#oneaday Day 46: New Acquisitions

It was a good day for new game acquisitions today, as a few preorders showed up all at the same time!

First up was Senran Kagura Burst Re;Newal (or however it's punctuated) — I preordered this ages ago and decided to hang on to it even after the unfortunate news that Sony had started tampering with vaguely sexual game content. The actual cut content isn't something that was especially important to me, so I was keen to continue my physical Senran Kagura collection; it would have just felt wrong to not have one of the games in the series on my shelf — particularly after making a point of getting Bon Appetit from Limited Run Games a while back! Plus Marvelous Europe's limited editions are always really good, so I jumped on board primarily for that. I haven't cracked it open yet; watch out for a post on that subject soon.

Secondly was Travis Strikes Again for Nintendo Switch. Now, I don't really know the No More Heroes series at all despite owning both for Wii — they're games I picked up during Game's Troubles a few years back because they were cheap and I had heard they were good. I did, however, want to support Travis Strikes Again's physical release because its one of several games recently that I feel is doing a good thing — the digital version is cheaper, but the physical version, costing the price of a "normal" game, comes bundled with the Season Pass, providing access to all the post-launch content.

Now, I'd rather Season Passes and post-launch content weren't a thing, to be perfectly honest — just finish your fucking games before you release them, this was not a problem for six console generations — but if I have to put up with this bullshit, I'd rather it was handled like this, rather than the more common approach of having to buy the game and then having to spend the same amount of money again if I want all the stuff that wasn't ready to put on the disc when it actually released. And it sounds as if Travis Strikes Again's additional content is going to be a lot of fun, so I look forward to trying that. Eventually. Perhaps as a whole No More Heroes feature one month!

The final game that arrived today was Ace Combat 7 for PS4. I've been idly looking forward to this for a while, but I got very excited about it in about the last week or so after reminding myself of how good the older games were. Actually, specifically it was hearing some of the music that someone shared that made me want it; really good music has a habit of doing that, and Ace Combat has always had amazing soundtracks.

I've spent most of the evening playing Ace Combat and I'm delighted to report it's wonderful. It's an Ace Combat game brought right up to date for the latest generation of consoles, blending the familiar arcadey air combat of the earlier games with some gorgeous graphics and spectacular weather effects. The latter actually play quite an important role in the gameplay now — you can use cloud cover to your advantage, but in doing so your canopy gets wet and eventually freezes up if you spend too much time in there; in other missions, you might have to deal with turbulence (normally while you're attempting to "thread the needle" somewhat); in others still, the weather is simply used for impressive atmospheric (no pun intended) effect.

There'll be more about all these games on MoeGamer in the very near future, but for now having been feasting on Ace Combat all evening I should probably go to bed…