(Emulated on Windows. Played using RetroAchievements, 80/80 collected)

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest for the SNES will never not be a strong contender for my favorite game of all time. Going through the game on RetroAchievements only solidified that further--shoutouts to GalacticSpear, Brian, Dissection, and Tiago17 for their work. I especially liked the special challenges for individual levels, such as minimum bananas in Hot-Head Hop and Rattle Battle or, conversely, every banana in Fiery Furnace. If you consider yourself at least pretty familiar with DKC2, you should definitely give this a shot; I guarantee it'll give you a new perspective on at least some parts of the game.

I don't really know what but there's something that really pissed me off about this game. I think at the core of it, it's that, I know some women who are influencers or streamers of various scales, and I think about this game and wonder "does this game do any justice for the kind of stuff they deal with online and offline, or the kind of social conditions that even pushed them towards that stuff in the first place? Does it primarily push a player to consider those things deeply?" and my answer, regardless of any interpretative gymnastics aside, pretty much comes down to: "No."

I think humans are generous and thus you CAN find something good in this game. But I don't think the game is, itself, meaning to be 'good' towards the types of people it takes up as its subject manner.

I guess one way I can frame it is, what if the premise of the game was flipped a bit and it was something like "Desperate Asian Girlfriend?" We play as a boyfriend of some unspecified age who has surprising control over an 'unstable' asian girlfriend. Through your choices you can lead her to all sorts of terrible endings! In fact the game revels in that - the endings are flashy, 'cool,' and a big selling point for the game, more than any look into why this 'asian girlfriend' is 'unstable' in the first place, historical precedents, etc. That's just what this feels like but for I guess, young Japanese women who use the internet a lot or something... like are we really playing this to somehow get a better look at mental illness and the internet? Or for something else?

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As a "princess-raising" style game it's a bit flat-feeling - having to go through the same motions of opening the messages, twitter, etc each day make replaying stuff a bit of a slog.

Beyond that idk. I understand how people could see themselves in this character and the pressures of the internet, but there's just something to the way that feels a bit more like a exploitative look at "various kinds of mentally ill streamer women" - I think, because of the way the game really pushes you to do things like overdose her on drugs, push her stress to the max, as it places (!) icons on all sorts of options. I would wager that more endings than less have these sort of schlocky, shock-value endings.

Does the game think that women who become streamers are stupid, emotionally unstable and manipulative? Does the game think that streaming is an exploitative system that perpetuates loneliness amongst viewers and streamers while video companies profit?

It honestly doesn't particularly argue for either, but it definitely plays into the shock value to increase its sales, and it takes advantage of players' preconceived notions expectations as to what hope to see happen to the character. It barely looks into Ame as a character outside of a malleable doll tumbling towards any one of the bad endings.

It ironically plays entirely into the streamer and social media fodder that partially creates the space for people like Ame to suffer, or creepy dude producers like P-chan to take advantage of young womens' streamer labor for money or sex.

I don't really know what to say but young women struggling through life or the internet aren't lab rats to be categorized and put on display in these kinds of bizarre simplified archetypes. I understand that women could find themselves represented in this game and I'm not faulting them for liking it, but to me that just feels like a slight positive to the game rather than an argument for the game's holistic goodness.

I'm not against a more nuanced take on the struggles of streaming, but I don't think it should be done through this cliche of the 'huge big streamer' - what about the majority of streamer, people who perhaps - are equally unhappy - but with small audiences in the 100s or even 10s, working each day towards... what exactly?

I don't know. The kind of latent misogyny I feel from this just pisses me off for some reason, something that is just profiting, via spectacle, off of the whole culture of fame and whatnot that makes a lot of people I know suffer

So they made the Virtual Boy version of Panic Bomber horror themed because the visuals in the game are only red and black?

Wow, a good Virtual Boy game! Someday I'd like to complete the entire library but that's for another time. This Panic Bomber title was the last one released before the PSP come back years later and it pretty much plays like the Neo Geo version with the same idea of blocks and power-downs you can get fucked over with by yourself or the enemies, not too sure if I like them or not...
The lack of link cable multiplayer makes this game a massive bummer since it's pretty much the famous feature for Bomberman games, being able to play with other people.
Graphics wise it's alright, the red will hurt your eyes but it's totally playable, well if you are playing on an emulator that is because I played it with an emulator and I don't think it would be worth it to play a puzzle game with a massive pair of goggle on legs, but that's an issue with the hardware and not the game itself.

Verdict, this game was kinda unnecessary to have but hell, I love that Bomberman had a game on almost all consoles ever released. If you have just heard about this game because of the Virtual Boy I can't blame you with the other entries of the franchise being japan only so if you want to play the best Panic Bomber game go play the Super Nintendo version!

I cannae believe so many folk are treating such an ok game as some big line in the culture war sand. If they took a few minutes away from signing petitions and replying to every Sony tweet with their hashtag, and actually bought the thing they'd see that no amount of skin can save this from being just very fine.

Flat shallow characters, messy predictable story, repetitive combat. This game has it all!

Fights are mostly just waiting for the enemy to do something so you can parry it and do a burst attack. There are combos, but you almost never get to do full ones because the enemy is starting its next swing and your only options are block, parry, or dodge. Good luck with that last one, because the dodge is dogshit. It's supposed to be for moving away from unblockable attacks, but the timing for it just feels off. This is made painfully worse when more than one enemy is targeting you, and your Souls instincts kick in looking for i-frames that aren't there.

Boss fights and music mostly rip though, so it has that going for it.

The characters however are like interacting with cardboard. Everyone is so basic. They're saying words that sound important, but there's so little there beneath it in both the acting or body language. Adam has to be the worst of these. The man feels like a placeholder model and voice through the whole game. It's wild that's he's one of the main cast. They're all desperately trying to get you to care about a story that feels vague, but by accident. Not some kind of "Oh the secrets are being kept from you" thing, but like they forgot to give us necessary info because they know it all since they're the ones making the game. I burst out laughing at the end when some daft stuff happens and a character just goes "What are you talking about?" as this person walks away without saying anything. It's exactly how I felt in the moment.

I'm convinced this whole thing could have worked better as more of a boss rush with bits of story or travel in-between à la Furi. I didn't feel like I was connecting wih the people or what was going on when I was trekking across empty desert doing fetch quests where every one ends with finding a corpse with an attached dying message. It's a poor man's Nier Automata, and that doesn't do it any favours in a world where I've come to resent a game I loved because it's done cross-overs with fucking everything and I'm sick of seeing 2B. THEY MADE ME SICK OF SEEING A NICE BIG ARSE!