This game is really ambitious and cool. It was a Saturn launch title and the stuff its doing is really impressive. Despite how low poly it is, it immediately captivates me into its world with its incredible music and designs that fit really well within the hardware. I love how unique the gameplay is from other rail shooters. Changing your viewpoint in four directions is something that adds a lot of dynamism to the gameplay. It is incredibly satisfying to do really well in a level, it has killer sound design where everything feels super good to pull off. Making a big laser chain might be one of the coolest things in a video game and the it rewards you for doing that effectively. It being a rail shooter allows the otherwise linear music tracks feel dynamic, like you are playing through an epic action sequence from a film.

This game has a lot of issues that hold it back a little bit for me. This being an early Saturn title, the game struggles to fullfill its ambitions. Its hard to see whats hitting you a lot of the time. The game has a really low framerate which makes it feel sluggish to play. There are a couple of bosses in this that are rather poorly implemented and some of them drag the pace down. The four way view is confusing and finicky. When I first played it, I thought it was like a first person mode where you just rotated 360 degrees to find your targets, but the easiest way to use it is to tap the L or R buttons to make it face four predetermined directions. Even when you do this method, it feels sluggish, so you cant use it to react to stuff coming at you, you have to really anticipate incoming waves. It overall doesnt feel great. I also dislike how much you gotta mash the shoot button.

Even with all those issues, I think this game is really cool. Its a really short romp, lasting less than an hour. Its a fun game to try and master. Even when a game over happens, its not too frustrating to pick it right back up, its cool how much better I got even with just a second or third try. If you have a Saturn I think its a must play. It really stands out comparatively to other rail shooters and its one of my favorites in the genre.

Like I mentioned in my Bionic Commando review, Strider is one of Capcom's franchises that have been left to rot in comparison to some of their other bigger properties. Which is a shame too, because it is a series with a lot of cool ideas, coupled with a style and flair that I love in video games, and I wish that it was brought back at one point (again, of course, after the 2014 game). For what we did get though, it looks like a pretty solid series (with an exception or two in there), and the original Strider is no exception.

This was my first proper experience with the Strider franchise, and after playing it, I would say that it is a pretty solid first entry, and an overall really damn good arcade game. Sure, it has its problems, and it is probably outshined by sequels later down the road, but it is still worth playing today.

The story is very basic for this kind of game, but it is helped with story visuals and the presence of voice acting (even if both of these things are presented in the blink of an eye, and then they are gone), the graphics are very nice, the music is pretty well done and memorable, the control is alright, aside from one aspect I will touch upon in a second, and the gameplay is simple, yet very fun in execution paired with many elements the game presents.

The game is a 2D hack-and-slash platformer, where you move from left to right, defeating enemies, getting powerups, fighting bosses, and all the stuff you have probably seen plenty of times before, but what makes it pretty unique compared to others is the types of enemies, powerups, and bosses you run into throughout the game, with the enemies and bosses being pretty creative for the time. In addition, the powerups themselves have what you would typically expect from a game like this, but you can also gain robotic helpers, such as a robotic tiger and hawk, to help you take on what lies ahead.

In my opinion, the simple gameplay, coupled with ideas the game introduces with the enemies and powerups make this game really fun to play and very memorable. Not to mention, it is extremely satisfying to run through these stages as fast as you can, slashing through so many different goons, coupled with the extreme precision and skill you can pull off. Not too many other games (at least from this era) can replicate this kind of style and look.

Of course though, it isn't perfect, with plenty of elements that can be done a lot better. For instance, your movement and jumping in this game is pretty fucking awkward, with many different directions and ways you can jump around the screen. This is cool and all, but given how much this game throws at you, and with the precarious terrain you will most likely encounter, it can be pretty frustrating to control. This is also paired with the climbing mechanic you have in the game, which does help out a lot, yes, but it isn't all too reliable when I feel like it should be.

In addition, yes, this is an arcade game, and as such, it is pretty short, and they throw as much at you as possible to try to get money out of the poor kids that played this back in the day, and that can make the journey more stressful than it needs to be. It is doable, yes, and it is still fun, but it can be a bit of a hassle.

Overall, despite the awkward jumping/climbing and the cases of arcade syndrome, it is still a pretty solid game after over 30 years later, and it has me looking forward to what the rest of the series after this has to offer.

Game #115

Replay. Having played a handful of "beat them up" games between finishing God Hand for the first time and the second time, it's fun seeing so many of the ideas that God Hand homages. This review is just a note on some of those.

From Final Fight, there's a handful of enemy types—skinny knife throwers, agile women, plump guys, and the idea of tall and short enemies indicating their strength. There's also the "destroy a car" minigame, and in God Hand there's even throwbacks to that 90s style homophobia. From Streets of Rage, God Hand takes the whip enemies, and also the thing where enemies will sit on the ground and get pouty.

After finishing God Hand again, I started playing God Hand for a third time. It just feels amazing to play. The new game experience reminds me a lot of FromSoft in the level of skill (and level/enemy knowledge) you carry over, even though you don't carry over techniques you bought or health or "tension point" upgrades; probably the game I'd compare it to most is Sekiro. When I finished that game, I ended up speeding through the NG+ and didn't die until I got to the burning bull enemy, which was immensely satisfying. On the other hand, God Hand also feels like there's a lot of skill I have left to build. I started playing the hard mode and got my ass beat in the first level. I want to get there, but it is truly difficult.

I'm not sick of God Hand yet so for my third play through I decided to do a Kick Me Sign run—a challenge run in which you can never activate your tension meter, and you can never use your special roulette abilities. It's called a "kick me sign" run because in one of the early stages you get a kick me sign slapped on your back, and it drops off when you use those special abilities—I was surprised to learn that the sign is persistent throughout levels if you don't use your abilities. In fact you are rewarded with unlockable music tracks after completing it, though the game never explicitly mentions this run as far as I know, which is an interesting bit of design in itself. You're never technically locked away from using the special attacks either, so there's a level of self control to it. You can even activate the roulette ability to slow down time and make your character face an enemy, and then back out of the menu without selecting a special ability. I learned the hard way to be extra careful about this—if you accidentally hit the special attack and then let yourself get killed so you can start the level over, you'll actually have to go back to whatever your latest save was to get the sign back on your back.

My experience for the KMS run was surprisingly close to my prior play throughs. It's simple enough to live without "Unleashed Mode," which turns Gene invincible and lets you wail away at an enemy while your Tension Meter ticks down; in lieu of that, you're just forced to put more time and damage into enemies, and to be more careful and consistent about dodging. In other words, you're forced to play better. I felt the most pain without that ability fighting the enemies that were really good at dodging you—Tiger Joe, Devil Hand—since the Unleashed Mode gives you a bit of a breather and a level of essentially guaranteed damage. I also missed this mode when fighting the demons, since they tend to run away from you and it can be very annoying to chase them down.

The inability to use roulette moves are a different story, and really highlighted the gaps in Gene's toolbox. For one thing, there's no gap closing technique, no projectile, no easy crowd control move—without these in your back pocket, it can make certain encounters pretty annoying and hard to deal with at the higher difficulty levels. I eventually learned to rely on juggling enemies and separating them to keep things under control. I still don't have a great solution to when the game sends a whip wielder plus a couple of "leader" characters at you (the tall enemies that have some kind of gimmick—axe wielders, knife throwers, etc.). The whip wielder tends to hide behind these leader types, so your best bet is to do some hit and run attacks, but since they're cloistered together it's just as likely Gene will tackle the wrong enemy, and that's a tedious, fraught way to play already. I wish there was a larger variety of crowd control techniques too—there's the round house kick and the quicker, weaker round kick move, but your best move is to juggle enemies and launch them, which takes a lot of patience and skill to pull off when you're being attacked by multiple enemies.

I had a lot of fun with this challenge run but would be lying if I didn't say I found myself frustrated with certain limitations, but this is the first time, after two complete playthroughs, that I have felt that way about God Hand. I wouldn't recommend this challenge run necessarily unless you're like me and are trying to squeeze as much juice out of the game as possible. The in-game reward doesn't feel worth it, and the game feels designed to be played with the special abilities. But I might not completely feel that way once I finish the game on hard mode...

I'm still not sick of God Hand after finishing the run. After my third playthrough, I just wish I was better at God Hand. This time I managed to stay between second and third difficulty for most of the game, with dips into the fourth difficulty mode, but I felt really challenged in third difficulty already...

In all earnestness, I do not believe there is a more significant example of why mobile games are the way they are now than this. There are several things that factor into it—the success of Clash of Clans and the addictive nature of Flappy Bird; the fact that the law allowed the unwashed, genital-shaped homunculuses posing as humans at King to trademark a single word from the English dictionary and get away with it; the failure many big-name developers ran into trying to translate some of their biggest IPs onto a relatively new platform with an eager audience; I could go on. Among this trash heap of inevitable nostalgia serving as blinds stands Infinity Blade and its two successors. A veritable trilogy of Fantasy epics that took advantage of the hardware instead of trying to accommodate for it, there's a good reason one of the three games in this series was legendary enough to earn a coveted 10/10 from IGN.

At least, in theory.

In all honesty, I have never played any of these games. I know of their status and the nostalgia that many have for them. But even if I wanted to, a roadblock stands in the way: all three games were delisted in 2018. So what? Why don't I just emulate them?

You can't. Perhaps that's putting it into layman's terms; you probably can, but the reason I've never heard of anyone doing it is probably the same reason PS4 emulation only made headlines recently. If you want to, it might be within reach, but with such difficulty that it'd probably be best to avoid it. And this is nothing to say of the fact that, even if you manage to set something like that up, it's likely that it's not something that'll even work out the way you want it to. I'm putting this here just so nobody writes a comment that begins with "Actually,", but I swear to god, I've never seen a single person talk about emulating an iPhone game.

If the game were on Android, this would probably be a different story. Old Android games do have their own fair share of quirks that can make emulating them a pain, but it's been proven that there's a workaround for even the most stubborn of APKs. Spoiler alert: all three of these games are/were Apple exclusive.

Here you have this actual fossil. Maybe it doesn't have as much value as it did back then in our current market, but that's the thing about old games: even if flawed, they help you appreciate the new. Just recently, I turned my Xbox One on for the first time in almost a year to play a game on it, and it was for a game on the Xbox 360 that was made backward compatible. I wound up playing that game, the first Saints Row, Grand Theft Auto IV, and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, and I had somewhat of a good time. Dated in a few ways, timeless in others, kept in between both camps is an appreciation for what I'm able to have now. In a word, it's history. If I hooked up my Xbox to find that ninety percent of the backward-compatible games I bought on there couldn't be played, and that the remaining physical copies of them had mysteriously disintegrated, my perception of Xbox as a brand would suffer significantly. It's not even that it helps brand recognition all that much; if you treat gaming as fast-food, you're more likely to have less regard and appreciation for what it does best.

Apple's decision to lock everything down lest you tinker with everything they've given you behind their backs is utterly dystopic for a multitude of reasons, and that's why I've never had much loyalty for the slop they keep pumping out. But ultimately, it's this that puts a nail in the coffin: they do nothing to preserve their back catalog. Say what you will about the botched ports of games before the iPhone came along; even the jankiest JME games can be played today. Unless you're willing to pay exorbitant fees to play ten-to-twelve-year-old games on devices that have them pre-installed, you just can't play games like Infinity Blade nowadays, and the medium of video games is worse off for it.