Author: sick skills

Summum Aeterna, a prequel to 2022’s Aeterna Noctis, riffs on a Dead Cells-style genre fusion, mixing roguelite elements into the tough Metroidvania structure of its predecessor for a game that doesn’t pull its punches. The result feels rough around the edges but it’s hard to deny that the gameplay feels pretty great.

Enemies hit hard, frequently gang up on you, and will almost assuredly send you back to the hub dozens of times before you manage to successfully complete a run. And while Summum Aeterna primarily demands dexterous skills to overcome its toughest challenges, you do have something to show for each failed run. You, of course, lose most of the upgrades you snagged while out and about, but every run will see you gaining currency and crafting materials that you can then reinvest into things like better stats and starting weapons. This meta-progression system thus ensures that you’ll always be making progress, even when you lose time after time.

In an interesting departure from similar games, Summum Aeterna also introduces a cool seed system for generating the world you run through each time. Before venturing out, you must first create the world by placing a seed in a machine that will generate it for you. Each seed is unique, spawns you in a different starting biome, and will have positive and negative modifiers that’ll change things like enemy health and the drop rate of certain rewards. Picking the right seed is thus as much a part of one’s strategy as deciding on a build, and we appreciated how this positively affects run diversity.

Controls are smooth and responsive, while weapon types feel genuinely distinct from each other and offer interesting twists on combat. A sword can be thrown and either quickly recalled or teleported elsewhere. The scythe, on the other hand, builds up Damage-over-Time debuffs on enemies with each hit which you can then trigger all at once. Moment-to-moment gameplay feels snappy and engaging, which encourages you to dare to try again.

The visuals feel like a cross between the illustrious Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and, of all things, Child of Light. Whether you’re exploring the shadowy reaches of a familiar-looking Gothic castle or the bright canal-bordered streets of a Venice-esque village, all environments feature a painterly, hand-drawn style that feels like a perfect fit for the somewhat dreamlike tone of Summum Aeterna.

Unfortunately, Summum Aeterna feels rather poor on the performance side of things. Luckily the frame drops here or there don’t affect things too much, but loading times can be pretty long and we had a few instances where the game outright crashed, ending promising runs and erasing some hard-won progress. Hopefully patches are forthcoming, as it feels like this could be an excellent addition to any roguelike fan’s Switch library with a little bit more elbow grease.

Launch instability issues aside, it may be a bit derivative, but Summum Aeterna ultimately ticks enough boxes to be worth your while. Smooth combat, tough difficulty, and an interesting seed system all come together to make this one worth investigating.

When I was working on my MFA in Game Design, I referenced Urbz: Sims in the City in a meeting with my thesis advisor, and he asked if I had played the console or the handheld version. I was confident that I’d played the console version growing up. I could recall the memory quite clearly—sitting against a study pillow on my childhood bed with the controller’s too-short cord pulled taut against the GameCube across the room, furiously speeding through the game in an attempt to finish every goal before Hollywood Video’s three-day rental period elapsed.

It’s hard to explain the cognitive dissonance I felt when my advisor started talking about in-game material that was completely unknown to me, that was certainly not what I remembered playing but had an eerie sameness to it, like the game I knew but in an alternate reality.

After that meeting, I got my hands on a copy of Urbz for my GameCube and booted it up. I was interested in the minigames I loved playing as a kid and wanted to take some notes for my thesis. The game loaded to a cinematic I’d never seen of a sim with big purple hair walking around a city in low-cut jeans trying to impress club bouncers with aerial dance moves. I launched the character creator and it was obvious that this was a different game than I remembered. The graphics alone were in a completely different ballpark, let alone the comparatively rich selection of hair and clothing options.

When I tracked down a copy of the handheld version of Urbz, everything came into focus. It was the game that I remembered— blocky graphics, ridiculous minigames and all. It turned out that I had played Urbz on my GameCube as a kid but only by way of the Game Boy Player, a genius contraption that clipped to the bottom on the GameCube and enabled play of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games right on my TV screen.

Double take

Urbz was far from the only title in the early 2000s to have distinct versions for handheld versus home consoles. 2001 was a big year for Nintendo with the release of both the Game Boy Advance (GBA) and the GameCube. These cousin consoles shared a library of titles that, despite sharing a name, were often completely different experiences depending on what console you played them on. Tony Hawk had multiple major releases during the PS2/Xbox/GameCube generation, including Pro Skater 3 and 4, the first two Underground games, and American Wasteland/Sk8land. Two of my all-time favorite games on the GameCube, SSX Tricky and Super Monkey Ball, had GBA ports that met with varying approval in comparison to their home console counterparts.

Games with handheld ports like SSX Tricky made the GBA experience feel like a consolation prize in lieu of the real deal on the GameCube

Taking a game from the console to the less-powerful handheld could be compared to a translation of sorts, like bringing a book to the screen or envisioning a game as a television series, either keeping as faithfully to the original as possible or making adjustments to suit the new format. The GameCube’s Super Monkey Ball received a port to the GBA under the name Super Monkey Ball Jr. about a year after its console launch. Super Monkey Ball Jr. includes levels that are direct ports from the console version and some that were made in particular for the handheld version. The mechanics are largely the same between the two games, but the GBA of course isn’t blessed with an analog stick like that on a GameCube controller which made for much more difficult navigation on the handheld version.

The Game Boy Advance outsold the GameCube by an incredible amount — 81.51 million units versus 21.74 million — a dichotomy in sales trends for Nintendo’s home and handheld consoles that continued into the Nintendo DS and Wii era, albeit with Wii closing the gap. Yet, many games that were made available for both the GameCube and GBA were clearly designed with the home console in mind. That’s why we have instances like SSX Tricky, where the handheld version is a severely watered-down, nearly impossible-to-play facsimile that stubbornly attempts to recreate the console levels and mechanics with far worse graphics and frame rate. Games with handheld ports like SSX Tricky made the GBA experience feel like a consolation prize in lieu of the real deal on the GameCube.

The games that came out of this era of development say a lot about the capabilities of different platforms at the time, but also speak to who the intended audiences were for console versus handheld gaming.

Take Urbz, for example. The handheld was rated ‘E for Everyone’ and had more of an action-adventure feel to it in terms of genre. The console version of Urbz was rated ‘T for Teen’ and frankly pushed at those boundaries with social interactions like ‘Strip Tease,’ ‘Grab Booty,’ and ‘Suck Face.’

The handheld ports for both SSX Tricky and Super Monkey Ball can be said to maintain the spirit of the console versions they’re derived from, showcasing the upsides and potential detriments of such an approach. Urbz falls into a different category, almost more adaptation than translation. At this point, I’ve logged dozens of hours in both versions of Urbz, and they are two games that feel like they’re drawing from a shared idea and source material instead of one game based on the other.

The same but (very) different

Their shared elements, like minigames, reputation, social groups, and goal-oriented plot lines make them seem like similar games on paper, but in reality they couldn’t be more different.

You start out earning money by squeegeeing windows while dodging bird poop.

In the handheld version of Urbz, I was tasked with taking down harmful capitalistic forces as represented by the comically evil character Daddy Bigbucks. Goals are a big part of the home console’s Urbz as well, but they’re more formulaic. Everything is geared towards getting the right clothes, impressing the right people, and progressing into more and more neighborhoods as your reputation increases.

The minigames in both versions center around making money. Whether you’re earning cash as skateboarder, model, or piercing manufacturer in the home console version, the same mechanic is always present: hitting a series of four buttons in the order shown to boost your performance as quickly as possible.

The handheld version’s minigames are more distinct and are what drew me back to Urbz in the first place. You start out earning money by squeegeeing windows while dodging bird poop. My favorite was always being a comedian where I’d tell jokes to fill up a laugh meter, occasionally promenading to either side of the stage to avoid tomatoes from the crowd.

Urbz on GameCube gives you everything you need to engage in social roleplay, from piercings and tattoos to complete your look to all the bizarre social interactions that help you climb the reputation ladder. Handheld Urbz gives you community and a grand purpose where the social elements are tied into a fairly linear plot. They’re two completely different answers to the same prompt.

Worlds collide

The Game Boy Player helped to bridge the gap for home console owners who didn’t have a GBA and wanted to be able to play major, handheld-only titles (like the main Pokémon series). I don’t even have my GBA anymore; I just play all my Game Boy games on my GameCube.

But the prevalence of GameCube games with handheld ports created the possibility for strange experiences like the one that I had with Urbz, especially if we think about porting as a type of translation. Playing a handheld game that is a port of a GameCube game on the Game Boy Player is similar to reading a book that has been translated into one language and then separately translated back into its original language. It’s a bizarre game of telephone that dabbles in the uncanny.

In 2023, there isn’t such a distinct separation as there used to be between handheld and home console gaming. I can take a Nintendo Switch game from my hands to the television without ever having to change out a cartridge. The challenge for developers tasked with making something that worked on multiple systems with entirely different processing capabilities and player experience expectations resulted in some truly iconic games. Today’s developers have their own challenges that continue to lead to gains in the gaming world, but I wonder if we’ll ever see the likes of 2001 again: translations that confuse as much as they delight, doppelgangers that get further from the original the more they materialize, the reflection in the mirror winking just as you turn away.

Full Void, a narrative platforming puzzle game from London indie studio OutOfTheBit Ltd, wears its love of cinematic platformer classics on its sleeve. Bringing along core gameplay ideas from early entries in the genre, it mixes in some modern influences and introduces a few new ideas of its own.

You play as a hoody-up teen on the run, lugging a backpack with a computer in it as you trek through desolate cityscapes in knee-patched jeans. You are hunted by evil robot monsters, tracking you down with their menacing stop-light eyes and scuttling about on spidery legs. As atmospheric as it is, quite why this is happening takes a while to become clear. Nonetheless, the threat of your pursuers feels real and lends significance to the companionship of a small robot helper you encounter later in the game. Flashback cutscenes suggest this robot was developed by your mother before things went bad, bringing a satisfying element of vengeance to the story.

The main gameplay influence is clearly 1991’s Another World from Delphine Software. Full Void’s very first scene is a clear and direct homage that ’90s gamers will love – a close replica of Another World’s opening moments, when Lester stumbles onto the scene and must escape a pursuing black beast. Just like that older game, Full Void’s characters move on a grid, allowing detailed, lifelike animations to play out between each step, at the expense of responsiveness of controls. This gives a sense of rhythm and structure to the gameplay that suits both the non-stop jeopardy of some segments and the logical thinking needed to navigate others. The game also borrows the trial-and-error gameplay of learning how to pass different scenes by failing at them first, then repeating until you can pull off the required manoeuvres. Thankfully, checkpoint spacing is more modern, which is one factor that keeps the playtime down to two or three hours, but makes it much more fun.

Another World’s influences continue in other ways: sections navigating tight crawl spaces, incidental cutaways to show close-up actions, and the aid of a sympathetic turncoat who can match the enemy in ways you can’t. However, it also becomes reminiscent of Inside as its story progresses into strange laboratories and brief stealth segments. Meanwhile, Full Void’s biggest distinguishing gameplay feature comes in its hacking sections. Plugging your computer into certain terminals throughout the game allows you to control elements of the environment or your robot friend. Entering a series of commands and hitting play to see things move is a lot of fun, and makes great use of the game’s inherent grid structure by overlaying a green matrix to navigate by.

With such a tight run time, Full Void’s ideas don’t have time to wear thin, but neither do they have chance to develop much depth. As a modern game, it’s far more player-friendly than Another World, its main inspiration, and looks and sounds fantastic. It also brings fresh ideas to the table, rather than simply retreading the old for the sake of nostalgia. However, it lacks a compelling narrative arc, which could have made it feel truly cinematic.

Update [Sat 16th Sep, 2023 12:00 BST]: Level-5 has now released these trailers for the new Fantasy Life game, the new Inazuma Eleven, and also DECAPOLICE. You can see them all below:

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time – 1st Trailer

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time arrives on Switch in 2023.

DECAPOLICE – Playable guide trailer & Concept image trailer

DECAPOLICE arrives on Switch in 2023.

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road

Here’s a 4-minute look at this upcoming release. The next lot of information along with a playable version will be at the Tokyo Game Show 2023.

Original article [Sat 16th Sep, 2023 04:30 BST]: Level-5 fans are in for a treat later today with the Japanese company releasing multiple game trailers for various upcoming Switch titles.

This was revealed by the company’s CEO Akihiro Hino on social media (thanks, Gematsu). The games you can expect to see more of include DECAPOLICE, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road and Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. They’ll premiere at 8pm JST via the company’s YouTube channel.

“New PVs for “Inazuma Eleven,” “Dekapolis,” and “Fantasy Life i” will be released tomorrow, September 16th (Sat) at 8pm!”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any mention of Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, which was announced earlier this year for the Nintendo Switch. Last we heard, there’s no release date on this one just yet and it’s still in the early stages of development. You can learn more about it in our guide:

Interested in any of these upcoming Switch titles from Level-5? Comment below.

After a packed Direct, are you ready for a big weekend of gaming? We sure are! Welcome back to another edition of What Are You Playing. Before we dive into our Switch plans, let’s take a look at the highlights from this week on Nintendo Life.

The big news this time around was that we finally got a September Direct. This one was packed full of remakes and remasters like Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but there were also some newbies to see in the shape of Princess Peach: Showtime! and Splatoon 3‘s ‘Side Order‘ DLC.

Elsewhere, it was rumours ahoy as we heard the latest gossip about the ‘Switch 2‘ and took a look at some joystick patents that might signal the end of drift — our fingers are crossed…

Finally, in reviews, we got our hands on the “excellent Mega Man X-style” 30XX, blasted into Super Bomberman R 2‘s feature-rich return and were left wanting more by Pokémon Scarlet and Violet – The Teal Mask.

Now, let’s have a look at what we’re all planning on playing this weekend, shall we?

Jim Norman, Staff Writer

It’s my birthday this weekend so I don’t know that I will actually have all that much time for gaming — unless you count pass the parcel, in which case, I will be doing a lot of gaming.

That being said, I would really, really like to get another chunk of Sea of Stars under my belt. I am just having the best time with it and I feel like it’s going to be one of those that takes a good few weeks to get over once I’ve wrapped it up.

I’ll also probably hit up a run or two in TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge – Dimension Shellshock. Gosh, I really wasn’t a roguelike guy a month ago, but the combo of this sweet Survival Mode and Vampire Survivors has really got me hooked.

Felix Sanchez, Video Producer

I’ll be finishing up Sea of Stars – around 30 hours into it – and wow, it is just a fantastic game. It keeps having fantastic twists and turns, and I can’t wait to see what’s at the end of the road. Oh, I’m probably also gonna hit up some more races in F-Zero 99 because, MAN, that game has no right to be as fun as it is!

Austin Voigt, Contributor

Whenever there are announcements about certain IPs, the excitement always makes me want to go play all of the other games in the series, no matter how old or outdated, just to sate my cravings. After yesterday’s Nintendo Direct, I’ll likely crack open all of my Splatoon, Luigi’s Mansion, and Paper Mario games just for the heck of it, not only on Switch but probably on the old Wii U and Cube of Game, as well.

I’m also still playing through all of my hundreds of StreetPasses from PAX West, because I refuse to let any of those minigames go to waste… being a completionist is a heavy burden. Send good vibes — and all the snacks.

Alana Hagues, Deputy Editor

It’s demos, demos, demos this weekend for me! Star Ocean: The Second Story R‘s demo is a delightful slice of nostalgia for me — it looks absolutely beautiful on Switch and runs like a dream, too. And Dave The Diver is a title I’ve been meaning to check out since it got rave reviews on Steam earlier in the year.

For Switch, my main aim is to check off the last few bits in The Teal Mask so that’s out of the way. Otherwise, my time will be spent on the PS5 playing through Baldur’s Gate 3 with my partner. What an overwhelming game that is — I can’t wait for it all to click into place, because I sense there’s something pretty special about this one.

Do your weekend gaming plans match any of ours? Drop the game that you will be maining in the poll above and then take to the comments to let us know what else you have on the cards.

Update [Sat 16th Sep, 2023 02:00 BST]:

During the latest Nintendo Direct broadcast in Japan, Hatsune Miku fans got another look at her upcoming Fitness Boxing Switch game. It’s scheduled to arrive in this region on 7th March 2024. There’s no word on localisation at this point in time.

Here are some additional screenshots from Nintendo’s official website:

Original article [Fri 1st Sep, 2023 04:00 BST]:

Following the news earlier this week that the original Fitness Boxing would be removed from the UK eShop, developer Imagineer has now announced a brand new Switch game featuring the superstar virtual idol Hatsune Miku.

Fitness Boxing feat. Hatsune Miku Isshoni Exercise is launching in Spring 2024 in Japan and will allow players to enjoy boxing exercises under the guidance of the famous idol. Hatsune Miku’s tracks will also feature in the game including her “main theme song by cosMo@bousouP”.

You can see a brief teaser in the video above. There’s no mention of a localisation, but a Fitness Boxing spin-off based on the manga series Fist of the North Star was released on Switch in Europe and America last year, so there might be a chance.

Would you be interested in a Fitness Boxing workout with the virtual idol Hatsune Miku? Tell us below.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been an absolutely huge part of Nintendo’s software and hardware success in 2023, and this trend continued in the month of August in the US.

As highlighted by Circana (via video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella), Tears of the Kingdom actually moved up a spot in the “top 20 best-selling premium games” for August 2023, going from seventh to sixth place.

Madden NFL 24 debuted in the top spot, with FromSoftare’s new Armored Core game just below this and Remnant II in third place. Apart from Zelda, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also managed to crack the top 10 in the charts, and Pikmin 4 dropped from sixth to 11th place in August.

It’s worth noting the digital sales of the Nintendo titles are not factored in, so they could be a lot more popular than this chart suggests. As we get closer to the holiday period, Tears of the Kingdom is likely to continue to sell incredibly well in the US.

As for hardware, sales fell by 13% year over year to $328 million and the Switch had a bit of a slump itself during August:

Mat Piscatella: “Video game hardware spending fell 13% when compared to a year ago, to $328 million. PlayStation 5 dollar sales fell by a single-digit percentage in the month when compared to a year ago, while both Switch and Xbox Series declined by a double-digit percentage…PlayStation 5 was the best-selling hardware platform in both unit and dollar sales during August 2023, with Xbox Series ranking 2nd across both measures.”

Did you buy any Nintendo games or hardware last month? Let us know in the comments.