Thoughts On Some Gaming News

2XKO

As always, I continue to be surprised when the 2XKO devs take a bunch of feedback from people who's opinions I don't share, and output a bunch of changes that I'm actually quite fine if not pleased with. The only change I'm upset about is assist-running being relegated to a specific fuse. The change I'm most intrigued by is pushblocking being tied to assists. I found myself opting to save my super-meter for pushblock a lot in the last alpha, so getting to use the other meter options more will be nice, and I imagine tying pushblock specifically to assists will add a lot of variance to when you can and cannot pushblock.

Some of the info in this interview has me worried. There only being 10 characters that aren't all automatically unlocked, and nothing but the bare minimum gamemodes on launch really lowers my expectations of how well this game will do. I imagine similarly to MultiVersus, it'll have a big launch, but then immediately fall off in the coming months as casual players fail to get hooked since it'll be such a barebones experience. Perhaps 2XKO could have a more immediately appealing content pipeline. I don't think they'd even need more or better content for people to be more satisfied than with the MultiVersus pipeline, I think the 2XKO devs would just have to announce stuff earlier. I don't know Riot very well at all, but if they give 2XKO more post-launch time to improve than Multiversus, then perhaps 2XKO could rebound from a low player count. Also hopefully the characters have faster, clearer, more consistent unlock conditions compared to MultiVersus. People lost their minds over how Fighter Currency was largely obtained through events in MultiVersus.

At the end of the day though, I most care about enjoying the core gameplay, so as long as that stays good, I could look past a lot.

Nintendo Directs

I (like many people I assume) am surprised this even happened considering the Switch 2 Direct that happened in the following week (and after watching that Switch 2 Direct I am even more surprised. I guess Nintendo maybe didn't want a bunch of excess announcements distracting from the Switch 2).

Raidou Remastered looks cool, although I say that about a handful of Atlus games and never get around to playing them.

Shadow Labyrinth is still funny to me.

I was unsure if Metroid Prime 4 would show up, but I really didn't expect it to just be randomly in the middle.

Disney Villains Cursed Cafe looks perfect for a very specific, yet very large demographic that I am not a part of.

Eternal Life Of Goldman has piqued my interest, it looks fun.

I don't bother watching most Pokemon trailers nowadays, but since it was here I decided I might as well watch it. I'm pleasantly surprised, while I don't think it looks particularly good, I didn't immediately think it looks bad so I'd say it's a step up from before. I can also feel it rubbing up against my Gen 6 nostalgia a bit.

Upon seeing the SaGa Frontier 2 remaster, I immediately thought it specifically wasn't being made by Square Enix because it looks quite similar, but not the same as some of their previous remakes, but then it turned out I was wrong.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion looks like a banger.

I never completely gave up hope on Tomodachi Life, but I was never specifically expecting it ever. I'm glad to see they're making a sequel.

Mario Kart World looks pretty good. It seems ambitious enough to satisfactorily follow up Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. I find the crab, the dolphin, the Spiny, and a ton of the other unusual roster picks really charming. I imagine with so many "bottom of the barrel" characters though, people will probably be disappointed when their favorite waning in relevance Mario character doesn't get in. So uh, about that $80 price tag, Nintendo Labo is a trendsetter 💸. In all seriousness, I don't care a ton, sure it'll affect my purchasing decisions, but I don't think it's worth some sort of full on Nintendo boycott. It's odd for Nintendo to go here after having only released one $70 game up to this point (Tears Of The Kingdom (correct me if I'm wrong)). Even more strangely, Donkey Kong Bananza is only $70, so I guess that game's a slightly smaller tier of release in Nintendo's eyes.

Is that camera actually gonna function well, because I'd find the idea funny of Nintendo doing the Xbox Kinect, but over a decade later when people don't care nearly as much anymore, but technology has actually caught up to support it.

I'm surprised part of Welcome Tour was just straight up refered to as "tech demos". I feel like that term usually comes with a negative connotations when it comes to commercially released products. Anyways, at best, I imagine Welcome Tour will have maybe like 1 really cool, yet unfleshed-out minigame.

I got spoiled from the leaks that the Joy-Con 2's would have mouse controls, which I remain somewhat bitter about, but hey the mouse controls seem pretty cool. They seem like they'd be kinda unwieldy though, with how slim Joy-Cons are, I imagine holding one like a mouse would get my hand to cramp especially fast. Plus in a living room setup, you normally wouldn't have an arm-height desk + mousepad to use the mouse controls on.

Nintendo's "+" naming scheme for rereleases is pretty wack, but I think Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV takes the cake for the strangest sounding name up to this point. I don't think Jamboree TV stands on it's own as a name as well as something like Bowser's Fury.

Kinda gritty, futuristic wheelchair basketball sure isn't something I expected.

Was anyone else confused by the release date in the SF6 trailer? When I first saw this, I thought it just meant the amiibo were releasing on the Switch 2's launch day.

I then checked on the Street Fighter website to see if that'd clear things up for me, but when I first looked at it also seemed like it only said the release date of the amiibo.

Checking the site again for this blog post though... well if this really was there at the top of the page the entire time, then that's embarrassing for me to have missed (the page didn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine though, so I've yet to have been proven stupid).

Anyways woohoo, crossplay and rollback might finally stop being specific system/PC exclusive features for modern fighting game releases. Time will tell if that actually ends up being the case though.

Woag, GameCube games are finally being released, 10+ years after people expected/hoped. Widescreen support is a pretty wild thing to just slip in there without directly mentioning; none of the reaction videos I watched even noticed it.

I don't have high hopes that the GameCube games will have rollback netcode like the Super Nintendo and Genesis emulators. If Super Smash Bros Melee releases through this, I imagine Nintendo might finally come after the Slippi which sure would be great for Nintendo's public relations (sarcasm).

I tend to forget just how much I love Deltarune, until I'm looking right at it, or listening to its music. Its trailer was the most exciting thing in this entire Direct for me personally.

Every reaction video I've watched so far had an immediate negative response to seeing Randy Pitchford. I don't know much about the guy, but the Controversies section on his Wikipedia page doesn't paint a positive picture. I just found it funny how quick and consistent people's separate reactions to him were.

I don't find the lowkey Silksong footage that surprising, from what I can tell it seems to me like the devs have been specifically choosing to be super quiet about the game, but I find it funny nonetheless. I've heard sentiment that the devs are making a mistake with how they've been marketing the game, but I disagree. I think the game could succeed very well with marketing, but judging by how people talk about the game, and how they reacted to its appearance in this Direct, I think Silksong's lack of marketing in recent years has pushed it into a sort of mythical status, which could proove to be lucrative. I'm curious to see if it'll get marketed more as its (currently still indefinite) release approaches, or if the devs will ride this barebones marketing all the way to the release. Anyways, I'm not that interested in actually playing the game.

From what I can tell, the only addition in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S is the Puyo Tetris Doubles gamemode, but that's not even shown in the Direct, I had to look it up on Sega's Website.

The Duskbloods is a hilariously unexpected announcement.

Despite being pleased with the idea of the game, I'm actually disappointed with the Kirby Air Riders trailer. It gives so little information about the game that I'm surprised anything is even shown at all beyond the text at the end. Smash trailers have also sacrificed information at times in favor of just having a fun to watch animations, but I don't even find this fun to watch.

Donkey Kong Bananza looks like it'd be a good game. I'm not a big hater of this new Donkey Kong design Nintendo's using, but I think black around his eyes is a strange design choice. It seems like it's maybe supposed to be brown (like in previous games) in promotional art.