(AfroGamers.com) I’ve been revisiting the Infamous games lately. I finished the first two games some years ago and we’re going to get into the three main games but let’s talk about the game world itself and the OG conduit.

The term “conduit” is used for any being that can use super powers. Initially, you had Cole and a few others in Empire City who utilized these powers but with the Department of Unified Protection (think S.H.I.E.L.D in Marvel Comics) being formed and getting their hands on important information, their high-powered death squad and director can wield powers as well.

A Lost PlayStation Hero: Cole MacGrath

Listen, I enjoyed electricity conduit Cole’s adventures in Empire City (NYC) and New Marais (NOLA). Being able to determine if he would be a hero, villain or anti-hero of sorts was a fun mechanic that directed impacted your gameplay.

I’d say it influenced the gameplay more than the story itself. Depending on your actions, the story would head in whichever direction but the combat options and benefits open to you by either saving hurt pedestrians and risking your own well-being or snuffing out ops and leaving civilians to their fate was very interesting.

It also helped that the people of these open-world titles varied between support for Cole MacGrath or fear and resentment of this perceived menace. Mind you, this was despite what heroic or nefarious actions you took. Because Cole was such a stock late 2000s-early 2010s action game (gruff, tough, athletic, possibly got parkour skills), the world itself and the people could have the player’s opinions towards these grateful or ungrateful citizens and act out of them.

The World of Infamous

Honestly, it was like playing through a living world versions of the Spider-Man games post-PlayStation. In these Spidey games, the city is rocking with the Web-Slingers and it’s mostly their ops and J.Jonah Jameson who have some animosity towards them.

In Infamous, it was more like you had this new super-powered person doing stuff around your city during a crisis and the news is telling everyone they’re a menace. The city forms individual takes on this new force and it’s routed in respect and hope or fear and desperation.

All of this is on top of gangs taking advantage of the crisis and the military’s super special task force shutting down the city and shutting it off from the rest of the world. For the PlayStation 3 era, this was some primo world-building! Sucker Punch Productions borrowed the morality system from games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout 3, mixed it in with the world around the protagonist as well as the powers system and it worked.

When the Cole’s adventures ended and the PS4 dropped, the story followed Delsin Rowe (who can absorb the powers of conduits) and later Abigail Walker (who utilizes neon). Their story takes place in Seattle. I always found it odd that Seattle was good as a setting but New York and New Orleans in name? Better avoid that piece of business. The aforementioned D.U.P organization makes it’s appearance as the primary antagonist for most of the Infamous: Second Son game on PlayStation 4.

The Best Part of Infamous’ Gameplay

Infamous was very much like other open-world action games from the PS3 era. You got a big city to run around in, plenty of powers (or weapons if you’re playing a Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause), and plenty of enemies to fight. Just go nuts and have a blast, the story isn’t timed or relies on an in-game clock and schedule. It’s not going anywhere.

Because of the decent amount of side quests, you always had something to do if you didn’t want to invest time in the main story’s nonsense. What really helps in getting players to indulge in the side missions is turf.

I love a game with territory conflict. Always have since GTA San Andreas and GTA Vice City Stories introduced and built on that mechanic. The Infamous games have maps featuring a few major parts of a city under control of the ops. They’re enemies flood the areas of these territories and to gain control, you have to do side missions or take out checkpoints and holding centers.

Once the territory objective is completed, you’ll notice the enemy presence in that area goes away and it’s safe to navigate. Very simple in execution and I spent most of my time in the Infamous games clearing out territory. Of course, I wish more came from doing so but there’s no currency or equipment to get in the games and no one tries to reclaim turf.

Maybe that will be explored more if Sucker Punch ever returns to the world of Infamous. However, with their Ghosts games being so successful that might be unlikely.

Were you a fan of the Infamous games? If so, share your memories of playing the game or if you think we’ll see another title in the series. Where will it be based?

Let us know in the comments!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

(AfroGamers.com) So, you got your mobile phone and you’ve got your usual games that require some skill and investment. You know: Call of Duty: Mobile, The Division. If you’re like me, you’ve got Pokemon TCG or Might and Magic. Sometimes, you got to have something that eats up less time. Something that can be played while watching a show. A low-effort or no-effort game that you will return to.

Here are three such games that won’t even eat up much storage.

Papa’s Burgeria (Flipline Studios)

The Papa’s games are mobile OGs. Flipline Studios figured out the formula for fun, repetitive lite-simulations games much like our second entry. The studio makes the kind of game that you will keep coming back to manage your shop and might even have you sinking time than necessary into it.

Papa’s Burgeria is the first of the Papa’s games I picked up and is a great introduction to the gameplay you can expect in other titles such as Papa’s Pizzeria and Papa’s Wingeria. While there is some business management in here as far as buying equipment and decorations for your shop to improve productivity, the game is a time management sim first.

In the Burgeria, you will serve up burgers to customers who give you their orders. You’re expected to cook the burgers as requested, put the orders together, and get it out to them in a timely matter. Faster speed equals a good performance and means both return business and more profit for you.

I recommend this one for time management veterans who want a fun challenge you can knock out during commercial breaks or a dragging show or game. Also, the Papa’s games tend to run on the inexpensive side being $1.99 for all games except for Papa’s Freezeria which is $0.99.

Game Dev Story (Kairosoft)

Kairosoft is a studio that also figured out the formula for mobile simulation games and actually influenced a lot of game studio simulators, the best known one being Game Dev Tycoon from Greenheart Games (also on mobile and Steam).

The studio is essentially “The House That Game Dev Story built” with most titles being some variation of GDS. If it’s a business game, it takes after Game Dev Story but it’s a village sim it’s more like Dungeon Village. For the studio’s sports sims, most are in a vein similar to Pocket League Story. But most games can be traced back to Game Dev Story, especially with featured characters/employees in each game.

In a nutshell, GDS has the player running a small gaming studio and building it up over a 20-year period. In that time, players will see new consoles, conventions, and award shows. If they’re sturdy with developing games and hiring the right talent, they could move millions of copies, get games in the Hall of Fame (making them sequel-worthy), or win one of the four Year End Awards.

I’d say Game Dev Story hovers between low effort and no effort as you do have to manage your employees via hiring, firing, training, and promoting but once they’re in place, you’re really just assigning devs to one of three stages of the development process and maybe naming the game if you think it’s worth it.

Of the games on this list, the Kairosoft games are the more pricier ones and that wasn’t always the case! They run anywhere between $4.99 for the older ones and $7.99 for the more recent titles with a Doraemon branded title running for $14.99. Let’s not even get into the prices of the game on PSN.

Regardless, the games have the same effect as Papa’s where you’ll return to manage your studio and try to develop better games each time. If you like this one, I recommend the Manga Works which is a little different in it being a manga artist career sim.

Zen Basketball GM (ZenGM)

If you dig basketball but don’t want something that will dine on your battery and storage or hit you with a promotion deal upon opening, Zen Basketball Manager is what you’ll want to get.

It’s a text-based basketball management simulation but it strips down the deeper management aspects such as lengthy contract negotiations and managing the stadium and coaching staff. Instead, you mainly handle the players you put on the team.

By “handle”, I mean you sign your rookies, you renew or cut players, and just allocate how much money goes into the facilities. At any point, you can move to another team and manage it. If you want absolute control over the league (or an easier playing experience) smash GOD MODE.

With that you can edit players, contracts, league rules, tournament and season length and contract caps. It’s with GOD MODE that the game’s involvement ramps up a bit but you’re not having to play the game or watch ads.

Zen Basketball Manager is free-to-play and has no ads. ZenGM has baseball, football, and hockey management games that feature a banner ad. I highly recommend their games for the sports fan who multitasks or who just loves sports.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

(AfroGamers.com) Somewhere along the way folks started talking like Vegeta drew up the whole blueprint himself. Arms crossed, that smirk, the grudging little nod when the hero finally pulls ahead. Ask around who built the proud opponent and the Saiyan prince gets the credit like he filed the paperwork. Respectfully, nah.

Truth is, the idea was already breathing years before he ever crashed onto Earth talking reckless. It just wore different clothes, because opposition back then wasn’t a checklist you ran down. It was a worldview.

Start with the Red Comet.

Char Aznable rolled through Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979, gliding behind a mask, moving three times faster than any pilot had a right to. People hold onto the crimson machine and the flash. What slips their memory is the why. Aznable wasn’t chasing Amuro to prove who logged more hours in the gym. Instead he was hunting the family he blamed for his father’s death, burying his real name, working both ends of a war so a revenge plot could wear a revolution’s face. His beef ran on grief and politics. Class, bloodline, betrayal, all of it braided into one aristocratic figure who’d smile warm while sketching your funeral.

That’s the texture the modern mold sanded away. His quarrel with the hero meant something off the battlefield. Pull the man out of the cockpit and he stays dangerous, still scheming, still carrying a plan bigger than any single duel. Later shows chased that ghost so hard that fans coined a name for the copycats, the Char clone, which tells you plenty. You don’t spawn a whole archetype by beeping a scouter. You do it by mattering.

Go back further still. 1974. Space Battleship Yamato flings a patched together crew across the galaxy, and parked out there waiting is Dessler, lord of Gamilas, blue as the cold vacuum around him. Opens as the enemy, no asterisk. No secret soft heart, no misunderstood childhood montage. Dude tries to wipe humanity off the map.

Then something strange creeps in. As the campaign drags on, he starts seeing that ragged crew as worthy. Not as future allies. As people who earned his regard by how they stood when everything burned. When the story finally lets him shift, it isn’t because he dropped a tournament bracket and had to choke down the loss. A warrior simply recognized another one across enemy lines. Down the line, that saga even brought him back on the side of the ship he once hunted, and it never felt cheap, because the honor was baked in from the jump. That ancient code, where you can want a man gone on Monday and salute him come Friday. Try folding that into a training montage. It splits at the seams.

Now flip to the one who needed no superpowers to make a rivalry burn. Kaede Rukawa, Slam Dunk, drifting onto the hardwood in the early 90s with his eyes low like the entire world bored him stiff. Basketball was his only religion. Sakuragi couldn’t stand the sight of him, partly over a girl, mostly over ego, and that friction set the whole squad ablaze.

Here’s the sneaky brilliant part. Both of them pulled on the same jersey. One team. Their competition wasn’t champion against threat, it was two starving teenagers clawing for the same oxygen, shoving each other toward heights neither could touch solo. No strength readings. No planet on the chopping block. Just sweat, wounded pride, and a jump shot dropping clean. Tension bubbled up from inside the huddle, which somehow ran hotter than any galaxy ending showdown ever managed. A sports story pulled that off with nothing but a scoreboard and two hard heads, which is arguably braver than anything with a spaceship.

So what actually shifted?

Shonen’s boom took a rich, tangled notion and ironed it flat into a pattern you could set a watch by. Enemy becomes friend. Friend becomes measuring stick. Everybody levels up on schedule, the arrogant one stews, then bends his knee just enough to link arms for the final boss. Satisfying stuff, I won’t front. That Saiyan pulled it off better than nearly anybody, and his peak moments still land like a freight train, the sacrifice against Majin Buu, a heel who took a hundred episodes to soften. Day ones remember exactly where they sat.

Doing a thing beautifully and inventing it are two separate acts. He polished a narrow cut of the concept and never fathered it.

What quietly died when the pattern hardened was range. Aznable’s version was political. Dessler’s was moral. Rukawa’s was raw competitive fire between two boys who couldn’t share a room yet needed each other badly. Not one of them leaned on a power ranking to carry weight. Their arrogance sprang from somewhere real, meant something, cost something back.

This whole medium had already wrestled the heavy questions to the ground. Why do prideful men throw down? What price does respect carry? Can you salute somebody while trying to erase them? Those stories trusted the audience to sit in the discomfort without a number crawling across the screen to translate it.

The prince stays a classic, no argument. Love him loud, no shame in it. Just quit slipping him the deed to a house other builders raised brick by patient brick, decades before his hair ever flashed gold. Proud challengers were walking around fully alive and gloriously complicated long before that smirk calcified into a genre rule. We simply quit looking back far enough to catch it.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Two cartoons sat at the middle of what Nickelodeon meant to a whole generation, and neither worked the same corner of the imagination. One lived beneath the ocean and treated a greasy fry cook gig like grand opera. The other set up shop in the suburbs and asked a simple, dangerous question: what happens when a neglected boy gets handed wish-granting magic? Line them up and the personality of the channel comes into focus, split clean down the middle.

A marine biologist named Stephen Hillenburg cooked up SpongeBob, and it hit screens in 1999. Bikini Bottom just flat out refuses to follow normal rules, and nobody living there seems the least bit bothered. Fire burns fine underwater. Sandy the squirrel walks around in a diving suit and everybody treats it like ordinary Tuesday business. None of it makes a lick of sense, which was the whole idea. Hillenburg spent real years studying the ocean before he ever picked up a pencil, and you can tell. His made up sea somehow feels lived in.

What sneaks up on you is how much of the comedy grows out of work. Half the show plays out at a fast food counter. You’ve got a boss so cheap he’d charge you rent on the air near his register. His star employee, though, treats flipping burgers like a calling, which drives their coworker Squidward slowly out of his mind. Meanwhile the competition is a guy the size of a thumbtack, dead certain that one stolen recipe stands between him and the life he deserves. Take away the water and it’s just people worn down by work, chasing things, putting up with folks they never chose. Adults heard those jokes one way. The young ones heard them another. That second layer is a big chunk of why the thing lasted.

Now flip the channel in your memory to Dimmsdale.

The Fairly OddParents came from Butch Hartman, and there’s a wrinkle worth noting. The kid actually reached the screen before SpongeBob did. His scrappy shorts turned up on Oh Yeah! Cartoons back in 1998, a full year ahead of Bikini Bottom opening its doors, though he wouldn’t claim his own half hour slot until 2001. Timmy Turner is ten, ignored by parents who love him in a distracted sort of way, and terrorized by a red haired babysitter named Vicky who rules his house like a warden. Into that gap float Cosmo and Wanda, magical guardians who grant almost any desire the boy can dream up.

Where the sponge’s saga mines the grind of adulthood, Turner’s tale lives entirely inside the fantasy of being small and powerless. Every episode is a pressure valve for childhood frustration. Bad grade? Wish it away. Bully getting loud? Poof, problem solved. The genius sits in the catch. There’s a rulebook, Da Rules, and it exists purely to make sure each wish curdles into a mess. You cannot manufacture true love. Fairies cannot directly maim or kill people. And whatever the kid conjures always spirals into a lesson he’d rather skip.

That structure tells you everything about the split. One cartoon asks you to laugh at the absurd machinery of the working world. The other hands you the keys to omnipotence, then quietly teaches you why unchecked wanting rarely ends clean. Both are moral in their bones. They just preach from opposite pulpits.

Look at the texture, too. Hillenburg’s ocean is soft and painterly, a little grimy, alive with strange organic shapes and a jazz and sea shanty soundtrack that feels older than the audience. Hartman’s Dimmsdale is sharp, flat, loud, built from bold outlines and primary colors, humming with the frantic buzz of a grade schooler bouncing off the walls after too much cereal. You could mute either and still know which universe you’d wandered into inside three seconds.

Even the pacing splits them. Bikini Bottom often slows down and marinates in a single stupid moment until it becomes hypnotic. That famous shot of the sponge scrubbing while the narrator drones about time passing? Pure patience as a punchline. Dimmsdale, by contrast, sprints. Setup, wish, catastrophe, reset, all before you can catch your breath. Hartman built a machine for velocity. The marine biologist built a mood.

This is where I tip my hat to what the network was pulling off back then. Early 2000s Nick wasn’t chasing a single flavor of funny. It was betting on range. You could roll out of bed and watch a fry cook find spiritual meaning in a spatula, then turn around an hour later and see a lonely ten year old accidentally destroy his town with a careless thought. Neither approach apologized for itself or tried to mimic its rival.

That confidence mattered. A lot of channels pick a lane and flog it into the ground. Nick, in its prime, understood that being young contains multitudes. Little ones are surreal philosophers, then turn into raw balls of want a breath later. The biologist spoke to the first mode. The animator spoke to the second. Put them side by side and you’ve pretty much got the whole feeling of being a kid, back when the adults ran everything and mostly missed whatever was rattling around in your head.

Both franchises got milked long past the point they should have quit, and the reason is plain enough. When something taps a real vein, executives keep drilling long after the well goes dry. Purists argue the fry cook lost his soul after his creator first stepped back, and plenty of folks felt Turner’s adventures overstayed their welcome too. Fair criticism, all of it. Still, go back to those first few seasons of either one and they hold up. Two cartoons chasing totally opposite notions of what counts as funny, parked under the same roof, both landing. That is not nothing.

I catch myself missing that whenever I sit through a lot of what’s out now. Too much of it feels ground down into mush, scared to pick a lane or say anything with a pulse behind it. Back then two very different minds were handed room to be strange in their own directions, and Nick had the nerve to platform both without forcing them to rhyme. The undersea tale dug into adult drudgery through the eyes of a creature too pure to notice how bleak his gig really is. Timmy’s world, meanwhile, mapped the fantasy of childhood escape and gently reminded us that getting everything you want is its own kind of trap.

Neither is better. That was never the question worth asking. They’re two answers to the same riddle of how you make a kid laugh while slipping something real under the door. Put a fry cook at one end and a starry eyed boy at the far side, and you’ve drawn the full width of what that beloved network could be when it trusted its own imagination.

And honestly? Both of them still hit. Throw on an old episode of either and watch how fast the years fall off your shoulders. That’s the mark of the good stuff. It waits for you, patient as the tide, ready to pull you right back under.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Look closely at the fall 2026 anime calendar and a curious pattern stands out. Some of the most anticipated releases arriving this October are not fresh creations at all. They come from shelves that sat untouched for decades, revived long after most of the industry had written them off. PSYREN, the psychic thriller that ran in Jump and never received an anime during its original run, arrives beside From Far Away, a fantasy that never once reached a screen, and Magic Knight Rayearth, which had its moment in the 90s and now lines up for another look. Their arrival in the same window feels like more than coincidence. Studios are placing a calculated bet, and it deserves a closer read.

Follow each one back to its origin and the play makes sense.

Start with PSYREN, which still stings anyone who read Shonen Jump in the late 2000s. Toshiaki Iwashiro built a devoted following around time travel, a bombed out future, psychic battles, and characters readers stayed attached to long after the serialization ended. The manga wrapped in 2010 after 16 volumes, yet an anime never followed. For roughly 15 years, fans kept asking for one. Satelight holds the project now, Katsumi Ono directs, and Iwashiro has spoken about younger editors and anime staff telling him they had loved PSYREN as teenagers before eventually rising into positions where they could help make the adaptation happen. He also expressed happiness that he could finally tell his parents and family that PSYREN was becoming an anime, an announcement he had never been able to make during the manga’s original run. Long dormant affection eventually built itself a payroll. Fan pressure mattered too. PSYREN was nominated multiple times in AnimeJapan’s Manga We Want to See Animated voting project before finally getting its shot.

One of the more interesting pieces of the revival is how much of the original atmosphere still appears intact. Official material continues to lean heavily on the public telephone and red telephone card imagery that helped give PSYREN its strange identity in the first place. Those objects already felt slightly mysterious when the manga began. In 2026, with younger viewers who may barely remember public phone booths at all, they carry an even stronger urban legend quality. Sometimes age does not weaken a premise. It accidentally makes it stranger.

From Far Away represents a different kind of oversight. Kyoko Hikawa was writing this kind of otherworld fantasy decades before the modern isekai boom turned the concept into one of anime’s busiest lanes. Noriko, her lead, falls into a sword and sorcery world and takes up with Izark, a wandering swordsman hiding a darkness that could end everything. What makes it work is not simply the plot. It is what happens in the gaps. The two of them cannot speak the same language at first, so much of their relationship runs on glances, missed cues, mistranslations, and slowly earned trust. It serialized in LaLa from 1991 to 2002, reached 14 volumes, and somehow never touched a screen. Studio DEEN finally grabbed it for the manga’s 35th anniversary, with Hikawa supervising the adaptation and participating in the script process. Material this delicate can fall apart in careless hands, so her involvement is the reassuring part. The irony is hard to miss. That blueprint sat there untouched while the genre ballooned into a seasonal machine, and almost nobody reached back for the source.

Magic Knight Rayearth stands as the veteran of the group. CLAMP introduced Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, swept from Tokyo Tower into Cephiro, in the mid 90s, and the first television version already earned a 49 episode run followed later by a three part OVA. So why revisit it? Because the property is proven, the affection endures, and CLAMP loyalists have wanted that door reopened for a generation. Casting Ayane Sakura, Rumi Okubo, and Rie Takahashi as the trio, with E&H production handling the animation, signals that the revival is being treated as a high profile project rather than a quiet nostalgia exercise.

The common thread across all three runs deeper than coincidence.

Some studios appear increasingly interested in a different kind of gamble. For years the seasonal pipeline has leaned heavily on light novels, web novels, manga still deep in serialization, and other properties whose endings remain years away. The pattern is familiar. A production house options a popular work, animates 12 episodes, stops on a cliffhanger because the source continues well beyond the adaptation, and the whole effort may fade once the next seasonal favorite appears. Plenty of those shows succeed, and some become enormous franchises, but viewers have also become familiar with adaptations that feel less like complete stories and more like extended advertisements for unfinished source material.

A completed run removes problems money alone cannot solve. The ending already exists. The pacing has been tested across years of publication. The devoted audience knows every beat and can show up on day one ready to talk about what changed, what stayed, and whether the adaptation understood the thing they loved in the first place. PSYREN is almost a perfect example. Readers spent years asking why it had never been animated. That audience does not have to be invented from scratch. The name already means something to them. Streaming platforms and production committees understand the value of recognition, and an established property arrives with history already attached.

The scheduling logic is easy to understand. Anime no longer needs every flagship title to come directly from whatever manga is hottest that month. A back catalog property with a strong reputation can occupy the same conversation while carrying a different kind of risk. Nobody has to guess whether the source eventually falls apart because the whole story is sitting there. Nobody has to wonder whether the author can finish it. The question becomes simpler. Can a modern production team make old material feel alive again?

Which raises the question this entire moment invites. What if the next major surge does not originate in a light novel? What if it emerges from the discount bin instead?

Consider how many finished classics sit quietly in the archives. Beloved series were passed over because the timing was wrong, the genre had fallen out of fashion, another title was selling better, or the industry simply never got around to them. Others received adaptations so long ago that an entire generation of anime viewers has never encountered them outside clips, old DVDs, scans, and recommendations from older fans. Each one is a complete narrative with a built in audience waiting to see whether somebody finally treats it right. A production house that learns to work that neglected shelf is not simply chasing hype. It is working with material whose strengths and weaknesses are already known.

None of this guarantees success. A cherished favorite can still be mishandled by a rushed schedule or a team that fails to respect what made the source special. Faithful is not the same as lazy. A scene that worked on the printed page still has to work in motion. Dialogue still needs rhythm. Action still needs weight. Character chemistry still has to survive the jump from panels to voices and movement. Still, a finished story hands the crew the full shape of the material before a single frame is drawn, an advantage no half completed serial can offer.

None of this argues against fresh voices. New talent keeps the medium alive, and some of the finest anime in any era has arrived from creators audiences barely knew beforehand. Yet the herd instinct in this business is powerful, and if several of these revivals perform well, expect more producers to start studying shelves they once ignored. The next gold rush may not push toward the future at all. It may reach backward, into the very titles audiences once loved and everyone else forgot.

Watch this trio closely in October. If they connect with audiences, the shelf nobody was studying could suddenly become some of the most valuable ground in the medium.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Going on twenty some years now, a certain kind of WoW veteran has carried the same quiet ache. You remember standing at the edge of Azshara, staring at a sealed gate nobody could open, inventing little stories about whatever waited behind it. Or the crumbled ruins between Mulgore and Desolace you flew over a hundred times, thinking, one day they’ll let me in there. That day kept not coming. Cut to BlizzCon this month, where the reveal trailer opens on the very dwarf hunter and bear that fronted the original cinematic. Something in my chest woke up that I’d long filed under dead.

It’s got a name at last: World of Warcraft: Forever. Launch is set for November 4, with beta opening September 17 for eligible upgrade buyers. Once Forever goes live, the WoW subscription you already pay covers the game itself. The optional packs unlock extras, including access to the new Skyborne race and other cosmetics. Simple.

Here is what makes me lean in, though. This is not another Classic rerun. The studio was blunt about that on the panel. It is not a mode, not a season, not a loop you grind for a summer and abandon. They are calling it a third permanent pillar, sitting beside Retail and the 2019 relaunch, with its own long tail of patches promised for years out. Same 2004 bones. Brand new muscle grafted onto them.

And that muscle is going exactly where longtime folks always wished it would.

Take the Riverglades. That stretch of eastern coast wedged among Redridge, the Burning Steppes, the Badlands, and the Swamp of Sorrows has sat mostly empty since day one. Now it is the biggest leveling region in the drop, packing over 150 quests, a goblin port, plus orcs and ogres and gnolls all scrapping across a frontier where help never came generations back. Lead designer Tim Jones described the pitch plainly. This is not a tale about saving the planet. It is a tale about living on it. Read that twice, because it quietly explains the whole project.

Then Shen’dralas, those ruins you soared past a thousand times with no reason to land. Finally a real destination, roped into Eldre’Thalas lore and the old centaur tribes, handing you actual cause to run Maraudon again. Mount Hyjal opens up too, set in the wake of Archimonde getting dropped, so you walk the forests as they knit themselves back together. Remember that Azshara gate? Behind it now sits Blackmaw Hold, a furbolg city clawing against corruption. The devs literally pointed at every spot we used to wonder about and said fine, come see.

That instinct is the smart move, and it cuts against how this franchise normally treats its own history. For most of its life, each expansion meant bulldozing. Cataclysm rewrote the map. Outland made your hard won gear obsolete in a single afternoon of questing. The treadmill demanded you leave everything behind and climb all over again. Meanwhile the disposable Classic seasons gave you the old map back yet froze it solid, a museum you could tour but never touch.

Growing the original instead splits the difference beautifully. Memory, for gamers who logged untold hours between 2004 and 2011, was never only the ground you walked. It was the ground you imagined. Every locked door and unreachable island became a little pocket of personal headcanon. By filling those pockets rather than paving over them, the studio is betting that honoring what you dreamed up beats the shine of yet another continent you have never heard of. Good bet.

They tested the theory already. Season of Discovery back in 2023 was the trial balloon, an experiment gauging how far you could bend vanilla before it stopped feeling like itself. The team says they located that ceiling. They also learned the community had no appetite for a temporary playground. Folks wanted a house they could actually live in. Hence the name.

The guardrails matter as much as the terrain. Flying mounts? Gone. Level scaling? Not happening here. The old continents stay wide and a touch dangerous, which means a mountain range is still a genuine obstacle and a long road is still a journey worth taking. Jones framed the governing rule as the world being the main character, with leveling treated as the point rather than a chore you rush past to reach endgame. There is even a camping feature now. You plant a site out in the wild, other travelers wander up, everybody chips in trade skills for a shared buff, and, God willing, two strangers actually swap a word or two. A mechanic built entirely to fight the loneliness modern MMOs quietly slid into.

The dungeon lineup eats well too, with nine new instances available as Forever gets underway. The raid game follows on December 9, led by the 10 player Barrow Deeps and the 20 player Hyjal Summit. More encounters unlock as the roadmap rolls forward. Hardcore arrives after that. A revamped legend of a raid waits farther out on the schedule. Asked what else might land eventually, the crew shrugged and said nothing is off the table, not even a fresh class. That is a team building for the long haul, not throwing a one weekend carnival.

Now let me keep it a hundred, because a good blerd never sells you pure hype. Under the shiny coat, this remains the 2004 engine philosophy at heart. Tab targeting lives on. Some veterans, including a few sharp voices in the press, wanted a full ground up remake with modern combat, maybe even a console release to court a whole audience. That dream did not show. What arrived is closer to Classic Plus in a very nice outfit, prettier lighting, volumetric fog, real shadows creeping over the hills at dusk, a toggle to flip the old character models back on if the fancy ones bug you. Gorgeous, yes. Reinvention, no.

So the honest question sitting under all of it: is deepening a map two decades old enough to hold people who know every pixel of the place by heart? My gut says yes, and here is the reasoning. The itch these players keep describing was never really for something unrecognizable. It was for more of the specific ground they loved, tended with care, without their history getting wiped in the process. That is precisely what got announced.

November 4. The sub you probably already pay covers the whole thing. And somewhere out past that gate in Azshara, a furbolg city has been waiting twenty two years for you to finally walk through.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) There was a stretch in the 1990s when the medium operated with almost no adult supervision, and the results were glorious. Home video was booming, late night broadcast slots were cracking open, and a certain breed of creator figured out that the usual gatekeepers had stopped watching closely. What came out of that gap was some of the rowdiest comedy the form ever put on tape. Nobody handed these writers a lesson plan, and no suit was sweating over whether a gag might scare off a toy company. Their only mission: make people laugh until it hurt, and handle the rest later.

Four titles come to mind first whenever this subject surfaces. Golden Boy, Excel Saga, Those Who Hunt Elves, and Dragon Half. Each feels built by folks who assumed nobody in charge was paying attention, and that freedom is the entire flavor.

Start with Golden Boy. Kintaro Oe completed the curriculum at Tokyo University’s law school and then walked away without the degree, choosing instead to pedal a bicycle across Japan and study life the hard way. He scrubs toilets. Writes code. Learns to pull noodles by hand. He also spends a healthy chunk of each episode leering at women in a manner that would land a real man in a cell. Gross on paper, no argument. Yet the work carries a genuine heart beneath all the sweat and the nosebleeds. Kintaro helps every woman he crosses, mends something broken in her, then rides off before she can thank him properly. This six episode OVA run, released from late 1995 through mid 1996, played the perversion for slapstick, but it never let go of the sweetness. That balance is a magic trick most makers today are far too nervous to attempt.

Then comes Excel Saga, possibly the most gloriously broken piece of television I have ever set my eyes on. Director Shinichi Watanabe took Rikdo Koshi’s manga and treated the source like a chew toy. Every week the thing picked a fresh genre to dismantle. A sci fi invasion flick one Friday, a survival drama the next, a bowling sports story after that. Its author himself gets dragged on screen as part of a recurring gag in which he is made to approve each new mutation of his own creation. A man forced to watch his baby twisted into something unrecognizable, and his suffering is the punchline.

Its finale sealed the case. Episode twenty six, titled Going Too Far, was built on purpose to be too filthy and too violent for broadcast, so it never aired and surfaced only on the home release. Watanabe said afterward that going beyond the limits of an ordinary television series felt good. Sit with that. It was neither accident nor leak. Someone sat in a room and decided the last act should be a middle finger to the very notion of a limit. That kind of nerve rarely survives a boardroom.

Those Who Hunt Elves rests on maybe the most deranged premise of the bunch. Three ordinary people from modern Japan get hauled into a sword and sorcery realm alongside a Type 74 military tank. To return home, they must gather fragments of a spell, and those fragments sit tattooed on the skin of random elven women. So the plot, week after week, has these travelers cornering elves and stripping them down to read the runes. Written out plainly, it sounds like something you would never confess to owning. In motion it plays goofy rather than nasty, closer to a rowdy schoolyard scrap than anything sleazy, complete with a tank that eventually becomes possessed by the spirit of a cat. One detail earns a mention: this oddball helped show that late night anime could find an audience, helping open a lane for a wave of titles that followed.

And Dragon Half. Two brief OVA episodes from 1993, and I have never laughed harder at anything so short. Mink is the mixed blood daughter of a legendary dragon slayer and the very beast he was sent to slay, the two having fallen in love instead. She spends the entire runtime chasing a pop idol who hunts monsters on the side, a fellow named, I promise you this is real, Dick Saucer. Character art collapses into squished chibi shapes mid scene for no reason beyond the laugh. One demon in the second short spends his single appearance bitter that he got cut from the first. Its closing tune, “My Omelette,” turns absurd food lyrics into a full blown musical number set to Beethoven. This piece roasts fantasy quests and idol culture and its own lane all at once, and it never pretends to sit above the trash it happily riffs on.

So why does almost none of this get made now. Money is part of it. Current production moves through committees, streaming partners, and merchandise forecasts, and committees flinch at anything liable to spook a sponsor or trip a content filter. Another part is the internet. A single clip yanked out of context can torch a project long before the full joke lands, so studios play it safe. And honestly, a fair share of newer comedy leans on referencing other anime rather than standing on its own two feet and simply being funny. There is a real difference between a wink and a joke, and the wink won.

I am not going to pretend every old tape holds up. Plenty of it is dated. Some of it is flat out nasty, and a few of those gags would clear a room now, with good reason. We lost the nerve underneath. These shows were happy to look stupid and grosser than anybody expected, all for a laugh. Those creators trusted you to handle a mess. They picked the joke over the brand and lived with it.

Today’s product is usually prettier. Cleaner lines, smoother motion, tighter scripts. What it seldom carries is that gremlin energy, the sense that anything at all might happen because no one was policing the room. Give me the tank possessed by a cat. Give me the wanderer who studies life by scrubbing floors. Hand me Dick Saucer and that absurd theme song. That chaos was never a flaw in the design. It was the whole reason to press play.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Back when I was coming up, the future actually had a shape to it. You could see it. Neo-Tokyo lit orange and tearing itself apart under a swollen sky, for starters. Then a cyborg woman steps off a high rise into neon and rain like gravity means nothing to her. Or Spike Spiegel, broke and cool, drifting through the solar system while a saxophone cried behind him. All of that crawled into a young Black kid who stayed up way past his bedtime for Toonami and Adult Swim. It got me asking things. None of them about elves. They were about us, and about where we were all going.

Katsuhiro Otomo put out Akira in 1988 and pretty much wrote the book on animated dread. He set it in a Neo-Tokyo raised up on the ashes of a city a catastrophic explosion had erased, so Japan’s whole nuclear nightmare sat right there in the backdrop. The story kept poking the same ugly nerve. What happens once our reach gets way out ahead of our judgment? Mamoru Oshii turned up seven years behind him with Ghost in the Shell in 1995, and his Major Kusanagi spent the runtime unsure whether any soul was still left inside a mass-produced body wired into the net. Think about the timing on that. Regular folks were out here cussing at a dial up modem, while this movie already had its teeth in what your online self amounts to, whether a hacked memory still belongs to you, where the human ends and the code kicks in.

That was the assignment back then. Look forward. Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain, Steins;Gate, Ergo Proxy, Evangelion. Even the giant robot joints carried heft, because the machine always doubled as a question about the boy strapped inside it. These stories chewed on cities and circuits and deep space and the bomb. They treated what’s coming like a place worth fighting over.

Now flip on a seasonal lineup and count how many series open with some tired office worker getting flattened by a truck.

Truck-kun, the fanbase calls him. Patron saint of the reset button. He rolls up, does his job, and our hero wakes reincarnated in a swords and sorcery realm holding cheat-level abilities, a swelling crowd of adoring companions, and a demon lord to slap around. This is isekai, “another world” in Japanese, and across the last decade it went from a rare novelty to the beast devouring the schedule whole.

Look at the count and it gets silly. One industry analysis found that for something like two decades the genre barely showed up, maybe zero to four new titles in a given year. It hit fourteen by 2019, dropped back to eight in pandemic-hit 2020, and after that the thing just went nuts. Twenty six in 2021, twenty three a year later, thirty three by 2023. Then a fat thirty four in 2024, the year this other world stuff swelled into roughly fifteen percent of all the fresh television anime Japan put out. Sit with this one. More than half of every otherworld title counted in that analysis arrived after 2020. Not stacked up over four patient decades. Dumped on us inside a handful of years.

Why? Follow the money, same as it ever was. Making original animation is pricey and flat out scary for the people signing checks. So studios and publishers keep returning to a content mine that already proved it could build an audience. Amateurs post serialized stories on a site called Shosetsuka ni Narou, or Let’s Become a Novelist, where popular works can arrive with readers already waiting. Publishers scoop up the ones that catch fire, turn them into light novels and manga, and some eventually make the jump to animation. By 2026, more than 200 anime projects had come from works posted on Narou alone. KADOKAWA itself later admitted the business had leaned too hard on familiar winners, pointing to a bias toward Narou and isekai properties that helped create market saturation and left less room for originality.

Then wrap the business case in something warmer. These shows peddle comfort. The lead is usually a burnout, a shut in, a kid who got stepped on, somebody life forgot. He dies ordinary and wakes chosen. No shock that grinding adults eat it up, especially during lockdown stretches when everybody wanted a soft spot to duck into. I get the pull. Honestly. Ain’t nothing wrong with a warm blanket after a brutal week.

But here comes my gripe, and it is a Blerd gripe to the core.

The old masters used their craft to squint hard at what waits ahead and warn us. This new wave mostly uses it to bounce. One lineage asked where humanity is headed. The other asks how quick can I ditch this planet for a pretend realm where I finally stand as the baddest cat in the room.

Not every last drop of it is hollow, mind you. Mushoku Tensei caught real smoke for its main character early, yet it earned respect from plenty of viewers for actually letting a broken man grow up. Re:Zero runs its lead through a meat grinder of trauma and fallout. Every so often somebody bends the familiar frame toward something true. Make believe was never the villain either. The atomic dread of those classics was its own flavor of flight, and the mecha stuff always packed a little wish fulfillment. Nobody is pretending the golden age was spotless.

The rub is sheer volume. When a single lane swallows around fifteen percent of everything, the neighboring lanes start fighting harder for room. High concept science fiction slowed to a drip while the reincarnation assembly belt ran three shifts a day. Where is this generation’s Ghost in the Shell, wrestling with what synthetic minds mean now that we went and actually built them? Right now we are living smack inside the questions those elder films only dreamed. The face scanners are already watching. Chatbots fake a soul convincingly enough to spook your grandma. And the fight over what a body even is anymore runs hot every day. The moment is begging for bold speculative storytelling, and a giant slab of the business answered by mailing everybody to fantasy medieval Europe with a floating status screen attached.

Maybe the tide turns. Fans have been grumbling louder about the same tale showing up on loop, and even major industry players have admitted that leaning too hard on familiar formulas can squeeze the life out of originality. Better still, Science SARU brought Ghost in the Shell back to television in July, becoming the first studio other than Production I.G to animate a Ghost in the Shell series across the franchise’s roughly three decades on screen. The old dog got let off the porch again, which tells you somebody upstairs still trusts that a hard look at what’s coming can move units.

I hope they are right. Because this art form handed me my earliest vision of what might be waiting for all of us, ugly and dazzling and painfully human. It taught a kid on the couch to lift his eyes and look outward. I would love the next kid to get more than a truck, a cheat code, and a one way ticket clean out of reality. Hand them a mirror aimed at the horizon instead. That is what this whole thing was made to do.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Alongside the manhwa’s release of the final chapter, Villains are Destined to Die was officially confirmed to have an animated adaptation in the works. Even though not much information has been revealed to readers about the studio, cast or release date, there is still heavy anticipation about what’s to come for the future of the popular web series – and potentially the future of other incredible villainess manhwa.

What’s It About?

The manhwa features female protagonist, Penelope Eckhart – a woman hated throughout the kingdom for her brutish, arrogant and temperamental attitude and behaviour. Penelope is not only all this but also a duke’s adopted daughter as well as a villain character in a otome game – a romance simulation game – titled ‘Daughter of the Duke: Love Project’.

Fast forward, we are introduced to Siyeon Cha, a university student from modern day South Korea who has finished playing all modes of the otome game; including the frustrating ‘hard mode’. Under mysterious circumstances, she finds herself transmigrated into that very same game as Penelope Eckhart herself. Forced to navigate the new world whilst bound to a system that makes her play on hard mode, she strives to gain all the skills and affection of the love interests needed to clear the game and survive her impending death. All the while, the game’s love interests slowly begin to realise that she wasn’t as bad as they originally believed.

Will It Flop or Flourish?

To be honest, anything can happen. Villains are Destined to Die is not the first or only manhwa series to receive an animated adaptation. There has already been a few in the past couple of years and currently, more have either been confirmed to be in the making or confirmed to have a release date – just like the action, supernatural webtoon, Eleceed.

The biggest concern fans might have about the adaptation could possibly be which animation studio picks up the series. As Solo Leveling and The Beginning After the End (TBATE) have shown, the animation style and the amount of passion put into the work by the animators can either make or break a manhwa’s overall adaptation. Another worry could also be how loyal the writers and animators will be to the series’ IP. The manhwa is already well adapted from the web novel its based on, so transferring that same faithfulness to an arguably bigger project – especially one with a, maybe, smaller budget – can lead to a third-rate production.

Even with these key factors, which should leave some fans worried, there is still hope that everything might end up going well or even better than we expected. For one, Villains are Destined to Die is just that popular with a sizably good worldwide fanbase. This means that more time and effort could be spent making the animated series stand out as well as its plot does.

An argument can be made that the manhwa might receive the TBATE treatment, not all hope is lost when you consider the difference in the level of expectation from them both. Meaning, some of us readers are likely holding on to the art style, costume designing and character chemistry being as faithful to the original work as possible – even if it means sacrificing smooth animation and a plot arc or two. Similarly to what was done for Who Made Me a Princess in 2025 with its beautiful Chinese animation.

Future Villainess Manhwa Animated Adaptations

If all goes well with this villainess manhwa and the popularity blows up as most fans expect it to, then more villainess manhwa adaptations may be present in our future. With the success of Solo Leveling, a lot of action/system/cultivation manhwa readers have held their breaths, waiting for the next big hit. The same may end up happening with the villainess manhwa fanbase.

Villains are Destined to Die is by far not the only best and biggest name in the manhwa scene. It simply managed to become the template for what villainess manhwa should look like and has inspired manhwa creators to create more original and refreshing works following the trope. Including, but not limited to, this series, there are Kill the Villainess, Beware the Villainess, How to Win my Husband Over and Your Throne that also have the potential of being picked up for adaptation the same way Villains are Destined to Die is. It is also important to note how this manhwa grew in popularity when it was being pushed forward on recommendation lists for people to read during the times of Covid-19.

Although not particularly a villainess manhwa, The Remarried Empress, recognised for its intriguing revenge story and otherwise controversial plot points, was picked up for a live action adaptation. Its Korean drama is even anticipated to premier on the 4^th November 2026 on Disney + which continues to show the possibilities villainess and fantasy romance manhwa have in the film and television industries.

Altogether, the Villains are Destined to Die manhwa is an interesting reach into the trope for adapting from the Korean comic market considering how the Japanese manga has since dominated the Asian animation industry. With nothing else revealed about the upcoming animated series, we, as fans of both the web novel and manhwa can only wait and hope it will be worth the watch.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Everybody kept saying the big war shooter was dead. Dead like the arcade, dead like couch multiplayer, dead like the LAN party you used to drag your tower across town for. The suits looked at the numbers, saw a hundred bodies crammed onto one map going nowhere, and decided the appetite dried up. They were wrong, Ace. Flat wrong. And a scrappy British studio named Bulkhead just walked into the room and proved it in front of God and everybody.

WARDOGS dropped into Steam Early Access on September 10th, and what followed was less a launch and more a stampede. More than 150,000 people piled in within minutes of the doors opening. Within hours the concurrent count blew past 337,000, and the surge did not stop there. By the weekend WARDOGS had pushed past 400,000, eventually peaking above 428,000 concurrent players. One and a quarter million copies moved inside twenty four hours. Servers buckled under the weight, went dark for a spell, then clawed their way back. You do not see that kind of madness around something nobody wanted.

So let me paint what this thing actually is, because the hype alone won’t do it justice. Picture a hundred folks split three ways, not the tired old red against blue. Three separate crews clawing for one shifting patch of ground somewhere inside a battlefield that runs 256 square kilometers. Mountains of Eastern Europe, rusted and grim. Whoever packs the most bodies into that control zone racks up points, and the first side to reach a hundred takes it home. That third team flips the math. You lean hard on one enemy and get gutted from behind by a crew you forgot was even out there. No clean frontline. No safe rotation.

Now here comes the part that would make your granddaddy nod. Cash. You start with ten grand in your pocket, and near about every useful move you make feeds the bank. Revive a downed teammate, get paid. Fly a chopper full of infantry into the storm, money again. Haul supplies, hold the line, build a wall that saves a push, and the scratch lands right in your account. Then you spend it on your next loadout when you respawn. Die reckless buying fancy toys and you go broke. So the medic matters. The truck driver matters. The lunatic who saved up for a tank can flip the whole afternoon. Support roles finally carry weight, which is something this genre has been fumbling for years.

Here is where I want to sit a minute. The tale everybody kept repeating was that we moved on. Battle royales swallowed the world, extraction loot runs took the leftovers, and the sprawling combined arms brawl became a relic your uncle reminisced about at the cookout. WARDOGS says nah. The studio did not reinvent physics. They handed grown folks a wide open field, a rifle, a tank, a chopper, and full permission to drop a building on somebody’s head. That simplicity is the whole trick. Sometimes you don’t crave a genre revolution. You just wanna ride shotgun on an ATV through the trees, hear gunfire somewhere ahead, catch a bad jump, and end up stuck on a log like two clowns until a passing supply truck rolls over, laughs at your misery, and hauls you into the fight anyway.

Understand, this arrived less than a year after Battlefield itself came roaring back with Battlefield 6, classic classes restored, armor howling, and that old combined arms feel back near the center of the franchise. Two hefty military sandboxes eating good within a year of each other. That is not coincidence and it is not a fluke. Both of them scratch an itch the industry swore had healed over. Turns out the audience didn’t pack up. It was waiting on somebody to cook the meal right.

And WARDOGS sits in a lane of its own even beside that. Slower than the twitchy slide canceling nonsense over in Call of Duty. Looser than the manual and two hour tutorial demands of a hardcore sim like Arma. Right in the sweet pocket where you gotta think and talk and coordinate, yet you don’t need a physics degree to have fun. Proximity voice ties it together, so you can plot with your squad or talk pure trash to the enemy who wandered too close. That local chatter is half the magic. It turns strangers into a temporary family for one rough match.

Now I ain’t gonna gas it up like it’s flawless. It won’t be for everybody. If you want to load in and start farming kills the second your boots hit dirt, this’ll drive you up a wall. Sometimes you ride a good while before a single trigger gets pulled. The opening day server mess left a real bruise. Queues stacked past 300,000 deep, the store rating cratered into Mixed territory near 45 percent, and folks raged about the hours lost in login purgatory. Then the devs patched, the dust settled, and the sentiment snapped over to Very Positive, sitting around 80 percent as I write this. It is early access, which means the team is building the plane while it’s already full of passengers. Balance changes, bug fixes, exploit patches, progression systems, and future content are still on the stove. Console players gotta hang tight until 2028.

But strip the rough edges off and the signal underneath rings loud. A studio best known for a modest World War II title took a beloved Arma mod, that old King of the Hill format, and grew it into a full standalone beast. No battle royale gimmick. No shrinking circle choking you to a corner. No loot you gotta sneak out the back with. Just territory, resources, and a whole lobby learning to move as one.

That is the lesson buried in these numbers, and I pray the ones in the boardrooms are writing it down. We never got tired of scale. We never got tired of infantry and armor and things falling apart around us while a friend screams coordinates in your ear. We got fed up with watered down versions handed over with a pat on the head. Give the people the real thing, the loud cooperative mess with stakes and heart, and they will show up hundreds of thousands deep before the machines can even catch a breath.

Days in, this thing had muscled into the top four most played games across the entire platform, rubbing shoulders with PUBG, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2. Immovable titans, and a first week rookie wedged right in among them.

Old school never died, Ace. It was just waiting on somebody with the nerve to serve it hot again. Bulkhead rang the dinner bell. And the whole neighborhood came running.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.