Bart vs. The Space Mutants fucking sucks. It's really a shame because by all means it shouldn't.

The presentation starts off really strong, as a puzzle platformer with a particularly surprising amount of detail and references to the show somewhat unheard of in many licensed games of the time. It's a little tedious, but there's a certain level of charm to it at first.

On the other hand though, the game's worst issues reveal themselves simultaneously, almost immediately after starting the game actually: the controls and the difficulty. The controls are so bizarre to me - namely that run and jump mapped to the same button, making movement incredibly awkward and making both individual actions somewhat of a chore. Running jumps are completely impossible as a result, and you'll never really get one no matter how hard you try. Instead, you have to do higher jumps by...pressing A and B simultaneously. You have to work with this while narrowly dodging various (like two or three total) kinds of much smaller but much faster enemies. Also, two hits per life and no continues. Awful.

So in turn the game becomes almost immediately really hard to enjoy, but there's at least still a decent amount of creativity at first, or at least just..something to appreciate at all really. This goes away as early as level 2, where the game decides to drop most of the ideas it had previously set up and just turns into a shitty platformer where you occasionally collect items that require no thinking or problem solving at all. There's almost nothing to interact with from that point onwards, all there is left is to trudge through until you inevitably throw in the towel or reach the power plant. God help you if you reach the power plant. That last level took me over 30 minutes even with savestates.

You know what else? There's only really two songs during gameplay, a dinky rendition of the theme song and some other shit that ultimately just blends in with the former during actual gameplay. It starts to grate on you really fast and just gets worse and worse from there. Combined with the gameplay and the drab colors of the later stages? It's maddening. Demotivating. Depressing.

What's that? There's boss music too? Not really. Two of them are just snippets taken from the fucking theme song again. The third is just the death sound played on a loop. They might as well not be there, but I'm glad they are because they're so amusingly shitty that they were essentially the only form of entertainment I found in this for two thirds of the runtime. That and Bart's weird miserable bird creature looking ass head.

I tried this in June 2021 or so and couldn't power all the way through it, and after finally doing so I just feel hollow and wish I hadn't bothered. It's better than Bart's Nightmare, but the time in elementary school where I just threw up all over the fucking grass in front of other kids was also better than Bart's Nightmare. Maybe this game would be more captivating if it wasn't so obviously rushed out the door. Maybe it'd be tolerable if the difficulty was toned down. Hard to say with what's basically nothing more than hypotheticals.

God this game fucking pisses me off. I wish it was good. I really do.

This was just okay, but videos and such talking about it led me to expect something better. The first 15 minutes are pretty damn fun, but it's kind of just the same thing for the whole runtime. It gets absurdly hard and unfair very quickly too, with enemies frequently swarming you in a way that only provides nearly frame perfect escapes.

The controls are a bit weird, probably worked better on the arcade version, but rather than aiming with the d-pad you have each button correspond to a direction to shoot in, with diagonals working by pressing two at the same time. It's kind of wonky using a keyboard, but I don't think it seems much better with a controller (at least not the diagonals). Not that I'll play it again to find out. It may be actually pretty close to a decent game, but man it is really exhausting.

Meant to replay Axelay tonight alongside D-Force, but l slept a lot and then started thinking about this game instead, which also needed a replay. Competing with the other 1991 shmups on SNES, it just might win. Gradius III is the only other one coming close from what I remember (though I guess technically that SNES port is a 1990 game, but it was still competing in the launch window in all regions whenever said time arrived).

This was kind of a weird introduction to the Darius series for me years ago, but a welcome one nonetheless. It's not on par with Darius Gaiden nor the Genesis port of Darius II, but it still plays very nicely and is even a bit more generous, notably allowing you to keep all your powerups upon dying. This would allow for an easier 1cc in theory, but the game is still quite tough towards the end so I wouldn't hold my breath.

I've really grown to appreciate how pretty this game looks as well. Darius in general has a very unique aesthetic compared to its contemporaries in the shmup genre, and Twin is perhaps the first to lean this far into it. I especially love the ocean backgrounds in levels A and H. On the other hand, though, it does make me wish the alternate routes were more varied. Twin dials back the different paths a bit in comparison to Darius II, only featuring one final level for example. I can't say for sure, but limitations at the time would be my guess. In the console's debut everyone was pretty much still finding their footing - Final Fight's port is heavily compromised, Gradius III is plagued by slowdown, and D-Force is shrouded in pure ineptitude and awful performance even on an 8 megabit cartridge.

Whatever the case, even without as many ways to replay it as Darius II or Gaiden, Darius Twin is thoroughly solid and seemingly very impressive for the console's infancy. I don't think I noticed any slowdown while playing, the big bad slowdown plaguing the SNES shmup library for decades to come, etc. If it's even there in this game, it's too subtle to really affect gameplay, much unlike peers at the time such as Super R-Type, Gradius III & D-Force. It's nothing too crazy for the Darius series' later standards, but for its release date and circumstances I've learned to appreciate it quite a bit more than I previously had. Certainly a much stronger effort than Darius Force, at a minimum.

Ronald Reagan's dogshit self and presidency paved the way for a lot of totally absurd anti-drug propaganda in the 80s, this being one of the most infamous examples as far as I know. In this game, you kill every drug user you see! Shoot them! Blow them up! Run them over!

Those are pretty goddamn skewed priorities, no? You pose a much greater threat to civilian life than any of these people combined, except maybe Mr. Big, the owner of the "K.R.A.K." drug trafficking organization, and he's only on the same level because he is also an evil giant moving head who shoots fire and...tongues. What are you accomplishing by not just killing him first, but instead painting the whole town red because you saw some junkies?

Who is this even aimed for? It's not aimed for children, what with the violence and gore, or perhaps the various porno stores and theaters in the background of stage 4. Were teenagers or young adults supposed to think this was cool? Maybe they were, honestly. It seems like back then it was really easy to win people over with anything that had blood in it. It seems like it worked, too, because most criticism on release appears to revolve around the violence rather than just, how completely questionable it is.

I ditched at the final boss. He absolutely tears through your health since you don't seem to have invincibility frames. Every time you use a credit at him, the battle starts from the beginning for some damn reason, which doesn't happen in earlier levels or any other fucking arcade game. I looked up the ending and it says "You have completed your narc training mission. Contact your local DEA recruiter." No sir, I don't think I will do that.

Another cinematic platformer in the vein of Flashback and Prince of Persia, this time starring a COOL DUDE and his COOL GUN!! For a while it's actually quite nice, but it's far too long in the tooth for what it is and doesn't have enough changes in scenery. Ultimately becomes a slog in the back half, though still pretty alright. The only thing I outright dislike is the gunplay mechanics, they're similar to the swordfighting in Prince of Persia in that they're both a huge pain in the ass and could benefit a ton from just being simpler. I think that's a good way to sum up Blackthorne, really - its full potential could've been realized if it was shorter and simpler. I really do like most of what's on display here, but it was starting to feel like it would go on forever.

It seems that much like The Terminator on SNES, Terminator 2 on SNES is also lumped in with a different game on IGDB. This review is for the Bits Studios game, whereas the SNES port of the arcade version was released as T2: The Arcade Game.

This is probably one of the worst to ever do it. One of those games so half-assed and obscenely unfun that it makes you wonder how it got released in the state it's in, but unfortunately as we've previously learned from Bits Studios' other titles such as Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and GunForce, this is kind of just a thing they had a knack for.

Gameplay alternates between sidescrolling kinda-sorta-run-and-gun levels and driving segments in between. The driving in particular is just hateful, even with a grasp of how it works (which I only gained about a minute before I was ready to ditch the game entirely) it is still dreadfully unresponsive and unintuitive. Sometimes the directions provided aren't even helpful, so I had to follow a video verbatim each time a driving segment began, constantly tabbing in and out of the game. Sidescrolling sections really don't fare much better, with the T-800's leisurely pace and near inability to jump combined with unending swarms of enemies and a couple of escort missions.

Up until the final level, there are merely two indistinguishable songs during the whole game. I can't even begin to understand this. Maybe you'd expect a gripe of the same sort with a basic puzzle game, but an action game with 8 stages? Did they run out of time? Were they too lazy to compose more songs?

Despite joking around about it in the previous review, I figured from the start that this would be a weaker effort than Gray Matter's Terminator game on the console. I did not figure it would be this much weaker. Very plausibly in the bottom 5 of all games I've completed, though I've never taken the time to rank them like that. Despite what my profile and rating curve on here might indicate, I do in fact prefer to ruminate more on things that are cool and things that are good.

One of the highlights of the NES library undoubtedly but it still has a fair share of major issues that bring it down. One is the lack of passwords and saves, which isn't too uncommon for the time at all but seeing as this is pretty long for an NES title it could really use some.

The other, much bigger issue is the fucking wall climbing mechanics introduced after Area 6. They are so fucking bad. A lot of people will tell you this but I can not stress how much more miserable the game becomes with them. You'll always cling to the sides of platforms when you just want to fall from one and even though there's only one new area after this is obtained I probably could count more than 50 times it tripped me up. It's such a shame too, because it's so late in the game and leading up to that point it controls and plays wonderfully. I wish you could just turn wall climbing on and off or something on the pause menu, only having it turned on when absolutely necessary. It's probably one of the most absurd endgame blunders I can think of, at least gameplay-wise. Crusader of Centy still has this beat if we count plot-related ones.

Despite the wall climbing being from hell, I would still recommend this. Maybe I wouldn't recommend beating it, but for that first half especially it's a lot of fun. I just wish it could've sustained that enjoyability longer than it does, and I'd definitely have it at an 8 or so if that was the case.

I used to have some trouble differentiating this and Ghouls n' Ghosts because last year I played them about two months apart, so this time around I decided on playing them back to back.

What I took away from it this time is that Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is a lot harder, and a lot slower. Not just due to SNES slowdown, the levels are generally just a lot slower paced, especially with the autoscrollers. It's easily noticeable even without playing the two games; if you look around for speedruns you'll notice Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is twice as long. I personally think the shorter, snappier levels of GnG fit the playstyle of the series a lot better.

Weapons also aren't too great this time around. GnG has a more well-rounded selection that will occasionally have better weapons for better situations, but in Super it's best to just stick to the knife whenever you can. Even with the upgraded armor and the upgraded weapons that come with it, the knife is far more useful than the others. A lot like Goblins in that regard except this game doesn't suck ass lmao.

The fucking princess' three sizes are listed during the curtain call before the credits for some reason. I don't know what that was all about but me and the friends I was calling were joking around about it when we eventually discovered it's the same measurements that Chun Li has. Wacky stuff.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts are both very solid, but I think the former sets a bar that Super doesn't quite reach when you compare the two. I'd probably recommend both, but if you wanted just one I'd probably never tell you to play Super first.

Did the two routes I skipped over on my first playthrough this time. I don't think I'm as partial to these two (Ultimate Being and Alien Heart) as the others, but it's not really important. What is important is just how much content and replayability there is here. More surprising is the amount of grotesque detail in all the final bosses, the unique movement and code for every individual boss, all that kind of stuff. I would say I don't know how this was pulled off in 1994, but if you look around a bit there is an absurd amount of cracked games from that year, and really the 93-95 period as a whole.

Gunstar Heroes is still my preferred of the two, but a big thing I like more here is the convenience of switching between free and fixed shots on a dime, whereas in Gunstar Heroes you have to choose between them at the start and stick with that. The soundtracks are about on par with each other, and Gunstar wins in most other aspects for me. Both 10s for sure though, and I'm not sure how I didn't realize it for my first playthrough of either of them.

I talked about it the first time, but this is actually another victim of difficulty being ramped up in the US version. I'm not actually sure if there's translated versions of the JP rom, but there are patches to add its health bar and unlimited continues into the US version. I would definitely recommend that first.

Fuck, man. I love run n' guns. I oughta try Metal Slug soon, everybody seems to love that one.

Was contemplating upon giving this one an 8 but the last leg really sucked me dry. Spent about 25 minutes total on the final boss, with savestates, and that's not mentioning the boss rush beforehand. Hell, even regular enemies start biting chunks of your health bar sometimes in those last two or three stages.

That being said, it's the only real issue I had here. Alcahest is generally quite solid in about every aspect, not necessarily an essential but I would definitely suggest it as a shorter action RPG, being hardly even structured as one and clocking in at only about 4 hours from my experience. The soundtrack from Jun Ishikawa is particularly notable, bringing a sense of familiarity and comfort with its close sound and proximity to his work on the subsequent Kirby games on the SNES. Very good stuff.

I'd recommend this for sure, especially into you're into games like the Zelda series or Soul Blazer, but be wary of the home stretch. It could definitely stand to be at least a little more forgiving, and probably will unfortunately turn out as my core memory of the game.

Here's what Spider-Man would look like running on a Game Boy Color!
Now we wish we had a handheld version of Spider-Man...

"I was the lead programmer on this game. Man, those fucking birds. I am very sorry."
-Matthew Conte

Man, I don't know. Over-designed, maybe? Too complex? For a shmup, at least? I don't know. I felt really out of my element the whole time, not only due to the brutal difficulty but also juggling around things like money management and a level system and a bunch of stuff that doesn't seem so necessary. Is that there in the arcade version? I'm not sure. I didn't like this version much, and I'm not too inclined to check out the others. Kind of disappointing because I did go in with high expectations. Rarely do I see console shmups from this era with averages above 3.5.