It's so easy to squint and imagine how earlier Platinum would've knocked this out of the park, how it was probably pitched as a full-fat spiritual sequel to Okami, but they didn't, their worst instincts activated and they put annoying gacha grinding and gear leveling and stripped it down until there was nothing left, superb character/enemy design and music wasted on a nothing game, like a case study on how exactly my favorite studio has fell off
Not a terrible game though, there's things to like here despite its best efforts to make you dislike it, you guys would've been all over this if it came out on the Vita, or the Wii, oh wait it did it was called Muramasa: The Demon Blade and it was boring and without actual meaningful level design that time too
The most exciting moment in World of Demons is when you get to fight Ninetails and she has her own boss theme and your heart swells because you are remembering that sick as fuck boss fight in Okami, and then you are brought crashing back down to reality
Thank god I was able to return my Apple TV to Walmart just in the nick of time, playing this before it shut down didn't cost me a cent

Multiple sources on the internet say that Serj Tankian from System of a Down conceptualized this game but I think it might just be one of those lies people repeat
Older shareware games like this, as a child, had a much trippier vibe than I was used to from the relative comforts of Nintendo and Sony
They would make me feel a little strange, a little uncomfortable, a little alone
Speedy Eggbert is all of those things, there is a frightening emptiness to it, but calm, and incidential
As in, it just turned out like that, they were just trying to make A Game, thinking it's weird is on me
Feels like the kind of game that aliens from another solar system would make if they played and were subsequently inspired by Super Mario Bros as a result of an intergalactic cultural exchange

I've heard this game has been an absolute hood classic in South America, again proving they have superior taste to the USA due to the mainstreaming of piracy allowing them to develop really fine-tuned taste due to all the options they have available, and a good appreciation for the past due to using older consoles a lot, importing the newer stuff was often too expensive
They give us all the best homages to retro games because they know what makes them special due to having the whole library to play with (I love you Joymasher! What a great studio)
Anyway, do not sleep on this game, it's a 4 player arena fighter on the NES and it stars my sweet precious baby Kunio-kun who I would do anything to protect
Don't sleep on Kunio either, aka River City Ransom etc, I've been playing those games since I was a kid because despite living in the USA I stumbled into piracy and emulation and all that, boy he's done it all
If you only play two Japan-only Kunio games, play this and the hockey one, they have a knack for infusing every kind of sport with rule-breaking violence, like dodgeball, basketball, volleyball, hockey, track and field, baseball, soccer, falling block puzzle, as well as all the solo adventures like River City Ransom where they have to get their girlfriends back or the Like A Dragon Ishin-esque jidaigeki spinoffs or the Three Kingdoms spinoff or River City Girls from Wayforward where the girlfriends, obversely, has to get them back
A personal favorite of mine is Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, now known in the US with two official translations (localized and literal) as "River City Girls Zero" because you do get to play as the girls too, even with those two options of theirs I like the original fan translation I grew up with though because they say "fuck" and "shit" and "damn", I mean, they're high-schoolers and delinquents, so I guess they would talk like that
Just for the love of god whatever you do, do NOT play Stay Cool Kobayashi-san! A River City Ransom Story...worst mistake of my life

P.S. Yakuza is what happened when Shenmue's narrative aspirations and Kunio's bursts of dopamine split the difference
When will they follow in Kunio's footsteps and we get a Three Kingdoms Yakuza game where Majima is Lu Bu or something


Important information: if you want to play these games on modern platforms, M2 really went all out with the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle, where they officially translated a whopping 11 games for the first time, including 14 total, including the subject of this review, even retranslating River City Ransom while keeping its Japanese visuals and script intact alongside the original, as well as "quality up" versions that remove slowdown, improve control, and remove NES flickering
And...they locked their roms with DRM so you can't play them on a CRT display like God intended, which is a shame

from HexaDrive, the would-be Japanese equivalent to Bluepoint, artistes who brought you Rez HD, Okami HD and the year-late damage control 2.0 patch for Zone of the Enders 2nd Runner HD on only PS3 that fixed the abysmal framerate and Kojima had to personally fund as an apology, comes their very first original game
checks notes wait, wait, no I'm receiving information that their actual first original game was...uhhhh...The 3rd Birthday? the Parasite Eve game for PSP that seemingly nobody liked? poor guys, they got so critically SLAMMED that they retreated into the shadows to be a support and port studio for the next decade or so, and then their first original IP game was 2022's Voidcrisis, a "tower offense" game with mechs that has mixed reviews on Steam and looks like a visual clusterfuck, both that and this game echoing ZOE2

a decent enough successor to games like Metro-Cross and Temple Run (compare and contrast to Namco's cancelled but leaked also sci-fi successor Aero-Cross that I also reviewed), it's as short-lived as it is fast as it is free (as in free beer), featuring an exceedingly lean four short levels wherein you guide Genji Overwatch through an obstacle course, one of them being a tutorial, once you start it you may as well finish it instead of fritting about to another game in your Steam Library because if you don't care about the S-ranks you can complete it in 15 minutes
if you do care about the S-ranks add another hour or so
atmospheric-enough programmer art visuals, seemingly taking inspiration from the virtual areas in Astral Chain or Metal Gear Solid VR Missions

the title screen has such chill music that it reminds me of the eminently-loungeable soundtrack of a game they ported from 3DS to PS3, the excellent excellent E.X. Troopers, a Japan-only spinoff of Lost Planet that has since received a fan translation, the forbidden result of splicing Vanquish with Monster Hunter and the fastest most technically impressive shooting action the 3DS has to offer

oh yeah, did I mention Bright Tracer is free? and only in Japanese? fear not though, it's one of those imports that are just gameplay and soaked in tons of English text to look cool, so pretty much the only way a language barrier manifests is wondering whether you're changing from windowed to fullscreen or vice-versa

it's Unreal Engine 5 so it looks pretty nice, ran well enough on the Steam Deck OLED to look smooth, but it's pretty evident this is just a test project to get used to the engine, which makes you wonder, could they be making a proper full length original game in UE5? maybe one day we'll find out, or not

it's a weird feeling to miss the PS3 and 360 library of digital only PSN and XBLA games, but it's a feeling I have

anyway here's the URL, it's worth 15 minutes, it's FREE, might as well have it in your Steam library: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2253460/BRIGHT_TRACER/

not enough people mention how much of a treat this game is if you're a big fan of Castlevania
it's amusing how much trouble Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon does to invent its own versions of all the iconography when Vampire Survivors just borrows everything, bibles are bibles still, holy water is Santa Water, etc, but also goes through a lot of trouble to make sure every enemy and character still have their own flavor
and I'd love to see this developer make a game with all the Vampire Survivors iconography they've implemented but just make a Castlevania clone this time, make a Classicvania or Metroidvania-styled game with all these interesting takes on the old favorites, and make it tough as nails to prove wrong all the people who say that you "don't know how" to make a hard game, and you can make it a bit roguey still like Dead Cells or something if you're trying to justify it as still being distinct from Castlevania
I do think there are certainly moments of challenge in Vampire Survivors, maybe I'm just not good at multitasking but I can't completely tune out while playing this
There are bosses and enemies that restrict your movement like memorably the one you fight while fleeing from rising water
And it's not just "walk in a direction", there are weapons you can fire in a direction of your choosing, therefore aim does matter a lot of the time, this game is stripped-down but there's a reason people keep making the comparison to twin-stick shooters
Skip the slot machine animations with the circle button, you don't want the game to jerk you off that much, it's a bit much already even if you skip them
On Steam Deck I force a 1920x1200 resolution because the sort of downscaling that results in is easier on the pixel art than what appears to be uneven nearest-neighbor scaling by default for 1280x800
have they ever said why the game only uses a 16:10 resolution? maybe for playfield legibility as opposed to 16:9? it befits the Steam Deck perfectly but results in awkward black bars for everything else
Decent game for like 20 hours or so, idk if I'll continue it now that I've mostly ran out of new maps, enjoy in moderation and it's better on a handheld where it doesn't feel like it's sucking away time because you're sneaking in a couple games
by the way, you diskhorse fiends have gotta calm the fuck down, I don't know what it is about this game that brings such intense emotional responses out of people, maybe it's their latent bigotry towards Italians...

And where the fuck is Bisconte Draculó? You seriously telling me you never get to fight the guy on the cover?
rated 4 stars for Schedule IV