This top down run and gun game in the Ikari Warriors mold is way more fun than I expected, and quickly became a favorite Toaplan game. It's much easier than their bullet heck (not quite hell) shooting games. The weapons are all really fun--there's the two regular weapons, one fast weapon that fires in the direction you're facing and then the spread shot. There's also a flame thrower, but my favorite weapon was the super ball, which spins around you while you hold the button down then fires when you let go. Really unique, goofy weapon; it's entered the league of games I'll pick up and play around with quite often. I played the Steam port by Bitwave Games, which is excellent.

Team Shinobi's final game as Team Shinobi is another iteration on the side-scrolling "beating them up" formula using all the lessons learned from the prior games. It has Golden Axe/Kunio-Kun style free movement, Shinobi's short/medium range attack patterns and FPS minigames, and from Altered Beast they wisely didn't take anything.

The character and enemy designs evoke the 80s special effects films—the designs and setting made me particularly think about 80s homages to 50s films, like Tobe Hooper's Invaders From Mars and Chuck Russell's The Blob. The characters all play differently enough, and the game can be somewhat difficult. It can look ugly, and it can feel awkward and frustrating, but this game has an air and style to it that just makes me want to return to it more than any of their other games. I can easily see myself plucking away at this again during the Halloween season.

M.U.S.H.A. (Metallic Uniframe Super Hybrid Armor), known in Japan as Musha Aleste: Full Metal Fighter Ellinor, is a stylish, if somewhat standard, shooting them up video game for the Sega Genesis (I played on the Nintendo Switch Online Genesis application). Like Compile's earlier games Blazing Lazers and Gun Nac, the enemy sprite and level designs are pretty impressive; I was really taken aback by Stage IV, where you battle over storm clouds, and as lightning strikes the screen goes white except for the silhouette of your ship and enemies. It's really cool. I'm a sucker for the mecha theme, and really like the robot designs. One of the enemies looks like an off-brand Zaku when they take their stance to point their gun at you; always loved killing those guys.

The final level is kind of a pain, expecting pixel perfect dodges in a constrained space, which had not yet been asked of the player. The way there is pretty breezy though. There's an options system where you can control how your drones behave, and the usual upgrade system that gets more powerful as you pick up more of the same color, but I played through most of the game without realizing which button fired your upgrade weapon, and the drones setting is never necessary to fiddle with. There are upgrades that float around which drop cards, and when you pick up three cards you get another drone added to your bank. I liked that addition; deciding when to shoot the icon to drop the cards reminded me of the Bells from Twinbee.

Altogether a pretty decent time; need to check out the other Aleste games.

Another World at once feels modern and old style. There's no UX cruft on screen while playing, and the game lacks tutorials—after getting dropped into another world it's up to you to figure out what your two action buttons do, what holding them does, what using them while moving does. The clean pixel art style and the slick presentation, which transitions smoothly in and out of cutscenes, makes it almost feel like an indie game from today. Even it's pace, which moves between puzzle sequences, action/shooting sequences, and short breather exploration sequences, feels incredibly modern—a precursor to the AAA Zelda-likes like the new God of War or Naughty Dog games.

What has not aged as well is the way it feels to play. The puzzles can be annoyingly obtuse in the way adventure game puzzles are, but the real problem is the action and platforming segments that you have to get through to solve them. The absolute worst case of this was the cave section, in which you have to do running jumps over biting pits, some of which have tentacle curtains hanging over them that will also eat you. You have to stop, shoot them one by one with your charged shot, then you can give jumping over the pits a go. Pressing the jump button once while standing will jump over exactly one unit of the ground, which happens to be the same size as the teeth pits. The most annoying room in the game has one biting pit, one unit of normal ground, then two biting pits, so you have to complete a running jump over the first pit and then tap jump again exactly when you land so you can hop to the other side. This annoying room is also centered between two more platforming rooms, and if you die in any of them you're sent to the start of the first room—you have to run through that one, stop, kill the tentacles, try (and fail over and over) to do the long jumps, then jump over a pit and another biting pit in the next room, before making it to a checkpoint. And after you get that checkpoint, you have to do it all over again in the opposite direction. This section climaxes with a platforming section where you are being chased by water that will drown your character if it touches you, and I died over and over trying to get through it. (Another modern touch is the unique death cutscene/animations you get, which is exhausting because you will see them often.) Altogether the cave sequence was a real gauntlet of my patience, and made this short game feel long. That's the worst of the game, but not by much—there's frustrating segments like this throughout.

The platforming and action sequences have an arcade air to them—it certainly expects precision. But I felt like the game wasn't very responsive, and I'm honestly not sure if it actually isn't, or if it's a consequence of the port or what. It never felt good to play or snappy in the way that great arcade games can feel like. This obviously compounds the difficulty of the action sections.

Still I'm glad I played through this game. It's hard to recommend since it's so trying, but the highly modern presentation still feels really unique. The game's plot is a 80s Heavy Metal magazine-style empowerment fantasy—your cool programmer character explicitly drives a Ferrari, and there's even female alien nudity. If you're the kind of person who has a Backloggd account, you'd probably get something from playing through it, or watching a play through.

Battle-Wing, also known as B-Wing, is a shockingly forward thinking vertical shooting game from 1984 with a lot of cool ideas; it plays like a game from five years later. The gimmick of the game is that you can equip your standard single-fire ship with external wings that attach to it; you have to shoot down the objects holding it, then fly through it to equip it, and it feels pretty good. Each wing looks slightly different, and has different firing types and directions--rockets, beams, different spread types. At a certain point, at the beginning of stages, you get to choose the first upgrade that you'll be able to obtain. The wing also acts as an extra hit point for your ship--if you get shot while having a wing equipped, one side will catch on fire, and it will be harder to control your flight as you drift left and right. You can then unequip the wing to return to normal, or wrestle with the controls so you can hold onto your upgrade a little bit longer.

There are also two planes at play--the higher, closer to the camera plane that you do most of your shooting on, and the lower, farther ground plane. You can press a button to dive down to the bottom at any moment, then after a moment your ship flies back up to the higher plane. You can use this to fly under groups of enemies, but you have to time it right so you don't smash into any of the buildings or other ships flying on the second plane. Some bosses have shield bars that prevent you from doing any damage to it, and you must fly underneath it, then come up into the area the shield is surrounding, before you can shoot its weak spot. The game has more than 40 levels, and they're pretty repetitive, but I was really surprised by the depth of this game. Feels like one of those games that should be talked about more.

After playing Zelda II, I decided to finally get around to the weird sequel in the franchise I have lot more love for. I had been put off by the promise of backtracking and exploration—so I used a guide. Just like the early Zelda games, I'm glad I did, because it can be really obtuse.

And I did have a better time with this than I feared. The moment to moment action is mostly pretty good, but it can be limited. It never gets too difficult, and it can end up feeling samey due to the lack of enemy variety for most of the game, but controlling Simon still feels really good. There are only three bosses, too, which is disappointing, and while they're somewhat easy they're not annoying fights.

What sets this game apart from the others is its weird fantasy horror atmosphere, which is downright subdued compared to the cartoon tone of the other games. It ends up being a fun tone to play in—almost somber. The text in the game often doesn't make any sense, but it's fun to read. I can see why the people who love this game love this game, but I definitely prefer the action-oriented, level based games.