The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III: Finally, It’s On PS4

Posted on February 3, 2020 by geelw

Yikes. I know Hungarian studio Neocore Games have been a bunch of busy bees over the years what with creating, changing for the better and supporting with content its excellent Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor, but I’d actually thought they went and forgot the series that helped put them on the map for a hot minute. Nope, they were just pretty occupied for a while, but wouldn’t you know it, out of the blue, they went and finally released the The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III for a very reasonable $14.99, while dropping the price on the first two games to $7.99 and $5.99 respectively.

Those prices on the two older games expires on February 5, 2020, so go get them now and fast, as they’re quite fun and a bit amusing, packing in a few surprises along the way. I’ll shut up here and let you get to it, then.

-GW

SALES: Spike Chunsoft Wants You To Switch It Up

Posted on February 3, 2020 by geelw

Well, this is good news if you own a Nintendo Switch and want a few good deals on some mighty fine games particularly video novel adventure games and a really solid tower defense title. Developer/publisher Spike Chunsoft is running a sale on a small collection of digital-only games from now until February 10, 2020. Check out the list below the jump.

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Rustler: Get Medieval in This Hilarious GTA-Inspired Game

Posted on February 1, 2020 by geelw

Yep. This needs to be played for this reference alone.

First of all, when I went to install the Rustler Alpha demo on Steam, I was greeted with Grand Theft Horse as a title on the game installer, which was magnificent. Indie developer Justus Games knows which side of the bread their butter in on. Second of all, for an alpha, the game is coming together pretty well. It’s just up on Kickstarter now and is there waiting for you to pledge or the drunken sot with the sword in the banner above may come for you. He’ll be right up your alley if you’re not right up his, as it were. That alley will be dark ad have a few rodents in it, most likely.

Gameplay is much the original Grand Theft Auto and GTA 2 isometric top down stuff but rendered in a nicer game engine with some lusher environments. As with the aforementioned games, there’s humor in all the mayhem you cause and yes, the old ultra-violence means it’s not a child’s game for sure. But there’s that nifty cathartic thing going on here that just works because you get immediate results from your attempts at criminal behavior (or, assorted guards and villagers don’t just stand by while you crime away), so expect to fight as you run run or ride a swiped horse away from trouble, or cause more pain for as long as you can. It’s your choice, but the lead’s character’s seemingly perpetually drunken state can cause him to fall off a horse or otherwise be dismounted.

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Here Be Dragons: Insanely Good (So Far)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by geelw

Too good to be true, so it must be false!

How does one properly describe a game where you play as a few somewhat (okay, VERY) off-kilter pirates in a turn-based strategy game that features a dice-spitting cherub, sea monsters of a few types, gameplay on a “living map” and a reworking of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World? Yeah, you can’t, but you sort of just have to watch this trailer first to see why:

Red Zero Games? Congratulations are in order as you win the prize. What prize it is will be determined at a later date, but you win something for this pure madness in my book (Memo: give Red Zero Games a prize but not the stale popcorn from last week, that’s not a prize unless they’re dead parrots). I’m actually still playing Here Be Dragons (my laptop has been in haywire mode this week), but so far, this game has had me laughing with it constantly because it’s got easy to pick up, tricky to master gameplay, other than a few glaring typos is extremely well written, and its humor is right up my alley.

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Overpass Hands-On: A Scoop Of (Extremely) Rocky Road, Please

Posted on January 30, 2020 by geelw

(sings): “Bumpy roads, take me home…”

Bigben Games wants to be your racing simulation racing studio of choice (WRC 8 was a pretty excellent sim on PS4 and my favorite console racer last year), and its upcoming off-road title developed by Zordix Racing in Sweden, Overpass (set for release on March 12, 2020 and March 17 for Switch) is certainly shaping up to be a really solid game experience. I got an hour or so of playtime with the PC version and can report that it’s going to fascinate some and frustrate others, but this is actually a really good thing. If you’re more used to arcade-style racers where all you do is floor the accelerator and powerslide to the fastest victory you can manage, well, here comes a game that’s a test of skill where learning the literal ups and downs of the tracks becomes part of the game and speed needs careful mastering and consideration.

Does anyone remember Spintires? If so, imagine that with faster off-road racers in mind and the needs to both master a track’s hazards and nail in a quick time despite those hazards. Overpass does this somewhat magnificently, with analog triggers and a thrilling use of controller feedback where you’ll feel the road beneath your ride of choice and need to navigate through the environment unless you want more free badly done rolls than you can find at an Olive Garden.

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The Pee Fountain, Death, and Bette Davis

Posted on January 29, 2020 by geelw

I got an email not too long ago that I still had money on a certain coffee card that never ever expires (we don’t do product placement here, but you can guess for free and no prizes will be awarded for guessing correctly), so I took a break from my Firefox-induced madness noted in a previous post and went down to grab a cuppa joe even though I’d made a fresh pot earlier today. A change of scenery was going to help my mood, I thought.

Sometimes, dear reader… you get more than you paid for.

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Review: Terminator: Resistance (PS4)

Posted on January 29, 2020 by geelw

Hi! I’m Darryl and this is my other brother, Darryl and we’ll be killing you in a sec…

Well, isn’t this a big surprise?

Reef Entertaiment‘s shockingly good Terminator: Resistance ($59.99, PS4) is the best game in the long running series of games based on the franchise since the one-two punch of Bethesda’s two very solid PC games, The Terminator: Future Shock (1995) and SkyNET (1996). What’s so astonishing is this new game’s developer Teyon is responsible for 2014’s RAMBO: The Video Game, which was raked over the coals critically for a number of issues, with being a simple rail shooter where movement was automatic and had too many QTE (Quick Time Event) sequences and some technical woes some of the biggest problems.

The Polish developer (who also has a branch in Japan) has been around since 2006 making a number of games for multiple platforms and to me, they’re a tiny bit like Cauldron, the Bratislava-based developer who made a number of journeyman-like titles across multiple platforms for a few publishers over the years. Whatever budget they had to work with here, Teyon really took the Terminator license seriously, going back to the first two films for inspiration and knocking it out the park as a result. Interestingly enough, there’s a even a Bethesda Softworks touch in the interaction scenes with other characters as choices you make affect a few outcomes and even the lock picking mini-game is lifted from the later Bethsoft-made Fallout games.

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Weird Tales (and It’s All True)

Posted on January 29, 2020 by geelw

Thanks, OOdie Smith!)

Amusingly enough, my last post seemed to cause some voodoo spirits* or whatever to affect my posting through Firefox, as I’m now writing this on Google Chrome after installing it because I can’t post or respond to posts using Firefox now. Weird, as it’s been an issue since last night when I was trying to post two reviews and respond to a few comments and I couldn’t. It was late and I was tired, so I did the usual human thing of going to bed without resolving the problem.

Of course, this didn’t work at all as a proper solution when I went to check early this morning to see what was up.

VOODOOOOOO!!**

I think I turned into Sir Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in Sexy Beast at this point, or I got up and had a cup of strong coffee, or both. But like a politician, I choose not to remember certain things as a matter of convenience. Oh, that video you clicked on was very NSFW (no, not in a sexy manner), but I may also have been (ALLEGEDLY), and Sir Ben is better at emoting, so there. Nyah.

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The Thousand (Plus) Post Stare

Posted on January 28, 2020 by geelw

I’ve got a secret that’s not really a secret is a silly way to begin a post, but so it goes. Anyway, I started blogging on Blogger 11 or so years ago, moving to WordPress because, frankly, Blogger was a pain on a few fronts and Google for some reason chopped my Adsense monetization off for no good reason. I know there was a class action suit filed a few years later and they eventually sent me a pittance of what I was owed, but that’s fodder for a separate post.

I’d been meaning to migrate my old site’s posts here for some time and indeed, did move a few years of content (a few thousand posts) over a few years ago. What’s left are about 1100 posts (including drafts) that I have no idea what to do with, although a few are junk posts that point people to this site, so I can ignore those completely. As for the rest, it may seem that many posts are outdated and some old reviews are no longer relevant, but it’s a weird time in the world where one may want old stuff to have some existence in some way outside the disposable content the internet is packed with.

Well, that and converting even a few hundred of those old posts will take a bit of time to do and transfer any images and videos over. Well, that’s a thing to consider, right? It might not actually happen, but I may slip in the occasional old blog post as a “retro” review other feature in the future, Well, maybe. My backlog is so huge that it may never happen, but I may surprise myself one of these days..

-GW

SAMURAI SHODOWN on Switch: Big Things, Smaller Packages and Big, But Little Surprises

Posted on January 27, 2020 by geelw

It’s time to Switch things up…

I’ll tell you, games can get you in trouble if you’re careless. Case in point, SNK’s Samurai Shodown has always caused me trouble because it’s intentionally misspelled the word “Showdown” since its initial installment in arcades in 1993. Which has lead me to ducking fists and feet ever since when I try to correct a fan of the franchise on occasion who spells the word incorrectly outside of the game title. (CHOP! Ow!)

Hey, sorry! My internal spellcheck just goes haywire when I see it. It’s not your fault! Anyway, here’s a peek at few trailers and screens look at some new content for the upcoming Unreal-4 powered Nintendo Switch version, ($49.99) which is coming on February 25, 2020 and looks pretty nice, by the way. Even nicer, players who pre-order the digital or physical version of the game before its release date will get a neat freebie -a port of the Neo Geo Pocket Color game, Samurai Shodown! 2 as a bonus.

Better still, pre-orders for the physical version from GamsStop or Best Buy get a cool bonus controller skin, so hit up one of these retailers if you’re in the US and want one before the game ships.

I still have my old NGPC here, so even though the Switch port will be an exclusive to the console, It’ll bring back memories playing it now on Nintendo’s home and portable wodder system. I actually missed the PS4 version of the game when it was last year (oops), but I think I can still nab a copy from the PlayStation Store when I need to.

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