This Week in Games

Robos Saved, Ninja Babes, and Sega's AI Plans

Welcome back, folks! Over the week, I saw someone I follow bring up Backloggd, a website for keeping track of your game collection. I used to have a similar deal on the now-defunct 1Up.com. I've gone ahead and made a Backloggd page for myself. It's quite incomplete at the moment: there are a lot of PS2 games I haven't registered, partly because I sadly sold them all in 2017, partly because I don't remember even half of the ones I had (they were all weird Atlus RPGs, too). But I also have a massive stack of Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS titles back home that I can't all remember, and I lack the space or money to send for them. I miss my whole collection—but also, I think that my Nintendo Switch library outnumbers everything back home quite handily...

We get to talk about Taimanin RPG again! Taimanin RPG is a mobile game based on Lilith Soft's long-running Taimanin series, an adult series of visual novels about sexy ninja-women fighting the literal monsters that sneak into Japan's criminal underbelly. One of the earliest things I covered in this column was an old collab between Taimanin RPG and Black Lagoon. And not too long ago, we also discussed Taimanin RPG's collab with Highschool of the Dead. Well, Taimanin RPG has settled on another collab with an established anime. And to their credit, it's about ninja! But also, it's likely older than a lot of current anime fans.

Like I said, I don't blame you for not recognizing Basilisk; it aired back in 2005! It tells the bloody tale of two ninja clans feuding for the Tokugawa shogunate's approval in 1600s Japan. The collab ropes in three members of the main cast: Koga Gennosuke (the heir of the Gennosuke clan who is trying to end the bloodshed between his clan and the rival Iga clan), Oboro Iga (Koga's fiancée, who can shut down all ninja powers), and Basilisk's interpretation of Lady Kasuga, a politician and a fascinating historical figure. Like with all of the previous collabs, it's completely safe-for-work: no lewd shenanigans involved, outside of Kasuga having alternate card art where she undoes her top a little. Unlike the other collabs, there's no need to make a game-exclusive redesign of the cast as ninja because, well, they're already ninja.

I'm more surprised than anything else at Basilisk being chosen. Black Lagoon was a wild choice, but tonally gritty enough to make it a good fit. Plus, the manga is still running. Highschool of the Dead, similarly, has enough grindhouse-style violence and nudity to make it a perfect fit, and even though it's been on hiatus since the untimely passing of its writer, it's still a beloved series. Basilisk, though, is fairly old. Being based on ninja makes it an interesting addition to the Taimanin universe. After all, series icon Asagi Igawa is supposed to be the prodigious heir of the Igawa clan, and there are numerous other clans that she works with. But Basilisk is so old; if it has an ongoing fandom in Japan, I'm unaware of it.

Sadly, by the time you read this, you'll be hard-pressed to finish the event: the collab ends on August 16. And it's unlikely this event will ever officially come to America: Taimanin RPG's American adaptation, Taimanin RPG Exstacy saw its end-of-service this time last year. Still, it's amusing to see the Taimanin franchise continuing to get collabs with mainstream anime. It's just a shame that none of those collabs make it to Action Taimanin, the franchise's dedicated safe-for-work action game. (It's fun, but very grindy—and buying new playable characters costs an arm and a leg.)

I've heard tell that Mario Mario is more recognizable to kids than Mickey Mouse, which means that the best thing for Nintendo to do is capitalize upon his enduring popularity among tykes. The best way to do that, thus, is seemingly with the new My Mario line. Announced this past week, the line is a part of Nintendo's ongoing efforts to expand the reach of their branding beyond just games and into "lifestyle" goods (see: the Alarmo alarm clock and the Nintendo Today app). Currently, Nintendo's headlining part of the My Mario line is Hello, Mario!, which will be very interesting to fans of Super Mario 64.

As it turns out, Hello, Mario! is an app based on Super Mario 64's famous title screen! Kids can touch and grab Mario's face, stretching and spinning him around. It's also possible to make Mario's face bounce around on the edges of the screen, bringing up a little counter for each bounce. The app itself doesn't launch until August 26, so if it has any other functions, we don't know yet. But also, it's aimed at very young children; I don't think it necessarily needs a dramatic storyline or anything like that. The app will launch on mobile devices, but also on the Nintendo Switch family for free.

The My Mario line also includes a board book that's soon to be released. It'll feature goofy pages where you can pull on certain bits of Mario's face to make his mouth stretch or his face spin. It's a cute idea! I loved pop-up picture books as a kid and even liked making my own in crafts classes. There are also going to be a series of stop-motion animated shorts called It's Me, Mario!, which will focus on "a variety of expressions and movements." I won't lie, I'm rather dubious of any proper educational content from this (teaching kids to recognize expressions, maybe?). There will also be a set of wooden blocks featuring Mario, Princess Peach, and other recognizable Mario iconography. Most curiously, all of those blocks will also have NFC chips inside of them, allowing them to serve as Amiibo. It's a cute function, but a bit of a puzzling one given that Amiibo barely have any support these days outside of Super Smash Bros. I'm more concerned with the blocks being a hot-ticket item for scalpers, which irritates me a bit more than it should, given that these should be for little kids.

The Hello, Mario! app goes live on August 26, but the remaining My Mario line goes global in 2026. Fittingly, 2025 is Mario's 40th anniversary; I have to wonder if Nintendo is planning anything else for the portly plumber...

The fun thing about the Nintendo Switch Online+ Expansion finally expanding its library to Nintendo GameCube titles is that we get to see a lot of Nintendo's homegrown cult favorites from the GameCube make their returns in a time where people might appreciate them. Animal Crossing managed to become a hit among fans, not so much the likes of Cubivore or Battalion Wars (and a lot of the prevailing attitudes about game design from that era didn't help, either). One of these overlooked titles was the charming platformer, Chibi Robo!—which, to the delight of many, Nintendo has announced for an August 21 return!

Think of Chibi Robo! as a cross between Toy Story and The Borrowers. You play as the titular Chibi Robo, a diminutive robot from an entire series of household cleaner bots. You'll wander around a family's household cleaning up after them, collecting litter, and fighting off weird bugs while the family goes about doing their own thing. There's a lot of background drama involving the family, the Sandersons, but there's also a plot involving the worldwide Chibi Robos themselves—and your Robo might be the only one that can help!

Throughout the game, you'll work through "days" as you wander the Sanderson house and clean up after them. Of course, Robo has a limited power supply, so you have to plug him into an outlet to recharge him regularly. As you help out the Sandersons and the toys that live in their house, you earn Happy Points that you can use to improve Robo's energy reserves, allowing him to explore further reaches in the household. It's a weird, offbeat idea, but it's what happens when you get Kenji Nishi, director of moon., to make a platformer.

Unfortunately, Chibi Robo! didn't do all that well, especially since it was released so late in the GameCube's lifespan. Its sequels didn't fare much better, partially because many of them diverged so much from the exploratory style of the original Chibi Robo! (you had a gardening sim, an AR photography game, and Zip Lash's weird platforming), partially because some of them were—for whatever reason—exclusively sold at Walmart, of all places. And I feel like this divergence is one time the fans might have a point; none of Chibi Robo!'s sequels managed to have the same heart or charm as the original. And some of the original developers probably feel the same way; Kenji Nishi even teamed up with several of his former coworkers from the Chibi Robo! team to crowdfund koROBO, a spiritual successor to Chibi Robo!. The game was fully funded in 2024, but it's still in development; no word on it yet.

In the meantime, it's nice that we have Chibi Robo! back. For those keeping tally, I'm not marking this one as a tiny miracle—with Nintendo finally giving us access to GameCube titles on NSO+, it was only a matter of time before they brought backChibi Robo! (Besides, they only have so many GameCube titles they can release—I doubt we'll see many licensed games hit NSO+!) In the meantime, get ready to clean your room this August 21!

Sega can be its own worst enemy, sometimes.

In a statement via 4Gamer, two Sega reps discussed the future of AI at the house that Sonic built. They explained that Sega is currently experimenting with AI development in the fields of "code generation, image generation, and motion generation." While these experiments are currently internal, Sega's reps felt that this could potentially become a pillar of Sega's development toolkit, up to and including "the automatic generation of stories and dialogue." Their presentation was similarly insistent on Generative AI as a pillar, claiming that "we are entering an era where it is impossible not to use AI."

I dunno about that, Chief. Imagine claiming that at Sega!

Longtime readers will know that I have a very low opinion of Generative AI, the same way I had similarly low opinions of cryptocurrency and the blockchain (which were also similarly cited as being "inevitable" just a few short years ago—and are both currently on life support). Similarly, I don't see this initiative doing too well at Sega. Ignoring that Generative AI is inherently wasteful of water and processing power (the US Government Accountability Office lists the environmental damages quite handily), is inherently built off of data scraped and stolen from creators (many of whom are marginalized), and easily "hallucinates" (translation: flat-out gets stuff wrong), the sheer truth of the matter is that generative AI is just so inefficient; programming code and translations still require humans to look over the results and correct possible "hallucinations." Which, in layman's terms, means they have to do twice as much work over twice as much time than if they had just done the work on their own without a glorified auto-spell getting in the way telling you that "blueberry" has three "B"s.

And that's before you get into the nuts and bolts of gaming, where people's personal touches matter. What was the inspiration for Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle system? Formula One racing—a creative leap that no computer could ever be programmed to undertake. Tim Follins' legendary musical tracks weren't the result of feeding obscene amounts of prog rock into a generator, they were the result of a man with no formal musical training hammering things out until we got the NES Pictionary theme. Naughty Dog used Sonic the Hedgehog as the inspiration for Crash Bandicoot, famously going so far as to call it "the Sonic's Ass game" due to its perspective. A computer that's fed Sonic the Hedgehog data wouldn't turn 2D Sonic into a 3D game with the camera trained on his backside (and likely wouldn't have created the Crash Bandicoot dance either).

I'm not even sure you can claim that rising costs of game development and graphical fidelity could sustain the idea of AI's "inevitability." For a Sega-grown example, look at the Like A Dragon series: those games have been recycling assets (animations, character models, textures), for years, and not only does that allow the games to be produced on a practically yearly basis, but it's allowed the Like A Dragon series to achieve landslide sales. Turns out, people want goofy old guys playing OutRun and ripping their shirts off while Kson makes goo-goo eyes at 'em. Similarly, so much of the critically-acclaimed Metaphor Re:Fantazio's essential backbones were proven successes courtesy of the Persona series. And that's before you get into how vital the work of actual physical artists was to that game—and many others in Sega's history! The late Rieko Kodama's unmistakable work as a director is what made the Phantasy Star series what it is. Yū Suzuki's keen eye for detail is what made Sega's arcade classics like OutRun what they are.

There's a lot of ink spilled over how "the technology is getting better," claiming it's better to adopt it now (while it's an inefficient hot mess that's boiling the oceans) rather than get "left behind." Here's a problem: theoretical technology ten, even five years in the future, is useless in the here and now. And AI can't even give us good games now-—why waste money on it? A lot of people might point to high-profile failures like Concord, but you don't even need AI to produce a failure. And a studio can still learn a lot from a "failed" game (famously, Beyond Good & Evil was a tremendous bomb for Ubisoft—but tons of its DNA would later inspire the generation-defining Assassin's Creed games). To paraphrase Dan Olson, a lot of the bluster over AI is just people holding a hot potato. And maybe some people like holding hot potatoes... but do they? Or do they hope they can convince someone else to hold it for them, Tom Sawyer-style?

Recently, Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees in a bid to support generative AI efforts—that's 110% of Nintendo's global workforce. While not all of those were employees of Microsoft's gaming branches, every last one of those employees could have been a Yū Suzuki, a Rieko Kodama, a Koji Kondo-—hell, maybe even a Kenji Eno. Any one of those 9,000 people could have had an idea that became the next Binding of Isaac or Donkey Kong. Sega so far hasn't dropped the axe on any of its employees. Still, with all the money you're investing in getting a computer to misspell "blueberry," you could probably give it to some of your talent and make a new game in the spirit of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg or NiGHTS. Because when Sega invested in their homegrown talents, even the failures were unmistakably special. I'd take a bullet for NiGHTS—hell, I'd take a bullet for the Bonanza Bros. I wouldn't spit on generative AI if it were on fire.

That'll do it for this week! I do have some special news for folks: That Bitch™ is going to be taking part in a charity stream! The folks at Entropy Emporium will be hosting an all-day charity stream of various table-top games in support of Access Sport, a United Kingdom-based charity based around helping improve the infrastructure needed for disabled children to take part in sports. And here's the kicker: all of the games are one-shots set in the Power Rangers universe! You'll be able to catch me in their "Essence 20" session, this August 23, from 1:00 PM PST to 4:30 PM PST. And me being me, you can count on me to take part as only I can! I've shared my opinions on Power Rangers in the past, but those teenagers with attitude always made sure to support local efforts whenever they could. I figured Captain Marvelous and Minami Kotaro wouldn't be against that, yeah? I thank anyone who takes the time to drop in! Be good to each other, I'll see you in seven!