Gran Turismo 7 is a lie. For all the words spouted about how this is a return to form of the massive singleplayer campaigns and content of Gran Turismos past, it's really not. It tries, goddamit, and definetly scratches the itch that we all have of Gran Turismo 4 and such... but it never goes more than skin deep.

Because Gran Turismo 7 is just an expansion of GT Sport, and with it, the promise of new stuff to come at an indeterminate date. At time of writing it's just a buy in to a live service.

The kicker here is content. Versus GT sport there's a grand total of... 4 new tracks and two new layouts of existing ones. I'm not joking thats it, and whilst the selection is mostly good - High speed ring, deep forest, and Trial Mountain are classics - there being no completely new additions outright is really sad.

The car selection is also quite small by mainline gt standards. 400 cars which are mostly unique (compared to GT6's deluge of 20 different types of Miata) and all beautifully modelled - but lots of these are ludicrously expensive, the vast majority are imported from GT sport, and there's very few additions in the racing car categories. The overall car selection is also, by now, quite old. Most of the cars here you can track back to about 2015-ish, and there's very few non concept cars from post 2020.

And it kinda all makes sense. The reduced scope of GT7 compared to - particularly GT4, is almost unavoidable. The level of fidelity demanded these days makes something the scope of GT4 or even GT6 basically impossible, and Polyphony arent the crazed madmen sleeping at the office and making Naughty dog's crunch practices look pedestrian anymore.

And thus, the campaign doesn't really work. There's the delightful level of gran turismo charm and cheese which is lovely to have back and is probably my outright biggest criticism of Sport, but the whole thing is too linear, short, and really lacks the freedom of previous GTs.

Particularly dissapointing is the lack of the super high level events from bygone days - Like the wind, Formula grand turismo championships, etc. It's outright bizzare, the game carries the license system from previous games, but there arent even any license requirements over A in the game at time of writing. And it's so weird, because the game dangles these awesome legendary cars in front of you for stonking credit values but there's like fuck all to do with them except online!

But despite it all, there's sparks here. S-10, the final license test, has you wrangling a classic Porsche 917 around a slightly damp Spa Francorchamps. It's probably the most fun i've ever had in a driving game. The handling model in GT7 is top tier, it's implementation of weather and changeable conditions amazing, it's level of fidelity so damn high, the Car such a fun beast to drive - that it all comes together and it's downright magical. It's the apotheosis of the driving fantasy GT has always been trying to fullfill, and it's the best it has ever done it. Some of the other missions and driving tests are also great, but this moment is what makes it, and proves GT7s potential.

But we'll have to wait, i guess. More than even GT sport, this is a game where buying it is buying into a live service and years of updates which will eventually make it the game we all wanted. GT sport eventually got there. And if there's more moments like S-10 coming... I guess i'll be there to see it in GT7.

This game seems quite neat. The music's neat, the premise is good, and from what I can tell from the game its probably got the best first person platforming i've seen. But I can barely say more than that.

As an average controller enjoyer, I can tell you this game is just horrible with controller. It's blatantly designed with Keyboard in mouse in mind, and despite the various options with relation to auto aim and bindings, it just expects you to do too many things whilst moving the camera to really work on controller. It's almost like you'd need pedals to really play it with controller.

And that's fine! The game isn't designed with that in mind. Just bear that in mind if you intend on playing it.

This game existing on switch terrifies me.

There are few games as utterly captivating as Elden Ring. Throughout it's runtime, I found the game's world and it's dungeons just absolutely sucking up my play sessions and spitting me out on the other side, way past 11pm and wishing i didnt have work the next day. It's a hard game to drag oneself away from, with an open world that constantly rewards curiosity, enormous main dungeons which you can now have a degree of vertical exploration and platforming, and constant beauty to be found in it's locales and vistas.

The world design and the main levels of Elden Ring are just astounding. If you exclude the copypasta mines and catacombs, which fortunately arent too common, nearly everything else is high tier Fromsoftware stuff, and the world design itself is fantastic. It's kind of like New Vegas in that whilst it's very open, there's a clear route the game is always nudging you in, and the world design being much longer than it is wide ties into that. Towards the end of the game it also gladly funnels a bit more, so just as the open world fatigue feels like it might set in and the world looks like it might be overstepping, it pulls it back just enough.

The gameplay itself is basically dark souls 4, which is pretty much what everyone wanted, so cool. If there is a significant difference between them, it is that Elden Ring is a game that encourges far more resourcefulness and usage of tactics and items that were pretty useless in previous games. The item crafting allows lot more liberal use of things like firebombs and knives, crossbows and bows are massively more viable, and multiclassing a melee build with some magic is a natural path to take as scaling seems way less important than stat requirements for wepons and abilities. With spirit ashes as well there seems a fairly large emphasis on using a wider variety of resources available to you, which is a good change, and discourages the R1-roll-r1 that souls can sadly boil down to.

On a core gameplay side, the only real issue i have is the scaling of enemy health and damage. It's just a bit overtuned. Unlike other Souls games, Vitality basically has to be your primary stat here - having about 40-50(!!!) seems appropriate for the endgame, in a game where other stat demands remain basically the same compared to previous games. Enemies also get vastly inflated health pools in harder areas than where you should be, and whilst i get the purpose to sort of corral the player in the right areas, it's a bit much. It leads to coming back to early areas being a cakewalk whilst lacking a few upgrades in a lategame area to be a nightmare - something that can easily happen becasue the drops required to upgrade weapons are kind of a mess to get and you may well end up in a situation where missing one low level stone prevents a massive jump in power. Reducing this quite massive range would have helped a lot, and I don't really get why the decision was made to be like this when none of the other souls are, excluding the chalice dungeons and the New game plus cycles - which is kind of what going to a new area feels like in gameplay terms.

The bosses are also a very mixed bag. Many are great, of course, but there's some serious dark souls 2 energy to quite a couple of them - bosses with really weird wind ups that track your position to an insane degree with only tiny windows to fight back with. And worst off, very occasionally you'll get to fight two of those fuckers at once.

There's also just too many bosses in general. I know they're often the best part of these games and that since you can run past so much of everything else in this game, it might be neccessary, but there's a large amount of copypasta of the minor bosses in particular, a lot of similar dragons - and the game basically ends with 5 bosses directly after each other, which is a bit much. They could have toned it down a bit.

Other than that, perhaps the biggest dissapointment for me is the narrative and world "lore". Especially in the early hours the world of elden ring feels a bit like bootleg dark souls, to the point i dont know why they didn't just make this a direct spinoff. There's so much stuff which is just "dark souls stuff but named different" that it feels a bit fake, and wheras something like bloodborne could get away with it due to a vastly different setting, Elden Ring's really is quite similar. The conflict of the game is also quite poorly defined unless you're really paying attention to stuff. Fortunately some very good NPCs (ranni my beloved) and the world design itself rises to the occasion, but yeah, I really think they should have made this just a dark souls spinoff, it just means it feels awkward at times, especially in the early hours which are just straight, boring high fantasy.

To be honest, there's an overwhelming amount of nits to pick with Elden Ring. I could write a review much longer than this one alone about individual locations in the game that feel like they were given to the team who made shrine of amana, or the weird quest design, or wonky performances issues or whatever. But, y'know, that's From. Every last one of the souls games - and all the earlier games of theirs i've played - have problems that I would dumpster other games for. I will forever make fun of the Cathedral level from Code Vein, but you'll probably catch me defending lost izalith if you got me drunk enough. Because just the general play experience of Elden Ring is so damn strong.

It's not the best soulsbornekirofieldtowerring - the honour still goes to bloodborne by a long shot as far as i'm concerned. Ultimately i do think enough of the issues i've mentioned, particularly the wonky balance, large amounts of reused stuff and some bad bosses definetly knock the game down a peg. But it's still clearly the best open world game since Gravity Rush 2, and FROM's first crack at this really doesn't feel like the sellout my cynical self thought it would be. It's like they've been doing this all along.

Watching Sol Cresta's pre-release has felt like watching a car crash in slow motion. From it's bizzare pseudo announcement on April Fools day 2020 to actually confirming it's a thing to now, the road has been rocky and it's seemed so, so much, like this was going to crash and burn. From "oh god why does it look like that", to "why is nothing happening, and where are the bullets" to "Why the fuck is it $50 no one will buy that" - the decisions have been continuously baffling.

And, as predicted, the end result is messy, buggy, looks so weirdly terrible it almost warps back round to being cool, its too expensive whilst feeling like it was made for a lower budget than most of the good indie shmups. But, well, i'm here. I put my £38 into steam with the intention of refunding it but I ended up well overshooting the refund time - because I was having a really good time.

It's really fortunate that the game's core gimmick, the docking - where you arrange your 3 craft in different formations and order - is great. It's basically straight up taken from wonderful 101's line drawing, and weaving between bullets whilst making patterns, trying to pull out the optimal formation in tight spaces and moments - it works really well. It injects the peak flow state that clover studio and platinum's very best games have into a shooting game. And whilst there's a bit of hellsinker here and a bit of radiant silvergun there, but it does really end up feeling unique, and filling a niche i didn't know I wanted. Its helped by good boss design and - after the first stage - stage designs that keep you on your toes constantly.

It also helps that the game is very likeable in other ways. The Cresta series is something that even hardcore shmuppers mostly had to google, starting with the ancient moon cresta in frickin 1980. But there's a very cute degree of reverance the game has for the series that even as an outsider is nice. Between it's cameos, the dramatic mode, some legitimately amusing fakeouts with bosses, it's generally very pleasant. The neo-nostalgia here is dealt with very well, and im sure the 4 ride or die Cresta fans are ecstatic right now.

That extends to the Dramatic mode, which, ignoring the insane decision to be $10 dlc, is quite good. Its a very kitsch 80s tropey anime sort of thing in terms of story, but works as a bizzarely good way of giving context to the events of the arcade mode without any baggage. You play the dramatic mode once and then you know, pretty much. It's asinine that it's not in the base product though.

In terms of real issues, it's mostly technical. The game looks bad - it's made in unity with 3d models and some bizzare shader applied to try and make it look like 2d renders or sprite work interchangably. Ew. It's also absurdly buggy. In my time playing alone i've encounters bugs where you cant move, visual effects breaking - and other players have already found consistent invincibility glitches, softlocks, crashes, you name it. On a gameplay level, the deepest flaw is probably that it's a game with probably quite low a skill ceiling. The docking system is good, but clearly doesnt have the depth of plat's best action games and it probably leans a bit too hard on the stage memorisation side of things, which will probably mean this will never be anyone's "main" shmup. It just doesn't seem like the sort of game those superplayers will put literal days into runs for.

Before i forget, Special mention has to go to Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack. It's both great in it's original pieces (Saturn, Mercury and Sol's themes are fantastic) but also in taking motifs from the original games, most notably the original Terra Cresta theme. I'm not good at music criticism so i'll just say, yeah - it's good.

Ultimately, I like the game. A fair bit actually - but I have to admit that trying to earnestly reccomend it at time of writing comes with too many asterixes for me to bother, which i hope i've gotten through in these thoughts. It's also a shmup, and shmups often need a while to be out there for an actually good take to emerge, so take this whole day 2 ramble with a good pinch of salt.

But despite everything, I like it. It's platinum's best game since Automata, and it's a good, unique shooter. I'm happy with that.

When i play Forbidden West, I can only think of one game. Ghost of Tsushima. Both, when they boil down to it, are the sort of basic crowdpleasers that there's been a million of over the past decade and that I don't usually tend to like, but made ridiculously pretty.

But I do like Ghost of Tsushima - quite a lot, actually. Whilst a big aspect of that is my love of the samurai cinema it's trying to ape, I do legitimately feel it takes the most generic of formulas and crafts a truly meaningful story and art piece out of it - whilst also being one of the best of it's class gameplay wise - And i've never felt that more than after playing forbidden west.

Because Forbidden west is just a pretty face. That's it. Whilst i will forever appreciate guerilla for crafting the robot dinosaurs that 10 year old me dreamed of, this is a weak as hell open world game. Not just in comparison to Tsushima from an artistic perspective, but also technically and mechanically, it's barely an evolution on it's predecessor.

And maybe that's the main issue. When horizon came out in 2017 I already felt it was a bit behind the curve on the open world adventure stuff, with a lot of bad UI, over reliance on crafting, a very weak core story and quests, and feeling a bit rough round the edges. But the aesthetic was really nice and the combat against the big robot dinosaurs was good.

Forbidden West, 5 years later, feels near identical to Zero Dawn. There's only minimal improvements to the game systems, and the whole thing has a level of polish way below the standard sony first party fare. These games have come to feel so polished over the last few years that even things like the movement, the climbing ribbed straight from uncharted like tsushima, feel notably worse. Doesnt help that at time of writing its full of technical issues and just lots of little quality of life imperfections that really add up like weird controls and overlong animations for picking up items which you do every 5 seconds.

But the real issue is that there's no innovation, no new hook to really make up for all this. Horizon Forbidden West is as about as iterative as a game could possibly be. It looks about the same, the story is the same bullshit as last time with basically the same boring characters and there's not even some really obvious gameplay feature they're trying to sell... it's just more of the same of a pretty open world game which is probably about a notch behind the average ubisoft trash mechanically at this point.

Even if you're really into this stuff, at this point I think you can do a lot better. If you're not, don't make this the one open world game you play a year. You can do better, and frankly, so can Guerilla.

If you've played any of the Metal Gear Solid games - games that Intravenous desperately wants to be like - you'll probably have seen some moments of truly weird energy. Not the good sort, like the supernatural bosses and meta storytelling, but stuff more like Kojima's eternal horniness, some racial insensitivity and maybe not managing a sensitive topic quite right. It happens. Thing is, in MGS, these are usually small moments, sometimes trying to make a point (even if quite badly), and almost always fade away in the face of a much grander message and point. And to an extent, I'm ok to take some weird energy and moments from my 20 year old games to get to that stuff.

Now, imagine a game where the whole experience feels like that moment where otacon tells you he's been fucking his mum or whatever. That's intravenous. A game which starts of with some good old homophobia and you spend the rest of it in a revenge quest against some... homeless drug addicts?

It is played so damn straight as well. Intravenous' ultraviolent revenge quest has no nuance and is not the slightest bit self-aware, which makes the game feel super weird when you're just culling dozens of HOMELESS DRUG ADDICTS.

Doesnt help that the game's other big inspiration, to the point of near-plagirism, is hotline miami, and it borrows all of it's ultraviolence, which only compounds the weird vibe more. I get that a bit of a gritty, unpleasant vibe is intended, but it's clear that very little thought has gone into the repurcussions of mixing a bunch of tropes and gameplay elements together which makes the game feel downright vile at times. And not in a kane and lynch 2 "this is meant to make you feel like shit way", more of in a "Holy shit this game dev is down bad" sort of way.

Oh and the gameplay sucks. It's basically hotline miami with more of a stealth beat and one or two gadgets on offer. It suffers from some ludicrously terrible map design that makes hotline Miami 2 look like hotline miami 1, and stealth mechanics that whilst on the surface, quite deep, with light and sound meters to manage and keep a track of - with the lethality so high and even silenced weapons being too loud in a large amount of situations, it ends up super basic, and the map design offers so little in the way of options to tackle stealth scenarios beyond either distractions and then chokeholds or being really quick coming through doors with throwing knives etc. If you've played like one stealth game in the last 20 years, well done, you've already experienced the maximum of what intravenous offers.

For what it's worth, If i was to be really generous I think some level of benefit of the doubt could be given that the extremely questionable content of the game is kinda unintentional, just a result of messily mixing tropes and not thinking through implications of stuff. Even if so, the game is still pretty vile, and generally just kind of sucks.

Coming from Butcher after playing it's de facto successor Carrion is a miserable experience. And that's saying something, because Carrion itself is not a good game. But in it's light, Butcher feels so, so weak. It's a game that relies almost entirely on an aesthetic it's successor both replicates and improves upon. And for me, that just makes me look at the gameplay of Butcher more intently, and dang, this sucks.

Essentially, Butcher sells itself as a kinda hotline miami-y, kinda doom-ish blend in a 2d platformer with free aiming, and its awful. It's not quite as bad as the comparable my friend pedro, but its thoroughly uninteresting and by the time you've finished the first level the game is already out of tricks. Whilst on a basic level it's quite similar to some game's i've liked - frankly, young me put way too much time into Armor Mayhem - There's fuck all depth and the lethality is so high on both your and the enemes side it just turns into peaking out behind cover constantly.

This ties in particularly badly with the game's other core problem - it's difficulty. Despite the game doing its absolute darndest to try and seem tough and cool, it's really not. It's mostly just kind of annoying. Enemy AI is so weak and your weapons are so powerful that you can pretty easily just murder everything if you take your time and dont overextend. At the same time, if you do, you die stupid quickly.

It's just kinda lame. The game's vibe seems to encourage high aggression, but ultimately the really bad difficulty balance encourages very conservative, boring play, and rewards you with a full level restart if you dare to try to have fun. Whatever you do, there's nothing like movement tech or really oddball weapons to master anyway, and the console versions have un-removable lock-on aiming, so have fun corner peeking i guess.

To be slightly fair, the aesthetic does work here. Butcher is remarkably grim, as one cyborg's rampage to murder the rest of mankind should be. Whilst the effects arent as great as they become in carrion, and the character sprite's are bizzarely tiny for no good reason, its thick and outright nasty throughout. It's also arguable this grimdank vibe works much better here than in Carrion, which whilst also grim is also aimed a bit more sympathetically to the creature. Its only real problem in Butcher is that it has like, 3 shades of brown on offer for every sprite in the game and when human sprites are so small it's very easy to lose track of them. Kind of crucial for a game which requires fast reflexes. Also god help you if you decide to turn on the CRT filter included. May as well smear vaseline all over your monitor.

Maybe if i'd played this in 2016 on release i'd have seen some value in it, but at least now, six years later, it feels like a game that offers basically nothing of value, that's own schtick has been thoroughly superceeded and that game itself is only decent at best. It's far from an ireedemable game, but also throuroughly not worth bothering with.

In a recent video, Tatsuya Uemura, one of the lead developers and composers at Toaplan in the 80s and early 90s, details his top 5 games the studio developed. The video's quite nice, as Uemura reflects on the games he's most proud of and likes. And whilst it's far from comprehensive and heavily personal, there is one deeper cut that stands out. At number 3, he has Slap fight.

Who the fuck talks about Slap Fight? Whilst Toaplan have gained a bit of notoriety in the scene as of late due to ports and re-issues, Slap Fight is not one of them. It's not even a game Uemura worked on, so why did he list it so high in his personal list?

Well, i gave it a go, and I can kind of see it. Slap Fight AC is pretty good. Not great, and far from Toaplan's best in my book, but for a game going on 37 years old, it holds up well. It's essentially Tiger Heli's gameplay system - consisting almost entirely of ground enemies that fire slow-ish bullets at the same time at a large player hitbox, but massively more engaging, mostly due to a power up system very similar to that of Gradius. These power ups are great, with the main gimmick being that a wing power up, which increases power at the cost of making your hitbox dramatically wider. Its good shit, eventually leading to you weaving through enormous waves of fire at high speed with your massive hitbox. It's less route heavy that tiger heli and just a lot more dynamic and well thought out.

Despite a surprisingly deep power up system, it's still extremely primative, coming very early in an era where Shmups as a genre were modernising rapidly. Even compared to games developed by Toaplan released nary two years later, It feels old. I can get why Uemura likes it, but it's just a little too unrefined and antiquated for me. But that's not where the story ends.

Bizzarely, Slap Fight got a Mega Drive port in 1993, a point at which it could arguably be deemed almost retro seeing the vast changes the genre went through in the intervening years. Many newer, better toaplan titles had allready gotten MD ports long before this came out - so again, what gives?

Well what gives is that it's clear MNM had plans. Slap Fight MD is not just the arcade game (which, for what it's worth, is recreated near perfectly), but also a brand new version of Slap Fight. Consisting of new mechanics, completely different stage design, massively improved boss fights, and a brand new, great soundtrack composed by Yuzo Koshiro.

The main thing here is the new bomb mechanic, where the hitbox-expanding wings of the base game can now be sacrificed for use as the typical STG bullet clearing bomb. It's a mechanic that works so extremely well it feels like it should have been there the whole time, and adds a lot to the experience.

Special mode in general just feels like a refined, semi-modernised version of Slap Fight that plays better, sounds better, has great level flow and just really works. It's a dad shmup without the jank, the technical issues, and with refinement.

The only real letdown with MD is that, much like AC, it's incredibly short and quite easy, and that's going to really hurt it as a long term play prospect. But sometimes, you just want to play a dad shmup. And no dad shmup quite holds up like this.

I kind of love Ghost of Tsushima. A basic bitch open world game it may well be, but it's easily the best in it's class and it uses it as a vector for some outrageously beautiful visuals and some pretty good storytelling. And in the base game, it ends just about right. Just as the new techniques are drying up and the combat starts to feel like a solved game, it gets to a big emotional climax and the credits roll. It's a huge game in it's own right, there's no need in this world for just more Tsushima, and as the Legends multiplayer expansion showed, maybe there is more value in doing someting a bit different than just giving us another slice of a good time.

Iki island is another slice of a good time. Ostensibly a post-game expansion to Tsushima that adds a whole new landmass of shrines, mongols to slaughter, and ridiculously beautiful landscpaes. And for me, that leaves it needing to justify its existence. If this is just more of the same, its a missed oppurtunity.

And, really, it is just more of the same. Gameplay deviations are very slight, mostly amounting to improved horse combat and a few extremely new cool charms which alter things. Enemies will now also switch between multiple weapon types, and a lot of little things. The world is another slice of beauty, and the quests follow very similar structures to that of the base game, albeit occasionally with some twists.

The story content on offer here is great though. Iki island leans way harder into the semi-supernatural angle seen in the mythic tales and the legends expansion, with Jin getting high on some mongol LSD and being forced to reconcile his relationship with his father and the commonners of Iki island through the medium of cool visions. The entire questline of Iki island is almost entirely focused on Jin, and basically serves to give him a set of tales like Masako and Ishikawa have in the base game, and it really helps a character who's presence in the base game is fine, but a underdeveloped. Particularly if you play Iki before act 3, it makes his motivations a bit more clear and is generally good stuff.

And that's really what Iki does in general. Nothing here is absolutely crucial, but the small amounts of gameplay changes, the story snippets, the absolutely adorable animal shrines, some great new cosmetic options and the general vibe - it just really rounds out tsushima. Whilst Iki is a very purely additive expansion to a game that's already bursting, it puts the new stuff in places that needed it - Both in jin's characterisation and providing more options for specific playstyles which might run out of steam in the later game - especially bow and parry based ones.

It's also fortunate it's pretty short. The main questline can probably be breezed through in a couple of hours, and the island itself is about a sixth of the size of the main game's map, making the whole thing much more of a slight detour than an ugly growth on the main game.

I think if one was to play it when it's clearly intended to be as a post-game thing, it would lose some of it's stength, but as another 4-hour segment in that long, long act 2 of Ghost of Tsushima, its one well worth taking.

Disco Elysium is the best western RPG ever made. I can say that without hesitation - for a genre which mostly consists of absolute trash, and of which the good games always have some drastic issues you have to look past, Disco Elysium either sidesteps them or - more often - runs circles around the big devs with consistently exceptional character writing, absolutely gorgeous art, an intriguing key conflict and good pacing.

The middle of Disco Elysium in particular, just before the map opens up, I find absolutely exceptional. Having come to terms with the basics and met most of the main players, going around and untangling the lies and motivations of the characters, as well as just exploring more of martinase and it's wonderful cast of characters, and their quests that give context to the core story.

And it's probably because of such sustained periods of being so damn exceptional that I kind of feel a bit dissapointed in disco elysium, especially in it's final act. The second district of martinase that opens on wednesday is such a dissapointment, being huge for no really good reason and consisting of way less compelling scenarios and characters. It's also in the second area where a bit of the facade of choice and consequence also fades away, with some severe railroading in terms of what the player can effect and do in a game that ostensibly provides such freedom. Whilst these events are mostly still written quite well on the character side, i do feel some of it is a bit contrived in an attempt to give the game a bit of a bombastic moment it never really needed.

Also, I do get that Disco Elysium is kinda deep into the subversion shit and it's kind of the point, but man is the actually solution to the crime extremely lame. I find it deflates the game quite a bit, especially when the game basiclaly already has the framework, characters and motivations in place to have the crime occur in cooler ways.

Outside of that, the only really overarching problem i maybe have with Disco is the skill system. Whilst the skills themselves are incredibly cool and I wouldn't change their writing or how they effect thoughts etc, their use in skill checks is often aggravating and i dont think helps the game's progression, where you can find yourself gated out by some check that you should either by breezing through or one you're encouraged to keep nibbling at every time you get at 5% bonus on it even though it's still a low chance because of how the white checks are redoable. I really think these checks should have just been full on requisites, which would encourage more clue searching rather than putting on a cool hat and trying to dom titus hardie by rolling high.

Oh, and the PS5 version crashes. A lot. And the game only autosaves very sporadically. It's not that big of a deal but it does take me out of an engrossing experience way more than it should. I guess it's so you know it really is a western RPG.

I don't want to take too much from Disco. Even if it ends on a bit of a deflating note for me, it's general quality of writing and some of the best artwork i've seen in a game vastly overpower it. It's just that when you slip from just below the tip of the mountain, it hurts a lot more.

Imagine making a game thats so dedicated and loving to Tatsujin oh to the point where Toaplan could probably send a cease and desist letter if they still existed, that only takes the most baseline, aesthetic lessons from it. That's crisis wing.

The most baffling thing about crisis wing is it's diagonal movement. I hope to hell this is only a bug in the switch version because if it isn't it's absolutely baffling. The player ship moves way slower upwards and downwards than side to side, with diagonals being ludicrously slow in particular. It's bizzare and is about the reddest flag possible a new shmup could possibly have.

And aside from that it's just so boring. There's no evolution on tatsujin oh here, just copypasta, and bad copypasta. Tatsujin Oh is an incredibly flawed game in it's own right, with it's eternally long stages flying over repetitive backgrounds, but it's base gameplay, control, and the scenarios it throws at the player are fantastic and have a great handle on the players capabilities and movement.

Crisis wing's formations are both boring and frustrating, with waves being barely in reach with the ship's bizzare movement speed, each repeating a couple of times for no good reason, until you end up at a very standard boss. All the while you fly over a background that changes even less than Tatsujin Oh's interminably long stages.

On a particularly sour note, you can't rebind your controls on the switch version. Hell, the game doesn't even tell you what your controls are without just messing about in-game. What the fuck is wrong with this game?

In the end, the control issues are unforgivably bad for an arcade shooter (and honeslty, probably any other genre), and the game behind it all is just a way worse version of an already polarising game that released 30 years ago.

If you want a good Toaplan-inspired indie, play Super XYX. This is garbage.

So, i'm one of those guys. The guy that hears "radiohead" and just thinks of Creep. I'm sorry, i'm just not into pop music that much. Is radiohead even pop music? Whatever. I've absorbed a couple more of their songs through cultural osmosis, i guess.

Basically, I'm not the target market for this. I've never listened to Kid A and Amnesia. And honestly, this project thing doesn't really give me a massive desire to go out and do so. The experience culminates with some cut-down style recordings/remixes of songs from the albums and it's just thoroughly uncompelling. The visuals involed are cool but the sequences themselves are so mind-numbingly long that I found myself completely zoning out and trying to make things look funny. Doesn't help that these new recordings just seem overall way less energetic than from what i can tell radiohead stuff normally is - and frankly maybe the band's music just isn't that well suited to the bombastic sequences that's gone for here.

What does work better here is the section before all those bombastic visual setpieces. The exhibition portion of the game is way more interesting, even if it is literally just a museum where you go round and look at some exhibition art pieces and paintings and shit. The level of visual fidelity here is absolutely ridiculous and really lends the vibe of like, watching a recording of the louvre or something, and then wandering around these weird, pretty exhibits at your own pace whilst the low-key radiohead plays in the background - it works pretty well! The art pieces are pretty good and the museum itself sort of is one, with what im fairly sure is impossible spaces that twist around each other, and weird rooms. It's a little eerie, but also kinda cute, and the sheer variety and amount of pieces of art scaterred all over the place really makes it fun to just walk about in. There's such huge amounts of detail, and it really feels like a well executed virtual exhibit that embraces that its virtual with impossible elements - it feels like some cool exhibit you'd see at the milennium dome and pay like way too much money for. Which is pretty much all id want from this sort of thing.

By the way, am I the only one who sees that radiohead logo cat thing as Neko Arc from Tsukhime/Melty Blood. It's very distracting. Burunyuu...

Dangun Feveron represents a road not travelled for Cave. In the sea of their shooting games, almost all of them can be traced back to the formula that Dodonpachi set out in 1997. Yes there are deviations there, notably in the Shinoubu Yagawa - lead games, but they still feel like cave games, radianting their polish, tight control, stylism and feel.

Dangun Feveron isnt a deviation on the Cave formula, it's a different formula entirely. For better and worse.

To put it bluntly, Dangun Feveron is just fast as fuck. The game's commonly compared to Toaplan titles, and whilst there are some aesthetic similarities and some bullet patterns that share a bit, the better comparison is in Caravan games, and games like Thunder Dragon 2 and Macross 2 from NMK.

Essentially, in Dangun, waves of enemies spawn almost instantly following the destruction of the previous wave. By speedkilling, you can spawn more waves and by extension, get more points from each stage.

Combine this with the point system involving picking up countless falling androids, some ludicrously fast enemy bullets, and player ship speed which can be chosen between "faster than most cave games" and "faster than any other shmup i've played" and you end up with a game which encourages zipping around the screen like nothing else.

And this shit is good. Feveron is a game that pushes the player to play faster, kill faster, move faster at every turn. Every single frame of this game is best spent doing something, demanding fast reactions and quick decisions from the player constantly. It's gloriously intense.

Probably too intense even. Feveron is a very, very hard game, that demands bonkers fast reactions constantly, whilst also having way more complicated patterns than the likes of NMK's games of this style, and they travel at ridiculously high speeds with very little room for micrododging when your ship can cross the entire play field in about half a second, with no means of slowing down.

And the presentation just does not complement it. Dangun Feveron's bouncy, disco theme and soundtrack is amusing and charming, but the more I play it, the more it annoys me. The frantic, intense nature of the gameplay just does not complement the off-brand staying alive soundtrack and how jovial it all is. Outside of the boss themes, the music is way too low tempo and relaxing for how bonkers the gameplay is. The vibe it gives off is very "take it easy", which almost feels like mockery when you get caught by a brutal pattern. It's also worth noting this is Cave's only shooter to outright take place in space, and it's just generally uninteresting to look at for large periods, and all of the stages end up feeling very samey.

Aside from the presentation, it has to be said the gameplay, whilst intense and fun, is probably also the jankiest full release Cave ever did. There not being any means of slowing down is a very weird creative decision the bosses don't seem built around, making them kinda suck. Ship and weapon balance is pretty dogshit, stages are often full of dramatic difficulty spikes and dips, zig-zagging between waves of unthreatening Zako and then 5 tough enemies at once, and there's a real lack of polish to how the game just feels overall. Cave's best shooters have exceptional direction in terms of level timing and control. Feveron's systems mean that the level timing and direction is weak and it's controls are so fast and slippery it's frustrating.

I also can't go without mentioning that Feveron might also have the dumbest bug i've ever seen in a shooter. If you reach the True Final Boss - which can only be accessed if you dont die the entire game, you are invincible for the entire fight. Apparently no one managed to reach the boss at the location test and it never got fixed. Sure, this doesn't effect me, but it's emblematic of a lack of polish that kind of pervades through Feveron.

The overall experience is just a bit sloppy, even if it is also exhiliarting and gloriously fast. The disco-theming would have been better used on a slower paced game and the gameplay itself really needs polish. Compared to the king of this sort of game, which i'd argue is NMK's Thunder Dragon 2, it lacks a lot in terms of stage direction and wave design.

This style of game has now basically long been lost. Dangun Feveron is one of the last of it's kind and Cave never touched the wave based concept again. And whilst I do think it's one of their worst shooting games at the end of the day, it's still good, and I do wish there was more like it. But i'm glad they went down the road they did.

Epic, this tech demo could have been a video. I would have believed you if you'd told me it was all in engine in unreal 5 and I wouldn't have had to download 27gb for a 10 minute car chase and perhaps the lamest open world experience conceivable.

Ok in fairness, the car chase portion is decently cool. It's very matrix reloaded, and despite one or two framerate hitches it's pretty visually impressive, as are the recreations of keanu and carrie ann moss, which you really need to squint at to see the uncanny valley-ness of it.

But there's so little here to talk about. The tech demo opens with a statement from keanu about tech and reality converging and shit but then completely drops it like a minute after and doesnt seem to actually have a point to make other than "damn, unreal 5 is pretty sick huh".

The open world section after the car chase is so pathetic I have no idea what it's purpose is. And it doesn't even look that amazing! It looks like Watch dogs! And all you can do is rob cars and run about!

Just watch the car chase on youtube.