Now Playing at SUPERJUMP: Issue 39

PokémonWe're back with a brand-new Now Playing! As usual, our team has been playing a wide variety of games, loving both the big titles and under-the-radar indies alike. No matter what we're playing, we want to share with you and maybe send you down the path to try something new. Let us know in the comments what you're playing and what news has you excited for the future!

Cat Webling

DigDigDrill

I recently had the great privilege to get a Nintendo Switch key for DigDigDrill from Toorai, and I'm having the absolute time of my life! This adorable game, which came to PC in 2024, has a simple premise: you operate a drill, and your goal is to drill! You forge new drills, explore the earth, dig up ores, retrieve treasure, and upgrade your machine to get further and further down, aiming for level 999.

I can't say enough good things about this game, especially the Switch port. The music is jaunty and fun with retro flair, the mechanics are simple but addictive, and the reward system is consistent enough to keep you playing for hours and hours and hours. I'm happy to sink ten minutes or three hours into a play session, digging as deep as I can go. One of my favorite aspects is the drill forging; the Tetris-esque mechanics are an interesting puzzle to explore and encourage you to find more kinds of ores so you can fill out more shapes.

If you're in the mood for a fun, silly digging game, DigDigDrill is available on Steam for $3.99 or on the Nintendo e-Shop for $9.99.

C.S. Voll

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker's Memory

I finished Hacker's Memory. In total, it took me around 140 hours to finish both Cyber Sleuth and its expansion. It was a fun ride.

Hacker's Memory fine-tunes many of Cyber Sleuth's systems. The story is so much stronger, perhaps because it focuses on a small, close-knit bunch rather than a larger cast. Its depth surprised me, too; You don't expect a Shonen franchise to tackle concepts like identity and mortality, but that's exactly what it did.

It was quite an important game for the franchise as a whole. One aspect of the game pays tribute to Kōji Wada, the singer responsible for performing the Japanese opening theme of the Digimon Adventure anime series, and who sadly passed away in 2016. The game was also released in the franchise's 20th-anniversary year. The developers probably felt the pressure, but they produced something that does the franchise justice, in my opinion.

Cyber Sleuth felt a little empty and grey, but Hacker's Memory definitely has a vibrant personality. Many players complained about the environments feeling samey in the first title, but Hacker's Memory is a big improvement on that front, and the backdrops are just beautiful in some places. They kept the RPG mechanics from the first game (why fix something that isn't broken, right?). It can be a grind, like the first one, but it's also rewarding and deep. This time around, I didn't feel as overwhelmed, perhaps because I had learned how to navigate the system in the first game.

Above all, what drew me back time and time again was the growth of the characters. That's Digimon's strength, too. The franchise isn't afraid to show how people grow up and change, which is refreshing in a world obsessed with preserving characters in amber. It's a story of a group of flawed people trying their best. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Jahanzeb Khan

Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition

Rayman might be the most ported platformer ever made, with Rayman 2 not far behind. You can quote me on that.

I love it when video game releases just drop; Nothing excites me more than 'Available Now'. That's how AAA games should be released: if it's good enough for Beyonce, then it's good enough for Resident Evil, too.

Rayman gets the royal Digital Eclipse treatment for his big 30th. The extensive documentary and developer insights are the real highlights here, but there's also plenty of gameplay value with all the major ports of Rayman; everything from Atari Jaguar to Game Boy Color is represented here. Rayman is a true platforming classic, and while it might be a little on the difficult side by modern standards, it's well worth diving into its beautifully hand-crafted game worlds. This platformer was clearly built to last.

It's just too bad they had to redo the music.

Nathan Kelly

Shin Megami Tensei

The very first game in the storied Shin Megami Tensei series was given a fantastic port onto the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s. This would be a Japanese localization, however, that wouldn’t stop fans from taking this version West. The iOS English-localized version of Shin Megami Tensei has long since been discontinued, but a dedicated patch has preserved that official translation and applied it over the GBA version. This is the version of Shin Megami Tensei that I played.

I got around 10 hours into Shin Megami Tensei before falling off. The beginning sections of the game are incredible to play. The first person dungeon crawling in its minimalist modern aesthetic makes me feel like I’m trapped in the back rooms. Every political and religious zealot trying to convince you of a promised land in an ideal world speaks with succinct and almost eerie prose. The end is coming, and I couldn’t get enough. I was addicted to exploring Tokyo, only having to look up a real map of Tokyo maybe once or twice to find out where I should be going. The story told in the first act is intriguing and shockingly adult for a game of this era and genre.

When the end of the world happens around 7 hours in, the game's difficulty spikes semi-drastically. That's not really a spoiler; in each SMT game, the world's ending is pretty expected. Regular enemies start chunking your health, basic enemies arrive in much larger numbers than you are prepared for, and the encounter rate shoots up drastically. It’s kind of awesome; you really feel like you’ve teleported from the cushioned Tokyo city life into a wasteland apocalypse, and you have to adapt. I played a little of this section, but as with all games that demand your respect in learning its systems, you, as the player, must be having fun with the system to give it that respect. I was simply not interested enough in this very simplified demon-hunting and team-building game to experiment and have fun learning to play.

But I’ve never been super interested in monster-gathering games like Pokémon or other similar styles of JRPG. It was very cool to see the beginnings of Shin Megami Tensei, and I have undoubtedly fallen in love with its moody tone and world-building. In this specific case, I can say that since this game was released, the developers' efforts to bring this series to a wider audience with games like SMT Nocturne and Persona have captured my attention more and made me a fan. Even though I’ll probably stick with the modern iterations of the formula and pass on the older titles, I’m glad that I was able to give the classic game a try.

Rachel Alm

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

I recently grabbed Pokémon Legends: Arceus for a long-haul plane ride in hopes it would ease my flight anxiety, and that's exactly what it did. The last game I bought in the series was Sword, and I didn't really love the new mainlines all that much, but Arceus was a wonderful little glimpse of an open-world, Pokémon Go-esque concept that works well enough, even given the blander environmental design.

I always get excited to see the Pokémon I love, and was happy to be able to skirt along tall grass trying to lob a ball at a Raltz or Ponyta, or tempt them with berries, or battle them as is the tradition. It gives much more flexibility in catching style, and while I didn't think I'd like the change at first, I ended up loving it. Pokémon has always been a sanctuary game series for me, in that whenever I had tough days or high stress, I could always return to the low-impact world of Pokémon.

It is, by design, a kind world, where villains are usually small-time, and people are good. It's a game world I adore existing in. PL: Arceus, while not exactly painting a rosy picture of the human-Pokémon relationship, being that this is the onset of it, still manages to reassure us that all will be well. Sometimes that soothing gameplay is really sorely needed.

Ben Rowan

BallisticNG DLC: Maceno Island & Outer Reaches

I had to eat a little humble pie recently because my BallisticNG article back in December confidently claimed there was no paid DLC, only for the BallisticNG Discord to politely (and very quickly) inform me I was wrong. So, naturally, I did the only sensible thing and grabbed both paid packs, Maceno Island and Outer Reaches, partly to correct the record and partly because this game already has a ridiculous amount of content and I clearly wasn’t done.

Between the two expansions, you get 12 new tracks (all playable forward and reverse), plus new campaigns and liveries, and what’s kind of hilarious is how naturally it all slots into a game that already feels almost bottomless in terms of content. Together, both packs give you more of the same at an even higher level of quality, while also trying, for better or worse, to push this WipEout-shaped formula into uncharted, off-world territory.

Maceno Island is the easy favourite, mostly because it’s bright, warm, and relentlessly pretty, like someone siphoned WipEout’s DNA into a tropical holiday postcard but kept all the edginess and futuristic sheen. My three favourite tracks of the bunch are Maceno Bay, which leans into a neon-coastal vibe with turns that feel playful rather than cruel; Maceno Interchange, which goes for rain-soaked commercial sprawl and fast tunnels where the speed creeps up on you, and Maceno Peak, the showstopper, with huge mountain bends under a sunset glow and wind turbines towering over the track. It’s still pure BallisticNG, just in a setting that makes you want to replay events for the scenery alone, whether you’re running any of the game’s plethora of modes like standard races, eliminators, or time trials.

Outer Reaches is where the developers get more experimental, pushing the game far beyond Earth to Mars, Titan, and the Kuiper Belt with low-gravity and even zero-gravity tracks where you’re literally flying through space and weaving between asteroids. While I respect the ambition and some of those long, flowing bends look incredible, it does drift away from the flavour I’m here for. I play WipEout/BallisticNG for cramped cyberpunk cities, narrow tunnels and chicanes, sharp unforgiving bends, and that insane sense of speed. Outer Reaches often feels bigger, floatier, and sometimes literally untethered, which makes it a DLC worth mentioning for pushing the concept somewhere new, just not towards my preferred kind of future.

Matthew Lawrence

Red Dead Redemption

This month, I dusted off a classic for the Xbox 360 to give it a try using the Xbox Series X backwards compatibility mode. While it has received a handful of facelifts via recent ports to newer consoles, the version I have been playing is the original. I first played RDR around fifteen years ago, shortly after it was first released. I enjoyed it immensely, but hadn’t touched it since, especially as Red Dead Redemption 2 satisfied any cravings I had for a game about cowboys and outlaws.

It has been a blast to replay, but it definitely feels different than it did the first time around. The most obvious difference is that the character animations are certainly showing their age. That might sound obvious since the game is over a decade and a half old, but this isn't something I noticed about its contemporaries, like 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV.

One other aspect that feels different, which can’t be blamed on technological advancements making it feel dated, is the story. On the whole, it is still extremely enjoyable, but it does get rough from a narrative aspect once John Marston sets foot in Mexico. This portion of the game, constituting roughly one-third of the story, feels completely disjointed. The player arrives in Mexico during a fictionalized version of the Mexican Revolution and begins to do missions for both the Mexican government and the revolutionaries simultaneously. Although playing factions off one another isn’t anything new in a Rockstar game, there isn’t necessarily much depth to this from a narrative perspective, and it instead feels shallow and out of place.

These caveats aside, I have still really enjoyed replaying the game. Having played RDR2 since the last time I enjoyed RDR provides some great detail into John Marston's backstory, which was otherwise only hinted at when the game was originally released. I think viewing RDR2 as a prequel makes replaying RDR1 more satisfying, as it feels like a complete story rather than the continuation of something unseen.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

On a completely different note, this month I’ve also been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on the Xbox Series X. I recently began a new job located near an airport, allowing me to watch low-flying planes come in and out of the city. It has reignited an interest in aviation I’ve had since playing Microsoft Flight Simulator X (2006) as a kid.

My favorite part of MFS24 so far is the career mode. While mods are available for previous MFS games offering the ability to be a career pilot, I was excited to see this as a built in feature. After playing around with it a little, I have found it to be enjoyable, but not without its problems.

One of the most immediate things players will encounter in career mode is Microsoft’s reliance on AI voice acting for passengers and instructors. This isn’t necessarily new to the Flight Sim series, as air traffic controllers (ATCs) in previous titles have also been voiced by text-to-speech AI, but using AI voices outside of the context of ATCs feels jarring. It’s one thing to have AI provide no-nonsense take-off and landing instructions, but it’s a completely different thing to have them try to express wonder and awe. The AI voices passengers and instructors use in MFS24 lack any inflection you would expect from an actual person and instead sound more akin to Microsoft Sam. As such, it actually feels really immersion-breaking in a game which is otherwise extremely immersive. It also doesn’t help that the lines the AI passengers speak are really poorly written, full of grammatical errors, and not how people talk.

One other quibble I have is that the rating the player receives after each career mission seems largely arbitrary, which is unfortunate because it makes it hard to tell if what you are doing is right or wrong. The place where I have noticed this the most is when it comes to landing. I have made some extremely rough landings and the game will still give me a positive rating. Alternatively, I’ve made some very smooth landings and received poor ratings as a result. If these ratings were just for show, it would be fine, but you unlock different missions depending on how well you can land your plane, so the inconsistency is frustrating.

These gripes aside, the game is extremely enjoyable and looks stunning. The integration of constantly updating satellite imagery, a carryover from MFS20, makes the game incredibly immersive. The addition of changing seasons is also very immersive and makes the simulation feel alive. Overall, I look forward to continuing to progress in my virtual pilot career and exploring the variety of different missions available.

Bryan Finck

Since I last participated in an issue of Now Playing, I've enjoyed a lot more gaming than I can usually cram into a few months. I started by reviewing two games for the fine folks over at Seasoned Gaming. The first was Cairn, a fantastic mountain-climbing survival game that provided some of the tensest experiences I've ever had with a game. After that, I took on Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!, a really fun boomer shooter based on the beloved '90s sci-fi movie.

For my personal gaming, I finally bought Resident Evil 4 Remake (after playing RE2 and RE3 Remakes), and I'm happy to say it continues Capcom's hot streak on the comeback from near-irrelevance. The original RE4 was one of my favorite games ever, and this version looks even more amazing while thankfully eliminating the nefarious tank controls. Every gamer should experience these revamped classics; they're just that good.

RE4 left me in a mood for more horror, so I picked up another remake of a classic, Dead Space. I somehow missed the series completely during its PS3 origins, but I'd heard enough great things to want to give it a go, and I'm so glad I did. The action is intense, the blood-soaked USG Ishimura creates an incredible atmosphere, and there are just enough jump scares to keep you on your toes. This is another highly recommended experience.

Since I wrapped up Dead Space, I've been working through a lot of backlog stuff, including the shmup Sine Mora, CRPG classic Divinity: Original Sin 2, Borderlands 3, and I am Setsuna.

I've settled into Borderlands 3 when I'm on PC, and it's more of the enjoyable Borderlands formula. If the classic FPS from Gearbox does it for you, this may be the peak of that franchise's prowess. If you've not been a fan of the series in the past, however, you won't find anything different here to change your mind.

When I can get over to my PlayStation, I've decided to see I am Setsuna through to the end. I'm not too far in, but I find it to be a really chill RPG with a good cast of characters. It's a traditional experience, with Active Time Battle and menu-based attacks, but it's done really well and makes me regret the closure/absorption of developer Tokyo RPG Factory by Square Enix.

It's been delightful to enjoy such a wide range of games recently; I can only hope to keep up the pace the rest of the year.

A big thank you to our writers for dropping by and to all our loyal fans for being here to check it out! Be sure to tell us what you're playing in the comments, and check back next month for more of what our team is getting into.