Game of the Month: Zilcho

Nope, no GOTM this time. I mean, of the many games I played in May one of them is theoretically going to be better than the rest, but this section was intended for deep dives on the big AAA stuff and long-term RPGs I'd normally be playing in-between all the retro games and Indies I was already blogging about elsewhere. This month's been a bit too busy for any of that though, which gives my backlog pile another free month to just tower there menacingly.

I have played a little more Tears of the Kingdom since April but I've yet to make any meaningful progress. I tried scouting the Depths a bit but man is it uneventful and painful and kind of unpleasant to look at down there (almost word-for-word what I said to my urologist also). There's certain big things I've discovered—one involves a certain high-flying reptile carrying something of mine and another regarding a certain series-recurring big tree that was hard to reach—but I don't feel I'm equipped to do anything about either just yet. I've tried fighting one of those Phantom Ganons that pop out after defeating the grabby hands but it, much like the lynels and gleeoks I keep waltzing into, feel like some endgame-only business I'm in no fit state to handle right now. Aggravating. Well, there's plenty of other busywork out there until I decide to bite the bullet and actually try solving some of the problems they're having over in the four non-Hylian population centers Purah told me about. Probably should get on all that, huh. I'll see if I can muster the enthusiasm for it in June.

Darling Indies and Other Gaming Tomfoolery

This month's gaming tomfoolery has almost completely been concentrated on May Mightiness, the newest iteration of my annual May Madness series. Goal this time was to revisit a bunch of Indie games I was forced to put aside because my previous PC couldn't handle them and it's been humbling to realize just how useless that old piece of crap was if these entirely benign games were too much for it. What I suspect was the case is that these Indie games, due to having small development teams, just weren't optimized very well for weaker systems. After all, not every Indie can afford to spend months tweaking the available settings to allow for every ancient, Win ME-sporting, potato-ass junkpile to run their game when 90% of the audience has something built in the last decade and will run into no issues whatsoever. You reap what you sow, or don't sow in the case of my negligible attempts to stay current. Well, I'm enjoying them now, and that's what matters.

I managed to take down seven (or I guess eight) long-standing members of my esteemed backlog, with the remainder of that shortlist moving into the standard IGotW rotation. Maybe I'll go back to old CRPGs next May: I'll have to see what I can dig up that hasn't already been covered by me in the past. After you've written almost 2,000 blogs you start to run out of material; or, at least, that'd be true for any industry that doesn't put out that number of new products a year. Hmm... I haven't done a thing on PS1 RPGs yet and I've a few of those stacked up, though how many I could get through in a single month is questionable. A future bridge to be burned: for now, the following list made for some superb delayed gratification (and be sure to click the above link for much more in-depth reviews):

• Adr1ft: Spacebound troubleshooting adventure game. Focuses around the travails of navigating zero-G in a fragile EVA suit as you move from one terminal to another. Looks amazing but the gameplay's definitely more low-key.
• The Deadly Tower of Monsters: ACE Team (the Zeno Clash/Rock of Ages guys) put together this tongue-in-cheek action-brawler thing set within a sci-fi B-movie that tries to have many plotlines at once. Gameplay's a bit basic, but there's plenty of charm to its humor and setting.
• Framed Collection: Puzzle game compilation involving switching comic book panels around to get the best result for the current protagonist. Huge sense of noir style to its sound design and visuals and for as much as it resembles a casual game it can certainly get pretty tricky in parts.
• Fract OSC: Walking sim that has you putting together the world's largest synthesizer one sound channel at a time. Trippy and contemplative, though it's easy to get lost sometimes.
• Small Radios Big Televisions: Likewise, a game that has you exploring maze-like levels set inside oil rigs while visiting micro-worlds within cassettes to unlock keys needed to progress. A mite aimless but one cannot deny the surreal low-poly PS1 style isn't somewhat compelling.
• Everything: A massively-scaled game that has you bouncing from "thing" to "thing" in a mostly rudderless pursuit of knowledge, switching scales from the galactic to the sub-atomic in pursuit of more things to inhabit. The sort of game that befits the right kind of mood.
• Spate: 2D platformer with physics puzzles that follows a lugubrious, drunken private eye as he investigates a hostile land full of terrors that may or may not be absinthe hallucinations. Grim but visually compelling, though the platforming gameplay is a little underwhelming.

WonderSwanning, Mega Driving, and Sixty-Forging Ahead

The fourth edition of my WonderSwan feature was also my favorite to write so far, despite a couple of clunkers. Checking out the earliest big revamp of the first Final Fantasy was something I'd been meaning to do for some time—the GBA Dawn of Souls remaster, which was what motivated to finally play through and complete the game over the far less accessible NES original from the '80s, was actually based on this WonderSwan facelift—and I'm always down for a Rainbow Islands playthrough, even while Putty's Party is much shorter and lacks what is probably a necessity for games about rainbows (that is to say, color) it has enough new semi-modern mechanical features to be intriguing. Finally, there's the O-Chan no Oekaki Logic picross game which, well, I'm kind of a tool for picross games. Hence me still hanging on the line for Pictlogica Final Fantasy despite its now week-long wait times for unlocking new areas. I will say O-Chan is unusually difficult as far as picross goes: definitely one for the advanced-level picrossers out there. The final two WS games of Part Four include a New Japan Pro Wrestling game originally from Yuke's (bleh) and Konami's sole contribution to the WonderSwan: a punishing Beatmania port. I'm sure worse games are waiting for me in the future of this feature though, so I appreciate anything remotely playable that comes along.

The Mega Archive is now deep in the November shovelware rush with a real dubious collection of mostly licensed shooters and sports games this month. I'd struggle to pick a highlight but if you had to put a Konami Justifier to the side of my head I'd probably go with either the perfectly OK if nothing remarkable Pink Goes to Hollywood starring the '60s animated cat or Sensible Soccer, which despite being a sports sim is at least one of the more immediately accessible ones. Notable detritus includes the heavily-scuppered Last Action Hero tie-in (which sucks extra as a fan of the movie), the RoboCop 3 tie-in which had absolutely no chance given the quality of the material it had to work with, and the notoriously disappointing Marvel crossover Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge. The next ten games I'll be covering in June will be better, so... please don't quit in despair. Or am I just trying to tell myself that?

64 in 64 was a delight this month since I got to play Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and The New Tetris, two games from my personal collection that I'd very much recommend even if they're not perhaps in the absolute highest echelon for the platform. They're also two games that probably don't need much of an introduction here, so in succinct terms I'll say that Rogue Squadron's biggest strength is its accessibility and how arcade-like its approach to Star Wars dogfighting can be while The New Tetris came up with a number of valuable new tweaks to the classic format, some of which have gone to be used in every Tetris game since. Your hint for the next 64 in 64 duo are as follows: A very kid-friendly episode, with a cutesy 3D platformer and an equally cutesy (in an ugly way) board game. Given the subject matter I should try to remember to not swear like a sailor in that one, but I can make no promises when I'm covering a THQ game.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Supraland: Six Inches Under (Supra Games, 2022)

Another real tough elimination process for the best of this month's Indies, this time combining a bunch of high-quality entries in some favorite genres instead of just all explormers all day. Seems only fair I stick to my guns and award Indie Game of the Week of the Month to the only game that received a five out of five rating: Supraland: Six Inches Under (#369), which combines 3D platforming, traverse-upgrade-enabled exploration, first-person puzzle-solving, and an amusing micro-sized (if only in terms of physical height, not scale) setting of a bunch of plasticine goofballs encountering the darker side of capitalism. Supraland's gameplay loop is just consistently engaging and its traversal upgrades uniquely suited to its format and world, so even if this expansion/semi-sequel didn't do a whole lot new just being more Supraland for me to sink my teeth into was more than enough. I've maybe become a little too easy to please, huh. Real curious what that upcoming sequel is going to be like.

Pseudoregalia (#368) is a close second place and would probably win in any other month, due to just how novel it feels as a 3D N64 platformer throwback that incorporates exploration tech and a saturnine, Team ICO aesthetic and tone to its desolate and abstract castle setting. It's the type of game where you'll regularly be thinking to myself "was I supposed to go this way? Was I even supposed to be able to go this way?" such is the versatility of its movement set and what it lets you get away with. That said, for as much as it can feel like you're sequence breaking there are sections where the opposite feels true and you're struggling with one really tough sequence or another but technically have everything you need (further upgrades might make it easier, but there's a good chance the next upgrade will be found on the other end of this current section). I enjoyed it immensely; it has a true explorer spirit to its often abstruse progression and its rare for a 3D platformer to be this unrelenting with its challenges (Demon Turf's another recent example).

Our other runners-up include the charming detective procedural adventure game Tangle Tower (#370), which is sort of like a Professor Layton and Ace Attorney crossover (that isn't the official one, anyway) that employs some neat ideas for the deduction process of figuring out the hows and whys of a case; the grisly explormer Carrion (#371), a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek misanthropic William Birkin sim that has you devour the staff of a research facility for daring to experiment on you while keeping your many squishy organs out of range of their guns and flamethrowers; and Pumpkin Jack (#372), a Selick-ian 3D platformer that has a solid Halloween presentation if perhaps a less exciting (though still impressive, given the difficulties of producing games in that genre and this all being done by one guy) gameplay core of platforming, combat, on-rails chases, and so-so mini-games. An unseasonably macabre month of Indies in retrospect, but the advent of summer tends to put me in a mood to anticipate the milder autumn months all the sooner. If ever there were three months of the year I would skip if I could...

The Bonus Indie: PowerSlave Exhumed (Lobotomy Software / Nightdive Studios, 2022)

Enter, if you dare, the realm of technical Indie disqualifications with another edition of Mento's Month's The Bonus Indie. This time I'll be looking at PowerSlave, also known as Exhumed, now also known as PowerSlave Exhumed (I see what they did there), which was first released back in 1996 as a full budget FPS made with 3D Realms's Build engine (the same one used by Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior and a bunch of others). Naturally, that would make it very much not an Indie, especially as it was published by BMG Interactive (what would later become Rockstar Games) in Europe. However, Nightdive's kinda out there doing its own thing by acquiring the rights to remake all these old FPS classics and it's hard to argue they themselves are not Indie. Well, at least back in 2022 they were; they've since been bought by Atari SA (formerly Infogrames) so really we're dealing with a morass of technicalities here. I just really wanted to play some PowerSlave this month since I went ahead and bothered to get that recent (and still active, as of writing) Humble Bundle for various Nightdive FPSes. So... that's... that's what the deal is.

Set in modern-day Karnak in Egypt, in a similar framing story to Serious Sam, the player is some covert operative superagent that gets swept along with the rest of the city in an ancient curse that reveals more about itself the further the player makes progress. Taking down mutated animals at first, the player's foes (and their own weaponry) start mundane and eventually become ever more mystical in nature. Of special note is the fact that the game has you regularly revisit older levels with new traversal upgrades which allow for more areas (and exits) to be reached, which of course makes this game an explormer. Because why else would I be playing it? Another notable deviation from the norm is the use of a "weapon power" gauge that most games would simply call ammo but for the fact that while you start with guns you'll eventually have wands and staves shooting out magic like it's Hexen; the gauge is representative of how much more you can still use that weapon before it runs out of juice, regardless of whether that juice is ammunition or magical power. Thankfully, each weapon has its own gauge so you can just switch around once you get low and are far enough into the game to have more than just the machete and pistol to fall back on (neither of which do much harm but are at least ideal for squashing bugs and destroying explosive jars, respectively).

Like the big idiot I am I started playing the game on Pharaoh difficulty (the highest) both for the sake of achievements and for the increased enemy population density which, much like in Doom, only serves to make boomer shooters like this more engaging. The difficulty modes were added into this version of the game to account for various QoL features introduced into either this remaster or one of its intermediary console ports that showed up a few years after the PC original, so in a way it's redressing a dip in the challenge level. While there's no manual saving there are at least a few checkpoints per each larger level and you can theoretically backtrack and hit an earlier one if you ever needed to save your progress again. I've been abusing it quite a bit since these jackal Anubis guys (more or less imp stand-ins) can roast my ass in four hits at this difficulty. Some stages also have parts of a transmitter: it's unclear why I need them, but the game's kind enough to give me a beeping indicator to let me know if a stage still has one so I imagine they're going to be important for something. I surmise they're going to be the most common reason to revisit places with more upgrades once I approach the endgame (along with ankhs, which act like extra energy tanks—I've already spotted one of these sitting on lava that I have no idea how to reach yet).

For now, I'm about... halfway through? Maybe? The enemies have been getting steadily tougher to deal with, though with ever more firepower to handle them this Pharaoh difficulty hasn't become overwhelming. Yet. Still, a game called PowerSlave is bound to start putting me through the wringer sooner rather than later. (I'll say that the level preceding the first boss, Temple of Set, was a real nightmare between its checkpoint scarcity and the new mummy enemies that fire homing snakes at you. Hope they don't pop up too often, though I worry they might replace all the Anubis imps.)

The Weeb Weeview

As a refreshing change of pace, I'm going to talk about three anime I've been watching this season that don't have anything to do with isekai or even the medieval fantasy genre more broadly speaking. Most of the shit I'm watching is assuredly either or both those things, don't get me wrong, with the third seasons of Reincarnated as a Slime (discussed last month) and KonoSuba being particularly worthy highlights despite their well-worn premises but even I have to admit that a constant diet of generic isekai isn't really giving the medium its due (and probably causing plenty of indigestion on top).

So, here's what I've been watching that doesn't involve fireballing goblins in the face and treating your elf girlfriend to delicious Japanese cuisine:

Wind Breaker sadly did not turn out to be a sports anime about competitive farting but instead a "bancho" style highschool brawler dramedy about a notorious school of delinquents which turn out to be community-minded, well-meaning kids with a bit of a rough image. This revelation creates a conflict in heterochromatic protagonist Sakura who has felt alienated due to his looks and is only confident in his fighting ability, choosing a highschool with the worst reputation for violence so he could rule the roost; instead, everyone there treats him kindly (with a few exceptions) and encourages him, causing his tsundere side to frequently come out. The show's since embarked on an arc involving a neighboring gang of strength-venerating hoodlums and a series of one-on-one fights that have ably introduced the rest of the show's main cast members, including an eyepatched aikido expert who reminds me a lot of Majima from his second introduction as the manager of the cabaret club in Yakuza 0 and a Deku-type (pre-powers) who's useless at fighting but good at reading people and their weaknesses and jots it all down for Sakura to review. Between the great animation behind the fights and the empathetic character work on all these individuals, friends and enemies alike, the show's shaping up to be something special. Like a River City Ransom if characters barfed out their feelings instead of just barfing.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! is a tokusatsu parody I think Jan would appreciate, taking the Power Rangers/Super Sentai template and marrying it to the kind of deeply cynical world of egotistical and psychotic superheroes that shows like The Boys make their home. The usual alien invader types attempt to conquer Earth with their monster-creating powers yet are thwarted by a team of transforming martial artists called the Dragon Keepers, but in this case the heroes then go to the aliens' floating base and massacre their entire executive class leaving behind the endlessly-regenerating grunts at the bottom of the pecking order. The ones that wear black bodysuits and get knocked down and disintegrate after a couple of high kicks. The heroes, drunk off the adulation and gratitude of Earth's citizens, then decide to arrange a weekly mock fight with the goons so they can stay in the spotlight indefinitely, keeping these nobodies in a state of terrified indentured servitude. One of them decides he's had enough and exploits his race's ability to shapeshift into anything (including humans) to infiltrate the organization and destroy it from within: being a nothing fighter though, he's going to require some inside help. The show consistently generates a high level of tension (and a mild amount of comedy) as our alien anti-hero risks constant discovery from not exactly passing himself as a human too convincingly, and the animation and visual style are both superb. Probably would help if I were a bigger fan of this genre though.

The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio is a case where I continue to be terrible at covering up my entirely chaste interest in yuri (lesbian) romance stories, despite reviewing around six or seven visual novels with that theme last year. In this anime, two classmates who are secretly also professional voice actors have their situation discovered by one of their producers and are asked with helming a two-person radio show about being normal highschoolers with a high-profile (if anonymous) side-gig. Trouble is, they can't stand each other: one is a gloomy loner who is quick to criticize others, while the other is a gregarious "gal" type who is outspoken and suffers from an inferiority complex at work. The show explores their deeply buried respect for each other that eventually becomes a fraught friendship (and possibly more, though we're not going to get there for a while if so) as well as the usual pitfalls that come from the fame spotlight, including scandals, stalkers, and imposter syndromes. There's plenty of drama but it's mostly a sweet relationship slice-of-life about the entertainment industry and fandom and rivalries that doesn't go quite as hard as, say, Oshi no Ko.

Next month on the Weeb Weeview: Way more of that isekai nonsense I mentioned. Ho boy, do I have a lot of it to get through. You will believe a man can go through life with zero taste. See you then for more anime talk (and games, time permitting).

Too Long, Do Relinks?

• Indie Game of the Week 368: Pseudoregalia
• Indie Game of the Week 369: Supraland: Six Inches Under
• Indie Game of the Week 370: Tangle Tower
• Indie Game of the Week 371: Carrion
• Indie Game of the Week 372: Pumpkin Jack
• Mega Archive: Part XL: From Last Action Hero to Virtual Pinball
• Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Four)
• 64 in 64: Episode 42
• May Mightiness

Welcome to a seasonally festive Hallowmay with Pumpkin Jack, a linear 3D platformer with a sort of MediEvil meets Ghost Rider theme as the titular Stingy Jack, a notorious crook and trickster, is resurrected by the Devil into a scarecrow body in order to defeat humanity's last best hope, the Wizard, in their war against Hell. For as metal as this all sounds, the game is very much geared towards a preteen audience with its wiseacre (though uncommonly violent) protagonist and his cowardly and sarcastic crow companion (and as a Longest Journey fan, I'll always approve of sardonic corvid sidekicks) as they defeat silly monsters and sillier bosses. Sort of like a Spawn for the recently spawned.

Pumpkin Jack's developers (which is maybe just the one guy, Nicolas Meyssonnier) keenly understands that in a genre like this, with an audience like this, the key is to keep throwing new ideas the player's way. While Pumpkin Jack does recycle its mini-games and other unique obstacles within a level, they're unique to that level alone: the game has six stages, approximately 30-45 minutes long apiece, and of the ones I've seen each had their own enemies, challenges, mini-games, and environments. Gameplay is usually a mix of platforming and combat, the latter being relatively weaker, though there's a fair number of on-rails sequences that reminded me of the dynamic that the first Jak and Daxter had, breaking up long stretches of collecting junk and beating up enemies with vehicle sections (which, towards the second game onwards, started taking over more from the on-foot parts). Its inventiveness and variety is definitely the game's strength, followed by the presentation.

I found the combat to be relatively mashy but for the fact that the developer implemented a lack of causing enemies to flinch which means that, unless you destroy them first, their melee attacks will hit unless you remember to dodge them. Most encounters therefore involve small combos followed by an evasive roll to keep out of harm's way, though you can also mix in attacks from your crow companion which can hit from a distance but require a bit of cooldown to activate again. There's also a stronger mid-air attack that also has a cooldown, but the game's kind of withholding about how long that cooldown might be. An odd decision by the game is giving the player a new weapon after every level: each new weapon is incrementally better for the most part, but you can always go back to an earlier type if the current isn't working out for you. In addition to standard melee types like a shovel and a scythe, there's also a magic sword that produces waves of energy and a shotgun which... well, might seem a little out of place against the game's fantasy backdrop but perhaps is fitting if you're fighting the minions of Hell (which are mindless monsters that will target you as often as any nearby human). You have a sturdy enough health bar and almost anything you can destroy in the environment will produce a healing effect, so the combat's never really a sticking point even for as chaotic as it can get with multiple enemies around.

The platforming's a little more palatable due to starting with a double-jump which, on top of everything else, does a wonderful job of correcting for any previously misplaced hop. As another Jak and Daxter comparison, the jumping feels very familiar with the same sort of fluid weightiness to it that can help plant you easier if not necessarily allow for any ridiculous long-jumps or maneuvers by way of a 3D Mario. It's entirely satisfactory, which is a hard thing for any platformer developer to get right while also being the most important thing to nail. The mini-games tend to be reminiscent of those that Rare N64 platformers drop you into, depriving you of your body to give you limited jumping options. These might involve playing back a sequence of musical notes Simon Says-style, directing a bomb around a maze, or a whack-a-mole challenge; each level, as stated, does something different with it and then offers two or three variations within that same level of increasing challenge.

I'm mostly positive on Pumpkin Jack (uh-oh, sounds like another 4 out of 5 is imminent) but for a few minor bugbears here and there. The combat, as stated, feels a little too unmanageable at times and the player's hitbox remarkably vulnerable. There's one annoying glitch in particular that causes the fullscreen option to break into a semi-windowed mode after every transition (say, entering a level or dying) and won't fix itself unless you go into the video options menu, tweak something, and apply the new settings. Falling into inch-high water or catching yourself on the edge of a barrier while in certain on-rails sections causes you to instantly die (with a sarcastic death message) rather than just do a small amount of damage and reset where you are, which seems overly punitive given how generous your health bar is in most other cases, and the sheer linearity and repeating mini-games can make revisiting levels for missing collectibles kind of a slog (there's two types, for the record: 20 crow skulls per level which can be spent on cosmetic skins and a single gramophone per level which I imagine will contribute towards some manner of post-game sound test). (Of course, you could just decide they're not important enough to go through the whole level again, but my brain worms deprive me of that option.) On the whole, though, the game is inventive with its challenge variants and charming with its Burton-esque spooktown aesthetic, and importantly plays well enough (platforming-wise, at least). Also, I'm a fan of how much the protagonist sound like Beavis whenever he jumps. I'm actually impressed that only one person made a whole 3D platformer of this quality level.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Folks around here are probably aware enough by now that every May I tend to take on a project wherein I do my darndest to clear out some of my long-standing backlog, usually tying together the various featured games with some manner of thematic connective tissue. My spin on some seasonal spring cleaning, as it were. Last year's feature was May Magnanimity: a focus on the many Indie games I'd picked up as part of Itch.io's enormous social justice charity bundles. This year, I've decided to go way back into the archives to take on a series of games that I'd put aside because my old PC just wasn't up to the task of running them, or at least not sufficiently well for a fair review; however, my new system is fortunately mighty enough to deal with almost anything I toss its way and so it's due time to tie up some loose ends. With many Indie games, this is often the result of poor optimization—Indie dev teams have a limited amount of time and manpower to account for every set of system specs, after all—but a few of these were graphically more intense than I anticipated.

Since many of these games have been waiting a long time for what meager limelight I can provide, I took the liberty of including the gaps between when they were first released and when I finally got around to completing them. After all, what's a good Giant Bomb feature without a little self-flagellation?

(For what it's worth, I have far more games I've had to put aside for "technological deficiency" reasons, but I'll be adding whatever I couldn't get around to this month to the usual IGotW rotation. Yeah... I'm never going to run out of subjects for that thing.)

Adr1ft

• Developer / Publisher: Three One Zero / 505 Games
• Release Date: 2016-03-28
• Date Completed: 2024-05-05
• Gap: 8 years, 1 month, 1 week

In some ways, and I'm sure developers Three One Zero would be thrilled with the comparison, Adr1ft feels like the video game version of movies like Apollo 13 and Gravity. Obviously because there's a lot of space stuff going on but more specifically in how, if you really boil down what actually happens during the story, it's almost entirely a bunch of analytical and meticulous technical troubleshooting often at a level of scientific and engineering expertise that goes well over most of the audience's heads, myself included. However, what makes both this game and the movies mentioned thrilling instead of deeply tedious is a combination of the perceived high peril of space travel as astronauts tackle the least hospitable conditions known to man in addition to the tension that is generated by same, where every error could be fatal but so could any hesitation. In some ways it becomes akin to a series of bomb defusal scenes: another slow, deliberate process that you nonetheless can't look away from.

Adr1ft follows Alex Oshima, the commander of the privately-owned space station Northstar-IV, after she rouses from unconsciousness with short-term amnesia only to find that the station has suffered a major catastrophic... space... thing... and the rest of her six-person crew are missing and presumed deceased. Though her EVA suit is badly damaged and half the station is in pieces due to explosive decompression, she's nonetheless tasked with recovering major systems in order to open the way to the station's escape pods (which seems like a pretty big design flaw) and must carefully avoid electrical dangers, flying debris, and staying outside too long as she floats her way across and through each of the station's four wings with a limited supply of oxygen which, naturally, also doubles as her thruster fuel. The gameplay is built around its first-person zero-G movement, where you're constantly micromanaging your momentum with omnidirectional thrusters and taking in reserve oxygen tanks only when you think you need them so you don't run out while heading back the same way. Thankfully, these oxygen tanks are pretty ubiquitous and your suit can scan the surroundings to point out any nearby supplies if you happen to be floating through space in a most peculiar way and could use some direction. The loop just boils down to reaching the far points of each of the four wings, restoring power (and repairing part of your EVA suit in the process, making the game more accommodating as it goes on), and heading on back to the hub to start your journey to the next wing. Along the way, there's the usual mix of audio logs and email correspondence from all five of your coworkers, as well as the coworkers themselves whom can be found by following a red flashing beacon to their final resting places. That part reminded me a little bit of 2017's Prey—particularly in how it uses environmental storytelling to explain what happened to them—and I wonder if that wasn't something Arkane Austin might've been inspired to add after seeing this game. (Man, speaking of poor suckers left to float dead in the void by an unfeeling universe: RIP Arkane Austin.)

Adr1ft is a largely passive adventure game at its core—a "walking simulator" with floating rather than walking—but at the same time excels at establishing its atmosphere (or dramatic lack thereof) and putting the cautious survival aspect front and center, so even if all you're doing is gliding from one terminal to the next the danger of imminent death by asphyxiation, electrocution, or miscellaneous space mishap is always present. Looking down on Earth is meant to be a majestic once-in-a-lifetime experience for astronauts, but you can't help but worry that it might be looming closer and closer the longer you take to fix up whatever's left that can be fixed or else waste time go around grabbing floating SSDs for collectionism's sake. It's a really attractive game too, fully recreating what a near-future private corporation space enterprise would look like (complete with random devastating explosions, if we're talking SpaceX specifically) which probably goes a long way towards explaining why I couldn't get this to work the first time. If you only liked Dead Space for the parts where you're in zero-G and have to fix things like a proper space engineer then... dang, was that probably a rough playthrough for you. No worries though, as Adr1ft might prove to be closer to what you were looking for.

Worth the Wait?: I'll say yes. Those impressive visuals definitely needed something sturdier to render.

The Deadly Tower of Monsters

• Developer / Publisher: ACE Team / Atlus USA
• Release Date: 2016-01-19
• Date Completed: 2024-05-07
• Gap: 8 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, 4 days

Man, it feels like it's been forever since I last played something from ACE Team. They're not the most underground group in Chile (that would be these guys) yet for as consistently busy as they are they're not a developer I ever seem to hear too much about, at least not in the way of appearing on major showcases like a Nintendo Direct or PS State of Play. Last notable game of theirs was the deeply strange The Eternal Cylinder, where you're an alien creature or series of alien creatures escaping the titular colossal rolling pin, but they've been trucking away with their tower defense boulder series Rock of Ages and other pursuits since I last reviewed a game of theirs (which... I think was maybe the first Zeno Clash? Though I recall mentioning Abyss Odyssey somewhere). Anyway, Deadly Tower of Monsters is paradoxically one of their more obscure games while also being one of their most accessible and immediately charming.

The idea of this top-down action/shooter game is that you're "watching" a terrible sci-fi B-movie while simultaneously also directly controlling it. It involves an enormous tower that you steadily climb throughout the game—and it does some interesting stuff with that verticality I'll get into in a moment—but not a whole lot of logical consistency in terms of enemy types or story beats or the "rules" of this sci-fi universe. The director Dan Smith, whose voiceover DVD commentary is prevalent throughout (as is the occasional quip from the exasperated sound engineer assigned to record it) as a Greek chorus, is quick to point out that in an action movie the action is all that matters and elements like plot and exposition only serve to get in the way. There's some great touches with the enemy designs in this game: most are obviously people in rubber suits or under a veneer of alien make-up, while a few others have the telltale stuttering of classic Harryhausen stop-motion. With some of the larger quadruped alien beasts you can clearly see a puppy's feet sticking out underneath. The whole game is steeped in a loving if not always reverent affection towards '50s and '60s sci-fi: for instance, one recurring sidequest involves finding five actors in ape costumes that are still wearing wristwatches (which, as is pointed out by the game, means that the actors took off their watches to wear the ape suits and then put their watches back on over it).

The gameplay is a fairly simple brawler type where you have a choice of multiple types of firearm (with an ammo cooldown meter to prevent spamming the stronger ones) and melee weapon, only two of each can be equipped at a time. The combat mostly involves crowd control, taking down the quick and persistent foes first before focusing your firepower on the larger and more dangerous enemies. You earn money dropped by enemies which can be spent on upgrades but the upgrade tree is directly connected to the game's achievements: each time you earn one, you can buy a new passive buff from a small selection, and since there's only a few unmissable achievements that come from story progression it's in your best interests to check out that list carefully and work towards its milestones. The brawlerish real-time combat and RPG-lite character development along with the humorous, self-deprecating meta commentary (and a very dumb reason provided for how the in-game economy works) immediately drew a comparison in my mind to the first The Bard's Tale reboot from InXile—the one from 2004 with voice work from a mostly unrecognizable Cary Elwes—which I think I probably liked more than most people did (no musical numbers in Deadly Tower though, for better or worse). I mentioned the verticality: there's plenty of moments where you aim your gun downwards to fight enemies chasing you from below, and you can leap off the side at any time and hit the teleport button to be returned to where you leapt off or else use the very limited jetpack to soften your descent when close to the ground, and there's plenty of secrets and other goodies found by taking the occasional plunge. It's not an exceptional game, but I took to it and its framing device a lot quicker than any of their other games. Maybe that lack of aggressive weirdness made the game less memorable to ACE Team fanatics than something like the narratively surreal Zeno Clash games or conceptually surreal The Eternal Cylinder but I'll admit to being a pretty basic guy who laughs at dumb jokes about flying monsters with visible strings. Basically.

Worth the Wait?: I'd say so. ACE Team might not always hit the mark but their games are always novel enough to be worth a look.

Framed Collection

• Developer / Publisher: Loveshack Entertainment / Surprise Attack Games
• Release Date: 2018-05-17
• Date Completed: 2024-05-18
• Gap: 6 years, 1 day

Framed Collection is a compilation of Loveshack's two Framed games, the first released in 2014 and the second in 2017, which depicts a dialogue-free story of shady figures on the run from the police while trying to protect a briefcase storing god knows what. The player's role in this narrative is to rearrange the comic book panels of this world, changing the order of events in such a way that is advantageous to the current playable character. A wrong configuration could quickly lead to an early death or arrest, but the right one should see you through to the final panel and beyond to the next "page" of their adventure.

The game soon escalates in both difficulty and complexity. Initially, you'd arrange the panels just so and watch as the narrative plays out as you designed it—sometimes you'll want to do a few dry runs just to see what you need to look out for, as it's not always obvious where the protagonist will enter the next scene or what might halt their progress—and the panels would gray out after their part is done. Later, you'll be able to shift panels on their axis to twist them around into several configurations or be able to reorder a panel after you've already moved past it once. Passing through a panel might make some permanent changes to it, such as knocking out a guard or breaking a part of the environment you used to pull off some platforming feat. The ambiguity makes for plenty of trial and error but the game never feels "unfair": it's more that you should sometimes expect the unexpected, which then becomes the expected on your next run and something to account for.

Since you're only ever dealing with a single "page" at a time there's a limit to how many panels you might be tasked to rearrange: I think I saw it go as high as twelve once, but nine is the highest I'm sure about, which mitigates the amount of possible combinations you could employ (and several can be eliminated quickly just based on the set-up: if there's a cop ready to pull a piece on you as soon as you enter that scene, clearly it's not meant to go first). There are times where it felt like I was endlessly reconfiguring the playing field though—especially with the tougher first game, so I guess either the second addressed the difficulty spikes or by that point I'd become used to Framed's tricks—so even for as brief as the game can be it'll throw enough curveballs your way to earn its keep.

Of particular note is the game's style, using silhouettes instead of people with discernable expressions to add to the level of mystique while scoring the whole thing with a noir-appropriate seedy jazz soundtrack that uses drum fills and other musical beats to represent the sound effects of bricks breaking or a security guard getting a probably-undeserved concussion with a quick briefcase to the head (I'm aware it's a sound design trick that's been used many times before in all kinds of media, but I can't help but think of Gabe Cuzzillo's Ape Out whenever I see it in action). The stories are often as ambiguous as the puzzles themselves, relying on subtext to explain what's actually going on until the ending makes things a little more explicit. Given their relatively svelte lengths the pair work well as a duo, lasting just long enough that they don't repeat themselves (or each other) too often.

Worth the Wait?: Sure. Though I'm not quite sure why I couldn't get this to run originally, since it doesn't seem that demanding. Maybe it's an Itch thing (I got it from one of those big charity bundles I mentioned).

Fract OSC

• Developer / Publisher: Phosfiend Systems
• Release Date: 2014-04-22
• Date Completed: 2024-05-23
• Gap: 10 years, 1 month, 1 day

Fract OSC (sometimes styled as FRACT OSC) is a text-free first-person adventure game with a darkened, minimalist look that is inspired by music production and in particular those based on synthesizers. Almost all its puzzles are based around producing music in some way but, conveniently for the tone-deaf amongst us, doesn't require any virtuoso leanings or musical aptitude. Instead, it's more that the process of producing music is incidental to the puzzle, which tends to be more the usual environmental kind you'd see in first-person adventure games of this type after the likes of Portal or Q.U.B.E.. It styles itself as a "Myst-like" which also might be closer to the truth: the game has that same balance of puzzles and emptiness and context-heavy storytelling.

I definitely recall the striking visuals of this back when I first played it many moons ago—my first achievement for the game was dated for 2015, to give some impression of how long this has been stored in some dusty corner of my Steam backlog—but I guess even for as texture-less as everything in this game there's a distinct smoothness to the animations and a whole lot of visual effects that I'm sure introduced a dispiriting sluggishness to my first attempt to play it. The gameplay loop is fairly standard: you're introduced to a plaza with three paths leading away, each color-coded (cyan, green, and magenta). These all link to one "channel" of an enormous synthesizer—the cyan represents the bass, the green the pads, and the magenta the leads—and each requires solving several puzzles to complete the sequence in full and activate it for the central hub. Activating them all opens the way to the second floor of this cave network, where you have one last enormous puzzle to solve to have access to the full synthesizer control panel. That's actually the hidden goal of the game: once you've unlocked all the channels and understand what each of them brings to the final composition, you're free to tinker in the game's track creation mode to produce your own synthesizer jams. Like the most elaborate KORG tutorial married to a contemplative walking simulator.

Fract OSC is cool in that sort of unconditional way that something like Rez is cool; both visually and aurally it has its own distinct approach and finds a variation of synthaethesia that instead conflates music and gameplay. The puzzles are just on the right side of approachable rather than hopelessly obtuse, and there's a semi well-hidden extra puzzle that each area doesn't tell you about but trusts you enough to find it as it's the very last step in completing that particular area. The game balances itself between walking around and interacting with the environment with a special "active" toggle that adds various prompts to your UI in an augmented reality sort of fashion: by regularly remembering to switch modes, you'll find there's much in the vicinity that can be manipulated this way. Conversely, the game's lack of hand-holding and large amounts of empty space to just wander around and get lost in can serve to detract from the core experience (unless losing any sense of place is fun for you) but I guess you can't really go around calling yourself a Myst-inspired game without a whole lot of pointless nothingness to wander around in for hours. Comes with the (frequently desolate) territory. All the same, I'm a sucker for these types of immersive first-person puzzle games and how that perspective draws you into a world where thinking and running around in circles becomes that much more pronounced and oddly therapeutic. When your whole world is just some block-sliding puzzle right in front of you, it's easy to relax and let the rest of the world fall away, and the low-lights and ambient EDM of this game only serves to enhance that feeling.

Worth the Wait?: It's a relief to finally tick this one off the list. Aren't too many games that have been waiting as long.

Small Radios Big Televisions

• Developer / Publisher: Fire Face Corporation / Adult Swim Games
• Release Date: 2016-11-08
• Date Completed: 2024-05-26
• Gap: 7 years, 6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days

Small Radios Big Televisions has a similar vibe as Fract OSC, in that it creates a minimalist low-poly world to explore with little direction or supporting dialogue. The main difference is instead of screwing around with music sequencers, you're getting lost in oil rigs for hours on end. Small Radios Big Televisions is nominally a puzzle-adventure game but this mostly boils down to poking through endless doors to find your way through maze-like areas while solving the occasional environmental puzzle along the way. As with Fract and its Myst lineage it's also a game that's cagey about its goals or what's actually going on, trusting the player to reach their own answers based on what they've been presented with. Maybe it's a lack of imagination on my part but I've no idea what that message or goal might be. Something about the transformative powers of magnetic storage, maybe.

The big gimmick, if I could reductively call it such, is that you'll occasionally find cassette tapes while exploring these oil rigs. You have a magical tape player that will actually transport to you to another world when a cassette is inserted, in a literal sense rather than the usual figurative, and these small diorama-like worlds tend to contain keys that resemble multi-faceted emeralds. However, some tapes won't have these keys on the first visit: what you need to do is find a powerful magnet and warp the tapes, which will transform their once tranquil landscapes into slightly nightmarish distortions (complete with wacky visual and audio glitches) and potentially make those elusive keys appear. Later levels will have multiple of these magnets, causing the tape worlds to warp in different ways and creating more areas to check for the keys you need to progress. Beyond that, the puzzles tend to involve moving gears around to make machinery activate or flipping switches to change the lighting conditions for advantageous reasons. One oil rig even has you raising and lowering the water level, which I'd normally take exception to except it feels way more germane to the theme of all these heavy-duty marine doors and their wheel-based opening mechanisms. So I'll give it a pass. Just for the record though, I hope puzzle/adventure game developers continue to resist the impulse to turn their games partly or wholly into Ocarina of Time's Water Temple for what I hope would be obvious reasons.

The game's been through the wringer, to put it mildly, with its developer Owen Deery (known professionally here as Fire Face Corporation) choosing to make the game freely available on their website after news that the Adult Swim Games publishing label, or more accurately its owners Warner Bros. Games, had elected to delist all their games on Steam and elsewhere for reasons that remain inscrutable even now. Knowing that one David "Enemy to All Art" Zaslav is the perpetrator behind it there's probably some incredibly minor financial gain to be made from throwing various artistic talents and their creations under the bus. He seems like the kind of guy who'd deface the Mona Lisa if said defacement was a stencil advertisement for one of his products. I tried this game a few years back but couldn't seem to run it—despite the minimalist look, it's pretty heavy on the visual distortion effects as stated—but now seemed like a prudent time to highlight it for those who may have missed out due to its awkward situation right now. That said, for as much as I want to support a beleagured developer, I can't say I particularly enjoyed all the confusing wandering that this game made its cornerstone even if visually and aurally it's definitely fascinating (in a positive, "this was clearly an intentional choice" sense of the term).

Worth the Wait?: I guess. Slaked my curiosity at least.

Everything

• Developer / Publisher: David O'Reilly
• Release Date: 2017-04-21
• Date Completed: 2024-05-27
• Gap: 7 years, 1 month, 6 days

Not sure what it is about all these contemplative, artsy games showing up on this "my old PC couldn't run this modest game somehow" list but maybe there's something about putting art above practicality that made them poorly-optimized wonders I could only stay in the dark about given that they refused to load on any device that wasn't expensive enough to run it. Then again, trying to render Everything in real time is going to take some serious computing power. David O'Reilly is some Irish guy who made a game about a big hill once and Everything is sort of a spiritual follow-up, making a natural leap in scale from mountains to everything even if it's perhaps one that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for a successive game to build on. What's left to make after you've made Everything, after all? (And excuse me for the cheap Everything jokes, but I figure Wario64's been getting away with it for years so why not me too.)

If I had to say what Everything is about, maybe something more specific than "everything", I'd probably say somersaults since that's the chief means of conveyance for most creatures in Everything. After that, though, it'd probably be about our place in the grand scheme of things and our relationship to everything else. In case the message of the game wasn't clear from spending hours jumping from plants to animals to solar systems, there's audio logs peppered throughout (they spawn and respawn randomly much like the tutorial messages, so there's no missing them—just as well, given the enormous scale of the game) from a series of lectures given by British scholar and Buddhist Alan Watts about the nature of being one with the universe whose voice has a calming effect that's germane to both the game's philosophy and to its overall chill vibe. I'm not sure I put a whole lot of stock into what's being said but I think the idea is more to get the gray matter in motion than it is to declaratively state spiritual musings as facts, for as much as it can often sound like a stodgy academic class. Either way, it fits the game's chief imperative of making you think without sounding like it's talking down to you (as opposed to a The Witness, for example) though I suppose accounts may vary.

As to what you actually do in Everything, besides everything (OK, I swear I'll stop), it's pretty much an enormous collectathon. I know, my eyes lit up too once I'd realized. You can choose to roam around the various biomes at various levels of magnification—it goes from galactic to solar to continental to "human normal" (i.e. 1-50 feet) to tiny to microscopic to sub-atomic and then loops back to galactic—and get close to other entities in order to switch focus to them. If it's a new entity, there's a brief period of "bonding" until it's logged in the in-game library and you can switch again (completing the tutorial, which is more or less the whole game as far as a sense of progression is concerned, eliminates this bonding cooldown). Taking on larger entities in the environment and grouping with similar types allows you to expand your sphere of influence with regards to what you can bond with in the vicinity, so much of the game is simply doing that over and over and logging all the new things you've found before moving on up (or down) a layer. There's not a whole lot to it beyond that, but between the casual gameplay and the interesting lectures there's something Zen-like about the game's simple (if incredibly large-scaled, since there's more than 1,000 things to inhabit) approach. In addition to all that, you can also sing (communicates) and dance (which, much like the sexytime dances of Viva Pinata, leads to new life) but they seem to mostly only exist for the sake of screwing around. Pretty much the same purpose behind the dance emote in online shooters and MMOs. Everything definitely isn't for everyone but as the kind of weirdo whose favorite part of Katamari Damacy was rolling up new types of stuff and checking them out the library of objects later, this scratched the same itch.

Worth the Wait?: Yeah. I turned around on it quickly after being prepared to dismiss it as artsy BS. Then again, I just like collecting things. My brain is sick.

Spate

• Developer / Publisher: Ayyo Games
• Release Date: 2014-03-28
• Date Completed: 2024-05-28
• Gap: 10 years, 2 months

Spate is a 2D platformer that has an alcoholic private detective infiltrate a physically-bizarre disaster site (sorta like Annihilation) in order to track down a missing millionaire businessman. Since the protagonist, Tim Bluth, has had an absinthe addiction since losing his daughter some time ago he's never quite sure if the trippy visuals are due to the unstable grasp on reality that the disaster site, nicknamed Zone X, contains or his own mind messing with him. The game's mostly cagey about this also. Beyond that, it's a fairly straightforward platformer with obstacles and traps to overcome as well as a few flying sequences that come straight out of Flappy Bird (which, granted, in 2014 was a much bigger deal than it is now).

I've actually covered this game before, back towards the end of 2014 when I was checking out a bunch of possible last-second additions to my GOTY list for that year. I ran into a game-breaking glitch, determined it was probably a hardware issue given the game's intense visual effects, and put the game aside from some point in the future when it would no longer be a factor. Ten years is a heck of a while to wait, but it turned out to be an accidental parallel to the game's story as Bluth lost his daughter a similar amount of time previously. The game was developed by Ayyo Games but really one person in particular: Eric Provan, a CG modeller for numerous big-budget CG animated movies from Disney and Sony. I guess this was an idea for a short he had that he decided would work better as a video game, putting the story's "unreliable narrator" device to use in throwing wrenches at the player that may or may not be real. The visuals are definitely the highlight of the game: there's a murky neon-green fog to everything that represents the absinthe-addled mind of the protagonist, and a few cases where some enormous creature or a conversation with himself proves to be pure hallucination, though the perils of Zone X are very real based on what you can actually walk on and interact with.

The game is narrated with a noir movie voiceover throughout, giving the players a clear sense of the character's interiority and current mental state as the hallucinations serve to rattle him ever further as well as the stark reminders of his deceased child, who frequently pops up as a transparent figure in the background and foreground, due to how she passed away in this very same accursed area. It's not all "crazy drunk man gets lost in the fog of his own mind", as an external narrative slowly forms regarding this missing millionaire and what lies at the center of Zone X, but the game never has you buy fully into the idea that the hero didn't just invent aspects of the current adventure wholesale. One interesting mechanic is that you can take a swig of your drink at any time, which does the discombobulating factor of the landscape no favors as it serves to distort it further, but your jumping height is greatly increased and might often serve as a means of skipping past harder platforming challenges or else make them far easier to handle. No telling what relying too much on your alcohol problem will do, though, especially given how close to the edge this traumatic journey has put the poor sot.

I enjoyed Spate enough for its narrative and visuals, though the gameplay itself leaves much to be desired due to some swimmy physics and a bunch of glitches both visual and mechanical everywhere I turned. There's a moving platform on a central pivot that you're meant to tilt one way with cannonballs, but it keeps hitting something at a specific spot in its rotation: turns out there's an invisible platform there, and I can't imagine why it wouldn't be visible as being able to see it would explain intuitively what this puzzle involves. Other annoying glitches include some very LittleBigPlanet "slipping off platforms that aren't perfectly flat" business, which made those games almost unplayable, and certain physics-based props like a launcher button occasionally dysfunctional. The game checkpoints generously and is otherwise pretty short at an hour and change, so it's not like the game gets too dragged down by its flaws, but there's a certain lack of polish involved. Spate is definitely a game worth checking out for its presentation alone and tolerated for everything else. (Just a shame that it doesn't appear to be available on Steam any more: I picked it up in an ancient Groupees bundle if memory serves.)

Worth the Wait?: Sorta. Like Fract OSC, I've had this one waiting in the wings for far too long.

Last week you might recall that I broke my streak of endless explormers on this feature by playing Tangle Tower, a delightful whodunnit adventure game, so I want to assure all those unsettled by this recent development that we are fully back into exploring big maps for traversal abilities with this week's game Carrion from Phobia Game Studio. I know, it was a scary and uncertain time on Indie Explormer of the Week but now the healing can finally start. Carrion's a bit unusual as far as this genre is concerned. Most of that is due to being an enormous amorphous blob of tendrils and teeth that very much has a bone to pick with humanity and will express that displeasure by picking their bones of all their tasty flesh. Its other idiosyncrasies are of course tangentially related to the above, in as far as what your immediate goals are and how you traverse the underground laboratory complex that you woke up in.

Carrion feels like an evolution of that old DrinkBox Studios game Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, with a similar pitch (albeit in a somewhat more somber tone) of an unstoppable B-movie monster run amok on our suddenly quite vulnerable-seeming species, in that the game regularly takes advantage of your flexible form to enter any sort of vent or small passageway your meaty form can squeeze into like an octopus. Enemies will quickly open fire on you if they spot you and despite having a dozen eyes, mouths, and presumably vital organs it doesn't take much punishment for them to be rid of you, if only temporarily (you leave "deposits of biomass" at every save point, so really you're just regrouping after dying in a more literal sense), so stealth and using the environment is usually key to winning fights. A typical encounter with one or more of the armored goons you can't eat (spoilsports) might involve making a ruckus on one side of the room only to emerge and grab them from the other, slamming them into the ceiling and floor until they stop twitching. Others might involve a classic xenomorph move of pulling them through a vent and dumping their bodies somewhere inconspicuous either for fastidious reasons or because they'll be easier to recover for some later snacking. Foes will continue to get harder to deal with, between employing flamethrowers and armored exosuits (wow, so it really is like Aliens), but most enemy types have some sort of weakness or blind spot to exploit if your powers alone aren't sufficient.

Speaking of powers, it wouldn't be an explormer if you didn't regularly acquire new abilities and they run the gamut between being able to brute force certain barriers or use short bursts of invisibility to escape laser tripwires and human detection. The powers are linked to your current size: as you gain abilities you increase in mass, but there are certain soupy pools (I didn't ask) where you can temporarily leave behind big chunks of yourself in a monster gumbo in order to access skills only your smallest form has access to and then return to bulk back up later. Most of Carrion's flow spends about an equal amount of time between the stealthy combat encounters and environmental puzzle-solving exploration. Despite not really being a game about dialogue and communication—you aren't interested in either, because you're a big scary monster—there's enough contextual business to get some idea of what's going down, including a trio of flashbacks as a group of humans explore a recently discovered anachronistic ruin, possibly waking you up in the progress, and there's signs everywhere that indicate where you are and how much "progress" you've made in breaching each area of this science facility built on top of said ancient ruin full of cool stuff. The progress, in this case, indicates how much of the facility you've breached, how many of the abilities you've absorbed from specimen tanks, and the optional containment units which more often than not will require you to come back later with more upgrades to access them.

Given the subject matter, you might not be surprised to learn that this is a very gooey and violent game that's very not suited for children unless they're really cool. Humans exist only as minor irritants and protein for the most part and nary a sojourn through this facility's innards is complete without pulling apart a bunch of hapless employees whose only sins were wanting to expand humanity's scientific understanding of the universe and also being too delicious. Everywhere His Royal Blobness goes he leaves behind viscera, painting the walls in pink goop as a handy telltale sign to show where you've been, and the game is fond of dropping you into creepy low-light conditions (you can bust many of the lightbulbs yourself, if you decide you prefer the murk) with a certain cold, gray grimness permeating both the human structures and the natural cave complex they sit upon and within. Lot of cool sound design, especially if you like terrified screaming and who doesn't, and it leans very hard on its monster movie aesthetic. Conversely, it's a bit of a one-trick pony as a result, but the regular influx of new upgrades serve to improve the combat as well as the traversal more often than not and with a relatively svelte run time of about six or seven hours the resulting combination means it's a game that won't lose your attention for long. It can maybe be a little obtuse at times about where to go next, but that's a criticism you could level towards the entire genre (and, in many cases, explormer fans tend to prefer feeling things out themselves rather than have a big handy arrow). The lack of a map is a pain for backtracking purposes, but the optional containers do usually at least have a diamond-shaped icon somewhere in the near vicinity to point you the right way.

I quite liked Carrion, though that's coming from someone who appreciates an explormer with a bit of novelty to its premise and presents something atypical when it comes to either combat (wrenching dudes through vents never gets old) or platforming (this game technically has none, since you can pull yourself through any passage as long as there's a wall or ceiling to crawl on). I liked those Mutant Blob Attack games, Carpenter's The Thing, and Radical Entertainment's Prototype series (in decreasing order of interest) and this game definitely scratches a similar itch as those. That is to say specifically, the itchiness produced by this worrisome-looking rash I received when I accidentally brushed up against that glowing meteorite while on an evening mountain hike. Meh, it's probably nothing.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Welcome back once again to another episode of 64 in 64, wherein we continue to dispel any fanciful notions about the N64 being "kind of a great console, when you get right down to it". Well, I say that, except I liked the two games covered this month quite a lot. That's right, it's a rare positive episode of 64 in 64, where I walk away at the end feeling refreshed and hopeful for the future of this feature (or what little of it remains). That, my friends, is what we call a distinct lack of pattern recognition.

As promised, we're proceeding with a themed list for every even-numbered entry until the finale and this time I want to talk about the strangest Japan-only games I was able to dig up. I realize it's a little trite to harp on how unusual Japanese games can be, and possibly also a bit xenophobic, but these are concerns that Japanese companies themselves often have to consider when it comes to figuring out whether or not to localize and publish their games overseas. It's usually a case of finding the right distributor if they can't just get someone big like Nintendo to do it, and if there's licensed properties involved there's often a heap of trouble figuring all that out, but sometimes a game is so absolutely unsuited for localization because of the amount of explanation required that they won't even bother; I suspect that was the case for many of the following.

1. Wonder Project J2: The sequel to a SFC game where you communicate with a robot child to help them adjust to human society. Notable for its Ghibli-esque visuals.
2. 64 de Hakken!! Tamagotchi: Minna de Tamagotchi World: A sugoroku board game based on the Tamagotchi toyline.
3. Susume! Taisen Puzzle Dama: Toukon! Marutama Chou: A Puyo Puyo-style puzzle game with multiple odd opponents, including a sapient axolotl.
4. Ucchan Nanchan no Honoo no Challenger: Based on the same high-tension Japanese game show that brought us the PS1 game Irritating Stick.
5. Super Robot Spirits: A Super Robot Taisen/Wars spin-off that's a fighter instead of a strategy RPG.
6. Kiratto Kaiketsu! 64 Tanteidan: A sugoroku game focusing on a team of Scooby Doo-esque teen detectives.
7. Getter Love!: A dating sim that's been repurposed into a competitive multiplayer party game.
8. Ganbare Goemon: Mononoke Sugoroku: Another sugoroku game, this one's themed around Konami's Ganbare Goemon/Mystical Ninja franchise.
9. Itoi Shigesato no Bass Tsuri No. 1 Ketteihan!: A chill bass fishing game hosted by none other than the surreal comedic mind behind the Mother/EarthBound RPGs.
10. Hamster Monogatari 64: A hamster-raising sim where you can eventually train and race them competitively.

None of the above are in my Pre-Select shortlist but the random chooser might yet have other ideas. Can't say I'm not intrigued by half of them but I'd rather not tangle with sugoroku given the amount of text that's usually involved. Speaking of an unnecessary amount of text, it's time to reiterate those rules again:

• Two games. Both for N64. Both played for 64 minutes each exactly. Both reviewed in incremental sixteen minute segments. Both are hopefully good games, but I'll be sure to let you know either way. Oh boy and howdy doody, will I.
• I didn't choose one of them. I left that decision process to a computer. I regret it to this day. Though, honestly, this time it was surprisingly accommodating so credit where credit is due. To a computer. That does not and cannot care about "credit". I swear I'm losing it.
• Since our declared goal here is to judge these games for inclusion onto the Nintendo Switch Online service I've made sure to (mostly) stay clear of anything already on there or earmarked to be included. Those mad(balls) bastards finally added Iggy's Reckin' Balls and even threw in Extreme-G as a bonus. They're plumbing the library of the erstwhile Acclaim now, gods help us all.

Be sure to consult the table below for previous entries. If you're looking for which episode covers which games, the ranking list at the very end of this blog should prove more conducive. That's me, Mr. Helpful.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Pre-Select)

• Factor 5 / LucasArts (NA/JP) + Nintendo (EU)
• 1998-11-17 (NA), 1999-01-15 (EU), 1999-08-27 (JP)
• =160th N64 Game Released

History: Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is the second of four Star Wars games to hit the N64 and the highest regarded out of all of them, creating a pure starfighter sim (as opposed to a half-and-half like a Shadows of the Empire) that puts players in control of Luke Skywalker as he becomes the Rebellion's most accomplished X-Wing pilot between the first and second movies of the original trilogy. Heading up his own division, the titular Rogue Squadron, after the destruction of the Death Star Skywalker takes on missions all across the galaxy to deter the Empire at every turn. While it lacks the complexity of PC contemporaries like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, the game's more accessible and arcade-like approach is a better fit for a home console like the N64 and serves as a fine gateway to those more-involved PC games. It would eventually be followed by two sequels on GameCube.

To an Atari ST kid like myself the German developers Factor 5 will forever be known as the Turrican guys but for most Americans it wasn't until their association with LucasArts making Star Wars games like this that they became renowned. That relationship also led to the two other N64 games they developed: Star Wars: Episode I - Battle for Naboo (sort of a spiritual sequel to Rogue Squadron) and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, two more games I honestly wouldn't mind trying out also. LucasArts are, of course, the video game division of LucasFilm and are behind anything Star Wars or Indiana Jones, including those already named and two others on N64: Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (covered in Episode 33) and Star Wars: Episode I - Racer. Though Disney dissolved the division after their acquisition of LucasFilm properties in 2012, shifting the role of publishing Star Wars games to third-parties such as Electronic Arts, they recently revived the brand under its original name of LucasFilm Games. While I have enjoyed many of their Star Wars games in the past, to me LucasFilm/LucasArts was always more important for their pivotal role in the evolution of the graphic adventure game, especially those produced by the likes of Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman.

Man, long lead-in. I dunno, I feel like this is one of the precious few certified bangers left for the system that I should probably cover before it inevitably shows up on NSO or as a standalone retail game by the newly resurrected LucasFilm Games. You can still buy the PC version on Steam (though there's a bevvy of compatibility issues if the reviews are anything to go by) and so I would be surprised if there wasn't some amount of buzz pushing the license holders to either port that version to Switch or negotiate with Nintendo to put the N64 version online. Either way, I'm getting out ahead of things here largely because playing Shadows of the Empire a while back put me in the mood to play a better version of that Hoth battle and I seem to recall it's in here, if perhaps only as a secret or as the final stage. I don't think I'll be mourning the lack of on-foot levels (though I am a big fan of Dark Forces and its various Jedi Knight spin-offs; too bad they never saw N64 ports, but maybe that's for the best).

16 Minutes In

I spent this first block trying to get the Gold Medal on the first mission, Ambush at Mos Eisley, but it's proving to be elusive due to the game's stringency. The mission is designed to be a softball to get you acquainted with the game's pace—the Empire is taking out allies and civilians quickly, so this game's more about speed than it is carefully lining up shots—and its controls. The first half has you shoot down a bunch of probe droids by following the radar wedge (not to be confused with the other Wedge) to various Tatooine homesteads; the droids go down in a single shot and aren't targeting you, so they're sitting ducks. After that, you're tasked with taking down six TIE Bombers trying to destroy Mos Eisley itself, and it's another case where you want to be fast more than you want to be accurate. Oh jeez, I hope they don't blow up that cantina full of violent criminals that's racist against droids.

I'll admit to not trying all the buttons yet. I recall that the special and secondary weapons (in the X-Wing's case, that'd be the torpedoes) are linked to the C-buttons but all I used here was the A button to accelerate, Z to slow down, and B to shoot. Slowing down makes hitting targets much easier while speeding up is of course necessary to reach and take down enemies before they do too much damage. The post-mission scoring table has a "bonus" category that tells you that there's some permanent power-up you can acquire there: if I get far enough into the story to find a mission that has one, I'll be sure to grab it before moving on. It might help in getting the gold medal on these earlier stages too if I can use them (that is, if they're "backwards compatible").

32 Minutes In

Deciding to be less precious about sticking it out until I finally get gold, this block focused on the next two missions: Rendezvous on Barkhesh (make it easy to spell why don't you) and The Search for the Nonnah. Rendezvous on Barkhesh is the first escort mission of the game—both a staple of the space sim genre and a big reason why I don't play them too often—as Rogue Squadron babysits five slow-moving transport units across a zigzagging map full of AT-STs and turrets. The trick is realizing when it's safe to leave your protectees behind to clear out the obstacles to come and when to stick on them like flies on poop because a bunch of TIE Bombers will just magically spawn and start wiping them out. It's a timing thing, mostly, and one that is benefitted by a few retakes of the mission if I was more serious about this. The Search for the Nonnah just has you looking for someone's elderly grandma after she wanders off while shopping for rutabagas, making sure to check in with every nearby park bench and "that nice young man from the fish market". Actually, the Nonnah is a crashed Rebel freighter carrying vital personnel and equipment stolen from the Empire, which the latter wants back. You're immediately accosted by waves of TIEs upon entering and then must quickly find the crashed ship (it's in a lake) and protect it from a nearby Imperial shuttle deploying these little baby AT-ST things as well as more TIEs. It's almost tougher keeping yourself in one piece than it is the Nonnah and the evacuation shuttle: the TIE Interceptors in this level are no joke.

The torpedoes are handy but you need a target lock to use them effectively, which are harder to trigger on faster moving targets like TIEs. I've found it's best to use them against slower, tougher ground targets like the AT-STs. The A-Wing you're given in the Nonnah mission is much zippier than the X-Wing and its torpedoes aren't so much the slow tracking kind but just a heavier version of your regular lasers so you can use those without as much lead-in, but the downside is that A-Wings feel like they're made of tissue paper. I took my first game over on that mission because I kept crashing into things: something I'm sure will go better next time now that I know what I'm doing, mostly. I found that the R button is what makes you barrel roll, so I'm going to need to get more proficient with evasive maneuvers if the Interceptors continue to be a factor.

48 Minutes In

Well, I talked a big game last time about keeping focused but for this whole block I was stuck on that Nonnah mission. The issue I kept running into was when the evacuation shuttle takes off and is beset by Interceptors, who are tough to nail down due to their high speed and relentless firepower. You don't want to play meat shield for the shuttle as it has way more shields than you do, but at the same time you can't afford to let the Interceptors play darts with it for long so I found the best strategy was to hang back from the shuttle, wait until an Interceptor got on an intercepting path, got behind it, and then smoked that fascho fo' sho. At least I got good at finding the Nonnah quickly—she can't get too far with that bad hip of hers—and eliminating the beachside opposition of tanks to give our allies some breathing room. Irritatingly, I just needed to gun down one more Interceptor to have nabbed the Gold for this mission: the amount of near-misses I'm getting is truly astounding. Can I clutch out just one before I'm done here?

Not much more to add since I barely made progress. One annoyance is that you get three lives and then it's game over, but all this really does is boot you out of the current mission as far as I can tell. One time I lost two lives and then the fission mailed because that shuttle couldn't get its ass out of there fast enough, and then upon starting the mission over I died once from colliding with a tank and that led to an instant game over: it decided it wasn't going to refresh my extra lives amount after that fail state. Kinda sucky. I'll keep that in mind next time I try to start a mission with less than the maximum amount of retries. Otherwise it's really just a matter of not flying into shit. Feels self-explanatory enough.

64 Minutes In

Ending on a perfect note, I managed to completely crush Defection at Corellia—a tough multi-stage urban siege that had us take down TIE Bombers, TIE Interceptors, several probes and AT-STs, and at least two AT-ATs, all in a firepower-deficient Speeder (though its cable sure came in useful)—even picking up the first of the game's "bonuses", some enhanced torpedoes for the fighters that use them—and was told that, despite defeating way more enemies and saving more friendly targets than I needed to, I failed to get silver by nine seconds. Yeah, screw you too game. This was a fun mission though, as we got some big Star Wars cameos: Crix Madine, the blond dude with the fake beard from Return of the Jedi who leads the Rebel strategy meeting against the second Death Star and is also the subject of this mission's title, as well as the sudden appearance of two deadbeats flying around a ship shaped like a big pizza with a slice taken out.

I guess the part of this game I never cared for was that scoring system. Instead of awarding a certain amount of points per category and letting the composite determine your ranking, it insists you succeed at every single category and if even one is found lacking than you're SOL. The former system rewards different approaches, whether you're the cautious type to systematically remove threats or the rough and tumble type who dashes in and satisfies the minimal requirements to push the mission onto its next stage, but here you have to complete the mission in a way very much mandated by the game with no wriggle room for self-expression. Alternatively, you can just come back later with those bonus improvements or maybe some "external help" to hit those targets, but all the same it's kind of joyless in its exacting nature. Well, if you care about medals at least. Casually the game's still got it where it counts.

How Well Has It Aged?: As Well As Yoda (Prior to Him Dying of Old Age, of Course). One thing I didn't really bring up is how good this game looks. There are moments where it looks and feels like a PS2 game and though the draw distance continues to be a factor in anything N64-related Rogue Squadron did its best to mitigate it with a minimal amount of fog and some subtle (enough) sprite replacements for ship models beyond a certain range. The sound design is exactly what you'd want from the very distinct sound library that Star Wars employs in all its iterations and the radio voiceovers are nice and crisp, which is desired when half of them contain vital info. A graphical remaster that could bring it up to parity with its GameCube sequels (then maybe released as a trilogy compilation) wouldn't be a bad way of honoring this series.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Never Tell Me the Odds. All depends on what plans Disney has for their older Star Wars games going forward. Some might yet get the full high-definition remaster treatment like Star Wars: Battlefront did just recently, and I could see Rogue Squadron certainly having the fan cachet to make that case for itself. If not, then it would make sense for Nintendo and Disney to sit down and hash out some kind of plan for getting the N64 Star Wars games on NSO given their generally positive rep. Wouldn't be shocked to hear all four announced the same time, though they've already missed this year's Star Wars Day to do it on. Maybe when that Rogue Squadron movie comes out? Is that still a thing? They're working on that, right? Anyone? Wedge?

Retro Achievements Earned: 4 (out of 49). Pretty straightforward set, with one each for the main sixteen missions and three secret missions and a second each for earning the gold medals. The rest relate to the military ranks (which are based on the medals you earn) and a handful of time trials and post-game mission revisits in other starfighters.

The New Tetris (Random)

• H2O Entertainment / Nintendo
• 1999-07-31 (NA), 1999-10-15 (EU)
• =228th N64 Game Released

History: The New Tetris is, despite the name, a mostly faithful rendition of the world's favorite puzzle game in which players stack blocks each made of four pieces into a grid to... wait, I guess everyone knows how Tetris works. Some of its new tweaks to the formula have now become indelible to the blueprint of modern Tetris, specifically the use of a reserve space—where you can store a single piece for later use, typically a long I-block for a tetris when the field is ideally set up to receive it—and a short window for some aftertouch "T-spins" that lets you resettle a piece to a more ideal state once it has finished falling. There's also an additional scoring method unique to this game that I'll get into when we cover it below. The primary goal of The New Tetris is to create lines in any of its modes which are all contributed to the rebuilding of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: each requires an absurd number of lines to fully construct, however, making them long-term pursuits.

H2O Interactive return once again after Tetrisphere (from Episode 34) and Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (from Episode 20) for their third and final outing on 64 in 64. The Canadian company went defunct shortly after Aidyn Chronicles, which I'm sure had nothing to do with its closure. I mean, it's a fine video game after all. As was the case for Tetrisphere, Nintendo themselves acted as publishers along with some involvement from Blue Planet Software, formerly Bullet-Proof Software, which was the Henk Rogers-owned company that originally brought Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris to Nintendo systems and later became The Tetris Company in both name and fact. They made a whole movie about it and everything.

This may be a first for 64 in 64: the randomizer choosing a game I was already planning to cover as a pre-select. How uncharacteristically cooperative of it. This would be the third of four Tetris games on the N64 that we've featured so far, following Tetris 64 (from Episode 1) and Tetrisphere, leaving only Capcom's Disney-fied Magical Tetris Challenge as the sole unplayed N64 block-stacker. The New Tetris, along with Rogue Squadron above, belongs to the few remaining games on my list for this feature that I personally own; TNT was a great "cooldown" game, which is to say something that I'd stick on for a few sessions between games that demanded longer playthroughs that I would stay laser-focused on until they were done. I dunno if I ever managed to build all seven wonders in the end: the later ones required what felt like a million lines each, which is quite the investment even for as eminently playable as Tetris could be. I somehow doubt I'll be able to get too far with them in the time alloted here either, but all the same I predict it's going to be a chill, pleasant way to spend an hour and change.

16 Minutes In

I jumped right into the standard Marathon Mode—there's two others, but I might be too good at Tetris to get around to them today—and started stacking them there tetraminoes. It's mostly the same Tetris everyone's familiar with, but with one notable new scoring system: by creating both monosquares and multisquares I can earn line multipliers whenever I clear lines that intersect those squares. The way to create either is to form a perfect 4x4 square with four pieces: using four of the same piece gets you a monosquare, which is golden and worth more, while using two or more different pieces gets you a silver multisquare which still kicks a hefty bonus your way. You can form monosquares with any piece type with the sole exceptions of the S and Z pieces (however, you could still sandwich either of those between one each of the two L-block types for a multisquare).

It's a neat idea for a mechanic because it's one of those risk vs. reward situations, much like setting up tetrises themselves, where you're as likely to break everything chasing after the high-scoring squares as you are actually making and clearing them. This goes double when the speed starts picking up and you wait ages for the RNG to finally throw a bone your way (a pain I know all too well with this feature). Since I want to earn as many lines as possible to start building those wonders—the first is 2,500 lines, so it might take a while—I'm going to keep at Marathon until I eventually lose, then I'll alternate to some of the other modes.

32 Minutes In

I held out for a while, reaching the top of the screen after 700 lines. There's an achievement for 1,000 in one session but maybe that'll require kicking the rust off my Tetris legs a bit first. A drop in the bucket as far as the Wonders are concerned, but then they didn't build those things in a day (though the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was probably only a weekend project at most: it's just a bunch of hanging baskets, how hard could that be to set-up with a stepladder nearby?). The trick is to never get too complacent clearing out single lines to make room for more monosquare construction: every line has a small effect on the game speed, and it becomes unmanageable before too long. I feel like almost anything I write about Tetris is going to come off as preaching to the choir though; between Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 it feels like it's back on the crest of yet another wave of popularity in recent years.

What else is there left to say? Hmm. The monosquares and multisquares have this neat little animation touch where they'll take a little bit longer to clear out than a regular line would after being completed, which might be a helpful moment in time to think about the upcoming blocks and where you could stash them. A piece will also flash if it's about to complete one of these squares, just in case the game's moving too quick that you didn't even notice you'd set one up perfectly. That probably wouldn't happen with a monosquare—those things definitely need to be set up well in advance, since it's not all that common to get four of the same piece just incidentally—but it's more common than you'd expect with multisquares. The squares are definitely the key to earning lots of lines at once, so they're worth aiming for if you're trying to build all these Wonders within a single lifetime.

48 Minutes In

For this block I checked out the Sprint mode, which simply has you clear as many lines as possible within three minutes. Best I was able to do was around 115, which is a long way from the 250 one of the RetroAchievements wants from you. I suspect this set was created by one of those crazy people who speedruns Arika's Tetris: The Grand Master series for fun. Naturally, the only way you're going to pull this off is to quickly assemble and clear a few of those monosquares. Yes, I bring those things up a lot but they're really the only element that makes this game stand out in a sea of near-identical puzzle games. Not that I'm on board with any new feature they decide to introduce—the heart rate monitor and sacrilegious non-tetramino blocks of Tetris 64 was some real gimmicky shit that added nothing—but without it I'm just left describing an hour of Tetris in eight paragraphs. Yo, you guys ever heard of Tetris? It's a block-stacking game where-

Sprint's kinda neat though. You can throw more caution to the wind knowing you only have seconds left on the clock, creating a huge mess higher up the field since it'll never be a factor as you continue to create opportunities with valuable pieces down where the action is with whatever time is remaining. If I need a T-shape to complete another square and the game keeps tossing me useless S/Z shapes, I can ditch that unholy business in some misbegotten stack on the far left of the screen and not worry about it. Like the Tetris version of fly-tipping. Three minutes really isn't a whole lot of time to get anything done, so knocking out a hundred lines in that time is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway, just a single mode left and going by its name—Ultra Mode—it's probably going to be the most low-key one yet.

64 Minutes In

Ultra Mode is essentially the reverse of Sprint Mode: rather than have a limited amount of time, you instead have a limited number of lines to clear. Time taken is a factor here, of course, but it's also a test of how quickly you can create and clear squares to hit that target as soon as possible. I suppose Ultra and Sprint work as options if you don't have a whole lot of time available and are not sure how long a Marathon session will take you, true to its name. Either way, regardless of the mode, you get to keep all the lines you form and they all get sent to the Wonder-in-progress, so you get those warm tingly feelings that no session is ever "wasted".

I neglected to mention this but the game has a ranking system that provides a numerical representation of your quality as a Tetris player. It's like those rankings you get in online games such as Apex Legends or Street Fighter, in that it can go either up or down depending on how well you did in the last few games. Kind of dispiriting to watch it sink because you crashed and burned going for broke on a monosquare that refused to drop its fourth piece, but good judgment (and luck) is a definite factor when it comes to Tetris. It also helps in a multiplayer game like this to know how good your opponents are: competing with someone with a much higher or lower rank might be grounds to introduce a handicap, for instance.

How Well Has It Aged?: It's... Tetris. I think this might be one of my favorite renditions of Tetris. The squares add such an interesting layer of challenge and the Wonders, as immaterial as they are, give me something to work towards if just playing Tetris by itself isn't sufficient motivation. Like I said, this was a cart that was in and out my N64 on a regular basis because I could just slap some blocks together and work on those Wonders between those games that required a bit more dedication. It's still good for that role and maybe more so than ever if its fate is to sit in a big library of other games that are also only going to be played briefly once each. The only thing that really dates it is the jungle EDM soundtrack which is super, super of its time (still slaps though).

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: The Ball is Monosquare in Nintendo's Court. I believe, much like Tetrisphere, Nintendo bought the rights to this particular T-spin on Tetris after H2O Interactive evaporated, if they didn't already own it before then. They would have to renegotiate with The Tetris Company for the rights to distribute it on NSO, I'm sure, but if they were looking for a solid four-player Tetris game that would have a guaranteed audience this would do the trick. It's nowhere near as weird as Tetrisphere, for one.

Retro Achievements Earned: 9 (out of 27). Some real heavy-hitters in this set, including competing with the CPU on its highest level and some previously-mentioned ridiculous milestone targets. There are even cheats to make the game more difficult (kind of backwards) and there's achievements related to those too. Seems like an "only experts need apply" scenario.

Current Ranking

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
2. Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
3. Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
4. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
5. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
6. Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
7. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
8. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
9. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
10. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
11. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
12. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
13. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
14. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
15. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
16. The New Tetris (Ep. 42)
17. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
18. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
19. Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! (Ep. 41)
20. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Ep. 42)
21. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
22. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
23. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
24. Bust-A-Move '99 (Ep. 40)
25. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
26. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
27. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
28. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
29. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
30. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
31. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
32. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
33. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
34. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
35. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
36. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
37. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
38. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
39. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
40. Gauntlet Legends (Ep. 39)
41. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
42. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
43. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
44. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
45. Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Vol. 1 (Ep. 39)
46. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
47. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
48. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
49. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
50. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
51. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
52. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
53. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
54. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
55. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
56. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
57. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
58. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
59. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
60. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
61. Mahjong 64 (Ep. 41)
62. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
63. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
64. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
65. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
66. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
67. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
68. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
69. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
70. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
71. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
72. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
73. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
74. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
75. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
76. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
77. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
78. Yakouchuu II: Satsujin Kouro (Ep. 40)
79. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
80. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
81. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
82. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
83. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
84. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
85. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
86. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
87. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
88. Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)

Shocker of shockers, I'm not playing an explormer this week. I still have plenty of them on standby, don't doubt that for a moment, but even I have to admit that everything's better in moderation. Or maybe that's just my Moderator bias talking. Either way, I've switched tracks to another old favorite of mine—the classic point-and-click adventure game—with this week's Tangle Tower, originally from 2019. Tangle Tower is the sequel to Detective Grimoire, one of the earliest games I covered on this feature (IGotW #38), and like that game repurposes the usual format of the genre to make it more in-line with a whodunnit procedural where gathering clues, interrogating suspects, and taking what you'd learned and applying some abductive reasoning to solve each stage of the crime are the primary objectives. (I swear it's a total coincidence that I chose this game now given developers SFB Games are presently enjoying the limelight because of the buzz around their newest game, Crow Country: a Resident Evil-style polygonal survival horror throwback.)

Tangle Tower has Detective Grimoire and his new sidekick Sally, the sarcastic gift shop proprietor from the previous game, reach the isolated titular manse to solve the murder of artist and free spirit Freya Fellow, who was slain inside a locked atelier with her mute aunt Flora as the only witness. The tower also houses several family members from various branches of the main family tree of the Remingtons, who once owned the tower but have since married into two external families, the Fellows and the Pointers, who now occupy the two tower-structures that poke out of what was originally a normal mansion overlooking a vast circular lake. You interview the other family members to understand what sort of relationship they had with the deceased and with each other, as well as corroborating their accounts on the evening the body was found, while searching around the mansion for many well-concealed clues. It turns out every family member is hiding something, though whether it bears any relevance to the crime you're there to solve is to be determined. The clue-gathering often involves solving Professor Layton-esque puzzles that sometimes require a little outside information (such as the meaning of certain symbols) to open up some locked container or other, the contents of which then get added to the list of topics that you can ask the suspects.

As with the previous game, the central mystery and the way it has you put it together with the information and items you've acquired is a great slow-burn approach to solving a tough mystery by doing it step by step, one smaller line of inquiry at a time. It also shares its predecessor's sense of style, digging deep from the realms of whodunnit fiction and classic LucasFilm adventure games alike for its idiosyncratic cast and environments and sense of humor. The style reminded me of the cartoon Gravity Falls a bit: less so the character designs but more the high degree of surrealism throughout its many detailed backgrounds that nonetheless have a familiar, lived-in feel to it all. Three of the major characters, including the deceased, are impressionistic teenagers who despite their unusual upbringing are still fairly normal examples of (albeit troubled) kids; the adults, meanwhile, tend to be the type with plenty of skeletons in their closets, as befits the rogue's gallery of suspects in a murder mystery. You spend quite a bit of time talking to the game's eight main suspects so plenty of effort has been put into their voice acting, animation, designs, and personalities to put them a step above the usual NPCs of this genre, who usually only exist for the sake of one puzzle or maybe a red herring joke or two. The various rooms of the mansion have almost as much personality too, befitting the characters that dwell in them or offering some hidden layers as their involvement with the central crime becomes more clear. After What Remains of Edith Finch, I'll always be game for exploring an eccentric (and unnecessarily tall) homestead owned by rich, crazy people.

Of particular note is the game's flow. You spend the first half of the game with almost full freedom of the mansion, with certain bedrooms closed off only until you've had the chance to talk to the people who sleep there; this way, you can have better context behind why their rooms may look a certain way and why the item you just found in a secret drawer or a locked cabinet might explain some things that you may have already picked up about them from your earlier conversation. After you've been everywhere and talked to everyone once, you can then go back to earlier characters and discuss everyone you've met and the items you've found since you last spoke with them. That's usually enough to trigger some suspicions Grimoire has about a certain suspect, which then leads into a guessing mini-game based on the evidence found to wrangle some truth from them. Doing this with every suspect then puts you on the endgame path, where there's a procession of clues and revelations that takes you all the way to the thrilling denouement. I appreciate that the second half the game is structured in a more railroaded fashion because at that point you've probably learned all there is to know—or at least have the means to learn them, since you've been picking up a bunch of items that don't have a clear purpose yet—and just need to piece it all together in a series of quickfire deductions.

I really enjoyed this game. It's short and sweet without a whole lot of content, but it still has a few challenges to sink your teeth into between the Layton puzzles and the way the game uses a set of rotating slots to input your deductions which requires a bit of subtextual comprehension (and if you're off by a single "slot" the protagonist mentions it, so you're not left floundering for long if you're most of the way there), the characters were distinctive and fun to talk to if not always helpful, the usual adventure game observations from checking random background hotspots had a lot of good jokes to discover, and that central mystery had me deducing half of it right away and the other half I was left guessing about right up to the point where the game expected me to have it all figured out, so I didn't feel too dumb or too smart which is always a tricky balancing act. The developers might've moved onto a different avenue entirely if Crow Country is any indication of their future output, but I hope to meet Detective Grimoire and his goofy hair again sometime in the future.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Welcome back to another furtive rummage through the back-catalog of the Bandai WonderSwan: a Japanese-only handheld that existed briefly in the gap between the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance, with technology boasting that of the latter if not always the color palette. Last episode felt like the series finally "landing", accomplishing the early stages of two goals I had in mind when crafting the outline for this feature: seeing what kind of output Squaresoft had on the system after embracing it as an alternative to Nintendo, to whom they were formerly loyal until a big falling out, as well as encountering the first WS game I was intrigued enough with to see it through to its end. We have more of both this time but I suspect there won't be too much of either in the updates to come; even so, those will be the highlights I'm personally anticipating. For anyone else, I'm sure the highlights instead will be those times I come up against a truly inscrutable anime tie-in and flounder around helplessly with the Japanese menus for ten minutes before calling it quits. Well, depending on your temperament and appreciation for watching others suffer, I suppose (I feel like Blight Club being as popular as it is has turned the site's audience onto a dark, sadistic path).

Speaking of sadistic, my continued negotiations with the Random Chooser Unnion* are progressing swimmingly. In AHW Part Two I managed to secure the "Lucky 7s Clause", in which I could switch every seventh entry from a random selection to one of my own choosing. I've just now procured another boon in the "Prime Plus Plan": from this entry onwards, I also have full jurisdiction over every prime-numbered entry. There are no numbers between 16-20 that are divisible by seven, but both 17 and 19 are primes so I've substituted a few wanted games of my own in there. And to think, all it cost me was full healthcare and dental plans for all employees. Pfft, peanuts. I'll be sure to keep working my bargaining magic over these blue-collar rubes in the entries to come, provided I even bother to show up to the meetings. Truly a leader conscientious of his workforce.

*I can't spell this word properly or else the whole blog errors out for some reason. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

If you're looking for more WonderSwan goodness be sure to check out the past entries here: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

#016: Final Fantasy

• Developer: Squaresoft
• Publisher: Squaresoft
• Release Date: 2000-12-09
• Inscrutability: Minor (with the partially-complete fan translation)
• Selection Process: Random.
• Is This Anime?: It's so close.

Field Report: The first Final Fantasy famously pulled Square's butt out of the fire when its financial outlook appeared bleak, kicking off a turn-based RPG franchise that would eventually prove to be the company's most identifiable flagship and main source of revenue, especially once the MMOs started showing up. However, Final Fantasy 1 feels a bit prototypical compared to what followed, with a basic (if somehow also convoluted) story outline that saw four interchangeable "Warriors of Light" attempt to halt a series of natural disasters by defeating a quartet of elemental lords and the evil god of Chaos that controlled their actions from the distant past. As with any party-based D&D game, from which Final Fantasy is indirectly sourced (going through a few inspiration intermediaries like Wizardry and The Black Onyx), party composition and balance is important though veteran players often like to challenge themselves with unorthodox and impaired combinations.

This would've been the last revision for Final Fantasy 1 before its 2002 reappearance on PlayStation as part of the Final Fantasy Origins compilation (and, soon after, Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls for Game Boy Advance), and it turns out the graphical facelift it saw in FF Origins actually came from this version of the game. Not only are the sprites remastered to resemble those from the 16-bit games but they also added backgrounds to combat scenes (it was just a void before) and other aesthetic enhancements everywhere you looked. I'd assumed that Square throwing together a FF1 port (their simplest RPG, if you don't count Mystic Quest) was just a quick means of testing out the hardware and seeing if the WonderSwan was a good fit for them, but they put a lot more effort into this remake than I gave them credit for.

Since the only fan translation that exists for the WonderSwan port of FF1 is an incomplete one, I decided to do the intelligent thing of assembling a party entirely out of Black Belts (or Monks, going by the translation) so I wouldn't have to tinker around in my inventory too often in case none of the items or equipment were translated (they were). What I forgot about is that Black Belts are kinda weak at the start (and also the middle, and also towards the end) so there was a whole lot of buff men grinding in the forest, as it were, before I felt prepared enough to take on Garland at the Chaos Shrine to the far northwest of Corneria. Incidentally, if you are interested in the full plot of Final Fantasy 1 then I highly recommend playing Stranger of Paradise, which is a faithful retelling that doesn't do anything weird with it whatsoever.

After powering up enough where my attacks weren't just whiffing half the time I marched into that shrine, rescued the princess from the curiously weak Garland, and set off to the nearby town of Pravoka to deal with their pirate problem. The pirates weren't tough at all; however, the random encounters on the world map in the Pravoka region were a different tale altogether. We started meeting these huge ogres that hit like a freight train and groups of four "MadPony", which are one of the earliest enemies that are capable of attacking multiple times a round. Good XP and cash from both though, and since Black Belts don't need to save up for equipment too often (with a few exceptions, mostly of the accessory kind) I made sure to keep myself replete with curatives. At any rate, I remembered that the next dungeon after acquiring the pirate ship was one that had a lot of poison-type enemies and I wasn't prepared to go through all that again, especially with no healers on my team. I've completed this game before after all—via the Dawn of Souls remake, in fact—so this was mostly just a quick visit to see what was different. I will say that the game does look pretty good: even the SNES port didn't look this sharp, though of course the more popular GBA and PS1 ports that soon followed stole most of the glory from this version's graphical updates. There were also some much-needed QoL additions too, like party members attacking other enemies if their chosen target had already been slain and a clear indicator of who could wear what and how they'd benefit stats-wise from switching gear. Still, it was mostly the same old Final Fantasy 1 as ever: a bit grindy and dull but worth seeing through at least once if you're a fan of the franchise, if only to see how far it's come since.

Time Spent: Just shy of 90 minutes.

#017: Rainbow Islands: Putty's Party

• Developer: DigitalWare
• Publisher: Megahouse
• Release Date: 2000-06-29
• Inscrutability: None (Fan Translated)
• Selection Process: Chosen (Prime Plus Plan).
• Is This Anime?: Nah.

Field Report: Taito's Rainbow Islands is the sequel, sorta, to Bubble Bobble and shifts the action from blowing bubbles at monsters in single-screen stages to ascending a vertical level with rainbows that can be walked upon or used to trap and defeat enemies. Bub and Bob also return to the starring roles but are back in their original human forms as Bubby and Bobby. As in Bubble Bobble, there's a moderately high level of challenge that can be mitigated if you know the game's secrets, the most important of which if you want the good ending involves spawning and collecting seven gems of the color spectrum in each of the game's worlds. Putty's Party is a spin-off, or sequel, or maybe like an alternative timeline game (think the other modes in some Castlevanias where you're controlling a different character), where you're instead playing as Patty: one of the two heroines Bub and Bob set out to save in Bubble Bobble. I'm not sure what else has changed but I guess we'll find out.

Despite being another Taito game there's no trace of them anywhere around this particular WonderSwan port/reimagining. Instead, we have DigitalWare and Megahouse, neither of which I know too much about. DigitalWare is a developer that worked in a supporting role for a great many games, though few that have been verified by GDRI, and this was the only WonderSwan game they were ever attached to. It sounds like they might've done the brunt of the programming and graphics but had other contractors pitch in on everything else. Megahouse is, I'm fairly sure, one of several publishing labels that Bandai used along with Angel and others. They're also the publishers for one other WonderSwan game: Tetsujin 28-go, an adventure game based on the very early (we're talking 1950s) mecha manga that was known in the States as Gigantor. Man, the tangents we go off on sometimes.

Disclaimer: I'm one of those weirdos who likes Rainbow Island more than Bubble Bobble, partly because traversal with those awkward mostly-vertical jumps isn't anywhere near as difficult when you can create your own platforms (well, sure, you can jump off your own bubbles too in Bubble Bobble but it's not ideal). The game's little cutscenes aren't just an excuse for ditzy tomboy protagonist Patty and her tsundere fairy familiar Notti to be all cute: one of the first few tells you important information about how the big diamonds work. Chiefly, that you have to collect seven gems per world by defeating enemies at various longitudes—that is to say, the vertical slice of the screen where the corpse lands determines what color gem you get, from red at the far left to violet at the far right, or in this game's case a darkish gray and a slightly darker gray. Yeah, I guess it needs pointing out that a game about rainbows is kind of a bad fit for a monochrome system but the "color" depth is higher than the Game Boy so they can still give each of those gems their own distinctive(ish) shade of gray at least.

Chalk this up as another game I was able to complete before writing this review, since the game is relatively short at just five worlds with four stages apiece, as opposed to the seven worlds (or ten, including secret ones) of the original Rainbow Islands. The stages always followed a similar pattern of two normal stages, followed by an "event" stage—for the odd-numbered worlds you had to quickly ascend to escape a rising tide, usually the result of spending too long in any one level, while the even-numbered worlds had you hunt down a secret door by firing rainbows everywhere—which is then followed by the final stage complete with boss fight. Most bosses can be defeated quickly by spamming rainbows at them, though they won't flinch at all so you do still need to anticipate their movements to not get caught by them. As for the differences between this and regular Rainbow Islands, there's quite a few significant new features: the biggest change allows you to enter a secret door after completing a world with the big diamond, the result of finding all seven rainbow gems, and the item within gives you a permanent power-up (double-rainbows, faster rainbows, faster Patty, or some cheat-like wings that let you fly past the level). You can also summon Notti with a specific item, and he'll circle around you like an option in a shoot 'em up and insta-kill anything he touches. Naturally, the other big change is the switch in focus to Patty and Notti, and in addition to the many small cutscenes there's multiple endings to earn based on how meticulous you were about those big-ass diamonds. Pretty standard take on an arcade classic but one with enough new features to feel both more modern (for 2000 standards, anyway) and distinct enough from other ports to draw in all the Rainbow Island diehards. Not that there can't be too many of those roaming around.

Time Spent: It took 90 minutes to beat the game with the best ending. It'll take a lot longer to get all those RetroAchievements though.

#018: Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden

"New Japan Pro Wrestling: Furious Legend"

• Developer: TOSE
• Publisher: Tomy
• Release Date: 1999-03-04 (launch)
• Inscrutability: Maximum. On two levels.
• Selection Process: Random.
• Is This Anime?: Wrestling is essentially anime, so yes.

Field Report: Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden is a NJPW wrestling game from Yuke's that happens to be the first game they ever made. Yuke's would later become renowned (if that's the word) for being the custodians of the annual WWE game franchise but they started with the local NJPW circuit and produced the first Toukon Retsuden for PlayStation in 1995, following it with three sequels. Western wrestling fans might know Toukon Retsuden by a different name: Power Move Pro Wrestling, with publishers Activision choosing to toss out all the NJPW talent and substitute in their fictional own. Naturally, squeezing a PS1 game onto a portable meant some cuts here and there but it otherwise seems faithful enough. It's also the third of the four WonderSwan launch games we've covered on here so far (and I fully intend to cover the last of those in due time, since it's Final Fantasy-related).

Of course, I say it's a Yuke's game but it appears as if assiduous contractors TOSE were given the honors of figuring out how to squash a CD game onto a tiny 1MB cart. TOSE would develop 14 WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color games in total, making them the most prolific third-party developer on the platform. Still, 14 games is a mere drop in the bucket for a developer purported to have worked on thousands during their long tenure; they're a seriously impressive group, even if many of the games themselves aren't quite as remarkable. No clue why toy manufacturer Tomy is here, but they were the PS1 game's Japanese publishers also; maybe they had licensing rights for NJPW figures and that included video games too? I suppose that's all the procrastinating I can get away with, so let's boot up this dang ol' wrestling game and I'll try to make as much sense of it as I'm able. Good thing there's only three games of this genre on the system (and one is a Kinnikuman game, which I'll have no problems with at all).

I mean... this went about as well as can be predicted. As you can see from the screenshots, we have a traditional perspective of the ring as opposed to FirePro's more diamond-shaped affairs and the wrestlers—of which there appears to be only six, though maybe there's some unlockables or boss characters—are rendered in a top-heavy chibi style to better suit the limited confines of the WonderSwan. The WS has several face buttons yet I could only get the basic attack and grapples to work: maybe there's a whole "direction plus face button" system involved to access the various piledrivers and DDTs but I'll admit to not being in any big rush to figure this game out.

I managed to get into two bouts, lost both of them, and called it quits there. There's not going to be an onboarding process for newbies and even if there was it'd all be in a language I can barely read. There are multiple modes on the main menu, all thankfully written in katakana: Title Match (exhibition), G1 Climax (a round robin tournament), Time Attack (didn't try it, but maybe "pin the guy in under X minutes"?), something called "Toshi Ichi-Ningu" which is maybe a two-on-one match?, and the Options (which had a sound test, if you wanted to hear a bunch NJPW entrance theme MIDIs). I tried out the first two of those but besides the set-up there wasn't much different about the matches themselves. I dunno, I don't feel equipped to render judgment on a wrestling game even when it's in English so I was pretty lost here. Luck of the draw, I suppose.

Time Spent: 10 minutes.

#019: O-Chan no Oekaki Logic

"O-Chan's Picture Logic"

• Developer: Santaclaus
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• Release Date: 2000-01-06
• Inscrutability: Minor.
• Selection Process: Chosen (Prime Plus Plan).
• Is This Anime?: Looks like Sanrio, but ain't.

Field Report: O-Chan no Oekaki Logic is a picross/nonogram game featuring characters from Sunsoft's recurring mascot team that debuted in the NES game Hebereke (Ufouria: The Saga in North America) and later made frequent appearances in games on the SNES and PlayStation also. O-Chan, a girl in a cat kigurumi, is the second member of the group after Hebe (a penguin) and she personally headlines the Oekaki Logic (Picture Logic) picross spin-off series, of which there's at least three entries. (What complicates matters here is that there's an "Oekaki Logic 1" for SNES, WonderSwan, Saturn, and PS1 and I'm not sure if they're all the same game or not. They each have some unique features and a different total number of puzzles, for what it's worth.) If you're unfamiliar with picross and might want a more thorough tutorial than I can provide here, there's plenty of great picross games out there to get started with including the original two Mario's Picross games (GB and SNES) available through the Switch Online service as well as Jupiter's Picross S series on Switch and numerous games on Steam (I recommend either Pepper's Puzzles or Paint it Back!).

Hebereke creators Sunsoft are of course our publishers here, though sadly this is the only game they published on WonderSwan that was either picross- or Hebereke-related. They worked on three other games, developing two themselves, including some Taito ports and a portable iteration of the Shanghai mahjong solitaire series that they originally licensed from Activision. The festively-named developers Santaclaus was a Sunsoft subsidiary that would go on to chiefly focus on browser and mobile games. One of their few big releases was the surreal airborne arcade fighter Astra Superstars in 1998. This would be their only WonderSwan project.

Total comfort pick, this one. I love picross and this is the only picross game on the system. I've played the original O-Chan no Oekaki Logic on Super Famicom but it's been so long that I don't recall any of the puzzles, so I'll just assume for the sake of my own sanity that I'm not just playing through them all again. This game uses the "Wario Mode" ruleset which eventually became the more popular choice for picross game developers. To explain what that is, in the Mario's Picross games (which were more or less the first of their type, unless there's some older obscure PC game I'm unaware of) you had two sets of puzzles hosted by Mario and Wario respectively. Mario's ruleset involved the instant correction of errors, usually inducing a time penalty or some other black mark to highlight you'd messed up; Wario, however, was happy to let you stew in your own juices if you ever made a mistake but on the plus side never gave out demerits for a simple misclick. Since misclicks are extremely common once you're in the flow of things, the laissez-faire Wario approach proved to be the more endearing one (I'm sure he'd be satisfied knowing that given their rivalry).

There's a remarkable 300 puzzles in the regular puzzle mode, spread across four difficulties and grid sizes ranging from 5x5 to 25x15 (which is realistically about all the WonderSwan screen could handle without some awkward screen-scrolling tech). This version of the game also has a "Versus" mode which, as far as I can tell, just involves completing a large 3x3 multi-picross puzzle to reveal an image of your current CPU opponent. There's a time limit in this mode, unlike the core mode, but it's pretty generous at 30 minutes per grid. The game prompts to save after each completed puzzle: I didn't pay attention that the default was on "iie" rather than "hai" (i.e. "no" instead of "yes") so I did lose all the progress I'd made in one session due to that human error, but otherwise I've been happily plugging away at this enormous set since earlier this week and will probably continue to do so for the rest of the month. It's therefore one of the few WonderSwan games that I intend to go back to once I've covered it here. Proof enough that I'm enjoying it I suppose, but that's a near certainty with anything picross.

Time Spent: Let's say 10 hours and counting.

#020: Beatmania for WonderSwan

• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• Release Date: 1999-04-28
• Inscrutability: Minor.
• Selection Process: Random.
• Is This Anime?: Not at all.

Field Report: Beatmania, or Bemani, is Konami's chief contribution to the arcade rhythm game craze that improved the olfactory quality of those dingy parlors by adding copious amounts of nerd sweat as they frantically shifted their forms to high-BPM Eurobeat and EDM jams. Bemani involved far less awkward stepping than Konami's other big rhythm game series Dance Dance Revolution though; instead, it had budding DJs manipulate a turntable controller to follow the on-screen prompts as best as they were able. Home versions either offered custom controller peripherals to recreate the effect or an alternative control scheme with whatever face buttons were at hand. I feel like such an old person describing all this like it's obscure information given these games hit their peak around 20-25 years ago and have remained consistently popular ever since.

Our first Konami game for WonderSwan is, in fact, the only Konami game for WonderSwan. One Bemani game is all they had in 'em I guess. Maybe the resulting sales figures didn't make sense for them to pursue WS sequels, given the vast number of other platforms beat maniacs had available for all their rhythmic tapping needs. I'm sad we won't get to see some monochrome Metal Gear Ac!d or Ganbare Goemon goodness, but there's a whole bunch of that stuff on Nintendo handhelds if ever the itch should strike.

Yeah, I figured out why there weren't more sequels. Beatmania on WS is hard, man. It's not just the usual high-demand rhythm game struggles either but a certain ambiguity towards the controls that make them challenging to remember. You essentially have six lanes that notes float down: five attached to piano keys and one for the turntable (your only goal is to scratch it; I dunno if there's anything more involved in later tracks). The turntable responds to the R-button and the rest are spread across the top three D-pad buttons and face buttons—you get more buttons to work with when the WonderSwan is in its vertical orientation, which it is here in order to be closer to the arcade format—but in a way where it kinda overlaps on the middle key (which is both D-pad right and the left face button) and that's what keeps tripping me up, along with having to do the mental math of how many positions the key is from the left and what button that corresponds to. When the track gets hectic with multiple beats per second it's just too much for my old man brain to handle.

Of course, that demanding on-beat precision has been a factor with Bemani and rhythm games in general since the get-go, but I can usually handle the easier introductory songs with just a few mistakes: here, I couldn't get through either of the initially unlocked tracks, "Funk" and "Ambient" (I wasn't initially sure if those were their names or just their genres or what) without the little dancing man just shrugging woefully at me. The practice mode walked me through what key does what for its first "lesson" but then I guess it skipped a whole semester and immediately drops me into Ambient, which is the harder of those two initial songs with its two-star rating. I figure the game was probably aimed squarely at those already familiar with arcade Bemani and wanted some approximation to play on the go rather than a new audience of would-be turntablists who maybe don't get out to the local arcade much. Still, even if I flamed out spectacularly on this particular portable rhythm game series at least I'll always have the Ouendan on DS (for which I'll point out that I beat all its songs on the hardest setting, since I need some ego-massaging right now).

Time Spent: 20 minutes of pain.

Current Ranking

(* = Don't need fluent Japanese to enjoy this and/or it has a fan translation.)

1. O-Chan no Oekaki Logic (Ep 4)*
2. Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (Ep 3)*
3. Final Fantasy (Ep 4)*
4. Rainbow Islands: Putty's Party (Ep 4)*
5. Flash Koibito-Kun (Ep 1)*
6. Magical Drop for WonderSwan (Ep 1)*
7. Gunpey (Ep 2)*
8. Judgement Silversword -Rebirth Edition- (Ep 1)*
9. Final Lap Special (Ep 2)*
10. Densha de Go! (Ep 2)
11. Gomoku Narabe & Reversi Touryuumon (Ep 3)*
12. Guilty Gear Petit (Ep 3)*
13. Blue Wing Blitz (Ep 3)
14. Beatmania for WonderSwan (Ep 4)*
15. Super Robot Taisen Compact for WonderSwan Color (Ep 3)
16. Inuyasha: Fuuun Emaki (Ep 1)
17. Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden (Ep 4)
18. Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? (Ep 2)
19. Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! (Ep 2)
20. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Musha Densetsu (Ep 1)

Hey there and welcome back to another enormous map for Indie Explormer of the Week to uncover one traversal upgrade at a time. Our non-linear search action selection this time is Supraland: Six Inches Under, a standalone expansion for the inestimable Supraland (covered back in IGotW #297). As with its predecessor, it follows a civilization of sapient plasticine people in some kid's backyard as they deal with one disaster after another. Usually, some chump is ordained as the hero that will save everyone, and when the earth collapses trapping everyone underground that person turns out to be you: a blue-tinted plumber (as opposed to a red-tinted one, as that's already been done). Humorously, the hero from the previous game is still wandering around but is immediately sidelined with other pressing business despite already having all the upgrades needed to quickly resolve everything. The rest of the story is fairly slight: there's an underground settlement called Cagetown (it's built out of an old hamster cage) that's led by the Baron, who has been sucking up the fortunes of his permanently poor citizenry. Since his strata-based town system is currently standing in the way of the exit back to the surface you're required to visit various areas—a mine, a factory, a bank, a wealthy resort—for the upgrades needed to ascend through Cagetown.

If you're unfamiliar with Supraland, it has an exceptional grasp on how to do the explormer game format well in 3D and while Supraland: Six Inches Under ("SSIU" from here on out) mostly revisits the same upgrades from the previous game they find many more tweaks and puzzles to bring out new sides to those tools and abilities. A typical power-up for Supraland might include a tool that produces a purple beam that you can use to hook onto anything wooden (and, later, anything golden) and hookshot your way up to it; however, you can also use it to create a solid beam between two wooden surfaces and then walk across it to reach new areas, or conduct electricity through it to power nearby devices. It's endlessly inventive when it comes to applications for its power-ups, giving you some relatively tough environmental puzzles to solve before you can acquire the next upgrade and make further progress. The type of upgrades Supraland sends your way include many I've never even seen in other explormers: oddly enough, the most common explormer power-up—the double-jump—was one I only found in the post-game.

Just as appealing as the many exploration and traversal options is the game's aesthetic and sense of humor. Despite being simple Play-Doh people there's a lot of personality given to random NPCs in your path, largely through their dialogue which tends towards the humorously meta or referential and some amusing set-up/punchline situational comedy. An example of the latter comes after a long trek through the innards of a bank vault and its copious laser security systems where you eventually reach a room with a chest that you could see from outside the bank via a glass window. There's an NPC by that window that points out the chest to you on your first visit, but upon coming back to him with the chest's item he sympathetically tells you that he wished there could've been a better and easier way to get on the other side of the glass, gently tapping on it for emphasis only for it to immediately shatter. While the meta commentary might wear a bit thin after a while, the developers keenly understand their audience: there's a massive amount of post-game content built for completionist types, and the "beat the game" achievement even has written in its description "you're probably only around 50% done, right?" (I was, for the record, and I'd been pretty meticulous too). The aesthetic meanwhile is pure Honey, I Shrunk the Kids micro-sized goodness, turning LEGO bricks and other toys and yard detritus into enormous platforms to climb and obstacles to overcome. There's a surprising amount of matches lying around for some fire-based puzzles too, suggesting the human child (whom no-one acknowledges save through whispered legend, despite often being clearly visible and taking up a huge chunk of the horizon—a recurring joke from the first game) that owns everything down here maybe isn't being as closely supervised as they should.

If Supraland and this expansion have a weak link it's the combat, which isn't particularly exciting even when you gain more than just a pickaxe to fight with. There's a limited number of enemy types and most melees can be resolved by mashing attacks and keeping enemies stunlocked until their HP bar drains, not too dissimilar to the lackluster melee of the Elder Scrolls series. Some flying enemies first require that you bat their attacks back to them like Agahnim Tennis but you'll soon acquire an electricity gun that stuns them, dropping them out of the air for an easy kill, and the means of throwing the pickaxe like a boomerang which does the trick also. Some of the arena-like multi-monster melees can be tough but still not particularly compelling. SSIU was smart enough to change things up so that the combat is very limited and often relegated to optional rooms where there's some inessential reward up for grabs. Enemies also don't endlessly respawn in certain thoroughfare areas like they did in the first game, so now having to throw down is infrequent enough to be more of a welcome novelty than an ubiquitous irritation to deal with when you're trying to focus on solving a puzzle or finding a nearby secret cache.

I still adore this series and even if SSIU was really just more of the same in a slightly new environment with new puzzle variations I'm entirely fine with that. Between the novel upgrades and the smart ways the game builds its puzzles around them, along with its Levelord aesthetic and genial (if occasionally trolly, in an affectionate way) sense of humor, it's a series that immediately charmed me when I first played it late in 2022 and I've been looking for a reason ever since to get my upgrade-grabbin' mitts on this expansion. It's even proven to be fairly beefy at 10+ hours and that's just to finish the story; there's so much left to discover that I discovered that there were actually more chests left to unlock than had already been opened, reiterating again that I'm normally a really thorough completionist type when it comes to explormers (or... at least I thought... I was). With no more final boss fight to power up for and nothing left in the stores to buy, I'm not sure I absolutely need to raid all these chests for their now-useless contents, but... it's just that they gave me a checklist and a means of detecting whenever one is close by. I'm only human, goshdarnit. If you don't hear from me for a few days, well...

Rating: 5 out of 5.

I know, you didn't think I'd realize that 40 is XL and not XXXX, didn't you? I'm not as look as I dumb, turns out. Anyway, after passing that incredibly low bar, I'm back once again for more delicious Sega Genesis/Mega Drive tapes. Well, at least that's what I'd like to report but we're still neck-deep in the holiday shovelware rush of November '93 and that means more licensed tie-ins. Five of them, to be exact, some of which are notoriously poor. The rest are racing and sports games for the most part so this won't be my favorite update to write but... this is the life I chose, I guess. The Mega Drive life. Drive-a-Live?

Now that we've passed the 500 mark, I keep wanting to put up a signpost or something, you know? Like "this many miles left to the end of the road" with the number of remaining games (about 400, if you're wondering), or maybe a chart that compares the Mega Drive to how far other consoles managed to reach with their (licensed) libraries. For instance, we passed the N64 a while back: that lightweight couldn't even make it to 400. Conversely, the NES, SNES, and PS1 will forever be specks in the distance even once we're done here: they had libraries in excess of a thousand games, and several thousand in the case of the last of those. Heck, the Switch is up to something like 3,000 and stuff is still coming out on it as we wait for news on its fresh and shiny successor. I don't even know what would qualify as a "good tenure" in terms of a console's total number of games available by today's standard but given Mega Drive was leading the western world in sales for a time you can't argue it didn't do its darndest.

I was going to do some graphs once I hit 500, wasn't I? Whoops. Just have to settle with ten more of these Mega Archive entries instead; that's already probably plenty of listening to me go on and on. Be sure to check in with the Mega Archive MegaSpreadMegaSheet for all the info and links you might want and plenty more you probably don't.

Part XL: 501-510 (November '93)

501: Last Action Hero

• Developer: B.I.T.S.
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Brawler / Vehicular Combat
• Theme: "Magic Ticket" My Ass, McBain
• Premise: Action movie buff Danny Madigan is shocked when he is warped into the world of his favorite series, but not so shocked that he can't spend the whole time pointing out plot holes and illogical inconsistencies. And that little boy grew up to be CinemaSins, lord help us all.
• Availability: It's a licensed game nobody should want based on a movie more people should watch.
• Preservation: Starting with a real banger this month, Last Action Hero is the video game tie-in for the Schwarzenegger movie of the same name, one notorious (at the time) for embracing the ironic meta commentary typical of the 1990s to deconstruct the Austrian Oak's prolific '80s career. The movie was actually a great deal of fun if you were the same type of wiseass action-movie-loving kid as the movie's floppy-haired protagonist, getting so meta as to include an animated cat police officer (he gets results so no-one bats an eye) or identifying a mob plant because he's being played by F. Murray Abraham ("he killed Mozart!"). The game's nowhere near as fun, sadly, scuttled as it was by both the usual licensed game deadline restrictions and a bizarre set of rules inspired by all the legal scrutiny games had fallen under due to the ongoing Senator Lieberman/Night Trap business. For instance, action icon Jack Slater could no longer use guns (too violent) and had to politely punch everyone out instead and there's no way you could put a kid in a brawler so the movie's main character was conspicuously absent (though I guess they had a point there). The movie got lambasted quite severely and I bet having an exceptionally poor tie-in probably didn't help. It may be an ignominious introduction but this is also the first Genesis game from British developer B.I.T.S. (later Bits Studio) who would perhaps become best known for the Die Hard game-only sequel Die Hard: Vendetta (apparently originally supposed to be a N64 game?). We'll be seeing more movie tie-ins from them soon enough.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. No additional work needed.

502: NFL Football '94 Starring Joe Montana

• Developer: BlueSky Software
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1994-02-04
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Joe Montana Football
• Genre: Football
• Theme: Football
• Premise: Football
• Availability: Like all games in annualized sport simulation franchises it was obsolete within a year.
• Preservation: Who's ready for some football? Well, I never am, but here we are regardless. Sega had been trucking along with their Madden NFL competitor series Joe Montana Football for quite some time by this fourth entry so they had a pretty firm grasp on the figurative pigskin, once again handled by Californian studio BlueSky Software thanks to their Sega exclusivity contract. We're mostly talking iterative improvements here, carrying over the digitized (and very robotic) "sports talk" live commentary from its immediate predecessors and switching back to the vertical perspective of the field that had become the genre standard by this point. Despite the franchise being named for him, this would be the last game of the series to feature Montana's endorsement: later games would drop the "starring Joe Montana" and just stick with the generic "NFL Football [year]" format, which continued right up until the final days of the Genesis. Which is to say, we're going to see many more of these games and I'm going to have even less to say about them each time. Look forward to that.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots and a header image, with minor edits everywhere else.

503: Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing

• Developer: Gremlin Graphics
• Publisher: GameTek (NA) / Konami (EU)
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: 1994
• Franchise: Formula 1
• Genre: Racing
• Theme: Cars Go Brrm
• Premise: Let this "Nigel" man sell you on Formula 1 with this high-speed racing simulation game.
• Availability: Nope, another endorsed/licensed sports game.
• Preservation: Welcome to what the British F1 scene looked like in the early '90s, with the affable but dull mustachioed Nigel Mansell representing the circuit in this nation for many years as a perfect metaphor for a sport that should be way more exciting than it actually was. The same could be said of this game, which perhaps takes to the simulation aspect a little too faithfully as well as feeling a bit antiquated compared to other racers from this era (Daytona USA is only five months off). While simultaneously released on Mega Drive and SNES, and from the same developer no less (Gremlin Graphics, another British studio making their Genesis debut this entry), the two games have some significant differences chief of which is that the Genesis version follows the vehicle from a third-person perspective while the SNES version opts for a first-person driver's seat view. If you were a fan of the 1992 F1 season this game gives you plenty of options for real-life drivers and courses alike, but there were more compelling alternatives out there for racing fans in general including the previous year's Lotus Turbo Challenge and the upcoming Lotus II RECS (both originally from Gremlin Graphics as well). Also, don't ask me why Konami were the ones publishing this in Europe. I guess they saw some sense in publishing a British-made F1 game with a British F1 spokesman in the only territory likely to give a hoot.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Just needed the European box art/release.

504: Pink Goes to Hollywood

• Developer: HeadGames
• Publisher: TecMagik
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: April 1994
• Franchise: The Pink Panther
• Theme: A-cat-emy Award Nominated
• Premise: The Pinkest Pu- wait, let me start over. The Fuchsiaest Feline makes his Genesis debut with this movie-themed platformer.
• Availability: Licensed game. We're due another reboot though.
• Preservation: Oh, hey, I remember this game. I rented it for SNES back when I was still a dumb kid who didn't realize the Pink Panther cartoons were based on live-action Peter Sellers comedies where the titular cat was actually a gemstone. My enduring memory was that it wasn't terrible but nor was it particularly notable; in terms of licensed feline platformers I'd probably rank it above the Chester Cheetah games but just below Virgin Interactive's The Lion King. (Man, "ranking the licensed cat platformers" would be a truly cursed project. Free blog/video idea if anyone wants it, though.) So yeah, a '90s platformer video game based on a '60s animated series (which, fine, did actually get a reboot around this time) and tacitly named for a controversial '80s British band whose biggest hit was about say gex: that certainly has "youth demographic" written all over it. We have another new face with this game's developers: HeadGames, a short-lived outfit from San Francisco that worked briefly with Sega of America on some other licensed games before being folded into edutainment developers CAPS Software in 1995. That we've already introduced two new developers that will be working on almost nothing but Genesis licensed games from here on out should give you some insight into the wonderful future we have awaiting us on the Mega Archive.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Just some Genesis-related release info.

505: Race Drivin'

• Developer: Polygames
• Publisher: Tengen
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Hard Drivin'
• Genre: Race Drivin'
• Theme: Race Drivin'
• Premise: Race Drivin'
• Availability: It's in Midway Arcade Treasures 3 but nothing more recent than that.
• Preservation: This region-exclusive Genesis port of Race Drivin', a polygonal sequel to Hard Drivin', comes to us courtesy of original arcade developer Atari Games's console software publisher alter-ego Tengen and our old friends at Polygames, formerly Sterling Silver Software, which had also developed the Genesis port of Hard Drivin' way back in 1990 (covered in Mega Archive #6, so it was an early one). The arcade machine was packed with all sorts of high-tech features, including force feedback on the steering wheel and triple foot pedals including the clutch. Naturally, none of those vehicle accoutrements made it into the 16-bit home versions, which also struggled to keep the polygonal graphics at a decent framerate (for both SNES and Genesis they reduced the gameplay window and put some static dashboard graphics in the empty gaps). That fidelity issue was cleared up somewhat by this game's enhanced Sega Saturn port, though the issue there was that it was exclusive to Japan. Dunno if Race Drivin' wins "Best Game" for this Mega Archive entry but it certainly clinches "Most Imaginative Title".
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Needed some MD screenshots.

506: RoboCop 3

• Developer: Eden Entertainment
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: RoboCop
• Genre: Half Shooter/Half Shoot 'em Up/All Licensed Dreck
• Theme: Shootin' Dudes in the Balls.
• Premise: OCP's trying to knock down Old Detroit for their new Delta City and make thousands of innocent citizens homeless in the process. RoboCop's having none of it, even if he has to fight through the RoboNinjas of OCP's new Japanese owners to stop them. God, this movie's dumb.
• Availability: Wouldn't you know it? It's another licensed game. OCP's not reviving this one.
• Preservation: Oh jeez, RoboCop 3. The one where they switched actors from the inestimable Peter Weller, killed off the second most appealing character in the franchise, and then gave the guy a jetpack and a streetwise hacker orphan to protect. Just saying, there were better RoboCop movies to make a game around, including all of them. Well, at least this one doesn't have any cyberwitches or whatever it was that gave Minotti so much trouble with that Xbox adaptation. I'm more familiar with the home computer version of this which went for a very early polygonal FPS type of game that ran like molasses, but the console version pretty much plays like all the other RoboCop games: a side-scrolling shooter where you occasionally (by which I mean "most of the time") have to aim diagonally up to shoot crooks popping their heads out of first-floor windows to throw dynamite at poor old Murphy. They do pay homage to that jetpack though, putting RoboCop through shoot 'em up levels as he flies through Detroit. Motown more like Mow 'em Down. That's all I got; RoboCop 3 bums me out too much to bring my A-game.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Needed some Genesis-specific releases and screenshots.

507: Sensible Soccer: European Champions

• Developer: Sensible Software
• Publisher: Renegade / Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: Sensible Soccer
• Genre: Soccer
• Theme: Soccer
• Premise: Soccer, but it's sensible.
• Availability: Sensible World of Soccer showed up on Xbox 360 but that's as recent as this series goes.
• Preservation: Ah, Sensi. The premier European soccer sim is one that, true to its ironic name, doesn't take itself too seriously while all the same having an eminently playable, more action-oriented core built for quick and tense matches. Of course, it's still a soccer game, so my antipathy is out in full force here but I'll admit to finding a few moments of joy back in the day for what would prove to be one of the last of the "approachable" soccer game franchises out there. After this it's International Superstar Soccer, Pro Evo, and FIFA, all of which quickly lost me due to their stronger focus on simulation aspects which gave them slower paces and steeper learning curves. This version of Sensible Soccer is in fact the first sequel, Sensible Soccer 92/93, which came out shortly after the original and is pretty much a mildly improved iteration (so, like every other annual sports game). That first Sensible Soccer never left the European home computer market. We'll see this franchise one more time in 1994 for its International Edition, which arrived just in time for the FIFA World Cup of that year.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Mega Drive-specific screenshots and releases.

508: Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge

• Developer: Software Creations
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: Marvel Comics
• Genre: Brawler / Platformer
• Theme: Superheroics on a Budget
• Premise: Spidey and a few of the strongest X-Men join forces to beat up the worst villain of all: a nerd who loves video games too much. Nice to feel seen by my heroes, I guess.
• Availability: Licensed game. One I doubt Marvel wants to acknowledge.
• Preservation: Our second Acclaim game this month is none other than this Marvel crossover that managed to disappoint two (admittedly overlapping) audiences simultaneously. Switching between five characters—Spider-Man and the four X-Men of Cyclops (boring), Gambit (creeper), Storm (overpowered), and Wolverine (Canadian)—the idea of the game is to complete each character's two solo "chapters" before teaming up for the final showdown against the bowtie-sporting antagonist Arcade in his giant mech. Some effort was made to match the powers and level design to each of the characters but it's not enough to exonerate the dull gameplay and annoying, maze-like levels. I'm a fan of Software Creations's original works (none of which made it to Genesis, sadly) but their licensed games and ports left much to be desired.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Genesis screenshots.

509: Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends

• Developer: Malibu Interactive
• Publisher: THQ
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Thomas the Tank Engine
• Genre: Edutainment / Simulation
• Theme: Dun-dun-dun-dun, Dun-dun, Duuuuuun
• Premise: Help Thomas and friends (and other coworkers, with whom he merely shares an acquaintanceship) round up all of Sir Topham Hatt's loose carriages and deliver them to the station.
• Availability: Licensed game. There's been several Thomas games since though and I'm sure they're all as equally compelling.
• Preservation: Long before his absolutely canon star turns in Skyrim and Resident Evil 4, Thomas the Tank Engine featured in kid-friendly games like this, which presented what was more of a mini-game collection of simple, easy challenges suited for its younger audience revolving around navigating train tracks. I don't think there's ever been a stage in my life where I wasn't perturbed by those giant, expressive faces on otherwise inanimate objects. It's like, what are the rules of this world? Can anything sprout a face and start talking to me? What about the toilet when it's in use? These were the type of intrusive thoughts that kept me awake at night as a child, and so I'm happy to see that others have embraced the scare potential of these uncanny locomotives through the above famous mods or the recent survival horror sim Choo-Choo Charles. At any rate, there's not much to say about this baby game beyond that it lets you choose the color palette of your chosen engine just in case you wanted to create the ultimate blasphemy that is a red Thomas. James is the red one, goddammit. What the hell is wrong with you?
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Could this be a new Mega Archive record? No extra work needed.

510: Virtual Pinball

• Developer: BudgeCo + Electronic Arts
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: January 1994
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Pinball
• Theme: Channeling Your Inner-Bakalar
• Premise: Play some pinball or build your own table in this 16-bit take on Pinball Construction Set.
• Availability: The original Pinball Construction Set had its source code officially released to the public just recently, but that's about it as far as "new releases".
• Preservation: We finish this batch with perhaps the most original game this entry in Virtual Pinball, which belongs to the time-honored practice of giving players a fully-featured level editor to work with to pre-empt them mouthing off online about being better designers. It's an adaptation of BudgeCo's 1983 Apple II game Pinball Construction Set—part of a series of level editor-enriched Apple II games that Electronic Arts put out, all from different developers—that was given a 16-bit facelift. There are of course limitations in putting a game like this out on console instead of home computer, chiefly that it's impossible to share creations and the cartridge memory can only fit ten tables in total all of which have to be crafted from prefabricated parts, but its neat that budding game developers could have something like this to tinker with on the Genesis. It might not have Sonic or Mötley Crüe MIDIs to sell it, but I bet you'd get a lot of pinbang for your pinbuck with a game like this. Developer BudgeCo is simply the label used by Bill Budge, the original creator and programmer of the Pinball Construction Set, who has had an interesting, mostly "behind the scenes" career having switched from EA to 3DO to Sony Computer Entertainment then back to EA and finally to Google, from which he officially retired a few years ago. Hey, maybe he programmed in one of those fun Google Search Easter eggs about pinball! Let me just type in "playing with balls" real quick...
• Wiki Notes: Our only other game this month that wasn't a SNES double dip. Needed some body text and a header image.

Hey team, we're back with another explormer on Indie Explormer of the Week, but wait! Put down those rotten fruit, dear sirs and madams, as there's a significant change-up this time: this explormer's a 3D explormer! Quite the novel shift to the staid formula around here, right? Pseudoregalia kinda feels like... if the Klonoa team at Namco played Team Ico's Ico, was inspired to whip up a platformer—fully 3D this time, rather than the hybrid style from before—with the same saturnine tone (connecting it thematically to the downer ending of the first Klonoa) and then whipped up a quick proof of concept PS2 tech demo before Namco nixed the whole thing, and this is that long-lost demo that someone uploaded to the internet decades after the fact. The protagonist is some kind of Toriel goat-woman (whose actual name we learn at the very end of the game) who finds herself summoned to a dark area full of cages, collects a few power-ups to escape the dungeon, and finds a whole castle connected to a bunch of other areas like a bailey, a keep, a theater, and a library and continues making her way through the place to figure out where it is she needs to go and for what purpose. The game is very light on story, though there's the occasional bits and pieces of inscrutable lore, and heavy instead on exploration and platforming. Specifically, some remarkably challenging 3D platforming where you continue to acquire various Mario 64-esque techniques to increase your horizontal and vertical distance. And also maybe a little bit of combat thrown in there just for flavor. union

The combat's definitely the lesser part of the equation so I'll cover that first. The heroine collects a cross-shaped club weapon (vaguely tonfa-esque) relatively early and can use it to bash enemies. Doing so allows her to collect mana which can be spent towards a heal, a similar system to that in Hollow Knight, with eventual upgrades to increase the damage dealt, the mana generation on each hit, and the heal amount respectively. The game doesn't really tell you that you have a lock-on or anything about healing before you're faced with the first (and, turns out, penultimate) boss fight shortly after starting the game which is something of a trial by fire, and an early indication of the mostly hands-off approach the game has to instructing or directing you beyond what is absolutely necessary, which for many is a pivotal quality of an explorer that wants to focus on the exploration side. After that tough encounter though, barring a few tougher enemies like the maids or the persistent ranged attacks of the big hands, the enemies mostly serve to break up the platforming sequences which are much more prevalent. If anything, they're a welcome source of mana and healing if one sequence in particular has been causing you to fall off the world (which thankfully just respawns you near the exit with less health) over and over.

The game truly shines during those times where they've set up a room of obstacles and platforms, some of which feel very out of reach, and tasks you with figuring out your way over to them. Of course, a lot of the time the solution is "I clearly need an upgrade I don't have yet" but once you've intuited the obscure order of destinations to visit to acquire said upgrades, the game becomes that much more engrossing. This is a natural progression of any explormer of course, especially where the traversal upgrades aren't just the key to overcoming specific roadblocks but increase your ability to get around just in general. The game's high jump, long jump, wall-running and other equivalents all contribute to an easier means of getting around quickly and dexterously and there's always that wonderful feeling where, due to the upgrades combined with all the training you've had up until this point, that you're performing platforming feats that would seem remarkable to a version of you from several hours ago. The apex of this particular feeling of platforming supremacy come from the optional challenges you can initiate by hitting a purple crystal in certain rooms: this generates a bunch of orbs for you to collect, either in a specific order or in any order you wish, and usually grants a cosmetic item if you're able to finish the course under a time limit. They're inessential, because they tend to be murderously tough even compared to the rest of the game, but it's where you can enjoy the game's platforming controls at their peak efficiency.

Initially I was a little put off by Pseudoregalia's "tech demo" aesthetic—which I'd describe less in the sense that it feels unfinished but more in the sense of how Super Mario 64 or Bubsy 3D (which really represent the full quality spectrum of early 3D platformers) kinda didn't have any idea what they were doing with regards to a consistent art style or visual language—but it won me over once I realized what the game was attempting with it. That is, an homage to the loosey-goosey feeling of those early PS1/N64 platformers combined with a dreamlike illogical sensibility that turned out to be more germane to the game's plot than I first realized (and yet another reason why I immediately thought of Klonoa, beyond just having Klonoa on the brain recently). It's true that Indie 3D platformers tend to look a bit archaic due to the relative expense of creating games in 3D even to this day, especially when there's more important considerations to get right like the platforming controls and constructing an explormer map that has a natural (if not naturally obvious) intended progression path, but all but a few like Pseudoregalia are too risk-averse to make their games appear experimentally strange the way the earliest 3D platformers could be. What matters is that the simplicity (and occasional obfuscation) of Pseudoregalia's blocky environs don't distract from the exceptional platforming core that powers the game.

I've played a few Indie 3D platformers, and fewer still those with an explormer focus, but what makes Pseudoregalia memorable isn't so much that genre rarity but the total package of its dreamy if rudimentary-looking aesthetic and how that belies a carefully-designed and occasionally-intimidating set of platforming challenges, with all sorts of the usual power-ups and traversal abilities to find and acquire. I won't say that it didn't frustrate me occasionally, especially when you're not quite sure if you need a new upgrade or if you're fine as you are and are just missing something (one sequence where you move around in the dark had me believing that you needed some kind of torch power-up until I realized that your sword glows whenever you throw it away, explaining why that mechanic exists at all), but finally conquering the game and its many challenges made it all worth it. If you want a 3D platformer that can move and feel the same slick way many explormers do towards their endgame, Pseudoregalia's one of the precious few outside of a Nintendo product that can pull it off, provided you can get past its look (or, ideally, are as equally entranced by it as you are the gameplay).

Rating: 5 out of 5.