Wish List 2021

            Hello hello, it’s that time of year again, I’m very excited! I love making dream lists. I don’t know why. In the grand scheme of things my wishes are pretty shit and developers usually put out something that I never could have thought of but it’s the perfect time for a list like this. It’s not quite the holidays so something could pop up and surprise us.

            So let’s go through some of my previous wants. There’s still no news on a new Mario Kart, no Monster Hunter 2D fighter, we did get Monster Hunter Rise on Switch and a new style Pokemon coming soon, no Nintendo X Sega Smash, no Marathon reboot and no word of a third person Girls’ Frontline like shooter. I’ll talk more about some of those later, into the new wants!

I first read about Dragon Commander in a very small segment in an issue of PC Gamer years and years ago. Seriously, it was on the side of the page and I don’t even think it was a whole paragraph long, but it had the words “dragon” and “jetpack” and I thought “let’s. fucking. GOOOOOO.” My mind immediately went to Star Wars Jedi Starfighter. Unsure why but that’s what I assumed it would be like but it was nothing like that. Dragon Commander was like nothing else I’ve ever played before or since. The best way to describe it is a weird mix of political, RTS, card game and air combat. It’s a little complicated but there’s not much of being an actual jet pack dragon. You CAN play as the dragon during the RTS bits but typically you’re busy trying to micro your army and stuff so I didn’t get to do it much. So yeah, I’ve kind of wanted a dragon type game to play for a while now. I’m still on board for a jet pack dragon game that is similar to Jedi Starfighter. I recently found Jedi Starfighter on the Xbox backwards compatibility list and have been playing it here and there. There’s so much I don’t remember about the game but it’s still a good time. There’s an early mission where you’re trying to break someone out of a prison and they get ambushed by some droids. If you shoot a certain airlock the droids are released into the void of space. I thought it was pretty funny and clever. It was probably because of this scene in Thor Ragnarok that rekindled this need. Come on, that’s good shit.

I had a new entry into Armored Core on my list but I decided to take it off then @NEETproxy and I were talking and he happen to bring it up so it’s back on the list! Armored Core is a series that is near and dear to my heart. I won’t go into how I came to know it but before FromSoftware started making Dark Souls and an infinite amount of Souls clones the only thing I knew them for was Armored Core. What I really liked about the games was how the mechs moved; it seemed to be the most realistic way to me. They’re giant robots, they’re not going to be able to do flips and crazy stuff that you see in shows like Code Geass, they’re kind of clunky and slow, the only way to make them move faster is with boosters. The story for Armored Core, loosely, is big companies are the government. They make armies, make war with other companies, seizing strategic points and/or resources and will occasionally hire an Armored Core merc known as a Raven or a “Next” or whatever the hell the Japanese think sounds “cool.” So you usually don’t have any affiliation, you just do the jobs as they come in, one mission could be for X company and the very next one you could be doing something against X. I think in 4 or For Answer there might have been more of a path or benefit/consequence type of thing for picking certain companies but I don’t remember, it’s been a long long time. Traditionally you have energy and ballistic weapons ranging from missile launchers, rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, howitzers, flamethrowers, energy swords, pretty much anything you could think of. I defiantly liked customizing my mechs more than anything but the gameplay was good too. I remember a specific mission in 3 where it was super dusty, your visibility was so bad that your targeting didn’t work until enemies were very close. In AC3 some of the cores had orbiters that you could activate to do small damage to your targets but if they ran out of ammo they could still track targets. I remember using them for that mission for that reason alone, I don’t know if I came up with that myself, I feel like that was before the internet and such but maybe not, I’m not Googleing all that stuff, I don’t want to know. Another thing I really liked was in AC4 you had side boosters that would turn you 90 degrees making it extremely helpful to keep on your targets especially if you were a heavier build. The side boosts could also be used to go left and right quickly too. I’m just mentioning some things that I was fond of in the old games. (Edit: Apparently I had this on my first wish list, who knew?)

Another thing I’ve mentioned before is a survival based co-op game similar to Tomb Raider and a much much lesser point, Ghost Recon Breakpoint. I don’t know how this would work but I’m thinking Tomb Raider crossed with Army of Two or Splinter Cell Conviction’s co-op. Army of Two and Conviction do co-op campaign pretty well as far as I’m concerned. So, some survival game in a jungle setting, hide in the mud, hide in the vines, hide in the trees, one person distracts an enemy and the other takes them out. Again, I don’t know really know how this could actually work. It sounds hard to do but I don’t know, it sounds fun to me. Have neat “back to back” segments where you have sticks or spears and people come at you from all sides and you take them out in a cool, slow-mo fashion.

In another post I made, before Cyberpunk 2077 came out, I had said I’d like a game based on Black Lagoon that was on a scale of Cyberpunk 2077 but in my opinion, I think Cyberpunk is closer to a Black Lagoon game than what I was expecting Cyberpunk to be. But in one of my conversations with @NEETproxy we were talking about how the game starts for the three groups you pick. After like what, half an hour of starting your character, what you picked to start as doesn’t really matter. But in each of these beginnings you meet Jackie. So what if the game was based more around Jackie getting jobs and setting up a crew to get things done and the missions were more based on your characters unique skills? So as a “corpo” you’d have to sweet talk and bullshit your way through certain conversations to get codes or shut something down. As a “street kid” you get some information from back ally channels and maybe do most of the dirty work for the team. “Nomads” do… whatever they do, but you see what I mean? All three playable characters are technically working together on the same job even if you don’t see them. You start talking with Jackie and he can say something like “Yeah, I’ve got a guy on the inside that’ll take care of those codes for us.” Like, it gives a reason to replay the game to see different angles. The way the game is now, nothing noteworthy is different from your initial choice.

So that’s it for new wants. Right now there’s no Marathon reboot in a Doom (2016) style but Warhammer 40k had a game come out in that vein called Necromunda. I haven’t played it but I’ve heard it’s pretty fast and pretty easy. Like you can glory kill any time basically and the enemies give you health when you do; I think that’s what I’ve heard. Another game coming out soonish that’s taking inspiration from Doom is Shadow Warrior 3. Again, don’t know much about it, saw one trailer and was like “yup, that’s more Doom” so maybe there will be a new Marathon game soon. I doubt it though to be honest.

I know you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about a Anime Division game by now but god damn it there’s just too many reasons for this to be a thing already. Look at this Black Ops 3 video with Girls’ Frontline characters. I want to play this but in third person, I want to see my character too. Rainbow Six had a crossover with Arknights and look how good my girl Frost looks in anime. It’s very evident that there is a big consumer base for a game like this. Look at these numbers this guy found for Girls’ Frontline. I understand it’s a mobile game and things are kind of different for traditional games but I guarantee if it’s done right it will sell like there’s no tomorrow. Talking with @NEETproxy about this and he suggested Valkyria Chronicles cross The Division kind of game. I can get behind that. In Valkyria Chronicles 2 there were a ton of different weapon types for each class. I loved the shock troopers and used them the most. I remember the guns all varied in how many rounds they had, whether they shot straight or in a horizontal line, flamethrower attachments, yatta yatta. There is a whole lot someone could work with if they wanted to do this.

I’d still really love to see Capcom do a 2D fighter based on the monsters of Monster Hunter. I mean look at this, Capcom themselves even liked it, come on. Now that Smash Ultimate has wrapped up Nintendo X Sega can happen now. I’m more hopeful that this could be a thing with Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl game being out in the wild. Never in a million years would I think that something like that would happen but it just makes so much god damn sense that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. But I said it in my other post about this, Sega has so many properties they could pull from it’s not even funny. I just want something a little different than a typical fighter. When you do your Tekken’s or your DOA’s you have characters using real world martial arts (more or less), which is fine for the people that want that but after years of these games and sequels, I’m pretty over it you know? You have your boxer and your karate guy and your Bruce Lee clone and your capoeira person. I want something a little more stylized. Now, this person’s art is fucking phenomenal. I look at their pixel art and I’m just like “this… THIS.” Some of my favorite ones are the new Samus, Gwen, Harley Quinn and Bayonetta. Just from what I’ve seen, they’ve done a lot of Nintendo characters but also DC comics, Marvel, Dragon Ball, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Avatar and more so I don’t even know what the game would be called if it had all these types of characters. Like it’s not quite like Capcom vs Marvel, it can’t be Nintendo VS DC or something. They’ve done so many characters and they’re all so good that I just want this big crazy mash up of all these icons. I don’t think calling them “pop culture” characters is accurate but I don’t know what else to call them, just, popular game and comic characters. Then maybe we could have Master Chief, Samus and Doom guy together in one game. Put in Lara, Kratos, Aloy, even Rost could go in. Put in a Transformer, get a Street Shark in there, get weird about it.

So, my main wants? My TLDR? I’d like a Waifu Division, a mega 2D pixel crossover fighter, a new Mario Kart and quite possibly a new Armored Core. What do you think? What do you like on my list? What do you not like? Do you have any dream game? Let me know, I’d love to hear them and I’ll see you around next time.

@AztecSauce