Top down shooter that adds a lot of content to the arcade version. Choose from the characters Snake or Eagle and fight your way through four levels to rescue the president, collecting grenades, flamethrowers, shotguns, and bazookas to use as main or secondary weapons on the way. Your knife is used at close range and for the boss fight and run with the president to your helicopter which is where the arcade version ends, in this version that is half the game. You are told that the helicopter is full with the president and prisoners you saved so your character stays behind and is captured. You then take control of the other playable character with the goal of saving the other character and remaining prisoners with new stage, bosses, and a funny ending where both character decide to take a vacation together and ignore their boss as he attempts to give them a mission to save the president again. Decent visuals, good music.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1665959625651552256

Well written world, charming art, good mechanics, and a story whose end you influence over time through both small personal and large social decisions.

Roadwarden is a text based RPG that has your character arriving in a northern peninsula to take on the role as the areas new Roadwarden and for more personal and secret tasks. The area you arrive in is broken up between a few different settlements of various prosperity surrounded by dangerous forests, bandits, creatures, and the reanimated dead from the bodies that were not burned after death. It is a Roadwarden's job to protect travelers, keep communication active between nearby towns, maintain paths and roads important to travel, and to fight or scare off monsters that endangers people. Upon arriving at a small outpost that is the areas closest point back to the city and civilization you come from you meet the only two surviving guards from a former party of eight, you learn that no one knows what happened to the last Roadwarden and asking about them both leads you to find that not to many people were fond of them and some are clearly not telling you all that they know.

Your choices in the coming conversations put you into a class of either a fighter who is better at combat and whose physical abilities, training, and knowledge of some enemies can allow you to activate an innate power in certain events that will give you a better option or to point out which existing options would be poor choices. A magic user that has a certain amount of spellpower to spend each day to help them through events. Or a Scholar that can read and decipher symbols, craft items to better survive or save time traversing the roads and forest, craft weapons, and brew potions. You can also choose the kind of religion that your character follows that can give you choices or effect your knowledge in certain situations and choose a personal goal for yourself like becoming rich, helping people, finding a place to live, escaping your past, etc. Your hidden job that you are shortly told is that you were paid by the merchants guild in the city to prepare that area for them to start traveling through, trading, and establishing outposts in the region. To do that you are expected to gain the trusts of town leaders and see that they are open to agreements with the merchants, help them in ways that will strength them that can be used by the merchants, and make sure there is nothing going on that would require them to send in soldiers or church inquisitors to war against the villages or to deal with problems you let get out of control. You are given 40 days, on the normal difficulty mode, to attempt to complete as much of your employer's goals, your own personal goal, and to do as much as you can to try to get the best ending for as many people as you can if that's what you desire.

Apar from the well written descriptions, characters, and encounters, some of your choices that would just be filler in most game can come back as having an influence on the world when what you tell people, maybe unless you chose an option with (lie) as part of the text, does show itself to be true either during the course of the game or in the ending scenes of the game when you go back to the city. Choices of how you act in dreams or what your character things of themselves, their future, and their current role can lead to multiple endings for your character depending on what your personal goal was and if you fulfilled it or not. How you solve problems, or if you discover them at all, will also influence the endings for the character you meet and the future of the towns in the coming years depending on if you have gained their trust, how their culture or leaders get along with merchants, if you left them with a dangerous leader, if you helped to set certain towns up with ways to better deal with the merchants, etc.

Your ways of interacting with people or encounters go beyond just the choices you make. People will respond better or worse based on the choice of greeting you give them (friendly, playful, stoic, intimidating, or insecure) and based on the condition of your outfit, how clean or dirty you are, and if you are wounded. Having a more favorable response can help people to trust you faster or allow you a better chance if you attempt to haggle for a jobs pay. Your choice of class, your vitality level, nourishment level, and the status of your armor will also effect how well you do in combat.

Good art style and music. Nice simple interface. You have a helpful journal that details your quests and some of what you have discovered about different subjects you are investigating, a section for details on people, details on towns, and a bestiary that describes different monsters and their potential weaknesses. A forgiving and not constantly oppressive feeling time limit, no stupid time progression from saying a few words or entering and exiting a building you accidentally clicked on.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1665575745253416962

Fifth in the Parodius series. Eight playable characters. Seven playable main stages in a game with six of them now having their own side objective that can get you a complete or incomplete mission, different ending picture, and can lead to an alternate stage 3 and 4 giving nine different stage options as well as a minor boss rush in between them with some old enemies. Stages are more active and colorful with a lot going on in the backgrounds. The bell powerups now helpfully tell you what each color will get you, which is useful since they can help with objectives. Good though I thought that two of the stages were terrible gameplay wise and one of those was fairly dull from a visual or gag perspective as well.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1664902105583190020