What a year for gaming it's been for me! I'm used to playing games only in limited fits and starts during the warmer months of the year, as ZFRP ends up consuming a lot of the time I'd otherwise be using to play. However, things were different this time. For the first time in a long time, I found the energy and motivation to keep playing new games continuously throughout Season 13 of RP, and as a result of that (plus other factors like continued trips to Funspot and playing several compilations full of quick new additions to the blog) I played dozens of games this year. In fact, this might be an all-time record for me!
It felt good to get my bad experience with Mechstermination Force out of my system in last year's post, so I will be including a few more reviews in this post of games I played but didn't finish if I have something to say about the experience, positive or otherwise. (Xenoblade fans, I am sorry.) This time the reviews are in roughly the order I played the games, so things kind of hop around at times, but at other times you'll see a bunch of Mario, Sonic, or TMNT games clustered together as I stuck with a franchise for a bit.
With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy the largest GB game review blogpost ever!
Galaxy Wars
Genre: Shmup
System: Arcade
Year: 1979
This one gives off strong Space Invaders aesthetic vibes, from its' graphics to its' sound effects, and it's no surprise that it was developed by Taito themselves. The gameplay is a bit unique, though - you play as a missile launcher, and you control each individual missile you shoot, trying to hit high-scoring targets while avoiding crashing into asteroids that threaten to get in your way. Not much else to say, really, it's from 1979 and games of the 70s were quite limited in scope. A curiosity, but not likely to hold attention 45 years later.
Snacks N' Jaxson
Genre: Ball-and-paddle
System: Arcade
Year: 1984
The things video game companies come up with when they want to make a game in a competitive genre and are desperate to stand out can be really... really something. Snacks N' Jaxson has the bones of a pretty ordinary ball-and-paddle game, but it's been done up in a ludicrous costume. Here's the pitch: You play as Jaxson, a fella who resembles a sort of clown hobo. Jaxson is seated at his dining room table, and it's time to eat, but he's got a very specific way of eating his food. When a level begins, Jaxson detaches his nose from his face, which moves toward the screen and then back down to him as if affected by gravity (so apparently Jaxson is seated on a wall). You must catch Jaxson's nose with his face to send it back up again. In between bounces, though, food is served. Jaxson has to use his stretchy neck to reach out and scarf down all the food on-screen in-between bounces. Catching Jaxson's nose before everything is eaten is a lost life, and so is letting the nose fall past Jaxson's head and hit the window behind him (the nose will bounce if it hits Jaxson's torso, though). If you can finish all the courses, you'll earn a bonus minigame (which changes depending on what meal you just ate) and then it's on to the next meal, which is harder. If you get through Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Midnight Snack, you'll start back at Breakfast with higher difficulty and a cuckoo clock on one wall that gets in your way.
You control Jaxson with a trackball. You also have a sneeze button to blow away the soap and green peppers that get tossed at Jaxson - eating them will stun him, which will probably make him miss his nose. Snacks N' Jaxson is a fever dream for sure, and it quickly gets too chaotic for most to handle (if you can get through a single day in Jaxson's insane sideways life of gluttony you can consider yourself very skilled), but it was kinda fun playing such an utterly bizarre game. Not something I would return to, though.
BreakThru
Genre: Shmup
System: Arcade
Year: 1986
Old games are known for making up for short length with high difficulty, resulting in players needing to retry many times to eventually conquer the challenges in place. BreakThru is the epitome of this strategy: weighing in with a mere five stages, a full playthrough of BreakThru will take you less than ten minutes, but you need to have a good, solid handle on each level to pull that off.
In BreakThru you play as a gun-shooting supercar that can jump over obstacles. Levels autoscroll so you don't get any chances to stop and assess the situation, it's all gung-ho the whole way through. Your mission is to "break through" the enemy lines, which explains the title. Your goal is to reacquire your "PK430 aircraft", which the unnamed enemy captured and hid at the very heart of their territory. You don't get to actually do anything with the jet once you get it back, though - it would have been cool if there was a final level where you used the jet instead of the car to finish the enemy off, but instead once you clear the fifth stage you'll see a cutscene congratulating you as the car's driver exits it to enter the jet and takes off in it. We also see the car driving away, so there was someone else inside to keep driving it. This is good considering you wouldn't want the car to end up in the same situation the jet was in, trapped behind enemy lines. After that, you are then offered a level select, allowing you to go back to any stage you want and replaying it for more points. There's not much to BreakThru and the initial difficulty barrier will turn off many, but it's not awful, just not particularly amazing either. The biggest problem is that the tilted perspective can make determining collision difficult.
Bust-A-Move
Genre: Puzzle
System: Arcade
Year: 1993
This type of puzzle game has taken many forms over the years (I personally encountered it long ago in the form of Vendor Tender in Thrillville: Off the Rails), but Bust-A-Move is one of the first of the genre. You probably know what I'm talking about - you control a turret that shoots colored balls, and there is a mass of balls already in place above you. Your goal is to make matches by combining three or more balls of the same color together until the area is clear, but you have to hurry because the roof is descending and will eventually push the balls into your gun, ending play.
The first few stages are easy, but since this is an arcade version of this kind of game, Bust-A-Move gets tough pretty quick so that you don't linger too long on just one token, and a single death means Game Over. You'll get a fair amount of playtime on that one token if you're a decent puzzler, though.
Zoo Keeper
Genre: Action
System: Arcade
Year: 1983
Not to be confused with other games named Zoo Keeper (such as a Nintendo DS puzzler I played once upon a time), this old arcade Zoo Keeper is a funny one. It's kind of a reverse Breakout. In this title you play as the titular Zoo Keeper, trying to prevent the animals from escaping their pens. Unfortunately you're either using extremely flimsy material or else these animals are supernaturally tough, because as the action begins the animals start flinging themselves around their cages and breaking them down, chunk by chunk. The Zoo Keeper is a skilled builder and can leave a trail of bricks behind him as he walks around the border of the pen. He can also jump if an animal is coming his way. The goal is to survive until time runs out, at which time you receive a bonus for every animal still inside the boundary of the pen (regardless of if the pen is actually fully sealed) and you move on to another, tougher stage with rowdier animals and a flimsier pen in place to start with. There's not a lot to this game, but that's true of most games its' age and I found it a cute and clever little title I might play again sometime.
Mad Planets
Genre: Shmup
System: Arcade
Year: 1983
Here's a frantic space shooter to play if you want something more speedy and chaotic than the likes of Galaga or Space Invaders. Your ship is being attacked by miniature planets, some with their own orbiting moons. Both you and the planets can fly all over the screen, making for a chaotic dogfight. Dodge planets and their attacks, touch the floating spacemen for bonus points, and blast everything in sight until you run out of lives.
Red Alert
Genre: Shmup
System: Arcade
Year: 1981
Red Alert is a pretty typical shmup when it comes to the basics, though it's an Earthly one instead of the usual space shooter. Your ground-bound cannon fires up at invading enemy aircraft - nothing we haven't seen before. The main differences are a strict reliance on time limit and a surprising amount of voice acting. You're given spoken-word orders before every level identifying your opponents, where in the world you're facing them, and how much time you have. If you fail to clear a wave quickly enough, the voice always warns you, "MIRV will be launched". The MIRV is a swarm of ballistic missiles, and in an interesting twist you don't instantly lose if the MIRV is launched. Instead, the enemies you were fighting retreat and the MIRV drops down and splits into nine pieces. If you can shoot down all the pieces before any of them hit the ground, you'll still successfully clear the stage. I didn't do very well when I played Red Alert - both normal waves and the MIRV require pinpoint accuracy under strict timers, and that's never been my strong suit.
Pac-Man Battle Royale
Genre: Maze
System: Arcade
Year: 2010
Pac-Man Battle Royale has a good concept but a fatal flaw. You and up to three other players maneuver around a Pac-Man maze, eating dots, avoiding ghosts, and looking for Power Pellets. When someone's Pac-Man grabs one, they grow massive in size and can now eat not just ghosts but also other players. Every Pac-Man has only one life, and when all Pac-Men but one are defeated, a winner is declared and play resets with a new round. Play continues for five rounds, which guarantees a winner in a two-player game but leaves open the chance for a draw in three- and four-player games.
This is a cool idea for a game, but unfortunately there's a major problem that sharply curtails the excitement - every session is exactly the same. You start in the same maze and eat the same dots that appear at the same time. There's some light variation when you eat a fruit, which erases the current dots and Power Pellets and lays down a new set, but each round of play ends up feeling identical to the last, making gameplay stale in record time. The lack of different mazes or dot patterns severely damages this game's longevity. They were so close!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2017)
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: Arcade
Year: 2017
The first of many TMNT beat-em-ups I played this year, this one at Funspot. It's a very basic brawler designed around the 2012 version of the TMNT. You progress through the stages from left to right, beating up the usual suspects like Foot Clan ninjas and whatnot. Occasionally you get to use a Pizza Power super-move that will clear the screen of weaker enemies and deal a decent chunk of damage to bosses. The final level is just a single screen consisting of a boss rush followed by Shredder, a clear attempt at padding and dragging out more tokens from the player. I finished it, but it was a token-muncher and very forgettable. The main thing you will remember from this one are the oft-reused yells of the turtles. Maybe I shouldn't have picked to play as Michelangelo, whose main personality trait in this version of the Turtleverse seems to be "obnoxious".
Pac-In-Time
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: SNES (played via Pac-Man Museum on Switch)
Year: 1995
Here's an excruciating widget from Pac-Man's long, weird history. Pac-Man is sent back in time by an evil witch, which also makes him younger. He goes on a journey to return to the present. It's a platformer, but with really weird controls. Pac-Man moves oddly and has ball physics, and the only way to progress is to find and eat every dot in the level. This is the SNES version of Pac-In-Time, and only the SNES makes you eat the dots - in other versions of the game, Pac-Man simply needs to find the exit. This game is very difficult and requires mastery of annoying powerups, especially a grapping-hook rope you need to use to climb walls and throw Pac-Man around the levels. I lost interest pretty quickly after initially thinking I could coast through this one for an easy addition to my list of games I've beaten. After I saw how difficult it was to get all the dots even just a few stages into the first world, I decided I had better things to do.
Crazy Kong
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Arcade
Year: 1981
This bootleg version of Donkey Kong is an odd inclusion among Funspot's mostly-legit game collection, but it's one case of a bootleg with some legal standing... but only some. Blindsided by the success of Donkey Kong, Nintendo couldn't keep up with demand, and so they allowed the company Falcon to officially release Crazy Kong in Japan to help keep the public back home satisfied while Nintendo exported most of the machines they made themselves. Falcon wasn't satisfied with this arrangement though and started exporting Crazy Kong to the US without permission. Nintendo cut them off and Falcon's brief time as a Nintendo partner was over.
Crazy Kong is basically just Donkey Kong, but some alterations were made like different-colored sprites and different sound effects. Most notable is Mario's little "HYA" yell every time he jumps. This is because Crazy Kong was built on hardware from a previous Falcom game, Crazy Climber, and all of Crazy Kong's sound effects can be heard in that game as well. Obviously if you've played the real Donkey Kong this is just a novelty in comparison, but it's interesting to imagine people who grew up playing Crazy Kong and only found out about Donkey Kong later.
Donkey Kong II
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Arcade
Year: 2006
It's Donkey Kong but way harder, with new levels full of tricky hazards. I couldn't clear the first stage. I had no idea Donkey Kong had its' own version of The Lost Levels! Not fun for me, might be good for Kong experts. (Update: This is a homebrew from 2006! Bizarrely, Funspot has it in the American Classic Arcade Museum section.)
Leprechaun
Genre: Action
System: Arcade
Year: 1982
If you only saw gameplay footage of Leprechaun, or played it via emulation, you may initially be puzzled. Arcade games are generally very difficult, so that players can't hog the machine for long without providing a steady stream of tokens to keep things moving. But Leprechaun is easy. Really easy. Extremely easy. In this game you play as a child who has wandered into a forest (each stage is consistent and has its' own name which sounds appropriately fairy tale-y). Your task is to get to the pot of gold somewhere in the stage and touch it. Standing in your way is the titular Leprechaun, who chases after you and can also grab and move the pot of gold around to get it away from you. You'll earn more points if you prolong the chase - not only does the point total above the pot of gold steadily increase the longer you linger in the stage, but the trees all around you will change color if you touch them and are worth 100 points each at stage's end. Additionally, some stages feature cottages you can use as warps to shake off the Leprechaun. If you find the pot of gold in every stage, you get a cutscene of the child descending a rainbow to find another pot of gold, and then the levels repeat with a smarter Leprechaun. But not that much smarter. On my very first attempt, I easily cleared all the stages, then I did it again only losing one life out of the four you're given (this was because I didn't notice until too late that while the stages do let you wrap around them, in some places they have walls up that prevent this). Ultimately I walked away on the third loop with lives still remaining, realizing I could have spent far too much of my limited Funspot time playing this easy game when I'd already seen all it had to offer twice over.
The history behind Leprechaun is when it all starts making sense... though it's a sad story. The Leprechaun cabinet is far smaller than the average arcade cabinet, and between that and the developer - Moppet Video, whose logo is a colorful picture of two excited children - it rapidly becomes clear why Leprechaun is so easy. This game was designed as something simpler for young kids to play, and isn't meant for us lifelong gamers. It's a pretty effective first video game, I think. It doesn't talk down to the player like a Sesame Street game would, it's a normal-looking game in a cabinet sized for the kiddos that looks and sounds like what their older siblings were playing but goes easy on them so they have a chance. It's also easy to grasp the rules, with only a few different factors in play and the only in-game controls being the joystick. It was a cute idea, and Moppet Video made a number of games in this vein, all in small cabinets and with low difficulty.
But, unfortunately, there is that sad story I mentioned. See, Moppet Video eventually sold their games - all of them - to Chuck E Cheese. And Chuck E Cheese didn't believe in game preservation. In order to write off their old games on their taxes (not to mention prevent their competitors from buying them), when Chuck E Cheese wanted to take a game off the floor, it was destroyed. And since they had ALL of the Moppet Video cabinets, once they were no longer pulling in enough tokens... Well, the end result is that Moppet Video's work is incredibly rare now, with less than a dozen known cabinets in existence across multiple titles. The Leprechaun at Funspot is one of the only Leprechauns in the entire world, something I had no idea about the first three times I saw it in the kiddie section and passed it by. But now I'm glad I played it, knowing I spent time with something that's almost been completely lost to history thanks to a powerful rat named Charles Entertainment Cheese.
Mystic Marathon
Genre: Action
System: Arcade
Year: 1984
Sometimes old arcade games didn't bother with much in terms of framing the action or presenting a world, instead just thrusting you into a maze or out in the depths of space, telling you to do something, and you do it until you run out of lives. And then there were games where the creators went into hilariously excruciating detail about why the silly things onscreen were happening. Mystic Marathon is the latter, hosting what had to be one of the most elaborate pre-game story scrolls of any game of its' time (1984). Not only does it hype up the titular marathon and what it entails, it does so in rhyme, channeling Shel Silverstein the whole way, and it's presented to the player not by simply Williams but "The Wizards Of Williams", and the whole thing is done up in a dreamlike fantasy style that wonderfully evokes the vaguely creepy sorts of fantasy worlds you'd often see in the 80s. You certainly can't fault Mystic Marathon for not getting into the act.
I can fault it for its' gameplay, though. While I'm sure I could get better with practice, Mystic Marathon wasn't for me. It's a footrace across 99 courses that endlessly repeat, as you try to dodge obstacles, grab treasure, and reach the end of the course before your foes. If you don't place in the top three at the end of a course, your game ends. Controls are rather clunky, and I found it tough to get my little horned goblin from Point A to Point B without managing to trip over every rock in his path. Points for effort and creativity, though.
New Super Mario Bros 2
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: 3DS
Year: 2012
Watching the Mario Movie in the spring of 2023 sent me off on a Mario kick that lasted throughout the first half of summer, as I played catchup with several Mario games I'd passed on. First up (because it was available for cheap) was New Super Mario Bros 2, a much-criticized installment in the Mario franchise for being generic and "more of the same". While I can't deny NSMB2 brings nothing of substance to the table, it's a perfectly competent game and was fun to play after not having played a 2D Mario in over a decade.
NSMB2 trots out all the cliches you expect from an NSMB game - Princess Peach, already established as competent and capable in other games like Super Paper Mario, the Mario Party series, and Super Princess Peach, is once again rendered a helpless loser and must be saved from Bowser. Thrilling. Also the Koopalings are there, and their initially-much-loved return was already past its' honeymoon period as people realized that if the Koopalings show up in a game, they take up a massive amount of boss slots and leave little room for anyone else. Still, though, it's way better than NSMB's tactic of pitting Mario against Bowser Jr a dozen times and Mario just watching him run away every time the annoying little runt loses.
What you're here for is strictly the gameplay. NSMB is, for all intents and purposes, a level pack. If you like run-and-jump Mario gameplay, here it is, done competently. It's a bit easier than usual though thanks to the big gimmick Nintendo leaned on for this release - coin collecting. For some reason, there are way more coins than usual in NSMB2's levels, and there are multiple new powerups based around giving you more coins. They didn't change the old Mario rule of 100 coins giving you an extra life, though, which means you're showered with lives and will very quickly have over a hundred of them. Seeing the Game Over screen in NSMB2 is a vanishingly unlikely event. The later stages do put up a good fight, though, and there are hidden Star Coins to collect, three per stage, if you feel like being a completionist.
New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Switch
Year: 2019
The original Wii U release of this game came in the same year as NSMB2, and these two games together were really what kicked off the whole backlash against the NSMB series for being derivative and unexciting. Again, it's a perfectly fine game, and if you haven't played other NSMB games you won't even see any issues, but it's easy to see why people were getting sick of the same old same old. The Koopalings are here - again. Princess Peach is a damsel in distress - again. Bowser is the final boss - again. Is there anything "new" in this game with New in the title?
The main shakeup this time is a more involved world map. It's nothing special, but there are some little secret routes and alternate paths you can unlock by finding secret exits in the normal stages, and there are events on the map that require timing-based movement. For instance, you may come across a loop with an enemy running in a circle, and time Mario's advance so he doesn't touch the enemy. If he does, you're thrown into a mini-stage where you must fight a swarm of enemies. It's all very reminiscent of Super Mario Bros. 3, and NSMBU seems aware of that considering they also resurrected the item storage box you can pull from between stages, and they even brought in Boom-Boom as the fortress miniboss (NSMB2, by contrast, opted to use Super Mario World's Reznor instead.)
NSMBUD has a lot of meat to it, at least. In addition to the main adventure, you can also take on various Challenges where you're tasked with specific goals in various stages, some designed specifically for this mode. These are things like collecting coins, avoiding coins, speedrunning a level, doing combos by bouncing off enemies to rack up extra lives, and so on. There's also a weird Coin Rush mode where normal stages from the main game are turned into autoscrollers and you can collect coins to make the camera scroll faster, with the goal being to finish the level quickly. And just for kicks they also threw in NSMBU's DLC campaign, New Super Luigi Bros U. This extra mode presents the main game a second time, with the same world map and premise, but all the individual stages have been remixed to be harder and have strict timers. I eventually burned out on NSMBUD's endless, steadily escalating trials and didn't even get around to trying Luigi's campaign, but I got a fair amount of bang for my buck here just doing everything in the main game (except the hidden Star Road, which had frustrating and annoying stages I ragequit quite quickly) and people more dedicated to doing all things Mario will find even more game than I did.
Super Mario Maker 2
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Switch
Year: 2019
ALRIGHT, BUDDY, LET'S SEE YOU MAKE IT THEN IF YOU'RE SO SMART.
When I was younger, one thing I desperately wanted to do was make my own levels using the engine of games I loved. I got a taste of it with Sonic Mega Collection on the GameCube, using the "Debug Mode" cheat code to make my own Sonic stages, which were inevitably cramped vertical climbs because the objects you placed despawned if you went too far left or right. I daydreamed about being able to make other games that played like my favorites, coming up with everything from dozens of new Smash Brothers characters to hundreds of Fakemon. If a version of Super Mario Maker had released on the Gamecube circa 2003 or 2004, there's no doubt I would have played it for hundreds of hours. This game ended up arriving a couple decades later than it should have, but I still got sucked into making my own Mario game for a good long while once I finally gave it a try.
Super Mario Maker 2 can be a little tricky to get used to, but once you know the tools of the trade you can throw together a competent level pretty easily. Of course, to make a truly excellent course you need to put more thought into it. I personally like to approach Mario Maker as if I'm making "real" Mario levels, albeit taking advantage of Mario Maker's weird gimmicks and tricks like being able to make winged or giant versions of almost any enemy, or the unique and fun power-ups on offer like Kuribo's Shoe. But I try to make the level look "proper" and not have that feel of a fanmade level where aesthetics go out the window and the stage is full of weird items and object arrangements that don't "make sense".
I had a tremendous amount of fun with Mario Maker despite barely even trying to play anyone else's levels - I personally got more enjoyment just out of making my own, not to mention tackling the campaign with a hefty selection of Nintendo-made levels that do a good job of showing off all the different tricks and tools at your disposal (though a few unique objects like a heavy stone you can carry around are only found in this mode, which is a disappointment). Super Mario Maker 2 comes strongly recommended for any Mario enthusiast who has ever considered trying their hand at giving him a new playground to romp about in.
River City Girls
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: Switch
Year: 2019
The Kunio-kun or "River City" series is a real oddball. Around since the NES days and with a very haphazard track record of releases in the west, the most well-known game in the series is River City Ransom, an NES beat-em-up with some gameplay elements that are rare for beat-em-ups even today. Instead of being a straight-shot belt-scroller, you have to explore the city to find your next destination. River City Girls is a direct evolution of this style of beat-em-up and this is both its' most memorable aspect and perhaps a weak point.
Playing as one of two Japanese schoolgirls on a mission to rescue their kidnapped boyfriends, you make your way through screen after screen of troublesome enemies itching for a fight, but you'll need to backtrack or take a detour often to progress the story. It's generally not that hard to figure out how to get to where you need to be, but it can be a real pain trying to get somewhere only for random fodder to block your path, and enemies in this game are no joke either. It's very possible to go into a shop, buy some food to restore your health, and end up needing to eat that food long before you've earned back the money you spent on it. When playing River City Girls with my brother, we got accustomed to running through screens we didn't need to be in, trying to dodge all enemy attacks while hurrying to the next mandatory combat segment. Playing co-op helps take a lot of the sting out of RCG's high difficulty, especially since you can revive each other when you fall in battle. With no lives system in play, if you get knocked out on your own, it's back to the last checkpoint with you.
Between the high difficulty and the wandering from place to place, RCG definitely isn't my favorite beat-em-up, but it's still pretty fun and has a tremendous amount of charm thanks to the cute, lavishly-animated sprites and silly cutscenes full of goofy dialogue. The ending really hammers in how this universe doesn't take itself seriously at all, though if you get 100% completion and face the final boss again the ending will change slightly to give you something that might satisfy a bit more. I might give River City Girls 2 a look sometime, though considering the price it usually goes for I'm waiting for a deep discount first.
Vampire Survivors
Genre: Auto-Shooter
System: Switch
Year: 2022
Just when you think you've seen every genre of video game under the sun, someone comes up with something new. Vampire Survivors has elements of roguelites, twin-stick-shooters, and bullet hell games, combining them into something no one had ever really seen before and birthing a popular new genre in the process.
In Vampire Survivors, you're plopped into a big top-down stage and tasked with surviving a full thirty minutes. Enemies move towards you at a steady pace, and your weapon goes off automatically, so instead of worrying about when to fire, you're more focused on positioning yourself so that your weapon hits your foes without you taking damage in return. Defeated enemies will drop gems, which you pick up for experience points. Enough experience points will level you up, at which time you are presented a list of randomly-selected weapons and buffs to choose from, allowing you to either upgrade an existing weapon or buff or grab something new. Every time a minute passes on the in-game timer, a new, stronger wave of enemies rolls in. The goal is to level up your character fast enough to make a build capable of outlasting each new wave. If you make it the full thirty minutes, the Grim Reaper himself tires of how much work you've made for him and instakills you, but the stage is marked as cleared and you get a money bonus for your efforts. This money, which is also found in treasure chests dropped by "minibosses" (just normal enemies with more health) is used to purchase new characters, as well as upgrades at a shop that serve as permanent stat boosts. This means that you'll steadily grow better and better at Vampire Survivors even if you lose again and again.
As simple as it seems on the surface, Vampire Survivors has a lot of depth. One important mechanic you'll find very useful in helping you hit that thirty-minute goal is weapon evolution. Every weapon in Vampire Survivors can be evolved in some way. The basic weapons are simple - you need to max out the upgrades for that weapon and also pick up one specific buff, and then finally open a treasure chest dropped by a miniboss that spawned after the ten-minute mark (there are exceptions to that last rule depending on the stage you're in). For example, the Magic Wand (which fires magic at the closest opponent) pairs with the Empty Tome (a book that lowers cooldown time between attacks) to create an upgraded wand that fires constantly with no cooldown at all. These upgraded weapons are incredibly powerful and are highly useful in enduring the later waves of a stage. As you progress further into the game and check off goals from a massive list of unlocks, you'll discover more and more features, levels, characters, and weapons that further complicate the proceedings, including ways to manipulate the RNG to make it easier to get the build you want like rerolling the list of choices, selecting a powerup to banish so it stops appearing, and the option to skip all of the choices and take some experience points instead. You can even unlock super-powerful secret weapons, including one capable of defeating the Reaper himself.
Vampire Survivors was created by a team of developers who usually make casino games, and it shows. There are endless testimonies online about how addictive this game is. The sound effects, the music, the way your character becomes nigh-unstoppable with a solid build and sweeps the screen of enemies, the little death noises sounding like popping bubble wrap as you vacuum up thousands of gems and level up over and over. This game has been built around tickling the brain in base, primal ways. But, astonishingly, it's not being used for evil. There are no microtransactions in Vampire Survivors, and it's being sold for a pittance (five dollars at most) on every platform it's available on. The only additional cost are a pair of two-dollar DLC packs that add more stages, items, and characters. It's remarkable how the developers resisted temptation to ruin Vampire Survivors by making it predatory, because it would have been so easy to do. It will take from you, at most, about ten bucks, and then all Vampire Survivors wants is your time. That alone deserves kudos.
For such a seemingly simple game, there's so much to do and unlock that if Vampire Survivors does get its' hooks in you - and it very well might - you'll have dozens or even hundreds of hours of playtime with it before you're satisfied. It's a fantastic game with a lot of bang for the buck, and while early runs may be discouraging, once you've unlocked features like the evolution chart and the map, you'll be well on your way to dominating the enemy hordes. Just don't expect any actual vampires, since for some reason this game opted for a running gag of not actually having any despite the title, the prominent vampire on the cover art, and the clear aesthetic and musical inspiration Vampire Survivors takes from Castlevania. (And since even a successful run ends with your death, neither part of Vampire Survivors' title is correct despite still somehow describing what this game is like pretty well.)
HoloCure: Save the Fans!
Genre: Auto-Shooter
System: PC (Steam)
Year: 2023
Not to be outdone, this game aims to one-up Vampire Survivors by providing a similar but more refined experience, and one with significant improvements over the genre's originator... and, improbably, it's not only themed after the Hololive brand of Virtual Youtubers, but it's also completely free.
"VTubers" originated in the 2010s but started to take the Internet by storm in the early 2020s. They're sort of a combination of two previously-popular things: people who commentate while playing video games ("Let's Play" and the like) and people who do video essays and represent themselves with a cartoon avatar instead of using their real face (folks like Saberspark and Matt McMuscles). The most common form this takes is a CGI or Live2D model of a cute anime girl reacting to video games. Unsurprisingly, some of these gals have gotten very popular, even within our own circle (yes, Korone is in this game), and STF is an exhaustive tribute to them.
Basic gameplay is very similar to Vampire Survivors for the most part, just with a cutesy coat of paint: You select a VTuber and jump into battle, leveling up, selecting upgrades, and earning coins you can spend to power yourself up further for the next run. A number of very wise changes have been added, however, that make STF play differently from VS. For instance, the survival time has dropped from thirty minutes to twenty, making playthroughs a little less time-intensive. Plus, you don't die when you reach the end of the level - instead, at 20 minutes in, a boss spawns. Defeat the boss and you'll properly clear the stage, getting bonus coins for your efforts. (There is still an "Endless" mode that starts actively trying to end your run at the thirty-minute mark, though, for a more VS experience.) But the most impactful change of all might be that you can aim your starting weapon and a few of the other weapons, turning STF from just an auto-shooter into something more resembling a twin-stick shooter. Marrying these two genres is like peanut butter and chocolate, and works exceptionally well to make Holocure: Save the Fans just as, if not moreso, addictive and habit-forming as Vampire Survivors.
As if that wasn't enough, there's even an entire bonus mode packed in here. Visit the Holo House to play a fishing minigame, recruit mooks to mine for coins, and purchase decorations to customize a cabin in the woods to your liking. Save the Fans couldn't be monetized due to not having a proper business deal with Hololive, but the extreme amount of effort poured into this game, especially with this completely optional sideshow, really shows how much the developer enjoys this weird universe of anime girls streaming video games. You can also see it in the cast: there's a ludicrous number of playable characters, and every single one has several powers only they can access, some of which have unique mechanics and effects, as well as their own super move that slowly recharges after each use. Even if you, like me, only have a passing familiarity with Hololive VTubers and don't recognize most of the characters on offer (STF does at least offer probably some of the most well-known Hololive members as its' starting characters, such as Gawr Gura and Amelia Watson), you'll appreciate the variety they bring to the table and the wide array of skills you can use to cleave through the enemy hordes.
The biggest problem I have with STF is probably the steep difficulty curve. Once you've gotten some upgrades, the first level is child's play, and the second level isn't too bad, but the third stage is a big step up and even max stats won't really dull the edges of the fourth and final stage's difficulty. The "recommended upgrades" you're warned to have before starting a stage are woefully inadequate, as you'll also need to have a good build (which is down to RNG) as well as excellent dodging skills and maybe some memorization, too. If you were hoping to eventually grow way too powerful for your enemies to stand a chance once you got rolling, that's not happening. Beating STF is doable, but requires a massive time sink of playing the same early levels over and over to grind up coins to make your character strong enough to have a chance. If a free timesink is what you're looking for, STF is great, but if your gaming time is limited you may want to play something else.
Oxenfree
Genre: Adventure/Story-Based/Horror
System: Switch
Year: 2016
Oxenfree is a difficult game to pigeonhole, but remarkably, it plays very similarly to a game I sung the praises of a few years ago, Jenny LeClue: Detectivu. Much like Jenny, it's a primarily story-based experience, relying on its' characters and dialogue to make an impact rather than its' occasional puzzles (which are, for the most part, even simpler and easier than the lightly-involved tasks Jenny asked of you). Also like Jenny, Oxenfree has horror elements, but it leans into them more heavily than Jenny did to the point that you could probably consider this a horror game, albeit a light one that doesn't feature blood and gore or in-your-face jumpscares (though there are some sudden moments that some players would certainly consider to qualify as jumpscares of some kind). Assuming the role of a female high school student named Alex, you, your new stepbrother Jonas, and three other kids (the goofy Ren, the grumpy Clarissa, and the "most normal" of the cast, a girl named Nona) show up on a lonely island to spend the night drinking and partying, as many other students before you had done. The island's sole permanent resident, an elderly woman, had died just a few days before your arrival, and there are some tensions bothering the fivesome as they gather, particularly in the form of a deep resentment harbored by Clarissa towards Alex for something that will become clear not too far into this fairly short adventure. Naturally, those tensions only get worse when Alex and Jonas stumble onto a supernatural phenomena that scatters the group across the island, leaving Alex and Jonas alone as they explore the island to find the others and escape. Certain forces beyond their control aren't very interested in letting them leave, though.
Oxenfree's main gimmick is how you can customize Alex's personality a bit by choosing her dialogue in many situations. As the characters around you converse, you'll frequently see two or three different dialogue options appear over Alex's head, which correspond to the positions of the Y, X, and A buttons on a Switch controller. Pressing the appropriate button has Alex say something matching the prompt. While the story is largely predetermined, there are different reactions you can get based on what you say, as well as a couple of moments where your choice actually mixes things up a good deal. For instance, at about the halfway point, Ren and Jonas get into a fierce argument as tensions bubble over. Alex is told to pick a side, with this option determining your companion for the next leg of the adventure. In my case, Alex got mad at both of them for yelling at each other during a crisis situation and took Nona with her, leaving them both to sulk. Later dialogue indicated this decision wounded Jonas, though, as he had hoped Alex would have his back, being his stepsister and all. On this note, the characters track their affinity with not just Alex, but each other as well. Whenever someone's opinion of someone else changes, a little picture of that character's head appears in a bubble over them. There is no indication of whether it's a positive or a negative change, but you can usually just assume which it was based on the dialogue.
Aside from all the talking, Oxenfree is mostly just about walking from place to place and taking in the scenery and story. The camera is extremely zoomed out, which lets you get a good look at the island, but the characters are tiny and struggle to express themselves beyond things like arm gestures, especially since their proportions make them seem even smaller (everyone is a tall, skinny beanpole, unlike Jenny LeClue's short stature and big head which make her expression easy to read even when the camera is zoomed out). The only time you get a good look at anyone is during the photographs that appear during certain loading screens - which, by the way, are pretty lengthy, around 30 seconds or so, which is kind of annoying but can actually help accentuate the mood at certain points. You have an action button to interact with things and talk to people, and you also have Oxenfree's other big gimmick, the radio. Alex carries a radio with her that she can use to tune in to various signals being broadcast by the island. Using the radio in the right place and tuning in to the right channel will remove obstacles from your path at certain points. The radio stations hide a lot of secret messages and worldbuilding, too, taking good advantage of the backstory of the island to provide additional hints for what exactly is going on. One mildly annoying issue is that it can take a while to find the right radio station to progress, though some subtle cues are given that hint you're on the right track as you flip through the stations (something that's especially needed towards the end when your radio is upgraded to reach more stations).
Oxenfree didn't grab me the same way Jenny LeClue did, but it was an interesting experience with a lot of personality, and while I didn't love the whole thing, I did really enjoy some parts of it. I don't think I'll spring for playing the sequel, though.
F-Zero 99
Genre: Racing
System: Switch
Year: 2023
Well, it finally happened! It's been nearly two decades now of F-Zero fans waiting for Nintendo to acknowledge the series again after the dual flops of the F-Zero anime and the Japan-only GBA game F-Zero Climax put them off revisiting the series. The official line is that they supposedly can't think of any new ideas for the series, but we know that's nonsense just by looking at the well-worn New Super Mario Brothers series - they're fine releasing games that don't change much as long as they're confident it will sell. F-Zero 99 isn't quite what people were hoping for. It's not a sequel to F-Zero GX. It's something else. And I initially wasn't sure I'd try it. I usually don't play online multiplayer games - I dabbled a bit with Pokemon and a couple others, but never really got into it aside from a stint in 2006 where I played a lot of Netbattle in the final months of Pokemon's third generation. And while I did play a lot of F-Zero GX, it was mostly me playing the easiest Grand Prix over and over to grind for currency to buy everything in the shop, because I wasn't a good enough player to advance the Story Mode beyond the mission that parodies Speed, nor was I able to handle the tougher Grand Prix events. On top of all that, as a Nintendo Switch Online exclusive, it seems inevitable that one day F-Zero 99 will be taken offline and shut down, just like Super Mario Bros 35 and Pac-Man 99 before it, and I generally don't like investing time in games that will be yanked out of my hands when the company doesn't feel like keeping the lights on. But despite so many things working against F-Zero 99, I gave it a try anyway... and as it turns out, this weird little experimental game is actually the most fun I've ever had playing F-Zero, and might even be one of my favorite racing games, period.
F-Zero 99 bills itself as a "battle royale", but it's a racing game. However, F-Zero did have combat and survival elements already, so it does gel well with the 99 concept even if things aren't truly whittled down to a single player. I think the best way to describe F-Zero 99 is that it's a heavily reworked remake of the original SNES F-Zero, redesigned around online multiplayer. The original four machines from the SNES - the Blue Falcon, Fire Stingray, Wild Goose and Golden Fox - are the only playable characters here, and the tracks are all straight from the SNES game, albeit most of them are widened and altered a little to accommodate for the massive player count. The visuals, too, are a close match for the SNES, but they've been given a very nice bump in quality. The framerate and scaling are both incredibly smooth, and the issues I usually have with Mode 7-style games - trying to see ahead and determining the distance of enemy racers - aren't a problem here at all (though part of that is because this a 3D game that uses sprites to mimic Mode 7). I can easily see what's coming up and gameplay feels clean and not jerky at all, which is especially remarkable since this is an online game testing 99 peoples' Internet connections at once. I don't have the best net in the world, but across hundreds of races I have yet to experience a single communication error or major lag issue, which I find remarkable - and essential, since this game would be useless if the online play was no good. The worst thing that ever happened was a pause at the starting line before the countdown, which was rare.
F-Zero 99 presents you with two ways to do online races at a time. The first option is a simple one-off race, and this is always available. The other option is a rotating "Special Event" which changes every ten or twenty minutes to become a different event. The possible events include Grand Prix (a five-race series that whittles the field from 99 down to 20 by the final race), Mini Prix (a three-race series), Pro Tracks (a guaranteed hard track to race on instead of the easier tracks seen in the quick race mode), and Team Battle (the 99 racers are divided into Pink and Green teams and score points based on performance and attacking the enemy team). To enter the Prix events, you need tickets, which you earn by playing any of the non-Prix modes. You receive points after every race which build a meter that will give you a ticket every time it fills. You also get a free ticket every day for logging in, termed your "Daily Bonus". There's a leaderboard, but it's more about tracking the most dedicated players than it is the most skilled ones, because how it works is you earn points for your leaderboard total every time you finish a Prix, rather than only maintaining your highest score in a single Prix. So the top people on the leaderboard are the people who have the flexibility of schedule to enter as many Prix events as possible, all while earning enough tickets to keep being able to enter more. Also the leaderboard resets every Sunday night anyway, so you can safely ignore it.
All that aside, how's the actual racing? Pretty great! A number of changes have been made to the SNES game's basic race formula. Your car can do a spin attack, which is great for avoiding being pushed around if you want to make sure your car hits a boost panel, ramp, or the pit area. There's a brand-new-to-the-series Skyway above the track that you can hop onto for a few seconds by filling a meter using pickups dropped from cars bumping into each other, and timing your Skyway use is really important since certain parts of it can be huge shortcuts, but you also can't wait too long because your boost button is also your Skyway button, so you can't boost normally until you use up your Skyway charge. Speaking of boosting, the genius boost system from X and GX is brought back here. Your health meter and your boost meter are the same meter, so you can conserve energy to survive dangerous sections of the track or you can boost like mad but be left in critical condition. Running out of HP will end your race (and eliminate you from contention if you're in the middle of a Prix), so it's all about that delicate balance between getting as many boosts as you dare and still having enough health to ward off enemies and obstacles. And there are plenty of obstacles - even the easiest tracks are incredibly dangerous if you're in first place, because with each additional lap more hazards are added in the form of Bumpers, NPC cars that get in the way and damage you if you hit them. There are generic Grey Bumpers, explosive Red Bumpers, and the unpredictable Blue Bumpers who are actually other players who crashed out earlier in the race. The closer you are to the front of the pack, the more Bumpers you have to deal with, and there will be few if any pickups to get you on the Skyway. The result is that you actually may not want to be in first place until the race is nearly over - it's just too dangerous up there! But the very best racers can still deal with the swarm of Bumpers and get themselves over the finish. It feels like a good mix of skill-based gameplay with some tools in the toolbox for players who need a little bit of a leg-up. It's not like Mario Kart where random items will screw you over (though a video I saw on Twitter of an unfortunate soul who was in first place on the Skyway but then was dropped back onto the track and directly into a Red Bumper, dying right at the finish line, shows that sometimes fate can decide you aren't winning today).
I think that, aside from the solid netcode, the most crucial thing F-Zero 99 gets right is that there are little victories. Let's face it: in a race of 99 people, no matter how great a player you are, most of the time you will lose. There's simply too much competition for anyone but the world's absolute best players to consistently win. It took me weeks to score a first-place finish, and I've only managed a small handful of them since, along with zero Grand Prix or Mini Prix victories. But I stuck around for a long time despite that because F-Zero 99 recognizes how the prospect of winning is kind of out of reach for most players and is built around that, so there are lots of ways for you to feel like you're winning even as you lose again and again. There's a "Rival" system where you're pitted against four other racers around your skill level and you gain points based on how many you outperform (and you lose points if you fail to beat any of them), building a letter grade for yourself. There's lots of customization options to unlock, but the goals are largely very achievable things like participating in a certain number of races or finishing in the top 25 a certain number of times. Most of the harder goals like "winning a race" and "KOing a rival" only need to be done once to earn their respective rewards. This is a game that offers congratulations for things as simple as finishing in the top fifty or surviving a Mini Prix. The result is that you're constantly working towards something, and even if you fail to achieve one goal, you probably earned progress towards another. You can even earn a badge if you get killed a lot. It's a steady drip-feed of dopamine where F-Zero 99 encourages you and cheers you on even if you're a mediocre player, which in turn motivates you to keep playing, which would then help you improve as you learn the courses and controls better. Unlocking everything is kind of out of the question for most (it requires, among other things, winning a Grand Prix with all four machines), but you can unlock like 95% of everything just through experience, persistence, and a moderate amount of skill.
There's also a very nice "Practice" mode, which is actually a time trial mode. Here, you can race by yourself to learn the courses you've unlocked, and what I really love about this one is that each of the four machines has a top time, and when you race, you'll face off against all of your ghosts at once to make an up to five-vehicle race (you can also choose to race against just the ghost that matches your current machine, or turn off ghosts entirely). You can even unlock stuff by hitting certain times in Practice, further encouraging you to master the courses.
There are plenty of potential improvements I could toss out. The rare, practically lost media status of the Japan-only Satellaview F-Zero expansion would make an excellent additional pack to add to F-Zero 99. They could also add more modes of play, particularly some single-player content or couch co-op so that F-Zero 99 can persist beyond the lifespan of its' online scene. Since writing this review, more content has come in less significant forms, such as Mirror versions of the tracks that also feature slight alterations to the obstacles, as well as a Classic mode that mimics the SNES game more closely and an option to play with only your online friends instead of random people. Even if they won't go all the way and put in more truly new tracks, what we have is still a very good and well-thought-out title I hope sticks around for a long time. Somehow, despite it not being at all the sort of game I normally play, F-Zero 99 ended up being one of my favorite games of 2023. Funny how life works sometimes.
F-Zero
Genre: Racing
System: SNES (Switch Online)
Year: 1991
Since I was enjoying F-Zero 99 so much, I decided to go back to the title that started it all, and the title 99 is based on: the first F-Zero game. The series hadn't yet found its' footing at this early stage: there's no multiplayer, you get one boost per lap instead of spending HP on boosts, and the AI isn't good enough to race fairly so on higher difficulties it instead cheats relentlessly to try and force you to lose. Racing is fine, not particularly exciting but fine. The main hazard is a stricter version of the Rank Out mechanic seen in 99, where you must be in the top three at the final lap to finish the race. There's no real podium or anything, F-Zero not even keeping track of your points across each league, so you can consider surviving a Grand Prix to be a win even if you placed third every race because there's no difference in a perfect performance vs a passing grade. My favorite thing about this game was getting a sneak preview of what awaited me in 99 when the Queen League unlocked a couple weeks into 99's life and the King League followed a couple more weeks after that. That intel came in handy for committing the courses to memory!
Suika Combination
Genre: Puzzle
System: PC (Itch.io)
Year: 2023
You may be familiar with 2048, a simple browser-based puzzle game in which you attempt to reach the number 2048 by combining numbered tiles. Combining two 1 tiles gives you a 2, two 2 tiles gives a 4, two 4 tiles results in an 8, and so on. The objective is to reach 2048 without boxing yourself in. Suika Combination is a Touhou fangame that uses a similar idea. You control a mechanism that plops Touhou characters into a big container, able to move left and right to choose precisely where you want to release them. When two of the same character touch, they merge into a different, larger character. The goal is to combine the characters until you get Suika. There's some physics-based puzzling going on here, too - you'll likely notice early on that you can use the force of falling Touhous to shove others around, especially when the bin is mostly empty, and it's possible to set up combo moves by dropping a Touhou that then merges with the one below it, and then immediately merges with the one below THAT, and so on. It's even possible to combine two Suikas, though this is difficult since it requires so many combinations (not to mention her horns get in the way of other characters moving around). Suika Combination is a simple, silly, and fun little browser game that's worth giving a try.
(Belated sidenote: Only after playing this game and writing the above review months ago did I find out it was inspired by Suika Game, a small game that went massively viral that involves combining fruits to make a watermelon and plays exactly the same. Turns out an enterprising Touhou fan simply went ahead with the obvious joke.)
Maneater
Genre: Action RPG
System: Switch
Year: 2020
One of my favorite "cult" games is Deadly Creatures, released for the Wii in 2009. In it, you play through a ten-level campaign, five levels as a tarantula and five as a scorpion, exploring the Nevada desert while humans cause trouble around you. The combat was sloppy at times and there was some repetitiveness and a general lack of polish here and there, but I loved the concept and atmosphere so much I happily ignored the drawbacks and had a great time. A planned sequel was cancelled when Deadly Creatures sold poorly, and I had always wished for another game like it. Along comes Maneater to finally answer my prayers.
An interesting thing about Maneater is how it feels so similar to Deadly Creatures despite not really being like it that much on paper. It's less realistic than Deadly Creatures (DC certainly wasn't wholly scientifically accurate, but Maneater goes much further into sci-fi territory even if most situations are fairly grounded in reality). It shares Deadly Creatures' wry, early-2000s brand of dark humor, though it has many more comical moments than DC did thanks to a lot more voice acting and flavor text, whereas DC had to put most of its' jokes in its' marketing material (like a very silly commercial depicting the scorpion as a mo-cap actor). In both games, the story of course centers more on a human than the animal you play as, but since you're a shark this time you make a much more direct and substantial impact on the plot. And while both games feature exploration and creature combat, DC is a linear experience divided up into levels, while Maneater comes packing a sizable open world divided into eight zones for you to conquer. There is a rough structure to things and you can't go anywhere you want right away, but if you want to set aside the main story for a while to mess around and do sidequests, you can.
Maneater casts you as a bull shark out for revenge against a shark hunter named Scaly Pete. Pete hunted and killed the shark's mother, then found the baby shark still inside her and scarred it so he could recognize it when it was grown. In retaliation, the baby shark bites his hand off and is thrown into the water, now alone in a swampy Louisiana bayou. The opening act of Maneater is practically a horror game, as your tiny shark is roughly the equal of the local predatory muskellunges and is easily killed by the patrolling alligators if they can catch it. This is where the RPG mechanics come in, though, as you can level up by completing quests and killing things, which earn you "nutrients" in four different flavors. Eventually your shark will grow large enough to challenge the gators, and later still you'll be so big and strong they can't put up a fight at all. You can also unlock "evolutions" for your shark to equip, allowing you to customize it to suit the situation or fit your playstyle. You can also spend nutrients to level up your equipment to make it stronger.
A common point of criticism for Maneater is that it has very repetitive missions. It's definitely not a lie - there's only a handful that are repeated in different locations throughout the adventure. Every location has chests full of nutrients to find, as well as "landmarks" (cute little points of interest that add flavor to the game world) and license plates to collect. Then there are three different kinds of "kill stuff" quests - you either have to kill a single powerful enemy, eat a certain number of non-combat animals (typically a flock that is protected by a handful of dangerous wildlife), or devour some humans in a specific location. You can even crawl onto land to collect things and attack out-of-reach humans, though unless you get some upgrades you won't be able to flop around up there for very long. Killing enough humans will alert shark hunters, who have their own progression system as you kill your way through their ranks. You're required to engage with all of this to some extent to progress the story, as the cutscenes and boss fights don't spawn until you do enough minor missions first. Gradually you'll uncover the story of Scaly Pete and his encounters with you, which in a clever method of making the story work despite your animal protagonist is presented as a reality TV series about shark hunters sort of like Most Dangerous Catch. Since the shark can't talk, you're instead regaled with a narrator whose quips as you play are the source of most of Maneater's comedy. He does a lot to make the job of killing people with a shark easier on soft-hearted folks like myself, as it's made very clear that Port Clovis, Louisiana is not a very nice place and the people here are almost universally shallow caricatures who thoughtlessly destroy the environment. Many locations in Maneater are horribly polluted and the Apex Predator bosses in particular emphasize the theme of a dying region, from being escaped, mutilated performing animals to being horribly mutated by pollution. The bull shark practically symbolizes nature getting its' revenge, like a classic giant monster movie.
There are some technical issues. It was apparently difficult for the developers to port Maneater to Switch, and the most obvious symptom is the lack of Maneater's DLC expansion, Truth Quest. The first three areas are smaller and self-contained and play very smoothly, but the other five are more wide-open and are prone to sudden loading screens as you travel around them. I also occasionally ran into minor issues like wildlife floating motionlessly in the water, again only in those last few areas and not in the first half. There was also some weirdness with the shark hunters, including a moment where I had to kill a hunter boss twice because the first time didn't count due to him losing my trail and giving up while I was looking for food to heal mid-fight, but he had not despawned because I'd kept him onscreen in the distance, so when I came back and killed him, the game didn't realize it should be in the "fighting shark hunters" state and I had to start another hunt to get him to show up again. A little annoying, but nothing too gamebreaking or terrible.
While the number of activities on offer is limited, I didn't mind the repetition and in fact was motivated enough to 100% Maneater. Most missions are simple affairs you can get done quickly, allowing for a constant sense of progress. Checking stuff off the map and watching my progress bar go up was an addictive feeling, and I played through Maneater in several days via lengthy sessions that left my right hand cramped from madly spamming ZR to bite stuff. I had a wonderful time with this game, and would be very interested in a Maneater 2 that followed a different animal in a different region of the world. Perhaps a crocodilian to allow for improved land sequences while retaining the underwater play?
Block Puzzle
Genre: Puzzle
System: Android
Year: Unclear, but possibly 2018
This game is a Goopsmom obsession. She absolutely adores Block Puzzle and has played it for a couple of years now on a regular basis. I had to see what the fuss was about and finally took a look myself. Fortunately, the hilariously generically-named Block Puzzle was the top result on the Google Play Store when I searched for "block puzzle", so I didn't have trouble finding it.
While obviously inspired by Tetris, Block Puzzle is quite different in execution. Here, you are tasked with placing pieces into a board. The pieces include the seven classic Tetris shapes as well as other pieces that use more or fewer blocks. Instead of the pieces falling from above, they appear in a tray at the bottom of the screen and you use touch controls to drag them into place on your game board wherever you like, as long as they fit (pieces cannot be moved once placed, so be careful!) You make a match when an entire row is filled vertically or horizontally. Your pieces come to you in sets of three, and while you can place these three in any order you like, they must all be placed - pieces cannot be skipped, changed, or held. In fact, you can't even rotate them. If you end up with a grid that has no room for any of the pieces you need to place, you lose.
There is a traditional endless score-chasing mode on offer, which is the only mode my mom plays, but there is also a "Challenge" mode where you take on various premade stages. Each stage tasks you with achieving a quota and has a few blocks already on the board at the start to try and work with in the early part of the level. Some of them play the same as the endless mode, just stopping once you hit the score quota, but there's also a second type of stage in play where the blocks you place have gems embedded in them. Make a match that includes the gems and they will be tallied up, the goal being to get a certain amount of each gem. Challenge Mode refreshes every few days with a new set of stages, and each set has an accompanying sequence of images you unlock as you progress through the set that gives some loose context to the puzzles. For instance, the Challenge Mode I took on was 16 stages long and told a story in three images of a woman packing up, going on a road trip, and relaxing on a beach. When this challenge expired, it was replaced with a 32-stage challenge with five images about going on vacation to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower and other major landmarks. The travel theme is cute and appropriate for a game you're likely to play while bored in a car, even if it has nothing to do with the actual gameplay.
Being a free mobile game, you might think Block Puzzle has microtransactions. Thankfully it does not, and instead it monetizes itself with ads. You'll never be interrupted mid-stage with an ad, but small banner ads do appear under your tray while playing, and every time you win or lose a stage, you'll be served a full-screen video ad. The ads are typical mobile junk fare, full of other puzzle games as well as ads for Tiktok. It could have been much worse.
There are a million games like this out there, so I have no idea who's ripping off who, but Block Puzzle seems get the job done well enough. Not a bad choice if you want to whip out a game while waiting for something else to happen.
Drancia Saga
Genre: Action
System: 3DS
Year: 2016
This is another game in the odd family of CIRCLE Entertainment games, connected to the likes of Fairune and Kamiko. The same pixelated fantasy world seen in those games appears again here. However, while those games focused much more on puzzles and mazes than combat, Drancia Saga is a purely action-based experience.
Each of the eight stages in Drancia Saga consists of a single screen. Enemies will constantly spawn in and it's your job to wipe them out. Your character will kill enemies simply by moving forward and touching them with their weapon, which sticks out in front of you at all times. However, the twist is that you can't stop moving. You can jump, ground-pound, and turn, but your character will never stop walking forward so positioning yourself can be tricky. The adventure is built around this limitation, however, and would probably be more dull without this added complication. Fallen enemies drop money, which can be used to buy upgrades for your character on the bottom screen.
Once you kill enough enemies, a boss will spawn. They're pretty simple bosses that follow strict patterns, and all of them except the last one go down in only three hits. If you die in battle, you'll start back at the beginning of the stage, but this isn't a big deal since the stages - and Drancia itself - are quite short. You can easily clear all eight stages in less than half an hour. Drancia is banking on your interest in replaying it, offering a huge variety of playable characters, most of which are locked. They have differing stats so it's not just a different sprite, but your mileage will vary as to how many times you want to do the same thing with different characters. (As a cute touch, certain games being on your 3DS will unlock bonus characters in Drancia, such as the unnamed main character of Fairune and Zizou from the Dark Witch games!)
Hypnospace Outlaw
Genre: Adventure
System: PC (Steam)
Year: 2019
Were you around for "Web 1.0"? Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter, the Internet was a very different place. It was an awkward learning period where plenty of people had heard of the Internet, but few people knew how to use it, and instead of users being slotted into one of a handful of major sites, everyone with web presence had their own little website, usually made using a free website host like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod and supported with ads. It was a different time, a time of MIDI files automatically playing in the background, of animated gifs flooding the page as decorations, of the Comic Sans font and 'webrings' of like-minded people linking their sites together. Hypnospace Outlaw remembers Web 1.0 very well, and it does its' level best to bring it back.
Set in late 1999, HO's world introduces players to Hypnospace, a unique form of Internet browsing created by the company "MerchantSoft" that is done by wearing a special headset while you sleep. Despite the sci-fi premise, the resulting digital world is incredibly similar to the real world's Web 1.0, and the main draw of Hypnospace Outlaw is that you are free to browse these pages and read what the fictional people who made them have to say. The home screen of your Hypnospace browser sorts websites based on community - there's a zone for younger users, one for middle-aged and elderly users, one for fans of a specific music genre, and so on. You start off with access to just a couple of places, but as you progress through Hypnospace Outlaw, you'll unlock more. There are pages that are hidden inside other pages, unlisted ones that require using the search tool to access, and even some very tricky-to-find pages that you need to acquire passwords or other programs to see. There are lots of interesting connections to be found, too. You'll come across a music reviewer who talks about musicians who have their own pages elsewhere on Hypnospace, multiple teenage users are big fans of the Pokemon parody Squisherz (it wouldn't be 1999 Internet without some form of Pokemania), there's a site that warns people about questionable programs you can actually seek out and download, and so on.
Hypnospace Outlaw isn't just a fake web browser, though. It's designed as an entire fake operating system, and you have a desktop with programs you can launch. You can download new backgrounds for your desktop and can also use certain images as stickers to decorate it further. There's also a music player, email, and a few downloadable minigames and virtual pets. You can even end up getting infected by a virus if you click on sketchy links, but fortunately there's an antivirus program you can buy to help remove offending illnesses... and 'buy' leads into what actually drives the gameplay of Hypnospace Outlaw.
All this recreated Web 1.0 stuff is fun on its' own, but Hypnospace Outlaw does have some actual game progression, and it's tied around your in-game job. You play as a content moderator, and your task is to review cases you are assigned of Hypnospace users breaking rules and then searching the pages of Hypnospace you can access to track down said violations, such as bullying and copyright infringement. When you find something that looks rule-breaking, you can report the offending image or text. Successful moderation will earn you HypnoCoin, which you can use to purchase programs, music, backgrounds, and other goodies for your system. Your cases are received as emails from your higher-ups, and you'll get a new one every time you finish your current one. Once you complete enough cases, you'll be able to trigger an event that moves the story forward in time a few weeks, and many of the webpages you visited before have updated with new content in the meantime. This makes revisiting them while searching for new violations a lot more interesting, especially since some of the users you flag for offending content will notice they got in trouble, and this brings me to Hypnospace Outlaw's greatest strength: The people of Hypnospace feel real.
What really makes the authenticity of Hypnospace Outlaw's vision of 1999 Internet shine through is the characters. Some of them are of course only one-note jokes, but many of them have hidden depths, little story arcs, and tiny details and references scattered around. Many users will also update their pages throughout the game, sometimes significantly. One of the highlights has to be The Chowder Man, a musician who was famous in the 80s but is now considered old and washed-up, making a living by doing advertising jingles. Several companies with Hypnospace pages use his jingles on their pages, MerchantSoft has him on staff to promote the service, and when you eventually discover his own personal page, you'll find he's gearing up for a huge comeback with a new band. As Hypnospace Outlaw progresses, you find out how his comeback concert went, and the fallout from that as it spreads across Hypnospace. By game's end, you'll have learned a lot about this supposed joke character, and it feels like he was a real musician that could have really been around in 1999 (the multiple Chowder Man music videos you can watch in-game further the illusion, too).
There are some annoyances. As you would expect with gameplay like this, there are times when you can see what looks like a violation but it doesn't actually count as one, and other times when you may feel annoyed by the limitations of your moderation tools. In one case, this is actually done intentionally when one user screenshots other users committing violations against them, but since the screenshots are hosted on the victim's page, you're forced to give them the penalties instead of the offending users to complete the case, and your boss actually notices the issue and tries to figure out what to do. There's definitely intentional commentary here on the limits of a moderating system that isn't dexterous enough to handle the job it's being given. There are also some tricky puzzles - I had to consult Google for help more and more as things went on - and a few intentionally annoying things like long loading times and "software bugs" that hamper your browsing for a while. I get the joke here - the actual video game is running fine, but it's simulating lengthy loads and other issues - but that didn't make sitting through it any less irritating after the first couple times wore out the joke's welcome. Fortunately, most annoyances are temporary, and if you focus on advancing the plot by solving your cases you can usually be rid of annoyances quickly, and once I got into the lategame, I started piecing things together on my own better and was in awe of the finale.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a video game like no other, to the point I struggled to figure out what genre to classify it as ("Adventure", a la the likes of Ace Attorney, probably comes closest). If you, like me, grew up on pre-social-media Internet, you're sure to get some enjoyment out of HO's authentic take on this one-of-a-kind era.
Also, in a lovely touch, Hypnospace Outlaw has modding tools so people can make their own web pages, which kind of brings it all full circle. Unfortunately there aren't a ton of modded pages to enjoy even years after release, but it was cool seeing any at all.
Garfield Kart
Genre: Racing
System: PC (Steam)
Year: 2013
Garfield Kart is infamous. The orange cat was already an Internet legend, with many different memes based on his comics, but the ironic fandom only escalated when he received a licensed kart racer, a genre that was absolutely saturated with low-quality Mario Kart imitators years ago. Steam's reviews section for Garfield Kart is loaded with people giving it a thumbs-up, but the text of their reviews makes clear they aren't seriously endorsing it, talking in feverish terms about how Garfield is the second coming of Christ and how much they want to bear his children and so on. It's easy to make fun of Garfield Kart, but how is it, really?
Well, it's a kart racing game and it exists.
Garfield Kart is primarily based on The Garfield Show, a CGI cartoon that was airing at around the same time Garfield Kart released. This is one area of Garfield content I have minimal experience with, so I can't say if the locations you race on here actually appeared in the show or not (though I do know that much of the music is lifted from the show). The character designs, though, are a good match. You'll recognize most of the cast if you've partaken in other Garfield media, as most of the characters you'd expect are present. Only Garfield and Jon are available at the beginning, but you'll unlock Liz, Odie, Nermal, Arlene, and Squeak along the way, all of whom are familiar characters to people who read the newspaper comics. The one character I didn't recognize was a black cat named Harry, and a quick Google reveals that, as I suspected, Harry made regular appearances on The Garfield Show. There's also a spider taking the role of Lakitu in announcing race events like starting a new lap (which are bizarrely called 'rounds' here).
Garfield Kart was originally a mobile game, which becomes clear when you see the in-game currency system. Characters are unlocked normally, but everything else costs coins. "Everything else" includes karts, spoilers, and hats. Each kart has its' own unique stats, spoilers tweak those stats, and hats are actually kind of interesting in that each one gives you an affinity for a different kind of item. A chef hat will make the pie item fly faster, for instance, and a space helmet will give you some resistance to Garfield Kart's blue shell equivalent, a trio of flying saucers that block the road and suck up racers into their tractor beam. Items are pretty strong in Garfield Kart because when you get hit by one it takes a while to recover and get back to full speed. In the 50cc difficulty, if you have any racing game chops at all, you'll spend most of the race in first place, but the items mean there's always a chance you'll get barraged and end up getting passed. You can also spend coins on "boosts" that give yourself a temporary edge, and if you don't buy one you'll have to confirm, yes, you intentionally did not buy one, and then get scolded with a "No boosts? Shame!" message after that. But there aren't enough coins to go around to afford boosts if you want to buy some of the better karts and hats (you'll find a few on the track, and you earn a modest amount after finishing a race). As you'd expect, the mobile version let you waste real money on in-game currency, but the non-mobile ports don't give you enough money-making opportunities to make up for it, and even the cheapest car will take quite a few races to afford - more than is practical. Higher difficulties are much more frustrating especially if you don't drop coins on boosts, but 50cc is fair enough. It obviously doesn't feel as smooth or nice as Mario Kart, and the characters only have a handful of voice clips to repeat (a couple different laughs when they pass someone or hit them with an item and a couple different exclamations of disappointment when they bump into a wall or get hit with an item) as they race on pretty generic tracks, but Garfield Kart is at least functional and I was able to navigate the courses without struggling with the controls very much (though the Steam version of Garfield Kart refused to read my controller so I had to play on keyboard, which was tolerable enough on 50cc but makes things much too difficult on higher levels of play).
One other thing about Garfield Kart I couldn't fit easily into discussion anywhere else: puzzle pieces. Every track has three hidden puzzle pieces (and they actually are pretty well-hidden, it was several races before I so much as saw a single one). Collect all three pieces to reveal a picture of Garfield doing something silly. Fortunately for anyone who wants to actually tackle this challenge, there's a mode that lets you do a single race on any track and you can earn the pieces there instead of trying to get them in the middle of a Grand Prix.
I'm reminded of several years ago, when I opted to watch The Emoji Movie to see if it really was the worst thing ever created by humanity, as the Internet had been hyping it up to be. It was a very generic "standard" CGI kids movie that took more than a little inspiration from the likes of Wreck-It Ralph and Inside Out, but it was just kind of... there. I didn't feel the frothing outrage other people did, it was just some movie. That's Garfield Kart. It was singled out as the epitome of humanity's failures because people thought the premise was dumb. It's not good, not at all, and I stopped playing after seeing how much of a difficulty spike 100cc was, but it certainly isn't the worst of all time, and all the Internet hatred is just people whipping themselves into a frenzy over something that really isn't worth spending all that energy yelling about. It's just a random shovelware game about Garfield going racing. That's all.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Genre: RPG
System: Switch
Year: 2017
I'd heard lots of good things about the Xenoblade series, and a copy of Xenoblade 2 was lying around the house - a failed gift for my brother, he had found it too complicated and stopped playing early on. I decided to give it a try myself, but although I did find some fun with it early on, I eventually soured on it and decided to stop playing because it was making too many mistakes and promised dozens more hours of more of the same.
Xenoblade's gameplay appears to resemble an MMORPG, but it's a single-player game. Some people may like that, but I most assuredly didn't. I found the battle system bizarre and difficult to grasp, and much less fun than a normal turn-based or action-based system would have been. You can't revisit any of the dozens of tutorials you're subjected to, which is just as well because they explain things pretty poorly anyway. Your character uses basic attacks automatically while meters fill for your skills. Timing the activation of your skills to happen at the same time as an auto-attack makes them more effective, but you're not given much visual feedback on whether or not you're timing it right and I never figured out if I was doing it correctly. You only auto-attack while standing in place and your skills only recharge through landing hits with the auto-attack, which incentivizes not moving, but in some situations you want to move around to pick up health potions or get behind an enemy (because sometimes attacking from the side or the back is more effective). Enemies will hit you automatically despite gameplay looking like an action RPG, so don't do what I did in my disastrous first real battle and continually run away from your foes to avoid attacks, wondering why they kept landing blows anyway. Tutorial after tutorial popped up to layer more and more mechanics onto this system, but it already had an unsteady base to begin with, so making it more complicated wasn't really making it any better. My least favorite part about battles, though, was how more enemies can wander over and join in the fight, and these enemies would often be of significantly higher level because you'll often find random high-level monsters lurking around areas supposedly meant for a newbie. There are multiple superbosses hanging around the first big open area you unlock, and if one of them sees you, you pretty much die instantly. The only penalty for death, at least on the easiest difficulty, is to respawn at the last checkpoint, so at least there's that, but then you have to navigate back to where you were before.
Turns out navigation sucks. Maps are gigantic and difficult to find your way in, and while you have a compass at the top of the screen, it frequently fails to help since it can't tell you if you can properly get to your destination from where you are (like, for instance, if there is a wall or a pit between you and your target). Other games I've played on Switch with open worlds like Maneater and Pokemon Violet do a much better job of clearly marking your destination, both games also letting you set a waypoint on your map you can follow, even if nothing specific is there and you just marked the area to get your bearings (though, to be fair, Maneater also had a few cases where you run into the "can't get there from here" problem, usually in the form of nutrient caches hiding in underwater tunnels). Maneater goes one step further and makes sure you can see the marker while actually playing, in the form of a pillar of light you can follow without having to constantly pull up your map to squint at tiny icons. Xenoblade doesn't offer anything like this. It does at least have a pretty good fast travel system, which you'll need to get around towns because of how overly large they are and how confusing they can be to navigate.
Quest design is of the Twenty Bear Asses variety, almost exclusively. Everyone wants you to go fetch them items. Even story quests do it. You have to go wander around and find designated search spots where you can spawn a handful of random materials. If you're lucky, you'll find the item you need, but more often you'll find something else and must continue the hunt. Having almost all progression linked to random drops makes for a miserable time as you try to find the doodads you need to progress only to find other stuff you didn't ask for. And, of course, at any time you could be seen by a hostile enemy and thrown into another monotonous battle of watching special moves recharge and hearing all your allies yell the same few canned lines again and again. And even if you do manage to complete a task, more often than not the sidequest won't end and you'll instead be given a replacement quest that asks for even more item hunting, keeping you from your meager quest rewards for even longer.
Xenoblade seemed like it would have been something I really liked. The characters are nice, the art style is good, the story was okay, and the soundtrack is wonderful, but I didn't like the battle system and I hated the quests. Upon getting hopelessly lost and consulting a guide that revealed I needed to find a secret area in order to spawn some items that were required for story progression, I decided to do a Google search asking if the quests got any better. No, it's item fetching and flailing at monsters all the way, meaning more leaning on RNG and way, way more battles. I had come into Xenoblade expecting a fantastic RPG along the lines of previous games I loved such as Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, and Skies of Arcadia. I'm not often this disappointed in a game, but when I played Xenoblade 2 I was greeted with something that was obtuse, needlessly overcomplicated, irritating, slow (by GOD is it slow), and so stuffed with RNG and navigation-based padding that it felt openly disrespectful of my time. This is also one of those games where some people tell those who aren't enjoying it that "it gets better 10 hours in". Many wonderful games can be beaten in far less than ten hours. How about a game that's good from the start? Lesson learned - I won't be touching this series again.
TMNT II: The Arcade Game
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: NES (played via TMNT Cowabunga Collection on Switch)
Year: 1989
The first TMNT game on NES was a completely different game from the popular arcade beat-em-up, and there was probably a lot of kids asking for Konami to bring the arcade experience home. Konami obliged, doing a pretty decent job at making a sort-of port for hardware that isn't really capable of delivering an arcade-style beat-em-up experience. A few new stages and bosses help make up for the downgrade in other fields like graphics and sound, and playing on the Cowabunga Collection will let you turn off two of the NES' greatest weaknesses: flicker and slowdown. With those options on to smooth out the gameplay, TMNT II ends up being pretty good! It also plays and looks almost identical to TMNT III: The Manhattan Project, the sequel that was clearly made on the same engine and that I played via emulation on my Wii years ago for an earlier installment of this review series.
Pro tip: Jumping dive kicks are your friend.
TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan
Genre: 2D Platformer/Beat-em-up
System: Game Boy (played via TMNT Cowabunga Collection on Switch)
Year: 1990
It was probably wise for Konami to take a completely different route once again for when it came time to do a Game Boy TMNT game. This thing resembles neither the arcade game nor the first NES game, and is instead a platformer with a heavy emphasis on combat. As the turt of your choice, you slowly stroll down corridor-like stages as enemies regularly jump onto the screen from the left and right and you must react to them in time to avoid losing health. It feels almost like a Game and Watch game at times as you carefully nudge yourself forward and then stop advancing to react to incoming ninjas. Occasionally a gimmick enemy, obstacle, or boss fight will occur to mix things up a bit, and you can also find secret bonus games if you touch certain out-of-the-way areas as you progress through the stages. Fall of the Foot Clan is pretty simplistic, but it's kinda fun and was clearly made with the Game Boy's limitations in mind - a wise decision.
TMNT: Turtles in Time
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: Arcade and SNES (played via TMNT Cowabunga Collection on Switch)
Year: 1991 for arcade, 1992 for SNES
Turtles in Time makes no bones about upping the ante from the original game, even if the resulting storyline is as stupid as they come. A gigantic version of Krang's robot body arrives in New York City and steals the Statue of Liberty. Just grabs it and off they go. Perhaps Shredder was planning on using the statue for ransom or something, but no details are provided so it just looks like they stole Lady Liberty for the hell of it, which is hilarious. What's more, the giant Krang robot is a background hazard in the first level, but later when you eventually face him in a boss battle, the robot suit is back down to its' usual size. Also, the Statue is stolen in broad daylight during an April O'Neal news report and the Turtles appear to leap into action immediately, and yet the first stage is set during 3 AM in the morning. In summary, this is just another Turtles beat-em-up so the story doesn't matter, and the plot appears to be intentionally ridiculous for laughs.
Turtles in Time is an evolution of the previous arcade game, with better effects (lots of voice acting), a couple new moves, and some in-level gimmicks. Time travel actually takes a few levels to become important, but eventually you'll find your chosen turtle battling it out in several different time periods, like prehistoric times, the Wild West, and the incredible highly-advanced future of 2020. You're harassed by Shredder's goons in every time period, of course, and beating bosses will (for some reason) cause the turtles to leap forward in time to the next stage... Again, it's clearly just set dressing.
The action is good, since this is a Konami beat-em-up and those guys knew what they were doing back in the early 90s with beat-em-ups. You have a small but usable selection of attacks and your foes come armed with a variety of weapons to make fighting them more interesting. What's perhaps most notable here is how your experience will drastically change depending on whether you play the arcade or SNES versions. The SNES definitely got the better game - it's a lot easier but still no cakewalk, plus it has an extra level and a few unique bosses. The arcade version packs much more voice acting and an exclusive boss of its' own, but the difficulty is ratcheted up to try and pry extra quarters out of players. Both are worth a play to see the differences in action. They play well enough, and you get all the free tokens you need to win the arcade version if you play it via the Cowabunga Collection (and there's a level select for the SNES so you can skip to your level of choice).
Guerilla War
Genre: Run-and-gun/Shmup
System: Arcade (played via SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on PC)
Year: 1987
I really do appreciate retro video game collections for a lot of reasons, and one of those reasons is because they let us cheat our way to victory. Any arcade game that lets you continue from the exact spot you died instead of booting you back to a checkpoint suddenly goes from impossible to a foregone victory thanks to the magic of infinite credits, and it means Guerilla War, a shooting game based entirely around draining quarters from desperate players, loses its' worst aspect and becomes a playable game. It's still not very good, but at least it isn't taking your money beyond whatever you paid for SNK 40th Anniversary Collection. And I actually happened to get this collection for free via Amazon Games With Prime (SNK loves this service for some reason and has dumped legions of their games onto it over the years, though none of those games are available there any more as I write this) so I didn't spend a penny!
Guerilla War is a very typical top-down run-and-gun shooting game, along the lines of Ikari Warriors, Commando, and Smash TV. You control a soldier as he pew-pews his way through an enemy army, occasionally gets to very briefly drive a tank, and dies a lot, only to repeatedly walk back onto the screen to continue shooting. Watching him die again and again and continuously trudge his way back onscreen so he could die about half a second after his mercy invincibility wore off became hilarious after a while, and I was laughing at the hilariously cheap final boss and pondering how exactly one would beat it without getting killed. You can also throw powerful grenades to blow up stuff your guns can't kill easily, and they are limited, but don't worry - you get a ridiculous 50 grenades per life, so only the very best players will ever be at risk of running out. Guerilla War was fun, but not for the right reasons. This game is more interested in stealing money than being fun to play.
Prehistoric Isle
Genre: Shmup
System: Arcade (played via SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on PC)
Year: 1989
The year is 1930, and a warplane (or two, if you're playing two-player) has come across a mysterious island crawling with prehistoric life. Supposedly just a recon mission, things get very violent very quickly.
The main gimmick of Prehistoric Isle, aside from the lovely retro-style dinosaurs strewn about, is how power-ups work. Grabbing a power-up gives you an "option", a drone that stays by your side and adds additional firepower. This is nothing special for shmups, but what is new is that you can adjust the option's position, rotating it in a circle around your craft, and depending on where it is it will do different things. For instance, putting it in front of your craft gives you a very powerful front shot but leaves you defenseless on all other sides. You'll want to rotate the option to switch to different weapons depending on the stage and enemy layout - certain sections can be made much easier if your option is contributing in the right way. Difficulty is relative, though - this is an SNK arcade game, which of course means it's a hilariously overly difficult quarter muncher just like Guerilla War before it. Prehistoric Isle feels a little less absurd in that regard than Guerilla War (It's about the same length, but I think I used fewer continues), but it's still going to take a LOT of credits to beat this, and you'd need to memorize every single aspect of the adventure perfectly AND get lucky with projectile spam to clear it on only one or two credits like the pros do.
Prehistoric Isle also gets a shoutout for its' dumpster fire of an ending, which would be absolutely rage-inducing in a longer and less silly game that cared more about its' plot, but here it's so stupid and absurd it's actually just kind of funny... though I can't imagine anyone who'd played this in an arcade being satisfied with this after dumping a jarful of quarters into the machine. (if you're curious: After slaughtering untold hundreds of prehistoric critters, the recon planes load into a big jet to leave... and out of nowhere the jet is mobbed by even more random critters and blown up, so the entire mission was for nothing. Also the island was inside the Bermuda Triangle the whole time. SPOOOOOOKYYYYY!!!)
Fragrant Story
Genre: Tactics RPG
System: 3DS
Year: 2023
One of the last games to release on the 3DS before Nintendo killed it, Fragrant Story is a tactics RPG with some interesting ideas but not a lot of room to show them. The name comes from the theme of the heroes being followers of a plant-based religion, out to save their realm from an army of evil, smelly monsters. You can play on three different difficulty levels, and this is mostly handled well but with one exception I'll get to in a bit.
The difficulty level you choose alters how many tokens you can spend on building a party from a selection of heroes with various abilities. Higher difficulty levels therefore force you to make a smaller party. Naturally, higher difficulty levels also feature more enemies. But there is a bit of a problem when it comes to the battle system. Every time a character uses an attack, a spinning dial pops up with an arrow pointing to it, the dial divided into wedges showing various outcomes of the attack (like a normal attack, a miss, or a crit). Press the A button to stop the dial and see what effect the arrow points to. On the easiest difficulty the dial stops the moment you press A, so you can easily time your attacks to do maximum damage - and, since you also control the dial for enemy attacks, you can make them miss or have the side-effects of their attacks fail. The medium difficulty makes this harder by having the dial take a second to stop, so you have to adjust for that when timing your presses. Trickier, but doable. Unfortunately, the hardest difficulty opts to make things tougher by just leaving things up to chance - when you press A to stop the dial, it will continue spinning for a random amount of time. It may stop almost instantly, it may complete half a revolution before picking something. There's no way to know and you have no control over it, so you may simply just get screwed over with no recourse. It's not complete blind luck, as the dial will, most of the time, behave similar to how it does on the medium difficulty, but it will on occasion go for an extreme. It's not that different from when a conventional RPG makes your attack miss or your foe's attack crit at the worst possible time, admittedly, but repainting an annoyance doesn't make it stop being an annoyance.
The weirdest thing about Fragrant Story, though, is the gameplay loop. One normally expects an RPG, especially a tactics game, to last a long time and have a lengthy story with lots of cutscenes. While Fragrant Story actually does boast fully-voiced cutscenes, it will only take you about ten or fifteen minutes to beat it, because there are a mere three levels. It's the tiniest RPG I've ever seen. But beating the "story mode" is just the start, as you'll quickly start unlocking more stuff. There are four "challenge" stages to unlock that have unique maps, and you also get "quick battles" that dump you into a new set of fights in the three story maps but with a randomized team. Whenever you clear something for the first time, you get a 'Mango Ticket', and clearing any level nets you in-game currency. You can use both forms of collectible at the shop to buy one-use healing items, keys to open those Challenge stages, and permanent upgrades for your party (particularly the main hero). So the real point of Fragrant Story is to tackle all eight of the things that give you a Mango Ticket - clearing Story, beating the four Challenges, and clearing the three Quick Battles - on all three difficulties, buying everything in the shop along the way. Beating most of the Hard Mode challenges will take some grinding so you can use Mango Tickets to upgrade the main hero into a formidable enough character to wipe out the enemy hordes on his own (since some of these challenges will force you to use only a single level 1 character). If you want to grind, I recommend the medium difficulty stage of the "Beeeeeeees!" challenge. Pick the guy whose special ability is to wipe out all onscreen insects at once and you're pretty much set.
Fragrant Story is a cute little game and the battle system could have worked in a larger adventure. As-is, it's a bite-sized bit of tactics gaming that is kind of forgettable but not bad, though with the store shut down so soon after its' arrival it had pretty much doomed itself to obscurity with its' poor choice of home system. It did later receive an update that expanded the size of the game significantly, though it's still small by RPG standards. A curiosity.
Slot Machine
Genre: Gambling
System: Atari 2600 (played via Atari Vault on PC)
Year: 1979
Slot Machine is a great example of the sort of nonsense you could get away with at the dawn of video gaming. It's exactly what it says it does, and there's no point to it beyond the simple novelty of a home slot machine you can play on your television.
You'll start off a rousing game of Slot Machine with a small bundle of coins. You can bet up to five coins at a time by pressing the fire button on your Atari controller, then a nudge of the joystick will start spinning those reels. The spinning reel effect is decently animated by 1970s gaming standards. The reels eventually stop, and you see what you got. Most of the time, just like in real life, you'll get nothing. If you won, though, you'll get a payout of coins that varies depending on what the match was, and then you can spend those coins on more spins. As you play, you'll notice that in addition to your own coin counter, there's another one on screen that goes up and down seemingly at random. This is a CPU "opponent" who is also playing the slots, spending random amounts of coins on each bet. Whoever goes bust first loses. You can also replace the CPU with a second human player - good luck finding someone willing to play Slot Machine with you.
Considering winning or losing comes down to an RNG within an RNG, it's pretty obvious Slot Machine is a completely luck-based game. There is no strategy, no substance, and no way to become a better player - and since it's not a real slot machine, you don't even have the fantasy of winning a bunch of money to entice you to try it. It's a harmless curiosity today and worth playing once in a compilation of Atari games for a laugh, but imagine forking over a sizable chunk of change for this in the late 1970s and think about how many other things you could have bought with that money instead. Slot Machine is nothing more than a very silly period piece and is obviously a terrible game by modern standards - or any standards, because even back then, surely they could do better than this.
Bowling
Genre: Sports
System: Atari 2600 (played via Atari Vault on PC)
Year: 1978
See, this is better! Bowling for the Atari 2600 is certainly a very crude and simplistic game, but there's an actual element of skill to it. It's a real, proper video game, with interactivity and everything!
Bowling consists of ten rounds of play for either one or two players. You move your bowler up and down at the end of the lane to position them, then press the fire button to throw the ball. What happens next depends on which game mode you've chosen. In one game mode, you can put a twist on the ball's trajectory with the joystick. In another, the ball goes straight down the lane, unable to be influenced further. And in the third, you can move the ball up and down as you please. You can also set the behavior of the pins to make them more or less likely to scatter when struck in ways that will help you score strikes and spares, and you can also play against a second player instead of just trying to beat your own best score. There's obviously not a whole lot to Bowling, but it's got enough variations give it a bit of longevity, and it's so much better at being a crude early video game than Slot Machine that it's clear that even forty-five years ago, if some guy bought an Atari around launch and had these two games for it, Bowling would definitely see a lot more playtime.
Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Atari 800 (played via Atari 50 on Switch)
Year: 1982 and 1985
These ancient and crude platformers have a kernel of a good idea but are let down by the atrocious jumping physics that plagued the oldest platform games. In both, you play as Bounty Bob and attempt to claim a room in a mine by walking over every piece of its' floor. Grabbing an item will give you a brief window of time for you to take out the otherwise-unkillable enemies patrolling the area, and you have to step carefully to avoid touching a slide and being brought back down to the ground, but the real danger lies in falling to your death because of your awful, awful jump. Bob can manage a pretty good leap sideways, but it's fixed in its' distance and angle, meaning good luck trying to pull off any kind of finesse with it. Bounty Bob Strikes Back in particular expects you to pull off precision platforming on tiny ledges with this jump in the very first stage. Yeah, sure. I understand the need for pre-NES-style games to be hard because otherwise they'd burn off all of their content in about two minutes (we saw with Leprechaun earlier what happens if they're easy), but I'd rather deal with tough levels and enemies than have the basic controls and actions of the playable character be what's making gameplay so difficult. A game that's fun to control is a game that has its' fundamentals down. A game that isn't fun to control is a game I put down.
I also tried the Atari 2600 version of Miner 2049er before playing the Atari 800 games. It's the most miserable experience of them all, with Bob moving excruciatingly slowly and mine shafts marked with lines that make them look identical to the markings used for ground you haven't walked over yet (as well as ground that must be walked over but that also sends you down the mine shaft, which is an instant kill if you're not on the first two stages, so how is that winnable?). In contrast, Bob handles a lot better on the 800 and moves at a much more satisfying clip, but that damned jump still lets him down. The Atari 800 version of Miner 2049er is the only one of these three I had any fun with, and even then, I won't be back.
Super Thunder Blade
Genre: Shmup
System: Sega Genesis (played via Sega Genesis Classics on Switch)
Year: 1989
Super Thunder Blade is the epitome of an early Genesis game. There's a special look, sound, and feel to the pre-Sonic era of Genesis titles and STB fits the mold perfectly. This was the early days, and while developers would eventually make games that looked incredibly impressive and sounded amazing on the Genesis, STB represents the first wave of efforts where they only look impressive in historical context, matched against the NES.
One of the big selling points of the Genesis in its' infancy was Sega's claim that it was the first system capable of handling proper ports of contemporary arcade games. This had long been a dream of various older systems - the Atari 2600 famously lived and died on the wildly-varying quality of its' arcade ports - and it was around this point in the history of home gaming that consoles were actually starting to catch up to the arcade experience after lagging behind throughout the 70s and 80s. The Genesis couldn't do pixel-perfect ports, but it could do a heck of a lot better than 8-bit systems could. Case in point, Super Thunder Blade. Released in arcades as just Thunder Blade, it got a Master System port, but the Genesis' predecessor proved unable to handle the scaling sprites and behind-the-back, mode-7-esque action the arcade version brought to the table. The Genesis, however, could muster up a reasonable port, and they even had the gumption to tack on that 'Super'. What made Super Thunder Blade more super than Thunder Blade? First, I should explain the actual game. I'm two paragraphs deep and we still don't know what the heck a "thunder blade" even is to begin with.
In Super Thunder Blade, you pilot a helicopter as you go through that age-old shmup formula of one vehicle against the world. Your chopper is surprisingly capable offensively but is apparently made of tissue paper because one hit instantly turns your proud whirlybird into a mangled mess of flaming wreckage. Uniquely, there are no power-ups to be had, but you don't need them. Holding down the fire button will make the Thunder Blade spew a constant stream of bullets and rockets that can handle most enemies quite easily. The tough part is dodging enemy fire and obstacles - you progress through levels automatically at a quick pace and will need to move around the screen to avoid all the stuff flying towards you. It's easy enough to get through the first level, but the second one introduces tougher obstacles like stone arches that have little room for error and can easily swipe away a life. Your greatest asset here is the air brake. Holding down the brake button will stop the autoscrolling, allowing you to reposition yourself to keep from splattering against something. You can also land the chopper for a similar effect, but never stay still for long - enemy fire will easily find you if you aren't moving. You also get a time bonus for clearing the level quickly, so high scorers can't afford to use the air brake much.
Super Thunder Blade consists of a mere four levels divided up into two halves (a miniboss fight at the end of the first half and a boss fight at the end of the second half), so it leans on its' challenge to give it longevity. On modern compilations you can dodge frustration by making liberal use of emulation features like savestates and rewind, and you may want to if you just want to experience Super Thunder Blade without banging your head against it - even with the surprisingly generous Options menu allowing Easy difficulty and up to a whopping seven lives per continue (you get three continues and can earn more lives by scoring high), Super Thunder Blade is no slouch. As for the 'Super' part of the title, the main things the Genesis port offers over the arcade original are the aforementioned options menu, cute little cutscenes before each stage showing your chopper taking off, and the miniboss fights, which weren't present in the arcade. All the minibosses are pretty simple affairs where you can pretty much just fly around in a circle to dodge all their shots and keep peppering them with your guns until they explode, but it's a nice bit of variety to break things up a little. The bosses are more interesting, with all of them being massive turret-covered behemoths you attack from above, the camera shifting perspective and limiting you to moving left and right (but you can use your air brake to let the boss move forward without you if you missed a turret). The final boss puts up an appropriate fight, but the total lack of an ending is a bit deflating. There isn't even a 'Congratulations', it just says 'The End' and the credits roll as you're shown a few nice pixel arts of the Thunder Blade. Adding even the slightest bit of story to explain what, exactly, our helicopter just accomplished would have been a nice touch to really emphasize that Super Thunder Blade wanted to build on the original Thunder Blade.
Anyway it was fine I guess.
Sonic Origins Plus
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Nintendo Switch (originally on Sega Genesis and Sega CD)
Year: 2022
I originally picked up Sonic Origins Plus, a collection consisting of the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy on Genesis plus Sonic CD, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. I've grown up with these games. On the Genesis I owned Sonic 2 (1993 birthday gift, included as the pack-in with my shiny new Genesis) and Sonic & Knuckles (1994 Christmas gift), and frequently rented Sonic 3 at the local video store. Later I picked up Sonic Mega Collection, trying out Sonic 1 at last and also racking up countless hours in all four games by messing around in debug mode, making my own levels. When Sonic Gems Collection released, I grabbed that too, finally adding Sonic CD to my repertoire in the process. I played that less than any of the others, but still quite a bit, especially spending a lot of time in the Time Attack mode, replaying stages to beat them quickly.
All four of these games play similarly, and are classic platformers. Sonic 1 revolutionized the genre with speedy sections and momentum-based gameplay that made Mario look old and "uncool" to many. Sonic 2 improved on the formula with the addition of Tails to flesh out the cast, a two-player mode, more accessible Special Stages, and more variety in the levels. Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles are two halves of one game, "Sonic 3 & Knuckles", presented here solely in their completed form. This is by far the longest game on offer, with Knuckles joining the crew and having his own unique paths through levels, new miniboss fights, 14 emeralds to collect, and more. Sonic CD is the oddball of the crew with mazelike levels that emphasize exploration and a different overall feel than the other games, but in practice it still mostly plays the same. Together, the four games tell a simple story of Sonic repeatedly defeating the troublesome Dr. Robotnik (or, as Sonic likes to call him, Eggman, a nickname the Doc has embraced) as the mad scientist uses his many inventions to try and conquer the world. Sonic CD adds time travel to the mix and Sonic 3 & Knuckles has a slightly more interesting story thanks to how Knuckles gets involved, but the main focus here is the excellent platforming gameplay.
Something that I think is Sonic's saving grace is the health system, because of how forgiving it is. You can collect rings lying around the levels and if you get hurt, you'll lose them all, but you can pick up a few that you dropped and that will let you survive another hit. You'll never die as long as you can hang on to at least one ring... unless you get crushed or drown or fall into a pit, that is. Naturally, classic Sonic is always at its' most difficult when the ring system is rendered ineffective and the game leans hard on either crushing you to death, making you fall, or denying you rings so that any attack kills you.
I thought I had played these games to death already. The main reason I got Sonic Origins was really just to make them easily accessible again, since of the core games, only 1 and 2 (via a Switch compilation) were available to me on modern televisions, which is all that's hooked up right now in my home. Much to my pleasant surprise, though, Origins does a lot to make these old games feel fresh and new again, and I was hooked very quickly into trying to make the most of this almost-definitive collection. So many lovely touches are done to make these games feel both modern and authentically retro at the same time. One of my favorites has to be the coin system. As you play the games in Origins, you'll find you have infinite lives. Every time you do something that would have earned you a bonus life in the original game (collecting 100 rings, passing certain score thresholds, etc), you'll instead get an Anniversary Coin. If you would have earned a Continue, you get three coins. And what can you do with these coins? Well, their main purpose is to unlock items in the Museum, a huge gallery of classic Sonic art, music, and videos... but you can also use coins to retry a Special Stage if you fail it.
As much as I loved the old Sonic games, I had never, ever, EVER gotten all the Chaos Emeralds and the good ending in a single Genesis-era Sonic game. The closest I ever came was managing to get the first set of emeralds in S3K, but that just had to be the one game with two sets of emeralds to collect, and I never bothered with the second set. Not only were the endings barely different when you got the emeralds, but I also disliked the Super form for draining your rings and replacing the stage music with its' own repetitive theme. Plus, in all the games besides S3K, you have a finite number of tries to get those emeralds. This is especially egregious in Sonic 1, which only gives you ten chances to earn the right to play a Special Stage, so even if you do one at every opportunity, you can only afford to mess up four times before you have to start all over. Even so, it bothered me that, despite Sonic 2 and Sonic 3K being two of my favorite games ever made and two games that had tremendous influence and nostalgia on me, I'd only ever gotten their bad endings. But with the power afforded to me by Sonic Origins, I could finally, finally do it.
And I did. It took just over thirty years and two months since the very first time I turned on my original Genesis that fateful day in October 1993, but I have gotten all the emeralds in Sonic 1, 2, and 3K, as well as all the Time Stones in Sonic CD.
It's kind of hard to overstate how much being able to say that means to me. It was something I had long since given up on ever doing, but by simply using these Anniversary Coins as a lives system for special stages, Origins made the challenge accessible enough for me to decide 'You know what? Let's give it a go', and now I've done it at last.
There's plenty more to love, too. The graphics are HD now, still the old beautiful sprites but in proper 4:3 format instead of being letterboxed in their old CRT-sized prison. 2D Sonic benefits greatly from the expanded screen real estate, letting you see more of what's around you. Some very nice graphical touches have been made here and there to touch up the titles and fix a few old graphical errors (one I appreciated was smoothing out the scrolling in Sonic 2's special stages, which made them a lot more playable to me). Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are all playable in all four titles, and playing as someone new in a game they previously couldn't access is a great way to freshen things up. They can also change how you play thanks to their special abilities. Tails can fly in every game, making him a great pick for beginners as he can fly over tricky obstacles and cheese areas that would make Sonic sweat. Knuckles can similarly perform skips and tricks with his glide and climb abilities. Amy's armed with her trusty hammer, which you can use to extend the range of her attacks (this can really come in handy in certain situations and makes Amy the best pick for a lot of boss fights). Sonic is kind of dull in comparison, sadly, but he does get an extra "Drop Dash" move and can spindash even in Sonic 1, so he's still more capable here than he was in the original games.
Mission Mode is a highlight, featuring original mini-levels using the old levels as templates and altering them to create unique challenges where you have to do things like clear the stage without defeating any enemies or collect a certain amount of rings in a time limit. You can earn coins here incredibly quickly, so if you want to unlock Museum content fast or just want to be extra sure you'll get all the emeralds in your next run, you can do a few missions and have dozens of coins in minutes. You can also do a Story Mode in which you play as Sonic and go through all four games in chronological order to form one enormous game. Each game has a Boss Rush mode where you have a limited amount of lives and must defeat all of the bosses for a particular game one after another (though you only get three lives even for the lengthy, difficult gauntlet that is S3K's rush, which I don't agree with). Beating a game will unlock Mirror Mode for that title, which flips everything to try and make another playthrough a little more interesting by throwing off your muscle memory, just like in Mario Kart. All four games get brand new lovingly animated intro and ending movies - even Sonic CD, which already had them (and those original ones are here too). The entire roster of Game Gear Sonic games also got thrown in, marking their first appearance on an HD console. If you preferred the original games with their CRT aspect ratios and limited lives, those are included too. And you can access every single Act of every single Zone of every single game individually once you've beaten it, through a massive time attack menu that lets you set your best times for everything from the boss rushes to the special stages and post them online - and even the CRT and mirror versions get their own separate entries for a truly level playing field! It's all wrapped up in a very fun presentation, each game represented with an island on the main menu upon which Sonic and pals beckon you to join them for some playtime. It's all just fun, the kind of simple, cheerful fun that video games sometimes forget about when they go hard on realism or story. Many of my favorite games are story-based, but I've never stopped loving the old Sonic games for their extremely satisfying gameplay, and this is such a wonderful way to experience them.
Buuuuut it's not completely perfect, so, the negatives! First off, the Game Gear games are just kind of tossed in here. They function, but they are horribly bare-bones compared to the loving treatment the main series got and should have gotten enhancements. Giving the Game Gear games the Anniversary treatment by increasing screen resolution, adding infinite lives, and enabling smoother gameplay and easy restarts would have been a real boon for them and gone a long way toward making them playable by modern standards. They really show their age these days, unfortunately (though some are better than others).
All the Genesis-era Sonic spinoffs are missing from this collection due to its' focus on the core series. This isn't that big a deal because the spinoffs (Spinball, 3D Blast, and Mean Bean Machine) are all available elsewhere on the Switch (and Bean Machine and Spinball are at least present here in Game Gear form), but I would have enjoyed seeing this oddball trio get the Anniversary treatment. Spinball and 3D Blast are both very hard games and would have benefited from using the Anniversary Coin system for their respective special stages (though using the save and rewind functions on Sega Genesis Classics can serve as a duct tape solution). Bean Machine already has infinite continues and doesn't benefit much from increased resolution, though, so we didn't miss a lot on that front.
As for the elephant in the room, there was a lot of hullabaloo when this collection released about two problems in particular: An abundance of glitches that weren't present in the old games (I didn't encounter anything obviously screwed up - a lot of the issues this collection had at launch had long since been fixed by the time I got my mitts on it), and three Sonic 3 levels having their music changed due to license BS. I definitely blame the music rights holders for this situation because there's no way a collection that was otherwise assembled with such obvious love for the games within would fail to include Sonic 3's complete OST without being forced to do so because of serious, steep roadblocks. I mean, yes, Icecap Zone's original theme is an iconic tune, but holding it for ransom and hurting this collection in the process is disgusting. The music used here isn't godawful (and, as it turns out, these are the original songs for the zones - the songs heard on the Genesis were last-minute replacements!), and anyone discovering these games for the first time won't notice anything amiss, so it's mostly a case of people's nostalgia bones getting tweaked.
Also, for the record, I think this collection would feel a little less impactful and solid without the Plus content. The base game minus the DLC is still good, but all the extra flourishes and especially playable Amy and the Game Gear ports make the selection on offer feel meatier, and if you get the physical edition you also get a cute little art book (though the physical edition was scorned by some for not bothering to put the Plus content on-cart, requiring a code download through the eShop to properly unlock the goodies). I suggest splurging for the complete package if you get this - keep an eye out for a sale!
Sonic Spinball
Genre: Pinball
System: Sega Genesis (played via Sega Genesis Classics on Switch)
Year: 1993
Sonic Origins was an inspiration! Immediately after taking down the core four, I decided to see if I could pull off some other clears of old-school Sonic games that had long eluded me. I'd at least gotten the bad endings of 2, 3K, and CD, but I'd never even finished Sonic Spinball! Even with the assistance provided by a modern emulation of it, it was tricky business. Spinball requires a lot of patience and some really good handling of its' kinda janky controls.
Sonic Spinball sees Sonic taking on Robotnik's latest plan almost entirely in curled-up form, working his way through the pinball-themed Veg-O-Fortress. Interestingly, this is one of only two occasions in the entire classic series that we actually see the process of Robotnik making badniks (the other occasion is in Mean Bean Machine's intro cutscene), and the only time Sonic gets to attack the badnik-making machine directly in a boss fight. Gameplay consists largely of using flippers and other mechanisms to move Sonic around the fortress, hitting the right targets to unlock the way forward. The main goal of each stage is to find all of the Chaos Emeralds inside (three in the first two levels and five in the last two). Between levels you'll also get a fun little reward in the form of a bonus game featuring a normal pinball.
Sonic controls pretty well when curled up, but he's miserable to use on the few occasions he has to walk around and jump to get where he's going. The smooth handling of the core games is nowhere to be seen here, with Sonic controlling terribly. He feels just absolutely janky. Fortunately you never have to do anything too intense with him out of ball form. Instead you can guide him while he's rolling around the tables, taking advantage of being in direct control of Sonic in order to make catching him with the flippers a breeze once you get the hang of it. The hard part is shooting him where you want him to go, as the flippers can be a little slow to fire and you need to factor that into your button presses to make sure you get him to the right places (this may just be an issue with this particular version of Spinball, though. The same collection has a laggy version of Sonic 2 that feels awful after playing the Sonic Origins version).
Sonic Spinball is a pretty tough game, though it prefers to delay you rather than kill you outright. Only a few areas have death hazards, and anything that isn't a pool of dangerous liquid is generally incapable of killing Sonic, instead bouncing him around or sending him back to an earlier area. It's an alright time, and I especially like the American 90s attitude on display here. Spinball is a US Sonic game and it shows, from the comic book and TV show characters making cameos to the totally radical lines offered up by the in-game status bar, which will show various messages as you play (and display your score when it has nothing else to talk about). Takes me back, it does.
Sonic 3D Blast
Genre: Isometric Platformer
System: Sega Genesis (played via Sega Genesis Classics on Switch)
Year: 1996
And I didn't stop there! After beating the core games and Spinball, and having beaten Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine long ago, Sonic 3D Blast was the last Genesis Sonic I'd never cleared. It was a decent time, but 3D Blast definitely needs modern conveniences like savestates to be much fun.
3D Blast offers a standard Sonic story with no twists - Robotnik is being evil, Sonic wants to stop him, he does, the end. What's different here is the gameplay. You see Sonic from an isometric perspective, able to control him in all directions. It looks impressive, and making the Genesis look good was clearly 3D Blast's main purpose. The affair kicks off with a full-motion-video sequence, and the prerendered graphics make it look like the Genesis is displaying detailed 3D models, but of course it isn't - it's just sprites that look 3D, a la Donkey Kong Country. Sonic's speed has been largely sidelined in favor of exploration. The main thrust of it is that each of a Zone's two Acts are divided up into a few segments. To progress to the next segment, you must track down five of Robotnik's robot minions, the Badniks, and destroy them to reveal the animals inside - little birds called Flickies. Unlike other Sonic games where the animals just run away, here you must pick them up and bring them with you to the checkpoint. Once all five are safely through, the way forward opens for Sonic to move on to the next segment of the Act. You can deliver the Flickies all at once if you like, and this is encouraged by giving you point bonuses, but nothing's stopping you from dropping off a few at a time, which can be handy in some levels since the Flickies will scatter if they're hit by an enemy or obstacle and Sonic will have to chase them down again.
The isometric perspective looks cool and gives 3D Blast a character and style all its' own that's totally unlike the other Genesis Sonic games, but it's also the source of many woes as the age-old struggle to control a game with this perspective arises. You need to get good at moving diagonally, and there are numerous platforming sequences here that would be utterly trivial in a normal Sonic game but are difficult challenges in Sonic 3D Blast. Even actions as simple as picking up rings and hitting item boxes can be difficult due to the controls. The atmosphere is top notch, though. The 90s CGI style is a fun one, and the soundtrack is just as fantastic as it usually is in a Sonic game. I found this game very inspiring as a kid and based many a playtime around making my own 3D Blast-esque adventures using my toys.
Unfortunately, Sonic 3D Blast is pretty difficult, particularly due to a bafflingly poor design choice - you can't stock up on lives. Early on you'll find lives in abundance, especially if you take time to go through stages slowly and carefully and collect lots of rings. The very first area, Green Grove Act 1, has over 200 rings in it, which is enough for two extra lives. This is great and all, but your life counter will stop going up once it hits 9 lives, and no matter how many more 1-ups you earn, none of them count - if you die, it goes down to 8 lives and ignores the additional ones you'd rightfully earned. This is gross, especially with how tricky and difficult the back half of this game gets. I almost never got further than the boss of the fifth zone, Volcano Valley, in my playthroughs back in the day. The inability to stock up lives on easier levels so you're ready for the tougher ones at the end is a crappy way of instituting a fake layer of difficulty and discouraging exploration because the lives you get as a reward aren't actually given to you if you have nine already. Fortunately modern emulation gets around this problem and you should have all the save states you need to get to the end of S3DB.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Genre: 2D Platformer
System: Switch
Year: 2023
It's another Mario game! The gameplay of Mario Wonder is certainly similar to the well-worn New Super Mario series on the surface: You run from left to right in a variety of platforming challenges, solving puzzles to earn collectibles along the way on a quest to save the day against Bowser, and there's co-op. The difference is in the details, where Mario Wonder is much more willing to introduce new gameplay mechanics and unique situations whereas NSMB was much more reserved in its' willingness to experiment. The graphics are also a big step up - though they may look similar at a glance, watching Wonder in motion shows much more love and care has gone into animating its' characters compared to the boring, rarely-emotive, plasticky models of the NSMB series.
While the NSMB games generally only introduced a single new power-up in each game, Wonder comes loaded with three: the Elephant, Bubble, and Drill power-ups, which are used well to solve puzzles and make unique level designs. The biggest addition is probably the Wonder Flower, though. Partway through every level, you'll be able to trigger a Wonder Flower if you can find it. The Wonder Flower does something different in every stage. Sometimes it will transform Mario and friends into new forms, other times it will introduce a new kind of obstacle or let loose with some other change like speeding up or slowing down time. Completing the Wonder Flower-powered section of the course always awards you with a Wonder Seed. You also get Wonder Seeds when you reach the goal. These seeds are the equivalent of Super Mario 64's Stars, used to unlock gates or open the world's castle. And while the Wonder Seed requirements are pretty mild, you can't stockpile them on the easy worlds - each world has its' own color of Wonder Seed, and you need that specific color to unlock things in that specific world.
One thing that hasn't changed from NSMB is that Mario is once again focused entirely on the gameplay instead of the story. Bowser using a Wonder Flower to become a sentient castle in a ploy to achieve ultimate power is a fun idea, but not much is done with it - he just patiently sits there doing nothing until you beat all the other worlds. On the plus side, there's no princess kidnapping this time so Peach is free to join the adventure, and she's even joined by Daisy! Aside from her debut in Super Mario Land where she was just a Peach clone and her playable appearance in the mobile-only Super Mario Run, this is Daisy's only appearance as a character in a mainline Mario title instead of endless spinoffs, and including her was an excellent idea considering her popularity. Now we just need Waluigi to finally show up in a Wario game...
Bosses are meh, aside from the final boss which is great. It's mostly a parade of repeated fights with Bowser Junior, though he does at least fight a bit differently every time. I admit it's a little odd that I get annoyed with repeating boss fights in Mario games but don't mind at all when Robotnik fights Sonic at the end of every zone in the Sonic Origins games... I guess Robotnik just does it better. It probably helps that I find him to be a really fun villain while Bowser Junior is just an annoying brat and not nearly as fun of a character as his father is.
Overall, Mario Wonder is... well, another Mario game. It may look a lot better than the NSMB games, and pack a lot more creative power-ups and gimmicks, but it essentially offers the same style of classic Mario 2D gameplay that the series is known for and doesn't rock the boat in terms of Mario norms aside from playable Daisy and Yoshi. If you like 2D Mario, you'll like this, and if you don't, you won't.
Octopath Traveler II
Genre: RPG
System: PC (Steam)
Year: 2023
The sequel to Octopath Traveler is incredibly similar to the first, and this is absolutely a good thing. With the once-excellent Bravely series having fallen into a rut, Octopath is the way to go for a similar sort of game.
Octopath Traveler II is essentially an old-fashioned RPG given an open world. You start off by selecting one of the eight playable characters as your lead hero. Pick someone you really like the sound of, because they will not be leaving your party for a long time. I chose Castti the apothecary, whose versatile abilities make her a great pick for just about any party - she's obviously a great healer and support character, but she is also surprisingly potent on offense. Once you've done the character's first chapter of their story, the world will open up to you and you're free to wander around, with only a handful of places locked off by plot gates. Using the map, you can see the other seven characters waiting for you. Track them down and you can add them to your party and also play the beginnings of their own stories. Assemble all eight travelers and have them help each other as they all try to achieve their goals.
The first game's strengths have all been kept. The lovely "HD-2D" style; the wonderful music and voice acting; the gripping stories; the excellent and unique combat system. And an attempt has been made to shore up the first game's biggest weaknesses, particularly the fact that due to the open-ended nature of gameplay, the cast frequently failed to interact with one another. There's still a lot of times your character will just stand there silently as another character monologues at them (particularly during sidequests), but the party chats that were so hard to access in the first game are much easier to see now (you can find them by hitting Start while in the Journal, looking at the list of a character's story cutscenes), and characters will occasionally talk to one another in certain circumstances. In particular, there are a number of cute quotes you'll hear in battle: the travelers will often call out in concern when one of their number is hurt badly, thank someone who uses an item on them, and will frequently praise each other for Breaking foes. Combine this with the fantastic voice acting and characterization for the crew, and you have eight protagonists who are all easy to like, and while I grew absolutely enamored with the wonderful Castti, I enjoyed all eight travelers and any one of them would have made a fine RPG lead - combining all of them just made them even better.
But going back to Breaking foes, a quick refresher on that fantastic battle system. Two main mechanics dominate the proceedings, the Break system and the BP system. All enemies have a row of question marks under their battle sprite, as well as a big number. Every time you hit an enemy's weakness, the number counts down by one, and if the weakness is found for the first time, the corresponding question mark will change to reveal it so you don't have to remember it. When the number hits 0, the enemy enters Break status, losing a turn and suffering a defense drop. Meanwhile, every turn your characters will earn one BP. You can spend BP on your turn to make attacks stronger or strike more times. The two systems flow perfectly into one another - you can have one character use some BP to whack an axe-weak enemy multiple times to quickly Break them, then have your next character use BP to power up a magic spell and blast the broken enemy for huge damage. This has got to be my favorite RPG battle system ever. It's smart, it's fun, it rewards a diverse party, and it's only made even better by Octopath's job system giving you so many tools to play with. Customizable characters with lots of unlockable skills are always an invitation to try and crack open the game's systems and turn yourself into an unstoppable band of heroes. The battle system did add a single new mechanic, but it's a fun one - you get to fill a super meter over time via battle, and when it's full, your character can unleash a "Latent Power" that can really turn the tide (or speed up a normal battle). Latent Powers range from maxing out your BP to giving yourself a bonus turn to being able to use a special super move, and while some are more situational than others, all of them have a purpose. Your Latent Power meter will refill fast enough that you can occasionally blow it on a random battle to make short work of it without worrying about being empty by the time you fight a boss, but not so fast that you can spam them on every battle - a good balance.
Another notable mechanic from the first game were the Path Actions that let you make use of the NPCs in various ways, like stealing items from them or getting them to follow you. In the first game, every playable character had only one Path Action, but now, they all get two. A day/night system has been added, and characters will swap between their Path Actions depending on whether it's day or night. For instance, during the day Castti has the same Path Action the apothecary in the first game, Alphyn, did: she can reveal special information about NPCs by chatting with them, provided your level is high enough. Come nightfall, though, and she can use items to slip people sleeping medicine to get them out of your way - the same function Olberic and H'aanit had in the first game, bur skipping the fighting in favor of it costing you whatever it took to acquire the items used. The sixteen Path Actions can be sorted in the same four groups as before (Information, KO NPC, acquire items, and ask to follow), but with four different approaches to getting that reward (a level requirement, a money/items requirement, a battle requirement, or RNG). You can change the time of day at will in most cases outside of Chapter 1 episodes, so this makes it much easier to have at least one character on your party who can get something done without having to rush to the tavern to swap around. That said, certain Path Actions are better than others in different circumstances - for instance, a character with something good for you to take may be highly resistant to having it stolen from them, but will be easily defeated if you fight them for it, so you may still want to swap your team around if your current squad isn't cutting it. NPCs will also often move around or disappear when the time changes to further complicate things. There are once again buttloads of sidequests to do that require you to make heavy use of Path Actions, and the lucrative rewards (not to mention the fun dialogue and fleshing out of secondary characters) encourage taking the time to do them.
One interesting thing about Octopath II is that it diverges slightly from the standard fantasy-era theming used by Octopath 1 and so many other games. This one's got more of a 19th century feel to it, with some areas boasting Victorian-era civilization, another area giving off strong vibes of the American Wild West, and there are even some very welcome steampunk elements. Not every location is like this - a number of places would fit into Octopath 1's world without issue - but there's enough to feel different. I'd love to see a third game in this series push things even further and try to set a traditional role-playing adventure in a 20th-century-style land with more recent technology, but as for what we have now it's a welcome change from the all-too-common medieval theming so many turn-based RPGs love to have and which I honestly am beginning to find stale and boring. Do we really need another "new" fantasy world with the exact same medieval tropes for the Nth time? Knights, magic, dragons, castles, ogres, they're all blurring together at this point. Merely by pushing us into roughly Civil War levels of technology (minus guns, there are no guns in Octopath 2), it managed to feel so fresh and exciting.
Octopath Traveler II might be an all-time favorite of mine. Its' notable flaws are few, and my nitpicks mostly boil down to two complaints: A small handful of the many plot threads in this game don't end as satisfyingly as I would have liked, and there is a bonus boss unlocked after beating the regular final boss who achieves its' difficulty by being outright unfair, practically requiring you to build a weird gimmick party specifically made to defeat it instead of just playing skillfully with a strong and balanced team (that said, if you do go for the gimmickry, you can defeat this thing without it ever even touching you, which is a classic example of how customizable job systems can be abused for unstoppable power). Aside from those minor complaints, it's an extremely well-made game that scratched my RPG itch very nicely, and I very much hope the Octopath Traveler series continues to receive further installments.
TMNT: Shredder's Revenge
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: Switch
Year: 2022
Shredder's Revenge is a huge improvement on the Raw Thrills TMNT game. This one is designed from the ground up to appeal to the folks who grew up with the original TMNT games, the ones included in the Cowabunga Collection. The style of the 80s cartoon is on full display here, including the classic versions of all the characters. Shredder's Revenge has a similarly goofy plot (this time Shredder's goons are attempting to pull off multiple heists at once to keep the Turtles distracted from whatever their real goal is). Gameplay is familiar, but feels really great - it's satisfying just controlling your fighter of choice, and landing hits and combos really scratches that brawler itch. Some work has been done to expand the offering a bit - this game weighs in at 16 levels that vary in length, definitely longer than any classic TMNT beat-em-up. There are also some extra challenges and sidequests you can do, things like refraining from using your super moves or taking time to look for hidden collectibles (though the straightforward design of the levels means that as long as you destroy every breakable object, you won't fail to find any goodies). For the most part though it's just an old-school brawler with gorgeous graphics and great music, perfect for playing in co-op with a friend or five.
There's also a DLC campaign that pits your character against hordes of enemies in small arenas. Unfortunately they only give you one life to clear the entire thing and your health isn't refilled between stages, and if you get KO'd you have to start all over, so the mode is extremely difficult. Considering the main game is very reasonable and accessible, it's a real shame they gatekept the DLC this way, and I was quite disappointed they surprised me with such mean difficulty. I recommend just sticking to the main game and not bothering with a DLC purchase.
Fight'N Rage
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: PC (Steam)
Year: 2017
Fight'N Rage is a game made by beat-em-up fans, for beat-em-up fans. This is obvious the moment you turn it on and it does a "rom test" while loading, as if it was an old arcade machine booting up, not to mention the screen filter that makes it look like an old-school rounded monitor is displaying the gameplay (this can be turned off in the options). Once you get into it, you'll find Fight'N Rage to be a pretty standard-style beat-em-up. Move to the right, dispose of waves of enemies, and use super attacks and combos to get out of trouble.
What surprised me about Fight'N Rage, however, was its' tone. Most beat-em-ups are pretty silly, and even the ones that deal with serious themes usually keep their tongue in their cheek, but Fight'N Rage has a ludicrous premise that it plays entirely straight. The gist is, many of the world's animals have been uplifted into human/animal hybrids, called 'mutants' in-game. Some time after this occurred, a lion mutant declared war on humanity as retribution for how humans treated animals in the past. Now, humans are second-class citizens. The lucky ones are employed by the mutants, while others are nothing more than slaves or playthings, and still others scratch out a living in tiny farm villages that lack modern amenities. Your character aims to put an end to the war on humans, and fights their way to the big boss to see their dream of peace achieved. The idea of an army of anthro animals rising up to destroy humanity is a fun framing for a beat-em-up, but despite how silly this is, Fight'N Rage treats it entirely seriously, with multiple lengthy cutscenes, bleak, dark, post-apocalyptic environments, and gruesome NPC deaths. And then on top of that, all of the female characters have extremely provocative figures and outfits, and breast boobily all over the screen whenever they appear - even the ones who are slated to die horribly. It's not all gloom and doom; there are occasional jokes to lighten the mood, and most defeated enemies just fade out like slain beat-em-up foes usually do in these games - but the dark, mature tone caught me off guard. (By the way, it's "most" because if you keep battering a beaten enemy, they will eventually explode into a pile of bones. You get bonus points for doing this.)
Fight'N Rage isn't interested in giving you an easy ride, either. You get three lives, with score the only way to earn more. You can continue all you like, but your score will drop to zero (plus one point for every time you continued) and you'll have to start at the beginning of the screen you died on. To FNR's credit, this proved a good enough balance for me to see things through. It was enough of a setback to push me to try and learn the enemies better, but not so discouraging that I quit and walked away. There are some pretty lengthy screens in this game, though, so you'll have to be both skilled and maybe a bit lucky to survive. Fight'N Rage is the kind of game that invites you to play it over and over and "git gud", offering insane-sounding challenges like achieving one-credit clears on very high difficulties. You'll also earn coins as you play the main mode, and you can use these coins in the in-game shop to buy extras like new modes, alternate costumes, and the ability to play as just about every single enemy in the entire game, even the final boss. There's also an Easy Mode you can unlock for a mere fifty coins if you're struggling too much, but the insulting pacifier icon used to represent it shows what the developers think of people who aren't very good at their game.
My biggest complaint with Fight'N Rage is that its' item distribution is very poor. You'll go through scenes where you're showered with health-restoring pickups (the classic apple and roast chicken of Streets of Rage fame are what's on the menu) and then deal with lengthy stretches of gameplay where you get little or nothing at all. Too often I found food right near the start of a stage when I didn't really need it, only to find nothing further in when I was desperately in need of a refill. Health-restoring item placement is important in any game, but nowhere is it more important than in a game like this where you can't backtrack to grab an item once you need it, and can't hold onto food to save it for later. Fight'N Rage derives no small amount of its' difficulty not from challenging enemies or dangerous obstacles (though there's plenty of those) but from simply starving you of health at critical moments.
Fight'N Rage was pretty alright, but I dunno how many times I'd want to replay it even if the shop, the alternate routes you can find, and the gigantic grid of possible endings you can find and fill in ask the player to give it many more goes than just one. It's definitely not for everyone, with its' grody aesthetic, blatant fanservice, and hardcore attitude, but it clearly understood the assignment and if this is the kind of game you're looking for you shouldn't be disappointed.
Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: PC (Steam)
Year: 2013
The Phantom Breaker series is one I know nothing about, really. A quick Google, though, explains that it's a 2D fighter. Battle Grounds is a spinoff title that moves from fighting into brawler territory and uses a chibi pixel art style as opposed to the less cutesy graphics the series normally uses. These two changes got Battle Grounds on my radar, and a few years back I acquired a copy.
PBBG is a bit different from your typical belt-scrolling brawler. Movement is strictly 2D and you can't move up and down, but you can swap between two "lanes" instead and this can be useful to dodge enemy attacks or fight your foes without hitting the various objects that contain useful items inside. Movement speed is horribly slow when walking, but fortunately you can break into a run that lets you move at a much better pace by strongly thrusting the analog stick to one side as if you're dashing in Smash Brothers.
This is an extremely Japanese game. Most gamers are no strangers to Japan's games since so many of gaming's biggest franchises hail from there (Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and Mega Man, just to name a few), but PBBG wears its' nationality on its' sleeve proudly. The voiceovers are all still Japanese, though an English text translation is provided. Most of the levels are in Japanese urban settings, and the enemy and boss design also skews heavily towards Japan cultural tropes. Even the plot has that feel to it, particularly in the banter you get with bosses before and after facing them.
Gameplay is fast-paced. Using a mix of light, medium, and heavy attacks as well as some special moves and the all-important desperation attack, your chosen anime girl carves her way through swarms of enemies, which are largely Japanese stereotypes like ganguro girls, burly delinquents, and salarymen, but several monstrous enemies get introduced a ways in to spice things up a bit and you'll also encounter troublesome bikers, flying drones, and one stage hosts an army of robots. Coins pop out of your foes upon defeat, and these are used for building your score. An emphasis is placed on comboing, and you can often juggle an already-beaten enemy to squeeze extra coins out of it. Between stages your character will level up, and you earn skill points as you gain levels that you can spend to either boost your stats or invest in a skill tree. In a nice touch, you're free to rearrange your investments at any time, learning and unlearning special moves as well as powering yourself up and down, so you won't ever be trapped in a build you accidentally made shoddy, and are free to experiment if you think trying something different will get you past a problematic boss.
I get the feeling there's more depth to the fighting than I could find. I was able to pull off the occasional parry to punish a foe, but other times I found my character stun-locked behind rapid-fire attacks and couldn't muster a response until they eventually laid off. You only get one life to clear a stage, but you're healed and your file is saved between levels, and it's a pretty generous health bar. I did need to do a second playthrough after getting stuck on the sixth level (of seven), but that gave me just barely enough level-ups that I was able to scrape past the last couple bosses. PBBG isn't an easy game, but it's not super brutal either - at least on the lowest difficulty level.
Hot Wheels: King of the Road
Genre: Racing
System: Arcade
Year: 2019
Hot Wheels: King of the Road is a good example of what modern arcade games are like. It's big, loud, shallow, and offers things you won't get with a typical home video game, such as the opportunity to win tickets.
This is one of those games where your choice of which spot at the cabinet to stand determines your playable character. Four different real-life Hot Wheels cars are available to play as, each decked out in a different color to make them quickly recognizable (there is another model of this game that has enough space for six players, and so adds two more playable cars). Once you've ponied up the tokens, you can select one of three different tracks to race on. G-Force is probably the most "normal" of the three, with a focus on relatively straightforward loops and jumps. Daredevil features switches players can hit that deploy traps to attack other players. The final track is Monster Madness, which is filled with various enemy creatures like dinosaurs and giant snakes that attack the cars.
Racing in HWKOTR is extremely straightforward, literally. Every track is just a straight shot to the end, with no major turns, and your car accelerates automatically. You're also given a nitro boost with infinite fuel, but the autoscrolling, non-splitscreen camera means you're kept from getting too far ahead of your foes. In fact, it doesn't matter who's first over the finish line. The real goal is to collect the coins scattered around the track. The player with the most coins wins and receives some tickets in recognition of their victory. The CPU is extremely easy to defeat, so if you need a small handful of tickets to get your total to a certain amount, this is a safe but perhaps inefficient way to get them. You'll also earn more tickets the more players participate, which makes sense because each player has to insert their own tokens and so the value of the tickets earned vs tokens put in would drop immensely if you had a full house but still got the same amount you'd get for a single-player run.
For extra novelty value, the machine also takes everyone's photo before the race. The winner will get a little crown placed on their photo during the brief 'congratulations' screen. Regardless of the race's outcome, you'll need to insert more tokens to do another one. HWKOTR is a silly diversion but it's nothing special, with puddle-deep gameplay and a repetitive commentator, and if you decide to play all three courses you'll see everything it has to offer in less than ten minutes.
Pac-Man Arrangement CS
Genre: Maze
System: Switch (Pac-Man Museum)
Year: 2005
I got a big surprise when I booted this one up. I remembered Pac-Man Arrangement from the Gamecube's version of Namco Museum, Namco's long-running series of slightly-different arcade compilations. Pac-Man Arrangement CS, however, is a completely different game from Pac-Man Arrangement and was first included as part of a compilation on the PlayStation Portable. PMACS does take some vague inspiration from PMA, but it's a whole new animal, starting with the fact that while the original PCA was made for vertical arcade screens, PMACS is a widescreen game that fills a modern screen much more efficiently.
Pac-Man Arrangement features gameplay similar to basic Pac-Man. You control Pac-Man as he runs around the maze and eats dots while avoiding his old enemies, the ghosts Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde. Grab a Power Pellet and the ghosts turn dark blue, signifying Pac-Man can eat them for points. As you play, however, new gimmicks are gradually introduced to the stages that make things more complicated. Elevators that move Pac-Man and the ghosts between upper and lower levels, a feather that gives Pac-Man the ability to jump, boost pads that give Pac-Man a burst of speed and let him stun ghosts, and a "gift box" item that briefly turns all the dots in the maze into Power Pellets are just a few of the new tricks added to the stages. There's also proper progression here, with six worlds to go through before the credits roll. Each of the six worlds follows a different theme, like a beach resort or a garden, and consists of four maze stages followed by a boss battle. The boss fights consist of dodging attacks until you can reach a Power Pellet, which will split the big boss up into a bunch of vulnerable blue ghosts. Pac-Man can then chomp on ghosts until the Pellet runs out, whereupon the boss regroups and resumes attacking.
Pac-Man Arrangement is a breezy, low-difficulty Pac-Man experience, at least if you play on the actual Easy Mode provided. The bosses are rendered pretty ineffectual by just continuously grabbing the infinitely-respawning Power Pellets, forcing the boss to remain vulnerable while Pac-Man leisurely dismantles it (only the final boss is able to somewhat neutralize this trick by continuing to attack while vulnerable). There can be some tricky moments but the high volume of Power Pellets, many more than in most Pac-Man maze games, make it easy to clear huge chunks of the maze while the ghosts are unable to do anything about it. It's a brief and fun little diversion, though.
Paper Mario TTYD 64
Genre: RPG
System: N64
Year: 2023
Paper Mario TTYD 64 is a mod for the N64 game Paper Mario that adds numerous features and content to the original game. The name comes from the fact that many of the additions are inspired by things the sequel game, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, did. For instance, Mario's party members are more akin to his equals here with their own HP and the ability to use items and such, instead of in the original game where they could attack but not much else and didn't even have their own HP, instead just losing a turn on the rare occasions they got attacked. Other changes include new areas, new minigames, new collectibles, some of TTYD's items and badges, and so on.
But let me back up a bit here and take this opportunity to go over PM64 itself. It's actually kind of hard for me to know where to begin. The original Paper Mario is one of my favorite games of all time. Long-time readers of my reviews may recall that it managed third place when I attempted to rank my 100 favorite games of all time, and while I think that list would look very different if I did it again in the modern day, PM64 would still be in roughly the same position, very close to the top. It's a cozy and cute adventure with low difficulty and a ton of personality, and it has charm, depth, and atmosphere that I've seen in very few other games. The story is "Peach kidnapped lol", but it's done remarkably well and is, in my opinion, the best Peach kidnapping of all time. Bowser simultaneously manages to have a goofy side but also actually feels like a real threat for once as he tries some impressive new tricks, including kidnapping Peach by stealing her entire castle with her inside and getting his mitts on the Star Rod, a legendary artifact that grants people's wishes, which he promptly uses to make himself invincible. The Star Spirits, seven deities who are in charge of the Star Rod, are overpowered and scattered to the winds, each held by one of Bowser's generals. It's Mario's job to rescue the Star Spirits and use their power to neutralize the Star Rod, allowing him to fight Bowser. What makes this time extra special though is that every time Mario achieves a significant milestone in his journey, we actually cut back to Bowser's Castle as it floats in the sky with Peach's Castle atop it, and we see what Bowser and Peach are up to. Bowser tries various schemes and plans to stop Mario, while Peach (along with a young rookie Star Spirit named Twink) tries her best to gather information for Mario, which Twink is able to relay to him. Peach isn't helpless and useless here, and is a real character with a lot of independence and spunk.
Paper Mario offers a huge world with tons to do. The main attractions are the dungeons, which have enemy encounters and puzzles to solve, but there's a lot more to Paper Mario than that. You'll find hundreds of NPCs populating the various towns and they all have something to say, with many of them getting new dialogue as you progress, especially in the hub city Toad Town. There are sidequests and secrets everywhere, and a completionist will find lots of surprising depth in the NPCs as many of them briefly take center stage for one thing or another. The turn-based battles are also great, as you use timed button presses to pull off Action Commands that help you deal more damage (and take less in return). I also love how the numbers in battles are minimalist. A lot of RPGs have massive numbers for stats, and even Pokemon is happy to go into the hundreds with its' numbers, but in Paper Mario, the strongest bosses in the game only sport 99 HP, and being able to do more than 6 damage with a single attack is considered impressive. There's also a Badge system where Mario can equip Badges to enhance his battling prowess, allowing him to do things like gain additional special moves, boost his stats, and more. Your partners are endearing, too, a fun bunch of allies who all have their own memorable moments and cute personalities, but the standout is definitely Goombario, a Goomba that's also a Mario fanboy. He's your first partner, and his special field ability is to offer commentary on every single area and NPC in the entire game, giving him by far the most dialogue of any character. There's so much going on in this game and it's all crafted with love and care by developers who were clearly passionate about the project. I freaking LOVE Paper Mario, and playing it again after years away just re-underscored that love.
As for the mod itself... well, it's got its' ups and downs. It's a huge win on the gameplay side, with even more content being piled on to an already massive game. The added partner utility is great, and the new difficulty modes are much appreciated, allowing you to crank up enemy HP and attack power by a 1.5x or 2x multiplier. This was already a pretty easy game, and it would be way too easy with all the additions if it wasn't for the ability to buff your enemies. Other tweaks were added, too, like the ability to skip the lengthy intro sequence at the start of a new game as well as a randomizer mode that shuffles the items you find inside chests and held by enemies. The bonus areas that have been added are mostly single rooms here and there with something small inside - usually a collectible you get by doing a small puzzle or obstacle challenge, sometimes a minigame or some shops or some other treat. They look nice and fit into the main world decently enough, but the mod's biggest flaw also rears its' head in these portions: The writing. Unfortunately the creator of this mod does not have the ability to properly evoke the PM64 writing style. Much of the mod-exclusive dialogue is poorly written in comparison to the original game's writing, with a general amateurish feel, which is really a shame and takes you out of the gameplay a bit. This especially shows in Goombario's descriptions of the new areas and NPCs. Some of his quips are fine, others need a lot of work, and I found one area where his speech bubble glitched and another where it was blank. Still, just being able to experience something new in a beloved old game is fun. As of this writing I've only just finished Chapter 5 (of eight), but I know I'll be seeing this one through to the end, because for me, Paper Mario 64 is timeless.
No comments:
Post a Comment