SIX ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ STAR GAME

6/5❗️

wasn’t expecting this at all.

I use game controllers like I use paintbrushes: loose and vibey. Precision platforming has never been my thing. But this bish rite here??!?!

going into this, I knew EVEN THE OCEAN had been criticized as being “preachy,” but not much else. I didn’t know it was going to make me “feel” like I’m capable of clearing megaman levels.

The art: the sidescrolling background illustrations, the platforming level design. Larry David voice Pretttty good. The visuals have an autumnal, unfussy cuteness. However, the people in the game don’t look cute—they look real.

The depictions of our natural world are the most adorable looking parts of this game. The world is magical place, and the depictions of how we treat our world, and each other, are the ugliest parts of this game.

Our protagonist is a technician starting her first day working for the city’s power plants. The 2D platforming occurs while she is on the job. Our hero is a young woman of color risking her life to save her hometown, Whiteforge, from odd occurrences that seem related to the energy these power plants are generating.

And that is why this game is not very popular. It seems that much of the same Games Media that praised Anodyne 1, was not tryna fuck with a real game talking bout real shit. This is the reason why, for years, Capcom was not tryna release those Ace Attorney games, here in the west, that depicted the normalized racism of British people in the 1900s—it’s not prudent to impugn the status quo. “Go woke go broke” they say.

If I recall correctly, in this game, all the main characters (antagonists notwithstanding) are brown, and both relationships given screen time are homo. That resembles my daily life, and perhaps that’s why this game is literally $3 on steam at the time of this writing (i paid the $20 for it on switch, and was a lil saddened that my new favorite game is available at 80% off, and may be relegated to ‘hidden gem’ status, like so many works of art I adore).

Another reason this game will make you uncomfortable is its spirituality. Instead of enemies to kill, your health bar is your ongoing challenge, which begins half light/half dark. Bulbs of light or dark energy shift the balance and you die when you are 100% light or dark. People hate games symbolically about aspiring to find balance within self & within community. Maybe a game about the next mass shooting is more to their liking?

Yeah. So this is New Age Megaman Ferngully, featuring a heavily lgbt cast. 🤯 To make a game with all these ideas figuring prominently sounds unwieldy. That’s why it such a triumph. Analgesic Productions got their chakras aligned all the fucking way down and pulled it off.

I want more bravery from my games, in a world where every big game studio’s toxic culture is being brought to light, I commend those who not only aren’t on that fuck shit, but are making art to inspire kids (FYI this game is still a PG-rated experience) to do better than we have done. That’s love!

P.S. the gameplay is fun af! Figuring out how to navigate certain parts didn’t take more than 3 or 4 attempts. Now I’m over here wondering what other puzzle platformers I might vibe with. But I ain’t gon lie, by the last fourth of the game I did adjust the settings to make it less impenetrable for me. The accessibility options in this game are brazy: if you don’t have time for platform hopping, you can make our hero float through the platforming…or choose story mode and skip them all together. The devs already knew that this was a story worth telling, with or without the gameplay. 🕊

Portraying the complexity of the human condition through a most inclusive lens: 5/5

Speaking truth to power: 5/5

Being written more like a good book/play/film, rather than a video game: 4.5/5

Menu design sometimes being lowkey frustrating: yes

Nuanced sense of humor: very yes

Far and away the worst game Capcom have ever made, a uniquely fascinating and objectively awful experience from a company whose lesser games are typically let down by near-imperceptible balance flaws for hardcore gameplay enthusiasts; a “bad” Capcom game is normally undone by subpar netcode or an overpowered character, but here we must suffer through actors falling through floors, textures upside-down on walls and enemies who forget to wake up and fight you, perhaps protesting at the unsanitary working conditions they’ve been asked to perform in. Rotten to the core in ways big-developer games are never allowed to be any more, Spanish bootleg-ass Devil May Cry game, fuckin El Diablo Puede llorar: Dos on a cigarette-burned DVD you got at the market this morning, buried deep in a spindle with Animal Soccer World. Hooooly shit dude, it’s funny like a bad movie for the first hour or two, rinsing bosses in minutes without taking damage by just standing still and shooting your guns and cackling maniacally about how little brain you used, but the novelty of a mute Dante’s hexagonal eyes clipping through their pentagonal sockets soon gives way to a depressive despair when you’re begged by a nervous stutter to pull off a series of chaotic wall-runs in order to beat a battle that I’m pretty sure was compiled and saved moments before Hideaki Itsuno had to load copies of this shitpile onto the back of a busted dumptruck headed straight to the cemetery. I persevered past the attack chopper’s infamy in hope of more epic-fail frivolity but was only rewarded with more mechanical misery; being able to activate Devil Trigger amidst what appears to be a knockdown state and have it expire before you can even jank yourself to your feet is a fun five minute feat, but my remaining shreds of self-respect prevented me from subjecting myself to ten more hours of bosses you can beat by simply walking behind them. Huge admiration for Capcom putting this in the HD Collection, presumably as a cautionary tale for generations to come about what happens when you release a CAG without combos, care or competence. Drakengard, eat your dragonheart out.

I am just over six months older than Ocarina of Time. It's one of the recurring thoughts I had while playing through this game. Seven months and five days, to be exact, is what separates the beginning of me and the release of one of the landmark achievements in the medium, a watershed work often lauded as one of the greatest the medium has ever seen. Despite this, Ocarina of Time feels older than me. Much, much older. I'm not the right person to equate just how much today's games industry genealogically descends from this game alone, so I will leave that for someone more qualified, but suffice it to say, Ocarina of Time feels part of the very fabric of video games. It is a primordial emblem of video games. Video games didn't start here, of course, but Ocarina of Time might just be the video game, the main character of the medium. Much the same way that Vertigo seems to re-centralise and gravitate cinema around its existence, consumed as it is by the very act of looking and creation, Ocarina of Time is the perfect encapsulation of video games for the sheer virtue of being a work about growing up in a medium still very much in an adolescent state. It arrived at the generational crossroads of those who grew up with arcades and those who would grow up with Ocarina of Time. Looking back at the game now, it is impossible to shake the feeling that the game's legacy, as a timestamp for the art of video games, is no accident. We are supposed to return to Ocarina of Time as adults, of course we are. We are supposed to return to see, to realize, the truth of those prophetic passing years. To see the brutality of adulthood as the shadow looming over childhood. To witness, with blinding familiarity, fascism rise from the shallow grave of inaction. There are rough spots in here, sure, but how many legitimately canonical titles retain their statures simply by being good, rather than being technical powerhouses or through the economy of nostalgia. I hope Nintendo does it justice and remaster (not remake) it for the Switch, so that I never have to play it with the fucking Wii U gamepad again in my life, thank you very much.

Joyfully tasteless like a massive fart that begins with an explosion of pure chaos, gradually receding as it fills the room with its stench, petering out into nothing but laughter and disgust. I know people get angry hairs on the backs of their necks when others compare video games to movies and use words like “auteur”, but I think it’s fair to say that Tomonobu Itagaki filled a role in the 2000s Gamerworld that was similar to that of Michael Bay’s in the the 2000s Movieworld: all stops pulled out at expense of any pretentious good taste, maximising the potential of computers to delight insane teenage boys worldwide. The inclusion of Playable Rachel in Sigma somehow finds a way to crank the dial on what was already there, allowing you to control a bikini sexbot of the classic Dead or Alive inflatable mold, strutting around The Vigoorian Empire with an iron thong up your arse that makes your walk cycle look like you shat yourself, balloon boobs flailing in wildly different directions every time you land a mechanically-sound-and-tactile Square, Square, Square, Triangle ground combo. This shit is practically gift-wrapped for a painfully horny kid on their 14th birthday, lol. Painfully, painfully awkward to be seen playing this edition, a mortifying ordeal of being known. Imagine showing the tentacle boss to your grandmother! It would fucking kill her on the spot, right? Big jets of polygonal blood spraying all over your shame. Game Over.

Still absolute mad fun to play, though. Don’t get me wrong.

Having the Scott Pilgrim guys and the co-developers of Streets of Rage 4 on the dock here meant this was never gonna be a failure, regardless of its status as a pretty ridiculous exercise in nostalgia for folks who are still wrapping their arms around a childhood long past expiry. Sometimes a shameless cash-in can also be a fantastic beat 'em up, and that's okay - the miracle of video games is that sometimes really good ones are created to promote some shitty movie.

Although based on the secret ooze that created Turtles in Time, you can feel the SOR4 in this from the moment you first grapple an enemy. We're back. Tribute Games and Dotemu have done a technically-marvelous job of taking that original arcade/SNES framework Konami developed and polishing its rough, unforgiving edges off with fairer, more thoughtful mechanics from other brawlers that folks know and love. This game isn't quite as mechnically dense or strict in the challenges it lays down in comparison to other 2D beat 'em ups, but that makes total sense because this also has to be a 90s reverie for people who just want to see Mikey eat pizza or hear a 67-year old man try to sound like a teenager again or listen to the boss themes Wu-Tang composed. And that's cool by me - I want more people to experience the joys of the genre.

Mechanically, I'd say this thing plays like the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 to Streets of Rage 4's Street Fighter IV - you're allowed far more leeway with OTGs, wall bounces and cancels compared to the precision of Wood Oak City, which leads to tons of incredibly satisfying juggle pathways that can even integrate obstacles from the surrounding environment. For example, with Raphael you can jab-loop a dude, cancel the last hit into a dash, cancel the dash into a shoryuken, roll-cancel over to the other end of the room and wall-bound the sandbagging body back to you by lunge-kicking it with a roomba. It's mondo bodacious, and goes to show how fulfilling fighting/brawling video games can be when you let the player "power fantasy" themselves as a lean green fighting machine with lengthy, stylish, free-flowing combos. A great way to show people how fun beat 'em ups are.

Six-player more or less throws all of the above out of the window in favour of a pizza party game, which is totally cool and lot of fun too, even if you're like me and don't know who anyone on the screen aside from the Ninja Turtles is (I am the right age for this flavour of TMNT, but they were called the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles over here and my mum didn't like me watching violent things and/or buying little post-Reaganite/Thatcherite plastic frog guys). A great beat 'em up should exist both as a big bashing exercise and a Sifu-like pathway to combat mastery, and no doubt some wise old masters will come along and show us multi-character juggle combos in the months to come that are like, mega bonkers radical, dude. Despite being PvE experiences, great beat 'em ups always end up developing fighting game-like communities around them who all end up complaining about patch notes and balance changes - it just goes to show the passion a great entry in this genre can inspire.

Only finished it twice so far - once solo and once in a random party - but feel like this could comfortably be a game like Streets of Rage 4 where I end up beating it like 10 times on different difficulties with different characters because it's clear they put the work in, making every character their own game to learn and every stage on every difficulty its own challenge to understand. What I'm trying to say here is that you should play Streets of Rage 4. Cowabunga! This thing has the fuckin Nickelodeon logo at the start and it could be Game of the Year lmao

its called pastiche you dipshits and it rocks

honestly this game is basically perfect, surf maps sega dreamcast sonic adventure gun game good sound design good platforming good leaderboards good skips good everything. adore it!

also here's my spiciest take: if you dont like the writing in this but you do like the writing in hades then you need to get better at having fun because they are The Same, but this one is more joyous