Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro Review

Plug-and-play consoles are a great idea on paper: a quick, portable means of playing games right out of the box with almost no other accessories or game cartridges required.  Unfortunately, be it due to the limited technology of their time or just plain laziness, a lot of plug and play consoles aren’t that great.  Over the years the most common ones I’ve seen are the basic Atari and retro arcade games like Pac Man with the occasional Double Dragon or original Mortal Kombat.

The NES and SNES Classic systems caused a bit of a resurgence in retro plug-and-play consoles. After how much demand they got, I started seeing more of the retro Sega Genesis and Atari plug-and-play consoles as well as the PS1 Classic on store shelves.

The Super Nintendo Classic was the only one to catch my interest, but it wasn’t enticing enough to join the rabid fans in hunting one of them down, especially when I already had, or could easily get, the games on it off the WiiU eShop or other ports.  You’d have to put KOF on your retro game system to get me to want it.

Wuzzat.

Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection Review

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love game compilations. They’re a bargain, convenient and sometimes have extras for added value.  There are a lot of great game compilations I can recommend starting around the time of the Gamecube, but in recent years game developer Digital Eclipse has been rising to prominence in this particular subgenre.

A not-inaccurate way to describe Digital Eclipse compilations is that they are the Criterion Collection’s game counterparts. Using their Eclipse game engine, they’re able to take the ROMs of older games and decompile them for modern systems at maximum efficiency, and using painstaking effort and resources from whoever hires them, they get every detail they can about the games included. That includes development history, interviews, high quality scans of whatever production and promotional artwork they can get their hands on, music galleries and explanations of each game’s central idea and what unique parts they play in the history of its franchise and gaming. It can almost make the games more of a side attraction there to let you experience the history the rest of the package lays out.

I recommend their Street Fighter 30^th Anniversary Collection, even if Street Fighter is obviously for peasants who can’t play KOF.  It not only has all the mainline games made before Street Fighter 4 (as well as the original Street Fighter nobody cares about), but it also has online play for the four most important games included and the aforementioned museum.

That's a lot of games.

After how well they pulled that off, I got excited for their new fighting game anniversary collection on the PC: the Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection. It may not be as awesome as the fast-paced action of KOF, but Samurai Shodown has its own legacy as a series less focused on high speed combos and more focused on slower-paced fencing, where one strike from a weapon can do tons of damage and draws lots of blood to really make you feel the weight of the blades. With a beautiful aesthetic of the Edo period of Japan, it’s host to all kinds of warriors of old from around the world, from Prussia to France to Texas. It’s a great series well-deserving of such a compilation.  There was already a Samurai Shodown compilation, the Samurai Shodown Anthology for the Wii, PS2 and PSP, but more game compilations available on more systems is good to have and both the Anthology collection and Neogeo collection have their own quirks and upsides, regardless of what might be considered the better one.

This is one of the best pieces of cover art ever.  Gold star.

Shonen Otaku's Top 5 Voice Actors

Voice actors are a critical part of any animated medium.  Just like any live-action movie or TV show, no game or animated series would have anything close to the kind of emotional impact it has without the performance to back it up and voice actors have just as much training and background as the Hollywood stars.  Among the many actors in games and anime, there are a select few who stand out as my favorites.  Based on my previous writing one may expect such favorites to be the likes of Keith Silverstein, Kevin Michael Richardson, David Brimmer, Maddie Blaustein or Christopher Corey Smith, but that is a misconception.  To set the record straight, I present my top 5 favorite voice actors ever.

Senran Kagura Burst Re: Newal Review

A remake of Senran Kagura: Burst using the mechanics of the later games seems like an easy recommendation. The original game’s story is my favorite second only to its direct sequel and Estival Versus has the best fighting mechanics among the spin-off games. Logically something good combined with something also good should create something good, but that can be hampered if the combined elements don’t come together right and Senran Kagura Burst Re: Newal is a good example.

I don’t understand why the decision was made to remake Burst in the first place. The game was barely 5 years old when it came out and I’m generally of the mind that a game should have a remake if the first one is archaic shite that badly needed the resources and technological advancements of the modern age or is simply a particularly old game that could use a makeover. Games like the first Resident Evil, first Persona and first KOF needed their remakes because, with the debatable exception of Resident Evil, they’re unbearable torture to play. The original Senran Kagura: Burst has some shortcomings, but is tightly designed, looks nice and its old-school fast-paced gameplay is still fun. Xseed’s historical screw-up was the worst thing about it and that didn’t even apply to its release in Japan.  All I really wanted was to have it on a cartridge.

The remake could have been a nice little distraction for Vita owners, but the developers couldn’t even get that right. Senran Kagura Burst’s remake is only available on the PC and PS4. With Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash there was a justified reason for this: as strong as the Vita is, it couldn’t handle a game that was half detailed water physics and matches typically had several different characters on the field at once. That’s fair enough.

Neither of those factors apply to  Burst Re: Newal, which can only mean that the reason the game isn’t on the Vita is because it uses the PS4 to its fullest potential by making games of the highest graphical fidelity on par with Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, Devil May Cry 5 and the PS4 Spider Man game. It’s a bit strange that it would go that route considering the original game was best suited for quick bursts of handheld play, but surely they wouldn’t completely ignore their one of their go-to handhelds for no reason.

Prepare for disappointment.

I guess it’s nice they made a new song, but rather than play the same videos in both stories, why not just use the originals?