere but really cheap and dull (chibi) gameplay, then amp it up to AAA levels – that's the magic of Stellar Blade.

The environments are beautifully crafted and the atmospheric soundtrack is another aspect I deeply appreciate and thoroughly enjoyed in this game. There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a captivating melody as you journey through vast, lonely landscapes and cities. Just like Nier, Stellar Blade really nailed its soundtrack.

The gameplay is just so much fun and showcases an exceptional level of refinement and polish. Every movement, dodge and parry hit the mark perfectly. The more skills you unlock, the cooler and more fun the combat gets. There's never a dull moment - the gameplay remains consistently exciting and stylish from start to finish.

I found the plot to be really intriguing, and I really enjoyed uncovering plenty of secrets and snippets of lore. But what really surprised me were the sidequests. Sure, some were usual filler content, but most served to make the world feel alive and deepened the lore. Completing them was enjoyable, they never felt like a chore. So good job there.

Oh, and I'm pleasantly surprised by Eve! Initially, I expected her to be the typical "waifu" (ugh, I hate that word), merely there for visual appeal with little personality beyond conforming to generic “anime girl” tropes. Most of these tropes revolve around being “innocent”, "naive" or a "sweet flower girl." But Eve defies those expectations, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Even though Stellar Blade took huge inspiration from Nier and other apocalyptic gacha games, it's still an extremely unique and fun game that everyone should give a chance. Don't listen to the manchildren throwing tantrums or all the buzz about the “fanservice," which is honestly vastly overexaggerated due to some optional skins. Honestly, aside from the optional skins, there are absolutely no horny aspects present in the game.

There are just so many little touches to the point where you can tell the developers really cared about making this game great, and they succeeded. Stellar Blade is simply a beautiful game.

(Part 3 of the Half Century Challenge, created by C_F. You can read their third review here)

In the depths of the ocean surrounding all of us in one way or another, there are plenty of different fascinating creatures that lurk below it, ones that are quite common for us to find, and even in some cases own as pets, and plenty of others that have yet to even be discovered by us at the time of me tying this review. One of the many different kinds of creatures that we do see often lurking below the water’s surface would have to be sharks, and for good reason. I mean, come on, they are only some of the best kind of fish that you could find, being very neat to watch go about their business, seeing the many different types of sharks out there, and even enjoying them with a nice side dish whenever you catch and murder one………… or at least, I assume they taste good, cause I have never eaten one myself before. Naturally, because sharks are cooler then you will ever be, there have been many different types of movies, games, or what have you entirely revolving around sharks and the things they do best, and in terms of video games, we would see ones involving sharks going as far back as the early 70s, such as the case with today’s game, Killer Shark.

Now, truth be told, I had no clue this game existed for a long time, and most of you probably haven’t either. If you were like me, you have probably only seen it once before during this scene in Jaws, not paying any mind to it, and just moving on with your day, but now that I do know about the game’s existence solely through this challenge that I am doing, looking back on it while knowing details about it is… pretty fascinating, not gonna lie. I did wanna try to play the game for myself, but unfortunately, I was not able to, not only because of there not being a machine of it anywhere near me (or probably anywhere else for the next five or so states), but given the way that the game works, you probably wouldn’t be getting the full experience of the game by trying to emulate it, so I decided to opt out of it. However, just because I can’t play a game doesn’t mean I can’t talk about it, so come along, friends, as I ramble on for a good couple minutes or so about this random game from 1972 that nobody gives a shit about! HERE WE GO!

One thing I gotta point out automatically with this thing is just the design of the machine by itself, as it does a pretty great job of automatically drawing me in. The simplicity of the design, the eye-catching colors that compliment each other, the very simple silhouettes of the diver and shark placed on it, all of it tells you exactly what you need to know about the game, and I imagine it managed to catch peoples’ attention back in the day effectively as a result, which is to be admired for this early on in video game history. The same can also be extended to the actual “graphics” of the game itself, which are dated and basic as shit, but they still look pretty good for the time, and the way that the sharks in the game are animated is charming, in an amateurish sort of way.

The objective of the game is very simple: you are a diver who is about to have the worst day of his life, when he runs into a vicious, killer shark, who follows the wise words of his fellow shark, Bruce, and doesn’t eat fish, but humans are ripe for the picking as far as he’s concerned! So you gotta swim away from that bitch as fast as you can, while armed with your trusty harpoon gun, which you will be using to fire at the shark for an unprecedented amount of time, because for some reason, it is a super mutant shark that can take many different shots from a harpoon. From there, you grab ahold of the plastic gun that the game presents to you and then take aim, shooting many different shots at the shark to make sure it regrets ever messing with you, racking up a very simple score that can be seen on the top of the cabinet, all within a time limit, to prove that you are the best Brody impersonator on the planet.

There isn’t really anything else that this game has to offer besides all of that from what I could tell. You shoot at a shark for a good while, you rack up points, you try to beat your friend’s high score, and that’s all she wrote, which is to be expected from a lot of arcade games like this, especially released this long ago, but once again, a lot of why I found this game to be so appealing was because of its simplicity and charm. The way that the shark moves around on the screen, the noises that the gun makes whenever you fire it, the incredibly simple scoring system on the top of the arcade machine, and the hilarious animation that plays whenever you actually hit the shark at any point. It definitely shows just how primitive video games were at that point, but at the same time, it is also pretty impressive for its time. Yeah, it is mostly just done using lights, with not much else helping it stand out visually, but in a time when your only other options out there were a game where you bounce a ball back and forth or some text-based adventures here or there, this shit is revolutionary in some sense, and I think that alone deserves some praise above all else.

Overall, Killer Shark was an interesting game to look over with the footage that I found online, as it not only shows just what kind of games could be made at this point in time, but also how to make something so simple as killing sharks feel so engaging and welcoming in video game form, and while I may not ever be able to play it, I am at least glad that I know of its existence, as well as how I can share it all with you guys to some capacity. If you wanna see the game in action for yourself, check out this video, as it does a pretty good job at showing off what this game is all about, and hey, maybe later down the road, I could try doing some more reviews in this kind of style, ones that are meant to observe a game rather than needlessly nitpicking the fuck out of it. I dunno, we’ll see how it goes. For now though, I think I’ll move onto a game that I can actually play, and one that involves less sharks dying. They already have it bad enough as is, what with them now snorting cocaine and becoming tornadoes.

Game #580

To nintendoamerica3@hotmail.com

Cc reggiefilsaime@gmail.com +70102 others

Big Fat Fucking Stacks of Cash

Dearest Nintendo,

Just steal this dude's fucking game and sell it for 20 bucks. "Oh, how do I make money? Oh, it's so hard being a mega-corporation worth billions of dollars, waaaa" Just steal his game and put it on the Nintendo Switch. What's he going to do, sue you? It's literally a free 100 million dollars. Why would you not do this?

Yours sincerely,

The only smart person in the history of video games (Henry Vines)

Played 2 hours and realized I just was not having any fun. I don't particularly like the weapon (his attack animations/feel). I have problems timing the parry and the dodge to the attack animations. I love big shields in Dark Souls, but that feeling is NOT the same as shielding in this game. I dont like that the first area is just a open area with some "ruins".

I got to the second area (a big safe zone city) and all my exploration drive went away. I do not want to hear any more talking, I don't want to explore anymore so I just quit.

Yeah I think the artstyle, setting, and music is a good change of pace for Souls-likes, but it I don;t like the combat so 👎

The secret behind Pikmin’s success was not that it somehow outclassed classic real-time strategy franchises, but rather that it was never competing with them to begin with. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, he came up with the idea for Pikmin one day when he observed a group of ants carrying leaves together into their nest. Miyamoto then imagined a game focused on cooperation rather than competition; he asked, “Why can’t everyone just move together in the same direction, carrying things as a team?” Nintendo EAD’s design philosophy went along with this line of reasoning, melding design mechanics from different genres to create an entirely new yet familiar experience. As a result, instead of competing against other players in Pikmin akin to classic RTS games, Pikmin forces players to explore and compete with the very environment itself by introducing puzzle-exploration and survival mechanics. It made sense in the end; after all, real-time strategy is concerned with minimizing time spent to get a competitive edge over opponents, and what better way to translate this than to force players to master their understanding over the terrain itself, managing and optimizing the one resource which governs them all?

Perhaps Nintendo’s greatest challenge was figuring out how to translate a genre considered by many to be niche and technical to an intuitive yet layered game, and even more so, translating classic actions from a mouse and keyboard allowing for such complexity to a suite of simplified controls using a gamepad. Coming from the other side as someone who played Starcraft as a kid and didn’t get into Pikmin until recently however, I’m surprised at how well EAD’s tackled this endeavor. Classic RTS games focus upon base-building and resource gathering through the micromanagement of units. Pikmin’s take upon this is to introduce a dichotomy between the player character Captain Olimar, who is incapable of doing anything by himself but can issue commands to the units only he can create by plucking out of the soil, and the Pikmin, who are essentially brainless but represent the units that must do everything. The player as Olimar must be present to figure out exactly how to best traverse and exploit the environment around him (replacing the base-building with management/prioritization puzzles) while the Pikmin provide bodies to construct, move, and attack the world around them. However, the Pikmin’s AI is fairly limited and as a result, Pikmin will sit around helplessly once they finish their actions and often get distracted by nearby objects while moving around, which is where the micromanagement kicks in. Therefore, the player has to decide how to best build up their supply of Pikmin to allocate tasks to surmount bottlenecks while exploring and opening the world, all while working against the limited thirty-day timer throughout the game’s five areas.

A part of me expected to really struggle with the gamepad while playing Pikmin, but the available actions on offer allow for a surprising degree of control despite the simplification. For instance, consider Olimar’s whistle; as a substitute for dragging and clicking to select units on PC, the whistle on the GameCube lets Olimar quickly rally groups of clustered units. Holding down B for longer allows the player to increase the size of the whistle’s AOE, which allows the player to better control and target how many Pikmin to rally in any cluster (hence, the analog of clicking and dragging to select boxes of units on mouse and keyboard). The Swarm command is another interesting translation. The obvious use is to allow Olimar to quickly move nearby Pikmin by directing them with the C-stick versus needing to aim and throw them by positioning and rotating Olimar himself. However, because it can be used to shift the position of Pikmin with respect to Olimar, it can also be used to swap the Pikmin on-deck for throwing (since Olimar will always throw the Pikmin closest to him) without needing to dismiss and re-rally separated Pikmin colors, and most importantly, it allows you to directly control the group of Pikmin following Olimar while moving Olimar himself. This second application allows the player to kite the Pikmin around telegraphed enemy attacks, and properly funnel them so the Pikmin aren’t getting as easily stuck behind walls or falling off ledges/bridges into hazards. That said, noticeable control limitations do exist. Olimar cannot pivot to move the reticle without changing his position with respect to the Pikmin around him, which can make aiming in place annoying if the Pikmin types you need to throw aren’t close enough to be moved next to Olimar with Swarm. Additionally, there is no way for Olimar to simultaneously and directly control multiple separated groups of Pikmin, which does make allocating tasks a bit slower. However, given that the tasks themselves usually don’t necessitate more than one Pikmin type at a time, this limitation is understandable, especially since the sequels would tackle this challenge with more expansive controls and multiple playable characters on the field.

Pikmin’s base model as a result is a fantastic translation of an abstract design philosophy, but I can’t help but wonder if the original could have been pushed further. Don’t misunderstand me: I absolutely take pride in mastering a game by learning all about its inner workings and pushing its mechanics to the limits simply by following a few intuitive genre principles. As such, I wish that the game was a bit harder in order to really force me to squeeze every bit of time from the game’s solid premise. For example, combat is often optional in Pikmin given how many full-grown Bulborbs are found sleeping, but given that most enemies don’t respawn within the next day after killing them and I can bring their carcasses back to base to more than replenish my Pikmin supply, combat is almost always in my favor, especially since certain enemies will spawn more mobs if they aren’t defeated. If circumstances existed where it would be unfavorable to engage (such as losing a significant number of Pikmin every time, or having so little time left that engaging would waste time), then I feel that this would add an additional layer of decision-making of deciding when to sneak past sleeping Bulborbs rather than just wiping out as many foes as I could as soon as possible. In a similar sense, I felt that certain design elements such as the Candypop Buds for switching Pikmin colors were a bit underutilized; outside of one environmental puzzle, I never had to use the Candypop Buds, mainly because I had so many remaining Pikmin and time to never justify their usage. I’ll concede here that Pikmin’s one-day Challenge Mode does at least provide a score attack sandbox where I’m forced to take my Pikmin stock and remaining time into higher consideration, but it’s missing the connectivity of the main story mode where my earlier actions would greatly affect how I planned later days in a run, particularly in making judgement calls on which days to spend at each site and which days I dedicate towards building up my Pikmin numbers versus hauling in ship parts. Regardless, I found myself completing the main game with all parts in just twenty days on my first run with minimal resets, and I’d love to try a harder difficulty mode with a stricter time limit and tougher Pikmin margins to really force me to better conserve my working force and dedicate more time to restocking my supply.

Gripes aside, I’m glad that my friends finally convinced me to try out Pikmin, not just to better appreciate RTS games as a whole but to also gain an appreciation of how different genre mechanics can work in tandem to intuitively convey concepts without spelling everything out to the player. It’s classic Nintendo at their core, and while I had my reservations coming in as a fan of older RTS franchises, they’ve managed to convince me once again that the best hook is not simply offering something that’s visibly better, but rather offering something that’s visibly different. I still think that there’s improvement to be had, but given how much I’ve enjoyed the first game, I can’t wait to see what they have to offer from iterating upon their memorable beginnings.

I was not expecting to love this as much as I did. It's not perfect for sure, but what it did right was more than enough to push it to 5 stars for me!

The combat felt THE best I've experienced in a soulslike outside of Fromsoft, even surpassing Dark Souls 2 or Lies of P for me. Aggro Crab just gets it somehow! My only gripe with the combat is just that the game got a little bit too easy towards the end. I think this is because you can unlock so many powerups that you get to a point where you can just mow enemies down without much trouble. I fought the final boss with full upgrades and took almost no damage (I didn't use assist mode a single time except to get the gun achievement post game). I would've loved to see a NG+ mode or boss rush to address this or just better scaling at least.

The platforming and movement were an absolute joy. Rolling around in one of the many incredibly creative shells and using the grappling hook had a great sense of speed. Sure some platforming sections could be janky but it never bothered me to the point of frustration. I wasn't even expecting the platforming going in so the level of quality it's at was a pleasant surprise. It also sounds like the team is hard at work on fixing bugs as well. Speaking of bugs, most of the ones I experienced just had to do with me getting launched after using certain moves. This also didn't happen often enough to frustrate me either.

The story is the other part that was a huge surprise. I was fully expecting the story to just be goofy crab shenanigans and there's for sure a lot of crab/ocean related humor that was mostly just fine and sometimes fell flat, but the main character actually goes through a lot of meaningful growth, the story gets pretty dark and serious, and it even had me on the verge of tears a few times. It wasn't a life changing story by any means, but it felt way more epic and meaningful than I could've anticipated.

The game also has a lot of references to other games which were kind of fun to discover though it felt like there were a little too many references at times. Now and then the attempts at humor even went a bit too far imo. Still, it was a great experience.

HIGHLY recommend this game to anyone who enjoys soulslike games or is looking for a challenge/different experience. I have heard about more bugs on other platforms so it could be worth waiting a while for more bug fixes. I'm feeling pretty strongly that this'll be my GOTY this year.