Definitely an unorthodox game, but considering this games background that's to be expected. You run a blacksmithing weapon shop with your burly mentor figure, forging weapons that various people can use to complete their quests and solve their problems. Forging weapons is done through this strange rhythm minigame where you tap different parts of a molten slab to a rhythm in order to strengthen different stats, but the game really doesn't do a good job explaining how to consistently make weapons with good base stats so it felt like complete RNG as to whether or not the game said I made a dull piece of garbage or a god-slaying masterpiece. Hell, maybe it actually is RNG, who knows.

Rather than outright sell the weapons you make, the shop you run has a weird rental system. Weapons are rented out, and only once your clients clear their quest will they pay you for your services whereas if they fail they both don't give you shit AND lose the weapon you gave out to them. Since weapons level up and grow in stats the more times they are used and successfully return, you definitely want to make sure you assign the right weapons to the right clients or else you might accidentally lose something decent. The weapons are also equipped with the "Grindcast", which is a twitter-like media feed that broadcasts whatever it is that the renters are questing in real time, and it plays all throughout the game (even during the parts where you are focused on something else, which can and will lead to moments where you miss some story beats entirely due to your attention being elsewhere. Maybe if the grindcast was voiced instead of a text log it would have worked better as an in-game podcast but then the rhythm gameplay would be harder and yeah i don't think they really thought that one all the way through). Customers also come in and out of the store as they please, and it gives the game this very passive vibe. Like there's just a lot of downtime as you just kinda work on making and polishing weapons while waiting for the game to send someone in. Or sometimes the game will throw countless random unnamed NPCs at you to rent random shit while you are trying to actually make what you need to make before an actual named important client comes back looking for the weapon you promised them. The pacing is borderline nonexistent and the gameplay almost borders on idle-game territory at points.

The real point of the game though is in its writing. It's clear that the weird rental nature and Grindcast feed system are all in place as a way to keep the player involved with the world and characters despite being confined within the four walls of the weapon shop for the entire game. The game was written and directed by Yoshiyuki Hirai of the Japanese comedy group America Zarigani, so the emphasis is on the gags within the NPCs and the quirks that each of the characters have. That being said, I think that the localization team might have translated some of the gags a bit too literally because the writing felt really dry and the jokes usually tended to fall under a very particular singular sense of humor that I honestly can't even describe in words. A lot of the bits didn't really hit for me, and I honestly can't really tell if that's due to the brand of humor that Hirai has in the first place, the localization team being too direct with their translation, or some combination of both. Even the games ending is a bit that just fell flat on its face to me...

I definitely think the game runs a bit too long for its own good, especially given the downtimey gameplay and flat writing that make the game feel far longer than the roughly 10-hour runtime actually is. Unlike the other Guild games having been developed by established and esteemed developers that have intricate experience on how to make games, this game was made by an entire outsider to the industry and honestly I respect that. Since Hirai has done voicework for other Level5 games I wouldn't be surprised if he got onboard for the project by just pitching this idea for a weapon shop game he thought up some time ago (yet didn't fully think through in a gameplay mechanical sense). You don't really see experimental titles like that from complete outsiders get made very often, stuff like the Mother series, Takeshi's Challenge, Penn & Tellers Smoke and Mirrors, Otocky, etc. Just people that don't typically make games having an off-beat idea and a publisher willing to take a chance on it. Even if the end result might be something that's kinda eh to play and doesn't feel very properly thought-out, I can't hate the ambition and adore how absolutely unique games like this always turn out to be.

It's a twist on Breakout, though I'm not particularly sure if it twists things in a substantially better or worse way tbh. Instead of having one ball bounce between a paddle you have two clowns bouncing off of a see-saw, and you gotta position things right and account for physics n shit to get good hits. The bricks are balloons now and are now constantly moving, with the line going in a loop constantly. It's cool in the way that you can get a clown stuck at the top sandwiched between two balloons as they keep moving into his bounces, but idk doesn't feel as inherently satisfying as calculating a shot to get stuck in the ceiling in breakout. The physics with the see-saw seem a bit inconsistent to me as well, as most of the bounces I had didn't even really launch the clowns high enough to hit the balloons in the first place. The balloons also repopulate on a per-row basis instead of everything refilling at once when the board is clear, which I thought was weird at first but upon playing the game type that refreshes in the traditional breakout way and being stuck trying to hit that last moving balloon by hoping it just happens to move into my clown ass I realized why they made the default refresh how it is. There are also game types that add extra barriers that move in a row below all the balloons, which add another layer of unpredictability to the game. At the end of the day it's breakout but with a lot of extra moving parts, and those moving parts can make it both more interesting due to the seeming random chaos that can happen while that same chaos can make the game less satisfying and engaging as sometimes you can get a crazy point combo by complete accident. I can definitely respect the thought that went into trying to make breakout more complex, but I don't really think it substantially adds or detracts to the block-breaking genre, it's just different. Despite being a circus game, you wouldn't have to be a clown to enjoy what's on offer here.

jesus christ activision sure knows how to make tense games for the 2600. On average, this game is like 6-7 seconds long, which sounds pathetic on paper but dear lord getting that time down is an absolute struggle.

So here's why this game is kinda nuts: there's a tachometer at the bottom of your screen. If it goes past 3/4ths of your screen at any time, you blow up and die instantaneously. Pushing the button on the controller is your gas and your gas moves the meter up. Pushing down the left direction on the joystick puts you in a clutch state where the tachometer is so sensitive to gas that pretty much holding both the button and left at the same time at any point is a death sentence. Releasing left after pressing it down brings you up a gear, where you go faster with a slower tachometer. Basically you need to do as close to frame-perfect button presses and joystick inputs/releases as you feasibly can, and if you do it right, you get a good time, and if you do it even slightly wrong you either die in a horrific car explosion or get a shit time that brings great dishonor to your drag racing career. The manual's challenge of getting under 6 seconds to join the World Class Dragster Club is no simple task either. Considering the frame-perfect theoretical perfect time is 5.57, there's a shockingly small margin of error to join that prestigious, 40-years-defunct club (and if you say you've gotten a 5.51 before, you are a liar!). It took me dozens upon dozens of attempts to be able to just barely squeeze out a 5.94 that I swear to god felt like luck as I did the same thing I usually did for a good run, I just must have happened to have pressed the buttons at a more optimal time. Though I guess since the game is only 6 seconds long on a good run those dozens of attempts was still only like 20-30 minutes of grind. I felt like I spent more time waiting for the starting countdown to finish (or prematurely exploding by failing to properly feather the gas during the countdown as a way to get a good start) than actually racing, which is kinda eh but it is what it is.

It's certainly a deep and thought-out game that has a high skill ceiling to work up towards for sure. With how much frame-perfection is emphasized here, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a game to sew the seeds of speedrunning or just general high-level gamer tech to the still-blossoming Atari gamer crowd. But it does mean that this game is definitely geared towards that certain type of player, so if you aren't into personal time attack grinds there's pretty much less game time for you in this game than the time it took you to read this whole ramble in the first place. Fascinating!

FUCK YEAH, KABOOM

im biased as fuck, this is easily my favorite game on the atari 2600. Using the paddle controller to catch bombs from the mad bomber is hella addicting, specifically due to just how unrelentingly difficult the game is. You gotta be mfin FAST to get anywhere past level 5, and scoring high is actually a reasonable challenge. Unlike Pitfall and Oink, the other two activision games I hit the manuals target challenge score for so far, getting 3000 points in this game to enter the Bucket Brigade takes a sizeable amount of practice and skill to pull off, where you get that one hot run going and it all just comes together, like shit man it's just satisfying as fuck to play this. It just gets me in that flowstate man where every game over has me immediately reaching for that reset button to play some more. God I love kaboom dude if you have an atari and a paddle controller for it this shit is an on-sight play

Another "banger with another person, pretty dire on your own"-like. The 2600 probably has a lot of these... There's a big grid of squares and one of them has a flag that two players compete to find. You can actually use the joystick to move around as a cursor to select which square you want to search (take THAT, a game of concentration! I knew you could make a cursor in 1978!), and if it's the flag, you win! If it's not, it's either a directional hint pointing you where it could be, a number hint telling you how far away it is, or a bomb that sends you back to the starting point (owned). It's more classic dumb simple fun that the Atari is good at, and there's definitely enough randomness involved for there to be fun shenanigans like guessing completely right on the first try or being misled to hit a bomb that you were SURE was the flag. The game gives the options for each player to either take turns guessing or have both players go at the same time for a chaotic free-for-all. You can also toggle having the flag MOVE every turn, with options to have it loop around the edges of the screen or bounce off of them to make things harder to find. For the solitary gamers out there though, all you get is a simple time attack where you have 75 seconds to collect as many flags as you can, with no real goal to aim for other than whatever your previous high score was. At least it's something? Definitely worth busting out when it's Atari night for sure.

For the game that comes with the Atari 2600, it's a great way to showcase the real appeal of the system both then and now ngl. The best moments from this console come from the simplicity of the games combined with the social aspect of playing the games with a friend. Combat absolutely fills that role quite well, as the games within are simple and easy to understand (shoot each other) and the selectable game modes and maps provide enough variety to keep things interesting for a long time. While the standard tank mode is fun enough, there's a surprising amount of fun to be had in the tank-pong mode, where bullets ricochet off of walls allowing for insane trick shots, or the sneakiness that comes from Invisible tank, where the only time a tank is visible is when it's firing a shot, allowing for extra strategy as you try to estimate where you and your opponent are (and yet neither player is always perfectly on-the-mark thanks to the stiff controls both players have to deal with). The plane modes are kinda lame tho. If you've never done it before, I'd highly suggest getting a homie, throwin on some music in the background, and just playing Atari games with them while talkin about whatever. That shits always a good time. I'm honestly surprised that this is the pack-in game instead of a safer pick like Pong, but I guess they probably did that to differentiate themselves from the plenty of already-existing dedicated pong machines at the time. Can't say it's one of the best Atari games due to the fact that it's basically useless to the solitary gamers out there, but it's a damn good statement of intent for the 2600.

You know, by 1978 I'm sure they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they never really considered whether or not they should. It's your typical memory-based flip-the-cards-and-get-matches type beat, and while I can certainly dunk on this for entirely being something that's more suited for a mini-game in even an NES game, but this do be like literally year 1 atari stuff so I have plenty of slack to cut in the content regard.

That being said though even in the context of its release I think this game is beaten by an actual deck of cards in a lot of ways. For a console that ships with a controller with 4 directions and a button why the hell would you go with needing a proprietary number pad controller to dial in which cards you want to pick instead of like using the joystick as a cursor and the button to select? The single player mode is entirely player-driven when it comes to goals; the manual doesn't even have anything like "try for a score under 10 to be a real Atari Concentration Camper!" or whatever, you just match pictures, and when it's done it's over. There's also a mode that replaces one pair of pictures with 2 wild cards that can be matched with any other card, except for the fact that it doesn't clear both the card the wild card is matching with as well as the card that it's supposed to be matched with, which just leaves you with a dead game at the end as you have two spare cards that cannot match with each other. It makes the wild cards less of an assist feature as they actually just end up being random game-ruining landmines. Very cool.

I get that this game was released in such an early state of gaming that the mere aspect of interacting with your TV to play something normally designed for tabletop play gave this game enough value through novelty, but like there are 2600 launch titles like combat and pong that have way more intuitive and responsive gameplay and control, so even in its time there would be better options to play imo.

holy shit. I just beat Battletoads.

I've seen the web lambast this game endlessly as the game has been showered with the title of "hardest game of all time" from all sorts of people and places on the internet. For years I had just assumed that this would be a game that I would never even think to pass the infamous Turbo Tunnels, much less actually see the ending. It was only when I saw this game cleared on a two-part Game Center CX playthrough when the illusion of this game being impossibly difficult faded. In fact, it looked like a fun kind of challenge! I figured that if Arino could beat this game, so could I, and as such I put it on the "games-to-stream" backburner until the time had come. And boy, did the time come. Roughly 9 hours of grinding later, here we are.

I think the main reason why this game sticks out so much as being so nightmarishly difficult is mostly due to how outwardly hostile the games design tends to be. Memorizing the levels and becoming intimately familiar with them through repetition (and a little bit of trial and error) is the key to being able to progress. Each level honestly stands out from one another well enough to make climbing back to where you were before at every game over not TOO painful in the grand scheme of things. Each of the 12 levels usually has some kind of gimmick or new mechanic to grapple with, like the ropes in stage 2, the turbo tunnels in 3, ice in 4, surfing in 5, snakes in 6, etc etc. Honestly the game does a solid job introducing the mechanics to let you know how things work before cranking the heat up. Graphically this game is really solid on the NES with plenty of quirks and tricks used to give the game some pizazz. It's definitely more of an A-list Rare NES title that contrasts from the licensed shovelware they occasionally made (likely to fund the projects they actually wanted to make like this)

It is still quite a spicy game, so those that are averse to getting your shit kicked in will have a bad time. Honestly the difficulty felt most similar to like middle-echelon Mario Maker levels. Like, the kind of stuff made by someone who is clearly good at games but not like insane person kaizo shit nawsay? Considering the fact that Rare has mentioned their lead designers being good at games and that a lot of difficult NES games are usually products of the developers also being the playtesters, essentially tuning their games for themselves rather than their players and accidentally cranking it up a bit too much, that's likely why this game is how it is. I had to use every trick the US version of the game could allow to finish this; I used the warps to skip levels 2, 4, and 7 while also alternating both players every continue with down+A+B held to get the most possible lives and continues the game offers, and even then I made it out on my last continue. Against games like this though, you really gotta get every leg up on the game that you can ngl, a clear is a clear. The hardest part for sure was the third rat in Rat Race, if you can pass that point you have enough skills to make it through the rest imo. Clinger Winger or whatever tf it was called was a cakewalk ngl, I heard the horror stories about that level and was surprised when I cleared the speeder section on my first attempt. This game is certainly a hot one, but idk it's definitely not the hardest game ever made. I don't even think it's the hardest game I've played, I had way more struggles with getting through stuff like Ninja Gaiden Sigma and God Hand (to their detriment, mind you. Overly hard games suck imo) than with this. The game is still pretty masochist-core, don't get me wrong, but if it was really the hardest game ever, I wouldn't have been able to get here in the first place. A must-play for pain-seekers, but definitely take-it-or-leave-it for the normal folk out there.

naw man i can't think of any reason why you should play this, especially over the much superior Basketball that came out much earlier. Like, I respect the attempt to innovate by making it be 2v2s instead of 1v1s, the visuals look more like a basketball court instead of the surface of mars, and you can hear the crowd cheer every time you score, but the added complexity of the team aspect of the game really hurts more than it helps.

The court is like split into two horizontal rows that each team player resides in, and you control them at the same time. You can't have the lower player go in the upper half and the upper player can't go in the lower half, it's like theres an invisible barrier that separates your two players. If the ball lands in the middle of the court, is it in the upper or lower half? Who knows! There's also the added problem of the pass and shoot buttons being bound to the singular button on the joystick, so it's very easy to do one action when you were intending to do the other. Awesome! The CPU obviously has none of these problems, and will absolutely smoke you no matter what difficulty settings you might have the game set to. I would say this might be fun with another player as both people are bound to the same control handicaps, but you know what else is more fun either by yourself or with a friend? REGULAR BASKETBALL PLAY THAT INSTEAD THAT GAME OWNS!!! if this is what real sports are I only care about fake sports.

luckily it's very unlikely you could be in a situation where you could only be able to play this and not regular basketball given the fact that this game was never actually released and as such the only way to play it is through compilation titles, flashcarts, or emulation. As far as I can tell, every title that features this game has the superior regular basketball as an option as well with the one exception being... Atari 50?!?!? What's up with that??

Neat idea for a game tbh. It's like a twist on breakout where there's your typical rows of bricks but instead of being the paddle under the brick row breaking the blocks with a ball, you are on the blocks side this time around and are trying to replenish the rows with blocks as the computer breaks through them from underneath. If a large enough hole is made that the computer can suck you out of your blocky fortress, then you lose. There's also a 2 player mode where one player gets to be the pig and the other player gets to be the wolf, but I haven't been able to try that mode out due to being a solitary gamer.

I get that they were going for a three little pigs theme by having the walls be made out of bricks plus each pig works as a way to give the player 3 lives, but it doesn't really look like Bigelow B. Wolf is actually blowing away bricks and sucking out the pigs as much as he's some sort of frog-wolf using his long tongue to eat the bricks and pigs.

The gameplay has the same frenetic energy as like having to put tracks over a constantly accelerating train to prevent it from crashing. The main way to stay alive and score well is just to keep pace with placing blocks right when the wolf destroys them, which is certainly easier said than done and eventually becomes impossible as you need to keep moving back to grab more bricks. I'd definitely suggest playing this on the B difficulty where you can drop the bricks from anywhere because on the A difficulty where you have to run up and down there's actually no hope of ever keeping pace with the wolf and you will die VERY quickly. I'd also suggest keeping an alternate controller like a genesis or looser aftermarket controller around because the constant erratic movement you gotta do does not mix well with the standard 2600 joystick. Supposedly if you can surpass 25000 points and send proof to Activision (supposedly on either difficulty, they don't really mention), you get to be an honorary Activision Oinker, complete with commemorative badge. I got around 45k points on my first attempt with B difficulty (A difficulty I died around like the 2k mark I think), so I better be an honorary Oinker, goddamnit. Microsoft better be using some of those 75 billion dollars to make more badges for people so help me god.

Step aside, 2K.

It's Purple Guy vs. Kermit the Frog at a no-holds-barred 1v1 on Planet Basketball, winner takes all. It's incredibly simple, you move and shoot with the stick and button, and all you need to do is run into the ball to steal it from your opponent. You can hold the button down with the ball to aim it at the cost of standing in place, leaving yourself open to stealing, and the game just becomes this frantic scramble to get the ball and throw it in the hoop ASAP before you get cornered and the ball stolen. I've played this occasionally in the past with other people and it's pretty consistently gotten good times out of the multiplayer just for how goddamn simple and goofy the core gameplay is.

I honestly thought this game was like combat in that it was multiplayer only for the longest time, but lo and behold, I found out today that there is indeed a singleplayer mode where the AI plays as Kermit. All I can say is goddamn can this frog ball. Seriously, the computer opponent is no joke, as it has one sole purpose in life; to make sure the ball goes in the hoop under any means necessary. This mfer dodges and weaves around you to get net using constant rapid diagonal movements, and he very rarely ever misses any shots he takes so you gotta just rush his ass and hope that you can steal the ball in the tiny window when he's trying to shoot. Conversely, if you have the ball, you better believe this guy is gonna be on you to steal your ball and IMMEDIATELY go after getting more points before you can even process what's happened. I genuinely wasn't expecting my ass to get clapped so hard by an Atari 2600, but I perservered. The manual states that there's some kind of dynamic AI at play, where the closer the game, the greater Kermit's lust for points becomes. It states that if you can win by a lead of over 4 points, you are a "superior player", and I can confirm that yeah that about sums it up alright. I had to remove my power limiters and do the ol' plug-a-genesis-controller-in-the-atari trick so that I could even keep up with the CPU since dear god the constant diagonals the CPU makes felt deliberately planned in order to make it as difficult as possible to chase with the real Atari joystick. (how the hell do you use that thing comfortably???)

I have learned some tricks up my sleeve though. The top right corner of the court is a safe space that Kermit will just kinda hover around you but not actually steal the ball from you, so if you want to stand a chance, aim for shooting from up there. Conversely, if both players get close enough with the ball, it will erratically vibrate between both players like an atomic particle as both players exist in a state of stealing the ball. Sometimes you can get the AI to be stuck like that in the bottom right corner, so an easy way to become a certified Superior Player is to get an early point lead and then sacrifice Purple Guy to seal away the evil aggression of Kermit the frog by trapping them both through the power of Atomic Balling. I have also discovered that even though the CPU is controlling the second player, pressing the button on Player 2 will still make them jump anyways so you can also use this psychokinetic power to force Kermit to jump against his will, slowing him down so you can make some easy shots. If real basketball had strats like this, I'd be watching ESPN like a drug addict.

It's simple, it's dumb fun, it's fucking basketball on atari. The golden age of basketball games began and ended here for all I'm concerned. Even when times up and the game is over as the system rotates around the attract colors for Planet Basketball, you can keep playing either with a friend or against the AI like nothing changed, there just won't be any points that count. No other basketball game is going to be as dedicated towards balling eternally as this one. If you have the means to do so, definitely give this a try (preferably with a friend). atari games rule

was it fucking worth it?

As I am writing this right now, my car is perched atop a bus station, watching endless amounts of police cars slam themselves into the pillars below me as i rest motionless. Once I've rested long enough for the timer and bounty counts to reach their arbitrarily high numbers, I will retreat back into the bus station on a raised platform, where either the police will not realize what I am attempting to pull and they will remain under me at a length just far enough for the game to consider myself having evaded the cops, or they will catch onto my shenanigans, drive up to my platform, and catch me red-handed, putting the past 20 minutes or so of idling to waste, and forcing me to start over from square one. Yep, that's me. You are probably wondering how I got here, so allow me to explain.

I've been quite the fan of racing games these past few years, so I've been giving the NFS series a solid go. I've heard from many people that Most Wanted '05 was the pinnacle of the series, the thrilling fan-favorite before the slow but certain decline. "The cop chases are awesome", I've heard. After hearing all the hype, I grabbed myself a (surprisingly pricy all things considered) copy of the "definitive" Xbox 360 version, played through the Underground duology for context, and went to driving. The thing about this game is that it's strongest and most unique improvements are also the sharpest double-edged sword that makes this game so much less enjoyable compared to it's predacessors imo.

The game itself is pretty similar to the previous years NFS, Underground 2, albiet with some additions and changes. The open world is still there, though the game now offers a menu to just quick-jump to races instead of needing to spend time driving to waypoints. It definitely gives the game a much snappier pace to it, at the cost of making the free roam mode almost entirely optional unless you need to go to a car shop (and even then I found the fastest way to do that is to just go back to the safe house and use the shops right next to it). The races still feel just as weighty and solid as previous titles, cars still feel good to drive, and the drift/streetcross events are omitted from previous games. The dreaded drag race events are regrettably still here, but they are so few and far between that it's really not much of an issue imo. The races are still as fun as ever, and like Underground 2 the racing difficulty strikes a nice balance in never making you too far ahead, but also not going turbo overboard like Underground 1 did with the rubber banding. Races are still fun and cool!

The vibe of this game is also entirely different from previous games. We have gone full 7th gen mid-2000s edgy punk vibes by now, baby. This game is DRENCHED with that iconic Xbox 360 piss filter, races take place in a shady, dirgy, late-afternoon city rather than the neon-lit night life vibes that the Underground games carried. The muddy pallete isn't to say that this game is bland, it's still quite stylized after the dirty vibes that they are going for. Whenever you clear an event, the game shows a picture of your car at the time of winning, shown through various dynamic camera angles depending on how you finished, all shown through a detailed background of asphalt and concrete. The game has more of an edgy plot this time around; it's a revenge story. Your unnamed street racer man is doing street racer things when this sunnuvabitch challenges you, cheats the race by rigging your car beforehand, tries to steal your girl, and gets to the top of the street underworld using YOUR ride. It's up to you to rise up the hooligan leaderboards by taking out the top 15 racers to finally give that mfer a piece of your mind. Essentially, this is car-themed No More Heroes. Instead of the CG cutscenes of the previous games, this uses live-action FMV actors for the cutscenes and it is gloriously cheesy. Each member of the Blacklist has their own intro that looks like it came straight out of a trashy MTV reality show, complete with stylized graffiti tags for every member. The cheesy cutscenes if anything felt more like the series was going back to its roots on the 3DO, as the very first Need For Speed game had quite similiarly playful live-action cutscenes. My only wish was that the game could have had more to show in its narrative, as most of the cutscenes are at the very beginning of the game. It certainly knows how to set the mood really damn well though!

All of this falls apart with the newest gimmick this game offers; the famous cop chases. Cop chases are an iconic aspect of the original Need for Speed games, so this game brings them back after their absense in the Underground games. Sometimes while minding your own business, a cop can find you and instigate a cop chase. Evading the cops for long enough gets your heat gauge up, which gets more cops to show up until the game reaches cartoonish levels of police activity, flooding your screen with so many cops wanting to ram your ass you'd think you are playing Dynasty Warriors in Detroit. Cops can also sometimes rear their heads into you mid-race which turns things chaotic as now you have to handle both your opposition as well as your newfound persuers. All of this sounds good on paper, and at first the chases were really fun to do! The problem comes from the persuit milestones. In order to deem yourself worthy to challenge the next Blacklist opponent, you need to pass these arbitrary challenges, and they just get increasingly rediculous as time goes on. Stuff like "ram into 25 different police vehicles", "bypass 12 different police blockades", "stay in a persuit for longer than 13 minutes", etc. What's annoying about it it feels like the point of the higher heat levels feels more like a timer system a-la old arcade games making a higher effort to kill you the longer you linger, yet the milestones feel like they are set at directly counterintuitive goals, focused on farming RNG elements that are usually outside of your control (like when and where blockades spawn, or how many of certain cop cars can show up). Make a mistake and get busted, and you lose all of your progress for that chase, which gets REALLY frustrating when you lose 15+ minutes of chase progress to something stupid like a random truck in traffic running into you or a slightly uneven piece of terrain geometry catches you up. Get busted too many times, and you lose your car, and if you lose all your cars it's game over, so there's a significant punishment to messing up chases. I can understand why people see the high difficulty as a good sense of tension, but I really HATE it when games make me feel like I'm wasting my time, and the chases in this game felt so much like that. It never felt like whenever I got busted that it was a mistake on my end, but rather just some unfortunate circumstance that happened from the game deciding my time was up and launching 5 different waves of suicidal armored police SUVs on my ass that launch me into the pirhana pit of 20 cops chasing my ass. Like imagine playing Pac Man, but every minute the game adds another ghost to avoid, and the game just gives you dumb objectives like "eat 30 ghosts", forcing you to linger until things get too much. Eventually things got too much for me, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted became Need to Cheese: the Wanted System as I learned about the handy Bus Stop exploit that I have been using this whole time. And even then, sometimes the bus stop trick doesn't work and your time gets wasted anyways!!!! The only way to leave cop chases is to escape or get busted too, there's not even an option to quit to the menu in the pause screen so if a cop comes when you are trying to do something else enjoy having your time wasted!!!!!!! gaming!!!!!!!!

Idk man, this game certainly has vibes but the cop chases just made this game absolutely sour for me. I think I've come to realize from playing this and the Underground games that these games aren't really designed with the premise of actually being "cleared", and the fun comes more from being able to just drive around and vibe in the game. Because in my times playing any of these games so far, I've noticed that they revel in dragging themselves out way too far, wasting any progess-seeking players time. For every time I was vibing with the races and aesthetics, I was absolutely livid with frustration at watching my sweet time go to deadass nothing. The Blacklist 15 could have been the blacklist 10 and the point would have still made its way across imo.

Anyways, I was able to make it through that final cop milestone, so time to finish this game. I noticed one of the cop cars try to drive up and bust me while I was writing this, but they backed up and left on their own instead. Perhaps the game has finally taken pity on me, and realized enough has been enough. Usually I don't write reviews of stuff before having seen the credits roll, but I feel at this point my opinions have solidified and by the time anyone reads this, the deed will have been done.

the absolute clueless energy I had going into this thinking it was going to be more of an offbeat simulator a la Seaman or The Tower but just airport flavored only to get absolutely slam dunked into the 7 layers of hell itself.

The game is more of a puzzle game than anything, and it's certainly hard to describe in words. There's a big tower of luggage carousels spinning around and you can press R to drop a leg on every layer to bring luggage downards, or L to lift a leg up to bring luggage upwards. Every luggage piece is color-coded, and the aim of the game is to time your inputs in an attempt to sort the luggage to go to their respective layer and get shipped off with a plane. It starts relatively simple albeit moderately stressful at first yet crescendos to a point of absolute lunacy that you'd need to have a supercomputer for a brain to do well in. It's a herculean juggling act of managing 7 different conveyer belts each with their own color and time limits to get at least one matching color of baggage in the plane lest the flight be cancelled and your airport funds plummet, managing a fuel mechanic that can hinder your play speed and visibility when left unattended, and taking care of various event baggage like bombs that need to be disposed of, picky mayors that need their luggage loaded first over anyone elses, presidential luggage with differently-colored tags indicating their true colors, so on and so forth. It is absolutely an utter and complete sensory overload that no sane person could ever hope to efficiently parse.

It's absolute unorthodox madness, but really aren't all the games that Yoot Saito makes like that? Seaman, Odama, and both The Tower games are certainly not conventional in the slightest, and this is absolutely in the same level of absurdity. I'd love to see what a TAS for this game would even look like, where someone has the tools to play this game at the superhuman level of efficiency that the game somehow expects out of the player. You'd think that this games absolutely absurd levels of stress and difficulty would make it a hard recommend but I really do suggest you give this game a shot if you can just to experience how overwhelming the game gets by the end, and see if maybe you can surpass your human limits to get a good score at the end.

If this is what actual airlines have to do in order for luggage to properly be shipped out then every airport worker deserves a trillion dollar salary. at duckman galactic airlines, we can gaurantee each flight will have at least one passengers bag shipped alongside them, provided our luggage system hasn't already accidentally exploded from the bombs that somehow keep making it in there.

What a stupidly petty concept for a video game, I kinda love it ngl. This game wasn't ever meant to be commercially sold; only like ~100 copies exist and they were given out at some business meeting or something. As a result, this game is one of the most expensive Atari carts costing thousands of dollars, so enjoy your four-figure atari coke propaganda, game collectors. The game is an extremely simple romhack of the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders except now you control Coke and the invaders are Pepsi (with alien companions since pepsi is a 5-letter word and there are 6 columns of enemies in Space Invaders, good job with that one guys). The gimmick is that as you are the almighty Coca-Cola company, you are invincible the entire game. No matter how many times Pepsi hits you, you will always get right back up to continue destroying them. If the enemies get to the bottom, instead of triggering an immediate game over like regular invaders, the Pepsi invaders will just keep bouncing back and forth until you do destroy them. The game is set on a 3-minute score timer, loudly flashing "COKE WINS" once the time is up. Could this potentially mean that this is one of the first Caravan shmups...?????? (no)

Honestly since there's a timer that just stops the game no matter where you are it really doesn't feel like you "win" the game when its over like the crowning domination the game expects you to feel, it's more like a stalemate if anything. Maybe this is a reflection of the eternal corporate battle that large conglomerates fight with one another in late-stage capitalism, where there's no real winner or loser, just perpetual hostility..... (this is also not the case)

Despite being an incredibly petty joke advertisement of a video game, through screenshots and the title of the game you'd honestly think this is an endorsement for Pepsi instead of propaganda against them given that the game has more PEPSI's on screen through the enemies than the sole COKE WINS on the top left corner. At least you can strategically shoot aliens to make the game spell out PEEEEEEEEEE so that's gotta earn this game something.

It really goes to show how much simpler game development was back then that you could just manufacture some doofy romhack of a best-selling mainstream title whipped up by some dude as a joke and nobody bats an eye. Imagine if something like this existed nowadays, where only in shareholder meetings for fuckin mcdonalds or something can you get an elusive copy of MACDONALDRING, a hastily-made hacked version of Elden Ring that replaces your character with an invincible Ronald Mcdonald and changes all the bosses to Burger Kings that die in one hit. actually that sounds rad hold up