Someone really watched a Sean Connery prestige film and was like "Do you know what the boomers watching this truly need? An arcadey Nintendo shmup that takes advantage of the latest toy gimmick gun!"

And, make no mistake, it's a very fun and unique game, but I can't help but feel its audience may have been... kneecapped a bit by the movie being adapted into something where you fight a giant cartoon squid in a sexy mode 7 level https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1048770623805079633/1116608022110797824/Hunt_for_Red_October_The_USA_-_Snes9x_1.60_2023-06-09_01-46-33.mp4

The graphics are pretty alright on SNES. It does the usual technique of making the water backgrounds very wavy and disorienting, much like say Super Bomberman 3. The enemy sprites aren't the most memorable but I suppose it fits. The sprite scaling in the lightgun segments is pretty nice as well, reminded me that this is one of the only 10 or so games to take advantage of the Super Scope and even now I wonder what potential the device could have fulfilled if more people were interested in it.

Red October isn't your typical shmup, AT ALL. There's a massive health bar, which already makes it more fun than at least 90% of arcade shmups by default. While most "space shmups" and the like are very fast-paced, Red October is slow and meticulous, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It emulates the feel of a slow deep dive into the ocean and being assaulted by unknowns. Thankfully, the player has a huge arsenal to work with. There is a weapon for each face button, and they hit just about every pattern imaginable. The player can either strafe with their shots or make hard turns, and if the player is moving up or down the bullets carry momentum which is super helpful for the penultimate boss.

Also I have to give mentions to the special weapons. The EMP disables all enemy projectiles for a while, which I suppose is realistic but utterly breaks most of the boss fights lol. I prefer the camo personally; Red October features stealth gimmicks that are actually pretty integral to surviving the experience, as some enemies are nigh-undodgable otherwise. Stealth elements in non-stealth games tend to be very tacked on, so I was pleasantly surprised by this to say the least.

And I have to give special mention to the soundtrack. It's all classical shit you've heard a million times, but it still never gets old hearing Ode to Joy in 16-bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8t45dOIFx0

Main flaws with the game? It's not the most fitting adaptation, it's very easy to 1cc to the point it should take ~2 hours max, and the cutscenes are uninteresting. But frankly, this sort of unique experience is the kind of shit I live for. Again, it's a meticulous underwater shmup with 5 different weapons, stealth mechanics that are fleshed out, and chiptune classical music for the OST. There's nothing quite like it and I would rec at least one playthrough for any hardcore shmup fans.

To quote another Capcom game, "a solid beginning may lead to a perfect ending". A solid beginning was something that Street Fighter V unfortunately didn't really have, and it pretty much haunted it for the rest of it's life, even if it deserved the contempt or not.

So what can Capcom do to deliver this solid beginning to 6? Well, how about a fun as shit mode where you make your own self-insert, and run around Metro City delivering shoryukens to the back of some old lady's head and initiate fights with everyone you see? A Yakuza-like perhaps, but for me it's Mortal Kombat Deception's Konquest Mode expanded and perfected. It turns out all you need to attract more casual fans is a cool single player mode that just so happens to have a neat fighting game attached to it. Vets like myself love it too, because the Capcom references and lore drops never stop falling on top of you, and the cellphone interactions with the fighters is so fucking adorable. God, it's probably the best mode I've ever played in a fighting game.

Capcom is always Capcom, they do silly things constantly, but here they've proved that they've learned from the last game. I haven't felt this good about a Street Fighter entry since Third Strike, and obviously it remains to be seen whether this can have that kind of longevity. Regardless, everyone I know who's playing is absolutely fuckin' happy, and you know what? I'm fuckin' happy. It feels so nice seeing the game launch this well after V's clumsy-ass stumble out of the starting gate. I do think there's a special kind of quality to having Street Fighter do good, and attract all this attention even from friends in my circles who don't normally play fighting games, perhaps more good things will come in the end....more fighting game friends.....yes....let's fuckin' go. Yes, I WANT YOU TO PLAY FUCKIN' FIGHTING GAMES!!

For now, I have high hopes.... perhaps a perfect beginning may lead to an even better ending. Rooting for ya champ.

The initial honeymoon is very strong but quickly gives way to a weak Wolfendoom propped up by wonderful aesthetics and weight. The thunk of your marine's boots, the thwack of the boltgun, the thud of your armour into an enemy, the thrill of the chainsword all mean nothing when levels are quasi-labyrinths with the same gothic coat of paint, the same enemies, the same circle-strafing.

The chainsword is cool in theory but is not as snappy as DOOM Eternal's loot granting chainsaw. The weapons feel fantastic but most of the time you can just use the boltgun and ignore everything else. The raison d'etre to charge ever forward to maintain your defenses withers away when you're locked in an arena trying to hunt down one last blue horror so you can get a key, or when you're trying to find the elevator in a sea of brown architecture. The unique models might as well not exist if they blend together or recede into the background as visual mud. It feels like playing the handheld port of a console title, the inferior (if charming) sibling to Space Marine.

The Far Cry Elden Ring-ification of Breath of the Wild with a smattering of end-of-chapter Fortnite and New Funky Mode.

While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.

The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.

The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.

Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.

TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).

Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.

A story that is at odds with itself. The game is truly at its best when its analyzing the malaise of the time period that the story takes place in. Sumina is a wonderful city with rich history but the rapid industrialization post WWII has left it polluted, both in a physical and metaphysical sense. There's a moment where two main characters stand on a bridge discussing the nature of the Sumina river. The Sumina River in this case is treated as the gateway between life and the afterlife, though it has been polluted through decades of industrialization. The city is littered with poverty. One of the main locations is a high school of impoverished students who have no consistency in teachers since they can only hire people on a temporary basis. Students with no prospects become ruffians, and are treated as unteachable animals that exist simply to be isolated from society. Members of the community try to treat them with care such as the policeman Hajime who treats his job much more like a social worker than an ACAB. The tapestry here is vivid.

Often the biggest sign towards this pollution is the powerlessness of women in this society, from Sumeo not given the option to pay the ransom for her child or Michyo forced into awful circumstances stemming purely from the death of her father. Women cannot not choose their circumstances and are only finally given some amount of power once given the powers of the curse echos. @Cadensia did a wonderful job adding a historical context to the story itself and how it fits into the sociocultural frameworks of gender, socioeconomics, etc. It's much better than what I could put together discussing the gender elements at play here so go give it a read!

The problem here is while the atmosphere of Sumina and certain plotlines are impeccable the story ultimately falls flat in terms of both theming and the mystery. Did you know that the only way you can learn the motivations of the true villain is through a File in the menu? Those motivations in themselves are also pretty whack. The story is best when looked through the lense of Sumue, a woman who is both trying to gain power that she's lost in society as well stubborn in her desire to ressurect her child. Often depicted as obsessed and morally questionable, she ultimately gets that ethos dissected into three different endings for her, all of which feel complete and conclusive. On the other hand, the villain? Abjectly evil. Decidedly feminine. Depicted with an obsession on pride which while being a fine villanous crutch is ironic when at one moment in the end a main male character does a "noble sacrifice" of sorts based entirely in his pride. While the themes identify gender and the power that men have in society as a root of so many issues, it in itself does not treat the male and female characters equally in its final moments.
As soon as the story tosses away the morally complex main characters to focus on the morally one sided villanous opposition it falls flat on its face. The mystery becomes unengaging, the plot threads begin to unravel, and ultimately the themes of the story lack consistency. Sumue cannot exist in the same story as Ashino, unless the thought process is that motherhood justified her pride or added some extra layer that makes it more morally complex than Ashinos desire to stay beautiful.

Ultimately the story leaves me frustrated. It is beautiful in so many small moments. It frames its historical context so well and the themes are so rich at first, but its fixation on morality is its downfall. The story does not treat its characters equally, which is unfortunate since all the problems in Sumina stem from its inequity.

In times where I find myself with little interest in the current doings of the modern era, and not much of a schedule to maintain a consistent play of anything with length (being a responsible adult with a lot of hobbies kind of sucks sometimes). There is always my home away from home, the ever-so simple shmup. I attribute my fascination very much to the childhood indoctrination of Super R-Type and it's training from hell, but aside from a smattering of random appearances by Sol-Deace and Einhander that interest was never particularly with the genre itself, and only due to those games randomly passing me by, as they would with many others. After all, Einhander was in A LOT of demo discs.

It seemed fate grew tired of me dragging my feet on exploring the genre proper, because I suppose one day at Blockbuster I was desperate to play something new with my monthly rental. Enter Gradius III and IV, an early release for the PS2 that would introduce me to one of the founding series of the genre. I guess it was fair for R-Type to be my babysitter, and the hardest entries in the Gradius series to be my personal drill instructor, however fucked up that may be. It goes without saying, it was really goddamned hard. How I managed to finish the game was beyond me for the longest time due to the lack of continues, until I remembered that the compilation came with a stage select that was slowly unlocked as you made it through sections of the game. Even with that blessing, it still kind of boggles my mind that I managed it within the five day rental period.

Oh, to be young again with that lack of things to do and with my current level of expertise. I like to think with that combo I could potentially be like the legends who can 1cc this in their sleep, but I'm not sure that will happen.

Over the last two weeks I had been casually playing the fantastic Hamster port of this on my Switch. I was in for a rude awakening when I remembered that I had joycon drift, and playing the game on a smaller screen probably wasn't the best thing in mind. Regardless, I did manage to get to the third stage with my newly found inability to continue despite the presence of a stage select. Joycon drift to me was like an extra challenge, but then I realized that was stupid, and that I may as well had added a bunch of other useless external bullshit like smearing raspberry jam over my screen or paying someone to take a mallet to my feet in random intervals of 10 to 60 seconds.

Then so, I returned to the compilation on my PS2 of which had come into my possession very early in my physical collection out of sheer nostalgia. I did the only thing any sane individual would do, I increased the difficulty to the max of six, and kept the wait level to "0" which eliminated all slowdown from the game. If I'm playing this, I want every infernal beating it can offer me right off the bat. It's just how we do things in V-Town. For about an hour I did what I could, I would be beaten soundly in certain sections, and use the stage select to slowly inch my way through by returning to the beginning of the stage I game over'd in. In theory, I totally could beat it in an evening with that method. Have I truly improved since then? I like to think so, or at the very least that I'm not just persistent and stubborn.

Maybe one day I'll take the time to master Gradius III enough to beat it without a stage select, but for now I feel the incoming appearance of the dreaded OTHER THINGS I would like to play. I do have to wonder though, why do I have an odd feeling of respect for you and not something like Gaiares where I'll gladly spit in it's general direction and stuff it in a locker? Is it that nostalgic upbringing of your appearance into my life, or is it because of the name "Gradius"? Maybe, it's "In The Wind". Regardless, my non-existent hat is off to you my friend.

May we meet again.

A layered cocktail that needs some shaking and stirring of its components.

The process of learning a new roguelite is one that, with enough experience, boils down to determining what works with what. This goes doubly for an engine-builder where the composition of the engine is just as important as its execution. Your Isaacs and Gungeons can be finished with poor items and pure skill, but when constructing a deck the parts need to work in harmony.

Peglin wants to have it both ways with its appropriation of Peggle's adaptation of pachinko machines. Whereas Peggle largely removed the element of luck in all but name (the Zen Ball making it most apparent that this is a game of skill), Peglin has done away with the possibility of winning with skill. Everything is down to RNG in one way or another, and the worst part is that Peglin refuses to admit this to the player. In this sense, Peglin is no different from its pachinko machine grandfather, the specific tuning of the latter's pins betraying the simple proposition of getting a ball to its goal.

The crux of the issue is that the player has no way of changing their odds in a meaningful way. Like other engine-builders, you are presented a few random choices for what passive items or balls you want to take. After battle you can upgrade your orbs if you wish. While other engine-builder roguelites like Slay the Spire and Monster Train offer the choice of card for free, Peglin assigns a cost to this and grants shockingly few opportunities to remove balls from the deck. Each shop does let you remove one ball for a fee, but you're going to have to bounce your way over there and thus structure your play in service of those spare few chances.

Building an engine is itself troublesome due to the nature of play. For starters, balls can have their own gravity which is further affected by bouncy pegs, bombs, gravity wells, slime bubbles, and other hazards. On top of this, the ball does not necessarily go to where the pointer is -- Peggle's balls always went straight to the pointer. Coupled with a paltry shot preview, each shot is a skewed gamble, a vague gesture of intent that is rarely realised. The game's confusion status which rapidly rotates your aim might as well be on by default, the end result is nearly identical. Even ignoring the inefficacy of aiming, without a way to meaningfully affect your luck, you can end up with a build that shoots itself in the foot. Whether due to my own (un)luck of the game's internal weighting, nearly every run of mine has been focused on increasing non-critical damage to ludicrous levels. That feels fun, but it is made instantly worthless if my ball hits a crit modifier, my damage cut down tenfold if not more. With a proper ability to aim my shots that would be fine, I would simply aim away from my Achilles' heel, but a refreshing of the board, an errant moving peg, a black hole, any number of possibilities will ensure my ball is heading straight for the one thing I don't want to have happen. That does not feel like I played poorly, it feels like the rug was pulled out from under me.

Most damning of all is that Peglin lacks the aesthetic, dopaminergic je ne sais quoi that makes Peggle so ultra-satisfying. Hitting a peg is a flaccid act without whimsy, the visual feedback a nothingburger of a number, the audio presented as effective white noise. The labouriously slow traversal of the ball makes each shot a tedium, something the developers are clearly aware of as there is a prevalent fast forward button which can knock the speed up to 300%. I am never on the edge of my seat, gnawing my nails hoping my shot was planned correctly, that I will hit that last peg with my final shot, the world holding its breath. I never feel my aptitude increasing. I only feel my time is being wasted, just as Peglin's potential is.

Before I begin my one-size-fits-all bitching and moaning, I would like to give Nintendo my sincerest gratitude in sacrificing this game upon their altars of public relations. I seriously could not imagine trying to play this game, knowing that real world is happening with it's cartoonish depictions. I'm sure Activision is more than willing to do the same for all their Call of Duty games, they could learn a thing or two from them. Since the game has finally released, I assume every war is now over. What a relief! Now I can game with peace of mind!

The constant delay gave me more than enough time to get over my initial shock of them remembering that this series once existed, and start bringing myself back on the level and stuff my inner fangirl back into their hole. The new artstyle for this game? Way too clean, I know it's WayForward's typical style, but I was never the hugest fan of it. Some COs like Lash look cute, but others just look drab. This isn't helped by the overly smooth animation for their in-battle portraits that look insanely cheap to me, it feels like I'm watching a bunch of vtubers in a multiplayer game. This is obviously pretty apples, oranges and melons. I'm sure some enjoy this new art style, but that's completely minor in the grand scheme of things, I would like to talk about the actual in-game graphics.

They are shit.

Awful. The most PepsiCo-sponsored corporate looking mobile 3D that looks tailor-made to run on the most budget cellphone you could imagine. I get that the Switch may as well be a shitty budget cellphone in comparison to my PC rig or the PS5/Series X, but surely you could've done better. It could be because it's hard to duplicate the original game's colorful spritework and backdrops that were created with the brightness of the GBA in mind to a more modern system with stock polygons, but I don't get why this unimpressive-looking mess also apparently runs at uneven frame rates. It clashes with the portraits of the COs, and this difference makes it even more noticeable. This is beyond my usual "sprites > polygons" bullshit when it comes to remakes, there's a clear winner and loser in this affair.

I know I'm going on purely about the visuals, but that's always the biggest change when these dreadful remakes pop up. If it looks shit compared to the original, then I don't care about the QoL improvements. It's great that they are there, but zooming out the map to see even more of the utterly dull landscape of this does little to excite me. I don't always have this attitude with remakes, I can be less mean-spirited. The Spyro Reignited Trilogy managed to survive my wrath despite it's glitches, and I think that speaks for itself enough considering my unspeakable adoration for the originals. A good touch could give an old game a new look for modern hardware that's pleasing for everyone, and this doesn't do it for me.

It's poop, I'm afraid. 💅

I would like to also bring up another thing, the price. It is outrageously rare that I would ever bring this up. I don't consider myself to be made of gold bars and pirate treasure, nor am I starving in the back of a McDonalds parking lot, but I know when something is fucked up. A few months ago the Metroid Prime Remaster was released, it was forty didgeridoos. I consider that game a nice glow up of a Gamecube classic despite it still being a bit much, this is a sixty didgeridoo mixed bag of opinions of two GBA titles that are very obviously running off the same rom file.[Biggest tell is AW1 Olaf losing his chair and Sturm no longer looking like Captain Snifit] I haven't had this feeling like I was about to be mugged since the Space Invaders Invincible Collection dropped, and attempted to put me into bankruptcy. It's way too much, you know the alternative. A sad day when your pricing approaches breathing distance of current-gen Taito re-releases.

If you're still interested, cool. The QoL will surely be nice, since underneath the Great Value presentation are still the skeletons of the gameplay by Intelligent Systems. However I consider this to be a mockery, and I no longer wish it to be in my kingdom. If WayBackward were gonna take up the reins, then they should've just done a new game [and it probably would've smelled even worse]. Maybe WayForward should've just made their way forward into a bottomless pit, because apparently their involvement would've made me angry regardless. I'm just hoping this remaster existing doesn't equip their GBA workers with the slow block when it comes to bringing the originals to NSO.[you know it's gonna be 2026 by that point]

I hope Arin Hanson accidentally bites into the world's most sour lemon, and has his mouth perpetually closed shut for the rest of his life.