Pretty good erotic pixel art under a tissue paper-thin veil of gameplay that is outclassed by nearly the entire X68000 library. You walk forward in a straight line, enemies spawn in abundance in front of and behind you, you punch or kick them, repeat until you get to a boss. The grotesque disfigurements of these putty women in the core game belie the print materials and slideshow rewards for beating a stage. Though ostensibly these are lesbian displays of lewdness, they cater to the male gaze with laser precision with both parties taking on stances of submission and presentation towards the camera.

Not that this a-phallic focus is of any surprise. Published under the Technopolis Soft label, a software imprint of Tokuma Shoten's Technopolis magazine, this material reflects the contents of this and other Japanese PC enthusiast magazines of the 80s and 90s. Whether it's Technopolis, POPCOM, LOGiN, these magazines and their ilk catered to an overwhelmingly male readership. Entire sections of these and other magazines were devoted to eroge, gravure photoshoots, and erotic manga. In Guerrière Lyewärd, as in Technopolis itself, lesbian imagery is not on display as a means of some liberation for repressed women loving women in Japan, but a fetishistic object for heterosexual consumption. These women are crazed nymphomaniacs in need of a satiation which never comes.

Pornography aside, this is one of the shallowest eroge I've ever played, both in terms of erotic content and the gameplay itself. I thought maybe it was a type-in game, or a pack-in from a Technopolis appendix. No! It physically released! It cost 6800円! That's around $110USD today! That's like $5 for every 'lewd' image, goddamn!!!

Despite its obtuse nature and rough edges, Lack of Love is a game that I think everyone should try at least once in their life.

Lack of Love is universal minimalist storytelling at its finest. Without any words, it conveys a beautiful story that captures the essence of life through its mechanics and striking imagery.

The world is frustrating, unforgiving and cruel. It never truly makes sense beyond its primitive, biological foundation. Despite it all, we grow and change through learning to understand said world and its inhabitants. Love is the key to this. The compassion we have for one another is what keeps it going. It's what keeps us all going.

The L.O.L. project demonstrates that without love, the world is an artificial paradise devoid of meaning and dignity. It's because of this that the project is a failure, and that the world as we knew it continues to live on.

After all, to live is to love.

possibly the most dreamcast-esque title to end up on the xbox, specifically in that bizarre control scheme. left trigger jump, right trigger shoot, different weapons mapped to the different face buttons (except for A, which goes conspicously unused), tank controls on left stick, inverted constrained camera on right stick, and boosting on the left stick button. there's a little bit of "you'll get used to it," but man is it a completely asinine control scheme that both simultaneously wastes valuable controller space and feels clunky up through the end game. an action TPS without strafing is already difficult enough, and somehow they managed to bungle it even more by tying so many necessary actions to stick buttons (the tank controls are not terrible on their own but still awkward). the mercury crash move required for the final boss (which requires both aiming yourself as a projectile in 3D and clicking both sticks in simultaneously while already in the air) is truly where I snapped on this.

it's a real shame too, because the boost mechanics are genuinely interesting and add some much needed flavor to an otherwise bland experience. while moving vertically expends fuel, boosting in the x-y plane is virtually free for the initial portion, and the game encourages you to spam alternating boosts to charge your special gauge and power up your weapons. the sense of speed you get from drifting across rocks like they're ice or flying across a giant map in seconds is absolutely the crux of this experience as a whole, and it's relatively glitch-free to boot. it's unfortunate that most of the platforming requires expending most of the fuel slowly flying up to reach platforms that seem placed to frustrate players getting used to the odd controls. it also does not help that stopping mid-boost requires snapping back on the analog stick, which often does not register properly resulting in either a full-speed fall or a misaligned hover.

the actual shooting mechanics are relatively downplayed thanks to there being only two guns, infinite ammo, and more than a smidge of auto-aim. most of the actual gameplay instead consists of panning the limited camera around waiting for a target enemy out of range to finally snag on your lock-on since around half of the missions consist only of clearing out all enemies in an area. the other ones generally just involve reaching a destination or defeating a mini-boss, which makes even bothering to fight basic enemies pointless. even with the game's extremely short runtime there's quite a bit of level reuse over the 14 missions, and the first two bosses also get reused multiple times each. thankfully for the most part of the bosses are manageable (outside of the final boss) but given the total lack of circle strafing I would hesitate to call them "fun" per se.

thinly layered on top of all of this is a rather odd story that mixes body horror and steampunk on the surface of an alien planet; at least, this is what I gathered from the optional in-game lore, which is entirely text-only and does not really make its way into the story. the off-screen villain dr. hubble seems legitimately unnerving and disturbed from the documents he leaves behind, but since he's never seen - beyond some bizarre infant creations that would make drakengard blush - I couldn't tell you one way or the other how effective he is as an antagonist. the game stirs up some pawed-at philosophy bits with a sort of mysticism DNA splicing thing, but it's so poorly integrated with the gameplay that to even dissect it seems not worth the trouble. all of the mutated colonists you kill ad nauseum throughout the story are somehow turned back to their normal selves in the end, and I get the feeling that most of the swarms of arachnid-adjacent monsters you take on are just random aliens unmentioned by the game's narrative anyway. and no, even by the end I didn't understand why there was a whale in the gunvalkyrie logo.

if anything this game feels extremely rushed, likely because of the mid-stream development shift to the xbox. it does make me wonder how the dreamcast would have handled the game's expansive level geometry (which I might add has the interesting functionality of having scalable area walls at points, though this is extremely poorly managed by the game's physics engine, which already struggles enough with moving the player up slopes) but then again the dreamcast did not have click-in sticks so I imagine earlier prototypes played significantly differently regardless. at best this game is a brainless shooter with mildly interesting traversal features, and at its worst it frustrates the player or forces them to wade through filler that really does not belong in a game this slight. so many levels on which I considered abandoning the game altogether, although I suppose I'm glad I waited it out.

For the people, it was just another exhilarating day, punching and rocketing through a deformed, deranged B-movie. For a decorated Pangea Software, this was maybe their most passionate, prestigious creation. Brian Greenstone and his frequent co-developers had the notion to refine their previous Macintosh action platformers, Nanosaur and Bugdom, into nostalgia for cheesy, laughable Hollywood science fantasy films. As the 2000s got started, this studio wasn't as pressured to prove the PowerPC Mac's polygonal potential, but Otto Matic still fits in with its other pack-in game brethren. All that's changed is Greenstone's attention to detail and playability, previously more of a secondary concern. This Flash Gordon reel gone wrong doesn't deviate from the collect-a-thon adventure template of its predecessors, yet it delivers on the promises they'd made but couldn't quite realize. Greenstone had finally delivered; the eponymous hero had arrived in both style and substance.

Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincial UFO bait humans awaiting doom, and this dorky but capable android who kind of resembles Rayman. Start a new game and you're greeted with something rather familiar, yet different: simple keyboard-mouse controls, hostages to rescue, plentiful cartoon violence, and a designer's mean streak hiding in plain sight. The delight's in the details, as Otto has an assortment of weapons and power-ups with which to defeat the alien invaders and warp these humans to safety. It's just as likely you'll fall into a puddle and short-circuit, though, or mistime a long distance jump-jet only to fall into an abyss. What I really liked in even the earliest Pangea soft I've tried, Mighty Mike, is this disarming aesthetic tied closely with such dangers. I hesitate to claim this mix of Ed Wood, Forbidden Planet, and '90s mascot platformers will appeal to everyone (some find it disturbing, let alone off-putting), but it's far from forgettable in a sea of similar titles. It helps that the modern open-source port's as usable as others.

The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.

So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!

Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.

Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.

I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.

And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.

Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.

Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.

The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023

As soon as I started playing I was in love with the music and aesthetics, it has a really nice vibe going!
It didn't stop there though, the story is really enjoyable and pretty fun to see play out, the 'collage' theme becomes more apparent as it unfolds. It is about the connections between the characters, about how everyone can have a positive impact on each other and how we can accomplish greater things when we join forces and support each other.
The way every part relates to the others is amazing! I think it really got what it was going for!

This may be a weird thing to say but if you are a persona fan for the right reasons you may like it.

Making cartridge games in the pre-Famicom years posed a dilemma: they couldn't store much game without costing customers and manufacturers out the butt. It's no surprise that Nintendo later made their own disk add-on, among others, in order to distribute cheaper, larger software. All the excess cart inventory that flooded North American console markets, thus precipitating the region's early-'80s crash, finally got discounted to rates we'd expect today. And it's in that period of decline where something like Miner 2049er would have appealed to Atari PC owners normally priced out of cart games.

This 16K double-board release promised 10 levels of arcade-y, highly replayable platform adventuring, among other items of praise littering the pages of newsletters and magazines. Just one problem: it's a poor mash-up of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and other better cabinet faire you'd lose less quarters from and enjoy more. This was the same year one could find awesome, innovative experiences like Moon Patrol down at the bar or civic center, let alone Activision's Pitfall and other tech-pushing Atari VCS works. Hell, I'd rather deal with all the exhausting RNG-laden dungeons of Castle Wolfenstein right now than bother with a jack of all trades + master of none such as this.

I don't mean to bag on Bill Hogue's 1982 work that much, knowing the trials and tribulations of bedroom coding in those days. He'd made a modest living off many TRS-80 clones of arcade staples, only having to make this once Radio Shack/Tandy discontinued that platform. His studio Big Five debuted on Apple II & Atari 800 with this unwieldy thing, so large they couldn't smush it into the standard cartridge size of the latter machine. Contrast this with David Crane's masterful compression of Pitfall into just 4 kiloybytes, a quarter as big yet much more enjoyable a play. Surely all these unique stages in Miner 2049er would have given it the edge on other primordial platformers, right? That's what I hoped for going in, not that I expected anything amazing. To my disappointment, its mechanics, progression, and overall game-feel just seems diluted to the point of disrespecting its inspirations.

The premise doesn't make a great impression: rather than reaching an apex or collecting an item quota to clear the stage, you must walk across each and every colorable tile to proceed. Anyone who's played Crush Roller or that stamp minigame in Mario Party 4 (among other odd examples) should recognize this. The only bits of land you need not worry about are elevator/teleporter floors and ladders, but the game requires you to complete a tour of everything else. In addition to padding out my playthrough without much sense of accomplishment, this also let me spend more time with Miner 2049er's platforming physics. And the verdict is they're not good. Falling for even a couple seconds kills you, and a lack of air control means mistimed jumps are fatal. The way jumps carry more horizontal inertia than vertical always throws me off a bit, too. Folks love to complain about a lack of agility or failure avoidance in something like Spelunker, but that game and Donkey Kong at least feel more intuitive and consistent than this.

It wouldn't be so bad if the level designs weren't also full of one-hit-kill monsters and platforms with only the slightest elevation differences. The maze game influences come in strong with this game's enemies, which you can remove from the equation by grabbing bonus items, usually shovels or pickaxes and the like. Managing the critters' patterns, your available route(s), and proximity to these power-ups becomes more important the further in you get. But I rarely if ever felt satisfied by this game loop; the flatter, more fluid and tactical plane of action in Pac-Man et al. works way better. Combine all this with getting undone by the least expected missed jump, or running out of invincibility time right before touching a mook, and there's just more frustration than gratification.

Now it's far from an awful time, as the game hands you multiple lives and extends in case anything bad happens. The game occasionally exudes this charming, irreverent attitude towards Nintendo's precursor and the absurdity of this miner's predicament. Mediocrity wasn't as much of a sin back then, especially not when developers are trying to imitate and expand on new ideas. But I think Miner 2049er is a telltale case of how back-of-the-box features can't compensate for lack of polish or substance. For example, it took less than a year for Doug Smith's Lode Runner to do everything here way better, combining Donkey Kong & Heiankyo Alien with other osmotic influences to make a timeless puzzle platformer. The arcade adventure-platformer took on a distinct identity with Matthew Smith's Manic Miner, part of the European/UK PC game pantheon and itself born from the Trash 80's legacy. One could charitably claims that this pre-crash title never aspired to those competitors' ambitions, that it finds refuge in elegance or something. I wish I could agree, especially given its popularity and number of ports over the decade. All I know is this one ain't got a level editor, or subtle anti-Tory/-Thatcher political commentary. The only identity I can, erm, identify is that silly box art of the shaggy prospector and bovine buddy.

Give this a shot if you appreciate the history and context behind it, or just want something distinctly proto-shareware. I just can't muster much enthusiasm for a game this subpar and oddly mundane, both now and then. None of the conversions and remakes seem all that special either, though props to Epoch for bringing it to the Super Cassette Vision in '85. By the time this could have made a grand comeback on handhelds, Boulder Dash and other spelunking sorties basically obsoleted it. Minor 2049er indeed.

Ugh this is gonna be one of those reviews where I'm going to be so cringy about my experience with the game. I really apologize in advance if anyone reads this. This was a really good experience for myself and right now I'm very happy to have played it.

So short little story here, similar to Castlevania Portrait of Ruin, I was always hoping to find a used copy of this game. I thought the cover looked cute but sadly never saw one at a store used but now that I've played it I can say now I really wish I could have played it sooner.

So this is a dating simulator with a rhythm game put into the story as well. You play as a normal girl who you can name and you switch roles with the princess from an alternate world who happens to have the same name and looks as you. The princes you meet are also guys that are similar to your world counterparts. It's up to you to decide who you fall in love with and become dance partners with.

I won't lie I don't really play many in this genre mostly because idk maybe I think I wouldn't enjoy them. I can't deny putting myself in the role of the character definitely made the journey all the more special for me. The dialogue is nothing amazing or anything but I really did like speaking them like I was there. It put me in a reality different from the one I'm in.

The rhythm stuff is neat but it's nothing outstanding but I enjoy it and a lot of the music is like classic stuff. Stuff you would hear irl. It's even got that one song people associate with Spider-Man 2 on stuff like PS2. I swear I've heard that song in other games too idk how it keeps showing up. I do feel like the touch screen makes it a bit iffy if you want a perfect score but you'll never feel screwed over from at least never getting a bad.

Honestly the only real gripe I have with this game is that some of the dialogue can get repetitive when exploring the world which can kind of hurt the immersion and oddly there is incorrect grammar in the US version which confuses me. It rarely happens but I'm surprised it wasn't caught during testing.

The game graphically isn't anything too special but I do like the dances attributed to each song. I also like the magical girl cutscenes for any accessory you try on. Since this is the DS, the models aren't too great but they aren't too bad either. The 2D art is rather cute too, I especially like the girl you play as for the art. She's just super cute! The music for outside of the rhythm stuff is servicable but I will say the constant voices for getting a good combo could annoy people but it never annoyed me personally.

Still kind of just amazed how much I really enjoyed the experience. I think one of the things that made me really smile is late into the game you can get an angel ring item and have an angel outfit for the dances, it's just like wow it fits me so well considering my name and stuff. There's a lot of replayability here but I sadly got other games to get through but I'll be sure to play it every year because I just love being a Princess. I could end this review saying something funny or maybe showing the awful PAL cover but umm yeah it really was a great experience for me personally. Certainly one of the biggest surprises this year for a game. An experience I'll never forget and I always love those kind when looking back. Sorry I'm just so full of joy rn I'll end the review now. Bye bye!

A hyperlinking manifesto for the funny lil' guy in all of us. You exit that clean Mac OS desktop and meet the eponymous object, framed like a Mayan calendar in all its majesty. Then the camera snaps to a more bizarre scene, a fantastically mundane fire hydrant separate from the hatch. Futzing with it either spews water from the spout or invites you to "Touch Me!", upon which begins an adventure in juxtaposition that would make Carroll proud. It's a non-Euclidean, all-inclusive sojourn into an information age lucid dream, a palate cleanser for our inner child, that most surreal utopia.

It can't be understated just how much Bill Atkinson's 1987 invention of HyperCard (and its scripting language, HyperTalk) democratized multimedia software creation. That's a lot of words to say that Rand & Robyn Miller never would made Cyan Worlds the atelier it is today without such a simple but feature-rich engine like this. And they were far from the first to start probing HyperCard's potential. Earlier digital storybooks, like '87's Inigo Gets Out, showed how you could make a simple but amusing story from postcards and duct tape. This software suit did for collages, graphic adventures, and even more real-time games what The Quill had for text adventures, or Pinball Construction Kit for that genre. We know The Manhole today both for its connection to later masterworks like Riven, but it matters more to me as an ambassador for so many ambitious HyperCard works made up to the advent of Mac OS X. Together with the puzzle-oriented, point-and-click paradigm first codified in Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion a year before, Rand & Robyn's earliest title pushed the medium in new directions.

One could look at this short trip and call it slight or too tedious for what unique content's actually included. It's true you spend a lot of time waiting through laborious scene transitions, a compromise worth making at the time. Not only was HyperCard generally not the fastest or most efficient way to make a Mac game (though certainly the easiest), but all the cool animations and sounds the Miller brothers packed in here slow the pacing down further. I'd argue this gives ample time for reflection on the things you've just encountered, however—let alone how they all connect together. From the start, the Millers had their own predilection towards meditation, with a world that beckons your attention but doesn't demand concentration.

The Manhole feels like a dérive, an anarchic dive through unexpected portals to events and characters both showy and quaint. First comes the beanstalk, casting aside the concrete status of the titular object in favor of the unknown. Climbing up and down the vine brings you to the heavens and seas, followed by yet more turns around the proverbial corner. My stroll through this world became a circular rhythm of entering, leaving, and returning to personable spaces, from hub & spokes to beguiling dead ends. And every personality you meet seems to know and accept this bewilderment, the unexplained but hardly unexpected confusion of time, location, and cause-effect.

I doubt the Millers had any Situationist or psychogeographical angle of critique to communicate here. They improvised nearly the whole game as a pet project, a simple consequence of learning how to work with Atkinson's tools and having fun in the process. It's that ease of transferring their creative processes and hobbies into a previously inaccessible venue, the personal computer, that makes this adventure so compelling. Sure, I could criticize how short the stack is, as well as the bits more obviously categorized as edutainment just for Rand's two daughters. (Even then, the rabbit's bookcase of classics has its own idiosyncracies, like the book Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy which isn't about anything.) Well before the highly regarded, non-condescending storytelling approach Humungous Entertainment's adventures used, I see The Manhole treating any player of any age with empathy and intelligence. Hierarchies and transactions need not exist here. There's a better, more equitable reality promised by the laggy, monochrome disk in your floppy drive.

Enough big words. Let's talk about Mr. Dragon's disco clothes, the elephant boating you through the white rabbit's teacup, and all the linking books and frames later used in Myst for dramatic effect. Observe how easily you can click around each slide, finding new angles in odd places or a delightful audiovisual gag where least expected. Just as Mac OS was the iconic "digital workbench" full of easter eggs and creative potential, The Manhole puts itself aside so that you can just explore, appreciate, and vibe all throughout. It's nice to not have puzzles or roadblocks for the sake of them—if anything's here to challenge you, it's the absence of game-y mechanics or progression. This might as well have been the original walking simulator of its day with how loose it's structured and what few interactions you need to use. And it's entirely in service to the amorphous but memorable, personalized sabbatical you take through Wonderland.

HyperCard cut out the hard parts of multimedia creation, expediting the processes once interfering with non-coders' motivation to finish their work. As such, The Manhole remains a convincing demo of the benefits, philosophies, and cultural impact this technology made possible. Even the initial floppy release I played has a lot of digitized speech and music for its time, and the CD release would leverage that format's increased storage and sample rate to improve this further. Compare this with just the first island of Myst, a place as enshrined in gaming history's pantheon as it is loathed by players seeking to make progress in that game. That single, setpiece-driven location couldn't have its staying power or sense of discovery were it not for Cyan's '88 debut. So much of this game's simple wonder, interconnections, and whimsy would get encapsulated into the '93 title's opening hour, showing how far the Millers had come. This kind of design continuity is hard to accomplish today, let alone back then.

Honestly, I could go on and on and on about this adventure often dismissed as just a children's intro to the point-and-click adventure. In the context of Mac gaming, this was an important distillation of the genre that the platform's earliest game of note, Enchanted Scepters, had pioneered. In my so far short acquaintance with Cyan's library, the parallels between this and Myst are too hard and meaningful to ignore. In The Manhole's defense, you need not play it to understand through cultural osmosis the message and principles it luxuriates in. That's what makes this so perplexing on an analytic level. Though Rand & Robyn made this ditty to satisfy their urges and ultimately start selling software, it's more introspective and uncaring of what you think about it than usual. One can sense the confidence and ease with which this colorful 1-bit universe exists and presents itself. Why rush or insist itself upon any and all who wander in? How can it know who we are, other than a friendly traveler? Our dialogue with such a game should respect both its outward simplicity and the subtleties that creep into view.

I first played The Manhole maybe a decade and a half ago, back when my ex-Mac user dad tried introducing me to this genre and Mac OS software at large. Predictably, I bounced off of it hard, sticking to my fancy PS2, DS, and Windows XP games. But beyond just having a vested interest in older video games and their history now, I've grokked what this unassuming pop-up storybook wanted to communicate. Food for thought, perhaps. Nothing in The Manhole strikes me as therapeutic, though—hardly chicken soup for the gamer's soul. It's as cartoonish, surreal, and irreverent as ever, a brief respite that one can claw into or bask in. Akin to something contemporary like If Monks Had Macs, this piece of history delights in playing the part of a media crossroad, a frame through which new perspectives can be found. I think there's a lot of value in that; if and when I write my own interactive stories, I'll be revisiting this to remind myself of what I cherish in this medium.

lol, uh, I'm concerned that anyone might actually think the Speccy games this "homage" references were ever this bad

It's not horrible for a 5-10 minute romp through hastily-made, gorily garish mazes until you find the somewhat hidden secret room that ends it. The music choices remind me of the earlier Space Funeral in a good way, and its commitment to just being a little fucked-up guy of a game, only loved by its creator, is admirable. Sadly, Fucker Gamer Scum Get Fucked almost entirely misunderstands the source material it's deriving from. Both of John George Jones' splatterpunk classics for the ZX Spectrum, Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly, are both more playable than this and offer an ironically meaningful kind of Thatcher-era nihilism. They were emblematic "video nasties" taken to the computer's known limits, while FGSGS would barely escape the Newgrounds blam-hammer with how much it tries my patience.

From the start, you're bombarded with Speccy-like colors-on-black aesthetics, albeit balking that platform's infamous graphical restrictions (ex. sprite color clash). None of this looks as cohesive as I think the creator intended. More detailed sprites and objects stand out in an uncanny but uninteresting way, like an overworked collage canvas. We're supposed to be floating a bizarre nightmare maze of sorts, the kind of Grand Guignol show turned gore film that Go to Hell did so well. But I wasn't even a bit spooked or put-off by the imagery, just bored. At least this doesn't fall into the same traps as fashionable mascot horror one-offs these days, but the baneful bits of J.G. Jones' duo have lasting power this doesn't. Used syringes, nondescript projectiles, and a cheap glut of bloody surfaces does not a fun horror show make. Gimme me the conjoined babies, flying guillotines, walls made of Hell's victims spanning all its rings, distorted scrimblo faces to make Otto from Berzerk proud...all that you'll get in the actual '80s games.

Now, you won't catch me saying there's any trenchant narrative or commentary in something like Soft & Cuddly. Transgression was by far the most important goal for Jones, using the Sinclair PC's inimitable visual strengths to transform horror cliches into something more compelling. But his creations weren't lumped into the more literary splatterpunk movement without good reason. There's a distinct air of anti-Tory, pro-creators ethos felt throughout either adventure, from the mercurial hells you explore to cute humor like the game over screen punchlines. All the grim, strange sights on offer, plus shrill soundscapes, evokes the evolving, never-ending drudgery of living through miners' strikes, predatory capitalism, and Mary Whitehouse screeds against non-conservative art in general. Jones made these shambling but nonetheless enjoyable scare houses for himself and friends, something the punks and outsiders could share in common.

I'm not sure who the audience for this modern retread is. Parts of FGSGS look too polished, too modern game engine-based to fit a visual style made under technical constraints. Go to Hell wasn't much more than a decent if tedious maze adventure, but this has barely any progression at all. You quickly jet your way through not nearly enough screens to feel as complete as its inspiration, all while seemingly anything kills you without logic. The life-draining walls and enemies in Go to Hell are very punitive, but possible to work around and feel some accomplishment for reaching each cross. FGSGS just has nothing like that. It's a big nothingburger of an attempted mid-2000s Flash game in its current state. Less like an amateur's earnest riff on Clive Barker, Alan Moore, Tanith Lee, or any other icons of '80s UK pulp fiction—more like My First VVVVVV Fangame v0.3.

But worst of all, this just doesn't get the kind of socio-economic nihilism that makes Jones' games so interesting today. I couldn't come across any weird level design, enemy type, or wacky set-piece here suggesting that vibe of "we're stuck in a hellish war-torn ghost town world with nowhere to go, hounded by those above us". Go to Hell has you playing a very simple but recognizably Manic Miner-like character, traveling through corridors adorned with commodified villains, symbols, and unfortunates like yourself. The crosses you seek are themselves distorted, flashing neon facsimiles of the real thing, lighting up a night of meticulous wandering. Jones' hell feels surprisingly barren despite its content overload, a telling contrast. Reaching each cross and finally Alice Cooper's digitized mug may not mean much, but there's something to feel accomplished about. FGSGS really just throws everything and the kitchen sink at you, hoping something sticks.

IDK, there's not much more to say for this one. Throw it on if you love watching your PC monitor forcibly switch to 640x480 resolution, or want a quick laugh. I get more enjoyment from Livesey Walk animations, let alone a quality YouTube Poop with the same runtime. Normally I'd just give this kind of game a 2-star rating and move on, but it's hurt a bit by having such a dismissive attitude towards Jones' games and the "ZX Spectrum aesthetic" in general. (Not that I fault anyone for disliking how Speccy games almost always look, but developers have crafted very artistically interesting works on it for a long time.) The most praise I'll give to Fucker Game Scrum Get Stabbed is that I finally played Go to Hell because of it—now that's what I call Entertainment.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 28 – Mar. 6, 2023

One of those epochal clashes between dirty, abrasive, endearing eco-romance and cute, sinister Y2K-era techno-optimism turned satire of imperialism. These angles lock arms in a subtle but ever-looming creation story of what video games, as puzzle boxes and a storytelling medium, could become in the new millennium. Love-de-Lic finally mastered this kind of anti-RPG disguising a clever adventure, and L.O.L's occasional flaws rarely distract from the majesty and sheer emotional gamut this offers. Here's a Gaia of broken promises, uprooted existence, twisted social covenants, and how to survive and adapt in a harsh universe where we're the only love we give.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023

If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.

We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.

One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.

I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.

Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to

In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.

The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit

Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.

L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!

Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.

The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?

There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.

Plot and thematic spoilers ahead

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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.

Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.

And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.

Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.

No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.

To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?

LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.

In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?

Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.

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End of spoilers

One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.

Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.

Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.

ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact

So a fan translation for this game was released last week when currently writing this and I gotta say, I didn't know this existed till I saw it got one. I was very curious about it as the art looked really nice and I thought maybe the writing would be really fun.

Private Eye Dol is a text adventure where you play as a girl named May going through 3 "Scenes" as the game calls it trying to solve the conflict going on in the game. I won't really spoil anything for this review so you can enjoy the story blind but the game's story is really good though keep in mind I barely play this genre so this could be the worst take ever. The plot while at time's hard for me to fully understand due to my stupidity, has a lot of great moments.

This game is pretty interesting gameplay wise as the usual gameplay is presented in a top down sprite look similar to like an RPG of that era. The game likes to introduce new ways of going through the Scenes like having a menu style town similar to the likes of many text adventures, a map that you have to fill yourself, and a couple of more new ways to do the gameplay. It keeps the game from being too boring.

Private Eye Dol though isn't perfect as it has those moments where you feel like you have to try everything not knowing what's changed. It also had one moment I had to look up the answer to because the place they wanted me to stand on was exactly on one tile making me confused what the game wanted me to do. There are game overs in this game but they basically reset you where you were just at before the failure so you don't even have to reload an old save.

I have to say I love the touch of how a lot of times characters will move around the areas you're in to get to parts to advance the plot. It really adds more to the world making it feel more real to my immersion.

The game graphically looks amazing as there's many detailed shots of the characters even sometimes redrawn to match the situation or time. It's amazing to think this was on the PC Engine. Though make sure you have the Arcade Card for this as it's needed for this title. I also noticed the girl Ayaka reminds me of Fuu from Magic Knight Rayearth. I wonder if it's the same artist. The voice acting is pretty good if a bit compressed though I think that's normal for the console. I will say at times it seems quiet, not sure if that was a problem with my emulator though. The music has a couple of CD quality tunes but a lot of it as for usual with games with lots of voices has to deal with the normal PC Engine sound. Though it's not all bad, I just think it's unfortunate they have these limitations. At least nothing ever annoyed me.

This game is a must play for anyone into these kind of games. One of the best I've played so far for the console. Happy this got translated letting me enjoy something I didn't even know existed. Hope this one someday gets more attention as it's one of better late end titles for the console. Sure it has it's flaws but it doesn't stop such a charming well made game existing. Hope others enjoy it if they ever get the chance to play this.

Also warning for anyone using an emulator, if your thing uses rewind, I'd recommend turning it off. It will break the game and even delete your save if you try doing it. Save states seem fine though. You won't really need either though just thought I give that warning to any of you all.

Props to Bandai for finally releasing a Tamagotchi that doesn't run on batteries! This might be the best improvement that has been added in this edition. Too bad the charging port is still micro-USB and not USB-C.

The Tamagotchi Smart is pretty nice. The basic 3-button design has been changed for just one button and a touchscreen, divided into four sections where you can either press or slide to interact with the Tamagotchi and its menus. It took me a little while to get used to the sliding action since its use can feel unresponsive at the beginning.

I never owned a smartwatch, so I can't make a proper comparison with one. The Tamagotchi Smart only gives you the current time a minuscule step counter in some of the wallpapers, with no biometric sensors to measure how fast are you able to fart or stuff like that. The extra monitoring options could have been pretty interesting, and having your monitored status be paired with your Tamagotchi's current status would have been even better. A little vibration option to tell you that the Tamagotchi is dying while you are at work could also have been good. The Tamagotchi Smart also has a microphone...but it lacks a voice recognition system, so your Tamagotchi will be happy even though you call them names (don't do that!!!). The watch itself is comfortable to wear on the wrist since it doesn't weigh too much, but the wristband is prone to suffer damage and it gets dirty pretty fast (how the hell do you clean it? please lmk). Luckily, Bandai has released replacements in other colors for users who are willing to pay.

As I said before, this might be my first smartwatch, but I own other Tamagotchis. And compared with previous devices such as the Tamagotchi Meets or even the Tamagotchi P's (released in 2012!), the Tamagotchi Smart lacks many cool options that were available before. The basic functionalities are still there, your Tamagotchi still eats and plays and gets dirty and poops, and you can still connect your Tamagotchi Smart to other devices. The requirements needed to have your Tamagotchi alive feel laxer in this version, since it is easier to get money and the daycare is free. You have fewer places that are available to visit, with fewer NPCs to meet. The buyable stuff (food, toys, accessories, and room decoration) is less interesting since the toys won't help you find the perfect couple anymore like in Tamagotchi Meets, so it's limited to getting merely cosmetic improvements. You can choose between four available minigames to earn money, but I only played the ice cream one (you choose images to match the order given by a customer in an ice cream shop). For the other games, after the long-ass loading screens, some of them would require you to jerk your wrist non-stop, or deal with precise actions performed on this non-perfect touchscreen. But for me, the biggest drawback that the Tamagotchi Smart has is the lack of generation mixing, I do miss trying to get the ugliest possible Tamagotchi hybrids or sharing my Tamagotchi on a website as you could do in Tamagotchi Meets. Sadly I haven't tried the TamaSma Cards (aka DLC) yet, but I will try to get the Sanrio ones someday.

Even if this review might seem a little negative, I'm still happy with my Tamagotchi Smart. This review might seem like a long list of complaints (and that's why I'm not working as a salesman for Bandai), but it is a pretty good entry-level device for Tamagotchi since it requires little to no attention needed to keep your Tamagotchi alive, and being able to carry the Tamagotchi in your wrist is way more comfortable than having it inside your pockets. I like mine a lot, but I can't really tell you to spend around $70 for it unless you want a Tamagotchi for your wrist since there are cheaper Tamagotchi options (but with even less features). Still, I don't regret spending mine since Milktchi and Poptchi are just too cute...

When I first played Luigi's Mansion in the 3DS (I never owned a GC) I had previously read about it and I thought that it could be the kind of game I would be liking, even if it was short compared with other Nintendo games.

Once I got the game, my impressions were confirmed as it was quite enjoyable even if it felt old at this point. What surprised me the most was the originality and vibes I was getting of it: a game where almost everything could be interacted, where puzzles really astonished you and everything was charming and very cautiously chosen. The boss fights and ghosts in general were absolute gold as well, just like Luigi's personality.

Even if short and a little bit old-fashioned, the game was set to be considered a piece of art by myself just because of its aura and the feelings it transmits, like a old magic of creativeness and excellence that there was once at Nintendo and that it might not be there anymore as it was in this era.

the path is a video game in which you assume the role of little red riding hood on her way to grandmother's house in the forest. it is a shockingly vibrant game, with an art style rooted in modern pop art and the uncanny valley nature of playstation 2 models, which makes the long trek to grandma's house a blindingly bright experience. it is pure white, ketchup red and vomit green with inspired, whimsical character designs laser-focused on communicating character personality and nothing else. upon reaching your goal, you shuffle uncomfortably through grandma's empty, foreboding house with a sense of unease, and then your character's model settles on the bed next to the corpse-like image of her grandmother, and you get the news. you were ranked with a "failure."

as a walking simulator, the path is equal parts game and art experience. it is a horror tinted vision where the goal is to encourage you to think and relate to the game in your own way. playing the path felt like holding a microscope up to my own recollection of childhood memories, picking out the moments that seemed to echo the path. it is primarily interested in the dissection of childhood and what it feels like to grow up in a world that you're still learning about. each of the little red riding hoods has her own personality, storyline and wolf to encounter in the woods, adding to this feeling of growing up as you play. proceeding from youngest to oldest is a stark experience of growing up from a young girl to a teenager and then burgeoning young woman; it echoed my own life experiences in a haunting way, but perhaps it wouldn't be as such for every other person out there.

decorated with a unique artstyle that indulges in the doll-like appearance of ps2 models, the path also sounds lovely with an ambience that has not be replicated in games since it. it is handcrafted to feel like a fairytale that is held together with wire, drapes and shadows, never quite revealing what it's end game is until you decide you've had enough and want to digest it on your own. it has a vested interest in leading you through an emotionally uncomfortable experience, allowing each player to have a unique take on what they interpreted the game to be about. the closest thing to it is looking at a painting and talking to other people about it: everyone notices and feels something different, so robust conversation that gives you peeks into one another as human beings feels like a component that has been baked into the path.

it is a bug-laden mess that is a pain and a half to get running these days, and when you get it to, there's still hoops to jump through. still, getting it to play feels like hitting a coffin after digging into the earth for hours. it feels like a skeleton you shouldn't be looking at, like the past is haunting you as you play.

it's worth noting that there is simply no user interface to this game. in fact, it probably is one of the earliest examples of a modern game completely forgoing a UI to hammer in the experience of it's stage. it expects you to learn to walk on your own, taking the game at your own pace and exploring as you wish, alongside the red riding hood of your choice. in this day and age, this doesn't quite achieve the effect it did almost fifteen years ago, but i'm sure that it added to the sense of disorientation back then. it just felt like something worth mentioning: there are multiple instances where things feel dated. the intuitive ui is one example, but the writing can be another. overwrought at times with a desperate need to sound like a page out of a fairytale, it can miss the mark when it really cannot afford to.

i don't think this is a game for everyone and i would hesitate to recommend it even to close friends. if you like stuff like night in the woods or what remains of edith finch, this #ArtGame might be for you. it's a masterclass in atmosphere, topped with some of the most uncomfortable gaming experiences i've ever had that were completely on purpose. the path is also arguably the best of tale of tales' gaming catalogue, and the development team's thumbprint is still pressed into the silicon form of gaming today.