Sporting a Killer Instinct style combo breaking system, the best underboob of all time, custom combos, some of the most beautiful graphics on Saturn, and a ton of anime references, Astra Superstars is one of my favorite games. It's very simple mechanically, but how it unfolds is not so easy to grasp. It's not too much mind you. The operation is kept simple enough so that you can kind of just mash through arcade mode with little resistance. The actual nuances are in various minutia of it's character gameplay design.

An example is how this game doesn't have special moves, only 6 unique normals. No command normals either, instead you have 2 moves you can perform as you bounce off a wall from heavy knockback, and 2 turning normals for if you're behind an opponent. Typically over or below them. See, in this game you're both in flight, but unlike how other games might do it the lower part of the screen is treated exactly like how the upper part is. You literally just jump downwards. Those turn normals seem useful in neutral, the most devious left rights ever you might imagine. But they're also important combo bridging tools. In this game everyone has very over the top squash and stretch, looney tunes esque moves. You tend to launch the opponent pretty far, which seems fine because everything is dash cancellable-- except in the corner. If the screen can't scroll in that direction, you can't dash cancel your normals that way. It seems like this is a hard line the game draws. The chain system is very freeform, so you end up getting decent combos by just doing a few dash cancels with the light auto combo into mediums, then 2 jump cancel (knock them down, follow downward, then back up!) heavies into a super.

The solution is that you don't really have to carry them there! You can launch them upwards or downwards, dash over or below them, and then use your turn normals as a solid combo bridge, as your own back will act like a surface for them to collide with. It's very very cool in motion. It's extremely DBZ.

Other examples are how the placement of your normals really matter. Even though everyone has giant normals, there's ostensible dead zones you're meant to manually compensate for. And like, you actually totally can. For what would normally be an awkward or impossible area to hit for a normal fighting game character due to being locked into just having specific moves with specific hitboxes, Astra Superstars characters can just do it because they can jump downwards. You can also cancel either the down or up jump at any point. A normal hits low, then very high, but you don't have time to wait for it to connect high? You can just spike them downward and press it or do it rising. Vice versa too. Every character has a moveset with specific multi hitting or wide arcing moves that can hit in a myriad of different ways that all matter due to very granular positioning intricacies. Very pleasant game, amazing art and music. Insane presentation, it's honestly kind of perfect!

Of two minds on this game. The base game, is very bland and honestly not good at all. The music is great, but the pixel art while appealing lacks any readability. It's very difficult to react to certain options because the resolution is so low everything ends up looking the same. Not that it actually ends up mattering much, because it has that same smash problem where there's very little reason to use most moves. See, in every smash game the value of each hit is attributed post hoc. It has to be, that's what percent does. But also, due to the nature of the games general structure (or lack thereof) of di and on hit situations, technically you could die at 0 anyway. It's kind of a "watch what happens" type deal. How this intersects with move choice is that functionally, you just have to have a hitbox out. There's a large mechanical overlap in moveset that just happens because there's a palpable unwillingness to add any sort of extra properties to moves. A characters forward air can fill the role of their entire moveset, with maybe one gap. And it feeds into itself because being in the air in a platform fighter grants a kind of versatility that's unquestionable.

In short, the games just kind of boring and weird. Almost every move launches at the same angle. The weak hitstun and tumble states are the same in this game, which means that if you get clipped by any move you're stuck in like a bunch of dead transitional frames and it can be impossible to get away from someone who's rapidly attacking. They knew they messed up because combo di in this game is insane. It's the opposite of slap city, where combo di in that game doesn't really matter most of the time, but survival di does. Well in roa, you aren't surviving anything. Characters fall like bricks, and di'ing into the corner isn't particularly good.

But, this game has mods. And that's actually enough to make me want to play it. I like this games modding scene, it's basically platform fighter Mugen! And really, that's a lot of fun. So I like this one

Nintendo's last true arcade title. Not like, literally a game made for arcades, but in terms of design. It's no secret that I basically don't like anything Nintendo has put out in almost 20 years at this point. The easiest answer for why is that their new titles are very safe, chaste, inbred games with few new ideas. This isn't to say their new stuff is strictly bad, far from it. There's still a competency somewhere there. It's kind of like the best playing garbage ever though. What defines modern Nintendo games is mainly the lack of any sort of design that approximates 'something.' What I mean is that it's all self-referential to what 'games' collectively are, and what Nintendo games used to be, rather than just simply being fun games with an identity that isn't so tautological. I ponder over this because DKJB has a lot of those 'square-hole' style ideas that went on to plague more modern entries; Being a sort of precursor to Mario Galaxy, by staff and design motivations. Yet this is one of the only modern Nintendo games where the design isn't frustratingly patronizing.

Arcade game design had you fit very dense encounter variety back to back into your games. The nature necessitated it. Time was literally money, but it was also a good way of keeping a game fresh in the eyes of venue frequenters. There were all kinds of flashy games, which due to primitive tech, had to come up with unique ways of executing a usually simple idea. Back then, there weren't many standards in place, so a game more naturally became what it wanted to be. Putting it super succinctly so we aren't here all day: Back then arcade games were inherently more engaging because the concept had to be front and center, and that 'flashiness' was delivered through gameplay density. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is a sidescrolling score attack game with a lot of ideas. From callbacks to the original Donkey Kong game with the logo font; To the barrel graze jingle, this game's explicitly introspective on the nature of arcade games. I see that even in how it controls. Just 3 inputs, Left, Right, and the 'Clap', which can be triggered by tapping the side of the bongos too. The somatosensory element of the controls are complemented by the frantic nature of the game as well. It can be very difficult to keep most combos going, and when DK grabs hold of enemies he beats the ever living daylights out of them. I'm pretty sure it was so violent it forced the ESRB to make E10+ because they didn't want this game to be rated T.

There's even an arcade game it actually closely resembles, in spirit and operation. Mach Breakers: Numan Athletics 2. A game about a superhuman decathlon. Mach Breakers also only has 3 inputs, insane mashing that really makes you FEEL the action of your characters, and above all extremely arcadey. I draw this comparison because there's even more DKJB could be paying homage to, that I may not be fully aware of because it's not exclusionary in that way. It's not some reference that exists solely for it's own value. It's kind of a more natural one, that I'm sure began during development as a coincidence and then they leaned into it as a genuine inspiration. I haven't even gone into the scoring system yet, which I find very interesting and well designed. Everytime DK does a unique action, such as backflipping, wall jumping, swinging, sliding up onto a ledge, etc; It adds to a combo trick meter. The combo stays going as long as you're in the air, unless you get hit. The combo counter acts as a multiplier for each individual instance of a banana you collect. Which bunches being their own multiple of 3. Additionally, when you grab many stray bananas at the same time using the clap motion it adds an additional amount by 1 per banana you caught. There's a lot they do with this. With all the unique enemy and banana layouts, it adds a lot of strategy to routing particular areas, without turning it into a chore necessarily. Because there's a lot of freeform stuff you can just try and do in the moment.

Not a whole lot of the game is up to scripted events. Even though you'd think there'd be a reason to add many of them because of the game's limited controls, the game uses them sparingly. Even when you grab a melon that was thrown at you as a projectile, there's still a chance it can miss when hit back because of poor positioning. But like, also, it has physics that do matter when being juggled by the claps soundwave. The game plays out mostly setpiece to setpiece, and the 'breaks' are still fraught with heavy mashing. It's a very involved game, but I love it for that.