Sunday, April 16, 2017

News:: Strong Style: Japanese Wrestling in a nutshell

Hello and welcome to Strong Style! I'm Soul Tsukino, and this is Japanator's regular column covering the world of Japanese Professional Wrestling, or "Puroresu".

In light of recent changes to the network, a lot of you might be reading Strong Style for the very first time, and so I have taken the liberty of writing up a sort of refresher on the column, and the glory of Japanese Pro Wrestling.

Let us know what you think, and what you'd like to see more of from Japanator in the comments!

Strong Style: Japanese Wrestling in a nutshell screenshot

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News:: Crowdfunded: You Got Slained!

I am a man in love. With metal. Show me an album with extravagant lyrics, majestic singing, and properly tuned instrumentation and I'll be a happy camper for a good spell. But this love has gone under-served in the world of video games. We got Brutal Legend in 2009, which was awesome and a bit flawed.

But since then, there haven't been many, if any games aiming to raise the horns. You could argue that Dark Souls and Bloodborne are pretty metal, but that only goes as far as the aesthetics. A true metal game lives and breathes the the spirit of the genre. Enter, Slain!

Crowdfunded: You Got Slained! screenshot

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News:: Fighting games and DLC to look forward to in 2017

[Near the beginning of the year, I messaged Virtua Kazama about getting a new post in line with last year's fighting games of the year. It's been a long time wait but we finally have this baby up. I'm looking forward to a year of fighting games on my new PS4! ~Strider]

(I apologize for releasing this so late, but this is because I was having a hard time releasing it due to Destructoid's Anti-Spam ruling.)

Last year, we saw the releases of several fighting games such as Street Fighter V, Pokken Tournament, The King of Fighters XIV, the console release of Blazblue Central Fiction, Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, Blade Arcus from SHINING Online Battle, Koihime Enbu, and Killer Instinct Season 3.

Fighting games and DLC to look forward to in 2017 screenshot

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News:: Wii Music is a no-good awful game and I absolutely love it

Wii Music is an embarrassing game. It was embarrassing when it was first demoed at E3, it was embarrassing when the people of the Today Show or Good Morning America played it on live TV and it is embarrassing as hell for me, a single guy in his 30s with neither kids nor young relatives nearby to play it with, to not only own such a game but to have pre-ordered it so he could have it day one. Wii Music is an abomination of a rhythm game, and quite honestly the Nintendo product I’ve ever purchased that forced me to think about what it is that qualifies something to be a "game." It’s lazy, one you can succeed in just by waving your hands wildly, and no other title in the past 10 years has put forth such clear evidence that Nintendo is one cheap-ass company than the music game that relies overwhelmingly on public domain tunes.

Wii Music is a complete embarrassment of a game, but I love it.

Last week, a tweet came across my feed with some guy complaining that GameStop employees were saying Yooka-Laylee was bad and blaming game critics. This was already after I had proposed this topic to the Destructoid writers, but the stupidity of it cemented the fact this is the right time to sing the praises of bad games we enjoy.

There really isn’t anything about Wii Music that I should like. I don’t like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” I don’t think “American Patrol” is a fun song to play on the tuba, and I certainly can think of five other George Michael songs I’d rather pretend to play than “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” And yet, for more than 65 hours on my Wii, I played all three of those songs and every other included on the disc, and I had a goddamn blast doing so. I love pretending to use a turntable to play “September,” I smiled all the way through my rendition of “The Entertainer” using nothing but castanets and hand claps, and there was perhaps no more jubilant an experience to be found on the Wii than conducting an orchestra to play the theme song to The Legend of Zelda.

I could talk all day about how to improve it - *cough* more Nintendo and general gaming music tracks *cough* - and I am the first to admit that this a lousy game, but it’s a lousy game that I hold near and dear to my heart. I don’t care what the critics or the haters say, I love Wii Music and something tells me my fellow Destructoid writers have bad games they adore as well.

Wii Music is a no-good awful game and I absolutely love it screenshot

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News:: Battlefront II will not have a season pass

One of the worst things about 2015's Star Wars Battlefront was that the game shipped with a season pass while being light on content. It would be one thing if the game packed a wallop and had players wanting to return, but gating off a bunch of maps behind a $40 pass and releasing a gimped product is just lame. It's no wonder the general consensus of the first game is a resounding "meh".

DICE isn't looking to repeat that mistake with Battlefront II. In an interview with Mashable, DICE confirmed before the reveal event that the game won't have a season pass. While that doesn't outright mean there won't be any paid DLC, at least the majority of the expansions are looking set to be free updates.

Creative Director for Battlefront II, Bernd Diemer, noted, "When we looked at the way Battlefront had evolved over its lifetime, with the DLC and everything, we decided, 'You know what? For this type of game, season passes are not the best thing. We need to [take it apart] and come up with something better."

The reason this information was withheld until today was due to EA not being sure if that information was set in stone. I guess corporations will always try to shove their policies into anything, but I'm glad the DICE was able to stick to their guns and deliver a game that won't nickel and dime players. Hopefully the lack of a season pass doesn't translate into numerous microtransactions, but that is still yet unknown.

It looks like 'Star Wars: Battlefront II' will ditch the Season Pass [Mashable]

Battlefront II will not have a season pass screenshot



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News:: Ben Heck's Nintendo Classic Edition teardown

It's time for another hardware teardown! This time it's the Nintendo Classic Edition -- specifically, a unit belonging to David of the "Technophiles" podcast. Using Keysight's DSOX1102G oscilloscope, Ben is able to find out how the NES controller talks to the base of the NES Classic. He then compares the inner workings of the NES Classic controller to the Wii Pro gamepad -- and he discovers something rather shocking in the process. Once the cable has been cut, Ben solders everything back together for David to test out some games. What other hardware should Ben teardown? Let us know over on the element14 Community.



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