playing klonoa feels like reminiscing about childhood with a friend who came from the same sorta social patch. some details won’t match up and some details are too broad generic to get caught up on, but every once in a there’s some hyper specific throughline. could be as minute as also happening to marching around barefooted looking for pecans sometimes, doesn’t really matter—that mutual nostalgia feels all the sweet regardless

i imagine if you could lift the misty veil off our dreams, you’ll probably see the phantasmic-but-oddly-photorealistic landscapes of phantomile. not to say there was some massive movement here, more so a handful of isolated incidents, but i really dig the odd fixation on oneirology we saw throughout that gen. no idea if this was the product of developers registering that technology was just at the right level to render vague, dreamy approximations of reality but not quite at the level of making new york city replicas, but it works nevertheless

nights played with this and mixed in suggests some analytical psychological theories; lsd dream emulator rejects any sense of formality by haphazardly throwing cultural, social, and religious sign around to create a game that is one part eerie, one part tender. klonoa takes this theming and dials it up on the whimsy, framing itself as a harlequinesque pop-up book concerning around human desires. what should be meek, passing touches on high concepts are deeply afflicting, all thanks to their shared framing device

again, beneath the mirage, there’s a real sense of familiarity ingrained here. they’re distant as they are true to life. it taps into a primordial understanding of our world and how we interact with it. i’d honestly say accurately articulating this is unattainable feat, but i really mean it when i say there’s something about these game’s audiovisual presentation that gives them an unmatched intimacy

even enduring the kinaesthetically nauseating movement, the level design here is about as incoherent as it gets. theres glimpses of nuance here and there (barring two exceptions, each district is equipped with infinite grind loop(s) encircling key areas of the map) but optimal routing still demands clumsily backtracking through level geometry, and consequently, breaking all sense of flow. the map being tucked behind two menus only further erodes all good faith, and this sentiment begins to set only three hours in. unfortunately for you, jsr stretches itself out for eight and that 9.6% completion rate on a game that, not only defined an entire aesthetic, but still retains a offbeat allure in its own right starts making sense!

all that being said, you cant listen to this track ( https://youtu.be/8yz9FOI1YFc ) and come out of this game sour like come on dude have some early 2000s optimism in your system yknow

yesterday, a friend of mines asked me to give them a hand with some troubleshooting. they’ve spoken to me how they finally wanted to give emulation a shot with their new big fancy pc beforehand, and the first game on their chopping block was um lammer jammy. we both hold the project diva series in strong adoration, so why not give the franchises that started it all a shot yknow? anyway the issue here, as they perceived it, was that the game was registering the inputs late. we both assumed it was a dreadful combination of their retroarch having some weird latency issues and lammer just being the harder game out of the psx duology. so we flicked on run-ahead, turned off v-sync, set hard gpu sync on, all that technical jargon, and we both started up parappa the rapper proper.

what preceded was the mortifying realization that these game were just like that. instinctively hitting the notes as parappa’s marker cross them only caused the game to call us out for our what it deems as bad rapping. eventually we started delaying our inputs just a few frames after the marker passes a note, and even then no matter what offset we set the game still felt disgusting wrong. what’s more is the tutorial even reenforces the notion that this game is a simple matter of timing ones’ input to the note, which, given that i went through the effort of setting up an gamepad viewer, pausing the game frame by frame, streaming it to said friend, all in a desperate attempt to prove we’re not going insane, is more than just a gross misnomer. (later found out that matsuura genuinely believed this as well and it’s not just some secret mechanic lost in translation, funnily enough within this same interview he attempted to preform a live demonstration of “how to be cool” where he failed to impress the game four times in a row. https://youtu.be/U_27Lkt-yIk )

eventually i phoned the person who gave me my passing interest in nanaoh-sha’s library and we learn that the intent here was for players to freestyle their way through the songs. believe it or not i actually welcomed this revelation! rhythm games have homogenized into this singular design approach where player expression is limited to the rudimentary act of following the notes as presented. while there’s nothing wrong with this scheme, parappa is peculiar because it aspires well above what contemporaries confine in by encouraging its audience to deviate from the chart a bit. step a bit outside the bounds the game laid out for you and, with just the right sense of rhythm, it’ll stop the game of simon-says and grant you the freedom to freestyle your own chart.

only took about ten or so attempts at scoring a cool on stage two for those wild romanticizations to be swiftly stumped into the dirt. creatively remixing the verses caused more harm than good, and harmonic improvisation pales in comparison to the score you’ll land by spamming the last note ad nauseam anyway, except, not really? sometimes the game punishes you for doing that too? sometimes it loves my incoherent remixing even though it just gave me a bad score for doing such?? who knows actually??? just follow the beat and Maybe It’ll Work Bro I Think???? such a sour mix of mechanical obscurity and variability, each attempt i make at understanding this game’s interworkings i descend further into perplexity. i’m too stubborn to let my cynical accusations towards a work sit without first trying to genuinely appreciate the design nuance and motive behind it, but, as i see it, no one has a thorough understanding of how parappa’s scoring system works and with the aforementioned live demonstration presented by its one and only director, i can’t help but feel the act of actually playing parappa is a contradictory, brutal chore that fails to hold much intrigue under the weight of its variability - a variability that even if understood is too strong for what the game demands.

that being said, i don’t have think anyone is coming to parappa for a Sound Rhythm Game Experience. one of the reasons the friend wanted to check out lammy was because they learned she was a guitar playing sheep who got sent to hell who also happens to be a lesbian. i mean, look at vivid the world artist rodney greenbalt managed to bring to fruition here, every fabric of it is downright charming. you’re a little teenage dog who’s trying to get with a sunflower, willing himself getting a driver’s license through the power of rap. there’s a place called “phat donut” that gets demolished and is renamed “flat donut” for the remainder of the game, like i can’t help but to appreciate that! even with how aggravating some of the charts can get, the track list is filled with back-to-back bangers and it’s equal parts irritating mechanically as it is cute. it’s that golden blend of brute honesty, slapstick, and humanism that makes nanah-ohsha’s games so infectious, and it’s what always drew people to their library to before any sort of mechanical ingenuity.

allow me to be a bit more formal about a game totally unconcerned about being pretentious and say matsuura is an auteur in the truest sense of the word. even discounting how his titles, even in all their rough edges, still hold a candle against games that were conceived with the backing of decades of hindsight in mind, the truth of the matter is that he codified an entire lineage of games in his first foray into an unfamiliar industry. i don’t really feel like it was a mistake that my first experience with parappa was one filled with bantering about how bizarre the hit detection is and laughing at the dog rapping to not piss his pants with a friend, because really matsuura only wanted to shatter the “wall between music and life” - and parappa more than accomplished that. oscillating between frustrating and bliss, memetic in its nature, that’s parappa.

by kato’s own admission, radical dreamers is an unfinished bastard child. developed in just three months and released on the ill-fated satellaview, its no grand revelation to say that it made an unremarkable blimp on his career and the general public. the game has yet to see a rerelease in over two decades and it’s a miracle it isn’t lost media entirely. even acknowledging less-than-legal outlets, it’s only perceived as that weird, nonessential, complementary work to its bigger brothers. i’d be posing if i didn’t make it explicitly clear that i came to dreamers for those same, enigmatic qualities - if not for the irrevocable attachment it has to a game many hold close to heart i feel as if the western world may have passed it up entirely.

but i don’t say any of this begrudgingly, it makes it fascinating even, how dreamers takes advantage of our nostalgia for trigger. radical dreamers was drafted hot off the back of trigger’s release, a period where kato was in an emotional slump. thusly, dreamers exists far removed from the juvenile enthusiasm characteristic of his past works. if trigger was a game about how opening up about our personal background and motives to loved ones can allow us to, collectively, strive towards a more brilliant future, radical dreamers is that future. a future where not everybody got to realize their desires and the indifferent thread of time has cursed them with regrets and woes regardless of their achievements. for the better part of its runtime, you’re trudging through rugged corridors after rugged corridors aided by people with baggage too heavy and complicated to plainly clarify, complimented by an ambient to downright melancholic mitsuda score. the manor is an emotionally draining hub, tasking you to backtrack through samey halls and text crawls you’ve seen three times over only to be met with characters wallowing in regret and cynicism once you finally reach your destination. made worse with some only being here to reinforce the notion that there’s no future for kid nor her gang of drifters - a pessimism that she long since deeply internalized.

yet, despite the burden this milieu is actively afflicting on kid’s already vulnerable psyche, she still finds a way to banter with the party every opportunity she gets. never getting a chance to sit down and process her emotions being surrounded in a never static environment, she attempts to make the best of the cards she was dealt and drifts on towards her ultimate objective - not knowing rather it will result in some final emotional catharticism or rather it’s even accomplishable. it’s not sincerity coming from a place of previously reached self-actualization a la trigger, it’s coming from a place of accepting the regrets of yesterday and fears of tomorrow in an earnest pursuit of that final, personal pillar. even surge never quite stops fawning over kid whilst submerged in the bleakness, and while magil never comes around to the two he still holds that fundamental will to live. the aforementioned chrono trigger links don’t ever dare to steal the spotlight from dreamers’ established mood and themes, instead opting to recontextualize what we know of these characters and their tribulations. it’s the only sequel the kato of 96 could have envisioned, a sequel that firmly stands as its own being, sometimes recounting nostalgic yet somber memories of days gone in a yearning to find solace in a future unknown and soon to arrive.

in some parts, it feels like radical dreams was meant to be abandoned, with the narrative being framed as the ramblings of a distant relative, lost and deceased. it’s a dream cast ashore, its vestiges dismantled and lifted to realize aspirations of greater prestige. but, i just can’t help but marvel at what kato perceives as some pebble, a pebble crafted with so much passion, so much emotion, so many dreams only for it to be simply forgotten.

genuinely one of the most nauseating four and a half hours i’ve had the chance of experiencing and the crude, candid presentation of it all made the act of playing it all the more abominable.

arguably you're not even playing as the two poster boys; you're moreso some ubiquitous cameraman, desperating attempting to keep two dudes actively committing a massacre within frame. not helped by your camera not being equipped to handle the explosion of bitrate-dropping grit and grain nor the overbearing soundscapes you'll be rummaging through. but, dog days goal isn't just to make you witness some wild descent to hell, these characters are already in hell anyway. what it really wants you to do is to feel, as an estranged viewer, a gradual, personal descent into exhaustion. the outrageous become a morbid curiosity, and that morbid curiosity turns into fatigue and cynicism; an effect not unlike that of its inspirations - that being gruesome, online recordings of extreme violence and cruelty (the game's teaser is styled as a liveleak video. unsurprisingly, its extremely gross! ( https://youtu.be/nkfBvxrIz5M )). all this distilled in a medium where big name contemporaries are ready to patronize you, either attempting to justify your every action or sometimes straight up not questioning them. this game was literally scientifically engineered to be as repulsive as possible - transcribing the true nature of some of its peers, the casual viscerality of user generated content, and the discomfort, nausea, and detachment that content incites.

so essentially, this game fucking rocks and the fact it actually exists alludes me

full disclosure, i played this on a fightstick which i (or any half-decent bemani player probably) would in no respect recommend. that being said, i would be damned if i didn’t go out of my way to play a rhythm game precisely tailored to my aesthetical/musical taste. produced by pizzicato five’s yasuharu konishi; an overbearingly yellow, designer republic-esque presentation; thirteen track selection composed by shibuya-kei mainstays and relatively unknown artists alike, all of them sticking the landing; just a really sincere ambience overall! couldn’t ask for more

The turn of the millennium brought with a barrage of interesting creative explorations and reexaminations, yet this was seemingly the norm for a company like Sega. In the midst of their pestilent financial strain, they were steadily supporting their avant-garde Phantasy Star Online, funding the development of Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez, and most voguishly, developing their Dreamcast magnum opus, Sonic Adventure 2. Rollicking in the shadow of these extravagant plans however, was a more conservative scheme; to save themselves from certain bankruptcy they would transition towards developing titles as a third party. Sonic Team and Dimps would collaborate to produce one of the first games under this endeavor, Sonic Advance. It acted as a return to form of sorts, the Genesis resonance can be picked up from anywhere. For a market growing progressively estranged with the franchise and Sega in its totality, it was a welcomed pip-stop between the company's more adventurous outings. The series would run on for two more entries, but this wouldn't be an early-2000s Sega game if it had stayed true to its humble beginnings.

No, in truth Dimps had plans to retool the fundamentals of 2D Sonic's design scheme for their individual liking. Immediately after the release of Advance 1, Dimps began envisioning a Sonic where speed is the constant, not the reward. A more static take on 2D Sonic if you will, where the objective is not to navigate complex level geometry at whatever pace you so desire but to traverse it at one set voltage. This design philosophy would materialize in Advance 2 mechanic Boost Mode, a speed condition in which you break the established speed cap and enter a light-state, with level geometry built over five times the length of Advance 1's in accommodation. What was an arguably less nuanced riff on the design ethos of old unsuspectingly became the primogenitor of the design scheme Sonic would run with for years on end: the boost. Just a short few years later and we would arrive at the modern interpretation of the boost, Sonic Rush.

No composer embodies the boost ethos quite like Hideki Naganuma. Naganuma's soundscapes consist of a diverse melting pot of techno, hip-hop, punk, and rap influences that amalgamate together to form this addicting, animated ambiance. His arrangements carry themselves in such a confident manner, effortlessly formulating an indelible flavor. He's never abashed to bring all harmony to a halt and veer far off the deep end, with every tangent managing to stick the landing. His hooks are an anthem that resonates with the mere thought of his works, thus its only natural that he'd worked on a game as vivacious as him. Between his technical rhythms and sampled hooks, he brings the meager capabilities of the DS sound chip to its zenith. In a franchise already lauded for its marvelous soundtracks, Naganuma's work on Rush manages to plant itself as supreme. Not yet has the franchises topped the harmonics of Raisin' Me Up, nor the technicality of Back 2 Back, that reverberated the world of Sonic Rush.

A world that is ironically rather banal relative to its forefathers, that is. With the exception of Water Palace, the zone locales, while conceptionally and mechanically dissimilar, are a sterilized repeat of the zones of old. Its creative bankruptcy is extrapolated further in relation to the cyberspaces, musical theme parks, and undersea bases of its GBA progenitors. Even them maintaining their pixel art bravura, their grandeur is neutralized by the crude presence of 3D models. Regardless of rather this was a consequence of a staunch desire to showcase the DS' hardware or the product of an egregious one-year development cycle, it stoves away the visual coherency the Advance series once relished in. All it does is robs an already cut-and-dry world of the grace of its more minute subtleties.

But even in all its platitude, there is still two points of interest here. The game's scenario is split into two perspectives, one in which in you follow Sonic's quest to thwart another one of Dr. Eggman's schemes and another where you inhibit the devote princess of another dimension, Blaze the Cat, on her quest to retrieve her world's enigmatic Sol Emeralds. Both scenarios pit their stars through the same acts armed with a similar mechanical toolkit, most of their distinctions lie in the superficial realm. Sonic's partition acts as the baseline, whereas Blaze's remixes it. Whereas Sonic's themes are Naganuma's original score, Blaze's compositions are twee re-arrangements of Naganuma's original score composed by Teruhiko Nakagawa. When Sonic's script goes through the motions of your usual Sonic narrative, Blaze's script takes her on a trip around an alien world as she progressively learns how to open up and trust others. The most substantial difference between the two runners lies in their level order; Sonic follows the natural difficulty curve while Blaze's sequence takes her on an unorthodox path that feels coarse in contrast. Most players are going to gravitate towards the honorary namesake regardless, but the game's intentions are clear; play Sonic first, then play Blaze second.

Whatever personality you go with, the elephant remains in the room. Dimps has partnered with Sonic Team numerous times over the years, and eventually their joint projects amassed a notoriety. A notoriety not stemming from a place of culture wars nonsense like your usual Sonic discourse, something far more terminal; their level design tendencies. The motif featured across all of Dimps' Sonic works is a proneness for sleazy level geometry that punishes you for unforeseeable mistakes. Spikes planted precisely where a player can regrettably land, platforming segments levitating above long, bottomless chasms, enemies deposited right on an otherwise innocent slope; this tendency has plagued the Advance series since its inception and Dimps' other works don't fare much better in this regard. Worst of all, what you're left with after attempting to make a genuine effort to engage with these games is monotonous, dull level design that besmirches the 2D Sonic games of old by being likened to. Consequently, audiences now approach Dimps' games with an aura of caution, and Sonic Rush is no different.

Sonic Rush leaves a better initial impression than the Dimps of old, spikes are less prevalent and the extra screen space gives leeway to more apparent danger, but the bar for sophisticated game design is far higher than the one Dimps set for themselves. They're not scrutinizing the failings of their past, they're just watering it down. All their routine habits are still there, they just have "less" adjoined to them. There are still moments where you have to suddenly stop and platform over an endless abyss, but there's less of it. You still land directly on a spike sometimes, yet there's less of it. Regardless of how much "less" Dimps affixes to their level geometry, it's all still there, and it all still stings. If one were to craft an enjoyment curve for Rush, it would be vulgar, ragged curves of mild highs and deep lows. Multiply those lows by two for every instance of Sonic's lack of real aerial control a la Blaze cruising towards their death or Sonic's depreciated homing attack leading to they themselves getting hit.

Perhaps in yet another attempt to showcase the power of the DS hardware, some characteristics of Rush are uniquely gross compared to the Advance series. The nine bosses featured in Rush are some of the most abominable sections it has to offer. Their attack patterns are complete RNG, and their toolset tends to feature one or more attacks that exist solely to stall out the player whilst they're in a state of invulnerability. Thusly most fights turn a drab test of patience, as the boss loops the same twenty-second attack three times over. Their attacks are not involved nor diverse enough to warrant the five minutes it takes to slowly wheedle their health down to zero. It only goes to aggravate an experience that already feels nauseating to play engage with even in short bursts.

Yet, when I started Blaze's story, a mental switch flipped on. While the bosses were still obnoxious, there was this return I never received for investing in the Advance series. Having had made mental notes of each little gameplay quirk, I started discerning the level design through a more pragmatic lens. Beyond their abrasive shortcomings, there was some meticulously crafted level design here. Learning the ins and outs of the level geometry felt gratifying, and very soon I was attempting to go for S-Ranks. Another switch trickled on, and suddenly I started feeling an electrification. The game's subtleties grew more pronounced and they started fueling my rush further. I went back and nabbed all the Chaos Emeralds in what might be my favorite incarnation of the Special Stages and beat the true final boss. Still, I kept grinding S-Rank attempts, eventually I ended up S-Ranking over half of the game. Finally I was getting Sonic Rush.

The most prominent quality of Sonic Rush is its intensely exhilarating game feel. The boost alone does a phenomenal job in supplying kineticism. It bears an invaluable instant action-and-reaction, allowing the player to burst ahead regardless of their current velocity. What's more galvanizing is, when held, it blitzes through any enemy capriciously, abolishing all obstacles between you and the level geometry itself. Its powers run on a limited resource however, a resource I'll colloquially dub Tension. Tension can be acquired by destroying enemies or taking advantage of tricks. Each upward spring, incline, or rail presents an opportunity to mount Tension by executing a series of tricks, these acrobatics being your primary source of Tension. When the Tension Gauge inevitably peaks, it grants a temporal surge of unlimited Tension, lasting so long as Tension is habitually being attained. The inclusion of a rank system that judges both Tension scored and time lapped thusly elevates the game from a trial of survivability to a full-on conundrum. How can you optimize accumulated Tension whilst reaching the goal in due time? With this, we arrive at the actualization of the design thesis has been building upon since Advance 2: boost to win.

This ethos transcends being a mere mechanical mantra, it is the very backbone to each of its finer intricacies. Even delicately engaging the boost button erupts the soundscape into a flurry of noise. Held down, enemies will rocket off-screen like a paperweight, Tension Gauge gleaming. Launch off a diagonal spring and soak in the barrage of applause and accolades as you perform a sequence of stunts. Tension finally reached max capacity, gaining you and your gauge a golden aura and the chimes chirp higher and the raves roar louder. That ubiquitous coin above your gauge wheels in hysteria. You're in The Zone, you gotta keep running. The cheers can't end. Are you even on S-Rank pace? Should I be performing less tricks? Can't think now, you're going too fast to keep up. Boost to win. Every little garnish is devoted to intoxicating the senses, and it's this flow quality that is quintessential to Dimps' dogma.

I was shocked by my gradual appreciation of Sonic Rush. Despite my dismal first playthrough and my apprehension towards even touching the game, I stuck with it despite my better judgment and got a healthy payoff. It's sure as hell not for everyone. I can't fault anyone for bouncing off the game after only a handful of zones given Dimps' track record, but in spite of its multitude of failings there's some fascinating game design at play here that deserves attention. I don't think there's any purpose in me recommending Sonic Rush, it's one of those games that sits at a niche so exclusive that only a handful of people could possibly gel with it. Either you feel it out for yourself or say, if this review really enticed you that much, give it the benefit of the doubt and go all-in on it. Sorry in advance in that time investment doesn't pay off like it did for me, but at the end of the day, I can't delegitimize my experience with Sonic Rush and how after much turbulence, it gave me what I wanted.

With the success of their work on the Sonic All-Star Racing series, Sumo Digital has amassed a well of notoriety over the years. deservingly so as well, the All-Star Racing linage is representative of the apex of the kart racer genre-- not yet has another kart racer struck that same perfect harmony between pure, unadulterated chaos and deterministic, mechanical soundness. Owing to this legacy, many eyes were on their 2020 release, Hotshot Racing. However, Sumo Digital swiftly dashed all theories of their latest project being even tangentially related to their more recent backlog beyond the fact it's a racer. No, Hotshot Racing was something far more daring than All-Star Racing-- it's a small-scale collaboration between newborn indie studio Lucky Mountain Games that aims to revive a subgenre long dormant.

Arcade racers, a subgenre left in the dust by the annals of time. A subgenre welded tight between the more realistic, simulation-esque racers and the fantastical, off-the-wall kart racers. Sumo Digital was looking towards the likes of Daytona USA, Hard Drivin', and Winning Run. Its poppy, non-textured graphics do more than enough work harkening back to its forefathers, but to further drive its ambitions home the game interweaves an "easy to learn, hard to master" philosophy into every fabric of its design. Hotshot Racing is far from being the first aspiring indie project seeking to feel a hibernating niche though, far from it. Routinely, these works fall into the pitfall of faintly imitating their forefathers on a superficial level but failing to grasp how any of their core components culminate to form a cohesive whole.

Hotshot Racing kicks it off on the right foot, as on a presentation level it exhibits a level of greater nuance. Instead of simply deriving from its inspirations, Hotshot Racing contemplates the limitation affronted to those games due to computer hardware and decidedly takes the next step. The game's art direction is simply an evolution of other vertex racers featuring a more realized, animated world. The backdrop of each track is extensively animated and the game has four distinct biomes to boot. While these biomes share many of the same assets, each one holds hosts to their own signature locale and sometimes even sport different color palettes. The racers themselves are more individualized, each bearing their own costumes, backstory, ending sequence, and car selection. For the most dedicated players, you can even personalize each of the game's twenty-four cars. In a genre that thrives on the players that dedicate hundreds of hours optimizing their times, superfluous side-content such as this ends ensuring this niche audience will have content to further engross themselves into the game's universe.

Nevertheless, these charming aesthetical additions are of little importance in comparison to mechanical depth when it comes to securing longevity. The centerpiece of the game is the drifting mechanic. Drifting has a weighty, yet tangible handling to it. The reward to it is high; gracefully turning a corner not only maintains your speed but also charges your ever-vital boost gauge. However, the slightest error in your handling can be utterly devastating. It's a simple yet potent dynamic that lends itself to intricate mechanical exploration. On top of that, you have Hotshot Racing's diverse car selection. Its assortment of vehicles forms this nice sense of player expression by throwing a barrage of intriguing, meaningful variables into the mix. Do you want a higher acceleration so you can swiftly speed the competition? Do you want a more accurate drift so you can cut turns with pinpoint precision? Do you want a heightened top speed so you can bolt through the track in style? Or, do you want a mix of everything even?

Such mechanical refinement is worthy of being appreciated and its subtlety is amplified by Hotshot Racing's twenty assorted racetracks. There are five Grand Prixs, each of them journeying through the game's previously mentioned biomes in addition to three different "difficulty levels". These "difficulty levels" are less so representative of how brutally the AI will outpace and more so an indicator of what CC you will be racing at. The higher the CC, the more calamitous the smallest errors are. The track layouts themselves are far from being bombastic, but the delicate touch of Hotshot Racing's drifting mechanic keeps them feeling diversified. These courses act as a test of overall mechanical mastery, with each one slightly remixing itself in favor of one specific skill to spice things up. It gives the entire game this holistic feeling, and by extension further highlights player individuality. I adore how adamant Hotshot Racing is about being a laser-focused, expressive racing experience... which is why I find it astronomically disappointing how the game's balancing can't keep up with its diversity whatsoever.

The Time Trial leaderboard is dominated by a band of three cars out of an array of twenty-four. To be frank, it's terribly demoralizing to see all the time one invested cultivating their playstyle be thrown to the wayside due to unjust balancing. It would be disingenuous to say that these balancing issues are prominent on a casual level, I cleared each of the Grand Prixs on Expert before I even delve into Time Trial Mode. However, it cannot be understated how much this tipped scale spoils the game's longevity. When a majority of the roster pales in comparison to a small, select group of them, it accelerates the game's natural skill progression an unprecedented amount. When you're attempting to play to perfection, why explore the possibilities of the other vehicles that are ever so tremendously outclassed by their peers? It's no wonder the game has struggled to gain any semblance of a community, the game's solved. Only a small niche of players are going to dedicate the time to a racer to truly delve into this level of technicality, but considering the fact it's these same players that keep a game alive for years on end, it's devastating how shallow Hotshot Racing's skill pool is.

This leaves us with the game's aforementioned Grand Prixs and AIs, the latter of which holding host to their own bundle of issues and highlights yet another balancing issue. A common complaint with racers is their infamous rubber-banding AI, and I want to get it out and the way and say that is absolutely not the issue with the game. Rubber-banding AIs are cool, they lend way to a form of dynamic difficulty that gives racer this evergreen kind of content. What is a problem is how overtly aggressive they are. For some bizarre reason, the AI tends to hones into the player in an attempt to tailspin you. Mind you, going for a tailspin at Expert level speeds is a borderline infeasible task that yields high risk and little reward. Yet, the AI manages to accomplish the feat with pinpoint precision every single time they go for it. They not doing this as a desperate attempt to win the race, as doing a tailspin often causes you more speed than what it's worth-- no, they do it specifically to screw over you and only you. Even in Expert It's not impossible to come back from a tailspin, but that does not excuse how much it diminishes the value of skillful play. When you're only one unlucky tailspin away from losing all your progress, none of the race feels like it matters up till the very last lap.

Don't get me wrong however, these AI are still easily exploitable despite how much it seems like they hate you. There's a trick you can do to win every single Grand Prix with ease, and it applies to PvP races as well to an extent-- never get in first place. It is effectually impossible for the 1st-4th place AI to not be in close proximity of you as long as you're in the 2nd-4th place range yourself. So here's the gameplan: on the final lap, get into 2nd-4th place around the second half of the final lap. Then, right before the finish line, use the boost you accumulated to dash right past the competition. This works on every difficulty; the AI will never retaliate by boosting themselves, they will always surrender themselves and let you easily breeze past them. It doesn't even matter if you fail to accumulate the boost you need by drifting, by simply tailing behind another racer you build boost. This plays into 1st place being at disadvantage rather or not you're playing with the AI or your friends, slipstreaming is too strong of a comeback mechanic for genuine, skillful play to feel rewarded. This game's core racing is fundamentally broken to such an astonishing degree, the deeper I explored the game the more it felt like it was directly insulting me for trying to play to its expectations.

Once you've broken the Grand Prix Mode and gave up on the idea of competing in Time Trial, the game leaves you with a handful of additional casual modes. First, you have "Cops & Robbers", a mode in which you amass money by clearing checkpoints and ramming into other drivers. By virtue of this mode rewarding the same predatory aggression AIs exhibit in your standard race and the game's handling not being equipped to handle pinpoint aggression even halfway as well as the AI makes it out to be, this mode isn't all that fun. Then you have "Drive or Explode", a mode where you have to maintain a speed that is perpetually rising or, as the name says, you'll explode. Honestly it's by far the best mode the game has to offer; it stresses the game's fundamentals while lessening the value of obtaining first place. First place is still the chief victory condition, but the survivability aspect adds a real nice dynamic to it all. Finally, you have "Barrel Barrage", a mode where each racer is given a Mario Kart banana every time they pass a checkpoint. It's honestly not as chaotic as it sounds, you're still playing the same game and the AI isn't smart enough to strategically place barrels to begin with. Overall, outside of Drive or Explode, these modes are rather boring diversions at best and are far from being the fun, casual distractions they set out to be.

I've gathered a vast amount of respect for Sumo Digital over the years, so I admittedly went into Hotshot Racing with high hopes. While I initially considered the game a home-run, that initial high grew into confusion, and that confusion grew into frustration, and that frustration grew into apathy. Needless to say, Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital missed the mark. I dunno which studio was the one leading development, but ultimately it doesn't matter. They were so close to clutching what makes arcade racers tick, but it instead holds a rudimentary grasp on what made its forefathers and other racers in general hold so much longevity. With it failing on the single-player front and failing on the hardcore front, I struggle to find the meaning of Hotshot Racing. No more what perspective you look at the game from, it's a fundamentally failed game that I cannot in good faith recommend. Maybe if you're looking for five or so hours of innocent fun I could say give it a shot, but the fact of the matter is Hotshot Racing is an unfortunate exemplification of one the most painful kind of games-- the more you try to love it, the more it hurts to play it.

(shoutouts to @shininghubee/@gunshoots1 on twitter for gifting me the game btw go watch goldran for them)

Nothing can take away the raw earnestness D exhibits. The arduous journey of developing and releasing a full-motion video, two-hour, grotesque adventure game rump is a daunting one to undertake, and it becomes all the more demanding when you're a small time video game studio in Japan with no major industry connections. Nevertheless, D's lead director put his future in game development on the line to see that D becomes a success. The same man even went as far to purposely hand-in D's golden master late, all in an elaborate scheme to swap out the "clean" cut of the game with his uncensored, vulgar original vision.

This ambitious man is known as the late Kenji Eno, former president of Wrap and video game industry cowboy. A man so eccentric that he bundled in condom feelies in the packaging of one his studio's titles. A man so punk, that after the disastrous botching of D's PlayStation version pre-orders by Sony, he showcased a video of a PlayStation logo morphing into a Sega Saturn logo at Tokyo Game Show 1996. Not only that, but to further cut ties, he presented a video of his team at Wrap dancing and singing a song with lyrics along the lines of "Enemy Zero is a good game, Wrap is a good company", followed by him violently tossing a plush of Muumuu, the mascot of Sony's Jumping Flash!, onto the ground.

The legacy of D and Kenji Eno especially are inspiring to say the least, and it is what mainly attracts people to Wrap's unfortunately short but admirable list of releases. Successful the man was as well; for a creator who would probably be barred from the industry if he was still with us, Wrap's D went on to sell over a million copies, becoming a game that succeeded not only critically but financially. It's hard not to love D, and especially Kenji Eno. No other game, let alone developer, has such a chaotic yet down-to-earth backstory, and it's important to understand the kind of place D came from before diving into the work. For D without that context, relinquishes the form of an allusive, sincere, video game oddity and reveals itself in all its crude, banal essence.

Eno's intention with D's universe was to craft a bleak, sinister world first, with an enthralling narrative coming more as a second thought. It's due to this that D is rather light on story elements throughout. Yet in spite of that, what little narrative is there is one that tilts heavily towards the characters', Laura and her father Richter, rather than the meticulously crafted space of D's fully CGI castle. There's one resounding "why" throughout D's story, what drives a man to massacre an entire cluster of people so suddenly?

Lightly hidden about the setting are grotesque flashback sequences. These digressions are the signature flair of D, despite their sheltered-nature. They served as a vehicle to flesh out the plot after the adventure segments were basically complete. While these cutscenes don't offer much in the way of thematic nuance, they do act as the most spectacular, unsettling scenes the game has to offer and it'd be disingenuous for me to say they don't hold much merit given that D's graphical fidelity is one of its secondary selling points. Even so, it does significantly hurt D for it to not have much substance for one to sink their teeth into. Substance is what gives your journey through horror's typically hostile worlds meaning, and without much in the way in meat in D's world, it leaves the whole journey feeling somewhat hollow.

While it is damning that D's narrative is lacking in eloquence, it is essential to reiterate that the focus of D was to construct an ominous, isolating adventure game setting. D's CGI landscapes are nothing short of a technical marvel, every scene is confidently showcased via sweeping camera angles and dynamic cuts. The music is a constant, nice ambient throughout, and it cuts to silence at times to exacerbate the tension. Yet, just as with the narrative, there's a tinge of vapidness to D's world. The world never emits the same peculiarity nor hostility of your typical horror work. Every mystery the castle introduces is well within the range of human understanding, and anything that exists outside of these bounds has their mysticism robbed by the game explaining them away soon after their encounter. As a whole, the setting of D feels detached from its narrative, and more execrably, fails to capture the atmosphere that it strove to capture.

All we're left with now is D's gameplay, which is, to be frank, the most abominable aspect of a game that is already full of poorly executed concepts. D's pacing can only be described as indulgently methodical. Every FMV sequence takes at least fifteen seconds to play out. This very quickly graduates from charming to aggravating when you realize none of the decisions you'll be making contain enough gravity to make these slow, deliberate animations tolerable. Outside of a forced game over if one takes over two hours to complete the game, there is no fail state in D. You are never at any threat of harm, failure, or difficulty regardless of what action you take. The only purpose these FMV serve is to pompously showcase D's largely forgettable environments.

This is all amplified by the fact that D has the audacity to intermix puzzles within its already monotonous gameplay. No matter how rudimentary these puzzles are, nothing will change the sheer amount of time each of them wastes for absolutely no reason. Bar none, I've never reckoned with a puzzle that has wasted as much as my time as the central puzzle of D's Disc 2. For one-third of the game's runtime, you will be forced to engage with a puzzle that has no barring on the game's narrative, atmosphere, or anything of meaning whatsoever. Five minutes into the puzzle, you will have probably already figured out what the solution is, but that doesn't matter when you have to sit through D's plethora of 20+ second animations. These puzzles aren't here to be mentally engaging, they're here to extend the game's run time past the thirty-minute mark so audiences don't feel like they wasted their money on a game that has absolutely nothing to offer on any front whatsoever.

I want to love D.

Nothing excites me more than a game with a chronicle as offbeat as D, and Kenji Eno's legacy resonates with me to the core. It's atypical for me to go into anything with any other expectation besides it executing on what it's aiming to do, but it's hard to dash that feeling of D being meaningful when it has all the foundations of a game I'd fall in love with. I pondered on rather I would say D is meaningful for a good night after playing through it. To be honest, I don't think I quite figured out the answer till I went back and revised this review.

D, despite all my misgivings with it on a fundamental level, is still a significant experience. It's not significant because it did the nearly impossible task of satisfying even a quarter of the game's initial, enchanting allure. It's significant because the story behind Kenji Eno, his legacy, and his drive to see D succeed is a rattlingly human, inspiring tale, and regardless of how you feel about D coming out of it, his ambitions will always resonate deeply within any person who's felt a creative drive and I strongly recommend it to anyone who's one of those people.

Cing's DS output are the type of games you encounter once in a lifetime. Never again will you get a game with a faux-noir narrative with marvelously animated characters presented in the style of a notebook. Nevermore will you get a Nintendo published game that handles people struggling to keep up this facade of them living this average, normal life while they're still aimlessly wandering through life in hopes of maybe finding a way to put their baggage to rest, all to the tone of a nice, jazzy soundtrack. Even if you do manage to find a mystical game that also happens to excel on all these fronts, this imaginary game will never grapple with the same level of pure ingenuity and confidence that is practically bursting out of the seams in some of Cing's works. Cing, and Hotel Dusk especially, does not deserve to be lost to the annals of time. Hotel Dusk, in all its innocent tenaciousness, is an experience that will forever be etched into my memory.

Cing's works tend to blend in with the rest of the DS' absurdly good third-party titles; and while this isn't necessarily a fault, the historic context behind the game sheds some light on how this seemly out-of-nowhere game sticks the landing with flying colors. Hotel Dusk's scenario writer Rika Suzuki is a lady that has had her hand in a lotta pies throughout the decades. From assisting on the production of Dragon Quest I through IV, to pioneering the adventure game genre with the successful J.B. Harold series, Suzuki has always been an influential force within the industry. This is why, from the perspective of Japanese audiences, Cing's foray into the DS represented a new beginning for an established game designer.

With the advent of the DS, Suzuki saw an opportunity to capitalize on her stock of experience and wisdom. With the unconventional nature of Nintendo's brand new handheld and the low-production costs of designing for said platform, Suzuki saw a chance to experiment with the adventure game genre from an unexplored angle. Thankfully Nintendo would see eye to eye with Suzuki's ambitions to an extent. They too saw the implications of the dual-screen setup of their latest handheld, and they more than willing to publish the game so Cing's ideas could come to fruition. This is how Hotel Dusk came to captivate so many unsuspecting DS owners, it's a game, unlike anything else Nintendo has published in the west, not only founded on top of a well of iteration and refinement but a game that's more than enthusiastic about taking full advantage of its unique platform.

However, it'd be disingenuous to solely put the spotlight on Suzuki when Hotel Dusk's director and character animator supervisor Taisuke Kanasaki's phenomenal art direction that really sold audiences on the world of Hotel Dusk. The stylistic boldness of Hotel Dusk's character portraits are not to go unnoticed. Kanasaki's rotoscoped, sketchy character portraits have an awing level of veracity to them. The subtle, small shift in facial annotation and posture establishes this living quality throughout the cast, and it's these same portraits that wordlessly communicate a melting pot of complex emotions these characters have to battle with as the truth and their insecurities claws its way into the light.

In a game as exceptional as Hotel Dusk though, where there's style there's substance, and Cing's down-to-earth, intimate universe has more than enough substance. Hotel Dusk has the foundations of your standard noir work, but this presentation acts an inventive illusion to a deeply interpersonal game. Hell, the game intentionally plays with this with its main character, a former detective turned door-to-door salesman, deceiving noir-esque jacket. The real meat of Hotel Dusk lies in the residents of the shabby, rattletrap Hotel Dusk. Over the course of your exhaustive, one night stay at Hotel Dusk, you will be deconstructing these characters' lives bit by bit, not to expose and critique the core of these characters' baggage, not to get to the bottom of some grand conspiracy, but in order to make amends with your own troubling past.

While you do eventually get to the bottom of a grand conspiracy, this happens more as a result of the cast collectively striving to find a resolution to their shattered past. In defiance to their seemly normal outward demeanor, all these characters are suffering; desperately yet aimlessly pursuing the truth of the days gone by so they can finally break free of their shackles. Hotel Dusk is brimming with people holding regrets, insecurities, trauma, and guilt and they're all brewing to be stirred before the dawn of the new decade.

Where would Hotel Dusk be though, without the constant hum of its understated soundtrack? Composer Satoshi Okubo produced a score oozing with variety and his memorable melodies enrich every moment it decorates. The music never quite oversteps what's happening on screen, instead it comfortably settles into the mood constructed by the script and art direction. The cast's off-beat banter is coated in a layer of swingy electric, the subdued investigation segments are laced in this soothing bossa nova sound, and with each moment of tension, the game sings its heart out and boasters the emotions of the prevailing scene.

With all this in mind though, I can assuredly say Hotel Dusk wouldn't be remembered as the brilliant gem it is today if it was propped by its ingenious presentation that exploits every avenue a dual, touch screen handheld mounts. Hotel Dusk challenges you to discard all petty preconceptions of what video games can do and forces you to hold your DS in the same vein as a notebook, packaged with a handy left-handed and right-handed mode of course. As with your usual adventure game affair, the player is constantly confronted with an assortment of puzzles, halting your progression until you sit down and solve them.

Except with Hotel Dusk, solving puzzles and investigating isn't a conventionally fair of solving riddles, cracking number codes, or deciphering messages. No, instead you will be whittling down notes in your notebook, locksmithing your suitcase with a wire, and revolving a cardboard box around to find a secret letter. While these puzzles aren't brainteasers, their novelty is exceptionally striking and a good portion of them never overstay their welcome. Unfortunately, as with many physically unconventional games, this comes at the consequence of the experience being diluted on anything but original hardware. Many of the game's head-scratchers lose all of their intuitiveness once you drop them out of the context playing on original hardware confides them in. It's a damn shame, but it just goes to show how Hotel Dusk is, bar none, one of the most distinctive experiences you can get your hands on.

Yet, while Cing's confidence is deserving of great praise and respect, it sometimes comes at the cost of breaking the game's cohesion. When you're working with an unconventional gameplay device, you have to offer some leeway to the player. There has to be enough information to invoke an intuition within their head, leading to them cracking the mystery. Some puzzles in Hotel Dusk break that code of law unfortunately. Every so often, the game contests you with a puzzle that are at least ten degrees more out there compared to the game's usual roadblocks. I would welcome these riddles with a warm embrace if it the game attempted to offer enough contextual information to trigger an intuitive, finally leading you to crack the secret. More often than not, I would solve these puzzles by sheer accident rather than me wrecking my brain, and puzzles of that nature are less satisfying and more anticlimactic. These moments break the established pace of the game, and by extension tragically fractures an otherwise smooth-sailing, immersive experience.

It dismays me that these rare few puzzles aren't the only blemishes on Hotel Dusk's journey and that sometimes the investigating itself turns the game into a monotonous, disconnected experience. At times will find yourself directionlessly roaming around the hotel, entering each and every room and interacting with every little nook and cranny in hopes of finally triggering an event flag. Kyle has something to say about little detail in the you choose to engage with, which quickly transitions from charming to annoying when compounded by Hotel Dusk's painfully slow default text crawl.

It's even more heartbreaking how the game's already numerous pacing issues are exaggerated even further by the forced game's absurdly out-of-place end-of-chapter summary quizzes. These quizzes aren't as aggravating as the other flaws presented, especially given that you have to try to fail at them at times, but their very existence is profoundly baffling. These quizzes often pertain to information that doesn't have any real significance to the game on a thematic level, sometimes even on a plot level, and they feel noticeably out of place in a game where the overarching conflict isn't even the focus. Conjoined by the fact that there are already chapter summaries right in the main character's notebook, the decision to include the segments is just utterly dumbfounding.

Now, with all my aforementioned frustrations, do I still recommend Hotel Dusk? Yes, in fact, I cannot recommend it enough. My grievances with some of its game design decisions does not change how remarkably well every facet of Hotel Dusk comes together to form such a cohesive, unique experience. I fell in love with so many aspects of this game, and it has made me break down and cry and feel for these characters. It's truly a one-of-a-kind game and I am begging you, even if you only have a passing interest in the game, to at least give it a chance before the game becomes inaccessible. No amount of words will be able to articulate how much Hotel Dusk has changed my perspective on the power of handheld games, and the possibilities of video games that are yet to be seen.