When your wheels touched concrete in the summer of 1999, you were sure nothing would ever compare to this. Propelled downhill, less by gravity but more by the venerated asphalt spirit, skaters far and wide convened here, a jam to end all jams. While you were happy doing everything you could, holding on to what you were, you couldn’t help but stare skyward at the street zephyrs soaring suspended; They careened through the air, making waxed wood and molded metal both their playthings. As you crashed down to the soul-shattering gravel, face bloodied and back broken, you could only wonder how they ascended from simple skaterdom, piercing the heavens of the board.

It took a year of shattered bones and busted lines to reclaim those halcyon days. A year of spilt blood and scattered teeth, splintered wood and worn polyurethane. It all felt like a dream then, placing bronze out in Roswell, but the age of simple skating had come and gone. You perfected flatland balance, dual-wheel worship at the altar of Mullen, but even perfection wasn’t enough for elusive gold; the Bullring by the Sea didn’t just cost you your metal, it cost you years of knowing you weren't good enough.

So now we’re here. Somehow, another year felt like two decade’s separation; Gone was the California sun, the first to die in the American Wasteland. A nation of Sparrows and Jackasses, failed projects and unproven theories, crept under wheel, biting at the ankles of the past. The spirit of yesterday was buried underground, leaving today to mourn in remembrance.

Well, maybe for some. The only angels you prayed to struck gold, immortalized in sharp vertexes and warped textures. They would be memorialized not in the world’s destruction, but in a final tour, eight stops; a send-off of olden days.

You forged your craft, refining your spark-casting perfection on the rails of automation, before skating to the north. Calgary’s frost-bitten hospitality was the first real test, but as if guided by Hawk’s holy hand, the snowy providence of Alberta bowed down, hailing 900s and McTwists like the second coming. For the first time in decades, a smile spreads across your face, your cheeks still rosy-red from the icy air…

You blink, and awaken to a crowd cheering your name. Looking down on the masses, faces revered and reviled stare back; Muska, Campbell, Reynolds and Margera. You glance around for Burnquist, hoping to celebrate with the hometown hero, but the master is missing in action. Somehow, you were sure you’d be able to show off this gold to him somewhere down the line.

It repeats, on and on: Suburbia becomes New Jersey, the Airport becomes a Mall. Twenty years made it all blend together. Even now, your second gold medal in hand, it barely feels like you’re awake. When those wheels roll, maple boards of a bygone age, time disappears, rendered in heelflips and darkslides. The pomp and circumstance of it all becomes an excuse, more than anything. In your immortalized element, the past is as real as you remember it.

The final jam beckons; neo-chrome Tokyo glistens, welcoming only the best of the best. The competition rages on, dreams dashed in fractured bones and dislocations. No matter what you do, face-to-face with your idols, no, your contemporaries, there's no break, no chance to cover lost ground. Rivals dwindle as career-ending injuries take one after another, but the legendary Birdman flies past.

Seconds are left in the last heat; only a miracle will change the course of destiny. You think to the future, to the final 900 and the first 1260. As if coming free from its wheels, the board possesses you one last time, as you pivot hard on impact, momentum propelling you into the cosmos.

180. 360. 540.

Tony looks skyward, the same shine that was in your eyes twenty years prior.

Two rotations. The 900. 1080.

Nothing else matters. An amoeba with a mind of its own, an ace of spades, whatever you were and where you come from don't matter. This lone moment, spinning on a golden axis, is what it all comes down to.

Zero seconds. You don't bother looking at the scoreboard; you knew better than to think that's what this is about.

All you were looking for was this lone moment of perfection, a revision of the summer of '99. You wrap your hand tight around your medal - does it even matter what it is? - as you board the plane back to California. Staring out the window, you see the past and future together, a first-hand account of what it's like when worlds collide. You never forget the past, and tomorrow closes in fast, but this single moment is eternal.

All the grand gestures can't ease your wonder. You finally unwrap the medal and take it in.

100% Pure Gold.

Dreams... why do we have them? Where do they come from?

They're many things. They often inspire us to create, mold and manifest those same dreams into reality. They give us a vision of what is to possibly come, or perhaps to remind us of simpler times that made our little hearts grow. Above all else, they serve as our home away from home, to escape from the troubles we face in our lives as we sleep through the moon's company, or look towards the sky as we lay on that peaceful hill and put our head in the clouds with the sun. To relieve us from all that stress and bad energy, and bring back that positive outlook that is so important to us as we live on this plane of existence. In a way, it is the most significant element for all of us. Without the ability to dream, what would we do aside from just exist? Where else could we go to get away?

...at the very least, that's my interpretation of them.

No one knows how they work, and we probably never will figure them out or who is out there trying to motivate and cheer us up. Is it a mystical property our bodies have? Is someone above looking out for us? Are they just... as they are? For all we know, we could each have our own personal rogue nightmaren that looks over us and tries to keep those night terrors at bay, and allow us to remain hopeful and optimistic. When we pass, do we meet them? The concept of dreaming in itself is a dream as my imagination runs rampant like the sheep that I count within my mind. It's more intriguing as I ponder on it, because I always find myself diving into that same realm to find my vision on creative personal projects, or to bring me strength to work toward a brighter future for myself and those around me. What about you?

Dreams of finally meeting that special someone online who lives many miles away? Don't worry, you'll see each other soon. Dreaming of finally making your own game and putting it on Steam? You got this. A dream of becoming a YouTube content creator? You can do it.

We can.

That is what matters. I'll always believe in you. Never doubt yourself.

Why the sudden burst of helpful optimism? Well, that brings us to you NiGHTS, the instigator of my sunny disposition. You offer me this flight through your world of colors and frolicking moody nightopians that grow with age as I play your game, challenging me to climb ranks and smash Sonic's records. I continue to be amazed at your poise and grace with your cat-like gaze. You're but an arcade game at your core, and yet you touch my heart with your musical score and the neverending warmth of your silent tale. It feels as though I had my emotions bottled up to keep myself professional like an adult as I went on my adventure with you, and yet... I left the experience feeling like a kid again, singing your tune to bring myself joy. With you, I touched the stars and felt the wind beneath my newly discovered wings.

If I may ask you, the reader...

Is it strange to be this full of cheer with tears in my eyes?

Direct criticism without the fluff is something I deliver to smaller developers who I want to see succeed and am a big fan of. I've followed JoyMasher since stumbling upon Odallus The Dark Call, and had hyped Blazing Chrome all over multiple sites and Discord servers with mixed success on selling it to others.

Moonrider is their fourth retro-esque venture, and it seems like it wants to eat every kind of action-sidescroller at the buffet table, but I feel it could've regurgitated at least a few Mega Man X helpings. The presentation once again is splendid, spritework is phenomenal and sound effects are oomphie as shit. My boy Dominic Ninmark is back, and yet again he delivers another rad soundtrack.

Controls are slick and always responsive save for a bit of divekick buffoonery that could've been on my end, I am not exactly a goddess among goddesses. The ultimate takeaway I have for Moonrider is the additional special weapons you gain from defeating the humanoid bosses at the end of the selectable stages during the main portion. They are horrifically unbalanced. Most of them are traditional MMX-style projectile attacks, but one of them is an Epsilon Eagle-style Alien Soldier dash that does massive damage with complete invincibility and next to no cooldown. The sheer utility of this attack along with it's ability to trivialize many boss encounters brings the question of why they couldn't have eschewed the boss weapons and had just designed around the dash as a basic move.

You combine this along with the regenerating MP chip and you can really lame out some encounters. The only time I switched off the dash move was when it was unwieldy to use, aka when pits were present or the boss was super-glued to the wall. You may ask, "well Vee, if it were that busted then why not use something else?" That of which I reply, "Alien Soldier dashing is fun as shit, fuck no I ain't changing to the boring fire boomerang unless I have to." On top of the unbalanced weapons, the game is also constantly giving you spots with additional lives and health/mp, and the only real difficulty increase is self-imposed stuff like equipping an OHKO chip, which is a tad much I feel at least on a first playthrough. It was just a tad unfulfilling at the end of it, even if I did enjoy the final cutscene and credits music. Once again, stellar presentation.

Despite that, I still enjoyed myself for the 20 USD I spent on both it and it's OST. I am very happy that they decided to include Dom's soundtrack for purchase, because last time I had to go almost a year with nothing but in-game audio for Blazing Chrome's OST thanks to the only release being a LRG special edition that got gobbled up by pre-purchase scalper bots in one nanosecond.

A step-down from Blazing Chrome, but we all hit a speed bump once in a while. I look forward to the next one.

It's impossible for me not to compare Neurocracy to a game like Hypnospace Outlaw without bias simply due to both games being "website browser simulators" and the latter being one of my favorite gaming experiences I've ever had for a multitude of reasons.

The key difference lies in the surface-level "game" aspect to it though. Hypnospace initially gives you a task of "look for rules being broken online" and then builds its world and narrative from that, alongside a tremendous amount of care in its presentation and aesthetics.

From the perspective of someone who only learned about it just now in the year 2023, Neurocracy effectively throws a website at you and says "read up, kiddo." And then it limits the amount of deep-diving you're actually allowed to do (when you hover over individual names, often it just gives you a short blurb about them without letting you view a detailed wiki-style article). While I feel like that's kind of the point given the context of "AI-written wikipedia articles with publishing approval clutched tightly by a select few elite," it's...not that fun?

To quote Cadensia's review, "the only reward the player will have is within themselves and nowhere else."

I don't love this. I don't think it's bad, but a project like this needs some kind of additional motivator for me to appreciate experiencing the world it tries to build.

I'd honestly rather just take an actual deep-dive into Wikipedia.

Year of the Rabbit #1: Recommended by... uh...I'll just say Cold_Comfort...

Yuletide givings often make way for me to put a game to the forefront, if I don't at least try my gift I'll feel like a terrible friend! Oh, shame on me for leaving it on my steam wishlist since the day it came out, the poor thing sitting out on my doorstep for years, waiting for me to open the door. It's going to catch a cold! You can rest with comfort now little one, warm yourself by the fire and have as many cookies as you like for my apology, I'm on a diet anyway.

Science girl who wishes to be cyber rabbit, what will they think of next? Are they trying to copy me, or did I copy them? Bullets brush past me as I cling to my bombs and lives by the skin of my teeth, hardcore electronic dance music goes crazy with the appearance of the fourth mini-boss. Vee in real life kicks their legs in an effort to go "NGAAAAAAAH" as they desperately weave between the not-actually-that-big bullets with their cute little hitbox. I say to myself "PULL THE LEVER KRONK" as I unleash the giant unholy laser beam of armageddon on my enemies, big giant shiny objects of interest manifest from the carcasses of my defeated enemies attempting to distract my draconic gaze upon the screen.

I. Must. Collect. All. I. Must. Destroy. All.

Is this what it feels like to be a dragon?

Weird, a rabbit-dragon? That's stupid Vee.

Oh so bright graphics, this isn't a GBA game is it? Oh thank goodness! The music is really good! I'm listening as we speak~. A splendid little welcome mat for those only beginning their adventure into maniacal shooting, with fun QoL and a stage select to practice the final boss over and over again. I think I just like the music for that part...was it the perfect gift?

Sadly, all references lost upon me aside from perhaps tidbits of allusions to Esp Ra.De. thanks to my Freeza day playthrough. Maybe I should go back to that now, maybe I'll enjoy it more after my training in Bloo Revolver. A new interest perhaps? A treasure trove awaits me if so, I might even try those touhous people go on about. What the hell's a raymoo?

Battle Garegga this, Ketsui that. Fine then... I'll play your little games... one day...

     ‘The requested page could not be found.’

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Jan. 10 – Jan. 16, 2023).

Omnipedia, according to its creator, Tony Hsiung, 'follow[s] the spirit, if not the letter of Wikipedia, which was truly irreplaceable'. This opening statement, nestled in the description of Omnipedia, sums up the entire approach of Neurocracy. Nowadays, Wikipedia is one of the most convenient sources of information; if it never replaces a real encyclopaedia or a long dive into various articles, the site appears as a convenient starting point to get familiar with a given topic. Whether it is to obtain some basic knowledge of a physics concept or to check the biography of a person, the site fulfils most of the needs that one may encounter in everyday life. The hidden side of Wikipedia is its collaborative aspect. Those who have contributed to the platform know that changes to a page are subject to peer review, which, while not as effective as that of academia, ensures the overall consistency of the online encyclopaedia. A corollary of this situation is the existence of editing wars. On certain controversial topics, some pages of Wikipedia can be protected to prevent disputes from escalating. Regular users are familiar with the rule of three deletions in twenty-four hours, which is the minimum threshold to qualify as an edit war. One of the most recent examples is the page on the Russian-Ukrainian war, which echoes the long-running controversy over the spelling of Kyiv [1].

Neurocracy plays on this tension, even if the player may miss the intention, at first glance. The title presents itself as a dive – a somewhat misleading assertion, as freedom to explore the different pages is not that large – into the Omnipedia of 2049, the successor to Wikipedia, with the goal of unravelling part of the mystery behind the assassination of Xu Shaoyong and Yuri Golitsyn. The player quickly learns that Xu was an extremely powerful figure – a sort of de facto leader of the 2049 China – whose economic empire has grown particularly large since his colloid technology, microchips capable of reading and regulating an individual's cerebral activity, was adopted by the majority of the world. The cyberpunk spin on the story is reminiscent of the nanotechnology of Deus Ex (2000) and the distinct references to current events reinforce this social fiction aspect. The rise of the far right and the Covid pandemic are prominent starting points for the events in the universe, which materialise in more severe forms in the 2040s, which Neurocracy describes. The progression of AIs and creeping hyper-capitalism take strong forms through projects that seem like nightmares, but easily echo the contemporary fascination with ChatGPT or art generators. More perniciously, the game also hints at the information wars being waged through the media and the difficulty of creating independent spaces, free from the deleterious power of billionaires.

On Omnipedia, it is only a shadow of Wikipedia that the player can explore. The majority of articles are only summarised in hover-over texts, full access being inaccessible. This is because the articles are written by artificial intelligences and access is only allowed after verification by human experts. In this respect, the ideal of neutrality of Wikipedia is reflected in Omnipedia, but in a rather more distorted form. The power of the community has disappeared, in favour of experts, whose ideological position and hidden agendas are largely open to question. Cold_Confort had rightly identified the sometimes unfactual aspect of the articles and the surprising shifts in tone from one page to the next. While I agree with him on some of the elements, which sometimes draw on somewhat crude and implausible satire, it seems to me that the questionable style of some of the articles only highlights the fact that several figures are fighting in the shadows for control of Omnipedia, with the intention of presenting the assassination of Xu and Golitsyn in a specific light. Suspects are strangely put forward, while key elements are suppressed from one day to the next, as if it were necessary to hide the truth. Initially, only Hsiung can approve changes to a page, but it is clear that the situation is more complicated than it seems. When after hours of reading, for the first time, the player is confronted with a page that has just been deleted, the error message conveys a singular dread, like the cruel sneer of a criminal who has deceived the investigators. There is something surprisingly powerful about the vague silhouette of a person standing behind a half-drawn curtain – the certainty that someone is there, but impossible to reach.

To explore these transformations of the Omnipedia pages, it is necessary to compare their successive versions over the ten days following October 1, 2049. This can be an insurmountable task and is understandable only in the context of the publication of the title. Neurocracy was a ten-week collaborative adventure, during which participants could discuss the latest pages added or edited, to propose their theories on the assassination and all the other events surrounding it. A visit to the Neurocracy Discord gives a glimpse of an exceptional collaborative effort, which is difficult to replicate. Some projects, such as Cicada 3301 (2012), may be similar, with its mysterious conspiracy aesthetic. On the French-language Internet, a legendary website was Ouverture Facile (2005), now unavailable, which offered puzzles of increasing difficulty, combining mathematics, steganography, computer science and many other puzzles. Without being as difficult as Cicada 3301, the project generated a very particular craze and many discussions on numerous forums of that time. To experience Neurocracy without this social dimension – something that cannot be replicated today – damages the game's design. Whereas Excalibur (2021) shines with its fake time capsule nature, Neurocracy thrives primarily on the interaction that players have beyond the game. Such an experience suffers from the passage of time.

For the player of 2023, all that remains is the universe and the mystery to be solved, but with no real solution to be reached or verified. The world of 2049 is filled with technological and biological anxieties, natural disasters, corporations playing a ruthless chess game, alliances between fascism and capitalism, already felt in the present world. Everyone will have their own perception of these events and the references to current pop-culture will come across with varying degrees of success, depending on the satire one is willing to accept from the game. Clues are scattered throughout the articles, in the names and dates mentioned. A reconstruction of the timeline of the 2040s allows the player to reconstruct the different factions in this universe, what they know and their alliances. In between the lines, there are many things left unsaid that guide the player closer to the truth – or at least a part of it. The footnotes and pictures also provide important information and contribute to the graphic identity of Neurocracy. If one is interested in this assassination story against the backdrop of greedy corporations, technological progress and pandemic, the project is a solid experience. However, the only reward the player will have is within themselves and nowhere else.

Neurocracy is certainly a fascinating experiment. I had as much pleasure exploring Omnipedia as I did the game's Discord, the discussions greatly enriching the elements I discovered when I read the various articles. It must be said that the mystery remains unsolved. If a general consensus seems to have formed around the culprit, many questions remain unanswered and the community's explanations are still at the hypothesis stage. There is a charm in an interactive experience that offers neither victory nor defeat. The end comes when the player is no longer interested, when they have something better to do with their time. This poetic approach to game interaction has both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, Neurocracy proves to be a unique and unforgettable experience for all those who managed to embrace the concept and immerse themselves in the story, far more complex than it seems. On the other hand, the title immediately alienates any audience that does not find anything interesting in this project. One must at least acknowledge a degree of audacity in this enterprise.

__________
[1] Stephen Harrison, ‘How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Is Playing Out on English, Ukrainian, and Russian Wikipedia’, on Slate, 01/03/2022, consulted on 13/01/2023.

“Whatever he’s planning, it’s going to happen, and I don’t want to be here when it does. If there’s one thing I’m sure of; everything’s about to fall apart”.

A couple days ago, I was calmly and cooly lamenting the way Half Life 1’s cinematic setpieces still remain somewhat unique through to today. There’s something I find incredibly cathartic about cataclysmic things happening to a gigantic facility while the player Mr Bean’s their way through falling platforms and rubble, all the while gormlessly operating critically important, high-powered machinery you have no qualifications for. Everyone wants their FPS to have a shotgun with lots of recoil or something, but I want an elevator shaft sequence with massive casualties.

INFRA is a rough-around-the-edges little anomaly of a game - if it isn’t outsider art, it skirts dangerously close. It’s just so rare for a title to lean so far into its own neuroses alongside such genuinely impressive production values.

Tasked, as a structural analyst, to do a routine survey of the crumbling water treatment facilities on the outskirts of the fictional city of Stalburg, there is little more for the player to do mechanically than take photographs of OSHA violations and flick switches. Even still, the average first playtime of INFRA is 22 hours long. An oftentimes painful linear first-person adventure where the common roadblock is the odd wildly cruel puzzle and level design. It truly begs belief, the shit they make you do in this to earn a crumb of progress.

I really do love the good majority of what this game accomplishes - there’s an engrossing sense of scale on the journeys between the puzzles. Though the game is linear, there is a lot of wriggle room for alternating paths and solutions to key events, all the while the set designers filled every nook and cranny with surprisingly mindful details and assets that make the city feel lived-in and rewarding to poke around. It’s even replete with intense large-scale destructive setpieces that remind me of something like Disaster Report, and the player character's dialogue has that tired in-over-his-head everyman energy that I luvv. Navigation requires careful deliberation as you have to scan the environment for the most subtle nudges in the right direction; finding keys, notes containing passwords, manuals explaining how to operate machinery. Dizzyingly many things here are purely optional and only affect your playthrough way down the line, if at all.

Where INFRA loses me is in how rotely demanding it can be. The kinds of puzzles here are these legitimately tricky logic tests that tend to be sprawled out over a large playable area - often obscured by too much detail and not-enough lighting - meaning that to even test out a hypothesis, the player has to do a not-insignificant amount of travel between inputs. The developers have this undeniable keen interest in civil engineering, the way these facilities and utilities are connected to one another in a grand network of city planning and infrastructure…… but it’s the sole thing that extends the playtime, and it fucking wore me down. There’s a grand conspiracy element to the game’s overarching story and I could hardly pay it any mind because I just wanted the water on the floor to stop electrocuting me. It wasn’t until the game entered its closing act where I finally felt as though I had clocked to the designer’s puzzle logic. I wanted INFRA to kill its darlings, cull extraneous sections and give me more simple problems to solve - but the game’s more interesting with the sheer friction it poses. Imagine you turned the difficulty of Half Life 1 to the max, only for it remove all of the enemies and guns, & make Black Mesa more annoying instead.

While the game routinely lost its balance on the knife’s edge between demanding and frustrating, I found myself completely enamoured by the way Loiste Interactive hyperfocuses on the spectacle, genuine lived-in immersion, of the decaying infrastructure of the fictional city of Stalburg. Allegedly inspired by watching a documentary on the crumbling network of civil engineering that the USA relies heavily on, INFRA is a game about corruption and decay. It’s a crude image, one of vainglorious despots causing corporate neglect to eat away at the infrastructure we rely on, cataloguing the rebar and cabling that protrudes the crumbling concrete like scabs, but it’s truuu.

INFRA ain’t a game for everyone, but there’s a lot here for folk with saintly patience to appreciate. If you do give it a miss, please at the very least say “tyvm :3” to the overpass you drive under for being kind enough not to fall directly on top of you. It’s very tempted, I’d be too.

Things you can do to Vince McMahon in this game:

•Throw them into oncoming traffic
•Throw them off a shipping cell into the miserable cold waters of the harbor, hopefully infested with starved tiger sharks.
•Smash them over the head with a wooden chair that splinters into nothingness from the sheer force of the hit.
•DDT them onto a concrete block that again disintegrates to atoms upon impact.
•Dudley Death Drop them through a limousine.
•Swanton Bomb them from 50 stories in the air.
•...and so much more if you possess a creative mind!

I'm not hate-filled, what are you talking about? I'm simply selling you on playing this awesome game!!!

As of the start of this particular document, I've tried three times to write a review of Darius Gaiden. Should I be more in-depth? A comedic piece perhaps? No, I cannot. I'm putting the joke book away for this, no funny thesaurus words either. I can't insult this masterwork like that, but what can I even think of for it?

All I can think of...is art. What is "art" exactly? It's a nebulous term, and we're already programmed to think of art as anything involving such things as drawing or sculpting and the like, but there's at least ten delightful people out there who believe that Beyblades are art. It's the things that you personally never get tired of feasting your eyes and ears on, like candy to the senses and perhaps even the soul. It matters not what it is, but how it makes you feel. Emotion. Feeling. Happiness. Sorrow.

Close your eyes.

What do you see? For me, it's the nonstop push I've found myself in by constantly doing the top-most route of Gaiden. A whole week I have done nothing in this game, but go up and up this escalator of delusion. Fatty Glutton? I hate your guts, I don't give a shit about your kids. Crusty Hammer? Keep me away from your strangly hitbox'd claw blade. Great Thing? What a terrible thing you are actually, you ain't so great when I'm done with you after dying three times to your homing lasers. I cannot possibly find the correct word on dictionary.com to express the sheer amount of vitriol I have for all three of these damned sea-based behemoths. Yet, I still come back for more, just to try and best the lot of you in a more impressive fashion...and keep my stock of bombs at a high amount, to savor the visual hypnosis that is the effect of the black hole as it consumes many while the Saturn port's slowdown makes it last longer.

The need to restart the journey over again constantly, yet grow better, and to be low-key rewarded by experiencing new observations; such as realizing that Great Thing spawns in right on cue with the music if you don't lose all of your lives during Stage Z'... is this art? Is it maybe... the Art of STG? To start as a mere beginner and be constantly obliterated, to only get better to the point of obliterating the game just as easily as it once obliterated you?

...my eyes are opened.

Darius Gaiden... perhaps I have underestimated you after all of those prior entries I slogged through. At long last, you have impressed me, and finally I can comfortably hail you alongside the likes of Gradius and R-Type.

I give a hearty cheerful chuckle

Welcome to the crew, lad.

     ‘I want everybody to know the fun of developing a game. If it becomes easier, more people can enjoy it.’

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Jan. 3 – Jan. 9, 2023).

Kenta Cho is known as one of Japan's most prolific independent developers, alongside Ikiki. A visit to his website shows hundreds of games, created over the last decades. Perhaps because it is a hobby for the one working at Toshiba, his various titles are always experimental, to the point where they have an almost scientific quality to them, like successive dives into the recesses of game design to find, ultimately, something new. This is all the more remarkable given that all of his work is open source, to the extent that his idea for Tumiki Fighters (2004) was the unquoted inspiration for Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy (2008). Cho anchors his experiments to the exploration of concepts borrowed from the arcade or from daily life. The Kibasen takes the eponymous activity beloved by Japanese children and uses doodles as graphics, emphasising the naivety of the idea. The River Meguro invokes the image of cherry blossom petals floating on the surface of the water during the spring hanami.

Torus Trooper is perhaps more prosaic in its inspiration. It derives from the tube shooter concept introduced by Tempest (1983) for the arcade. The principle is to place the player on the inner surface of a cylinder – or torus – allowing them to move around very freely, while remaining confined within the geometric space of the level. In Tempest's heyday, the graphics were based on metal wires. For technical and ergonomic reasons, it was decided to keep the camera fixed, because rotating the level would make the player feel nauseous. For others, the notion of having a fixed ship and sliding the level was significant, giving rise to titles like Tube Panic (1984), N2O: Nitrous Oxide (1998) or iS – internal section (1999).

Kenta Cho's title follows this general premise, but injects a new spin on it with its staging. The emphasis of the game is on speed, and to emulate the effect, the stage is just a section of a tube, so that some stretches are open and look like a conventional track. Since the rest of the level can be seen on the horizon, the curves fly by at breakneck speed as the player tries to avoid the various opposing projectiles however they can. There's no question of going slowly, as the game is about survival. The timer runs out continuously and the only way to add precious seconds is to finish a level or kill a boss. This design pushes the player to speed up, whatever it takes, swept away by the sensation of velocity and the psychedelic music.

Torus Trooper succeeds in remaining perfectly readable – the choice of polyhedra, reminiscent of Geometry Wars (2003), to represent projectiles and enemies works wonderfully – despite the intense on-screen action, owing to the clever placement of the camera, which pulls back and fixes on the horizon as the player accelerates. Hitting the railings never slows down the player and it helps maintain a rare speed frenzy. In this respect, the title is much more akin to F-Zero GX (2003) than iS – internal section. There's something magical about breaking 6,000 km/h and driving through projectile barrages as if they were nothing: it's the same feeling as being on a bullet train and seeing the landscape go by very slowly, because it's so far away, while the electricity pylons, much closer, go by at full speed. Torus Trooper has such a unique cathartic quality, almost inviting contemplation: the transitions between levels only alter the music and the colour of the tube, but the shift in tempo is so pleasing.

The concept is flawless and is seamlessly implemented. In addition to standard blasts, the player can use the alternate shot, which pulverises incoming enemy projectiles into dust and explodes at its point of impact. Something about the flow of this attack is incredibly pleasing and works every time. It's hard to pinpoint what in Torus Trooper works so well. The game's design is minimalist and elegant: it reminds me of the Montreal's Biosphere (1967), whose steel structure is surprisingly simple, hiding no artifice from the visitor. Torus Trooper's little lie may be that it doesn't appear to be a torus; but who knows? The infinity of the layout and the random generation of curves and enemies make it impossible to be sure of this fact, and there is a poetry in imagining that the ship is just running on the same loop until the timer stops. In a way, the game would seem to be vain; or rather, the point is simply to have fun. In Kenta Cho's own words: "it is very fun to think about a new game mechanism in my head but that is not enough to test whether a player is going to have fun, playing that game' [1]. This centrality of enjoyment strikes as the primary strength of Kenta Cho's titles and Torus Trooper is perhaps one of his most accomplished manifestations of this idea.

__________
[1] Quote Unquote, The Last and Final Word: Kenta Cho, consulted on January 3, 2023.

So for Backloggd's game of the week, I have been tasked with something fairly tricky, and that is the Game & Watch title Egg!

Now I know what you're thinking, what is Detchibe's reasoning for having us do a Game & Watch title? They're hard to come by in working order, and emulation for it is an incredibly sketchy endeavor due to the nature of trying to imitate early LCD games. Worry not! Late 90s Nintendo has you covered with Game & Watch Gallery for the Game Boy, and all of it's older brother systems! These were an excellent way to update these games to then-current portables with brand new "modern" versions featuring your favorite Mario characters, as well as having pretty spot-on recreations of the "original" versions of the games complete with their BEEP BEEP BEEPs and lack of music. An uncharacteristic act of preserving their old games that current age Nintendo would scoff at, and then attempt to sell you limited time overpriced replica systems instead.

Just like most other G&W games Egg is rather simple, just collect the eggs in Mr. Foxhound Logo's basket as they roll down the four chutes. He's really hungry, and dropping one means bad news for him! You just lose the game if you gain three misses, but him? No fried eggs for Mr. Foxhound Logo, only some lousy celery that will leave him under-caloried for the rest of the day. For whatever reason there's also a hen that pops out of a window in the top-left, if they spy on Mr. Foxhound as he drops an egg it counts as only a half-miss. It's quite an odd addition, and I'm not entirely sure what the in-universe explanation would be. An accomplice on the inside perhaps?! Most disturbing.

Do you want to know the reason? It's because the hen was formerly Minnie Mouse. That's right! This was originally a Mickey Mouse game! The rat bastard himself was behind this the entire time! Motherfucker! Nintendo and Disney in cahoots, who woulda thunk it? Not I, that's for damn sure. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer around those two shady individuals...

My one complaint about G&W titles in general is that they have this problem of starting pretty slow, even on hard difficulty. Trying to patiently play this on my Game Boy Player as opposed to riding in the car with Mum at the tender age of six or so makes it a ton more troublesome to stay awake prior to when the eggs start moving at a more breakneck speed. It does get shockingly intense later, it just takes a while, and that's a thing I remember plaguing all of the original versions of these games. Definitely check out the Game & Watch Gallery games though, their modern interpretations are definitely most eggcellent!

...excellent...

After taking the time to reach 1000 in every iteration of Egg in Game & Watch Gallery 3, I can safely say that I have "mastered" Egg and can consider myself a true Egg Emperor, Dr. Eggman must be so jealous! I had your number since Mean Bean Machine Eggy Poo!

...

What's that? This wasn't the Backloggd game of the week? I played the incorrect Egg?! I did all that for nothing?!

loudest non-offensive swear that could ever be conceived

     「それはひとつの終末 そして始まり...」

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Dec. 27, 2022 – Jan. 2, 2023).

A glance at Beyond Interactive's website turns out to be a rather disappointing visit. Although the company was founded in August 1989 by Hitoshi Akashi, no trace of their early work remains. Nowadays, the company operates mainly as a development auxiliary for various projects, without producing any original titles. This philosophy is surprising in the light of the fertile experimentalism that Bunmei Korokoro Game: Egg illustrates with considerable poetry. Perhaps this transformation could be explained by the departure of talented and creative employees, who had made their mark on PC-98 titles, such as Kiyoto Yoshimura, currently working for Chime Corporation. As a result, it is not so easy to find any information about Egg, either in English or in Japanese.

A CGI scene immediately sets the tone of the game: over layers of ambient music and a few broken piano chords, an egg is revealed, enclosing a foetus and a whole galaxy of civilisations. This cosmogenetic setting places Egg within the mystical movement of science fiction, more interested in the great trends that drive the rise and fall of civilisations than in the individuals within them. The egg turns out to be an object of adoration for the different societies, alternately protector of life and herald of destruction. The player acts as an egg on an idealised battlefield, pitted against another civilisation. Players play one after the other and, when they can control their egg, must hit it, similar to a golf or pool ball. The standard move allows the player to cover the tiles with their civilisation. Surrounding a large area also captures everything inside it. As soon as the civilisation becomes substantial, a tower emerges and grows as the surrounding civilisation develops. This tower is the command centre and must be protected at all costs, as allowing it to be destroyed by the opponent leads to an immediate defeat.

Victory can be achieved in three different ways. The player can break the opponent's egg by smashing it repeatedly or they can destroy the opposing tower, following the same method. It is also possible to achieve a cultural victory, as in civilisation simulators, by upgrading the tower to level 9. Depending on the chosen solution, the strategies implemented will be different and the player will have to use their arsenal creatively. Indeed, in addition to normal shots, it is possible to spend energy – accumulated by expanding one's civilisation – to perform defensive shots that create walls or offensive shots, which destroy buildings, whether they are allied or enemy. An aggressive approach requires a high degree of precision when shooting, and this is rendered tricky by the shape of the egg, whose propensity for unexpected turns should not be underestimated. Meanwhile, an overly defensive approach prevents the accumulation of sufficient energy and is punished in the mid-game, as soon as earthquakes are available.

This results in a constant strategic asymmetry, reminiscent of the dynamics in chess. Progress is only made at the cost of imbalances, which may or may not be punished, thus making it necessary to anticipate the amount of risk that can be accepted. The weakness of the tower may push one to build the base far from the centre of the arena and refuse a direct attack too quickly, out of fear of being too far away from the base to defend it effectively. Furthermore, overextending risks running out of energy if the opponent engages the egg directly, nearly always resulting in a loss. Ultimately, it is necessary to find a rhythm in the progression, so as to execute shots that always have dual objectives. In the early stages of the game, the creation of territories often requires three moves to be optimal; a good play can break out of this ternary pattern to surprise the opponent and create positional traps. Cutting off the enemy territory to prevent them from expending, whilst leaving an exit route to reach one's own base and increase its civilisation strength, is therefore a formidable strategy. Building walls very closely to the enemy base limits movement and slows down their civilisation's development. Every move can be used defensively and offensively, and Egg reveals a genuine strategic and tactical depth in its gameplay.

Perhaps most importantly, the title is driven by an atmosphere of rare poetry. The electronic noises hark back to the aesthetics of 1980s sci-fi and complement the instrumentation of every mission. In Stage 4, the alien civilisation has organic-looking buildings and is accompanied by muffled bass lines and primordial noises. Stage 5 stands out for its carnivalesque aesthetics, while the sixth mission has metal accents, immersed in wicked coughing sounds. The last mission opens with traditional Japanese instruments, reinforcing the contemplation of the final stretch of the journey. These atmospheric shifts give the title an esoteric quality, and when the player is focused on the move they are about to make, a real sense of poetry is created, perfectly in line with the game's discourse. It is as if, in a way, the creation and destruction of civilisations, which result from the various shots, do not matter. They are merely a product of the conflict between the galactic eggs, whose potential, in a philosophical sense, is indescribable. Admittedly, the egg must stay close to its civilisation to survive, a symbiosis that is very well implemented in the gameplay, but the beauty of life and the tragedy of war are not relevant to these shells of boundless substance. The glory of progress shines on no one.

After the World War II, Japanese fiction is riddled with visions of the apocalypse. The Lost Decades underlined the individual's lack of control over the world ending, in a society where young people find it difficult to belong and to understand why they have to suffer injustices that are not of their making. Unlike the teenage revolt of the sekaikei, which invaded the 1990s manga and anime [1], Egg provides a half-toned response, one that does not resolve the complexity of the issue, but seeks to assuage the fears. Societies come and go, they have their idols, but these cannot guarantee absolute security. Fortune and fate remain a sword hanging over everyone's head. These themes have been tackled in a much more frontal way by other Japanese works and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) is perhaps a shining example, wherein the Black Moon carries Lilith, avatar of life and destruction. The angle of the anime is very different, as the camera focuses mostly on the characters, but I would argue that the roots of the discourse are the same. Just as Shinji struggles to evolve in a world where moral values are blurred, so the apocalypse in Egg is never one-dimensional. There is, through the ambivalence of the gameplay, creation in destruction and vice versa.

It is unfortunate that Bunmei Korokoro Game: Egg is so poorly known. It is however a classic example of the experimental capacity of Japanese studios in the PS1 era. A unique poetic breath runs through it, halfway between the absurd and the contemplative, and is supported by an always apt gameplay. There is something eerily cathartic when playing the game. The cosmic scale of the playground both underlines and dampens conflict. It's an end and a beginning, the game repeatedly intones. Yes, it's definitely an end and a beginning.

_________
[1] Motoka Tanaka, Apocalypticism in Postwar Japanese Fiction, PhD thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2011, pp. 164-174.

It's rather telling that this ur-Tetris operates with the same mechanical elegance as its progeny. I find the consideration of Tetris - and indeed, any game - as a 'perfect game' to be trite, but from the outset Alexey Pajitnov demonstrated with aplomb that Tetris is a perfect idea. The reiteration of gameplay systems necessarily precludes Tetris from an actualised perfection -- who can judge which of its 322+ official releases is 'definitive'?

Yet, with hundreds of versions each expanding on that which came before, one would expect the very first title to be lacking most of what allowed Tetris to be a success. The Electronika 60 release is a monochrome textscape without even the barest flourishes of the Game Boy version. The shrill piezoelectric beeper's pathetic tones are an auditory agony; the ubiquitous whine of the cathode ray tube a tinnital torment. There is no bag randomiser. There is no hold. Rotation is clockwise-only. No T-spins, no back-to-backs, no combos, no garbage, no ghost. One next piece is shown. Surprisingly the hard drop is present, despite its omission from subsequent versions until 2001's Tetris Worlds.

It all matters not. In a cacophony of noise befitting a Ryoji Ikeda installation, I am dealt five Z-pieces in a row. The inconsistent speed increments befuddle me, catching me off-guard. How characters are rendered makes it difficult to consider my board's layout. I am in love. This scant realisation feels pure. I am entranced by it. It is all I have ever needed and wanted.

Backloggd Game of the Week (20 Dec – 26 Dec, 2022).

So I don't really play shmups? I think Ive played like one or two at actual arcades and that's about it, havent got anything against them, just not really my thing. So I don't really know what my opinion is worth on this but here we go.

It was pretty cool visually. The bosses (especially the non robot ones) had a lot of personality conveyed just in their movesets and I was sort of invested in seeing just what the hell else the game was going to throw at me. That being said, there is no way in hell I could have beat this without infinite lives.

Again, I don't play these games so my playstyle mainly involves spamming the attack button, tokenly trying to avoid projectiles until I get hit and adding another credit. So no comment on difficulty/balance for people trying to get good at this. Anyways, it was an entertaining 30 or so minutes and Id even replay it with someone else if they offered.