Hello and welcome, fellow viewers and readers new and old. This is me again, your Kakuchopurei content director, Jonathan “Mr Toffee” Leo, with this week’s video game and pop culture recap.
June has been a great month for us. Apart from covering Summer Games Festival and other June-related game company livestreams earlier, there’s been a lot of esports events happening as of late, from Mobile Legends content to even a major fighting game tournament that took place over the weekend. There were also a number of anime events that happened in Malaysia, which means a busy week for many of us.
In any case, we’re very blessed with spreading information and talking about everything that’s been going on via our website. Sure, this means some sleepless nights, especially in the weekend, but hey! That’s the price for being one of Southeast Asia’s up-and-coming video game news sites
Video Games: What We’ve Done
We witnessed a major Mobile Legends tournament in the world taking place in Malaysia last weekend.
The top three teams are Resurgence Philippines at number 1, RRQ Hoshi at number 2, and Omega Esports at number 3.
Malaysian teams Orange Esports and TODAK are placed at 5th and 6th place respectively, beating out Singapore teams EVOS SG and Resurgence Singapore who are at 7th and 8th place respectively.
The MVP of the tournament is Eman Sangco, or EMANN, who plays for Resurgence Philippines. Check out our recap here.
We also covered a major international fighting game tournament called Community Effort Orlando 2022, or CEO 2022. Check out our highlight video and recap here.
There were also a ton of video game news that popped up during the course of the week until 27 June. These include:
–CD Projekt’s third-party QA company lying to the company about Cyberpunk 2077 bugs, –Bungie and other big video game companies making their stances heard regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade,
-Elden Ring creators From Software in the final stages of development of its next big title,
–Michael Jackson’s confirmed involvement with the soundtrack of Sonic The Hedgehog 3 back in 1994,
-A preview of the Junker Queen in Overwatch 2,
-The folks behind the Total War series making a new multiplayer shooter called HYENAS.
Pop Culture: What We’ve Done
We wrapped up all the episodes of Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it was definitely a crowd-pleaser for Star Wars fans. While some may argue that the story that takes place with Obi-Wan between episodes 3 and 4 did not need to happen, it’s at least done in a well-produced manner, and this is despite the shoddy camera work during the fight scenes at times.
We also did an epic lightsaber supercut between Obi-Wan and his former pupil-turned-Sith-Lord Anakin Skywalker, whom you may know eventually turns to Darth Vader.
We talked about both the Quay to Japan’s big music rhythm arena hosted by Infinite Carnage as well as the Cos-Mic anime event that took place in Sunway Clio. Unfortunately, the latter had its second day cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
We reviewed two major shows, the Korean version of Money Heist and Westworld Season 4.
Money Heist Korea is well worth the binge, if you’re looking for a thrilling series with intense heists. Maybe Money Heist Korea Joint Economic Area can even turn out to be the next Squid Game-like craze if given the chance.
Westworld Season 4 is definitely a promising new start for the series, though the stretched storyline is starting to wear thin and it’s not friendly for those who didn’t do their homework with Seasons 1 and 2, or even 3. The plot threads are so deep that you may need to go back to past seasons to see if it all makes sense to you and may require repeated viewing, but it’s good to know that the show’s scifi dystopian story quality has yet to falter and cheap out.
What We’ve Been Playing
We checked out Sonic Origins, a collection of all the important 2D Sonic The Hedgehog games in one classic package. The collection features new museum and gallery options as well as the Anniversary versions of the four classic titles:
-Sonic The Hedgehog
-Sonic The Hedgehog 2
-Sonic CD
-Sonic The Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles
What’s really cool about the Anniversary versions of the games are that it’s presented in 16:9 aspect ratio and also ditches the lives system so that players do not need to restart the entire game if they lose a set number of lives. They just need to start over from the last checkpoint over and over until they overcome the hurdle.
If you’re not an avid collector of the Blue Blur, Sonic Origins is a good place as any to start with the best Sonic games available. It’s the best way to find out why these Megadrive titles are regarded as top-tier 2D platforming even up to this day, and also remind you why the 3D Sonic games will never ever age well.
We also played the Capcom Fighting Collection, which is an assortment of classic fighting games from the company that made Street Fighter 2 that was all the rage in the 90s. Some of these titles are hidden gems like Pocket Fighter and Red Earth, the latter being a stab at combining a role-playing game with a fighting game.
If you loved the 90s Darkstalker titles, which is essentially Street Fighter but with Universal Monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein but in anime style, you’ll love this collection because there are 5 Darkstalker titles in there. These include the Japanese updates of Darkstalkers 2 and Darkstalkers 3 which are Vampire Hunter 2 and Vampire Saviour 2 respectively.
These classic titles were handled with care and they have very stable net code if you wish to play online with others. While the collection featured too much of the Darkstalker titles, at least the current generation of gamers can check out classics like Cyberbots and Red Earth (both the English and Japanese versions) through legal means.
That’s all for this week of our gaming news recap feature and what we’ve been up to for the week of 17-27 June. Catch you next time, readers new and old. As always, do check out our awesome content on kakuchopurei.com and on our YouTube website. We post new content every day and every week!
