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Streets of Rage 4 It felt a little stiffer than I would have liked, but ultimately the intuitive comboability of the game won me over, at least compared to my experience with TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge . Where bosses in that game felt like they were just rolling through their movesets and phases, with little regard for what I was doing, the ability to interrupt (some, not all) moves and pick them up with OTGs meant that the game never really ground to a halt on my first playthrough. Only one boss – the one with a shield which uses ranged attacks – really frustrated me at first encounter (frustrated in the emotional sense, not the difficulty sense). I did find it painfully tricky to avoid enemy attack patterns, but part of that was poor positioning and restraint on my part. Hopefully as I keep dipping into it, I’ll overcome my sillier instincts. Streets of Rage 4 ’s concessions to the casual audience are also more comfortable than Shredder’s , in terms of both my own preferences and the...

West of Dead I’m stretching it a bit to say I finished West of Dead . I did beat the final boss, but then he told me that he was bound by three souls and I hadn’t really beaten him blah blah blah. I’ll dabble here and there, but I’m not committing too much more time to it. Personally, I think it would have been a better move to polish out the mechanics and craft both a more engaging gameplay loop as well as more handcrafted combat encounters rather than rely on the willingness of players to commit to runs of procedurally generated content… but of course I’d say that. As it is, I’m really not sure why this was a roguelike. There’s pretty much no interesting power gains (ooh, big decisions like health or damage or alternate damage oh my), the guns are fairly samey, the abilities and charms do little to break it up. The slow pace of unlocks only adds to this sense of inertia, of being stuck. At least there’s ludonarrative harmony there, I suppose, but creating an array of unsatisfying t...

  9 Monkeys of Shaolin was released in 2020 by Sobaka Studio. I believe it was their second game. Although many would describe it as a beat-em-up, it eschews some of the hallmarks of the genre in favour of an experience that courts more mainstream attention. With a level-based (rather than arcade) campaign, skill trees and item unlocks, and a focus on story sections, I would consider it more broadly in the 2D action genre, refuting the more specific descriptor. I enjoyed my time with it, although it was not particularly ground-breaking and in the end broke itself.   9 Monkeys most obvious departure from the beat-em-up formula is the prominence of its story. Not every mission is heavy on the story, but the opening prologue includes a forced loss which leads to protagonist Wei Cheng’s recovery and training in the care of Buddhist monks. Wei Cheng ultimately masters their techniques and takes a new name as he joins them, achieving first revenge and then overcoming a threat o...

An omnibus is ‘a volume containing several books previously published separately’. Technically, most comics sold as books fall into this category, with trade paperbacks (TPBs) being omnibuses collecting floppies, larger TPBs being omnibuses of smaller TPBs, and the traditional comics omnibuses collecting these into an even larger volume, in both length and page size. In the world of comics, omnibus largely refers to these editions, oversized hardcovers with massive page counts – many over a thousand, although many smaller ones have been printed. Comic omnibuses are pretty damn cool, and it borders on tragedy that they’re largely the domain of capeshit. Luckily, both Marvel and DC have published a range of omnibuses collecting stories outside their main universes, including both popular IP like Star Wars or Conan, and stories that began in the medium like Sandman, Lucifer, and Preacher. By cool, I mean cool. On some level, the only thing that differentiates an omnibus from a typical ove...

Loading screens in video games are pretty boring. Sure, you can fluff them up with a little animation or music, but they’re still there for the player to wait while the console does its thing. The good stuff is on the other side, no matter what’s added to enrich the experience or distract from the boredom. Loading screens, especially longer ones, are a good opportunity to leave, to grab a glass of water or a snack, to check on something in the house, to stand up and stretch. The problem then, is that players might have left the room entirely by the time the game loads and dumps them into the action. In the worst cases this will force a restart, and with it another stretch of loading. I recently encountered this in the Resident Evil 3 remake, where the loading bar hung around 10% for most of the time, before quickly jumping to 90% and then throwing Jill in front of a hungry zombie. One way to negate this issue is a confirmation prompt replacing the progress bar when it reaches 100%, req...