The Weekly: Sept. 18th, 2025

This morning I watched Japan Railway Journal and thought about the impermanence of our social order.

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VF5 REVO World Stage beta

Not really worthy of anything full-length even for a maniac like me, but there was a beta program for the latest Virtua Fighter 5 patch, World Stage. This is just the console release for PS5 and Switch 2 with cross-play between those and the existing PC version.

World Stage is said to have some kind of single player adventure mode where you fight the CPU over and over again, but there’s nothing of that in the beta. It’s just an online play test, a beta in the true sense. If you’re on this beta you’re either on console, or you’re deliberately forgoing the perfectly good online play in the nice PC version of REVO that you already have so that you can play against people on console. Remember that the actual purpose of a beta is to help the devs fix stuff up; we were urged to go report our issues in the game’s Discord.

It worked about the same as the PC version I’m accustomed to playing, it just has the same basic issue that was never fixed: Unlike other fighting games with rollback, things aren’t correctly configured to “just work” straight out of the box on the PC version. The game fixes your graphics settings according to your graphics card, and the settings it chooses are based on offline play, not online. On my setup, I have to turn off most post-processing effects to keep a steady 60FPS online. Most players will probably have to do this, and when they don’t, the netplay goes to hell. It is frustrating that the staff hasn’t fixed this, as it obviously turns away first-timers who think the netcode is bad.

I’m ultimately looking forward to whatever influx of new players console cross-play gets us, but I should note that the overwhelming majority of fighting game players I’ve fought in the last five years or so are on PC, and I’m basically in PC migration since I got a system good enough to play most modern games. I’ve even re-bought Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising on PC! Anyway, I’m most looking forward to buying VF5 on Switch 2 so I can tinker in practice mode on the subway.

I finished my Fist of the North Star set

Despite its status as a genre classic and minor internet meme, Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken) has never had a proper full manga release over the years. It’s a pretty long series and most of the parts that people know, like the 80s anime movie or the various side stories that have been released over the years, are heavily abridged or otherwise context-less chunks of the material.

The original story is weirdly hard to come by, especially past the very beginning (which has been retold in any number of tribute manga, remake anime, or videogames). Of course Toei’s 80s TV series is an all-timer anime adaptation with an outstanding cast, but the dramatic art and storytelling of the source material remain untouchable. And up until this point only the first few volumes were ever properly released, and that was 20 years ago. I’ve read all of the manga solely because I put up with some pretty rough scans back in the day.

Anyway, Viz has a beautiful high-quality release out in hardcover sparing no expense: high quality paper and color chapter splash pages; a few pages have red highlights on the black-and-white art. To call it merely an upgrade on the old scans would be insulting; this is the only way you should read the manga in English. I have finally picked up the Viz release’s first ten hardcovers, up to “the end”; that is, the point where everybody agrees the comic really should have packed it up and ended.

Thing is, Fist of the North Star goes on for eight more hardcovers. And nobody talks about them. Licensed material like video games and even pachinko use only the story and characters of the first half of the manga, with kind of a gentleman’s agreement to act as though the story ended after the final battle with Raoh and to disregard the rest. Is it that bad? Well… yeah, honestly. It’s a mediocrity following up a masterpiece, which can only point backwards at its peak and remind the reader how good that was.

In the words of famous anime wife Marge Simpson: It’s true, but they shouldn’t say it.

Retro game I’m into lately: Zero Team

I bought this a long time ago, but lately my subway rides and other commutes belong to Zero Team, an obscure early-90s beat-em-up by Seibu Kaihatsu, the shooter developer known for the Raiden series.

The arcade beat-em-up is thought of as a brainless genre, and certainly if you pump in 20 quarters it is. But much like their contemporaries at Ancient (Streets of Rage), the developers at Seibu were thinking about Zero Team from an expert’s point of view, as a game you would take on as skillfully as you’d take on one of their shooters.

Gleefully themed after the gaudiest and schlockiest late-80s/early-90s American action movies you can think of, Zero Team has up to four colorful ninjas chasing some kind of Dracula Satan through an American waterfront city as he kidnaps random pretty ladies.

Right away the game’s minute attention to detail becomes apparent, as all four characters have slightly different move sets and walk speeds that affect the way they play the game. I right away enjoyed the flashy, high-difficulty female character Spin, but her butt is very prominently out and I’m on the subway so I use the more practical– and practically dressed– Speed.

The characters are much smaller than in typical games in this genre (compare to Final Fight) and that gives them a lot more room to move around the screen. The meta gameplay of the beat-em-up is that you’re trying to keep enemies from surrounding you by taking them out as fast as you can: if you’re too slow they surround you and you die.

Zero Team plays directly to this meta, with all of the ninjas’ moves doing a different type of crowd control. There’s a combo that throws enemies into crowds, there’s a combo that allows you to punch an enemy behind you while beating up on an enemy in front of you, and there’s even a combo you must only ever use in 1-to-1 combat else you get ganged up on and killed. The classic everybody-off-me attack exists, of course, but get caught twice by even the weakest enemy and you’re dead. It’s compelling stuff. I’ve been working on my one-credit clear of this game, and I think I can handle the first three stages pretty well, now.

Zero Team also oozes physical detail: for example, if you throw an empty barrel at just the right trajectory, an enemy can get trapped inside the barrel rather than merely clobbered by it. Hit the barrel and the enemy is helplessly flipped over: you can now pick up the barrel— with the mook trapped inside— and throw it at another enemy. That’s video games.

Zero Team is in the Arcade Archives series on Switch, PS4 and Xbox, but not PC. I’m told there’s some way to play arcade games on PC, though…??

The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more, I'd love to see you become a regular or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts. Thanks for reading the pitch and hope to see you subscribe!