doublepepperoni

I remember when they became standard way to select weapons, abilities and so on in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation and how modern and next-gen they felt. When you wanted to change equipment in older PS1 or PS2 games, typically you had to pause the game to dig around in an inventory to pick a new weapon, then exit back to the game and oh boy does it feel clunky when returning to those older games.

I assume the change was motivated partly by the dpad finally being completely supplanted by the left analog stick for movement so designers could come up with new uses for it

PC games had of course used the number keys as hotkeys since day 1 so the change was mostly a console thing

Two guys logically explain why The Boss, a middle-aged war veteran, does not look like a 20-year-old e-girl

Gamers: Well she should look like one anyway

I'm so tired

It's so fucking stupid, she looks pretty much exactly like the original character but in a photo-realistic style

Holy shit, I somehow missed the most unhinged comment:

[CW: Transphobia]

Their brains are so fucking cooked

Can't believe I completely missed the news, I remember being really excited when they first joked about collaborating however many years ago.

Unfortunately, I hate to say it but the game looks to be a bit, well... crap.

Visually it reminds me of Swery's first indie game, THE MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories which was also a rather spartan-looking 2.5D platformer with whacky visuals and tons of violence. I assume that's a limitation of the probably tiny budgets he's working with these days, so I guess I can't harp on him too much for it, but still, it's disappointing to see when his early games had him ambitiously punching way above his weight class.

As someone who loved Deadly Premonition it's just sad to see Swery continue to flounder.

https://youtu.be/430X2G4Vii8

Beware, some of the other national stereotypes are... less amusing

Author mentions being a kid in the Wii/PS3/Xbox 360 era

Author mentions being a kid when the PS4 and Xbone were out

Check out his ~~silly getup~~ SICK trenchcoat, shades and bike. What a badass

This game has some really goofy scenes

Man, they just don't make games this stupid anymore

Where the first two Onimusha games felt very much like they were intended for a Japanese audience, Onimusha 3 has been really interesting in how it tries to pivot to appeal to a more Western one. You have the big name Western actor, the introduction of a modern-day Western setting (2004 Paris) and the introduction of a bunch of Hollywood tropes straight out of Roland Emmerich movies. There's the disaster movie opening where Nobunaga's demonic forces invade Paris as well as Jean Reno's character, Jacques, a divorced dad with an estranged son with whom he's trying to connect and who doesn't like his new fiancée.

I think this is the beginning of Keiji Inafune's famous push to capture the Western market

I'm playing Onimusha 2 with an undub patch and this difference between the Japanese and English scripts got a chuckle out of me.

After defeating a lady demon boss, Jūbei says fairly neutrally in the English version:

All demons will be destroyed!

While the Japanese line is:

これで、世の男たちは一安心だぜ。

Which translates to "The men of the world can rest easy now." Jujudormah, the boss in question, was a joke character whose entire joke consisted of "Fat ugly lady thinks she's hot and is always horny." She also killed the protagonist's mom before the boss fight but I guess Jūbei is so stoic and unflappable he got over that already and didn't need to make his post-fight one-liner about getting revenge for her, preferring to instead reiterate one final time that the demon was, indeed, an uggo

Something something woke localisers destroying Japanese culture

Reminding me of Resident Evil, Dino Crisis and Devil May Cry is a great first impression.

There were 4 of these games on the PlayStation 2 and one of them has fucking Jean Reno in it

Interesting to see what the quality curve on these will be given they were pumped out in about 5 years

Edit: It's got tank controls and pre-rendered backgrounds

I finished Kuon, which is a really cool survival horror game from a pre-Dark Souls From Software. All of its 3 playable characters are women, of which the final, unlockable one is apparently some legendary Japanese mystic whom the devs decided to gender-swap for the game. The funny thing is that they still made the female Abe no Seimei unflappably cool and ludicrously OP, demolishing all the enemies in the game with ease

Also Japanese writers just love turning male historical figures into girls, don't they

I actually ended up really liking Kuon's writing and characters, so it's interesting to see the devs being kinda weird about their female protagonists

In all honesty though, as a connoisseur of fixed camera angles, Kuon's camera angles aren't that amazing most of the time. The game's environments are fairly open and empty so the angles are mostly pretty pulled back and utilitarian, more focused on giving you a clear view of each area rather than setting a mood with creative shot composition like your Resident Evils and Silent Hills. The game reminds me of Silent Hill 4 which had a similarly detached camera to go along with its larger, sparser environments.

Despite the kind of simplistic gameplay and repeated puzzles and progression during its two campaigns I'd recommend Kuon if you're into PS2 horror and traditional Japanese ghost stories

BY GAMERS, FOR GAMERS

It's like if someone distilled the entire reactionary anti-woke gamer mindset into one picture, it's amazing

The developers are all "cool" white guys with shades while the only women in the picture are anonymous blonde bikini babes only there for eye candy

Me when I see an air fryer for cheap

Me when I realize at home it's so tiny I will basically need to fry everything one portion at a time

Hopefully it'll still work out to be more energy efficient than the oven