Time for an update regarding my narrative writings! First off, I am going to revise my two prior novels, Verde’s Doohickey and The Malice of Abigale Quinlan in the ensuing weeks, where I will remove red herrings and things that are distracting to the story or just do not work. I will also be rewriting one of my favorite story, Psycho Shatter, to better match my current standard of writing. Now, you may be asking why I am doing this. Well, my upcoming story, tentatively titled Psycho Bullet Festival: Please Bury My Children, has been encountering quite a few snags over the past few months, and I want to put out something in the meantime. Plus, I’ve wanted to do these things for a while, and I feel that is as good a time as any.
Eurogamer recently revealed a series of information about the NX, stating that the system will be a very powerful handheld, one that can also link up to a TV in order to be played on a larger screen via a dock station. It will also have two detachable controller segments on its right and left sides, which can be used to play multiplayer games with simplistic controls or, and this is my own speculation, be combined into a single controller for TV based play. The system will also utilize cartridges, will not feature any sort of physical backwards compatibility, and will likely be officially unveiled in September of this year, just over six months before its March 2017 release date.
Beyond that, MCV inadvertently confirmed that the NX will actually be cheaper than what people have been initially speculating, meaning the system will likely be $200-$250 at launch, which is a really good price to launch at. While the Wall Street Journal claims that the system will also be compatible with Nintendo and DeNA’s smartphone titles, which is good for people without smartphones, all 6,000 of them… including me.
As for my thoughts on the matter… I actually like everything I’m hearing. It will be a console that I can plug into my monitor and play, and uses a controller that, for the most part, will be presented as a traditional controller. That is all I want from a Nintendo console at the base level. Nintendo games, presented in HD, on my computer monitor. It’s also worth noting how Nintendo will be developing games only for the NX, and will not be spreading their resources to keep two systems alive. Meaning their output will likely be large enough for the system to be self sustaining.
Beyond that, there is not much to talk about beyond announcements, the first chunk of which came from an event that developer Level 5 hosted in Japan over the past week… none of which I really cared that much about. Despite not really enjoying the puzzle centric adventure series, I do respect the Professor Layton series quite a lot, so I am naturally willing to support Lady Layton, a successor series following Hershel Layton’s adorable looking daughter and her talking dog.
Yo-Kai Watch is coming to Smartphones, which is a greatly unsurprising given how popular the game got in Japan, but my thoughts on the series, based largely on the demo of the first game, make me inclined to ignore everything about this series, even though I do want to like it. Though, I just don’t care for soccer/football RPGs, as is the case with Inazuma Eleven: Balance of Ares, which is set in an alternate universe to the regular Inazuma Eleven series… yeah.
Snack World, Level 5’s upcoming cross media project, looks to be fixated on phone based interactivity, gimmicks, and a fantasy art style that makes me tilt my head, considering these people made Dragon Quest games and Ni No Kuni, so they should know how to make an appealing looking fantasy adventure game. Everything is too stylized, circular, and looks to be based on something I could not get into. Alternatively, Megaton Musashi is Level 5’s other cross media project, a mecha affair with enjoyable bulky and circular robot designs as well as a story centered around humanity fighting back against genocidal aliens. Which sounds nifty, if a bit simple, but I doubt I’ll have much interest in dusting off my 3DS when this game will not come out in North America until late 2017. Or potentially never.
You know what else will likely not release in North America? Nep-Nep Connect: Chaos Champions, a free-to-play Vita card game featuring all your favorite characters from Hyperdimension Neptunia, Fairy Fencer, Trillion: God of Destruction, and Omega Quintet. While I am a sucker for some Nep-Nep, I have no interest in any of the other words that were used in this descriptions, so this mention is more obligatory than anything. I mean, there’s a reason why I don’t talk about card based games, ever. I’m just not interested in them.
Though, I am unabashedly interested in the PC remastering of Little King’s Story, which is coming out on August 5th, where it will release for Steam, GOG, and Humble for $25. This news fills me with much delight, seeing as how the original was one of the most delightful games I ever played, but these kind of unexpected announcements really do damper my review schedules. I was going to play Double Root Before Crime After Days Xtended Edition after it sat in my steam library for 3 months, but I guess it’ll need to wait until October now…
Dontnod, the developers of Remember Me and Life is Strange have announced that they acquired another French developer by the name of Hesaw, who has collaborated with Dontnod in the past, and are now rebranded as Dontnod Eleven. The company will be focusing on smaller titles, such as the 2D multiplayer game Battlecrew Space Pirates while Dontnod continues to work in the trenches of major console releases. Oh, and as a bit of related news, Square Enix, Dontnod, and Legendary Digital Studios are working on a Life is Strange live action series, which actually sounds appropriate from what I heard about the game. I really do need to play it one of these days… once the season pass drops below $10. That’s all for this week, good night childrens.
The header image was drawn by ONATaRT