gosokkyu

エンド

  • 戦う人間発電所

owatte shimatta


idk why DmC was and remains such a punching bag when Ninja Gaiden got it much worse, multiple times in a row:

  • Nintendo, a publisher that typically afford good studios the environment to make great games and wrings good games out of mediocre studios, roped in Team Ninja to make a legendarily bad 3D Metroid: it's not bad because of Team Ninja, mind, but...

  • Team Ninja takes the "lessons" learned from Nintendo and completely torpedoes Ninja Gaiden 3 with 'em: drastically smaller and shallower toolkit, one-note enemies and bosses, no real resource management/progression to speak of, QTEs for days and tons of forced, one-note rumination from Ryu Hayabusa on the nature of murder that makes no sense and goes nowhere

  • Team Ninja lets Keiji Inafune and Spark Unlimited (a combo fresh off ruining Lost Planet) give the western-dev treatment to Ninja Gaiden via Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, and say what you want about DmC's combat but it at least exists in the same ballpark as classic DMC; Yaiba's completely braindead

  • a decade later, and fresh off a redemption arc of sorts thanks to Nioh, Team Ninja finally returns to Ninja Gaiden with some half-arsed ports of the worst possible versions of the 3D trilogy



gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Jan.12: Friday Night Puyo Puyo's kicking off again for 2024, as something of a primer for the upcoming in-person tournaments taking place at Vortex Gallery at the end of the month

Jan.13: 24 Kickoff, a 48-player online tournament that's already confirmed to include a bunch of elite-level players from both the Japanese and broader international scenes—you'd think these two communities would interact more than they do but true global tournaments like these aren't as common as you might expect, so even if you're not game to join, you might at least want to watch


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

(EN stream here. FR stream here)

Off the top of my head, I don't know that there's ever been an international Puyo Puyo tournament that's featured so many top-level players from all over the world—like, a western tournament might get a pro JP player to jump on for a post-tournament exhibition or whatever, or one of the JP leagues might let a western player slip in every so often, but getting so many elite players from so many countries is extremely rare, and hopefully it gets enough attention to potentially become a more regular thing



Sega's updated their near-term Puyo Puyo eSports calendar with a surprising number of events—in addition to the previously-announced Puyo Puyo Cup open event at Tokyo Big Sight on January 28, they've revealed several other events scheduled for the first quarter of 2024: https://info-esports.sega.jp/puyo/detail/4919/

  • February 12: Puyo Puyo Grand Prix 2 (hosted @ Sega HQ with a live audience; presumably another 32-player round-robin invitational)
  • March 3: Puyo Puyo Ladies Cup (women-only event, hosted @ Sega HQ with a live audience; they generally run a series of online qualifiers to determine a top-16 for the offline finals)
  • March 17: Puyo Puyo Grand Prix Final (hosted @ Sega HQ with a live audience; presumably another 32-player round-robin invitational)
  • March 23: Puyo Puyo Ranking Pro Senbatsu (hosted @ Sega HQ with a live audience; tournament based on ranking points across the last ~ year of play and other factors, used to determine new recipients of the pro license required to play cash-prize tournaments)

Sega was extremely quiet for most of 2023, and even after they promised more info at the end of the year, I don't think anyone expected so many official events in such a short period of time—some more online events would be nice, I'm sure, but any effort's better than none. Might these events be a concentrated promotional push for... y'know what, let's not even go there.

They haven't revealed any further details for most of these events, and the one I'm most curious about is the Ladies Cup: this will be the third one they've done and they've proven to be quite popular, both as spectator events and with all the players who feel a specific motivation to enter this event vs. more open or elite-level events... but this'll also be the first one since the passing of two-time champ Akajikou, who succumbed to cancer last year at age 29, and I do wonder how they might address her passing.