Gross Football Lunch – Week 2, 2025 NFL Season

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is The Truth

The original Ninja Gaiden for NES is probably my favorite video game of all time. I didn’t regard it as such when I first played it; rather, I came to this realization over the course of decades. While it was obviously amongst the great action platformers of the 8-bit era, boasting high-wire tight controls, a fast and addictive gameplay loop, and a marginally compelling story at a time when most games justified their action with the flimsiest pretenses. But I was a kid with gamer rage issues, and it was the toughest game I had ever played to that point. Many a session ended with screaming and controller throwing. It’s easy to get addicted to a game that inspires real anger, but it’s hard to fully appreciate a game that causes such pure, unalloyed frustration.

While I did manage to brute force my way through to the end of the game back in the day, it was only through coming back to it off and on over the course of years that I came to truly love Ninja Gaiden. The more times I beat the game, the more my frustration turned into confidence, and as I grew confident I gained understanding of what makes Ninja Gaiden work so well. Whereas many NES games – even the highly regarded ones – feature bugs and janky mechanics, Ninja Gaiden is precision engineered to the last detail. Every game mechanic is built to purpose, every enemy is placed exactly where it should be (with the notorious respawns serving as punishment for hesitation), and the difficulty curve, while steep, is immaculately paced. In short, Ninja Gaiden provided a curated, bespoke experience at a time when even the most ambitious game developers struggled to achieve their exact vision.

While I do my best to regard nostalgia bait with the cynicism it deserves, I’m not made of stone. Therefore, when I learned a brand new 2D Ninja Gaiden was coming out at the end of July, my interest piqued. Most of the titans of 8-bit action platforming have kept churning new releases at a modest pace; at a bare minimum, most of these series’ releases one or more games on Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, or both. Ninja Gaiden has not produced an original 2D title since Ninja Gaiden III, released in 1991. Granted, the series made the leap to 3D in 2004 to great success, and while those 3D entries are also fast and tight, they feature a much greater focus on combat, exploration, and boss fights, with a certain bare minimum of low-stakes platforming thrown in for good measure.

And while Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound returns the franchise to 2D action platforming, it also offers a new synthesis of the series’ 2D and 3D styles, remixing all of the previous games’ constituent elements with creative flair and keeping the pacing, controls, and difficulty as razor sharp as they’ve ever been. The boss fights match the 3D series for length and complexity, and the levels delight in sending massive hordes of enemies after the player to a degree the NES could never accommodate. Like the 2D series, every enemy, boss, and level is precisely tailored and balanced perfectly against the players’ abilities.

Ragebound is a difficult game, to be sure – a Ninja Gaiden title that isn’t difficult isn’t worth its weight in spit – but it is never unfair. As with its 8-bit forebears, practice makes perfect. Get enough practice with the guillotine boost (which lets you bounce of enemies) and you will soon find ways to use it that keep you alive in desperate situations. Get enough practice with the aura/hypercharge system (which gives you the ability to defeat elite enemies in one hit), and you will learn to pay attention to the whole screen, without letting swarms of enemies send you into a panic. Get enough practice with both, and you just find yourself in the flow state, able to read and react to whatever the game throws at you.

Even if that never happens, a player who can stay calm, dust themselves off, and try again after each death can improve and progress. With practice, levels and bosses that once seemed unfair will become manageable, and once they’re manageable, mastery becomes a clear and clearly attainable goal. This truth of gameplay is exactly what I admire so much about the original Ninja Gaiden. A player who understands the game’s fundamentals, pays attention to the details of their execution, and isn’t afraid of failure is a player with everything they need to succeed. In both games, the player need only become familiar with what the game is asking them to do, and then do it.

In other words, Ragebound preserves the feel of the original Ninja Gaiden without ever feeling like a cheap facsimile. After all, the NES trilogy didn’t have any hidden areas, secret levels, or somersault boosts, and the 3D games don’t force you to cross the abyss one platform at a time while dodging and slashing at enemies. Nostalgia is always a fundamentally reactionary force, and therefore must be viewed with distrust, but sometimes old dudes with shit going on like me just want video games to respect our time again. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a modern re-imagining of the tough-as-nails action platformer that provides a fast, addictive gameplay loop in a bloat-free package that chooses to push its namesake franchise forward, and anyone with any interest in 2D gaming owes it to themselves to check it out. Highest recommendation!

NFL Confidence Pool – Week 2

As I said last Thursday, Week 1 is the second scariest week of the entire season, and while I’m grateful to have put together 13 successful picks without any double-digit losses, I am also horrified at how close I came to going a horrifying 6-10 for an even more horrifying 48 points. Success is great and all, but success is scary when you don’t feel like you deserve it. And boy oh boy, it’s hard to feel like I deserve it when I knew the Cowboys have real offensive firepower, the Bengals have a terrible defense, the Vikings were starting a redshirt rookie QB on the road in primetime, and the 49ers are less a professional football organization and more an outpatient physical therapy concern.

This knowledge makes it tough to feel confident that I can capitalize on these wins, and that’s made even tougher by the fact that Week 2 is the first scariest week of the entire season. Week 1 is scary because no one has any evidence, but at least we all know we don’t have any evidence. Week 2 is even scarier because we still don’t have any evidence; we only have data points. In the past, I have sought a quick and dirty solution to this problem by embracing the false binary. Should I overreact to the Week 1 results, or should I underreact by overreacting to the football pundit industrial complex’s overreactions and fall back on my preseason priors?

The good news is that I’ve finally suffered through enough terrible Week 2s to reject this busted framework. The bad news is that the key to Week 2 is the same is every other week; all you can do is consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of each team and how they might play off of each other, and make a determination accordingly. That’s work, and I resent it. I resent it even more in this week, when there is only one mismatch and the two best teams in football are playing division rivals they have a knack for losing to.

I’m not convinced the Rams are legit by any stretch, but if they were able to squeak a win against the Texans’ outstanding defense they can squeak a win out against the Titans’ respectable one, and I trust Stafford to throw downfield more effectively than Bo Nix, who was last seen missing his best receiver streaking wide open (check the bottom left) on what would have been a game-sealing fourth down. Also, there’s no rational reason to expect Cam Ward to do well against the Rams’ pass rush. Putting the Bills and Ravens this high feels very dicey, but it beats the alternatives. I’m slotting Bills under the Ravens because the Jets have a better offensive line than I expected, which means they have a better offense than I expected, and let’s face it, one forced fumble does not a run defense make, no matter what absurd comeback results.

Speaking of the alternatives, these last two games see the only four trustworthy-ish teams in the league facing off against each other. The Chiefs are in no position to exploit the Eagles’ primary weakness at cornerback and are at a disadvantage in the trenches on both sides of the ball, making Philly the easier choice. The Packers/Commanders tilt is a closer matchup, but I still think the Packers are superior, and worth a double digit assignment. Micah Parsons was monstrous in limited action last Sunday and will only get a larger share of snaps as the season goes on; to make matters worse, the Packers’ defense dominated the line of scrimmage even when Parsons was off the field. Parsons’ arrival enables the Packers to win more games than in recent seasons without altering their approach. You don’t need your talented but streaky quarterback to go out and win you every game when you run the ball effectively and give the opposing QB hell in passing situations.

Even with fewer points at stake, these five games constitute Week 2’s Danger Zone, which makes them five of the most dangerous games on the entire season schedule. Double digits on the Vikings is probably a bit much, and could prove to be an act of showing ass on my part, but I figure that if J.J. McCarthy can get it together before the fourth quarter, there’s nowhere to go but up! They are also at home and facing one of the few teams that is more cursed, although I am intrigued to see whether the Falcons have gained a functional pass rush for the first time in living memory or they simply feasted on the Bucs’ line without Tristan Wirfs. They really gave Baker Mayfield fits last week, and that makes it quite difficult to see how he’ll have an easier time against the Texans.

Bo Nix was bad against the Titans, but there’s no reason to believe Daniel Jones can sustain any kind of success. The Broncos will undoubtedly give him more trouble than the Dolphins, who quit on the season before it started. I’m wary of giving Denver double digits on the road, but at least they have a team built to purpose instead of a loose assortment of decent players, most of whom were on the team back in the Frank Reich years (shout-outs to Mo Alie-Cox). The Chargers’ offense was all-around impressive in Brazil. Herbert was awesome, Omarion Hampton was a bully between the tackles, Keenan Allen looked like his old self, Quentin Johnston grabbed a couple of downfield TDs, and the pass protection held up against all but the least responsible Steve Spagnuolo blitzes. It was enough to get me thinking they’re finally ready to be an elite offense, but I need to see them keep it up. A higher assignment against a possibly competent division rival Raiders team is irresponsible.

Losing the road game against a division rival is no embarrassment, and losing to the Packers in Green Bay is no embarrassment either, but football is a game of context. I expected the Lions to lose because I expected them to struggle in the trenches but man, I didn’t expect them to struggle that much. If they had played even slightly better, I would write the loss off as an excusable bummer. Despite my decades of experience observing Detroit Lions football, I am choosing to give the kneecap kitties some benefit of the doubt, for the moment. Facing the Bears makes this easier, of course, but it will take a few weeks of winning football before I’m giving Detroit more points than this.

I absolutely did not expect Steelers/Jets to become a shootout, and have no idea what to make of the fact that it did. Again, the Jets offensive line deserve a lot of credit, but even in this period of wandering one does not associate the Steelers’ defense with getting pushed around. The Seahawks’ defense, by contrast, held up their end of the bargain but their offense looked about as bad as I feared. You can’t win if you can’t score; the same goes for the Giants. The Bengals have the opposite problem; I can look past struggling against a competent Browns defense, but I cannot look past being unable to stop modern-day Joe Flacco without committing pass interference.

Finally, let’s acknowledge this trio of lesser disappointments at the bottom. The 49ers should be worth more points, but they’ll be missing just about every skill position player of consequence except for Christian McCaffrey. In case you think that’s enough, I will remind you that even the worst NFL teams have a respectable position group at a bare minimum, and in the Saints case, that position happens to be off-ball linebacker. The Cardinals beat the Saints but did it in such unimpressive fashion that I can’t trust them against the Panthers, and a Patriots/Dolphins game is too depressing to contemplate in any detail. Do not put a consequential amount of points on these three games for any reason or under any circumstances.

Enjoy the games, everyone!