after this many revisions, granblue versus is in a great spot with its mechanics. there is definitely a big need for some character rebalancing rn (as per arcsys standard, the top tiers are ridiculous), but most of all im glad there is finally a real arcsys game with both rollback and footsies. it's also an interesting glimpse into a fighting game without the need for motion inputs, and a much needed respite from games like sf6 where sloppy inputs literally lose you the entire match. if you like street fighter but don't enjoy how unforgiving its input system is, i highly recommend this game.

the only reason i'm not rating this higher is because i don't really like the monetization scheme, with no ability to buy individual characters and instead having to pay full price for a remaster of a game that came out years ago. i also think the character and mechanic balance need tweaking, as 66L is far too overwhelming of a universal move and the top tiers feel like they're playing a different game at times.

looking back at the 2018 hype for this shit i think marvel 3 might be the most misunderstood fighting game of all time. in comparison to the literal screen tearing positional tug of war of marvel 3, where dashing to take your assist out of the screen is a fundamental offense strategy, movement in this game feels like a weird mix of kof hyper-hopping, melty blood's importance of constricting your opponent's aerial movement, and maybe like any given 2D fighter franchise weird entry where they added assists (i.e. kof 99/2000 or now MK1 I guess). i've been playing this game on and off for closer to 5 years now and been exercising mid 30s salarymen dedication to watching stray replays during lunch hours/work down time and the neutral
movement here has never looked slick tbh. the reliance on super jumping and holding 2/8 to control momentum and fall speed means that say, hopping over a beam to punish the recovery feels genuinely awkward on a pad. in a way that saying magneto holding up hitting a dash micro and pressing S doesn't. absconding to pockets of the safety on the screen feels way harder than it should for a game based off flying aliens. dead horse but i wish they took more from arcana heart than blazblue.

speaking of, as a fighting game designed for beginners i actually think this might be the most frustrating game to play for beginners/intermediates, on par if not worse than tekken 7 (tekken 7 having a higher playerbase and somewhat more reliable netcode offsets the knowledge gap i think. also a far worse matchmaking/lobby system. look i get it playing an arcsys game past 2004 and going "ooooo the lobbies suck not the lobbies 🤓🤓" is low hanging fruit, but like, its still true). i think the autocombos suck because the grounded versions do not lead to a knockdown like most other fighting games autocombos, i would not show this game to someone to demonstrate the get a hit -> knockdown -> run some oki flowchart of anime 2D fighters. superdash as a whole mechanic is more tilting for new players to counter than any superarmor/invincible reversal super/comeback system possible. granted inputs and learning any given character is easier, but if im at a function and somebody was like "matt bring one of dem fighters around" i'm still reaching for soulcalibur, tekken, or kyanta first u kno.

but having said all that, this game can be rlly cool on occasion. the attention to detail is rlly outstanding, and seeing any of the lvl 3 closeups or intros looks rlly good when u haven't seen it in a while. there's also some characters who diverge from the boring fundamentals here: zamasu, ginyu, krillin, nappa, gotenks, & baby are beacons of light, possessing the creativity and uniqueness of something more in line with p4a than p much what every other character is doing. they can actually like, run oki, besides guessing a tech direction and going for a meaty. crazy. in spite of how simple the building blocks are it's wonderful the type of synergy in blockstring/combos you can explore. i just wish this game had a more even experience & design, the xenoverse 2 level dedication to updating this shit without planned DLC down the line is rare, it's doing justice to a property that hasn't seen a W in like 7 years, it's in conversation with a pretty vaulted subgenre of 3v3 fighters, it's just too frustrating and awkward to deal with long periods of time...this was always gonna be true and technically has been true for a while but budokai tenkaichi 4 will truly be better

Of the three new games put in fortnite in the last week or so, Festival is by far the most fitting. Lego Fort feels a bit tacked on and barely keeps touch with the main platform, and Rocket Racing feels like a minigame for Rocket League that for some reason, is found in fortnite, but Festival actually kinda makes sense. It's actually shares the styling of fortnite for one thing, but is also a pretty reasonable extension of the relationship the main game has had with celebrity and music for the past near-decade now. Add on top fortnite's very obvious avenues for the monetisation and licensing of everything involved with a rhythm game and it really feels like this should really work. It's so easy to visualise the way it should be - get the Weeknd skin and it comes with a Weeknd emote and a few tracks to use in what is basically rock band 5, the new live service music game that could ride on for god knows how long.

Well, first problem with that is Harmonix have presumably lost all the staff that knew how to make rock band, because festival is just fundementally terrible, keeping the worst aspects of rock band (multiplier scoring, uninteresting charting, difficulty coming from endurance and repetitive notes, note accuracy not mattering), but worse.

Main issue is really the charting. It is, for one, shockingly easy, with even the very hardest currently available chart (Kendrick Lamar's I on expert, vocals), being barely a mid-level Rock Band chart in terms of diffculty, and games like even the relatively casual DJMAX wouldn't rate it about the bottom half of its difficulty scale. Realistically, that alone is enough for the game to really fall apart for even new rhythm gamers quickly as there is next to no challenge, but the woes go further than that. In an adapatation to making this work on controller face buttons, the chart is now secretly split into two, a bit like djmax, and opposite holds arent allowed (i.e you cant hold the middle and fifth button on expert because they would be the Square and Circle PS5 Buttons simultaneously). Whilst this isnt a distaster on it's own, combined with the already weak charting of Harmonix and you end up with some extremely unengaging rhythm gameplay. It's repetitive and boring.

The song choices are just shit too. The licensors might have truly pulled all the big guns, but protip, Seven Nation Army, a song that repeats the same 3 second riff for 4 minutes, is not a good track for a rhythm game. A whole bunch of tracks will have 30 second plus sections where you just wait and emote, i guess? Don't put that in your rhythm game!

This last thing probably is a result of, for some reason, still sticking to the old guitar-drums-voacls-bass set up for song charts despite that no longer being neeccessary, and them all fundementaly playing identically due to the loss of peripherals and lack of imagination.

The nail in the coffin is really the monetisation, which is really poor. I know music licensing is silly and that rhythm games often come with a tax, but a super limited rotation of free songs, an awful battlepass that's twice the price as the BRs, and $4 a pop if you want to keep a song with no other frills attached is twice as bad as rock band's traditional pricing, which itself was pushing it. And when that's put side by side with content for the real game at a more reasonable price, it sticks out even worse.

I don't want to even bother talking about the Jam Stage feature, one of the most worthless game features ive ever seen, which lets you mix some samples with friends. It's remarkably limited, doesnt sound good, and you get a whole two tracks to sample from. It's embarassing.

The other two additions to Fortnite this month, rocket racing and lego fortnite, are also bad - Rocket Racing is kinda boring and Lego is cursed by being a survival crafting multiplayer game, basically delivering it straight to the pit of medicority, but Festival is the biggest stinker, and a huge waste of potential. Given time and a lot of work and deep discounts, epic can probably force it to be a long term thing - but the start here is the worst game i've played from Harmonix and you have to wonder whether they will just dump this and go all in on the lego.

Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao