A couple of years ago, they announced a rerelease of Hebereke/Ufouria and I played the original on an emulator to prepare for the official release and to promote it saying it would come out soon. Turns out it took way longer than expected. It’s weird as the Gimmick one came out a long while ago and we also got Trip World DX. It then just randomly got announced right as Hebereke 2 was going to release. What made this rerelease interesting was we were even getting the Japanese version and not the PAL version that was shown years ago. Now that it’s finally out, should you get this Enjoy Edition? It’s hard to say really.

Let’s get this out of the way now, this is a pretty similar release to the one Gimmick got so any opinions you had on that rerelease will probably be true here. Not much was added outside of the usual borders, scans of the boxes and cartridges and manuals, achievements, and a speedrun mode that you can post to the leaderboards. There’s no challenges, no hard achievements to earn, no interviews, no scans of just the artwork, not even a sound test. I think the reason it lacks a sound test is because you can pay additional money for the OST to listen to on Steam which is kind of stupid if you ask me. I’m not really sure about input lag or the sorts as I’m not one to notice that stuff, I heard Gimmick had some little issues with that so it might be the same here? Though this is a much easier and more relaxed game, you’ll never really cry foul for any input lag shenanigans.

Actually I guess there is one important feature that is the Special Snaps. You see, the original has always been Japan only, you needed a fan translation to ever read the dialogue in English. This release sort of adds English support but it’s kind of weird. Once you see a dialogue box, the game will let you view it there and translate the scene in English. You can even compare it to the PAL version called Ufouria the Saga. While these are cool, it might hurt the experience for some as you have to go to the menu and then look at the Special Snap to even read what the dialogue said. The translation can feel a bit iffy at times but it's not unreadable. There’s also a before and after scene that’s incorrectly placed for the Ufouria images. How this got past testing is beyond me and hopefully a patch can fix it. They also hilariously made an error where pressing the A button does “ChengeTitle” according to the bottom of the screen. Speaking of Ufouria, I wanna talk about something related to it.

Look, I don’t like Ufouria at all. I always hated the replacement sprites, especially Bop Louie. The dialogue has also lost a lot of the charm it once had and it’s why I always recommend the Japanese original. That said, I can understand why someone would prefer Ufouria even if I don't agree. Which is why I find it very disappointing that you just can’t play it here at all. It makes no sense to not have it here as it has scans, the comparisons in Special Snaps, and even a border. It’s even more of a shame as every release of Ufouria that was on Virtual Console in the past has been delisted meaning there’s still no easy way to play it outside of emulation. I don’t get why there’s no toggle to play that version. This makes me even more confused why they even bothered localizing the sequel under the PAL name if they were just not gonna do that here for this rerelease. It’s something I hope they can patch in but I don’t expect it to happen.

Should you buy Hebereke Enjoy Edition? Honestly, it’s hard to say. It doesn’t add too much to warrant playing it over emulation unless you just don’t feel morally okay with doing something like that and the release just isn’t perfect in general. They did make this one cheaper than the Gimmick rerelease with this being $9.99 and it’s a dollar off currently but this still could have been better. Hebereke is an expensive Famicom game unfortunately and the rerelease on PS1 has poor sound emulation so this is your best bet for an official release. It also might be a nice buy if you wanna compare it to Hebereke 2. Hebereke is still a wonderful game and I enjoyed my time replaying it here and got every achievement as well (even though it’s super easy to do). Stick with emulation if you think the price isn’t worth it but this is still a playable release of one of Sunsoft’s greatest games.

The real benefit of living in the future isn't the high-end 4K videogames we get. It's that legacy publishers are desperate enough that they'll let the world play all their killer Japan-only shit.

Hebereke is one of the best games on the Famicom/NES. Easily in my top 5, anyway. It's a full-blown Metroidvania with the sensibilities of Parodius. Stuff that used to get lumped together under the umbrella of "mad Jap games", that I now appreciate as "funny guys making good jokes". There's no backstory to any of its weird characters, or much of a plot. It's just daft stuff jumping around and crows that take explosive dogshits on you. I can enjoy serious, lore-heavy, socially relevant games as much as anybody, but shit like this is definitely my comfort zone. Hebereke's characters don't even seem like they've been designed with the game in mind. In the years following, they've appeared in puzzle games, stupid experimental titles and for much longer than you'd expect, yonkoma manga characters in the back of games magazines. They're just silly doodles, and we don't really care about who they are. In the game's intro, Hebe starts explaining the backstory and gives up halfway, resolving "Y'know what? I really can't be bothered. Read the backstory in the manual or something." Beautiful.

This release just as half-baked and crummy. It's the Famicom game running in an emulator. There are modern conveniences, like a rewind and save system, but it's all fairly rudimentary. There's also an Achievements system, that I was quick to disable in the settings. The most jarring thing is the Japanese text. You can switch between English and Japanese in the menus, but everything in-game has been left untouched. They have bothered to do a full translation of everything in it, but you access this by watching each scene play out in Japanese and then browse to a menu to view the new English dialogue boxes. I'd suspect that if the emulator can track player progress well enough to implement an achievement system, overlaying the dialogue boxes with English text wouldn't be outside the realm of possibilities, but I guess Sunsoft didn't really think of that, and we're stuck playing a barely-localised game.

There had been an English version of Hebereke before, but that was one of those awkward early-90s localisations. Released in limited numbers in limited territories, Ufouria: The Saga basically stripped out all the humour and mad shit from the game, replacing it with bland toyetic filler. Curiously, Ufouria doesn't appear in this version, even though screenshots, artwork and full scans of the German manual do. I'm not going to cry over not getting access to a version of the game I like less, but I do think it's a shame for those with a fondness or nostalgia for this specific wart on videogame history. I grew up in the PAL region too. I remember the hazards of navigating the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, with the Sonic Team, Fleetway, Archie, AoStH and SatAM continuities all fighting for dominance on toy packaging and pillowcases. I don't like sacrificing Lylat Wars for the technically superior Star Fox 64. We probably should be able to play Ufouria, even if I'm never ever going to turn it on.

Hebereke's design mainly benefits from its simplicity. There are none of those vertical shafts of endless platforms that you see in early Metroid. It's much more modest than that. If you know where you're going, you can access any spot on the map within a couple of minutes. Over the course of the game, you'll encounter other characters who will join your party, and each of them come with their own abilities. You'll have to switch between them on the Select menu, but this isn't too much, right? People like Mega Man. Sometimes, when you're switching characters to get past blocked-off areas, or exploit a mechanic to bypass an area quickly, it can feel liberating. There are instances where it feels a little over the top. Only one of your characters can walk on ice, but they have the crappest jump, so you sometimes have to take the run up as O-chan, switch to another character for the jump, and switch back for the landing. It might have been nice to shortcut this by dedicating each shoulder button to switching to each character or something, but again, this is a fairly untouched Famicom ROM. I don't mind this stuff, personally. I've completed Game Gear games on original hardware. I do worry about the appeal for those who have never used a floppy disk before, though.

It's a breezy, silly little game, and its eccentric charm carries a lot of it. One of your guys is a ghost who hits himself in the head with a hammer, and his eyes fly out and attack enemies. There's a tough boss in a suit of armour, and when you successfully break it, there's just a big dumb cat standing there, waiting for you to kill it. I really like Hebereke. I like coming back to rough, old games every now and then, to keep my values in check, and there's few that I have a better time with. If you're going through the heavy-hitter NES games, and you're stuck looking at stuff like Zelda 2 and Startropics, maybe give Hebereke a shot first.

Decided to try this game on a whim based on the huge appeal of a monster-collecting Metroidvania, where your creatures' abilities are needed to traverse the world. I thought the exploration was going to be the main draw, and the battles an afterthought. However, everything else about the game soon became outdone by the intricacy and challenging nature of its battle mechanics.

Presentation-wise, the game has fairly simple but effective pixel art. The humans are nondescript little pixel people, but the monsters look great and are animated well even in their small overworld form, which is important not only for battle but because every single one can follow you around. The monster journal provides some gorgeous pixel portraits that give you a more detailed look at what each creature really looks like. As for the music, it ranges from passable to rather good. I got pretty tired of the basic battle theme, which all too often interrupted the atmospheric songs of certain areas.

The main story is pretty basic, including a twist that was really easy to see coming if you're paying attention (although I would rather a twist be predictable than come out of nowhere with absolutely no way to figure it out), but this game shines more in the background worldbuilding it establishes, including a ton of detail on each monster, its behavior and its history with humans in the sanctuary. Speaking of which, the creature designs are in general very cute and charming, and it's tempting to just use a team full of your absolute favorites like you could get away with doing in Pokemon, but that may not be an option because if you're not putting thought into team composition, this game will kick your butt.

So let's talk about that. Battles always consist of three monsters vs. three monsters (with keeper duels featuring a full team of six, a backup mon swapping in when one of the active three is defeated). The interplay of abilities in your current grouping of three will be vital to victory. Each monster has a detailed skill tree, and you get to choose a new skill every time you level up (but there is a level cap so you can never grind so much that you just fill out the entire tree). These include not only new attacks, but plenty of passive effects. Buffs, debuffs, shielding, healing- all of these considerations are important, because this game is NOT easy, and throws a lot of opponents at you who actually have good strategies, and will wipe the floor with you if you aren't thinking through your own team synergy and actions carefully. In fact, the vast majority of damage done on a given turn (at least in my case) comes about "off-turn" at the start of your opponents' movement via debuffs like poison, bleed, burn, the chill-congeal combo, etc.

If it sounds complicated... well, there's even more that goes into the stats. Each monster also has a weapon slot and three additional equipment slots, all of which can be improved via crafting, you can feed your monsters to give them small boosts, past a certain point you can change your monsters into one of two color-shifted forms which confer different advantages... there's a LOT to keep track of. That's what makes this game so interesting, but if you're just looking for a mindless fun time unwinding with cute creatures (no shame in that!) this may not be for you. When I was stuck on a certain battle near the end, I changed to "casual" mode out of curiosity and didn't find it to be much easier, since the opponent's team strategy was still good enough to compensate for having less health in this difficulty setting.

That said, if you DO find a team comp that works well for you, a lot of this game can end up being kind of a slog, as you don't really need to switch up your team and you can get through most battles using the same strategy. And then suddenly the game throws a curveball of a boss battle at you, and you feel the need to totally re-evaluate. Still, unless you're playing on the highest difficulty level, don't believe anyone who says you absolutely must follow a certain team comp or strategy to get through. I used plenty of early or mid-game mons that I liked and managed to win without constantly resetting my skill trees to min-max or creating an entirely new team just to deal with one boss, or anything like that. I saw some people get turned off of this game by difficulty spikes, but there are lots of ways to get through a tough battle, you just have to find one that works.

As for the Metroidvania aspects, it does feel good to move around the world, and it's neat that sometimes the game gates you by a required ability and you're left to find the appropriate monster(s) by looking at the monster journal and figuring out which ability could help you. A couple times there were story gates with hints that you needed a different monster, but mostly it's up to you to figure out how to solve a problem, or if you're even able to at that point or might need to revisit with a later-game companion. Unfortunately, while some creatures do cool movement-related stuff, a lot of monster abilities boil down to simply activating elemental orbs, and most of the world's puzzles are based on... pulling levers to open gates in the correct order. WOW I got tired of seeing those levers.

To sum it up, this game is a very interesting combo of genres, and they might not always mesh together smoothly. Certain parts can start to feel tedious or like a slog, as developing too good of a team might have you suffering from success as you grind through repetitive battles. But if you're looking for a challenging RPG experience that makes you think, with some charming creature designs into the bargain, this game could become your new obsession.

It's impossible to be upset at Bomberman. He's Bomberman, look at him!! It's also kinda hard to be mad at his little friend Pommy, even though I want to be. And therefore, I find it impossible to say I truly disliked this game, or think it was some kind of mistake, even though I had to drag myself through it.

Let's talk about aesthetics first. Following in the footsteps of the other Bomberman games on N64, this game has some truly exceptional music, with talented and recognizable names on board. What's more, after you've defeated the boss on each planet (which comes a fair bit before you'll actually be done with a given planet), more instrumentation gets added to the world's music track, which is a really fun detail. The level and enemy themes also work pretty well, and are substantially more interesting than the first Bomberman 64's rather generic areas, taking you from a casino planet to an apocalyptic city in the midst of a zombie outbreak and gang war. Overall, the simplistic style of the Bomberman universe and character design ethos is a perfect fit for the N64's limitations, leading to a game with plenty of visual charm.

The thing that stands out to me most about this game is its ambition. There's an unexpectedly detailed JRPG styled story, complete with extreme stakes, and a surprising amount of dialogue. Believe it or not, I enjoy when otherwise "simple" franchises attempt this sort of thing now and then. The story and structure actually reminded me a LOT of Super Paper Mario, which for me is one of the highest compliments I could give something. I want to love this! The main baddie is an emo cowboy and there are are interstitial "at the villain's lair" segments, gosh darn it!! The problem is that most of the characters' personalities are one-note, if there's a discernible note at all, without enough there to justify their amount of dialogue or the gravity with which the plot later wants to treat them. Still, I'm not going to fault them for trying, and it was fun.

The game's structure is puzzle-dungeon based, and solving problems with the various elemental bombs you're given (and there are a LOT by the end of the game) can be quite fun. That said, with so many options, certain solutions can just as much feel like a guessing game. Why do my super-overpowered earth bombs not destroy this gate, but my basic fire bombs do?

All of the pieces were in place for a game I would actually appreciate and love, and about halfway through it, I was ready to say this was my favorite Bomberman game on N64, despite its flaws. But over time, the game's innate problems just started to build up more and more to a degree where I no longer wanted to play the game, and forced myself through it. (This echoed the two GameFAQs guides I occasionally consulted, one of which was less than half complete, and the other in which the author had to recruit others to help with later sections as they did not finish it personally.)

First of all, each level consists of a series of lots of little rooms, and enemies will respawn when you leave a room and re-enter. This makes backtracking for exploration or puzzle-solving a massive pain. But what's more, the game frequently uses the classic Zelda dungeon structure where you'll have to defeat all the enemies in a given room before the doors will unlock and you can move on. This means you'll have to be fighting through the same rooms again and again- and this means patience, placing bombs, waiting for them to explode, trying not to get hit or blow yourself up in often cramped spaces.

Oh, and the only time you can save is when you beat a level. The levels are LONG. So, you want to get started on a planet? Get comfy and grab a drink; you're gonna be there a WHILE. You'd best commit. Granted, I'm a very slow gamer, but I don't think there was any planet that took me under an hour. (An hour of praying my N64 wasn't going to crash, as it sometimes does.) Once you figure out what to do, it'd be much faster, but finding out how to make progress can stop you in your tracks for a bit.

The checkpointing in the levels is the major source of the time sink. Some levels are structured in such a way that you can open up shortcuts and paths for yourself which can be utilized between lives, but this is very often not the case, and any death will result in you having to redo quite a bit, including certain puzzles which might involve pushing statues around or the like. AND THEN, when the game DOES give you a legitimate checkpoint (as in a change of where you respawn), it's often so unhelpful as to be almost insulting, maybe just a room or two out from your previous spawn point.

Aside from these major structural issues, there are a number of smaller frustrations that add up. In addition to the plentiful amount of "power-downs" that spawn as pickups, there are enemies that, if they hit you, will remove all your power-ups in
a given category (bomb number, bomb strength, or movement speed), rendering Bomberman instantly weak or- worst of all- extremely slow, until you find some boxes to blow up that will tediously get you back to where you were before.

Now imagine all that combined with how many things in this game can insta-kill you, from spikes to water and lava (that you have to build bridges over while trying not to harm yourself in the process because every chunk of an ice bridge is itself formed from an exploding bomb) to simply miscalculating your wind-bomb-blast as you propel yourself over a pit. Or falling into a pit because there was a small hole you couldn't even see.

All of these issues add up to a game that feels extremely punishing, but Bomberman's little friend Pommy is an aspect that COULD make an unfriendly game much friendlier. Based on food you find in the world, he can evolve into a number of really cute designs, and later evolutions can damage enemies for you (while earlier ones will just stun them and frankly, he will be mostly useless). The problem is, on a regular playthrough, both me and my partner and the random person whose let's play I watched and the OTHER random person whose cutscene collection I watched, never got past his second form. The amount of grinding for food you'd have to do to get Pommy into a state where he's actually useful doesn't seem to happen naturally over most playthroughs.

Pommy can be controlled by a second player, and could potentially be useful at strategically stunning enemies even in earlier forms, but for the vast majority of people who aren't going to be able to recruit a friend or loved one into playing Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! with them, he pretty much just gets in the way and spends most of the time stunned himself.

But the absolute worst thing that happened to me is that I completed all the requirements to get the good ending and "true" final boss, but due to extreme bad luck in the final level, had something happen which locked me into the bad ending anyway, and which I would have had to replay about half the level to revert (and even then there's a chance it could have happened again, with save-scumming not being an option). I don't want to spoil the details, but that's a thing that can happen and you might want to look it up before going in. So I accepted my bad ending, complete with bad final boss which seems to actually be more difficult than the other one, and just watched the good ending on Youtube. I was ready to be done.

Upon writing this review, while re-listening to this game's soundtrack, I decided to bump it up from a two and a half to a three on sheer ambition. This is a strange, unique game that very few people have played or even know about. Even some people (including myself until the past few years) who've heard of it assume that it was only released in Japan. The game deserves love and praise for some of its mechanics and the amount of care they put into certain details. Like I mentioned above, I would rather a game be ambitious in its story and structure than a franchise constantly playing it safe. I just really, really wish it wasn't dragged down by so much frustrating nonsense, leading to an overall experience that's very hard to recommend. Even Bomberman seems to spend most of this game being either confused or pissed off.

Was drawn in by the hook of this being a postal worker simulator, only to be trojan-horsed into another Netflix-brained drama. A Life Is Strange-like that has you driving around a poorly-disguised and thoroughly-sterilised simulacrum of Twin Peaks (this was made by a Dutch dev team - why not show us NL's country life instead of leaning on a well-worn setting?).

You're relatively un-fussed by any of the day-to-day concerns that would no doubt come with delivering the post in a secure and timely manner, and there are so many missed opportunities for fun little gameplay pieces - the truck doesn't take damage, you can't break the speed limit, the parcels don't arrive late, you don't have to dodge dogs - any of these little things could have injected a small sprinkling of spice into it, but the game is only really interested in telling its story. I think I wanted it to be Shin Paperboy.

I get that it's nice, sure, and there are people who really do want a depressurised and bloodless GTA driving/walking game; but without anything really driving (lol) the experience, this is basically just a series of Walking Dead-style dialogue encounters split up with a cuddly coddling truck-driver experience. Nothing ever matters, which seems to kinda contradict the game's nascent notions of changing your life. Dialogue options only seem to be there to move the chatter along most of the time, and characters often react in the ways the developers wanted them to react, rather than the ways you hoped or expected they would. The different ending options are a perfect example of this, but as the game only really has its story going for it, I won't spoil the bizarre surprises here.

The romance options are exactly what we've all come to expect from indie games at this point - utterly toothless and sexless stuff that makes the 40-something main characters behave like preschoolers holding hands on a trip to the park. You can't have a single city gal discover her first kiss is now a huge sexy lumberjack and have it only lead to a nice hug. Come on now! It's about time one of these games played out with all the debauchery of a greasy pulp paperback like A Stranger In Her Bed or whatever.

My postman sometimes come up the stairs of our building mid-joint roll, banging crap metal out of his phone speakers and huffily hurling anything marked FRAGILE onto a rough approximation of our doorstep. Now that's the delivery guy game I wanna be playing. Lemme dropkick an Amazon parcel and shag some lonely lady after I break her windows with a Hello Fresh box.

Lake is basically the videogame equivalent of catching one of those fluffy, breezy rom-commy films on Lifetime or Hallmark where basic looking but smart successful business woman visits a small town and discovers her path in life and MAAYYYYBE a love interest.

Sorry if that's sort of spoiling what happens here but its something that's obvious within the first five minutes of the game and while its not a completely bad thing, its very much the sort of game to destress and chill out with and fits that 'Cozy' definition to a tee thanks to a heap of chill vibes, amusing enough characters and the odd silly moment.

The problem is it... it is just that sort of thing, so the novelty winds down a little too fast and by the time you're midway in the second week of ingame time, you sort of wish it was finished with already about halfway through delivering a letter, as by then you've already likely explored every single spot over and over and heard 'Last days of September' to the point where you'd rather just listen to silence.

Don't get me wrong. Its cute and for those wanting something light and airy in between bigger titles, its a good pick... but honestly it needed either a few more plot points and characters or a shortening of the gametime to just a week or a week and a half.

I was always interested in Lake after finding out about it as it has a very relaxing vibe to the videos and previews I've seen which is often a nice change of pace between larger games. Finally playing it though I just had a constant nagging thought rattling around in my skull from almost the start to finish.

Do games need to have a point?

Initially I felt it doesn't matter. Lot's of arcade and action heavy games you just play without a point. After assessing more though I thought increasingly that that isn't true, the gameplay and challenge is the point. Beating your previous score, getting through in 1CC. They absolutely do have a point, it just is different to a more narrative focused game where the story and characters are the point or a game like journey where the experience, visuals and music produce feeling in people that a normal game may not. Nearly every game has a point, purpose or direction the creators are pushing for in some form and most are identifiable if different to each other.

Does Lake have a point?

I could think about this so much because of my lack of investment in Lake as a game allowed my mind to wander off in search of it's own direction. Unfortunately this game whilst not bad is just unsatisfying in it's gameplay and narrative to the point I don't feel it had a direction. I saw all 3 endings and don't feel a single one of them resolved the story in a satisfying or most importantly, meaningful way. The game focuses on Meredith Weiss in 1986 who after finishing helping create a new computer software package takes two weeks to go to her tiny town to cover for her dad delivering mail. I think Jamesbuc's review covers the premise best describing it as a daytime Hallmark movie plot and frankly they arn't wrong. The thing is Lake's story needed to be strong to carry it and it unfortunately isn't. dialogue and characters just fall flat, many encounters seem pointless, are completely optional and are superfluous to the ending. There are two romance options but neither felt really convincing and some of the dialogue just didn't flow well or naturally. I will give the developer credit though for being able to make so many choices who you hang out with and talk to but when it comes across as so meaningless by the end it doesn't really matter. there is one sub plot with your co-worker that seemed absolutely pointless but that could have been due to my choices and I have no desire to replay it to find out.

The reason this needed to be strong is the gameplay side of Lake is somewhat lackluster. You are delivering mail, literally. I know people enjoy the train, car mechanic, farming and Bowser cleaning simulator type games for mundane jobs they don't actually enjoy but this just doesn't work. I found it interesting initially but having to stop and slowly walk to a mail box and put envelopes in, climb into the van then repeat for two weeks in game time with nothing to spice it up really drags by the second week. The van music radio and pretty aesthetics are nice, I enjoyed driving through listening to country pop type music but with only 5-6 songs and visual pop in and minor bugs even that got repetitive after a while so I turned the radio off in silence.

By the end I was happy for the game to finish and I didn't care what happened to Meredith. The idea of the game is good but it meanders in what it wants to be and the elements don't come together. It needed stronger character development on fewer cast members with a point to it all to make it an overall more engaging experience because there is little suggested here to actually give Meredith a reason to stay in the town, go back to her job or run off in an RV.

Lake just doesn't have a point.