Of course it's Joust with balloons, but almost every arcade game from the era was riffing on some year-old idea. However, here we have a greater reliance on proper physics-based momentum, a notable feat for the time.

Sure, it's not something you could play for more than fifteen minutes per sitting, but similarly to all the greatest arcade games, Balloon Fight manages to squeeze tons of tiny moments of tension alongside satisfying small victories. Just within a single round there's plenty to both laugh about and agonize over.

I'm kinda shocked how easy this game is in comparison to Dragon's Lair I and II. Legitimately I'd suggest everyone to play this game in Ace mode if you can as any lower cuts some actions scenes and they are just too nice to miss. It's not as good with sequences as Time Warp is, but you also don't need to collect anything either so it makes for a rather simple game you can enjoy and not stress about. Sadly I don't think we'll ever get another Space Ace or Dan Bluth game for that matter, but these were a ride to playthrough, and I'd suggest anyone to play Time Warp or Space Ace as they are both good games (as long as you know where to get the treasures in Time Warp). The original Dragon's Lair is still pretty bad, but it at least paved way for these two gems.

Even people who enjoy playing old games can be guilty of looking at them patronizingly, like they’re just cave paintings that formed the basis of the renaissance art which deserves the real analysis. However, as a programmer and a games analyst, I wanted to highlight the amount of work that went into designing these seemingly primitive games, and what better way is there to do so than looking at decompiled source code. Specifically, this will be the code at the heart of Donkey Kong’s difficulty: the movement of the barrels.

If you haven’t played Donkey Kong before, you might be wondering what makes barrels rolling down slopes so difficult. They all go at the same speed, they’re the same size, and there isn’t a restrictive timer that forces you into hasty mistakes. However, sometimes they go straight down the ladders between each of the slopes, and this is what makes the game so tricky. Ladders are incredibly useful, letting you quickly reach the next level and reliably dodge barrels underneath you, but the slow climbing speed and potential for getting hit by a falling barrel leads to a lot of quick decision making at each ladder. At first, it may seem like the falling is entirely random, but here’s the exact logic of how it works:

(Decompiled and commented by Don Hodges. If you've never seen Assembly code before, yes, it really is this nightmarish)
2178 3A4863 LD A,(#6348) ; get status of the oil can fire
217B A7 AND A ; is the fire lit ?
217C CAB221 JP Z,#21B2 ; no, always take ladders before oil is lit
217F 3A0562 LD A,(#6205) ; else load A with Mario's Y position + 5
2182 D604 SUB #04 ; subtract 4
2184 BA CP D ; is the barrel already below or same level as Mario ?
2185 D8 RET C ; yes, return without taking ladder
2186 3A8063 LD A,(#6380) ; else load A with difficulty from 1 to 5.
2189 1F RRA ; divide by 2, result can be 0, 1, or 2
218A 3C INC A ; increment. result is now 1, 2, or 3
218B 47 LD B,A ; store into B
218C 3A1860 LD A,(#6018) ; load A with random timer
218F 4F LD C,A ; store into C for later use
2190 E603 AND #03 ; mask bits. result now random number between 0 and 3
2192 B8 CP B ; is it greater than modified difficulty?
2193 D0 RET NC ; yes, return without taking ladder
2194 211060 LD HL,#6010 ; else load HL with player input.
2197 3A0362 LD A,(#6203) ; load A with Mario's X position
219A BB CP E ; compare with barrel's X position
219B CAB221 JP Z,#21B2 ; if equal, then go down ladder
219E D2A921 JP NC,#21A9 ; if barrel is to right of Mario, check for moving to left
21A1 CB46 BIT 0,(HL) ; else is Mario trying to move right ?
21A3 CAAE21 JP Z,#21AE ; no, skip ahead
21A6 C3B221 JP #21B2 ; yes, make barrel take ladder
21A9 CB4E BIT 1,(HL) ; is Mario trying to move left ?
21AB C2B221 JP NZ,#21B2 ; yes, make barrel take ladder
21AE 79 LD A,C ; else load A with random timer computed above
21AF E618 AND #18 ; mask with #18. 25% chance of being zero
21B1 C0 RET NZ ; if not zero, return without taking ladder
21B2 DD3407 INC (IX+#07) ; else increase barrel animation
21B5 DDCB02C6 SET 0,(IX+#02) ; set barrel to take the ladder
21B9 C9 RET ; return

The line that may stand out is the “load A with difficulty 1 to 5” command, when the game never explicitly states a difficulty level. This is a value hidden from the player that simply increments every thirty-three seconds, or when the player reaches a new level number that’s higher than the difficulty value. To oversimplify the minutiae of the exact math, this is used for comparison with a random number between zero and three to decide if the barrel goes down the ladder. For the player, this means that on the lowest difficulty (the first thirty-three seconds of level one), barrels go down the ladder 25% of the time, but this increases by 25% either when thirty-three more seconds pass or the player goes to the next level before such an increase, until it reaches a maximum of 75%. However, there are two cases where barrels will always choose to use the ladder, either when Mario is directly underneath the barrel, or when Mario is actively moving towards a barrel that's going the same way.

So, the question now is why Nintendo bothered to put so much detail into something people could easily dismiss as token-taking randomness. The reason is a concept that anyone who does a lot of cooking understands well: that just because something can’t be consciously detected, doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to the experience. The best example might be how barrels moving in the same direction you’re walking towards will always go down the ladder. That might not be a rule you’re directly conscious of, but it ensures that thoughtlessly walking towards a ladder will always result in punishment. Similarly, barrels always dropping on top of you if you’re on the ladder itself forces you to be mindful of where you stand, and not use them as a safe zone. Players begin to understand these mechanics implicitly, and this mix of reliability and randomness creates difficulty in a way that makes the game more tense even without a change in the player’s control. Consider the alternative methods of raising the difficulty: boosting the speed of the barrels would make them harder to react to, but easier to jump over, and slower barrels would have the opposite effect, making the difficulty adjustment more of a lateral shift than a direct increase. Throwing more obstacles could lead to cases where barrels clump up and become impossible to jump over, and randomly mixing up fast and slow barrels could cause the same issue.

Despite how this barrel logic is just a small part of the game, considering its implications reveals just how thoughtfully it was designed. Randomness is an easy way to make games harder, but when coupled with the deterministic rules which enforce proper play, players will never fail directly due to the randomness itself. Few games handle randomness and difficulty as cleanly as this, even forty years after the fact. It’s a reminder to take even the oldest, most seemingly primitive games seriously, and that there’s always something left to be learned, especially from the ultimate classics.

Hey, Animal Crossing, its been a while.

I know I don't play you often anymore; nevertheless, the 80 or so hours you entertained and immersed me during the beginning of the pandemic will never be forgotten.

Sincerely, thank you. Never in my life has such a game come out at just the perfect time. This rating is biased in no short reason due to the external factors at the time, but I could not possible possess less regret.

(spoiler drop at the end of the review)
Ambitious as it is messy, Apollo Justice is an interesting hodgepodge next entry in the series. It was a super pleasant ride for the good majority of it, but ultimately led to more frustration than I ever could've expected.

To start things positively, there's the general case mystery structure. Other than really 4-2, case mysteries are superwell structured in terms of the 'how' and 'why', with genuinely more grounded murders all wrapped in a different but welcome new tone. The pacing of it all tends to wobble between awful and bearable, but I still had an excellent experience putting the pieces together in something like 4-3.

The new characters range from completely new different types of cardboard to stare at like Apollo and Skye, to more interesting well developed characters, like the magicians, the Gavinners, and Trucy. They overall all feel very fresh and their own thematic struggles with the law and truth were interesting.

This does not extend to the massive elephant in the room. I can appreciate the outer workings and surface level wonders AJ pulls for a good amount of time, but there is something that needs to be addressed. Apollo Justice follows Trials and Tribulations with having a slowly moving and opened up puzzle box that reveals connections between cases that were always there that you can slowly pick up on and piece together.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Just kidding, Phoenix fucking Wright is here to tell you that he actually 5headed the entire game from day 1, and that you're literally on the coattails for him metanarratively pulling all the strings just so he can get revenge on this one dude in the most epic cucking ever staged. Words do not begin to describe the amount of frustration the final case for me was just to see all of the interesting thematic threads be tied to the dumbest character story I've seen thus far. Phoenix Wright actually brings down the entire game with his inclusion and having the whole story revolve around him. Fuck him, he was always cardboard in the previous games anyway and yet they somehow dropped the ball at even making his new struggle interesting.

Overall, despite my ridiculously jaded final impressions, I'd still recommend playing AA4 to an extent if you liked all the games previous. But you better be prepared for when it trips over the finish line and lands on its face.