Suzerain's facade is very good. A beautiful map, a 4X-style UI, some resources to manage and distribute and pages upon pages of deepest lore and people to keep pleased. The further you get into the game, and especially on repeat playthroughs, the cracks in the veneer show hard, and it will dawn on you at some point - this game is way closer to a dating sim Visual Novel than any 4X thingy.

Suzerain is just text choices and basically nothing else, where you basically balance relationships, constantly doing everything you can to make the waifus of you preference back you. And by waifus i mean the oligarchs or the old faithful.

And viewed in that light, Suzerain is really dull. When you get past the awesome conceit of the game and the occasional cool things you can do, it mostly consists of endless, endless text boxes of slightly meaningful decisions punctuated by the occasional chance to drastically change the land in one swoop.

Though probably the main problem is the writing. For a game which is so text heavy it's characters are so stock and one-note it verges on parody. This isn't helped by there being so damn many and almost none of them getting a scene solely dedicated to themselves, but when the Vice President character does get a bit of that time and has no character traits beyond "Adulterer" and "Alcoholic", and he's the most well rounded of the cast, there's an issue.

And you will spend like 90% of your time in the game in endless meetings with these boring people making decisions which might eventually add up to something but probably not. All of this with extremely minimal artwork, and clicking between the 5 different places on the map the game lets you because it wants to pretend its a strategy game still.

The way choices are dealt with suzerain is very frustrating. The game follows a general order of events no matter what you do, which is not the best thing in the first place, with some slight weaves around this core line depending on whether you go full facist or not. This both really restricts how far the political stuff really lets you go (no matter how hard you try you can't really make any revolution happen in anything other than "we'll do it soon!"), but also feeds into that good old choice-game problem where one choice near the endgame can just take you wildly off course because the game still needs to have 9 endings. So near the endgame you can get some severe whiplash when one aspect of the story you've built up essentially railroads you and there's no way out.

If you go to war, for instance - that defines your run. Every other aspect of government ceases to matter and your policies and politics have no more bearing on the plot besides how much attention you paid to millitary waifu. And you'll get one of 2 endings from that point onward depending on whether you win or not.

Suzerain feels like a game that should have fallout style endings - reflecting on how each of your decisions effected different people, countries, branches. But it's not. And the more I reflect on it and the potential it had, the more it infuriates me.

It's all a facade. Those beautiful moments at the start of the game where you're watching the meters and going through the codex and making rational decisions thinking it will all add up - they end up meaning fuck all.

If the writing and story was good, I could easily forgive it. But when that facade crumbles there's nothing left to Suzerain.

Senjin Aleste is arguably the first Shooting game since 2012 to feel like the high-polish, well presented games of the likes of Cave, Treasure and Taito. It's probably the game's biggest claim to fame and attention.

So it's really kinda weird that the game underneath that veneer is kinda fuckin weird and unpolished. Ex-Cave programmer Daisuke Koizumi has just decided to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall here, and it... mostly works.

The core of Senjin is very similar to Koizumi's doujin-production Rolling Gunner (and frankly, every game he touches). High difficulty in bullet patterns, a dynamic difficulty system which multiplies score, an obsession with hyper modes, bullet cancels and item pickups. This system works really well in Rolling Gunner, and is generally excellent here as well. In fact, i'd say it makes senjin a pretty great scoring game and a pretty thrilling shmup outright to just play.

Koizumi's grasp of pacing, bullet patterns and level design is top draw. There's nothing about the pure feel of this game that feels any worse than Cave's peaks. Stage 5 in particular is an absolute triumph of shmup level design and is an incredible finish to the game. It feels an awful lot like Ketsui's stage 5 - partially because it cribs a couple of its ideas - which is close to the highest praise i could give it. It's helped by fantastic pixel art and Tatsuhiko Kasuga's pretty great soundtrack.

Senjin's stutters come from it's more from it's out of the box ideas. The main one being it's life/character system, where instead of having a set number of lives, you control four different ships, and when one is hit, it swaps out for the next ship in line and takes about two minutes before it can be swapped into again. All the while you can switch ships by grabbing cycling pickups.

The concept of this system is actually really good, and it almost works. It lends well to the game's theming and presentation, it makes the game far more forgiving to early mistakes, allows the game to do some truly heinous patterns, and makes the game flow really nicely when you're swapping characters in at just the right time. It also creates some unique tension when you've got one character left, but getting another two chances may only be a few seconds away which you have to survive til - it's neat.

The problem really comes in the execution. The character balance is pretty bad, and the special abilities of each captain (which of the four ships you choose as your primary) are a complete crapshoot. Type D captain is basically the only valid choice for a survival-focused clear as she speeds up repair time for hit ships by a pretty huge amount, whilst Type B is by far the best for scoring as she gives the ability to chain hypers to super long lengths as more character switch drops which give meter. In actual gameplay, Type C is amazing, Type B is almost useless, Type D is amazing defensively but does no damage, and Type A is ok. Whilst this isn't so bad as everyone plays the same characters, once you know what you're doing it tends to lead to gameplay loops where you're not really using all characters in a balanced way and are mostly trying to switch back to Type C whenever you can. It's clunky.

The other core problem is one i kinda wrestle with a lot in my head. The way the game's life system works means that early game deaths dont matter so much, which is great. Whilst i personally like the really punishing edge to arcade shmups, variety is nice and it makes it a far more approachable game. But at point on survival runs it makes at least stages 1 and 2 completely pointless. And for score runs, the sheer difficulty of some of senjin's patterns even in those early stages, where on a survival run a hit or two is fine - causes some real restart syndrome.

The one thing that does really mesh well together in Senjin is the poorly named "burst", which effectively acts a fast recharging mini-bomb which sends nearby bullets outwards - only for them to home in the player after. It's a system that ties in extremely well to Koizumi's fetish for hyper systems, buying players time and adding another layer to dodging certain patterns.

In the end, Senjin feels a lot like the late-era Cave games Koizumi cut his teeth on - or at least, their first releases. Like those games, the potential and fun in Senjin is there, but locked away behind some wonky balance and design decisions.

Those previous games - Dodonpachi Saidaioujou and Akai Katana in particular, got those revisions, in 1.5 and Shin respectively, which are frankly massively improved versions of both those games (even if i think Akai Katana Shin still kinda sucks). If Senjin Aleste can get that same boot in quality with it's inevitable console port, it may well end up something truly special. Time will tell.

Part 2 of a series reviewing Takatsuna Senba's games at Taito.

In Senba's retrospective on Metal Black and Dino Rex's development, he's especially cruel talking about Rex. He goes as far to call it Kusoge - which frankly, it kinda is. But whilst his tone surrounding it's twin game, Metal Black, is less harsh, it's still tinged with a strong sense of dissapointment, lamenting a troubled development and failing to live up to Gun Frontier.

And at first thought, it's kinda hard to get. Metal Black is probably the game of which he and the team is most known for and definetly it's most influential. And when you come from it from Dino Rex and the experience of getting beaten up by a fat purple sauropod's janky disjoints, the opening of metal black in particular is just such a drastic leap in quality it's kinda hard to see how it's creator couldn't be proud of it.

Metal Black's first stage, like many of Taito's games in the 90s, is an absolute treat. It's depiction of a dead earth, with the sun hanging low behind a dozen parralax layers, a giant hermit crab using an aircraft carrier as it's shell, and an eldritch abomination at the end of it - it's still beautiful. And all along Born to be free, one of ZUNTATA's best ever tracks, plays. It's a wonderful, somber start to the game that hints towards the surreal voyage that Metal Black takes off towards for the rest of it's runtime.

After taking off from the dead earth, you go on to face moons which are eggs for aliens, bizzare dream landscapes, some truly bonkers alien designs, kaleidoscopic backgrounds, and eventually images of human war and digitized cats in the background of the final boss. When you combine this with Senba's styling - thick outlines on sprites, use of digitized sprites, deep backgrounds with heavy use of pseudo 3d sprite scaling - Metal Black really resembles little else, and is often absolutely gorgeous to look at. Taito's own Darius series - of which Metal Black was originally intended to be an entry before being deemed "too dark" - is about as close as you're going to get, but it's really not very close. MB's aesthetic is way less refined than something like darius gaiden, and has a lot of rough edges like it's weird UI and a lot of asset reuse, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

Special mention also has to go to the soundtrack by YasuhIsa Watanabe, also known as YACK. According to Senba, he told an unnamed member of Taito's sound team he didn't think they would be able to fullfill the vision he wanted whilst during development of Gun Frontier (which was done by a non-taito composer) - with the aim of "Lighting a fire under them" for Metal Black. It seemed to do the job.

Metal Black's soundtrack is absolutely incredible - it's probably YACK's best work and really hammers in the dark, somber edge to Metal Black. It also is fantastically timed to be in cue with events in stages and boss events, and despite the darker, slower nature of the music compared to say, Darius - still carries an intensity when it needs to.

So, this all sounds amazing. And MB sometimes is. Stages 1, 2 and 6 in particular are brilliant audiovisual feasts. But the problem is that MB is kinda not a good shmup, and to an extent fails to bring together all it's incredible visuals and effects into the great whole it could be.

MB's gameplay is just not great. The beam system it uses, where firing your super laser diminshes normal shot power, is actually pretty interesting and future games it inspired have done similar things well, but the game notably only has a forward directional attack in a game which has loads of enemies coming from behind. Without warning. Yeah.

The level design in general is just generally uninteresting and full of pretty cheap enemies and ways to die. There's also just too many of them. MB's about 40 minutes long, with 6 stages, which could have worked, but around stage 3-5 the game sort of levels out on how far it's surreal visuals and stuff goes until the finale turns it to 11, and the game lulls a lot in this period. Stage 5 could probably have been cut outright for my money, and none of them in this period offer anything particularly interesting gameplay wise. This section really hurts the feel of MB, where it really just feels like it's spinning it's wheels.

Also, the less said about the bonus stages the better. They kill the pacing and just kinda suck.

So I get why Senba isn't happy with this game somewhat. The gameplay sadly brings down the experience quite a bit and it plays a lot worse than Senba's earlier work, Gun Frontier. It's a messier experience and compared to Taito's other vibe-powered shmups - Gun Frontier, Darius Gaiden, Rayforce - stages dont flow into each other well, and it's hard to put a finger on what the story of the game even is.

Nontheless, I hope he becomes proud of it eventually. This fucking mess of a STG, made by 4-6 people over a 6 month period whilst juggling another game and Taito's management being dicks, remains rad as hell and a massive influence to STG developers 30 years later. Taito's darius series in particular took massive influence from it, and refined elements of it's bonkers imagery into more focused, polished experiences in Gaiden and G. Ex-Taito staff later formed G.Rev and did years of contract work to be able to fund a spiritual successor - Border Down.

I do think Gun Frontier is the better game of Senba's, and if the aim of Metal Black was to exceed it, I don't think it does. And whilst it's attract mode labels it as "Project Gun Frontier 2", it's really something very different - and something that's influence in the genre and beyond will always linger.

Dear lord this is rough. The floppy, beautiful skin of what will probably be a pretty good shooter in 3 years (probably like 1 month before the next battlefield comes out) masquerading as a full tentpole release for EA. 2042 is more blatantly a work in progress than some telltale episode 1s, it's so ludicrously barebones and buggy, but more importantly, doesn't seem to have even worked out it's core gameplay hooks and flow.

You really only need to play one game of conquest to see the cracks DICE apparently havent. Honestly, you merely only need to look at the map screen once. Maps are way, way too big and the way objective zones are set out means action across a map spreads out to such an extent you can go literal minutes without even seeing anyone, only to either get shot by a sniper or probably to do it to someone else. And weirdly, every weapon other than sniper rifles, and arguably to an extent them too, have terrible performance at extended ranges.

Making shots with even assault and marksman rifles at around 100m is a crapshoot and anything beyond that is basically pointless. When maps are absolutely enormous. It gets to the point where it's pretty common for you and an enemy to both see each other, pop off a few shots, realise that this will take like 20 seconds to resolve and just stop bothering.

The game does have some strengths when you play it's other mode - Breakthrough, which is a normal attack-defend set up much smaller versions of the conquest maps, though still with 128 players. These maps are still frankly way too big and all of them have one (or more) of those horrible chokepoint sections that attack/defend maps tend to do, and it's still rarely actually fun. But what it does have are flashes. When the fighting get's to the point where like 60 of the players in the server are fighting over one park or underpass or whatever, the sheer and utter chaos that erupts can be a riot. It really feels like a war movie, with helicopters crashing everywhere, countless streams of tracer fire going over your head as beautiful weather effects crash against a beautiful broken world.

And 2042 is beautiful. The skin of the pre-alpha game being playtested here is truly something, with a nice sense of heightened/semi-magical realism that's very cool, and when you're involved in the insane firefights, can be pretty remarkable.

But those awesome firefights are few and far between and way too much of 2042 basically forces you to admire the scenary because you've got fuck all else to do but try and wait for the fight to bunch up so you can actually have some fun. Much has been said about the lack of weapons, the bugs being so prevelant and the specialist system, and I don't really care because that's battlefield, that's going to be fixed - probably by the point no one really cares about 2042 any more, but fixed nontheless.

The problem is just that the gameplay lacks any momntum and flow and the maps are absolutely enormous for no good reason. You could probably add another 64 players and Conquest would still feel like a ghost town. If these things are going to be fixed, the whole direction of the game needs to change substantially - and I doubt that's going to happen.

November 2021 is truly going to live long in the memory as the month where every long running, blockbuster franchise dropped the ball, except of all things, Shin Megami Tensei.

The lead developer of Dino Rex, Takatsuna Senba, has a blog. Despite being entirely in japanese, it's one of those blogs that is pretty interesting even with machine translation, with anecdotes and tidbits that really give an insight to the way game development was in early 90s japan.

In what is probably the saddest blog post of his, he details a few things about dino rex - how he knew it was bad, the hit detection was terrible, and how he was denied even a single month's delay to fix it in order to capitalise on the fever surrounding street fighter 2 and the introduction of Taito's upcoming F3 arcade board.

In the end, Senba delivered the game's final build and his resignation the same day. He hasn't made a game since.

Dino Rex is a tragedy through and through. Originally concieved as a Shmup, which were games Senba and his team actually knew how to make (having made the exceptional Gun Frontier and Metal Black in the prior 2 years), Taito heads demanded a fighting game following the success of street fighter 2. In like, 6 months.

It's shit.

Dino Rex is just a very good example of what not to do with a fighting game. Terrible readability, bad animation which doesnt convey windups/etc, and worst of all, controls which feel barely functional. It really ends up feeling like two dinosaurs just wailing at each other without a drip of nuance, and gameplay boils down to staying out of range and charging up your special attack because literally everything else you can do is a complete crapshoot.

It is at least, pretty cool. There's an extremely distinct style to the three games Senba lead at Taito, characterised by sprites with harsh black outlines, extreme use of parralax backgrounds and foregrounds, and use of surreal visuals - as well as a distinctive UI/font. Dino Rex's look, with its use of digitized dinos, sadly does look a bit cheap in comparison to GF/MB, but there's some bombast in watching dinosaurs throw each other into stands and cause general carnage that is caught well here. Honestly, Dino Rex isn't a bad game to watch a video of, it's just irredeemably bad to actually play. Still, it is never even close to as cool as the space-western Gun Frontier or as beautiful as the fever dream that is Metal Black. And those are actually also fun!

Mechanically, Dino Rex is probably the worst fighting game I've ever played. It's only very slightly redeemed by some neat visuals which themselves are a massive step down from the creator's previous games. And the career of one of Taito's brightest developers died for transgressions that were mostly out of his control because of it.

Dino Rex, today, is just a footnote to stories. The end of one promising development teams, one of many failed SF2 imitators, a ridiculously awful game that some extremely talented people also happened to be involved with. And that's pretty much it.

I'm going to review Senba's other games, and despite it being his last, I felt compelled to do Dino Rex first. Because this isn't the shit anyone involved with taito in the 90s deserves to be remembered by. The two games he was most involved with prior - Gun Frontier and Metal Black - are the ones that deserve the last word.

Part of the list review series. Reccomended by Ophelia.

So this one is just a case of really not being for me. A super atmospheric adventure game that close to borders on the level of walking sim with puzzles and shit. As a monke that relies on neuron activations for pure pleasure in my games, cineris somnia has very few of them and is a decidedly slow game that's more about drenching you in that atmosphere and everything.

And that just leaves me in a very weird place to review it from. Radio Zonde isnt entirely my thing but at least I knew which ballpark I was in. The most recent game i've played that compares to this is... flower sun and rain? Maybe? Does that count.

So with that big pinch of salt in mind i'll voice my main problem with CS. It basically boils down to production value. Animation is pretty poor, the level of fidelity isn't great considering the art style the world design is going to (I was surprised to learn this came out in 2018 when it looks so very Gen-7), and there's just a lot of little things that add up. The camera and control is a bit messy and awkward, and there's a clumsiness to the levels that I find hard to quite voice. The prime example of this is in the ligthhouse right at the start, where you end up climbing this super long staircase, and it just goes on and on and on... slightly too long. Without the right camera framing to signal you're still climbing, whilst your character is blatantly lacking the right inverse kinematics to deal with stairs, and whilst the 20 second long music track loops for about the 50th time.

And these bits are all good. These 20 second long music tracks going plin plin plon are pretty good. But my overall take away is kinda based on that - Those 20 second pieces of music don't feel like they were made for that 10 minute walk down to the lighthouse, looping over and over and over. All the elements of the game kinda feel like that to me. I'm far from an adventure game stan, but this just feels kinda... off.

Part of a list review series. Reccomended by PKmudkipz.

So, I don't like Hellsinker.

Honeslty, I could probably just the end the review there, because Radio Zonde is just a complete distillation of that game, being it's predecessor. Ridiculously awful User Interface and User experience brush up against a shooter with great bullet patterns but is really bland aesthetically, with weakish stage design, and is way too complicated for it's own good.

In fairness, the process of actually getting to play the game is the thing that really puts a bad taste in my mouth. Downloads of the game aren't easy to find despite it originally being freeware, and then they're missing some random .dll file you have to beg the hellsinker fans on your discord to impart knowledge of, and then it's one of these old doujin games which unless you've got a PC running with JP text will just through a scrambled options menu at you, then your screen resolution will get fucked up, and then you get introduced to a main menu that's so pointlessly obtuse and literally hiding things it feels like a joke. And then the game is some Diet hellsinker and i just sleep. I watched the STG weekly video on this game to try and get more to grips with it and just ended up more pissed off at it being so needlessly awkward at every step of the gaming process that's not just dodging.

I'm not going to give it too low a score because like Hellsinker, I do get this vibe that there's a nugget of gold deep down here somewhere. And the bullet patterns are generally quite good. There's part of me that thinks that the way I think about this game now is similar to when i didn't get Shmups at all.

And then the game literally refuses to close without me getting out the task manager and I start to doubt my leniency.

The period from 1985-1987 was a seminal era for the Shmup. Whilst games from before 85 are very occasionally pretty decent, notably Robotron 2084 and Mad Planets, games like Gradius, R-Type, Darius, Twinbee, Fantasy Zone and Hizousame really codifying many things like general game structure, gameplay loops, use of music and various other tropes little things that add up to give late 80s games a very different feel to them to games not even 3 years old.

Tiger Heli is interesting in that in part it feels like one of these redefining shmups whillst at the same time feeling extremely old and simple. With an extremely limited enemy variety (there's like legitimately 4 different enemies in this game and 90% of what you will face are identical tanks), music which loops legitimately every 20 seconds, and frankly, it looks like shit.

But at the same time, the game design approach here, particularly in regards to level design, is way more modern and actually pretty good. The combination of an extremely slow ship, almost all bullets being aimed at the player, and a very short attack range for the player gives the game a puzzley edge and puts an extreme emphasis on working out a good route and taking a more strategic approach to each stuation, especially in the later levels.

On top of this, there is the bullet-clearing bomb, which this game actually was the first to introduce. It's value here is way more offensive than the typically defensive bombs of modern games, as they're basically the only way to quickly clear out groups of enemies, which adds a nice layer of resource management and gives more options in the routing, as well as just being satisfying to lose.

And generally, I think the game is a good time. Honestly it's pretty remarkable how solid the level design is and how well it still kinda plays considering it was both Toaplan's first shooting game and its 36 years old - but it is also extremely limited.

The level design is pretty strong, but there's only 4 of them, and once you have figured out a route... the game's kinda over. There's very little room for freedom as well due to the heli's very low speed, and so many of the enemies are just the same tank which behave identically. The game's simplicity is neat, but much like games like Xevious, the sheer amount of copy-pasted assets and enemies gets a bit much, and the game doesn't have the incredible core twitchy gameplay that could make it work long term.

Oh, and I did mention the presentation was awful, right. The NES version of this game looks like a dumpster fire and the Arcade version isn't much better. And whilst the standard background music is legitimately nice, the background music whilst you've got a little-heli - something that preferably you would always want - is an astonishingly annoying and prompts me to play the game on mute.

Overall, I feel Tiger Heli just about holds up the test of time, at least if you've got a mind towards exploring the curiosities of gaming past. The strong level design bolsters the game high enough for at least a few credits, which is probably more than can be said for frankly the vast, vast majority of shmups of the era. And it's an early window into some of the magic that Toaplan would produce in the following years.

The first 2-3 hours of inscryption are wonderful. A creepy, thoroughly atmospheric dive in this weird, creepy card game, played in a small little cabin against some weird guy who pantomines the parts of the bosses and kills you with a camera at the end. There's so many little touches in this part, and coming off the table and solving all the little puzzles of the cabin with an aim to escape/win, its awesome. There's a great occult, macabre vibe to it all, and then it all comes together for a neat resolution as you and your talking cards hatch a plan.

Its sad for me to say that whilst it would have been dissapointing in it's own right, the game would have been better stopping right there. It would have left me wanting way, way more and the game would come out at about an hour and a half long, but that's a better world than the one we live in.

Because Inscryption really just could not help itself from going down the creepypasta meta rabbit hole for the latter two thirds of it's runtime. It's not as bad as the dev's previous game Pony Island and is presented pretty well, but is ultimately just way less endearing and interesting than the first act.

Sadly the game also gets less mechanically interesting. Part of this is definetly a psychological element - i'm less interested in getting into the minutae of the mechanics when its obvious the game's now committed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater every 20 minutes, but I also think there's an elegance to the creature sacrifice emphasis of the first act that nothing that comes after comes close to matching.

I understand there is meant to be a point to this, at least somewhat, as the soulful roleplay-driven gameplay gives way to more mechanically deep or whatever gameplay, but I do think it just falls flat and the non-card gameplay of the latter sections are particularly weak in comparison.

And the story? It's thankfully told with fantastic production values and editing and is pretty well paced, and pulls those good old 4th wall meta game tricks which honestly im a bit tired of by now even if they're very cute in this one. But it's just really not interesting and there's not really much more to it than Sonic.exe at the end of the day. It's well told and the presentation is outright incredible throughout, but on a personal level it's really just where I wish the story didn't go after such an incredible opening.

It also really drags near the end. The final section prior to the ending is way too fucking long and not much even happens in the story. If it didn't so blatantly feel like a "final act" I probably would have dropped it about halfway through.

So yeah, if I stopped playing the game after 2 hours the score here would probably be a 4.5/5, maybe even a 5 if i was feeling particularly generous. And it's not like the rest of the game is offensively bad or anything, it's just profoundly dissapointing, especially in the light of what's clearly a mountain of effort and attention to detail that's gone into it that feels in service of completely the wrong way for the game to go.

Inscryption truly took me down the rabbit hole. I wish it didn't bother.

There's an appeal to the Horror B-movie that games have scant captured. Stuff like Resident Evil gets a part of it, but there's a certain vibe to a Horror B Movie where multiple layers of self awareness, weird egos, overambitious ideas, lack of awareness, camp, and low budget somehow all intersect. And to it's credit, Illbleed is maybe the only game that gets that feel down quite right. I ca appreciate that. The dialogue has that vibe of a bad giallo movie and is bizzarely paced, the story setup is incredibly weird in what it devotes time to and doesn't, the sense of location and space is blatantly flimsy and the production values are completely all over the place. I can appreciate that illbleed has grabbed something here, latched onto a feeling very little else does.

Still, it kinda fucking sucks. Illbleed's pretty strong momentum from it's opening and initial exploration of the hub and the start of the first level comes crashing to a halt as you've found yourself in maybe one of the worst gameplay loops imaginable. Even if you've got a friendly person in your discord VC to point out the easily missable key item hidden in a cranny at the start of the game, you're left dealing with this stop start game of wandering down hallways, equipping some goggles to spot weak-ass jumpscares in advance, indicated with blue dots. The blue dots can be jump scares, items, enemy encounters or nothing at all, and most of them are gonna trigger if you walk past them anyway so the only point on putting the goggles on is so you dont get fucked by them.

And getting fucked by some pathetic, annoying jump scares, is like, the game. The player's involvement is in, of all things, meter management, of blood, stress, etc. There would be some tension to this, slowly bleeding out over the course of a spooky level, but this is completely the wrong game for it to be in. The entire tone of this game is this fun goofy b movie horror and then the game itself is this slow burn, patience rewarding, fucking aggravating survival experience.

There's also some predictably dogshit combat. I kinda don't care enough to comment more than that on it.

The real crime here is the dissonance for me. Illbleed's tone is great, and I don't think the gameplay had to be anything spcial at all for this to be worthwhile. Honestly, even that dogshit melee combat system just being the whole game on a mechanic level might have been fine, like the B-movie Horror drakengard we all needed. But what's been chosen is both pretty bad and worse, slow and repetitve. Managing meters and analysing the world through goggles every ten yards. It's a system better suited for an abject survival horror game where the feeling of slowly bleeding out might actually be tense, and even there i'd say it'd be too much. For what's basically a comedy? Fuck off.

I have heard that the first level is notoriously terrible and a massive filter on the game. Sure, i can buy that, but the core of the game still feels absolutely rotten. When I was playing this, I had Border Down installed in the same folder, taunting me on the flycast boot page. And Illbleed does nothng to hook me back in outside of what i could probably experience in a youtube cutscene compilation.

I have to commend Ratalaika games for giving this niche Shooting game a good port on modern systems, turning a game where even the Reproduction cartridges cost $200 into something pretty much anyone can play legally for $5 in a pretty good way.

But any mystique it built up of being this really rad, extremely rare gem, is quickly shattered by actually playing through it and finding out it's an ridiculously conventional console STG, even in the context of it's time.

At it's core, it's very similar to the Thunder Force games of the era. But kinda just worse. It's poorly paced above all else, with long periods of dead air, way too many stages, and just really not enough bits where you're actually dodging bullets or being under really any challenge at all. It's a pretty easy STG overall, thanks to the game giving you a million lives, but harder sections are just dropped into stages among minutes of simple stage hazards and simple enemy formations which you can mostly speedkill before they can present any difficulty.

So the strength is in the presentation right? Nah, not really. The game does feature these pretty nice pixel art CGs between stages 3, 6, 9 and after 11 (btw, a STG having that many stages is a red flag in the first place), but they're short, very sparse, and give very little context to the events of the game until the very end where it's revealed that the plot is literally the earth federation defeating "aliens". Great.

It does have nice stage backgrounds and is generally quite pretty, but its nothing special compared to say, the Pretty great Thunder Force III. And boy, does this game make Thunder Force III and IV look great in comparison. Of even better, even if you dont want to leave the console space, MUSHA Aleste, Super Aleste, Super Fantasy Zone, Bio Hazard Battle and a myriad of pretty decent arcade ports of things like Tatsujin, Hizousame, Darius 2. And if you're prepared to play arcade STGs, god help Gleylancer.

The mystique of this game shatters with high availability and low pricing, frankly, which is pretty pathetic. It's a game that cribs an awful lot from the Thunder Force games of it's era, whilst playing a lot worse and having less character or really, lacking any hook to be worth playing beyond some occasional great backgrounds and art cut ins you see every
20 minutes - which by the way, some of the games ive mentioned above handily beat it out on anyways as well.

God help the people that spent $500 on this one.

If you gave me enough beers, put this on a boxy CRT and told me "This is the secret Metroid Nintendo made in 2005 for the gamecube", I'd like to think I'd believe you. The kindest thing I can say about Dread is that it really just feels like a natural successor to Fusion without... caveats. Mercurysteam have got their own flair in parts (dear lord do they love their parry QTEs), but the thing I was worried with most about Dread - that it'd feel like this unnatural weird growth on the core Metroids, was unfounded. Dread really just in Fusion 2.

And the core of that is the control I feel. Fusion, to this day, is still one of the nicest 2D games to just move about and do stuff in. It's gamefeel is just spectacular. I'm not convinced Dread is better, but it's close enough for this to just feel like a wonderful game to just run about in. It's absolutely wonderfully animated too, with loads of little things - Samus putting her hand above morph ball holes when you're nearby them, for instance - that add up to the game just feeling wonderful to play outright.

As a Search-Action game, it takes much more from Fusion than any of the other Metroids, with more of a focus in putting the player in areas to puzzle through rather than leaving more of the map open at any one time. There's plenty of points of no return and theres way fewer means to sequence break, and lot more square hole-square peg problems than in Super, at least from what I can tell. Which is fine. What it loses in the sheer freedom, it gains a lot in pacing and direction, and does a much better job of conveying the goals and "plot" than Super does.

And clumped in the middle of all that is the EMMI. They're pretty good! Whilst they never get close to the sheer fear of death the SA-X put in my 8 year old's heart, they provide a good degree of tension and a neat obstacle in the middle of the zones. The generous respawns the game has undercuts it, and the (mostly pretty great) boss fights a bit, but I think it's a reasonable concession to the fairly difficult nature of both the EMMI encounters and portions of the game in general.

The way the game ups the power of the EMMI, through letting them start seeing through walls, freeze samus and walk freely through water she can't, is pretty good, but the facade definetly does wear thin towards the end of the game when samus has about a dozen different movement options and can easily outpace them, especially after you get Gravity suit and Space jump. Fortunately though, they take a backseat in the last few hours and honestly they're not as much of the game as it seems.

Honestly the best thing they offer in my opinion is the psychological effect. Triumphing over an EMMI basically completely gives you the reins to each zone, especially as they're tied to key progression items. It helps create a great flow of rising and lowering tension throughout the game, and help reinforce your progress in a game that has nothing else like Super Metroid's 4 bosses to kill or Fusion's sectors.

There are faults here. I'm not going to pretend to care about the Metroid storyline, but I think it's fair to say it lacks one of the exceptionally strong beats which kinda characterises Metroid 2 and Super in particular, outside of some pretty good characterisation of Samus through her actions. There's not enough new abilities really, and the placement of some powerups is extremely strange to the point they almost feel like they're put in out of obligation. I really like what the game does in mixing up the original item order but it does feel kinda stupid to get Power bombs so damn late and they're near completely useless, for instance. And it would have been nice if they could have gotten rid of the loading screens and elevators between zones, which feels like a pure technical constraint.

But honestly, I don't really care. I just know first time I stopped playing it, I realised I felt exactly the same way Fusion made me feel all those years ago. There's a certain thrill to a wonderfully paced, fun controlling search action game. Countless devs have tried in the wake of Metroid. Some of them have managed to scratch that itch, most of them fall pretty dang flat. There's frankly just not enough games that feel like Fusion and Super. That drip feed of satisfaction and thick tension thats so wonderful, that knows not to overstay its welcome. I honestly did not think that the developers of Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 could come close. I am very happy to be wrong.

Dread probably isnt going to be my favourite Metroid. But if someone told me it was - I'd get it. It's a game that slots right in among some of the best games Nintendo have ever made in Fusion and Super. And that's really something.

In the heat of a firefight, Hell let loose does touch on something for a moment. A peephole of the sheer horror and cruelty of WW2, maybe.

But boy is it boring for 95% of the time. I get it's going for a Squad sort of thing, but it's such a pain in the ass to actually get to the combat here. Base spawns are usually a literal mile away from the centre of the map, which is usually where the combat is, they dont update with the moving objectives, and if you havent got one when you spawn in, you've probably gotta walk. If you're winning when that happens it could well be across the whole, ridiculously enormous maps.

And then when you get where you're going you're basically just playing day of infamy because the game basically funnels all 100 players into objective areas anyways. So why wouldn't you just be playing that? I dunno.

And the whole thing just doesn't have anything else to bring it up. It's very rough, particularly on PS5 where the lack of KB+M leads to the game feeling completely out of place. Quality of life features are terrible, text is barely legible, it controls kinda weirdly, online stability is a joke, you can't turn the damn controller microphone off when you end up on the Wermacht side and the """larpers"""" come out the woodwork. And there's just baffling decisions everywhere. Setting up team wide spawns can requiresmultiple players working in tandem - not to do anything interesting, but just to get the supplies in the same spot and do it. So in a public server, they may as well not exist and you have to rely on your teams officer. Who hopefully hasn't DC'd or something or you'll be forced to do western europe walking Sim 1944 for another 10 minutes before you get sniped from an MG34 and have to do it again.

Just play Day of Infamy. Or Squad, or Insurgency, or something anything else. HLL has some technical chops and has some cool viscerality to it, but it's just really not worth it.

Damn, what a good idea! I've been waiting ages for a good, economical way to play Guardian Force and Cottom Boomerang!

I am stil waiting for a good, economical way to play Guardian Force and Cotton Boomerang.

The games here are good. Guardian Force is a rad tank-themed STG and Boomerang is easily the best cotton game (excluding the upcoming Rock n roll, which legitimately looks pretty great). The problem is that this port is horrible.

So to start, the interface is so extremely barebones. There's some very basic shit done badly like control options being seperate between the game and interface. Which is just some weird energy and makes setting up the dang controls a hassle. It's all presented really blandly and has no real sauce on it.

But the kicker here is the lag. Saturn Tribute, from what i've heard on the grape vine, is an open source saturn emulation thingy then put in a Unity wrapper for the aforementioned bad interface and presumably some other technical shit. That naturally adds a bit of lag, thats natural, and i'm not snobby enough to pretend a little of bit of it isn't a dealbreaker.

This isn't a little bit.

Preliminary tests of Guardian Force puts it at 10 frames of native input lag. That isn't just bad by STG standards (put it this way, Ketsui Deathtiny on the same console has 2 frames input lag), it's significantly worse than most AAA games and frankly, almost anything that's not a trash fire like Crystal Chronicles HD (which somehow has about 20 frames lag lmao).

Long story short, it makes the games feel like playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Whilst twitch dodging bullets. I don't like to say it but it's basically unplayable. Guardian Force's original release was already on the edge in terms of lag and this tips it way, way over the edge. And i'm not a snob on this stuff, i swear! I know for instance, an upcoming arcade game was rejected from a platform for DARING to have 4-5 frames, literally half the lag.

Guess I gotta go looking for that hacked Guardian Force Romset...

Considering Raizing would almost immedietly go on to become purveyors of the finest jank, their first game, Sorcer Striker/Mahou Daisakusen, is a very easy game to like. The core gameplay is fun, conventional, and easy to get to grips with, and it combines with wonderful presentation and music, and only moderate difficulty by arcade standards, makes it a very easy STG to just get into and play and enjoy.

If there is a blemish on Sorcer Striker, it is that gameplay though. It essentially plays like a spin-off of Aleste, which makes a lot of sense considering Raizing was founded by a group of ex-COMPILE staff. In general, it feels a lot like Musha Aleste, which is fine, that game is great, but if anything is simpler and less interesting. It's basically pick the weapon pick up you like best, shoot, and survive. This can work fine and even simpler conceits have made for better STGs (most notably I'd argue is the exceptional Thunder Dragon 2), enemy waves aren't that interesting, and there is absolutely nothing to the scoring system beyond basically pure survival.

And whilst Mahou isn't generally that difficult, the difficulty it does have is a bit poorly balanced, and full of spikes. The stage 2 boss is going to be a big roadblock for people, and one of the Stage 6 midbosses easily eclipses the final boss. It's nothing that bad, but is a bit of a mark against the game.

But whilst the gameplay struggles to get much higher than "pretty good", the wonderful presentation really picks up the slack. The world of Mahou Daisakusen is this adorably kitsch high-fantasy/steampunk world that's beautifully realised with great sprite art, imaginative enemy/character designs and some great direction - there's an ebb and flow to the game, forming a little heroes' journey in a way, with recurring rival enemies, and great pacing with the levels, culminating in it's pretty great Stage 6.5 which really rounds things out. It's a setting that's built with just the right amount of seriousness that it feels dramatic whilst also having plenty of levity. It's a bit like viewing a more professional, artistic version of those original, kinda goofy Magic The Gathering cards that you fly and shoot things through.

And that's really it in general. Mahou is a game that does leave you wanting a bit more. Wanting a bit more interesting gameplay, but also just wanting another window of this adorable high-fantasy world to blast through.