What’s happening folks, it’s Tuesday! With October rolling in it’s officially time for the “spooky season” (which I hope you just read in a scary voice), and what better way to kick off our most frightful time of year than with Pokémon; wait. That can’t be right, the first big game of Halloween is Detective Pikachu Returns? I mean, I guess they’re called pocket “monsters” in Japan so, like, maybe that works? No, I guess not. Well, in that spirit, why not check out this really calm and serene video I made this week.

Alright, now that you’ve watched the video (you did, right?) let’s go over Detective Pikachu. Despite being in the Pokémon franchise, Detective Pikachu Returns is not a traditional RPG like the games in the mainline series. This spin-off franchise (the second in the series) is a “cinematic adventure”, with players hanging out with a talking pikachu as they solve mysteries in Ryme City by exploring crime scenes and gathering clues.

Detective Pikachu Returns (Switch) – Releases Oct. 6^th

Developed by: Creatures
Published by: Nintendo

That’s pretty much our only major title of the week, but if you want to dive deeper (or maybe play something that has more gameplay) then check out one of two tactical RPGs, Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless and Front Mission 2 Remake which, if I’m not mistaken, is the first time that Front Mission 2 has been officially released outside of Japan since it first came out in 1997 for the SNES.

Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Oct. 3^rd

Developed by: Nippon Ichi Software
Published by: NIS America

Front Mission 2: Remake (Switch) – Releases Oct. 5^th

Developed by: Storm Trident
Published by: Forever Entertainment

Our last two new games are for two fandoms that probably have a fairly sizeable crossover. For you sports fans out there, NHL 24 is the latest entry in EA’s long running franchise (heck , we just talked about NHL ’94 last week). I’m big into hockey, but I still can’t bring myself to pick up these games when they’re new, so I’ll just install the 2022 version that I got at Target for $3.99.

Our next fandom to get a new game is the Rick & Morty crowd, so if someone screaming “PICKLE RICK!!” make you uncontrollably laugh then you’re going to love the High on Life expansion High on Knife. Funny enough, this expansion is the ONLY game this week that actually fits in with the spooky season, with players using talking knives to do all their killing. This leads to some rather grotesque and gory situations, things that will make your skin crawl; be warned.

NHL 24 (PC/PS4/PS5) – Releases Oct. 6^th

Developed by: EA Vancouver
Published by: EA

High On Life: High On Knife (PC/PS4/PS5) – Releases Oct. 3^rd

Ports and Re-releases:

Borderlands 3: Ultimate Edition (Switch) – Releases Oct. 6^th

Just one major port this week, with Gearbox’s Borderlands 3: Ultimate Edition. With the game being quite graphic intensive, and well over 100GB on disc, I can’t imagine what they had to do to this game to get to run on Switch. We’ve all seen the laughably bad Mortal Kombat 1 Switch version, will Borderlands 3 follow suit? I guess we’ll find out when the reviews start popping up in the next few days.

Everything else:

• Silent Hope (PC/Switch) – Releases Oct. 3^rd
• Survivor – Castaway Island (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Oct. 3^rd
• Sword Art Online Last Recollection (PC/PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Oct. 5^th
• Wargroove 2 (PC/Switch) – Releases Oct. 5^th

Notable Releases from 10, 20, and 30 years ago:

It’s notable game time! Do you like David Cage? No? Well too bad, because here’s Beyond: Two Souls! If you’d played Cage’s previous games, Indigo Prophecy, Hard Rain, then you know that he clearly had aspirations to be a filmmaker. with Beyond: Two Souls, Cage really got to flex his directing “cred” by hiring notable Hollywood film stars Elliot Page, Willem Dafoe, and Kadeem Hardison. In the game, Elliot’s character Jodie, a foster child, starts to discover that she has psychic abilities and is connected to a incorporeal being named Aidan. With her foster parents unable to explain the condition, Jodie is sent to doctors who, in turn, send her to a government agency run by Nathan (Dafoe) and Cole (Hardison). This paranormal agency tries to help Jodie understand her powers and to control Aidan. When the CIA learn about Jodie they recruit her to go on missions as an assassin of sorts, using Aidan to kill targets. Jodie unwittingly kills the president of a peaceful country in the name of U.S. liberty and becomes disenfranchised and angry, abandoning her mission, which brands her a traitor to the United States; chaos ensues.

Beyond: Two Souls is technologically impressive, has a well plotted story, and is competently acted, but…you have to deal with David Cage. For some people it is easy to separate the art from the artist, hell, I still like Manhattan and Crimes & Misdemeanors, but Woody Allen is a fucking creep, so I can look past the scumminess of David Cage to enjoy the work he puts out, but I can still feel weird about it. Beyond: Two Souls was a critical and commercial success, becoming one the best reviewed and best selling PS3 games of all-time. It was also nominated for, and won, multiple year end awards in 2013. The game is easily available today on PS4 & PS5, after a remastered port was released in 2015, and I say give it a look. Sure, David Cage sucks, but his games are enjoyable, with Beyond: Two Souls perhaps being the best he’s ever made.

Speaking of controversial video game auteurs, our notable title from 2003 is Hideki Kamiya’s Viewtiful Joe. Originally marketed as a GameCube exclusive, part of the infamous “Capcom Five”, Viewtiful Joe is an unorthodox side scrolling beat ’em up in which players take on the role of Joe, a mild mannered film geek who is magically transported into a tokusatsu film where he is transformed into a Super Sentai-esque superhero (think Power Rangers). While in the movie world, called Movieland, Joe must rescue his girlfriend, Silvia, who has been kidnapped by the film’s antagonist. With the help of the film’s hero, Captain Blue, Joe makes his way through multiple stages of hardcore, action mayhem.

Viewtiful Joe was seen by Kamiya and his team ad a chance to improve their skills as game developers, challenging themselves to create something unique. The game was a critical success upon release and sold very well for the GameCube, however the low install base was concerning to Capcom. Knowing they had a hit game on their hands, the company would eventually break their promise with Nintendo and port both Viewtiful Joe and both 2005 releases, Resident Evil 4 and Killer7, to Sony’s PS2. A sequel, Viewitful Joe 2 would come out in 2004, followed by a fighting game, Red Hot Rumble, in 2005, as well as a DS title, Double Trouble!, also in 2005. Since then, the franchise has been at a standstill, likely due to Kamiya and his team leaving Capcom to form Platinum Games (who would release a quasi spiritual follow-up with The Wonderful 101). Your options for playing Viewtiful Joe today are incredibly limited, with emulation or the original disc being your only choices. Tough break for a really well made game.

Our final notable title is one of my all-time favorites, the SNES masterpiece Secret of Mana! Originally released in Japan as the sequel to the Game Boy title Seiken Densetsu, which was released in the U.S. under the name Final Fantasy Adventure, Secret of Mana was an action/RPG that played like a cross between Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda, which was absolutely perfect for a kid like me. I distinctly remember first watching the opening title screen for the game, the one I’ve embedded above, and being completely transfixed. From the opening sound of singing whales, to the beautiful piano score, to the lush greens of the Mana Tree, seeing our three heroes standing there in awe, as pink flamingos fly by, it was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard in a video game before. Thinking back on all of these notable game write-ups that I do, my favorite titles always tend to be something that introduced me to something new and/or revolutionary, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy IV, Grand Theft Auto III, Super Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 2, each of these titles had a profound affect on, not just me as a person, but on the video game industry as a whole.

Secret of Mana was directed and designed by series creator Koichi Ishii who, until 2006, had a hand in every single Mana game in the franchise. He felt a very personal connection to Secret of Mana, saying it was more a reflection of him and his ideals than any other game he had previously worked on. Interestingly, Secret of Mana was to be a launch title for the announced Nintendo-Sony CD-ROM game console. However, when Nintendo backed out of the deal it struck a blow to the team’s morale and, fearing that an SNES cartridge would compromise their vision, decided to scrap the project. Of course this didn’t last, we’re talking about the game after all, as Squaresoft’s upper management demanded Secret of Mana be put back into development and that the team would just need to figure it out, basically.

For Secret of Mana’s localization, Squaresoft used translator Ted Woolsey and gave him just 30 days to complete it, followed by 60 days to localize the game. It was an massive undertaking and almost killed Woolsey who explained that the translation files he was given to work with were disjointed and mixed up, as if someone had taken a novel and rearranged all the pages. With so little time to translate, and so little space on an SNES cartridge, much of the original Japanese text was removed or shortened to the bare minimum that you could possibly use to convey an idea. One other interesting point, for whatever reason, the Western releases of Secret of Mana fail to name the three protagonists, only referring to them as “The Boy”, “The Girl”, and “The Sprite” or “The Child”.

I could go over the story of the game but we’d be here all day. Suffice to say, there’s an evil entity that wants to destroy the world and it is up to three legendary heroes to stop this evil by using the Mana sword to defeat it. There are heavy themes in Secret of Mana, stuff about environmentalism, as well as each of the protagonists discovering their self worth & how they fit into the world. Themes like this really spoke to me as an adolescent, a confused and angry kid who was coming to grips with his changing body, his changing family dynamic, and a realization that people are cruel, the world is mean, and kids at school will no longer like you just because you’re another kid, they’ll only like you if you have the right personality, the right clothes, the right amount of money, listen to the right music, practice (or don’t practice) the right religion. The world was becoming cold and dark and angry, and Secret of Mana helped me through that trying time. I’m still not convinced I’ve figured the world out, but I know that I can always go back to Secret of Mana to help me remember why I enjoy life in the first place.

Let’s talk notable movies! 2013 gave us the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, a film about the terror of being trapped, alone, in outer space. Like literally IN outer space. Not stuck on a space station or space craft, FUCKING outer space. The film would give Sandra Bullock her second Best Actress nomination (losing to Cate Blanchett) and Cuarón his first (of two) Best Director wins, making him the first Mexican director to win the award. 2003’s notable title is Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, starring Jack Black, and made both of them household names. We just discussed Linklater’s breakthrough film Dazed and Confused, but he wouldn’t find true mainstream success until ten years later with School of Rock. Jack Black, of course, would become one of the biggest movie stars in the world after the film, going on to star in movies like King Kong, Nacho Libre, The Holiday, Kung Fu Panda, and the Jumanji reboot films.

1993’s notable film was a movie that I watched ALL THE TIME in middle school when the teacher had a hangover/needed a break/had to catch up on other work, the feel-good Disney sports movie Cool Runnings. The movie is loosely based on the real life story of the Jamaican bobsled team who competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Like Secret of Mana, and recent notable album release In Utero, this movie is completely intertwined with a specific time and place in my life, middle school, and I can’t watch it without thinking about all of the highest highs and lowest lows of that period of my life. I love this movie and will watch it start to finish any time, any place. Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up! It’s bobsled time!

That was a great group of movies, the albums though…eh…they’re okay. I’m just not a Miley Cyrus fan so Bangerz did absolutely nothing for me but it did, of course give us all those Miley memes and shit where she’s sticking out her tongue and being “crazy” or whatever. You know, the typical shit where pop culture media tries to paint the former child star as wild and out of control and they become the butt of all our jokes. Yeah, fuck that. In the end, Miley turned out okay. Gonna jump over the 2003 album to quickly discuss 1993’s So Tonight That I Might See by the band Mazzy Star; that’s it, I quickly discussed it.

Let’s end our notable section with 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress by the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian, an album that I would EASILY put on my personal list of all-time greats. After debuting in 1996 with the album Tigermilk, the folksy-indie band would put out four full length albums and four EP’s, solidifying themselves as one of the most prolific acts in the indie music scene, and even getting a back-handed shout out in the film High Fidelity when Jack Black’s character referred to them as “sad bastard music”. After the release of their fourth album, Storytelling (the kinda/sorta soundtrack to the Todd Solondz film of the same name), Belle & Sebastian moved labels where they would record Dear Catastrophe Waitress, an album who’s sound was miles apart from their previous records.

With up-tempo, sonically produced songs, Belle & Sebastian took a risk with Waitress and it paid off. While the album didn’t sell as well as previous efforts, with their second release, If You’re Feeling Sinister, outselling Waitress, it has some of their all-time great songs. There’s the title track, of course, then the scandalous opening song “Step Into my Office, Baby”, the folksy ballad “Piazza, New York Catcher”, the Thin Lizzy inspired “I’m a Cuckoo”, and probably my favorite song on the album, “Wrapped Up In Books”.

With Waitress, Belle & Sebastian found themselves becoming more open to having their songs played on the radio, where more open to conducting interviews and having their picture taken for promotional materials. While they aren’t the most famous band in the world, Belle & Sebastian have been able to keep their “indie cred” and sit among bands like NOFX who can sit comfortably on the line between stardom and anonymity, making a living writing & performing music without having to worry about getting bothered in the grocery store. Belle & Sebastian rule, I should put their sticker on the back of my car next to the NOFX one, the yin & yang of my personality.

Beyond: Two Souls (PS3) – Released Oct. 8^th, 2013: Wiki Link

Viewtiful Joe (GameCube) – Released Oct. 7^th, 2003: Wiki Link

Secret of Mana (SNES) – Released Oct. 3^rd, 1993: Wiki Link

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