fun little time waster, but not that deep of a game even for atari standards. It's basically a physics simulator where you have to calculate the right speed and angle to set your cannon so mr cannonball can land in his safety bucket instead of splattering against the floor. There's a mode where the speed is randomly set and you have to set the angle to compensate, a mode that's the same thing except the cannon is farther away, a mode where you can set the speed AND angle but the position of the cannon is randomized (yet you can move the safety bucket for some reason so it's really more like catch), and a mode where the speed and angle are randomly set but you can move the position of the cannon (and again the bucket). There's also variations of each of those four gamemodes to include a giant forcefield with a rotating gap around the bucket so you have to time your shot properly as well as aiming it, but I felt that it really didn't add much besides making the game more burdensome since this is way more of a thinking mans game than anything so proper timing feels unnecessary. Regardless, in any gamemode you have 13 shots and if you get seven buckets you win whereas seven cannonball corpses is a loss. Nothing really more to it. I can imagine this game was probably a fun programming experiment and there's gotta at least be ONE math nerd out there that really got into doing cracked human cannonball trickshots in order to impress the ladies, but for me this game is just okay.

Cool game, the last title NDcube made before getting sent to the mediocre party game mines until the end of time. Despite being developed by a literal first-party nintendo studio this was published by NEC and was only released in north america. Weird.

It's a fun zero-G racer, leaning more towards Wipeout than F-Zero. The courses are all composed of the titular slidable tubes, and while it seems like a gimmick at first the courses are definitely designed around being able to ride on all sides. It makes cornering particularly unique, as turns can become bumps if you are on a certain part of the tube. Getting bumped into the air significantly hinders your speed, so the best way to go fast is to treat it more like a bobsled luge of sorts and keep your vehicle glued to the floor at all possible times. There are 3 different types of turns that you can make depending on which combination of joystick and trigger directions that are inputted, and the game doesn't really do a very good job explaining the best use case situations for each so there's a lot of trial and error when it comes to picking up the controls and mechanics. It's really hard to to drifts without spinning out, losing all the speed gained throughout the course, getting passed up by 3 different other racers while you watch helplessly. There's also a boost system that's designed around a meter that increases over time. There's a weird combat mechanic thrown in where tailing other racers from behind allows you to steal their meter, but I found that due to how the AI works there weren't many options for me to take advantage of that whereas the AI loved to just suck me dry every opportunity they could get. Apparently there's like a parry window where you can input to reverse card their succ attempts but nowhere in my entire playthrough could I successfully pull it off (but of course the AI can do it without breaking a sweat). You can also choose between like two different boost types where one accumulates up to three boost stocks that you can spend and another where it's a bar you can pull from any time. There aren't any items or such to speak of, so it's a rather straight-laced racer.

The game has vibes for days though. The menus look like they have been ripped directly out of some 2003 ass jetix/toonami cyber-futurecore ad bumpers and I'm totally here for it. The vehicle designs are rad, the soundtrack is some bumpin techno, and the levels actually have decent environmental variety despite all being enclosed in clear metal tubes. There's your typical cybery metal city landscapes, sure, but there's also stuff like a giant withered tree, a lush jungle, a shady neon-lit city block, and the classic underwater ocean tube. Every game with an underwater ocean tube is a good game, I don't make the rules here.

My only major problem with this game is in its pacing and difficulty. This shit is paced like a mfin SNK fighting game, where even though the game is short 75% of my time playing it was spent in the mfin final nayuta cup instead of having my playtime spread evenly across the games full breadth of content. The AI is such a blatantly cheating bastard in this game it's not even funny. It's not unusual to be running a decent race in like 4th place or so, look at the map, and see that first is halfway across the fucking course isolated from everyone else. Once the game spreads the AI out like its joever dude you might as well restart and save yourself the time. There's only 3 cups in the game split across two classes and while the first cup on the first class is piss easy to the point of being braindead, the second cup starts to take the gloves off and the third cup puts on the brass knuckles. And then you have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN on a higher speed class with even more fiendish AI! I'd really chalk it up to being a case of the devs not really playtesting too well and tuning the game balance for themselves over the average player because the game spikes up the difficulty way before I could grasp the game enough to be ready. Maybe they expected players to grind out each course in the training free run mode or time trials before tackling the third cup? This game would easily be bumped up a star if the balance was toned down by like two notches, it's super demoralizing to watch an entire run go awry from the CPU just being utterly merciless.

Overall it's a cool racer with sizably thought-out mechanics and hella vibes made slightly sour by just how unbalanced the AI opponents are. I've seen videos of SPEEDRUNNERS getting second place in certain races due to the fucked up balancing!!! If I had a nickel for every brutally difficult zero-G racer that's exclusive to the gamecube I've played, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that there's two of them. They really should let NDcube run wild again sometime instead of having them make Everybody's 1-2 Wii Party the top 100, this game is probably their best work.

The hardcore blackjack players at the 2600 launch must have had their ultimate marvel vs capcom 3 moment 33 years in advance because this is virtually the exact same game as blackjack except with more in it released likely less than a year later. The blackjack mode is still blackjack, the rules are the same as always and the jacks are just as black as they normally are. This game does add insurance to the table, where you can safely bail if the CPU shows the potential of getting a blackjack. There's also card splitting in Blackjack where you can branch one hand into two for even higher stakes fake gambling. Instead of Blackjack having a 200 credit starting pool that resets at 1000 this game has a pool of 1000 credits that resets at 10000, though considering the fact that you can only bet in increments of tens it's really more like you start at 100 and it resets at 1000. You still play this with the paddles too, so the four-player support is still intact. This games blackjack mode renders regular Blackjack completely obsolete at this point.

And that's not even all that this game has to offer! New entirely are the gamemodes of stud poker and poker solitaire. Stud Poker goes up to four players and everyones credit pools can carry over between it and blackjack in this atari casino. Basically you watch your hand and the houses hand and place bets as it grows to see who has the winning hand. The only strange thing about it is you can still add one final bet after both hands are already fully shown which like if you already know you have a winning hand you can spike your bet right at the very end to get easy extra credits, or if you know you are screwed you can pull out and take less punishment. I'm not gambling or poker expert and haven't really stepped foot in an actual casino (outside of going to arcades that happen to be inside casinos) but I don't think actual stud poker probably plays that way. Most of the poker hands won't even show up in stud poker due to the RNG nature of it all; 95% of the time if anyone makes one singular pair they will win. I don't think I saw very many straights or flushes at all honestly. Through initially betting really small and only going all in when I knew I already won I was very easily able to break the bank and hit that 10k credit threshold. Honestly a way safer way to gamble than playing blackjack ngl. The last game is Poker Solitaire where you have a giant 5x5 grid and you place cards to try and see how many perpendicular hands you can make going horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. I'm sure that there's some solved-puzzle perfect pattern to put the cards in to get the highest score, but considering the fact that it's a singleplayer mode that doesn't factor credits anywhere I only really saw that mode as a little distraction from the main gambling action. It would have been cool if you had to go to solitaire mode to earn extra tokens in the event of like going bankrupt or whatever, but it was not to be I guess. If you want to experience having a gambling addiction in the comfort of your own home, this is as good a pick as any.

This game is pretty much one big homage to the tabletop games that inspired so much of the medium, and while I'm not a big tabletop player myself (i don't have a group of tableplayers to dungeon and/or dragon with, nor do I have the spare time to be doing long campaigns), I definitely see the vision this game goes for. It basically strips the RPG to its absolute bare essence. Cutscenes are told mostly through text over still images, there's pretty much zero animation in the game as every character is a still figure model, there's no level-based stat progression as equipment and skills are your tools to survive enemy encounters, and there are plenty of dice to be rolled for checks. While the overall presentation of everything can certainly feel a bit dry at points, the writing absolutely steals the show. I haven't played any of Yasumi Matsuno's other work, but if the writing in those is as raw as it is here you can consider me very interested to try them out. The cutscenes did a really good job at allowing my mind to fill in the blanks created by the limited visual presentation, and I did enjoy each of the party members even if I still do not know how to properly pronounce "Giauque". Only downsides this game has is there's a random dumb item grind smack dab in the middle of the game that's just doing the same battle over and over in hopes that a progress item gets dropped and that the game kinda has a short length that makes it feel over just as the party starts to get enough skills to make battles comfortably interesting. It certainly ain't a game for everyone, but I enjoyed it surprisingly more than I expected.

Can I really be that harsh on a mfin atari 2600 launch title that seeks to replicate a simple gambling card game and nothing else? It's exactly what it says on the box, you want blackjack, you get blackjack. Only in the late 70's will you be able to find a card game that you play with a mfin paddle controller. It's pretty cool that this game supports up to four players though, even if its everyone vs the house rather than everyone vs each other. For the launch lineup this is probably one of the more social games in the bunch. You start with 200 chips and the chip counter resets at 1000 so I initially set that as my goal, but after getting to around 750 and then watching the house completely own me with enough back-to-back losses that I was back at basically square one again did I realize that huh yeah maybe this is why I shouldn't get a gambling addiction. Truly a cautionary tale from the dawn of console gaming that nobody seemed to heed, this game ran so Balatro and gacha games could crawl.