Games to Buy Week of February 11th, 2020

Well, good news They finally finished Street Fighter V. Yup Street Fighter V: Champion Edition release this week. Honestly, this generation has not been kind to Capcom’s Street Fighter. If you prefer a more polished fighter Tekken 7 is a much better choice. If you like your fighters with humor and cartoonish gore, Mortal Kombat 11 is an excellent choice. If you are like me and judge fighting games based on their breast physics, Dead or Alive 6 is a good choice. (Dead or Alive 6 is also a good choice for button mashers.)

Street Fighter is basically left with the die hard nostalgists. I am not a fan of Street Fighter’s new art style, which I find ugly. I haven’t really been a fan of the Street Fighter games since the mod-nineties and unlike those three franchises above I have not spent more than a few minutes curiously playing a round or two.

Dreams

Dreams has been in development as a PlayStation 4 exclusive since 2012. It is a creation and sharing tool that provides incredibly powerful creation tools and resources with the ability to use all these tools with only the DualShock. Dreams has gotten very good reviews and looks fantastic. Part of me wants to buy it right away and start my new career as game developer.

I want to state how good the feedback has been and how I have to talk myself out of buying this game right now. Because I have some serious caveats.

The first is my experience (as a consumer mind you not a developer) with Xbox Live Indie Games. I have about 400 of these games. To play them, I have to find a TV that can take my old fat 360. Microsoft shut down the service when the new Xbox One game on the scene and all that work is locked behind a closed service on an aged system.

Dreams appears even more restrictive than the Indie games were. To share your games with the world (or lets face it friends and family) not just do they have to have the PlayStation 4 console but they would also have to be using the Dreams game to access it. This is more akin to creating a nice livery in Forza than creating an independent game.

This lack of portability is a problem. If I write a novel and publish it on the Barnes and Noble Nook if that service disappears, I still have a novel I can publish on the Amazon Kindle. Once Dreams shuts down all your creative works will be gone forever. And it will shut down. If life has taught me anything, these services will disappear someday. All of them.

What’s worse, your knowledge of how to create will be gone as well. Knowing how to creatively use the tools in Dreams may be useful in some transfer of skills way but trust me from experience there is a level of regret in learning a complicated set of tools that are worthless today. Nobody is looking for someone who can program a Commodore 64 (Or use a slide rule now that I think about it.)

Look, I own a version or two of RPG Maker and have been eyeing a visual novel program every once in a while. Dreams looks like the program that would get me off my butt and get me to creating. (I have trouble using GIMP for goodness’ sake.) I am not concerned that if I buy Dreams it will collect proverbial dust on my hard drive. I am concerned it will one day break my heart.

Yakuza 5 

Ah, a nice remaster of a Yakuza game. I am currently twenty hours into (checks hard drive) Yakuza zero I am sure I will get to Yakuza 5 in time for the next remaster.

Not for nothing the Yakuza games are great fun and great value but like so many series that have had multiple games it can be a little daunting to jump right in. Yakusa in particular has a story that runs through seven separate games and is better to be experienced in order.

Darksiders Genesis

Today’s word is polished. Darksiders Genesis is a very polished game. I have enjoyed experimenting with previous Darksiders games. This one is quite the departure trading God of War style third person action adventure for a Diablo style isometric game (But without Diablo’s weapon loot drops it must be mentioned.)

Lately I have been ignoring this style of spin off but the reviews are good and I like a good hack and slash. I do not understand who keeps trying to make Darksiders a thing, but you have to admire their gumption.