How to watch and how to organize a Puyo Puyo Champions Tournament at AnimEVO

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Image: A screenshot of Shirobrawl and S2′s match in the top 8 of the 2019 AnimEVO Puyo Puyo Champions Tournament

By Don (@opobjectives)

EVO 2019 was held a few weekends ago in Las Vegas, with thousands of people competing in a range of competitive games. While the spotlight was on fighting games with larger communities and budgets, a variety of side tournaments were held at the same time under the AnimEVO 2019 umbrella. Side tournaments are a hallmark of the fighting game community, often relying on self-organization and focusing on games produced by Japanese game studios. Rather than being on EVO’s main stage, they rely on their communities for broadcast, commentary, and organization. All of that is why the tournament that I wanted to tune into the most was the self-organized, six hour, double-elimination event for Puyo Puyo Champions.

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A quick look at Minoria, the follow up to Bombservice’s Momodora games. It plays with similar ideas and influences as Momodora, and its strengths are largely the same, but misses on a few marks. 

Pawarumi Review

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by Amr (@siegarettes)

Pawarumi
Developer: Manufacture43
Publisher: Manufacture43
Switch, PC, Xbox One, PS4

Sporting a multiple weapon system and three color polarity system, Pawarumi might immediately bring to mind Treasure’s shooter diptych of Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga. But while it clearly draws inspiration from the two, Pawarumi is both simpler and more complex. It frequently overwhelms, but is balanced by allowing some messiness. Pawarumi might be balanced around a triangle of weapons, but it’s often a game of dichotomies.  

At the heart of Pawarumi is its three color weapon system. Red lasers home in on enemies, the green wave beam hits a wide area directly ahead, and the blue laser inflicts direct, steady damage in a small area. At first, Pawarumi seem follows the usual STG weapon balance, trading off between covering wider angles and doing direct damage. This is unfortunately undercut by two factors. 

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Getting Drunk and Hustled at Darts in Yakuza

by Don (@opobjectives)

The Yakuza games are well known for being part neighborhood simulator, part highly dramatic hypermasculine gangster fantasy. On occasion, that mix includes an oddly thorough representation of meeting strangers, playing darts, and getting drunk. 

Just about every entry in the series offers a few bars with dart boards, with bar staff offering a small variety of minigames like 501, Cricket, or Count-Up. If you play a few rounds, then side characters start to crawl out of the woodwork to offer some competition. That’s par for the course across the series. 

Only in Yakuza 0, however, does that competition lowball their skills, liquor up protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, and hustle millions of yen out of him.

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Rolling Gunner Review

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by Amr(@siegarettes)

Rolling Gunner feels like it stepped out of a time machine. Starting it up, there was something about the interface that immediately made me feel as if I were playing a doujin shooter from ten years ago. The interface, the very specific pixelated edges its pre-rendered sprites, down to the story sequences and between level transitions–all it felt right at home with my expectations of old doujin works. It was almost surprising to be playing it on the Switch, and in widescreen–if it wasn’t for the sheer density of projectiles this could easily pass for something you’d find on a 4:3 CRT monitor in some corner of a fan event. 

That’s not to say Rolling Gunner feels, outdated. Rather it combines the sensibilities of latter year shooters with their modern design, and feels aware of the way people engage with the genre today. 

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Muse Dash Short Review

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by Amr (@siegarettes)

Muse Dash
Developer: PeroPero Games 
Publisher: XD Network
PC, Switch, Android

Note: This review is based on code for the base PC game, which does not contain the entire song library. 

Muse Dash begins with a message declaring that it wants to be a rhythm game for everyone, even those who don’t feel they have a good sense of rhythm. And on that front it largely succeeds. 

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Velvet Swing short review

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by Amr (@siegarettes)

  • Velvet Swing
  • Developer: Flamebait Games
  • Publisher: Digerati
  • Switch, PC

Velvet Swing makes a great first impression. The art style and moody soundtrack set up a trip into a surreal, vaporwave inspired landscape. It’s swinging manages to convey a sense of momentum while giving me enough control to keep it from feeling like I could be carried into an inescapable situation by mistakes I made three moves back. So already it manages to swing right past so the traps so many other momentum platformers fall into. Then it drops into the rest of them.

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Super Tennis Blast Review

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by Amr (@siegarettes)

  • Super Tennis Blast
  • Developer: Unfinished Pixel
  • Publisher: Unfinished Pixel
  • Switch, PC

Nobody I know plays tennis, but everyone has played videogame tennis. Alongside golf, tennis is one of the most ubiquitous sports in games. The mechanics have been iterated on and refined so many times over that everyone’s got their own expectations of what a tennis game should do. Super Tennis Blast mostly lives up to those expectations, even if it’s presented in a no-frills package.

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