Generally better than NEO with how you unlock extra abilities and skill customization way sooner on top of a more jovial party of characters, but I'm docking it mad points because 1) the majority of the game is an asset flip and 2) if you pick Cyrille for the end-game chapter you're fucked. Her stats aren't balanced at all for the last dungeon and you have to pull about 5-7 hours of grinding just so shit doesn't kill you in one hit. And when you do finally beat it you get an explicitly not-done anticlimax ending with like 2 lines of dialogue and a cut to credits. I'm gonna dig a bit further to see if Toma's route has anything resembling a real ending, but damn is this an embarrassing way to end your game

Some camp, melodrama and self-indulgent projection - it sure is a 1992 visual novel for teenagers. Afaik it's not the first of its kind, I think I played a few on Master System (and that's before considering how text adventure and point & click fit into this conversation), but the restraint of its visual elements respects the 'novel' aspect very well, setting the least intrusive flavor possible so the reader imagine the rest from context clues. That alone makes this a titanic progenitor in the genre, whereas I feel many prior games are glorified cutscenes and limit the breadth of their story to what they can tangibly render in the game environment. Very interesting. Thank you C_F for sharing and streaming this with the gang.

I love Genesis, but if there's one thing I hate about its library, it's how over-produced and under-designed these can be, and every time I replay Hard Corps I'm convinced it's the epitome of this. Meet an awesome boss, kill it in 15 seconds before it does anything, move to the next one. Rinse and repeat for 6 stages. All these crazy moments and spectacles that obviously took a ton of work to implement, and they play themselves out with barely any input on your behalf. Barely any running or gunning. This is actually also an issue with Contra 3, and it's arguably worse there, but it feels so much louder and overt here because of the difference in scope.

Playing the JP version with health is by F A R the easiest Contra game, not even close. And why health in the game named 'Hard Corps', the cooler, edgier one obviously intended to be a pro-player gauntlet? It's obvious it was a last-moment inclusion when the devteam realized all your deaths were due to memorization-based pitfalls, and they chalked up they'd rather let players see all the cool shit than have them burn 10 hours into the same scripted sections just to see a burping alien foot or the pelican version of Mighty Orbots.

Idk, cool game, rad game, still fun just for merit what's here, I'm gonna come back to it like 6 months from now and notice something new in the backgrounds, but the gameplay is so so so so so not there and I can't help but pine for a version where these bosses kick and scream and go rabid like actual bloated alien menaces should.

Jenny asked me to play this a fair while after i watched her play it. It's cool, you fight the Toohoos by absorbing their bullets, converting them to blocks on a separate grid, then clicking them away. They're constantly introducing new rules building on the groundwork, either changing how the boss interacts with your attacks, throwing special disruptor blocks, making you intentionally take damage, etc. You have to manage two interfaces at once + two vectors of control, it's some really creatively-orchestrated stuff. I also admire that even though this isn't a shmup, your shmup movement fundamentals apply to bullet-weaving and shot-collecting here too. I'm admittedly put a little off by the artist (why's everyone a cannibal with giant love handles?) but I respect the hustle. More solo devs ought to make self-indulgent stuff like this.

I would like this more if it had a little less fat to chew and anything resembling a soundtrack - like, I'm not even a Touhou fan, but isn't half the appeal of this series the classical/rock fusion music? What's with the babies'-first-tonka-truck-greg-heffley-stepping-forward-famitracker-ass sludge here?

It's fantastic but too hard and mostly for things that require insane routing of not just level layouts, but unpredictable physics-based environmental hazards - which is still 100% more learnable than the average gradius game because you RESPAWN WITH OPTIONS INTACT but still makes this a mind-numbing and cruel torture once you get to the back half of the levels. Treasure outdid their Konami associates but I'm starting to think their panache for genre-defying gimmicks is ill-fitting for the strictness that shmup design requires.