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.

Journal 71

It’s the 21st of July, I’ve been hiding from the feds for over the past week now. I see constant news on my murdering of my ex wife and her husband. Damn bitch always was more trouble than she was worth.

I’m currently in a swamp in Northern Georgia, the Alligators here are some wild fuckers, one almost chomped off my dick earlier this morning.

Mario Kart 64, I’m thinking about it now… If only a Blue Shell could be in my hands so I could blow those copper fucks to kingdom come. Fuck… I knew I shouldn’t have had a son. If I had known that it would’ve come to this, I wouldn’t have murdered all those guys in Cleveland.

I write this review from my bed as a few days ago I had one of my teeth ripped out by a dentist due to it being cracked. Deep root, firmly in molar. A nurse literally had to hold my head whilst the dentist got bigger pliers to pull it like in a cartoon. Most pain I've ever been in both before and after. This has hampered my gaming as I can only play in short bursts whilst holding my swollen face feeling sorry for myself.

The thing is that Coffee Talk 2 is a perfect pick up and play game for this just like it's predecessor. It's a Mythpunk visual novel where you are an enigmatic late night coffee shop owner serving drinks to elves, orcs, vampires, banshees and an assortment of other creatures as you learn about their lives and troubles. It's minimally interactive with only making correct drinks or handing items over the bar effecting the slice of life stories for the endings you get.

The game just works though. It's wholesome, chill with fantastic pixel art and character designs supported by the sort of pleasant music you'd find in a nice cafe or an elevator. I would recommend playing the original game first as characters and subplots do progress through and it plays with your assumption of that knowledge.

Recommended.

+ Very relaxing.
+ I like the characters and their lives.
+ Lovely visuals and music.

- Drink making is still semi guess work.

I've often wondered what exactly makes a game "the worst" I've played in an objective sense. The stuff that doesn't involve shit that just pisses me off specifically like terrible remakes that are used as judgment pieces for the superior original, or games that I think did active harm to the industry. I'd imagine it would have to be a game that is either a potential physical or emotional health risk.

Well, this one threatened to give me a headache with some of the terrible water effects/backgrounds, and features unmentionables that would require me to put a trigger warning in order to go into detail, so I guess this is in the running now.

I think my least favorite thing in fighting games is when they lock you into the main character for the single player mode. It's especially bad in this era, because wow they sure did love their bland karate guys.

"Hey game, can I play as the cool looking pirate dude or the girl?"
"No, you're gonna play as your dull-ass karate guy and you're gonna like it."

Bonus star for having Toguro as the final boss, that's pretty neat.

If you're a Time Crisis fan, you've likely been curious about this strange 2001 PS1 "sequel". Arriving a mere six months before Time Crisis 2's PS2 conversion, it's one of the most baffling games I've encountered.

Project Titan comes to us from Flying Tiger Entertainment, who are mainly a porting house. The only other original titles I can source to them appear to be No Rules: Get Phat for the GBA and the PC King of the Hill CD-ROM "game". After over a decade occupied solely with mobile games, they have recently been tasked with porting Data East arcade games to the Switch eShop, where they're stretched to widescreen and presented with mandatory pixel smoothing. Look, I know the games industry is a harsh and often unfulfilling place, and anyone who decides to make games for us to enjoy ought to have our encouragement, but I'm just trying to present an accurate picture of who these people are, and why it's so bizarre that Namco would offer them the rights to one of their headline franchises at its peak. This is like if they gave Tekken 3 to Titus Interactive.

Rest assured, Project Titan is far and away the best thing Flying Tiger have ever made. Yes, reader, this is weak praise.

I really don't know how or why this game happened. My best guess is that Namco had produced too many G-Con 45s, and weren't confident that they could rely on Rescue Shot and Ghoul Panic to shift units. Project Titan does try to disguise itself as a proper Time Crisis game. We're still playing as Richard Miller, and both Wild Dog and the console-only villain, Kantaris, both return to antagonise us. Character models appear to be higher poly than TC1, with more detailed textures, but still end up looking a little cruder, lacking the original artists' skill and insight. They're post-2000 American PS1 characters cosplaying as classic Namco characters. The game's tone attempts something goofier than the more earnest original, but lacks the charm to make it palatable. The first mid-level sub-boss is an outrageous French chef who throws butcher knives at you. Standard enemies now appear in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. The original game's brilliant sunset framing device is gone, and the pressing nature of this "time crisis" takes a backseat as Richard indulges in international flights and hails a taxi. You don't even get a shoot-out in the taxi either, as this team clearly isn't up to the task of presenting a 3D highway chase.

The actual Time Crisising is mostly fair. The original game's design is replicated quite faithfully, with colour coded enemies, moving obstacles and elaborate action on each new potshot position. The game does tend to hang in one spot a little too long, with some mandatory enemies appearing a little too distant. The environments lack the Castle of Cagliostro romanticism of the original, taking place in relatively dour locations like a cruise liner and an airport. The fact that this is so heavily inspired by the original Time Crisis prevents it from doing some of the things I dislike about the sequels, like using bulletsponge enemies and wacky, kinetic chase sequences. There's also an on-screen combo indicator, tracking each time you successfully fired at an enemy without wasting a bullet, and rewarding you with health if you manage an unbroken chain of 30 hits, but that just plainly isn't going to happen without fully memorising this fairly middling game.

The biggest mark against the game is when it tries to be clever. It introduces an original mechanic. Please do not do this, Flying Tiger Entertainment. Data East are waiting for you to make a terrible eShop port of Atomic Runner Chelnov. Go talk to them.

There's a few bosses where Flying Tiger plays their ace card. You have to shift your cover position by shooting a big on-screen arrow while ducking. They'll appear just out of frame, and Richard will need to run through the hail of gunfire to position himself behind a barrier, two feet to the right. It's crap, disjointed, and introduces a bunch of enemies to fire at whatever's in front of them, with little regard over whether there's a target there or not. There's a big tank boss thing, and you have to shoot canisters on either side of it and one on its back. It'll shift depending on which of the five positions you're sitting behind. You have to fake it out by quickly shifting from the rightmost position to the leftmost to reveal its weakpoints. The armour piercing bullets and anti-aircraft cannon doing nothing to Richard as he runs from pillar to pillar. The tank's design is pretty bad, too, and I had to look up a Let's Play to discover it had a weakpoint on its back.

Project Titan isn't terrible, but it isn't Time Crisis either. The game feels thoroughly inauthentic. It's a fangame, stripping voice clips and sound effects from the original, and slotting them within a campaign that doesn't match its tone. You also have to play the whole thing again on Normal Mode if you want to get the last level, and that kind of thing can fuck right off. There's no good reason to play this over Time Crisis 1, 2 or 3 (though you can rightfully call it a day before dipping into 4 or Crisis Zone). I make no apologies for my veneration of Time Crisis 1, but I've attempted to put that to the side as I've presented this game to you as objectively as I can. Privately, I've been calling it Project Shitean.

A thinking man's game.

When you've got a rubber butt, what happens when you rub one out too much? You would now have an empty metal butt. How else would you maneuver through the cavernous Bubsy 2-adjacent level design without a rubber?! You've got your wooden stiffy jump that flops at the most inopportune times, and you're over here trying to draw naked mermaids while getting blasted by nu metal pirates and vacuum cleaners who won't even give you the common courtesy of a reach around. Here's a tip, be quick on the draw, or eat lead as they say. Get my point?

You attempt to rub another one out, but you constantly miss your mark because what are hit boxes but a suggestion? I'll pen you one right now, or better yet a finger because fuck pens, we pencils in this bizzatch. No more monkey business from you, or it'll be a walk of the plank straight into the giant toilet. With a zillion units sold, the entire multiverse has accepted massive amounts of wood into their homes, and the brick wall industry has collapsed unto itself. The last winning effort to preserve the rain forests was one love tap from a new beloved mascot, move over Mario Andretti or whatever that jabroni's name is, because the stiff competition has found itself on top. A new pencil-necked dude with attitude has replaced the hedgedork as the head of Sega, replacing the current timeline as Nintendo is now the one who missed the mark and has found themselves rubbed out for good.

Say it! SEGAAAA!!!!!

Your favorite president is Woodrow Wilson.