history is a nightmare
... and loving it!!!!

A little sad this is the last one of these, but they went out on a high note. Like all the rest it's funny, charming, and actually pretty creepy when it wants to be, and it's cool to have seen in relative real time them figuring out more tricks/ways to take advantage of the medium. I find this whole series really endearing beyond all that because it just seems like a really good example of how if you feel like it, you can make a game. Just go right on ahead and make one! Who's gonna tell you no!!
Also I don't wanna spoil anything, but Virtua Fighter is mentioned in this one, and I've spent most of the past week playing VF non-stop, so it feels like it was made just for me. Which is quite nice!

A kind of halfway point between Karate Champ and fighting games as we know them today. The animations are really cool and it's pretty satisfying to scissor kick someone in the face and make a big smacky sound. Some of the features here are quite impressive for a game from the time - the training mode that beefs up your fighter, for instance. It's pretty simplistic, you do a little minigame and number goes up, but the basic gameplay there is stuff that the UFC games were still using 20 years later! Crazy. Things like being able to customise your moveset and record replays also weren't something I expected going in.

I'll tell you what I did expect going in, though. I expected Eric Roberts. This game is called Best of the Best and yet Eric Roberts nor Phillip Rhee are anywhere to be found. You don't even get Chris Penn! This is shameful. And I'll tell you something else, the full-page ad in the 1994 issue of Superman I was reading that made me play this had a big "TO BE OR NOT TO BE..." plastered over it, and that to me is either supposed to evoke the chorus of the movie's theme song, in which case where is Eric Roberts, or they're just throwing in allusions to completely unrelated kickboxing movie To Be the Best, in which case come on. Nobody could mix those up. Neat game but I take major umbrage at this marketing!

That one bit in Brooklyn Nine-Nine where Diaz talks about what she'd do if anything ever happened to Arlo the puppy - that's me with Gigaman!

Grabbed this with the DLC in the Steam sale and am pleasantly surprised by it. It's obvious that this was made by people who really love the old Godzilla PS2 games and love giant monster stuff in general (and Power Stone. They love Power Stone). It's not going to be winning any awards for technical depth, but Falcon Punching a kaiju into the nearest skyscraper and then meeting them on the rebound for seconds feels good and that's what's important. Lamping a giant robot with a radio tower should look and feel satisfying, and it does!
The original characters are all pretty fun and have a ton of personality. Gigaman and Pipijuras are my good friends! The DLC characters are all excellent - it's probably in their implementation that the team's commitment really shines through. I played a little bit of Ultraman and couldn't stop smiling at pretty much everything he does. Godzilla's dash attack is the Godzilla vs Megalon dropkick. Gigan is here and does stuff!! Gigan!!!
About the only complaint I have about it is that the amount of content is pretty thin even with the DLC (although the number of arenas is actually pretty good) - a very short story mode and then a handful of other modes like arcade, survival, etc. Not really too big of a deal, though - the game is clearly meant for playing a few matches with your mates. Get on it. Pipijuras vs Alien Baltan only, go!

Did I mention the music's good, by the way? The music's good.

As a game it's pretty thin - closest point of comparison I can make is something like Transformers: Devastation, but if combat was a lot more basic and bosses were way worse. You're gonna do the same bunch of attacks against the same bunch of enemies for about 5 hours and then you're probably never gonna play this again. I can't really hate though, because 1) this is a game based on a 70s monster of the week mecha show! It's entirely appropriate for it to be highly formulaic! And 2) it's just kind of absurd that this game exists in the year 2023 and I think I'm very happy it does, regardless of quality. It's just really cool that this ancient anime was a huge hit in France (Goldorak is such a great localised name, hell yeah) and now we have a French-developed game of it 50 years later. There should be more things like this! If a Voltes V game comes down the pipe a Filipino developer should get to make it. A Latin American dev team should get to try their hand at a KOF game. I demand more products of love!!

I played this with the French dub on as is right and proper, but in the English dub (which is pretty amusingly bad), there is a bit where Duke Fleed word for word quotes a line from The Phantom Menace. I don't know why either.

I'm not remotely skilled at or knowledgeable about shmups, but I do know that Ketsui is one I like a whole lot, and this is a real good version of it. These M2 ShotTriggers releases seem pretty cool! The Super Easy Mode and the Arcade Challenge training mode are great inclusions to break players in to the game and slowly build them up to taking on the crushing whirlwind of Normal Difficulty, and the Bonds of Growth mode that records your deaths and lets you practice those moments is something I want in every shmup going forward. As a package, this is pretty flawless!
A good side effect of having these modes that increased my familiarity with the game: now that I'm not in a constant state of desperation (most of the time), I was able to appreciate the game as an artistic endeavour beyond the insane gameplay a lot more on these repeated playthroughs. Little moments like the first stage music properly kicking in right as you pick up your first powerup and come up against the first tougher enemy type. The part right after Black Draft in stage 4 where you slow right down as you hit the cliffside and mop up a couple of ground mooks feels like taking one deep breath before you descend into the absolute hell corridor that is the horizontal section. The inverse of that, right after Trafalgar in stage 5 where you're immediately beset by a rush of smaller enemies - no rest this time, we're in the endgame. Speaking of stage 5, how good is that music, that melancholic rendition of the first stage's theme, driving home that this whole thing is a suicide mission? What a game. What a game!

(Marked this as Mastered because I got the plat, but please understand I have in no way, shape or form mastered Ketsui. Please don't ask me to prove that I've mastered Ketsui)

Gonna be honest: I love Double Dragon. I think Double Dragon is just the coolest little thing ever. Get a big cheeser any time I hear the theme tune! This can sometimes be a bit of a struggle because quite a lot of Double Dragon games are shite (Double Dragon II's good though). Hearing a new Double Dragon game was out, I had my now-common response of "oh, cool" tinged with deep, dark, primal fear - desperately trying my best to smile politely through the cold sweats when hearing oh, it's a roguelite as well, is it? Interesting! Haha!
Thankfully, this one isn't atrocious, even if I don't think it's particularly good. There's definitely the spine of something here - the fighting and combo systems have potential! There's multiple ways to cancel, including tagging in your partner to continue the combo, and you can juggle enemies for days. The specials are cool and satisfying to bop enemies with, and the game rewards you with health pickups for special KOing 3 or more enemies at once, actively encouraging crowd control and positioning. This raises the first sticking point, though - whenever you actually do this, the whole game pauses to cover the screen with a big congratulatory graphic of your health pickup for a couple of seconds before gameplay resumes. This happens every single time, and with the amount of enemies in a given area, you're going to see this multiple times a minute. This constant stop-start is mega irritating, and it feeds in to another speed concern - the movement. Bimmy, Jimmy and friends walk slow as hell in this game! There are powerups you can buy at the end of levels to mitigate that some, but it's random whether or not you'll actually be offered those (there's that roguelite magic). There's also a dash you can use, but you have to hold a button down to do it rather than do the extremely natural doubletap, so combined with the snail strut and the sit-there-a-second recovery on a bunch of attacks (and the dash itself!!) there's a kind of sticky feel to movement that just isn't very pleasant. Starting up Stage 1 and immediately having that walkspeed hit me? I'd never refund a Double Dragon, but for the briefest of moments the thought was there! It was there!!
Re: the roguelite element, I don't think it adds much (when do they ever, haha). No matter what you pick your playstyle really isn't going to change much, and it just becomes a thing of oh, I can get some more health here, yeah, I use this move a lot so I'll pick the thing that makes it do more damage...none of it feels very significant. More than once I got offered options where I was just like well, none of these are going to matter at all, so I'll just pick whatever...who cares...not I...
It's a shame, because as I said they do have something they can build on here, and the presentation is pretty nice. The sprites are fun, the soundtrack's great, there are enough overt (and boy, I mean overt) Hokuto no Ken references to satisfy my basic human need for those. And look at that key art! The absolute best Jimmy Lee has ever looked. Someone get 90s Mark Dacascos in this getup, pronto!
So yeah, it's got some big flaws, but those end up making it kind of average rather than outright terrible. I'd much rather replay this than replay Double Dragon 3, although maybe that's the default bar all beatemups should be able to clear. In a post-Streets of Rage 4 world though, you've really got to be doing more than this, especially when that game also threw in a roguelite mode!

As an overall fighting game package, Capcom's most concerted effort in forever and a bit, even if it does come with all the usual bullshit Capcom-isms to try and pry every last penny out of you. They've clearly put a ton of work into making this accessible to new players, to ensuring that there's plenty of content on offer across single- and multiplayer modes, and to making the online experience as smooth as possible for casual and competitive players. And hey, they even moved the characters' stories on beyond their status quo! Imagine if KOF did that! There's something for everyone, and despite the embarrassment of having the first thing you see be the game shilling Chipotle at you, as a new fighting game launch it's miles above the disastrous day one of SFV.
On that front, good. For me personally though, I don't really like how this game looks, the music might as well not be there (and they know it, which is why they're charging you for the actual good stuff), the roster is extremely weak and from what I've experienced so far as a competitive game I don't think it has the juice - I won't be surprised if people are as sick of it as they were SFV within a year. So, you know, as someone who only really engages with fighting games competitively that's not great for me, but the amount of stuff they give casual players to do is actually pretty enticing and means it's not really as hard a hit as I was expecting. I don't mind as much, because while I'm waiting on the next attempt I can make my dumb avatar and run around kicking passersby in the back of the head and unlock all the cool art and play SonSon and So onSo on. I don't like Street Fighter 6, but I kind of do!

Also had no idea Luke's thing was being a gamer bro PMC guy. Gotta be the most putrid fighting game character ever, and that's counting the paedo in Karnov's