The title screen of this game is so fucking funny.

It's frogger! A four level long game that loops around once you beat it. It's definitely harder than it looks, when I got to the Swamp level for the first time my hands were definitely shaking.

This is a decent challenge game to try and get through it all. And the multiplayer is fun to dick around with friends for a bit. That's about its whole purpose. I've done both in life, and now I can shelve this game. The main thing I can say about it is, "yep, that's a video game!"

This game is fantastic if you don't go into with preconceived notions. I thought going into it, this would be hardcore run-and-gun chaos. This is not necessarily true.

You will spend a lot of time getting lost. You will constantly look at the map wondering where to go. You will wander the halls of the levels back and forth and back and forth. And it rocks. Going into the game thinking it would be hardcore off the bat, this game was off-putting, but after staying with it, I was rewarded with a game that has aged incredibly gracefully.

Doom is a very patient shooter. After a while, I enjoyed wandering the vast, detailed levels, all the rooms and details, all the secrets I occasionally came across. I think there was one or two levels I had to look up what I was supposed to do, but most of the game can be figured out intuitively.

The real secret is that the run-and-gun madness part of this game comes a while after you start playing it. After you get a feel for the maps, you'll understand where to go faster, and start getting into fights more. For this reason, this game has a TON of replayability, just running through the levels killing stuff and having a blast. It takes a while getting to that point, but I honestly enjoyed getting there.

The only thing that I guess stands out as weird is the inability to look up and down, creating weird auto-aim situations where, if an enemy is very high or very low below you, you'll seemingly shoot at nothing, but still hit them. It's nothing too awful though, you get used to it after a while.

It's overall just a blast, getting faster and faster and fighting through the hordes of enemies, all of which I enjoy aside from lost souls, seriously fuck those guys. Definitely recommend! It's no wonder this game has such a strong community to this very day.

In the lore, danmaku battles in the Touhou prioritize beauty above all else. This is the first game in the series that really feels like that's the case.

The game opens up on this beautiful, welcoming tune as you fly through a blizzard, seeing an old face in Cirno and a new one in Letty. This start is really imprinted on me, I don't know why. But anyway, as you'd expect, this follows the standard Touhou formula - 6 stages, 4 difficulties, and you have to get a 1 credit clear to get the good ending and bonus stuff. In that sense, this isn't breaking new ground, but I think for what it is, this game is special.

The back half of the game is what really sells me. Stage 4 is this really well made section with a fantastic music loop ending once you break through to see the clouds and are given a moment of calm before being tossed into an awesome boss fight with the Prismrivers. Stage 5 is short but damn is it majestic with the stairs in the background and the temple music. I just really dig this game, can you tell?

The big big big big one though, the big thing that makes me love this game, is the last stage. The cherry blossom trees in the background and Yuyuko's beautiful spell cards are so memorable, and once you beat her, I won't say what happens, but it is honest to god one of the most hype things I've ever experienced in any game.

I really struggle to find things to say about this game other than "it's beautiful." Go play it!

The base game is really bad. If you include fan-made WADs, this game is really good.

It's the same engine as Doom with some sick new additions, like the super shotgun and Archviles. Unfortunately, it's held back by some absolutely atrocious level design. This game's levels feels like some dogshit from an old forum thread. Boy do I love softlocks, enemy spam, dumb gimmicks, stupidly long levels, introducing new enemy types in moronic ways, and camping. After falling in love with the first game, this one felt like a slap in the face.

This is, so far, the worst game I've ever played.

The performance is so bad I had to install an external program to increase my PC's fan speed. The drone mechanic is slow and annoying. The game as a whole isn't well designed, the part where you have to find all the objects (can't be bothered to remember what they are) is annoying, the chase sequence is unintuitive since there's an invisible wall where you think you would exit, you have to turn off the alarm that looks like a decoration. You don't even SEE BANBAN IN THIS GAME. It's not even "so bad it's funny," it just sucks. I'll still laugh at banban memes though.

This is more of a reminiscing post than a review. I'm going to write about the Flash version of this game, which is, effectively, no longer playable. Even if you can get it to boot up, it's effectively in a dead, offline state.

It was amazing. It was a far, far greater game than SAS3. I wasn't around for its early days, but I wish it was. You could spec into reload so much that your weapons had instant reload with no cooldown. You could apply the Overclock augment to semi-automatic weapons, and combining these made the HVM MPG, a Rocket Launcher, an absolute demon of a gun. If you specced into speed high enough, you could clip out of bounds and end levels early. With strong enough guns, you could break open the entrance to the grocery store at the start of Zombie Pods and run through the level much faster. This was a very special game, this top-down shooter with insane optimization for builds. Even after the Fast Movement nerf, you could still hit crazy speeds. You could get armor high enough to get 99% resistance on all 3 damage types. You could make a Suicide Medic that would die, throw out high-level medkits using Final Farewell, and revive extremely fast and repeat the process.

The game wasn't perfect, you definitely had to play quite a bit to get to the good levels. I definitely have hundreds of hours in this game (no way to check anymore) and never even hit level 100. The strongbox system was far from perfect too, you could get something truly beautiful like a HIKS S300 with some garbage augments like Skeletonized or Biosynthesis, and you just had to live with it. ZX840, if you're reading this, I still think Biosynthesis is bad regardless of what you think.

This game had another feature that Ninja Kiwi very sadly lacks nowadays: full text chat. Whether it was strangers in a public game or playing with my buddies, it was such a joy to be able to communicate freely (aside from the heavy censorship filter) and made the game so much more endearing. I even miss saying what strongboxes I got at the end of the game (in the form of something like: 112348).

Nightmare Mode. Oh my God I loved this mode so much, it was like crack to younger me. Every enemy was insanely buffed up, there were far more boss encounters, but you got absolutely ridiculous rewards in exchange. You unlock it at level 35, but you will barely be able to function in it until around level 50. Even with the 5-tickets-a-day system, I would play this mode ALL the time. This game had a really special way of being just unhinged enough in the right way. Even though sometimes I'd lose cause a Nightmarish Dark Minion Apex Runner jumpscared me because I couldn't see it in the foreground, it was still fun.

This game had such a fun variety of guns as well. To this day, the standard Lone Star is my most damaged weapon in the game, being one of few to I had to hit the 32-bit integer limit. The Mustang, Gebirgskanone, Shredder, Hotspot, Stripper, and oh god the 1887 Shockfield my BELOVED. I had so many fun guns in my inventory, I do wish there were more slots available cause it always killed me to get rid of some of them.

I guess I should criticize it, too. This is less of a criticism of the game than the player base: I despised how every. Single. Multiplayer game. Was done on Pods. Nobody every wanted to play anything but Pods. Pods Pods Pods Pods. It's a fun map, but I definitely got tired of it sometimes. And if you picked an actually fun map like Ice Station everyone would just leave. Shoutout to Nightmare maps which chose a random one, made it way more fun, even if you could look into your cache to see what the game was loading. But it was still tolerable cause people would take anything that wasn't Last Stand.

What I truly hated was this game's end cycle. Championships were one of the worst things ever added to a game. You had this shitty contest that was INSANELY grindy that lasted a week I believe, and for getting top 3 you get a disgustingly overpowered weapon that invalidates the whole game. It's so unbalanced and stupid. Fuck the HIKS M1000 in particular, that thing should be put down. I didn't care for the crafting system either, it was nice but felt really cheap getting whatever I wanted, I missed the Strongbox system where I would hope and pray more. It did let me get a 10/3 HVM 001 though, which I used all my Elite Cores on. Got some good reactions out of people in lobbies.

More than anything, I miss the Ninja Kiwi community. Back when the website had a profile feed and forums, and you could Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down posts, and the higher level you were, the more your votes would count. I miss a lot of the people from there. Won't name too many names, but if you were there, you were there. I remember always hoping that Rohan would accept my friend request, cause to me, that was like a status symbol. Alright, I'm getting off-track now.

I guess I should mention this here Steam port of the Mobile version, huh? Well, I don't care for it. The score I gave is for the Flash version. This version is way less cool aesthetically. I have no idea why for this, BTD5, and BMC, Ninja Kiwi thought the mobile ports should be the ones ported to Steam when they look much worse. Additionally, this version doesn't have Ice Station or Meltdown, but it does have a really funny car level which is cool. If I had to put it to words, this version is like a sauceless SAS4 Flash. It feels dry. And with a game dry like that, the long level-up times aren't easy to bear through.

You can find the Flash version on NInja Kiwi Archive, but you can't get any multiplayer games, so what's the point. The multiplayer is the heart of soul of this game.

Alright, reminiscing over. Thanks for reading, or thanks for scrolling straight to the bottom. I don't really care which you did.

test2

Update 2/11/24 - I forgot about this website, maybe I'll start using it. Sorry for having one of the few reviews on this game be "test2" for so long.

This game is pretty sick! Really enjoy the two-screen action as you both manage a bullet hell and block puzzle at the same time. The game keeps giving you new gimmicks too, keeping things constantly changing. You've oftentimes gotta change up your playstyle with each new battle. This game isn't your average cut of meat, it's something!

The game has occasional difficulty bumps, and the writing is... in the game. It's not perfect or earth-shattering, but I enjoyed my time with this one!

test

Edit 2/11/24: Whoops I forgot to write my review. This game is really solid, I mean come on, it's Super Fuckin Mario Bros, this game is an important piece of gaming history and is well known for a reason. Even if it isn't as widely played as Mario 3 or Mario World these days, this game holds up. The game can feel weird for some with things like not being able to turn around while you jump or not gaining momentum during a jump, but you can get around those.

What I feel like most people don't acknowledge with this game is that it's secretly an exploration game. I reckon most people just go from 1-2 to 4-1, them 4-2 to 8-1 and beat the game. Hell no! Going from level to level, no warps, no continuing from last world, no save states or rewinds or nothing, gives you a whole new appreciation for the game. I'd be looking in every single ? box looking for coins, looking for hidden blocks, breaking every brick, and keeping in mind where the 1-ups and vines were, so that you can stockpile lives for the later worlds, where resources get a lot more barren. It adds a whole new layer to the game that is easily missed with modern luxuries!

And when you put it like that, with the exploration, all the little hidden secret areas, the speedrunability of this game, and even the playground rumors like World -1, you've got a really cool versatile game here! Definitely something real special here. Wonder if this Nintendo company will go on to make any more games after this one.