I don't think many games have so vividly captured the feeling of wandering a city alone at night. I can't bring myself to truly hate Ghostwire, but I sure hate a lot of things about it.

The story is nothing, a complete waste of time, it could have been seconds long and wordless if this were an arcade game. Monsters show up, bad guys kidnapped a girl, use your magic powers to save her; they spend 30 full minutes explaining this to you.

The combat feels unsure of itself. It uses a lot of classic FPS design for its weapons and enemies, but it's too imprecise, too slow, the scale is too small. The "aim assist" button should have been a full Metroid Prime-esque lock-on.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, between the main missions, there are these relatively small city areas where you can explore, do side quests, shop, etc. Ghostwire is an entire game in which traversal feels exactly like those parts of DX:HR.

I hate when an open world game shows me a fraction. I especially hate when that fraction's denominator is six fucking digits. DK64 and Crackdown are blushing.

Some games feel like they were made by an artist, some games feel like they were made by a storyteller, some games feel like they were made a game designer, some games feel like they were made by a corporation, some games feel like they were made a programmer.

Mercury Meltdown is the kind of game that I feel like even an indie dev might not make today, certainly not with any expectation of commercial viability. Maybe something like this might be made in the smallest scale possible for a game jam or something. Its relatively narrow focus on soft-body physics and color theory combined with its unabashed use of what feels like surely must be "programmer art" makes it feel completely alien to today's video game industry paradigm. It opens with a reference to a C64 loading screen, it has autosave but it's quite slow; you might spend as much time in the menus between levels as you do in gameplay, even if you always select the "go to next level" option after finishing each stage. The ability to save ghost players and replays, it's a feature set we might consider rather unusual for a console game, especially for the time.

This is the version of the game that I played when it was new, so this is the version that I sought out. It is somewhat surprising to me that this is a port of a PSP game given that its liquid physics seemed kind of crazy at the time, but today it is not surprising at all that the original version of the game was the kind of game that had a person's full name in the title. It's just that sort of old fashioned piece of software, like an Atari 2600 game just showed up more than 20 years later.

It's like Monkey Ball meets Marble Blast injected with a variety of its own weird game-ey concepts, the kinds of things that feel like they could only exist in obscure PC shovelware, 100,000 game in 1 type stuff. I want to be clear: I am absolutely delighted that there is a major release for the best-selling console of all time that plays like this and is available on a physical disc. A decade and a half or so ago, this is just what a video game was still allowed to be, and I think there is something genuinely beautiful about that.

Airblade has some tricks up its sleeve, but doesn't quite stick the landing.

Airblade is a Tony Hawk knock off with a science fiction setting. The titular airblade is a hoverboard powered by anti-gravity, a product of clean energy research. The dystopian corporate overlords want to destroy the airblade, and the experimental anti-gravity technology along with it, so they can continue profiting off of fossil fuels.

The idea of a skateboarding game with no gravity presents some interesting ideas. No gravity means no gaining momentum from downward slopes, your default movement speed is quite slow. Generally in this kind of game you would build up speed, and then start tricking and try to maintain your speed in order to keep balance while you do your moves. Here, you do tricks in order to build and maintain a boost meter. The game does still have combos and scoring, so tricks still have most of their typical purpose intact, though the way you keep pace with the level has certainly changed. The fact that your hoverboard is never actually touching the ground but your combos and trick options are still affected by whether or not you have "big air" does obfuscate things a little. Generally you get a good sense of speed and control, though player expression is not as fully featured as in a typical skating game as "grab" tricks no longer involve grabbing the board, but instead are for grabbing objects in the environment to swing from them.

Each level presents you with some number of objectives, and while they have some kind of narrative explanation for why you're doing what you do, the mechanics are generally 1:1 with Pro Skater; grind on 3 of these, swing off 5 of those, if you run out of time it's game over. One of your partner characters will always verbally direct you to a particular set of objectives at the start, and an arrow at the top of the screen will always point towards a single target. Despite this you are able to do most objectives in whatever order you please, though not all of them will populate the map until some number have been completed. The exit won't open until you've done everything. Generally speaking I would say the core mechanics are much easier than Tony Hawk. Since the airblade is never actually touching the ground, very few tricks can be messed up badly enough to result in a wipeout, and balancing during grinds is borderline trivial.

However, the fact that you absolutely need to do everything in the level in order to progress makes a world of a difference. In Pro Skater, the "perfect run" was primarily a self-imposed challenge, here it's mandatory to progress. Many skateparks have some tedious or obtuse tasks that can be skipped over once the player has done enough to move on, not so here. Almost every level ends with some ridiculous leap of faith combo string where you have to do a specific sequence of grinds and swings in order to reach the borderline inaccessible highest point of the map. If you know what you're doing, this game's main story mode can be beaten in barely 15 minutes, but on your first playthrough your definitely will not know what you're doing.

The fifth level, the last normal one, is just flatly evil. The level takes place on several sky scraping rooftops, with an instant death bottomless pit below. Several objectives involve hopping from building to building, grinding on precarious rails to knock things down into the void. The first objective you are directed towards is to knock four cable cars off their rail; the first and last time that you do this, the game goes into slow motion and the camera angle changes, and you just have to hope and pray that you've pressed the right buttons for the right amount of time to land back on the rail when the camera repositions itself.

It's moments like that which will make you appreciate how well put together Airblade is as a piece of software. Load times are short, quicksaving is unobtrusive, and reloading a level from the pause menu is virtually instant (which is good, because in the later levels you'll probably be doing this a lot). Performance is excellent, visuals are mostly effective for the purpose of communicating aspects of gameplay; the only exception is the character models, which are all a bit dark, making it difficult to distinguish enemies from the small crowds of NPCs that often surround them.

The audiovisual aesthetic is great. After just one half-hour session with the game I had every song I heard stuck in my head all week, I feel like these songs have always been there. To be fair these aren't the most original compositions in the world, and some pretty common samples are featured, but it's solid tunes. The menus are just plain slick. Characters are about what you would expect for early 00's, which is exactly what I want to see. I love it when a businessman in a trenchcoat says he's going to "bust in cap in your ass" to someone who wouldn't look out of place in Cubix.

The most disappointing thing about the game is that we don't really see much like this anymore. Aside from being an obvious attempt to leech off the success of a much larger franchise, this is a very well thought out original concept in terms of how the mechanics and narrative fit together and how it differentiates itself from its competitors. But franchises are where the money is at so all that Criterion can do now is either their signature style of racing or development support on whatever EA's next microtransaction machine is going to be.

I'm going to be pretty negative here but I only say these things because I love Mega Man. Mega Man for the NES is a video game that was made by only 7 people. 1 designer, 1 programmer, 3 artists (and the designer also did art), and 2 sound designers, and it shows. Every main stage outside of the game's last leg has its own musical theme, and both is clearly visually differentiated in color palette, tiles, and in the lively sprites of each boss.

One thing that always struck me about early NES games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda was the fact that none of the character sprites had outlines. As a kid this challenged my understanding of 2D art; any illustration I had seen that wasn't a painting featured lines of some kind, however bold, to differentiate figures and objects from their surroundings. Mega Man has a clear outline, Link does not (in the NES game). You can see the whites of Mega Man's eyes, where Mario just has a couple of dots.

The inspiration from Mega Man's different weapons came from sentai and tokusatsu shows (think Power Rangers). "A.K." saw the heroes, each with matching uniforms of different colors, each with different abilities, and thought "What if it was just one guy, and he could change the color of his suit, and thus change his abilities".

At the beginning of the game, you have no such special abilities, only a simple shot that fires straight forward. Originally, they had wanted Mega Man's default suit to be white, so that upon gathering more weapons, the changing suit color would be more striking. In order to collect the weapons, you must defeat one of the game's main six Robot Master bosses.

This is one of the core elements that has defined the Mega Man series even beyond the original "Classic" portion: once beyond the title screen the player is not dropped straight into a level, but instead is presented with a choice between six different levels, each with a unique boss that will give the player a unique weapon. These weapons will give the player an advantage against one of the other bosses, as well as often having some practical utility in the levels themselves.

In reading a translated interview with "A.K." on shmuplations.com I was honestly a bit surprised that the levels were in fact built more or less how Arin Hanson once described the level design in his "Sequelitis" video on Mega Man X. The goal of Akira Kitamura's design parameters were more or less this: introduce an element in a way that doesn't immediately threaten the player, but allows them to observe it, and once they understand the threat you can make the obstacles more actively dangerous.

One of the favorite ways of ramping up the difficulty was by reusing a piece of terrain that the player had already navigated, but placing more enemies around it, or keeping the enemies in similar positions, but making their surrounding environment more treacherous.

While this is theoretically a good way to build levels it isn't always how it happened in practice, and this is a significant problem in a game where any of six levels can be "level 1". The very first screen of Elecman's stage features a precision platforming challenge that, while pretty easy to brute force through, is very difficult to navigate without taking damage. Gutsman's stage features a level gimmick in the form of platforms which travel along a rail, and as it goes along it will run over gaps which will cause the platformer to tilt and drop an unattentive player. These platforms are without a doubt the peak of the level's difficulty, and they only appear at the very start. Iceman's stage marks the first time that one of the series' classic disappearing platform sections appears, and the floor beneath is being patrolled by a "spine" enemy, an immortal hazard; the new mechanic is introduced without giving the player a safe opportunity to observe.

One thing I do like is that this is one of (in my opinion) few Mega Man games where all of the boss weaknesses make enough logical sense that the average player could probably intuit which boss is weak to which weapon without a guide. Gutsman (the rock themed boss) is weak to Bombman's bombs, Gutsman's rock throwing ability beats Cutman's scissors, which in turn cut Elecman's cord.

Electricity is good against Ice, Ice is good against fire, which is interesting. This kind of abstract elemental advantage is ingrained enough in the popular understanding of video games, RPGs for example, that I buy it. What stands out to me is that in the later Mega Man Zero games, where there are no boss weapons and bosses are instead weak to one of these same three elements, it's the other way around. Fire is good against ice, ice is good against electricity, and to close the loop, electricity is good against fire.

Fire, of course, ignites Bombman's bombs.

I will be honest, I don't like the Robot Masters at all. I genuinely think the entire idea for these boss fights is flawed. When a typical fight begins, Mega Man and the enemy start on opposite corners of the arena. There are only two things that can happen, Mega Man and the enemy will attack each other with ranged weapons, or the boss will begin to approach Mega Man. Mega man, already being in the corner of the room, has only two options; meet the enemy in the center of the room, or stay in the corner. Either way, Mega Man and the enemy will almost without a doubt collide their bodies into one another, and when this happens the most obvious advantage that the bosses have makes itself apparent. Mega Man takes damage from the enemy's projectiles, the enemy takes damage from Mega Man's projectiles; Mega Man takes damage from coming into contact with the enemy, the enemy leaves unscathed.

On Miranda Paugh's fansite, "Mega Man Home Page", Bombman is recommended as the first boss that the player should fight, and looking at his movement patterns it's easy to see why. Bombman's patterns are marked by wide swooping jumps around the arena, jumps that give Mega Man enough time and space to find chances to walk beneath him. Most of the recommended first bosses of other classic series games (Metal Man in Mega Man 2 and Plant Man in Mega Man 6 to name a couple) have similar behavior.

Most other bosses boil down to a certain rhythm, the two characters oscillate back and forth, engaging in a periodic jousting match where only one combatant can ever win. Some battles, Elecman probably being the worst example, even start with Mega Man in the center of the arena instead of the edge, putting him even closer to the enemy than usual. There is rarely an effective way to avoid this uncomfortable mechanical intimacy (as in the X series which introduced wall-jumping for vertical options), nor an incentive for the player to want it (as in the Zero series which gives the player a powerful melee option). The Vile fight in the intro stage to Mega Man X is intentionally designed to make the player feel helpless, and its attack pattern really just an average Robot Master with infinite health.

The bosses being weak to particular weapons is only a band-aid fix for this poor design; many bosses are only ever unfairly difficult or are made trivially easy by their vulnerability to a particular type of projectile. Some people claim that the other subseries of Mega Man are more difficult, but I think that this is because later games have boss designs that expect you to learn them at all. In classic Mega Man, they knew most of these bosses were bullcrap, so they give you an easy way out (though it often feels like the only way out).

In his video "Action Button Reviews Doom", Tim Rogers makes the claim that Mega Man only has a gun because they couldn't make platforming fun enough on its own; I'm pretty sure he only meant this as a kind of game design based piece of observational humor, but it is nonetheless factually incorrect. Again I pull this from the interview I found on shmuplations: Akira Kitamura originally wanted to make something more akin to a shooting game, but Nobuyuki Matsushima's hit detection code was too slow for what the kind of game he had envisioned. They had to decrease the number of enemies on screen, and had to focus on other elements like platforming. With fewer sprites on screen, they were able to make Mega Man's appearance more detailed: Mega Man's armor and his exposed face are actually two separate sprites.

So, while what Tim Rogers said was missing the details, it was in some way spiritually correct. Mega Man is a game produced not from a well met creative intent, but from compromises working within the limitations of what this particular small team could do. What's frustrating, to me, is that Mega Man has been so endlessly iterated upon with these compromises intact, and many of the games which try to address these compromises fail to capture the same cultural sway as the original.

This, to me, is why the original Mega Man is important, not because it's a particularly good game. Honestly, it's probably bad enough that in another world I would be content to completely write it off. In some ways I do think that, given the limitations placed upon the team who made it, the fact that it turned out as good as it did is remarkable, I don't think those 7 people did "a bad job". What makes Mega Man for the NES important is that the problems which plague the series start here, they exist here as the compromised vision of a couple of guys who would only ever work on one more Mega Man game before handing it off to other creatives. Yet, even after changing hands, these compromises never really went challenged until the series exploded into spin offs, re-imaginings, and spiritual successors.

This is the first one, but you shouldn't start here, you should only come back here when you wonder where it went wrong.

Tetris 99, Mario 35, and Pac-man 99 are allowed to be openly disposable products and kind of bad games because they are just a novel way to play well-trodden entries in high profile series. We can safely assume that there is going to be some kind of new Tetris, Mario, or Pac-man. This treatment doesn't really work for F-Zero, and the idea that this game could be a way of gauging demand seems sort of absurd.

What makes this game "99" anyway? Tetris, Mario, and Pac-man have things like scoring systems and timers that could be used for competition, but the main conflict is between the player and the computer; in a race, the conflict is already against other racers, so what's so different about F-Zero 99? From a quick search it seems like real life racing competitions have at most 60 cars on the track, so 99 simultaneous competitors is a high amount but it's not a spectacular amount.

Tetris, Mario, and Pac-man aren't just solo games, they're solved games. Pac-man is basically completely deterministic, Mario has an ideal, computer-controlled playthrough that humans have nearly matched, and what randomness Tetris has is still completely manageable without altering the difficulty in other ways. Even in their 99 incarnations they're really still against the computer, the multiplayer element comes exclusively from tampering with other player's games, introducing more extreme randomness or at least semi-randomness, changing the solution or even making the game unsolvable.

A game like Mario Kart uses power-ups to introduce randomness, to make things easier for players who are doing worse, to make victory less guaranteed for skilled players. They do this in service of the game being a casual, "party" experience, so that the game can be a fun thing for a group of people in a room together who may not all be familiar with games. The power-ups more or less separated from the game's main mechanics; you race according to the course, power-ups are given at set positions on the course, the effects of these power-ups influence the race but your focus should always be on how you maneuver your car.

Even where F-Zero 99 is not strictly random, it has enough variables to be semi-random enough that it knows you won't win, and instead highlights a handful of players that you will be rewarded for beating. You have a boost but it doubles as health, depletes when you collide, and only refills in a specific place once per lap; there is nothing in the way of tactile engagement with the track or with your vessel's handling. F-Zero 99 knows that the tracks are crowded enough that you won't even really be "racing", some tracks even introduce wind for you to fight against. You spend most of your time avoiding other players while trying to collect gold particles that randomly fly off of colliding players to build a meter that lets you fly over the other racers for a little while.

Calling games "Skinner boxes" is sort of missing a lot of the point, an operant conditioning chamber can used in different ways, and different things were learned from those methods; the scary thing about them isn't so simple as "hit button, get treat", the scary thing about that is that if you only give treats after a random number of button presses then animals will just hit the button over and over. F-Zero 99 isn't just frustrating because it's a random mess and a lot of people will love it because "addictive" game design is something people see as desirable these days, it's frustrating because I thought F-Zero was something else.

Though, let's be honest, Nintendo didn't even make GX. If Nintendo actually did make a new, "real" F-Zero it probably wouldn't be as good as any of the other sci-fi racers that exist today.

Spark the Electric Jester 2 makes a mockery of the blue blur.

Sometimes a game feels like it's onto something, sometimes a game really gets it all right. Super Mario 64 got 3D platforming so right on the first try that Nintendo couldn't figure out how to improve on it and didn't really rediscover what made it so great until the past 5 years. Devil May Cry had a lot of trouble juggling its mechanical priorities and identity crises but the eventual result was the absolute apex of the character action genre. Typically, one would think that with enough iteration a game concept with a strong skeleton could be fleshed out into an ultimate expression of its particular mechanical form. And yet, the "Speed Platformer" has largely stagnated into cinematic fluff.

Sonic didn't have a rough transition into 3D, he had a rough transition into the real "Modern AAA" space; while I think the obsession with content-per-dollar is something that tends to be associated with online discourse from about a decade ago or so, the reality is that this was at least an implicit factor long before. On its initial release in Japan, Sonic Adventure was on store shelves right next to Ocarina of Time. A game like Sonic 3, where you could easily see the end credits in a couple hours, wasn't going to cut it anymore. Replaying stages couldn't be an activity that the player would be expected to do themselves, it had to be an explicit part of the game's design. 3D Sonic had to add hub worlds, side-quests, multiple characters, branching stories, alternate types of gameplay, melee combat, and all sorts of other distractions to make sure that the game was big enough to justify its price tag next to the competition.

Somewhere in all this, the core platforming was all but forgotten. Even a "good" modern 3D Sonic game like Colors alternates between 3D levels that practically play themselves and 2.5D levels that feel about as good as browser games from the same year. Even my personal favorite, the original Sonic Adventure, lost its focus on movement. From the beginning to the present, so many of 3D Sonic's set-pieces rarely expect the player to do anything other than hold forward, and often punish the player for trying anything else. Fan projects have offered alternate translations to 3D, or simple tests and demonstrations, but nobody until now has really built something truly great and complete on the solid foundation left in the initial move to 3D.

Spark the Electric Jester 2 doesn't just feel like the best execution of this core game concept yet, it feels like the beginning of a second "Golden Age" of video games. In the early 00's, 3D development was sophisticated, but in the absence of later high definition displays, fidelity wasn't a priority and all kinds of corners could be cut because through a composite signal on a 20 inch CRT who was going to care? 2D games had been around for decades and just generally speaking the process of game development was well-understood and relatively inexpensive in terms of both money and time. You could have a weird, experimental take on a franchise like Mega Man Battle Network, and it would get 5 sequels on a single platform. Xenosaga was such a flop that it will probably never be re-released let alone remastered or remade, and it still got 2 sequels. Until HD game development changed everything, we had this little pocket of time when games were worth taking substantial creative risks on, because the losses wouldn't be multi-million dollar disasters.

Today, the tools of game development are so sophisticated that a tiny team of passionate and dedicated fans can put decades of corporate projects to shame. While the trade-off is obviously that these tools also enable the kinds of cynical cash-grabs we see on every digital storefront, powerful hardware and software is so accessible and intuitive now that we really don't need to (and often simply can not) rely on massive franchises to deliver this kind of quality.

The first time that I got on a loop-de-loop my jaw dropped. I actually had to correct my angle to match the twisting turn myself, I could feel the deceleration as I hit the peak, and I could feel gravity kick in on my way back down. Set-pieces in Spark 2 aren't just static, scripted events, they're just part of the environment like anything else. The fastest way through a loop-de-loop is usually just to jump over to the track on the other side. The quickest way through levels is often to circumvent the set-pieces with clever "Jester Dashes". While some of the 3D Sonic games also had these kinds of shortcuts it has literally never felt like an intentional part of the game; it always requires either such precise inputs or such unnatural angles that I've never felt like I was really "learning the levels" or getting better at controlling the character the way I do in Spark.

Spark 2 has an absolutely unforgettable soundtrack, absolutely rivaling the historical platforming greats from major publishers. Not just in terms of the absolutely unbelievable level themes, the vocal tracks used for bosses capture the energy and purpose of Sonic's Crush 40 "butt rock" absolutely perfectly. The visuals, especially the characters, may not hold a technical candle to modern big-budget titles, but in gameplay they're more than serviceable; it's one of those things where even if the cutscenes don't look great, I have to ask myself, if a game from a popular IP looked and played like this, could I forgive a shortcoming like this? In every case with Spark 2, the answer is yes.

This isn't just "Not Sonic", this isn't even Spark. In this game you play as Fark, a fake Spark, a copy of a copy. It's only the second installment of the series and they've already done a soft-reboot. On one hand, for those who wanted to see the concepts from the original 2D Spark game translated to 3D, here it is, bigger and better than ever. On the other hand, for those who just want to get to the gameplay, this repeated narrative can be easily ignored, and that's one of the strangest things about Spark 2: it's a game with so many strengths, and yet to some extent it feels less like a proper sequel, and more like a proof of concept for the next game, the real sequel, where Spark himself is coming back and everything.

I'll never turn down another opportunity to spark it up.

I've played a good bit of Mega Man 3 throughout the years. I played through this game on a Samsung Juke cellphone. Even on more ergonomic platforms it's always been a bit strange to me that this is generally considered tied with Mega Man 2 as possibly the best in the series.

There are some nice tunes here, most of the soundtrack is catchy at least, but in general I find the sound design more blaring, ear piercing. Most of the soundtrack feels more rhythmically frantic, more mechanical than previous entries; many songs sound to me like rejected versions of the Mortal Kombat theme.

Visually it's as good as ever, I genuinely wonder how exactly they did some of the effects in this game given the hardware (not in the sense that they seem "impossible", just unusual enough to be of interest). The wriggling serpents of Snake Man's stage whose segmented bodies make up the shifting terrain, the countless tiny eggs of Gemini Man's stage which each hatch into a tiny tadpole.

The major gameplay addition is the ability for Mega Man to do a sliding maneuver. Something that's always frustrated me is the sheer number of critics who seem to bring up Mega Man's inability to duck at any chance they get, which is annoying for a number of reasons, but chiefly here is the fact that the slide accomplishes the same purpose as ducking in a more interesting way. The amount of vertical space the character takes up is reduced, but only for a moment, and it comes with a required horizontal motion. The slide does have somewhat limited practical use, the most obvious situations for it are portions where the player must slide under low ceilings, and a couple of the non-Robot Master boss fights.

Break Man/Proto Man in particular is perhaps the most boring, though he seems to mostly exist purely as a skill check to see if the player understands the dash. The Yellow Devil fight in this game actually seems possible, due to the fact that the second from the bottom row of his blocks no longer have to be narrowly leapt over.

The stages themselves aren't anything worth complaining too much about but the bosses are odd. This game starts a trend that more or less continues throughout the rest of the Classic and X series of Mega Man games: almost none of the Robot Master weaknesses are things that the player could naturally infer, it's now pure trial and error unless you look up a guide. After beating the main 8 stages you have to go through 4 remixes of those levels and fight 8 visually identical bosses that all use movesets of Mega Man 2 bosses. Naturally, figuring out the weaknesses of these bosses is even stranger.

The platforms items from the previous games have been replaced by Rush Coil, Jet, and Marine. Rush coil is fine enough, a situational high bounce with limited use. Jet and Marine are terribly uninteresting. Marine is only useful, or even required, in a couple of areas. Jet literally just lets the player fly around whichever way they please. Between this change and the generally less impressive Robot Master weapons, there doesn't really feel like any reason to experiment; every tool you are given has a more clear time and place than in the second game.

The main factor that I think makes or breaks this game is whether or not a person appreciates the sort of philosophical shift that happened in the creation of this game, namely the fact that much of the Mega Man 1/2 team (including the original designer) did not work on this game. With the original Mega Man, Akira Kitamura practiced some restraint, doing the math to find what length the levels had to be so that an experienced player could play through the game in about an hour. Mega Man 2 was a bit longer, Mega Man 3 is nearly twice as long as the first game, and about a quarter of that length is recycled padding. In short, Mega Man 3 seems to have recontextualized the idea of a Mega Man sequel as less of a refinement, and more as simple iterative content.

I could only see this game as Mega Man 2's equal if one holds quantity in as high regard as quality.

90% of what I would way about this game I already said in my review of the second one. In some ways I prefer how concise the previous game is, but this is just plain unreal. It's more polished, encourages more varied styles of platform gameplay, has a more coherent story that's genuinely gripping by the end. I could nitpick about minor gripes I have with small changes made from the previous one, the same way I could with a 3D Mario game, but at the end of the day 3D Spark has some of the best 3D platforming mechanics that exist, and this is more of it.

I'm usually pretty cynical but a few games this year have made me feel ways that games haven't made me feel in quite a while. A very exciting time. You absolutely cannot miss this.

It's Strange World: Gunman's Proof is a cowboys and aliens themed Legend of Zelda clone with Smash TV combat, Contra weapon power-ups, and a treasure collecting score system straight out Kirby Super Star's The Great Cave Offensive.

The game is extremely easy, not only because of how frequently it doles out new abilities and permanent upgrades to your base equipment, but also because almost none of the enemies can shoot diagonally. The few enemies that do shoot diagonally can't really aim, they just fire in random directions (or all directions at once). The player, on the other hand, can shoot diagonally while moving, and pretty much nothing in the game really knows how to react to this. From start to finish, this is the winning technique. Though I will say, even if the game is consistently not much of a challenge, it is also consistently quite fun.

The soundtrack is fantastic. The village theme (which will greet you at the start of each play session) is chill, whistling elevator music. The overworld themes serve as excellent background for galloping across the landscape, and the theme that plays while you ride your donkey is joyful without being overly bombastic. The dramatic theme that plays during certain cutscenes carries all the weight of more classic themes from the game's contemporaries.

The game's characters, in terms of animation and dialogue, are charming in a way similar to Earthbound. The main character is basically the town failson until he's possessed by an alien at the start of the game, becoming the only fighter in town competent enough to face the Demiseeds. By around the halfway mark of the game, some of the townspeople start to wonder if something's the matter with you, while your dad (who kicks you out of the house at the start of the game) claims to have always known you were destined for greatness. The main character is extremely well animated, with smooth animations for 8-direction walking, shooting, crawling, punching, not to mention all of the little poses he does when finding treasure or interacting with other characters.

I'm gonna talk about the racism.

So, a lot of the enemies in Gunman's Proof are typical video game fare, giant bugs, slime monsters, etc. But a common enemy, probably the first one that the player will see, is basically a cowboy golliwog. Now, in this wild west themed island setting, the heroes are obviously colonial settlers. The enemies are the native people and wildlife of this "new" land, and killing them is justified by the fact that they are all possessed by a space alien. Yet, in order to defeat them, the hero too must carry this same otherworldly spirit.

The townspeople are obviously an invading force, but they project their alien nature onto those who were there before them. It's a strange world, but it can be made normal. In the end, with the alien defeated, so too can the alien be expelled from our hero's body, and everything will retvrn to the way it ought to be.

When you defeat an insect in this game, you don't kill it. It just turns back into a normal insect.

When you defeat a late-game boss consisting of two twin sisters, they don't die, they regain consciousness and remark on how exotic their attire is.

When you defeat a wild west Mr. Popo, nothing remains.

It sucks. It's a pretty substantial blemish on an otherwise really charming game.

Gunman's Proof is a fairly short game, if you want it to be. You can beat it in a couple hours or so. I would recommend taking it slow, play one or two dungeons each session. Talk to all the NPCs, they usually have something new to say. Explore around and find any health upgrades or new moves you might have missed.

It's speculated that the reason this game is as short as it is, is because it wasn't really finished. It was the last game developed by Lenar, and it doesn't even have an end credits sequence, nor could I find that information online. If you try to open a chest while riding your donkey, you get a text box that specifically says

"You can't open chests while riding Robaton. We're real sorry, honest."

Edit: 3/16/24

I do think perhaps as others have pointed out that the racist aspects of the game are sort of blown out of of proportion in discussion of it, and I want to make it clear that in accusing the game of having racist imagery or colonialist themes that I don't think the game is truly worth condemning or erasing. This review was originally written as a sort of companion piece to a review of Resident Evil 5 that I never finished because I never finished playing the game either, because that game isn't very good. The point though, was that Resident Evil 5 is, perhaps on accident, a very valuable work of fiction in the same way that something like those WWII era cartoons. It shows the exact kind of post-9/11 hysteria that was going on in the minds of most of the first world at the time, and the virus and bioweapons serve as an effective symbol of how wartime propaganda is used to paint civilians as equivalent to combatants. In the same way, I think a game that makes the undertones of games that encourage the player to plunder and conquer a space in the name of ousting an outsider more literal and surface level is interesting. Plus, even if we assume that those pixels on the screen aren't meant to have a golliwog-esque appearance, it's not like such images were unheard of in Japanese games from this time, and it's not unreasonable to assume that's what your looking at.