Hellishly hard: dense webs of bullets rapidly accelerate towards you in an unholy union of bullet-hell and Raiden-style shmup design. The colorful prerendered graphics and squeaky voice clips only rub it in.

A short shmup with variable stages and a meter you have to keep down by chain-killing foes to avoid an instant ride to the final boss. Its Rez-like CyberWar premise and presentation are extremely cool. Plays great.

Love when a Tetris game makes me feel like I'm defusing a live explosive. This is a faultless and ruthless take on the classic format. T.A. Death is a great way to get nightmares. Pumping soundtrack and neat, industrial backgrounds.

Putting aside its dismally boring presentation, this is probably one of the best "revival" beat-'em-ups we've gotten, if only for its novel movement options (ground pummels, a super bar) and wisely short length.

Deeply unorthodox shmup where every enemy can be turned into a unique weapon, detonated as a bomb, and used to get into laser-beam struggles with bosses. Sheer, low-poly psychedelia. Pretty tough.

Pretty much what you'd expect from a G/S iteration upon the original, but with a few more modes and features, including a neat Battle School that taught you the more obscure rules of combat. The mini-games are not as good...

Mostly bought this game because it came out before the Wii U version. I give it one more star for the novelty of a full-fledged portable Smash game, for how nice the thick black character outlines looked, and for Smash Run.

Its presentation and campaign scream "late-era SNES game." The whole collect-'em-all angle seems like a natural evolution of the JRPG mindset, though it does make for a very easy and combat-irrelevant title.

This game had maybe too (??) much fun with the Contra IP and would've been better-received as a standalone top-down co-op shooter. On its own terms it's a very good game, though the goofy stuff is more successful than the grotesque.

Even if it now looks kinda like a PC doujin title, the passion and personality crammed into pre-Xrd Guilty Gear is exuded by every pixel of this ruthless, irreverent, fathoms-deep, execution-hungry anime fighter.

Anime fighter with hyper-specialized character archetypes. Has a shockingly comprehensive tutorial. Once you get past the arcane system descriptions and busy HUD, it's a pretty approachable and didactic game.

The presentation and fabulistic story mostly make up for what feels like a step back mechanically: too many long-winded puzzles and uninteresting stages compared to the first game's more even pacing and design.

A personal favorite kusoge. It's full of dull or alarming stereotypes and often feels like shit to play, but it also has cool backgrounds, fun movement options, desperation moves, and Mudman... I may have to re-evaluate my opinion of ADK.

Oddball combination of Zelda-like top-down exploration, Suikoden-esque base-building, and tactical mega-tank artillery battles. Each system feeds into the next. Simple and brief, but still feels like a second-tier handheld game to me.

A simplified roguelike very much like Mystery Dungeon. Four dungeons, each with a different objective required to proceed, make dungeon runs short, crunchy, and varied. An ideal little game for handhelds. Funny, too.