Never before in the history of the STG genre had such a elegant, beautiful shmup been devised. From legendary master of the genre, Shinoubu Yagawa - programmer of battle garegga and armed police batrider - we get his magnum opus.

MMP is a game of such a tight, focused design, building on the foundations of Battle Garegaa and Ibara, and retaining the core game flow of medal chaining, rank management, and the general control, but meshing with a far more CAVE-y, Bullet Hell design in general, which forms for a super unique mix of styles and works really well.

Team this with an amazing narrative and presentation - the tale of earth fighting back against a military dictatorship over the battle over which is better - Beef or Pork, and the subsequent battles over rural japan that take place in it's wake, as our three heroines - each having been disfigured by the enemy prior, make a final stand. Weaker games would lack the pathos to truly deal with the moral quandries of this situation, but Muchi Muchi Pork remains reserved, polite, and nuanced throughout it's short running length.

And there's such an astounding use of metaphor, as our lead characters are both transformed into vile, monstrous chimeras, and then forced to fight against those they have been transformed into - and why do other farm creatures show up in a game so focused on the consumption of pork? In many ways, the game could be considered a companion piece to Bong Joon-Ho's Okja - where a metaphor of consumerism and the cost of it echoes throughout the whole game. And all the imagery is so interesting - our heroines fire what is described as a LARD LASER - by picking up pigs from the ground or the air and... consuming them? Even though they have become half pig themselves? Truly, every frame of this game brings up so much intrigue. Im currently planning a 7 hour long video essay on the topic of symbolism within just this game alone, it has had that much of an effect on me.

And in the end it all comes together to form a truly spectacular package, something no other shmup - hell, no other game can truly compare to - wait hold on, i'm getting handed a note -

"It's just a thicc pig-girl bondage fetish shmup, dude."

Happy April Fools, everyone :D

As of time of writing this game hasn't worked for 5 days because the servers are down. Welcome to DRM hell. When it works, it's maybe a notch or two lower down in quality than DJmax respect but has it's own charms and a lot of unique tracks.

But when you're legitimately looking at a coin flip for the game actually booting on any given day, it's impossible to rate it highly. I only begrudgingly give it more than the lowest rating because I actually want it to get going.

Also the community almost rivals Valorant and LoL for toxicity, jesus christ. Don't ever touch it's discord.

I've been trying to work out what the target market for PD Remake is. And I've come to the conclusion it's literally just the people who have heard of Panzer Dragoon but never played it and are mildly curious when they see it on a deep sale on steam or the eshop.

Because I feel for literally everyone else, it's kinda... pointless? And it's not really that it's accidentally pointless, it almost feels by design that there's very little here to appeal to both the Dragoon die hards or the people who don't know what the fuck it is.

The core problem is the premise - not so much a panzer dragoon remake on it's own, but remaking it whilst keeping the content almost identical, and putting it in the hands of an indie studio who don't have the budget to make it look truly current gen.

And when the game you're building your remake on is frankly a glorified Saturn tech demo and the apotheosis of "boneless Launch Title" - as much as I like it - not building content on top of it really leaves it as something only for the die-hards - when the stylistic changes are something that's liable to put them off.

Frankly though, I think the artistic direction kinda works? It's quite comparable to the Demons souls remake in the changes it makes, but i prefer it to that frankly, despite the lower production values. The new look is reminiscent of the FMV cutscenes of Panzer Dragoon past, mixed with a bit of Orta's look. It's not quite right, and I do prefer the original look, but it's quite neat in it's own right.

The remake does, however, have one absolute ace up it's sleeve - a brand new arrangement of the OST by composer of Saga and Orta Saori Kobayashi. It's predictably fantastic and is worth the price of admission alone when the game is on sale.

But still, the game remains this weird chimera. Divorcing PD from being the saturn tech demo thing it is takes something away from it, and to new players, they're gonna experience a stupidly short game with very little to it, frankly.

So I kinda like it, and I definetly reccomend it on the frequent sales it gets put on where you grab it for like $5. But it's a missed oppurtunity for it to only be that.

Doujin devs really push the envelope on how ugly they can make their games sometimes. Gundemonium was almost pushing me to my limit - until stage 3 started and there were P90s sitting on flying revolvers and I realised it was a shitpost the whole time.

And fortunately, it's also incredibly solid fun. It basically just boils down to one single thing - pacing. Gundemonium is about 15 minutes long and barely a second of it is dead air. Stage 1 alone has about 6 minibosses, most of which last about 10 whole seconds, and its thoroughly engaging. The challenges change so ludicrously fast that it never comes close to being boring. Team that with the dynamic difficulty system and some wild scoring, and it's pretty unique and wild.

The polish isn't quite there, and i still can't quite get past how butt-ugly it all is. The music also isn't great, the various challenges don't always hit the mark and I don't really like the control feel for some reason i can't quite put my finger on.

But this really is the sort of mad shit you only really get in the doujin/indie space. A stupid amount of things happening crammed into 15 minutes because why the hell not.

The game is actually delisted from steam right now but if you're interested, you can get keys from the grey market for about £2. It's well worth that.

GGA3 is just lovely. I know that sounds dumb, but I really think it's the best way to describe this, frankly, terrible idea that the 4 devs somehow presumably convinced M2 was commercially viable. Granted, it helps that said 4 devs are industry veterans behind some of the greatest STGs ever made.

And it shows, though not quite in the ways you'd expect, particularly from staff who have worked amongst Raizing and Cave's intricate and wack STGs. GGA3 follows the Aleste series in general in being extremely simple to play, and amounting to little more than holding down one button, dodging, and picking up items. But what GGA3 really brings is polish and the knowledge of 25 years of games development progression to this very rudimentry, classicly made game.

In particular, there's a real eye for presentation here. The sprite art is fantastic, as are the backgrounds, and there's particular attention paid to the pacing of levels, particularly when it comes to integration with it's music. Stage 5 is clearly the standout here, the stage starts with a foreboding track in a base before you take off and dogfight around the scrolling exterior of a ballistic missile nuke to an amazing, upbeat track, the destroying it and facing a rival boss fight with another banger track - it's very comparable to Stage 2-3 in Zeroranger or Stage 3 in eschatos - you know, two of the best STG stages ever made.

The music in general is great - Manabu Namiki, legendary composer of battle garegga, ketsui, DOJ, thunder dragon 2 - is both the composer and (weirdly) director of this game, and he puts in a great shift here with the ancient game gear sound hardware. Hacking Storm, Dogfighter, and Zero-G Tears alone are probably worth the price of admission.

There are issues. It's probably a bit too long - I feel stages 3 and 4 probably should have been consolidated to one stage, for instance. This is only made worse by it's rough performance on original hardware, which legitimately lengthens the game by 15 minutes on special mode due to all the slowdown. Fortunately, this can be turned off in the Switch and PS4 versions of the game, which I would say is an outright neccessity unless youre a complete purist and makes the game a lot more fun, particularly in special mode. I think it's also fair to say there's a bit of a lack of depth - but that's also just a standard of the series and clearly not what the game is going for. Much like Zeroranger, this is a shmup focused on it's presentation much more than it's scoring or gameplay, and as that, it really works.

There really isnt much to GGA3, truth be told. But that's fine. It amounts to 4 industry veterans making a simple old compile-styled shooter imbued with the 25 years of progression in game design and presentation built up in that time and a bunch of passion and respect for the original games. And the end result is really just a lovely time.

This could have sucked so very, very easily. Nier is one of those games where it's flaws and rough edges are so entwined with the charm and strengths, and where a low budget and constraints lead to some of it's most inspired moments.

And I think Toylogic and the Producers/Directors behind this project have earned a lot of credit for the approach taken here. Because 1.22 is just Nier, pretty much. Nier with better combat, improved visuals, a smidge of additional content, and some adjustments here and there.

The combat is so blatantly better I don't even really feel like getting into it. It's still nothing particularly special, about the same level as automata's, but as a vector for experiencing the game as a whole, and in particular, it's excellent boss fights, it goes a long way throughout and there's no real compromise here.

The visuals are where I have more to talk about, because to an extent before i saw some comparison clips I thought the game looked basically the same, and mostly amounted to up-ressed textures and new faces. But it's really not that. Lighting has been vastly improved, as has model quality throughout, and there's a few changes in aesthetic even here or there for some areas but all of it is so in keeping with the style of nier that it really makes for one of those things where it just feels like playing the game how you remember it versus how it actually looks. It does make it look a bit more automata-y in general, but this is no Demon's Souls remake aesthetic shift.

The only contentious parts of the looks for me is the faces, which are definetly automata-fied a bit - granted, I don't really see that as an issue considering how butt ugly the original character models are. They also maybe look a bit pale, but I find it fits with the overall vibe, and when i'm nitpicking to that extent the aesthetic is still getting a strong pass overall.

Maybe the thing I'm most surprised by is the inclusion of a lot more voice acting throughout the game. For one, massive props to the voice direction and actors for making the re-recordings and new lines sound completely in line with the original, that must have been a tonne of work. And the increased use of voice acting all around makes the game world feel a bit more alive. The english voice actor for Bro Nier fits in well with the existing cast as well, and whilst I'm not really going to get into it with this review, I think the bro-nier dynamic actually works better with the characters and events than papa nier from Gestalt, despite my initial reservations.

The only real dark spot is the OST, which is still 95% one of the best Soundtracks out there, but a few of the original amazing tracks have been replaced with some weird arrangements that dont work nearly as well. I think if you've never played Nier before, you'll probably just fall in love with the soundtrack and not care, but it's a slight mark on the game, and I really wish the original OST was an option.

But beyond that, Nier 1.22 really is just Nier. There's still a bit of jank, there's still the game's weird and weak connective tissue in the first half, the wandering about , and a myriad of other Nier things. And maybe there's a case for a different remake going further and making huge adjustments to the quests and narrative and fixing the "bad". A "Gestalt" remake, if you will.

But 1.22 isn't that. All 1.22 really amounts to is a more enjoyable, prettier way to experience the Nier from 2010. And that, for me, is all I could really ask for. Whilst good ol' Gestalt still has it's value and place, Replicant 1.22 just makes it so much easier to love.

Playing this concurrently with the Nier Remake might not have been the best decision for my heart.

Whilst requiem suffers from the base conceit of mostly being a retread (particularly in its final act) of the base story, and that base story is overall far, far superior to this, dear lord Novetacle know how to absolutely wreck me, and this story of inevitable tragedy, the wham moments are wonderfully gut wrenching. It also does a good job at fleshing out some of the main cast, and the new included characters are surprisingly strong.

As ever the art and in particular the haunting soundtrack could carry a much weaker vn on its own. And whilst requiem is a bit of a tacked on retread that almost feels like a stretch goal for a Kickstarter, making that retread good, and somehow still being tense as hell - is quite remarkable

Well, this is the definitive edition of Raiden IV, I guess. Even that might be overselling it - all this is amounts to a straight port of Raiden IV OVERKILL, a game you can commonly get on PC for $3-5, with a new arranged soundtrack.

Ok, that's not telling the whole truth. It's actually a desperate ploy from Tokyo Arcade Mikado (a place notable in FGC and STG scenes) to try and recover some of their lost revenue from this goddamnned pandemic.

And Raiden IV remains decent. Ugly and bland, with some notably insane difficulty spikes, but a fine enough STG of the classic, super-fast bullet style rarely seen these days - though granted, this game is already 14 years old by now. Its still way better than Raiden 3 and 5, and has some great bosses and decent enough levels. As ever, Overkill mode remains dogshit though.

But hey, how about that new soundtrack? It's... ok. Frankly, it's mostly fine, but definetly has that feeling of an arrange soundtrack that's better listened to outside the confines of the game than in it, and sadly has a few shit songs - Most notably Stage 1's "A Stormy Front", which previously was the best track in the game and was incredibly good at hyping the player up. The new version is an overproduced mess of guitars and percussion that sounds awful. The rest is ok, with stage 2 and 3's arrangement being particularly strong, but the soundtrack on the whole works way worse than the original - and the Stage 1 track sucking is a huge issue for a shmup and means im bound to just use the original soundtrack... In which case I might as well just be playing the PC version...

Yeah don't bother. Raiden IV is decent and this is the best version of it, but also, just get the PC version.

How do you come this close to making a cute, aesthetically fatnastic tribute to Virtua Racing only to fuck it up entirely with obnoxious, terrible voice acting punctuating every moment of gameplay, some wonky physics and drifting, and AI that rubber bands at the drop of a hat.

Virtua Racinng from 1993 is also legitimately more thrilling, fast, has better track design and is less obnoxious. Who the fuck thought giving a retro throwback racer more constant chatter than an ace combat final mission? (that repeats itself astonishingly quickly) was a good idea?

It has a saving grace in it's flat shaded, glorious aesthetic which really does feel like a great modernisation of Virtua Racing. Which makes it only worse when the Model 1 - style graphics make way for in-game advertisments for Curve Digital's other games. Yes, that is actually a thing, and no, now I have no intention of playing Snake Pass, what the fuck?

Fuck this. Just play the Virtua Racing port on Switch.

I first played this game in about 2013 on the PS3. I thought it was shit.

Hindsight and some growth on my part, as well as getting to the point where this game legitimately costs a buck has enabled me to see this game through the lens of being more along the lines of something like Busby Visits the James Turrell retrosective than Gears of War or Uncharted.

I have to say, I've come to really like the art style. Yes, it gave me multiple headaches, but it's unique, and I really like the way they've replicated compression artefacts. It works well with the "world is a fuck" nature of the game.

And the vile, ugly nature of the whole game i do get is the point. There's times with some games where people will say "oh, it's not meant to be fun" and I don't buy it, but Kane and Lynch 2 definetly is not meant to be fun. It's wholly unpleasant from start to finish.

Sadly I think it's biggest flaw sort of draws from this, because I think despite the game's remarkably short length, it can't keep it up. It absolutely peaks at the end of the second act where you start shooting up shanghai naked and bleeding from torture, and from then it basically becomes a blockbuster shooter and it frankly just gets a bit dull.

By hour 3 you end up in huge arenas full of identical enemies which do generic 7th Gen TPS potshotting from half height cover, whilst your weapon options are hilariously innacurate at range and you have only environmental hazards as an option for flusihng them out of cover. It sucks, and the gameplay, whilst never good, is by far at its strongest in the small environments of the first half of the game, where it feels more intimate and chaotic.

And that's my other main problem, honestly the most significant gripe i have with this thing as an art project - the portrayal of violence isn't "intimate" enough, and the scores of people being gunned down in the streets is a bit laughable, and I feel the approach of a game like the last of us, where there's more of a focus on intimate, cruel violence against individuals rather than just straight up massacres, would have worked better here. It gets a bit silly.

Speaking of silly, the story's shit. There's no real throughline, for most of it - things just happen to our protags and eventually they shoot the main villain ten seconds after he's first shown on screen. The game ends with them hijacking a plane and just... getting away with it?

I must also say, from an audio standpoint, it falls really hard. The audio mixing is terrible to the point where you can barely hear what the protagonists are saying, there's a score you can barely hear that also isn't good, gun sounds are bad and the voice acting isnt great. I probably wouldn't bring it up if the visual side of this thing wasn't as strong as it was though.

So yeah, Overall, odd, weird, disjointed mess of a game, and a pretty decent exhibit of unpleasantness. Definetly fits into the "unspeakable games" category on the EGS if it's there. As the art thing, it falls apart in the second half and it might be fair to say being outright headache inducing is a flaw, but eh, I at least appreciate the effort here.

So, despite being remarkably shit, I do prefer this over most of the smorgasboard of Gen 7 Third person shooters. Unlike the vast majority of them , you can't say it's not interesting.

So this game was basically just made for me. An arcade arena shooter masquerading as a roguelike, with an interesting narrative, a gorgeous sci-fi aesthetic in a bunch of cool environments, and probably the best third person shooting ever conceived.

And really that last one is all that really matters. Returnal is absolutely fantastic action game, nothing more, nothing less. Whilst it is a third person shooter, it resembles Housemarque's own Nex Machina and the likes of Twin stick shooters for the most part, with a heavy focus on enemy prioritisation, strafing, and "cutbacks" through gaps in enemy attacks, formations and such to gain positional advantages. Throw in a extremely versatile melee attack with some generous snap-to-target, a dash, and a grappling hook you get in the second area and it's just super good. It's particularly great at adapting the style to the third dimension using environmental features and verticality to evade enemy attacks and bullet formations. Add on top of that a limited, but extremely fun and varied set of weapons, and it just works so damn well. The large arena fights in particular are an absolute joy.

And then you throw on top the roguelike elements. It's a mixed bag in that whilst I feel a lot of it is pretty pointless, there's a few little aspects of it that lend such a huge amount to the game. The first is the sheer tension this adds to runs. Returnal is all about tension, the feeling of getting so far and ending back at the start with very little to your name. It makes the encounters feel even better, makes every loss of health worse, and punishes you hard when you fuck up. It's basically like getting to a lategame stage of an arcade game, and it works so well. Also ties fairly nicely with the aesthetic and narrative.

And of all things for the narrative to be actually good was the one thing I was not expecting. The closest comparison I can think of to it would be Alex Garland's Annihalation. I wouldn't want to go much further than that, but I think if you're into that sort of thing, or maybe things like Silent Hill's narratives, you'll dig this, and I certainly did. It also has some fantastic wham moments. It maybe relies a bit too hard on the use of audiologs, and this sort of narrative is never going to be for everyone, but I thoroughly liked it, and it all came together nicely for me in the end.

It's a bit rough around the edges - how it launched without a save system is beyond me, the weapon and difficulty balance is a bit weird, there's not a huge amount of different rooms per biome, and I would appreciate more difficulty options - and I get the impresison a lot of this stuff will be addressed in patches, fortunately.

But don't let any of that put you off. This is for my money, the best third person shooter ever made by a long shot, as well as just one of the finest action games available - and when you interweave that with it's presentation and narrative, it ends up something really quite special.

I almost pity this game.

Imagine being Bend Studio, working as a support studio mostly doing portable titles for years, and when you finally get your chance to put out a big, AAA game with years of development behind it, you put out this wet fart of a game that's endlessly derivative of much better works, taking every boring idea from the open world scrapbook and doing them all worse.

The general level of presentation is also just laughable. Scenes cut at weird intervals and dont tie well together. Animation is weak (especially when it's blatantly copying The Last of Us' death animations), and there's just nothing good here. Even the biking, which i have to imagine is the one draw this game has, is fucking awful - the physics are way worse than those in, for instance, death stranding, and that game isnt even remotely about biking or biker culture.

This whole thing is pathetic. It doesn't have an original bone in it's body and it's execution of every element is at best mediocre. Shooting? Bootleg TLOU. Stealth? good old crouching and hiding in bushes with no feedback and dumb AI. Story? Boring post apocalypse.

Even if you limit yourself to literally just first party PS4 games you have so many better options for literally everything this game is trying to do, and there is absolutely nothing remarkable about it beyond maybe an opening which is so jarring and abrupt I thought I accidentally skipped a cutscene.

What a waste of everyone's time.

I really should be loving this. Obradinn is a really cool game, with a great aesthetic, with some great whodunnit stuff and is all about environmental storytelling and such, and finding out who did what via logical deduction using a scant set of hard clues is legitimately fantastic.

Sadly, it's also a game that I feel neglects QOL stuff to an extent that has worn me down quicker than is reasonable. There's just a lot of little things that really add up to frustration for me. Chief among these is not being able to switch flashback scenes quickly - you have to return to each corpse to start each sequence, and whilst you can often go forwards, if you want to cross reference people and things - which a dumbfuck like me requires - have fun wandering around the ship constantly around places you've already been to. On top of that, there's things like being unable to tie deaths to unnamed people, the ease with which you can end up following completely the wrong track and end up in an unrelated set of deaths, muddling things further than neccessary - it goes on. Just trying to observe the evidence feels

Frankly, my frustration probably boils down a lot to the sheer bombast and presence which it lends literally every death scene. When you fiirst find a body you'll get this 30 second long sequence where it blasts horns and strings at you whilst you observe - before you can practically do anything as the player. Then, if another body is in the scene, you'll go to that, then it will do another scene in the present before doing the same bombastic horns and strings, usually with exactly the same track, again. And again. There's so much emphasis on the wham moment EVERY TIME it gets grating fast, and what's worse, the extremely loud music (by the way, you cant adjust sound mixing and there's also voice acting where listening to accents is important so hahah fuck you if you want to turn it down) continues into your retreads of poking around the scene, which got on my nerves real fast.

The goddamn horns and strings being so damn loud as I tried to work out who the damn guy with the wooly hat is got to the point where it felt mocking, sarcastic even, like they had prepared this investigation to only take 30 seconds and i'm too much of a dumbfuck to recognise that the guy in the wooly hat is obviously the 5th mate or something.

And its such a shame, because the core here is wonderful and unique, and being able to poke around these split seconds of life for clues is fantastic. But it's simultaneously wearing me thin to the point where my enjoyment is filtered through enough boredom and frustration with the QOL stuff that it's not worth it for me.

On a local FG level, this really does seem like an absolute treat. A lovely remastering of a fighting game that feels like it has an absurd level of technical depth, great art design (with some particularly amazing animation work) and great gamefeel.

But as an "Esports" reinvigoration of the game, it sadly falls at the first hurdle. For all it's cute bells and whistles, tournament modes, and events coming down the line, the game just feels bad to play online. In a game with such very tight timing windows, having so much delay is basically unacceptable, even playing against others with what the game presents as the best possible connection. Going from training and local play to online and watching what feels like a 300ms delay between the offline and online play just makes it feel unworkable and its extremely hard to adjust between the two. Even by the standards of delay based netcode, it's bad.

If you gave me 100 hours, maybe I could adjust to it. And maybe in 2010 I would have, it seems like a supremely good game in local play. But it's 2021 and the middle of a Pandemic - at this point, I have plenty of options for games which are both supremely good and don't feel like shite to play online - which, considering that's the emphasis of this title, basically defeats the point.

What a shame. If the online was good i'd probably be going into discords trying to build up a lobby for the next little while, trying dumb shit and having a great time with friends. And maybe I would anyways, but it's at least going to be squeezing a much harder fruit for the same amount of juice - and I don't have patience for that in my online games anymore.