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This Week in Games - "Hand It Over, That Thing, Your Armored Core"

while a sci-fi Soulslike would be nine kinds of fun

RPG Maker Unite's finally through its developmental woes! It was released as of the 27th of this month. Amateur game devs, jump in!

The Stadia tanked so badly that it, leaving Microsoft as the only people doing cloud gaming, killed a $59 billion deal. Everyone think about that for a second.

Food for thought... the UK says it is blocking the Microsoft-Activision deal because of Microsoft's advantages in cloud gaming, which are stronger because Google Stadia failed... in other words, the deal is now in jeopardy because of Phil Harrison

This is particularly heartening news. Mega Man Battle Network was the black sheep of the franchise when it debuted in the U.S. in the early '00s. The games moved from the traditional Mega Man formula of side-scrollers to more of an RPG format during the time when people really started hating hard on Japanese games. Plus, people really loved ragging on Mega Man having "too many sequels" in those days. Oh, and it was painfully "anime."

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RPG Maker Unite's finally through its developmental woes! It was released as of the 27th of this month. Amateur game devs, jump in!

Oof. You wrote this part of the column at the beginning of the week, didn't you? RM Unite's listing on the Unity Asset Store broke when they attempted to go live, somehow, and consequently the final release is now in limbo pending some kind of ambiguous backend fix.

https://twitter.com/RPGMakerUnite/status/1651882770522836994

Naturally, people have all sorts of uninformed hot-takes and conspiracy theories. I don't work for Unity or GGG, but I do work in software, and sometimes the problem really is just as boring as it sounds (and boring does not necessarily mean "easy to fix"). All we can really be sure of is that the curse is still very much alive and well, but hopefully not for too much longer.

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This is particularly heartening news. Mega Man Battle Network was the black sheep of the franchise when it debuted in the U.S. in the early '00s. The games moved from the traditional Mega Man formula of side-scrollers to more of an RPG format during the time when people really started hating hard on Japanese games. Plus, people really loved ragging on Mega Man having "too many sequels" in those days. Oh, and it was painfully "anime."

Meanwhile it was always a huge success in Japan spawning multiple spin offs and anime series spanning hundreds of episodes. Maybe it came out in the US at the wrong time during the xenophobic anti-anime era but Battle Network doing well is not surprising. I suppose people are more receptive to it nowadays with anime losing most of its stigma. It's always been my favorite Rock Man iteration.

3) Only previous re-release was the inferior Wii U Virtual Console versions no one remembers.

Meanwhile it was always a huge success in Japan spawning multiple spin offs and anime series spanning hundreds of episodes. Maybe it came out in the US at the wrong time during the xenophobic anti-anime era but Battle Network doing well is not surprising. I suppose people are more receptive to it nowadays with anime losing most of its stigma. It's always been my favorite Rock Man iteration.

Zoltan Kakler wrote:

Meanwhile it was always a huge success in Japan spawning multiple spin offs and anime series spanning hundreds of episodes. Maybe it came out in the US at the wrong time during the xenophobic anti-anime era but Battle Network doing well is not surprising. I suppose people are more receptive to it nowadays with anime losing most of its stigma. It's always been my favorite Rock Man iteration.

There was never really a strong stigma towards anime in the U.S. as evidenced by the popularity of DragonBall Z, Gundam Wing, Pokémon and some other stuff

Yeah... no. That's ahistorical as heck. Yes, these shows and games made bank in their time and developed thriving communities. The 90s and early-00s (and even mid-00s) were still pretty lousy with anti-anime sentiment. It was all "big eyes, small mouths, screaming your attack name" stuff to people, and being an "anime fan" marked you as one of those kinds of nerds. There were plenty of wild, expansive screeds about how manga were so "different" from American comics. The whole thing was shunted into its own ghetto. There's a reason Miyazaki is the only anime director most other people in "nerd" fandoms can name.

Mega Man was always a Japanese franchise, but fans in America could pretend it wasn't because so much of it was changed in localizations (and boxart changes). The Battle Network series was the first to really lean into its own unique aesthetic (and had a tie-in show that was an anime), there was definitely a ton of "Mega Man is now ripping off of Pokémon" sentiment back in the early 00s when Battle Network came out.

I mostly missed out on Battle Network by virtue of never owning a GBA. The one game I did have as a kid (and played to death) was the Gamecube sidescroller spinoff, Network Transmission, which is also the only one missing from the new collections. I always liked the designs for the robots/programs/whatever-they-were-called, so I might check those out if I ever work through enough of my backlog.