yakuza

Predicting Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds’ Year 2 DLC

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

September 25th marks the one-year anniversary of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and though I ranked it lower than Mario Kart World in my best games of 2025 list, I’ve honestly found myself playing it far more frequently thanks to its regular online events, numerous in-game challenges, and it just being a fun time. This is the game that made me a regular PlayStation Plus subscriber so you know it’s doing something right.

As such, I was pleasantly surprised to see Sega announce it would be supporting the game with a second year of DLC, especially since Sega had previously admitted CrossWorlds wasn’t meeting sales expectations and publishers are all too eager to kill post-launch support if video games don’t become overnight successes nowadays.

So, to celebrate the game’s anniversary and for my own amusement, I’m going to see if I can predict which characters will be added to CrossWorlds throughout its second year. To be clear, this isn’t a wishlist of characters I want to see. My aim is to try and get inside of Sega executives’ heads and figure out what sort of characters they’d pick as both free and paid DLC.

Continue reading →

Five Franchises That Should Get a Warriors/Musou Spin-Off

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

2000px-Koei_Tecmo_Holdings_logo_20090401.svg

Koei Tecmo and Omega Force kind of struck gold when they first created the Dynasty Warriors series back in 1997. It was such a simple formula that, despite being criticised by some for being TOO simple, found itself a very devoted fan-base. Nowadays there are so many bloody spin-offs of not just the main series but also ones centered around other franchises like Fist of the North Star, The Legend of Zelda and Fire Emblem to name a few.

I personally don’t have much experience with the series but I’ve enjoyed what games I have played because they’re flashy, satisfying and just overall fun to play. So naturally I want to see other franchises get a similar treatment. Let’s run through five of them right now, shall we? Continue reading →

Ten of My Favourite Music Tracks from Project X Zone 2

/ Michael Beckwith / 1 Comment

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Project X Zone 2

One aspect I didn’t mention in the Project X Zone 2 review was its soundtrack. As a crossover of many gaming franchises, it naturally draws most of its music from those franchises and gives them fancy new remixes. The first game did the same thing but, due to licensing issues, a lot of tracks had to be replaced (and some just flat-out removed) for the Western release.

PXZ 2, however, managed to avoid this pitfall and we were gifted with an untouched, complete soundtrack (though Japan still got an exclusive pre-order that offered the original versions of the remixes which sucks but what are you gonna do?). So, to continue the trend of me pretending I know what I’m talking about when it comes to music, here’s a quick list of ten of my favourite music tracks from the game. And believe me when I say that this list was much harder to make than the last one. Seriously, this is a really good soundtrack. Continue reading →