PixlBit

These past few months have been shaping up towards being rather hard on my gaming budget. There are too many upcoming games that I really want, and me being me, I'll probably end up getting all of them even though I am currently working my way through the Xenoblade trilogy. Incidentally, unless Bayonetta 3 really, really knocks it out of the park in October, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is likely to be my GOTY.

Anyway, over the past week, I did pick up two games that I've had my eye on for some time.

Super Robot Wars 30 (Switch) - This is one of those Japan-only games I always wanted back in the day, alongside Sega's Sakura Wars. However, in recent years, Bandai Namco, which inherited the series when they bought out the original publisher, Banpresto, some time back, has been putting out English localizations (English subtitled with Japanese voices.) These are actually meant for the Asian markets that have a lot of people who speak English (Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan, etc), but Bandai Namco seems to low-key encourage American fans to buy the Asian English versions. They actually put out an official localization for the US on Steam (but not on PS4 and Switch), but I got the Switch version because that's where I do my gaming these days.

These are SRPG/visual novel type games, kind of like Sakura Wars, only with crossovers from a lot of Japanese mecha anime like Gundam and Code Geass. Sakura Wars is actually in this game as well. If you're not into that kind of thing, this isn't for you, but it happens that I am into SRPGs. Hopefully the Steam version of Super Robot Wars 30 did well enough that Bandai Namco will consider localizing future entires in the series, which is apparently kind of difficult due to Japan's heavy-duty copyright and licensing laws. 

One neat thing about these games is that the combat sequences attempt to replicate combat sequences from mecha anime. There was apparently even a Super Robot Wars on the Nintendo 64, a system which was otherwise starved for RPGs, and it looked pretty good for its time. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Colleciton (Switch) - The Ninja Turtles were the last superhero franchise for which I was a fanboy when I was a kid, before I started watching more adult fare like The Simpsons and Married With Children. And for 40 dollars, this collection is jam-packed with games. Basically, this is every TMNT game ever released for the NES, Game Boy, Super NES, and Genesis, plus the two original arcade games. So you can play both the arcade game as well as the NES game, which had content added to it to make up for the loss of graphical fidelity from the arcade as a lot of NES ports did. You can compared the SNES Turtles in Time with the Genesis's Hyperstone Heist. You can look at the differences in the NES, SNES, and Genesis versions of TMNT Tournament Fighters. And playing these games, I can see that Konami put a lot of love and care into these games that you don't see a lot wth licensed games even to this day, which are why these games are among the few licensed games I really like. The Game Boy games really push the little green handheld to its limits, even including a digitized "Cowabunga" voice clip when the second and third GB games load up. I was partial to Fall of the Foot Clan because i had a Game Boy back then. Several of the games, including both arcade games and Hyperstone Heist, support online multiplayer. It would have been kind of cool if they'd included the Gamecube game based on the 2003 series, but there's more than enough content here. And even though we had a recent TMNT game, Shredder's Revenge, that had a few modern bells and whistles thanks to some of the folks who made Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, Konami's classics still hold up incredibly well. 

I even picked up a pizza on the way home from Gamestop to play these games.

Not only does this collection have the games, but it also has scans of the boxes for both the American and Japanese versions of every game, scans of the American and Japanese manuals, and even a little trivia on the various TMNT TV shows that have been released over the years, from the 1987 original to the 2003 series to both of the Nickelodeon series. And there's alao a music player for every game. 

Gamestop offered me a collectors' edition, which has trading cards, banners, and such, but at $150, it was a little rich for my blood. That said, this is an incredible collection that really celebrates the games and the franchise. If you're a fan of TMNT or arcade beat-em-up action, don't miss this one.