The friends of Ringo Ishikawa was a game that took me back to my teenage years, viewed through the sobering & cynical lens of hindsight. The titular Ringo & his friends are a bunch of classic Japanese delinquents, with seemingly no initial higher ambitions beyond their schoolyard gang warfare, entering their final year as students with graduation on the horizon. Despite being a gaggle of petty thugs who smoke cigarettes & have seemingly little interest in their own futures, it's shown as the plot goes on that there's more to each of these delinquents than let's on. Your violent, dumb-as-rocks lackey Goro is a surprisingly talented thespian. Your number one brawler Ken has the talent necessary for a shot at a boxing career in college. Even Ringo himself is a shockingly erudite scholar with an interest in literature, a once-promising career in karate, and is a surprisingly idealistic, loyal, man of virtue. The one thing holding them back is their gang lifestyle & ideas, something that resonated with me as someone who saw this same situation play out dozens of times in my youth.

My own high school wasn't great looking back on it. Violence & abuse were common occurrences, drug use & sex in the hallways was an unspoken fact of life, and basically everyone was a minority of some kind from a low-income background. Lots of people I knew came from broken homes, or were working part-time to put food on the table, or were otherwise struggling with something no kid should've been dealing with at that age, the kind of things that can make studying for your history exam seem like small potatoes. It's a structural issue decades in the making that leads to people getting trapped in places like these, and unfortunately not everyone is able to escape it. Schoolyard fights that escalated into shootings. Football players who graduate with bright prospects only to then get arrested for murder. Kids akin to Ringo's gang members like Masaru or Goro, who have zero sights beyond the now & fully believe they'll be set for a life of petty crime after graduation. The short-sighted violent mindsets people box themselves into that end up spelling their own ends because they can't escape the circumstances that put them there.

I vividly remember hanging out in the parking lot after school one day, and I saw a kid reading a book on the hood of his car. His friends came up to him and immediately dogged on him for this and the supposed weakness such a hobby would project on your image, and he sheepishly put it away in his bag before he left with his friends. It's a small event in hindsight, but it was called back to my mind crystal clear during a scene where Ringo's friends rip into their fellow member Goro for his new vested interest in acting.

Ringo, for all his virtues, for all the books you can make him read, for all the training he can undergo, for all the studying & knowledge you can try to impart on him, still fully believes that his gang of schoolyard bullies is going to last forever, despite it being made rapidly apparent that everyone is starting to move on and find their own callings. Ringo still gets into casual street fights & latches onto his childish notions of schoolyard ethics, of "official challenges" and "rules," even as things spiral out of anyone's control & everyone starts to get in too deep. Much like some of my peers that I saw in my youth, he's a bright soul with potential and promise that is being squandered by his own adherence to violence and unhealthy group mentalities & expectations, and the simple fact is that as the days go by, everyone around him is starting to realize that they need to grow up and move past it all.

Everyone except him.

So uhh…there was this one time in my history class, and I was sat pretty much in the middle whilst this other kid was sat at the very front. Now this kid had a laptop because his handwriting was awful and the teachers had agreed to give him a laptop so he could write better. Now this kid loved to use the laptop in history, and any chance he got you would bet that he would be doing something that he shouldn’t be on it. It wasn’t anything horrid or crude, it was just what any normal young kid with a laptop would do: either play games, watch YouTube videos or just mess around on Microsoft paint. But this one lesson, we were learning about history in dissection. Personally anything to do with surgery always makes me feel sick and I tried to find any sort of way to distract myself from the lesson this one time. Thankfully the kid who was in front of me with his laptop was playing a game: cookie clicker. The kid slowly worked himself up, he got more and more auto clickers, he increased his building levels and buildings. The more and more he played the more I got mesmerised and eventually I was probably more glued to his screen than he was. Eventually the kid clicked on that I was watching him play the game, and slowly but surely he started flexing his ability. He got even more factory’s, even more auto clickers, and got achievement after achievement. Eventually after it all, he had reached the end. The game asked him if he wanted to ascend and just when he was about to click yes…the lesson had ended. We both got up, looked at each other, and burst out laughing. I’m sure to anyone looking we looked like madmen, but in the end it was probably the funniest thing I’d ever slightly been apart of.

Good time waster, chill music, funny ideas, grannies

During the Dreamcast's short but oh-so-sweet time in the spotlight, no developer more distinctly encapsulated the brands ethos and aesthetics quite like Sonic Team. Although criminally cut short due to the consoles lacklustre sales, the catalogue of varied and creative titles they put out during this time were overflowing with that special Sega sauce; colourful, fun, pick up and play classics like Sonic Adventure and Chu Chu Rocket managed to instill themselves in the hearts and minds of gamers for decades to come.

However, their most groundbreaking game by far would come at the tail end of the consoles short life, in the form of the seminal Phantasy Star Online- an insanely ambitious experiment that redefined the joy and wonder of co-operative play by introducing console gamers to the world of online play- and it would do so with that signature Sonic Team style.

From the title screen alone you knew you were in for something truly special- lulled in by its hypnotising, ethereal sci-fi intro theme, inviting you to imagine the endless possibilities that lay ahead at the frontier of this new age of gaming...

As a young polaroidplayboy, I was utterly mesmerized by Phantasy Star. I can't begin to count the sleepless nights I spent teaming up with strangers (who quickly became friends) to explore this beautiful, strange, uncharted new world- helping each other learn the ropes, battling ever increasingly difficult monsters, trading the rare and wonderful weapons and loot, feeding our Mags (which was almost a game unto itself), and simply shooting the shit back at home base after barely making it through a tough as nails boss fight. Gamers today might take these simple pleasures for granted, but at the time, there was nothing even remotely comparable, and it opened my eyes to a whole new realm of possibilities in gaming.

With its stunning and vibrant cyberpunk aesthetic, otherworldly ambient techno soundtrack, and irresistibly addictive gameplay loop, Phantasy Star Online pioneered (hehe) a new genre and heralded a new era in technology. And as far as I'm concerned, no game has managed to quite recapture that same co-operative magic since- the closest contender being of course Monster Hunter, which owes much of its DNA to PSO as even its developers readily admit.

One of my most nostalgic gaming memories by far, and unquestionably one of my all time favourite games ever.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to cook some bacon and eggs with this new weapon I just found.

I really adore the very specific mood that Dark Cloud 2 and a ton of games of this era had: a sort of illustrative, vaguely French, soothing carnivalesque pastoral steampunk anime fantasy vibe... I know that is a LOT of descriptors but it was such a fucking thing I swear!!! Nights / Klonoa 2 / Professor Layton / Final Fantasy IX / Steambot Chronicles / Radiata Stories / Tail Concerto... There is some aesthetic affinity between all of these that feels really meaningful and worthy of a subgenre descriptor by someone more savvy and cogent about the origins of this style than my dumb ass!!!!! You know the vibe: Everything looks ADORABLE but kind of janky/haphazard at the same time and there are accordions and big loaves of bread in random peoples houses near gleaming amber hay fields where a bunch of purple hot air balloons are floating and your messenger-capped protagonist fights with some bulky tool or with something silly like a weaponized jack in the box and there are simultaneously cartoony medieval knights and monacled train conductors running around everywhere and there's definitely a big circus happening somewhere at some point! It's such a lovely storybook way to render a world and serves this wonderful game so well. Intensely overlong if you want to engage with even 30% of its side content (I think my childhood playthrough took me like 160 hours) but in a sweet and welcoming way that never feels burdensome. Maybe a little bit too saccharine to return to something this time-intensive as an adult, but this has good vibes and good fun that I remember fondly.

This review is to tell you all, my friends, that there have been some pretty large breakthroughs within the past few months to create a translated, parsable version of this game for non-Japanese players.

https://youtu.be/BA0qoAE7ciM

A Discord community and some developers put together an app called AHKmon that takes the Japanese dialogue of the game, runs it through a machine translation tool called DeepL (free separate download required) that is miles ahead of google translate in making sentences make sense, and translates the game's text content live on a small separate textbox.

The interesting thing, however, is that in addition to the machine translated tool, the developers are updating a database of all the text in the game, which the AKHmon tool runs the text through first before machine-translating, to see if a pre-existing translation already exists. In the database, these lines are currently just machine translations, but they are looking for volunteers to hand-edit them to create a better localization for the dialogue.

What this means, is that, as far as I know, this is the first attempted synthesis of fan localization and machine translation pipeline software. Quite newsworthy indeed! When you think about it, that is really the best way to fan-translate an MMO like this, which has text that's premade and new text that's generated all the time online.

Keep in mind this is super new, so it still has flaws and bugs, but I have high hopes for this project!

If you want to join the discussion, find the devs, or talk about stuff, the discord link is here:
https://discord.gg/QTuFH9X

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As for the game itself, I'm only early in, but this game is crazy interesting. What MMO asks you to create not only your own character, but to then choose a sibling, younger or older, male or female, and then character create them too at the same time?
What MMO bakes that relationship into the narrative and ties familial themes so hard into its world and gameplay?
What MMO then asks you to reincarnate later, to choose a new character race, and then go through a different character creator when you're already somewhat into the game?

The lengthy offline portion of the game at the start itself feels exactly like a mainline DQ game, with interesting characters, a fantastically designed town, standing up to even the best in the series, great writing, constant subversions of what you think is gonna happen, and a weird narrative focus on alchemy, making it stand out from what I typically imagine for the series.

I can't wait to play more!

8-bit games often feel strangely lonely and alienating to me. Do you feel like this? I can't really put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe it's because so many of them are such well-trodden ground by now, that it feels like everyone else has been and gone, leaving me alone, crawling amongst the wreckage the words of others have left behind.

Few games tap into that feeling more than the much-maligned Final Fantasy II. There's really no way to say this without sounding hyperbolic/unhinged/pretentious, but it's a game that I am absolutely convinced has a true Soul, one that exists beyond the cartridge, and in the heart and imagination. In the same way that many people develop emotional attachments to their cars and end up attaching human characteristics to their errors and singularities, evolving them into quirks and endearing character flaws, Final Fantasy II's straining ambition gives it an utterly human character to me, a mess of quirks and ideas and wholly distinctive character traits that are entirely its own. Even when the game has serious issues that can impact my enjoyment - namely, the dungeon designs, the one part of the game I find largely indefensible - I find myself endeared to it completely. "Oh, you, FF2!"

There is no other game quite like Final Fantasy II, and there probably never will be again, simply because we now have so much ingrained knowledge of how systems like these are supposed to work, how stories like this are supposed to be told. The lessons learned from games like Final Fantasy II have taken root in the future, but in so doing, the games themselves have been left to languish in retrospect's austere halls.

If I had to sum up the soul of this game, I'd say that it's character can be drawn out through one of my favorite anecdotes in video game history (https://twitter.com/woodaba2/status/1331685180285874176?s=20), the story of how Ultima, the spell sought after by the heroes that Minwu, the most stalwart and useful of the guest party members, gives his life to unseal, only to find it ultimately useless. Although "fixed" in subsequent releases, the emotions this bug inspires live on in the "correct" implementation of Ultima, that being it growing in power the more spells you have mastered, and it takes quite some mastery to push it beyond the bounds of Flare. Even if you do unleash it's full power, that power comes from the user, not the spell: in the hands of a party member without spells, Ultima is powerless.

Unintentional though it may have been, this moment is core to the heart of Final Fantasy II and why it remains incredibly impactful to this day. Common storytelling logic - and, indeed, the original intention of the script - holds that Minwu's death would allow the heroes to find the weapon they need to overthrow the evil Emperor once and for all, but the programming of Final Fantasy II, astonishingly present thanks to the myriad bugs and systemic quirks the game is infamous for, rebels against this idea. "No," it says. "Ultima is but the loudest cry of a far bygone age, echoing almost silently into the future. Minwu died for nothing."

When Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII, the party is struck by the suddenness of it, but eventually come to understand that she died casting a spell that may save the planet. They can find meaning in what she died doing, even as they mourn the death itself. But in Final Fantasy II, people die and often, their deaths are senseless and without meaning. Perhaps characters like Gordon, who dies from his wounds in his bed, marking your first real mission for the Rebel Army a failure, may have inspired tragic cutscenes in a SNES or PS1 RPG (though I should stress that this game does have the integral addition of choreographed cutscenes punctuating critical moments, but I'll let New Frame Plus discuss it better in their excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xapVOKEMk6A), but here, a death like this brings with it only the hole they leave in your party, a wound on the very battle screen that no one can entirely replace.

Not to say that characters are entirely mechanical, like they are in the original, but certainly the game leverages the mechanical boosts the guest characters offer you to make you truly feel their absence. Despite his sparse dialogue, Minwu, the ass-kicking white mage sporting one of early FF's best designs is beloved by fans because he is a crucial asset in battle, and his loss is deeply felt by a party that has no doubt by this stage come to depend on him. Your permanent party members, the vectors through which you'll explore the game's revolutionary levelling system - now thoroughly jacked by The Elder Scrolls, becoming the foundation for the most popular RPG in the world - wherein your characters grow organically through play from orphans who are destroyed in the first battle of the game to distinct archetypes of your own choosing. In my last playthrough, Firion became a master of bows and magics, while Maria took up Leon's fallen sword and became a dual-wielding powerhouse. You can become incredibly powerful in your chosen niches quite quickly in the remakes of this game...not that it will help you against the might of Palamecia.

Victories against the Empire are hard-won, difficult to come by, and often, negligible or even fruitless. Even slaying the Emperor in his palace only allows him to rise again, more powerful than ever before, as the Emperor of Hell itself. By the time you begin the final assault on Pandaemonium, there's a very real sense that there's not much of the world left to save, so devastated has it been by the conflict, leaving you wandering alone in the wreckage of the world listening to the crucially melancholy overworld theme (https://youtu.be/SaCLoLBdxTU). A later Squaresoft title on the PS1 leaves its world in a similar state going into the final dungeon, but it never hit me there quite like it does here because that game is filled with so much exposition and character moments that there's so much else to think about and consider. Final Fantasy II drowns you in the sensory silence of it's empty world, and it is deafening.

But still, you press on.

For those you have lost. For those you can yet save.

Because the deaths of Minwu and the others, they can't have been for nothing.

You can't let them be for nothing.

Most people don't get out of this game what I do. Heck, even I often don't get out of this game what I do in my moments of highest appreciation for it, as it exists in experiential aggregate, forgetting the miserable dungeons and the way the game is almost completely broken in it's original form. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is a special game, that does very special things. You may argue that those things are unintentional, sure, but does that matter? Games like Metroid II: The Return of Samus have come to be seen in bold and incisive ways that grow beyond their original intentions, so allow me to plant my flag and say that Final Fantasy II deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated much the same, as a defiant Wild Rose, rather than be left to wither and dry up on a sad, lonely outpost on the road to a future that left it behind.

My number one most overrated game of all time....is Tetris.

Tetris theme plays for two seconds
Ok, seriously people? You are seriously going to call THIS GAME, one of the greatest games of all time?! Alright alright alright...you're telling me you'd rather play TETRIS....then Metal Gear Solid 3? You would rather play....TETRIS....then Skyrim?! You would rather play....TETRIS....then Team Fortress 2 (do you see where I'm going with this)?!

I see this game on DOZENS of "Best Games Ever" lists and it just doesn't deserve it! And before you go all ape on me I am fully aware of the history behind Tetris and how much it impacted the NES's sales, but that's more of it being influential rather then a good game! When was the last time you actively sought out playing TETRIS?

When was the last time you thought "Hmm...I don't think I wanna play Battlefield 3, I think I wanna play some Tetris." I bet it was you were waiting in line for something and had nothing else to do. I'm The Fiery Joker and I'll conceit that Tetris is a fun and challenging game.....but it does not deserve to stand amongst the greatest games of all time!

"A good tree has victims".
Stare close enough at the screen and you start to see the human hands appreciatively building every one of Beeswing's vignettes. I was thoroughly not expecting a game to understand, to so deftly and honestly articulate grief, nostalgia and mending. Beeswing is just honest, It’s not trying to impress anyone or manipulate them into feeling something, it simply wishes to exist - just as its inhabitants live quietly near and far from their loved ones, opening up to anyone who'll listen. Beeswing isn’t sad, but it isn’t happy either. It recounts the lives of (I assume) people the developer knew growing up with a plain biographical melancholy that is difficult to properly explain. I’m so used to media recounting horrible events, making me depressed for the sake of a narrative that’s supposed to mean something. But Beeswing never tried to bring me down, in fact it’s so clean in its indifference to how the player feels that it would seem cold if not for how tangible and raw the things it says and the way it shows you them are. A recurring motif in this game in itself is this kind of honesty, not necessarily to "make the most" of our limited time on this earth, but to live true - to yourselves and others, as it's the greatest way to reciprocate love.