Playing Clock Tower really cast modern technological freedom in a harsh light for me. It’s so interesting that a game so limited by the technology of its day tried so hard and managed so well to capture the aesthetic and stylistic overtones and moods and vibes of giallo cinema and very specifically of a couple of famous Dario Argento movies, but because of the SNES tech they were working with it was impossible to fully rip that filmmaker off in a 1 to 1 way, and they created something that has a clear and obvious influence but still a distinct and powerful identity of its own. Today it’s so much easier to just, mimic the thing you want to mimic, and it’s easier to get away with that without a clear understanding of what makes the thing worth mimicking. A lot of AAA games or big studio games are these empty facsimiles of other popular media and it’s hard not to yearn for a day where this was impossible to accomplish but trying led to interesting things instead of boring, repetitive hash.

Clock Tower isn’t a perfect game, and indeed the more time you spend with it (and its structure does encourage multiple replays) the more the sheen comes off the apple, but it synthesizes a lot of standard gaming stuff with its filmic inspirations in ways that are very cool and even occasionally novel in 2022. A point n click adventure game that is also a lurid slasher film, it incorporates action and stealth sequences that are a combination of proto-quick time event, stamina meter, timed stealth section, and trial and error puzzle solving that feels tense and enigmatic initially. Of course, once you realize the points where attacks are scripted and where you can hide and how to solve the environmental puzzles ahead of time, the game’s charm naturally expires as you check the boxes of various easter eggs and alternate endings, but that first time is always electric, and the tension of discovery on a second or third remained enchanting for me.

The thing I found most exciting about the game is the modular way the events of the story play out. It’s this cool schrödinger’s cat universe where events only happen if you see them happen? Like one of the first things that will happen is you’ll go into a bathroom and see one of your friends get murdered, which is the first time the famous Scissorman will appear. But if you don’t go in there she won’t die that way, or maybe not even at all! She might be thrown from a window (which won’t happen if you don’t look out the window when you hear a scream when you walk by it), and Scissorman might instead make his entrance crashing with another corpse through a stained glass window in the main foyer. If you know what you’re doing and you play it smart, you only HAVE to see that guy twice in the entire game, and only one of the many teenaged girls visiting this spooky boarding house will die. This is an interactive horror movie where how closely it resembles its gialli inspirations depends entirely on how much you the player opts into acting like a Horror Movie Sucker, and that’s a really cool approach that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen done elsewhere.

Of course the events that are here are an almost textbook Mid 20th Century Italian Horror Checklist, with the gaggle of beautiful women being stalked and murdered in gruesome and violent ways by a sicko dude, a subversion of the good will and power of authority figures in the lives of young women, intense and striking color pallet affectations in key scenes, last minute overarching supernatural implications, a deeply rooted investigative nature to the story, the emphasis on the unstable mental health of the protagonist and her parallels with the villain in this regard, delusions and hallucination, etc etc. These things don’t sound specific to any particular strain of horror on paper but Clock Tower is deploying them in a very identifiable way and it’s clear there’s a lot of intent behind the aesthetic choices the game is making.

Clock Tower was utterly surprising to me, even as a game that stuck hard in my vague childhood memories of being really really scared of the Scissorman lol, who is in fact quite scary, at least as scary as he is ridiculous. This is a premium example of a game that will not have “aged well” and while I think that on closer and more earnest examination it does have a lot of seams and rough edges, it’s also an obviously passionate and successful piece of horror media and a rewarding and ambitious experiment in the adventure game genre. Would that more games had aged as poorly as Clock Tower.

I was kind of percolating a long piece in my head as I played this about the portrayal of in-game museum or gallery spaces and how often in games these spaces are bizarre simulacra that lead you from point to point for your character to read a plaque or for a little sound byte to play. I was gonna talk about how these representations of museums land in a weird middle ground between a true museum experience of letting a player pace themselves and experience the art with themselves and having to be an experience in and of itself that is paced and guided and moving you to the next thing, and that these elements are so often at odds even though they don't necessarily have to be.

But tonight I'm tired and I don't want to write a whole long thing about Ib, which is really a great little game, both lovely in its character and hugely endearing in tone and atmosphere.

It's a tough balancing act to be a game with, essentially, no actual Big Scares in the indie space, even in the world of indie horror back when Ib came out and everybody (including the woman who made Ib, very clearly) was losing their mind over Yume Nikki. But Ib gets by entirely on its premise and its art and some clever dialogue. Most of the time it's even being pretty goofy; I was smiling and laughing as much if not more than I was feeling dread, and I mean that as a high compliment. Every time there was a particularly good fucked up guy, or sickening reveal, or bro when Garry is looking for the key in the room (YOU KNOW THE ONE BRO) I was simply hooting and hollering, it's a real crowd pleaser. This game pulls one of the most obvious but best executed Silent Hill 2 For Me It's Always Like This bits I've seen in a while and I'm never not gonna pop for one of those.

What the game always handles pretty soberly and with the exact right tonal balance is its character writing. There are really only two guys here with anything to them, Garry and Mary, and both of them are spectacularly well drawn given the length of the game and how little time Mary in particular gets. These are interesting and sympathetic people and unlike so many other indie games with character-based dialogue options that lead to multiple endings, there are compelling reasons to want everyone to get what they want and deserve here. Ib not having a real villain in that sense, and especially not REALLY dwelling on the nature of its situation beyond what's necessary to get the characters' stories where they need to be, is so so good for it.

This game has seven endings that result in various degrees of happiness or tragedy for Ib and her two companions and every single one of them is good, and every single one of them is a worthy ending, and there are very few games structured like this where I think that's true.

It's very cool that Ib's remake is getting ported to the Switch, because looking up the extra features in it they seem really great, the graphics are really nice, and Being On The Switch is what gets the teens involved and frankly I think the teens will go apeshit for this one. All you Omori guys, right? They'll love Omori's grandma. Great fuckin game dude. Classic.

Ultima really pushes and occasionally breaks the limits of how much an infectious and rowdy energy can offset a core sense of tedium that otherwise defines an experience. The map feels pretty big, the dungeons limitless in scope, the objectives grand in scale, but it’s expressed in a way that makes the game kind of LESS fun to play the deeper you get into it?

Early on there’s a real sense of danger as things like HP and Food management are real active concerns, and overworld enemies or an unlucky dungeon encounter can end you in an instant. Even towns offer some hostility, with thieving NPCs and guards who can wreck your shit easily for the first half of the game if you toe out of line. Very quickly though this switch just flips and you’re an unstoppable juggernaut with infinite resources and mondo huge stats just trampling on dragon turtles and black knights with every heavy footstep, and it really doesn’t matter much because you still have to kill those guys and you still have to make your rounds across the entire map and you still have to do that extremely long extremely repetitive extremely finnicky extremely BORING space shuttle section.

That’s the flip side of Ultima, though, isn’t it, and it’s a hard one to explain. I dunno if it’s the first game to blend sci-fi and fantasy so explicitly (my knowledge of pre-NES-era gaming is sorely limited) but it’s certainly an early one, and a stylish one. First a hovercar equipped with lasers to blow up those pesky pirate ships that swarm the bay between early continents, eventually a laser gun that serves as the best weapon for most of the game, then a space ship, then a time machine, this shit is just out there, shamelessly. Shameless is the only word for it really. Ultima is a pet project by one very young dweeb in 1981 and it shows, a borderline random mishmash of references, direct quotes, copyright infringement (you’ve got tie fighters and mind flayers I mean uh sorry mind “whippers” present and accounted for), British mythology but like puddle deep aesthetic versions of that stuff, the aforementioned sci-fi shit – everything a teenaged Richard Garriot was into and could cram into this thing, he did, and that youthful energy comes through every corner of the game.

It’s not graceful and it’s not particularly fun in aggregate, but there’s meat on this bone for sure. There’s a modicum of mechanical depth and even a minor amount of room for creative expression of play in the way you apply spells and stats, rudimentary as it is. It’s hard to imagine a more exciting start to something as storied as Ultima will become.

Playing Ys games “in order” the way I like to play series offered a unique challenge out of the gate. Falcom’s original flagship series was incredibly messy for decades, with almost every entry having multiple versions from back when different versions on different consoles meant often wildly different expressions of the same core concepts, from sound and visuals to level design and gameplay mechanics. Ys IV was famously outsourced for its two versions to two separate studios who didn’t collaborate at all and this resulted in two completely different games both titled Ys IV with different subtitles to differentiate them, which worked from the same design outline but otherwise diverged wildly. Things started to level out for the series with the release of Ys VI on the PS2 and PSP, and since then there’s a mainline Ys game every once in a while, but Falcom has also gone back and fully remade the first four Ys games alongside their work in furthering the series. These remakes are considered the definitive versions by the developers and “canon” to the overarching plot, such as there is one, but even they don’t totally simplify things. They came out haphazardly between Ys VI, VII, and Origin, and occasionally share engines with these games, which means that Ys Origin, VI, and III play the same, IV and VII play the same, VIII and IX play the same, and I & II live in their own little thing. There is currently no recognized Ys V because Falcom never remade it and it languishes on the SNES, technically having happened in the canon of the story but unrecognized by its own creators.

So here I am, playing Ys III, which is both the fifth Ys game chronologically and the second game to iterate upon this particular engine and play style, which originated in Ys VI. Do you see what I mean? This is outrageous. What’s going on here.

Anyway all of this is to say Falcom wins they broke me they broke my stupid shitty brain I do not give a shit about playing these games in release order I won’t do it I’m just gonna fuckin play the remakes in the order the numbers go in on the boxes. FUCK it bro. Origins can plop in after 6 I don’t give a SHIT. Maybe I’ll play some old ones later we’ll fuckin see.

A N Y W A Y Oath in Felghana fuckinggggggg slaps super hard bro this game is so fun it ALMOST makes me okay with the fact that they got rid of Bump Combat. Where Ys I & 2 Chronicle, the remakes of the first two games, are very clearly facelifts of the most beloved versions of those two games that otherwise preserve their cor designs and gameplay, Oath is a ground up reimagining of Ys III: Wanderers of Ys, which was originally a Zelda 2-like on the SNES. Now, rather than that OR the classic Ys style, we’ve landed on a fully 3D isometric game that kind of EMULATES the visual identity of classic top-down Ys games except when they think it would be cool to do anything else. All the characters are 3D models filtered and scrubbed to look sprite-ish, but the camera swoops and swerves with you to give dynamic or dramatic angles whenever it’s appropriate. Sometimes this is used for general sidescrolling, or classic spiral staircase traversal, but a lot of the time it’s just for the flair of things, and in a game that introduces as much platforming as Oath does it’s welcome to be able to offer different vantage points.

Combat itself evokes the FEELING of Bump Combat, expressed in a more normal mode. Adol has a six hit combo that you get by just mashing the fuck out of the attack button, a small combo when he’s jumping into the air, and a plunging attack he can execute at the height of a jump that stuns most enemies. As you acquire magical bracelets throughout the game you also acquire a ranged fireball, a spin attack, and a charge that doubles as an i-frame counter if you time it right. And that’s it! It’s not deep and it’s really arcadey-feeling, but where the game is clever is in the way the game works itself around your small skill set, always introducing new enemy types and frequently dolling out bosses with unique mechanics that require special deployment of abilities, often only for the moment of the game. I don’t think this works EVERY time (fighting airborne enemies in particular always feels a little wonky), and the balance of the game feels tuned a little too specifically so that often the difference between doing no damage to a boss and creaming them is grinding out only a couple of levels, but overall combat is as fast and fluid FEELING as ever even if that’s not practically true.

Something that I think is absolutely fucking insane about Ys is that it’s setting is like...Barely Fake Real World Plus Monsters??? It’s set largely on a continent that just looks like Europe ass Europe, the main antagonistic presence in the background of all of these is the Romun Empire with a U, there’s talk of the continent of Afroca with a O??? Why are you doing this Falcom, make something up!! The plot of this game revolves around this fake Catholic church which I would not blink an eye at aesthetically in a JRPG except that in this game they are explicitly a stand-in for the real life actual ass Catholic church it’s so weird! It just hits different when you’re hanging out in Fake Germany lol. It’s called like Garmany or something it’s so funny.

The region of Felghana itself though is very pleasant. Like the first two Ys games you still have a sort of central town area that you return to over and over to chat with the locals and upgrade your equipment and maybe pickup a sidequest, and as is typical for modern Falcom the flavor writing here is full of personality despite these people and their plight being super generic. You visit standard Mines and Icy Mountains and Lava Caverns but rather than feel generic in a bad way it does carry that classic vibe, like this game may be from 2005 but it’s really carrying the 1991 sensibilities on its back, which is what I want from this sort of project.

The driving force of the plot in this game is this guy who really wants to get revenge on the local tyrant and he devises this really convoluted and massively destructive way to do it (it’s poetic you see, because the Count destroyed his entire island and all the people on it, so it will be good to massacre people in proximity to the count, even though they are his servants and suffer under him and he doesn’t care about them). This kind of feels like a classic lib-brain “the bad guy is right but too much” thing right, like this guy is right that the Count did a genocide and deserves to die but people will be like nooooo killing is wroooooong nooooooo. Hilariously though this is not really what happens? Like yeah there’s a little bit of that but there’s more than one scene where people try to talk him down and their arguments are more like “what if you ONLY murdered the Count, or drove him into exile or something.” Both times they’re like “you know EVERYBODY hates the count right like if your plan simply wasn’t to murder everyone in the castle too you could get the whole town in on this EASY, NOBODY would care.” EVEN the count’s wife is immediately like “yo fuck this guy” when given evidence of his crimes lmao but no our buddy does in fact unleash a curse on the castle that literally just kills all the staff people and damn their souls to Fake Catholic Hell forever and unleash Mega Satan, WHILE GOING OUT OF HIS WAY to protect the countess and her children specifically. WHAT a prick lol.

But idk I feel like that beat is kind of my thing on the game in a nutshell it’s just kind of goofy and loose and hard to take too seriously and it’s constantly serving me fun shit to dig into even when it’s executing a lot of stuff in a way that feels just like 15% off the mark. As an expansion of the design core of Ys 1 and 2 I think it does a way more interesting job of incorporating magic into both combat and traversal but WAIT really I need to be comparing it to YS VI FUCK

anyway it’s good I had a good time it’s only like fifteen hours long that’s the sweet spot

I’m on a INTENSE Dragon Ball kick lately. I finally watched the last arc of Super after a year or so away from it, I watched Super – Broly, I started re-reading the original manga, I’m thinking about torrenting more of the old movies, and this streak has carried over into an itch for GAMING. Now being a bitch who just can’t find it in herself to engage in fighting games, my options are somewhat extremely limited (even the single cool one, Budokai 2, is the one that was left out of the HD collection for reasons I don’t know) ((it’s cool because the story mode is the weird board game)). If Kakarot is still on sale when I get paid on Friday I might pick it up but in the meantime I’ve revisited the game that in my head was the best DB game there could possibly be when I was a kid: this one you know, you’re reading the writeup.

It’s sick as hell, a story-driven RPG with five playable characters??? Would that every interest of mine got this treatment. Eight year old Ina was feasting. Upon revisit though, I think I appreciate what was going on here even more. It’s kind of astounding what Webfoot has pulled off here on a number of levels. First and foremost is the elephant in the room which is that Legacy of Goku 1 is an unmitigated disaster on every level, one of the worst I’ve ever played, so bad that even as a very young child I understood that no actually this thing just sucks. Being a kid however I did just buy the sequel anyway and lo, it’s a complete 180. The game is well-balanced, well-paced, well-written, looks beautiful, sounds gorgeous, only like half of the character portraits are terribly ugly. The other thing has to be taken as a whole: there’s just an impressive amount of STUFF in this game. It covers the middle third of the Dragon Ball Z phase of the story, which is a big chunk of shit, and even makes room for a filler movie and a lot of original side content. There are many locations, tons of unique NPCs, and the game is absolutely jam-packed with dialogue. As much as people make fun of Dragon Ball as the show where people scream a lot and it’s nothing but endless fights, the central body of the work (the manga) is actually really story and dialogue dense by this point and I think it’s a high compliment that I think you could easily plop a complete neophyte down with this game and they would be able to not only follow the story easily but also get a full sense of this very large cast’s unique personalities. Every time there’s a big story beat where everybody is hanging out you can talk to every single person in the group and they’ll all have two or three unique lines of dialogue in every situation it’s wild!

The game was clearly made by fans of the property and a lot of what’s really charming about it comes out in the loving attention to the property paid here. Like, there’s one part in the story where you have to blow up three generators to shut down a force field, but one of them is being used as a nest by a dinosaur lady. At this point in the game you could be tackling this open area as the friendly sweetheart boy Gohan, stoic alien with a cruel past but a noble heart Piccolo, or barely repentant mass murderer who only a few moments into the future from this scene will declare himself to have “a heart of pure evil” Vegeta. All three of these guys have completely different interactions with this dinosaur mom, and even though the little minigame you do to get her to move is always the same, the context of the interaction fits each character perfectly. You can get different responses from random NPCs you talk to or accept quests from depending on who you’re playing as, bosses will respond differently if you fight them as someone different than the story sets them up to fight, one guy is an original Dragon Ball reference and will have unique dialogue with Goku if they meet, it’s all very referential.

The extra content goes out of its way to fit in cleanly too – one early chunk of story sees Gohan have to run around town because Famous Phony Martial Arts Idiot Mr Satan is supposed to be holding a parade but refuses to start it until he gets a particular sandwich, but the guy who makes those won’t do it without reading his morning paper, but the newspaper stand is closed because the newspaper guy’s kid was involved in a bus crash you need to save him from. Then once you’ve resolved that and HAVE the sandwich, Stan insists the SONG at the parade is wrong and you have to track down his shitty record. THEN as soon as you get the parade going and Satan is given the key to the city, it’s stolen by a guy who is angry because he actually did the thing Satan took credit for to GET the parade and the reward. Mr Satan is an important character in Dragon Ball but in the story proper he shows up right at the end of the content covered in this game; here he’s introduced at the start, you get his whole deal, and references to him are sprinkled throughout the game. It’s a cool way to flesh things out.

The gameplay could read as shallow, but for a system with four buttons total and 8mb on a cartridge to work with I think Webfoot really hit a complexity sweetspot. You’re mostly balancing a basic melee attack and your limited energy for ki-based attacks, which you acquire a few of for each character throughout the game, and while there’s no combo system there is a certain rhythm to combat; stats and levels are really important and enemies hit hard when you’re not a fair bit ahead of them, so finding a way to keep a guy stunlocked based on the distance you keep between yourself and them and the frequency you hit the attack button at never stops being a satisfying management game. There’s a really good enemy variety, with a not-offensive number of reskins mixed with new enemy types all the way to the last moments. You can’t just trap a guy against a wall either, they bounce off it and through you, meaning you can’t really cheese any bosses by edging them into a corner or anything. It’s never the most challenging thing in the world, but the only dedicated recovery item is extremely scarce and tedious to farm, so it’s more fun to just stay on your toes, which I think actually helps the game balance.

One more thing that I think is really interesting is this game’s place in Dragon Ball’s localization history. Dragon Ball is famous for having many dubs from many companies even just in the English language, and for the really spotty way that stuff all aligned with the truth of the series until like, the late 2000s really. The most settled home for DB in the English language turned out to be Funimation, and their second, definitive dub of the original show is the era this game sits in. The interesting thing, though, is that while by this point DB games on console would always get English voices, they were firmly and obviously Japanese games, with the bright colors, peppy music, and poppy stylization that Toriyama was famous for. That stuff was obviously a part of Dragon Ball and we all became familiar with those vibes through the games, but it was always at odds with the much more intense, synth-and-metal soundtracks and deep red color palettes that Funimation was pushing in the marketing and openings for their English releases. The small handful of games developed by Webfoot on the Gameboy Advance are, as far as I know, the only Dragon Ball games every developed outside of Japan, using a non-Japanese version of the text as their source, and as such they’re a really unique and interesting relic of an era of the franchise that’s unique to a specific time and place that’s been firmly left behind. It’s present in small, funny things, like never spelling Frieza’s name the same way twice, which was a huge thing at the time, to curiosities like Piccolo’s species being referred to as “Nameks” instead of the now-correct “Namekians,” but the biggest and most important instance of this is that this game uses Bruce Faulconer’s iconic for that dub of the show and there has been a simply incredible and outstanding accomplishment in crushing those songs onto the GBA’s soundchip and retaining what makes them so infectiously kickass. I think the GBA soundchip gets a lot of undeserved hate from people who hear games that tried to put outside music onto a thing that wasn’t built for it. Here, music from an external source was instead deconstructed and reconstructed directly with the hardware in mind and I think it’s just hugely successful. Even in original songs, the vibe is perfect, wouldn’t change a thing.

I feel like I could get bogged down in the details I appreciate in this game forever if you let me. Like how Piccolo ends up having the weakest stat spread but on a technical level I think he’s the most fun character to play as because his charged melee attack has the highest risk-reward in it’s extremely short range/high damage/multi-hit element and that his transformation gets a higher speed boost than the super saiyans do to make up for his slightly lower power curve? That’s sick! But I won’t I’ll stop myself. I hope that my affection is evident, that my enthusiasm for the game shines past my obvious fangirl phase, that the merits of this cool little six hour tie-in action game can poke through a little bit between the cracks of this writeup. I do think the game is just a blast to play. I fully 100%ed it which involves grinding every character to their level caps, including a cute alternate ending with the statistically worthless character you get for doing that with everyone else and I feel like I wouldn’t do that if I was ONLY here for the cool attention to detail. Sometimes you just want some good clean fun to reset your brain a bit when things are unbelievably fucked up at work for the foreseeable future, and right now that game is DBZ the Legacy of Goku II!

Schmups are a genre I’m so entirely ignorant about that I’m not even sure I spelled schmup right? Is it shmup? Neither of these look right to me. Does this game even count as that? Is this what a shmup is? Or are like scrolling shooters their own thing? I have absolutely no idea. I think it’s short for shoot ‘em up and while you do certainly shoot ‘em up in this game I also spend all my time shooting ‘em up in like, Breath of the Wild or Dragon’s Dogma or one third of Sonic Adventure 2 so who can say if I know what the fuck I’m talking about. I think by now it should be obvious that I’m playing this game because it was recommended to me by MagneticBurn.

I’m trying really hard to recall if I’ve ever played a game in this genre literally ever before and I think the answer is actually “no,” and as I was going through this one I started to suspect that I was being really spoiled by being started here. So please forgive my statements and opinions here, they’re those of a true neophyte to the genre, I genuinely don’t know what I’m talking about. But the game has a gentle difficulty curve, not really bringing a real challenge until after the halfway mark I think, and although dying weakens you so much that it can basically ruin the run after a certain point, that did encourage practice and get me a little more dexterous maybe a little more quickly, even if I wished that powerup progress would be retained across continues. I appreciate that every level had a strong mechanical gimmick in addition to an aesthetic one; “level design” isn’t something I had really considered as a thing one might be terribly playful with in this kind of game but here you have levels where there are fewer and less dangerous enemies but much higher import is placed on dodging environmental hazards, you have levels where your field of movement is really restricted, you have a level where you’re in a car instead of on a jetpack and that completely changes the way you interface with basically all of your controls and weapons. Every level has a strong theme but they all play notably differently too which really helps them stand out from each other in memory and keeps the game from every getting monotonous or letting you get into too comfortable a groove.

I also liked that rather than picking one jetpack and sticking with it for the entire game, you get to re-equip before every stage. You get a little hint about what kind of stuff might be coming up in the next level (sometimes they even straight tell you “do we have a weapon that shoots vertically???”) and matching your special attack to the circumstances you’re anticipating can really make or break a run. There are a lot of small customization options that have big ripple effects, in fact. One of your stages of powering up is that you get a little drone thing and you can set it to rotate around you in a circle, shoot with you, or shoot in the opposite direction you’re facing, covering you in certain directions better or maximizing DPS (which becomes extremely important later one!). Similarly there are three completely distinct control schemes that totally change the feel of the game. None of them make it easier or harder, they’re just like, different ways to make the girls shoot? And they change how you’re able to interact with enemies, it’s a really cool inclusion and it adds a lot of replay value on top of the already high incentive to just run this bad boy because it’s so obviously, inherently well-designed and fun.

I didn’t mention the story, or the incredible girls you play as, or the sick ass music, or that it’s cool that all the enemies are yokai themed instead of just like airplanes or mecha or whatever, but that stuff’s all cool too. Really just immaculate vibes. Entirely unrelated to all this, I’m gonna go watch Dirty Pair, apropos of nothing. Thank you MagneticBurn for the recommendation this is probably not gonna be My Genre but this was an incredible time!

Despite the genesis being the 16-bit console in my house growing up, it really wasn’t a PART of my childhood; we had a lot more NES games including several of The Classics so that was kind of always in competition with the Nintendo 64, which we got a couple years into its life cycle, and was the first console I was old enough to really engage with on my own as a kid. After that it was like, damn, 3D graphics amirite? Ocarina of Time changes a kid. So we had like, the first two Sonics and that point n click Pac-Man 2 nightmare and that Aladdin game and like a few shitty sports games and Phantasy Star TWO which I guess if you want to know why I turned out this way, Phantasy Star 2 might be the first JRPG I played to completion. Imagine that ending informing a kid on a genre.

Anyway I didn’t have a good spread of genesis games, I didn’t particularly like PLAYING most of these games and I didn’t enjoy like, the aesthetics. I don’t know enough about tech stuff to understand the differences between consoles and I don’t really care but there’s a clear difference between the aesthetics of a lot of SNES and Genesis games and I assume that’s gotta come down to what’s under the hood? Regardless, I feel there’s definitely a Genesis Look. Sonic has this, y’know, Toejam and Earl has it, Wonder Boy has it. You know what I’m talking about.

Ristar is probably the platonic ideal of a Sega Genesis game. Genesis-ass game right here. Massive fuckin’ sprites, weird little fucko, obvious sonic clone, Japanese vibes but not so Japanese that people will make racist jokes about how wacky it is, interesting control gimmicks, funky-ass soundtrack, and my god the colors. Look at all the JEWEL TONES in this fucker. The deep purples, the turqoises, the burnt oranges that fill in the crystalline outlines of these bizarre and creative level themes. Sure yeah we start in like a forest and and water level but it’s really not long before we’re hitting the crystal planet and the synthwave cityscapes and shit, GENESIS shit y’know??

Ristar is a fantastic One Of These Guys (big sprite Sonic cash-ins I mean, he even steals the sonic title screen), and true to his name, he’s got stretchy wrists, and he is shaped like a star. What you see is what you get. It makes for an interesting dynamic where your jump isn’t anything to write home about and your stretchy arms don’t actually give you quite the freedom of movement you WANT but they do enable you to do a lot if you put in the time to find mastery. The game actually does feel something like a slowed down, zoomed in Sonic in the sense that there are winding paths and secrets hidden in every level if you’re skilled enough to navigate them well.

This isn’t the kind of game that I probably would have sought out on my own but I’m glad I was prompted to on my rec list by BansheeNeet. I love a good platformer, I love good tunes, I love good art, I love challenging my biases. A great recommendation!

Now THIS is Star Wars, bay beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Star Wars at its best, for me, is when creators explore the nooks and crannies of this mythic universe and just kind of dig into the cool things and interesting implications that will never have time to be elaborated upon properly in a big movie or tv show. The prequel era is the best period of time for this shit because there is such a breadth of production design around especially Phantom Menace but all three of those movies really, and so so so much of it exists really only in mini-documentaries in DVD extras or in those books you see in Barnes and Noble but never purchase that show you a diagram of what the inside of a Sarlacc looks like or whatever. Those books don’t terribly interest me, but people writing books about shit that simply doesn’t matter but might be a cool idea certainly does. OR A VIDEO GAME MAYBE.

ABOUT PODRACING.

I do genuinely think that this is a sick fucking racing game, with a really solid track variety, a good sense of stats mattering, elegant controls, great audio-visual style, and a wonderful cast of sick fucks to play as. But what makes this one of my very favorite pieces of Star Wars media is how well it uses that framework to characterize the world of Star Wars, entirely through the trappings of a racing game, just by fleshing out the concept of podracing as it’s presented in that one movie.

We only ever see one podrace in the movie but we’re told a little bit about it: that’s it a sport renowned for its speed and brutality, that most podracers simply die during races sooner or later, that it’s actually illegal because of this and is only put on in the essentially lawless Outer Rim, where the fingers of the major governments (regardless of which is in power at the moment, they’re always based in the center of the galaxy) can’t quite enforce their order; when we do see Republic representatives in this game they’re openly corrupt.

All of this is reflected an amplified by the content. Rather than your winnings being in credits, Star Wars’ common currency that is represented in every other Star Wars game, even ones set thousands of years prior to the events of the films, you’re paid in truguts, a currency specific to the locality on Tattooine where your parts shop and garage and junk yard are located. This is established in the movie and it makes sense that it’s true here: Hutt Cartels run this place – theirs is the money that’s good here. You see the stories of many of the planets you visit woven into the tracks you race on. Over the course of the three times you visit Mon Gazza, you get a full tour of its ecology, from the standard city racetrack said to be where unskilled rookie racers go to die in the overconfidence, to badlands outside of the populated urban areas, to the hellish tunnels and valleys of the spice mines, darting between the treads of the gigantic excavation vehicles. Another series of tracks takes place on the moon Oovo IV, where a Republic Maximum Security prison is located, and the warden hosts illegal races in makeshift courses that trace the perimeters of the facility and the inner workings of the infrastructure that keep things running; the final track is a special course only hosted occasionally because it relies on meteor showers breaching the thin atmospheric shields of the land surrounding the prison as an exciting natural danger to threaten racers. This corruption, this callous abuse of power and flaunting of wealthmaking for the galaxy’s imprisoned while acting like this race they can’t see is for their entertainment, that’s worldbuilding dude!

These vibes are supported in play also. Pods go fast, like, really fast, they’re extremely fragile, prone to overheating and explosion, and very few of them actually maneuver well. The sport is designed around the spectacle of death, and you WILL die, a lot. You’ll die to narrow gaps in cliffs, to tricky u-shaped turns, to big jumps you just couldn’t hit enough speed on – you might even die from hitting your own boost too long and oops one of your twin engines just exploded. In one particularly memorable course called simply The Abyss, it’s all too easy to drive off the incredibly narrow driveway and just kind of...fall. You even have a delay before you explode and respawn, unique to the falling deaths in this game, to emphasize that you’re meant to be falling forever, that if this weren’t an arcadey video game your little guy would be experiencing a really awful way to go. In a perhaps necessary video game convenience (one the less popular sequel to this game would avert though), you DO immediately respawn upon death though, and get right back into the race, but it would really get me thinking about the way they talk about podracing in the movie, about how dangerous it is. Every time I’d crash I’d think about how damn, Ebe Endacott just ended right there, very unceremonious.

Podracing seems like a bad deal too! It’s hard to get ahead and stay ahead. Races only pay out once, period, and your parts are ALWAYS degrading, much much faster if you’re crashing a lot, which adds a nice challenge to what sort of becomes a contiguous campaign mode in the game, balancing your maintenance with winning the various cups and the brutal bonus invitationals they unlock. But it’s just always, like, what are you gonna do with that money? Spend it on your pod I guess. Race more, and more dangerously. The better your stats get, ironically, the harder it is not to crash due to how wickedly fast you can become and how incredibly sensitive your controls can be, and the faster you are the more fragile your pod is on collision with non-wall stuff like asteroids or small rock formations. If you want the wins later on though these are risks you need to take. That’s what it is to be a podracer, according to the game – you go as fast as you can as hard as you can, you flash as brightly as possible for as long as possible before you’re snuffed out. But everybody does bite it sooner or later.

This is one of my personal favorite pieces of Star Wars media because of how much is here to be squeezed from it. Part of it is because of the absurd amount of detail in the production design of the movie, which leaks its way into all of the movie’s supplementary material, including this game, and part of it is because everything about this game is ambient; there’s no direct storytelling, you’re going entirely off of the patter of the arena announcers, the visuals of the tracks, the stats of your vehicles, stuff like that. It makes it so you do have to do your own homework but there’s a lot of freedom for interpretation in a way that feels almost antithetical to what Star Wars wants to be most of the time since wikis became a thing. Of course it’s also just a real banger in the High Octane Sci-Fi Racer genre but I think all of these elements together make it something pretty special within the brand. I don’t know if we’ll ever see something like this again from Star Wars. But it’s cool that this stuff is still floating around.

What a breath of fresh air!! It’s so uncommon to find something that feels really original, and I don’t know that Mega Man Battle Network REALLY is that, but I’ve certainly never played anything quite like it.

If not the most famous Mega Man spinoff then certainly the most successful with like a bazillion GBA games that I’m obligated to play and a full anime series that I think actually has a completely different vision of this world but whatever it’s fine lol, Battle Network envisions a world where instead of ROBOTS everybody got really into, like, early 90s-tier internet interfacing, lol. But this is not just the boring evil future that we live in today, no no, in the fun chill future of Battle Network, we operate on Flinstones rules, where essentially all electronics (even ones that don’t rally seem to need them) are operated by little cyber-guys that live inside each device’s personal webring. You want a soft drink from that vending machine? Well there’s a little guy in there making sure that vending machine operates properly. You want to cook something in your oven? Buncha little guys making that thing work. You want your city to have a water filter that takes all the water from the nearby river that the city built atop of and filter it so it’s not seemingly lethally poisonous to drink? A veritable ton of little guys live in that thing, sure would be a shame if...something were to happen to them…

And of course this is a game for nine year olds, so everybody has their own personal little guy as well who they carry around inside of a very marketable little wrist-mounted smartphone-esque PDA. These guys are called NetNavis, and that’s what Megaman is, and all the Megaman characters you expect to see; little guys who accompany their human pals and do stuff for them online. At first it kind of seems like they mostly exist to destroy viruses on The Net, but there’s a very funny bit in the middle of the game where Roll brings Megaman an email and when you respond to the email Megaman has to physically carry your email through the internet back to the other kid’s personal network and physically hand it to Roll like a messenger delivering a missive scroll in 1250 AD. Including the random encounters along the way it takes like fifteen minutes. To get an email! In the future! This girl lives next door Lan could literally walk to her house faster than it takes to deliver this thing.

It’s a very goofy and charming vision of the future, trapped in the exact wrong moment to be making a thing about The Internet, that crystalline moment where things are taking the shape of modernity but the entire system in this game’s idyllic future is modeled on this old style link-based personal web page era of the internet. What was surely cutting edge for exactly one year in 2001 does lend the whole proceeding a sense of the nostalgic idyll, this fantastical, upbeat, utopian version of a version of technology that existed in the mainstream for the briefest moment; combined with the kids who are free to do whatever the fuck they want for the most part, the bright colors, the peaceful town and the mostly low stakes to the conflicts, Battle Network has accidentally become one of those games about Being A Kid In Japan that everyone loves so much, if not to the extreme of something like a Boku No Natsyasumi. It’s one of those with a Saturday Morning coat of paint, a tone it strikes really well even as its villains make threats and commit acts of violence they could never have gotten away with on the Fox Box in 1999. There is a twist at the end of this game that made me LOSE my MIND it’s the funniest possible thing that could have happened but I’m into it if we’re breaking the glass and hitting the alarms in game one of six (plus two spinoffs) then bro strap me the fuck in I’m ready for the ride.

Gameplay-wise I think this one is pretty famous, with it’s combination of reflex-based twitch combat on a 9x9 grid with a deck building game, I think it feels fresh and great 20 years later. It’s not IMMEDIATELY perfect; elemental weaknesses are present but feel like an afterthought, the way your abilities load in between turns feels like it needs a more active element, attempts to force players to strategize their builds via card classifications are either not extreme enough or are too stringent, the encounter rate is HIGH and fleeing is an equippable ability only – there are just things that feel OFF here but despite all that the game is such a blast to play that the prospect of ironing out these kinks is exciting. There’s plenty of room for innovation. That goes double for level design, which is actually pretty bad uniformly but not to the game’s detriment with the exception of one late game dungeon which is possibly one of the worst single levels in any video game? But making all the internet stages just like bland corridors where the simple (OR IN ONE CASE NEEDLESSLY DIFFICULT) puzzles are made tedious by the encounter rate does seem needlessly hostile, I hope they’re a little smoother in the future.

I actually started playing this entire franchise chronologically from the beginning specifically so I would have full context going into Mega Man Battle Network which lol lmao do not do that what a huge mistake, BUT the game is very cool and now I’m a mega man fan so I guess it was worth it? It’s fine. This one’s good.

When I was younger and I hadn’t played many older games and I wasn’t really paying attention to the ones that I HAD I would often find myself thinking that while some games were obviously worth recognizing for being the first in iconic series and having cool music and being the foundations upon which great things would be built, there wasn’t ACTUALLY that much separating something like a Mario or a Zelda from the kinds of games that we had in my house growing up that were utterly forgotten by history like Kung Fu Heroes and Swords and Serpents, or actively maligned like Home Alone 2 or Battletoads. OBVIOUSLY this was an ignorant way to think about these games, a dismissive attitude informed by an unwillingness to branch out of my comfort zone, one that I talk about often on here. Making an active effort to shed this attitude is a general good because it not only helps me better appreciate the more run of the mill or forgotten games of the era as worthy of attention and examination but it does also help me identify DA CLASSICS and goddamn is Castlevania ever one of those.

Obviously there’s a lot here that does this, from the nonstop bangers (a game with ten pieces of music where every single one of them is a stone cold classic broooooooo) that are perfectly matched to the tone of each stage, to the variety between those stages despite the relatively limited bag of tricks the devs were working with, to the deliberate control scheme, to the distinctly minimal number of fuck off dickhead unfair set pieces. Even the premise is pitch perfect, goofy enough to be remarkable, for every moment where you turn a proverbial corner into a new boss pulled from the classic movie monster canon to be worth a hearty chuckle without shedding the instantly classic schlock horror vibe it’s cultivating.

I think the thing that’s really cool to me though, especially for a game from 1986, is how well Castlevania establishes, uh Castlevania. Like, the castle itself. For a game with literally no text in it, Castlevania (the game) does an incredible job at rooting you in its senses of character, of narrative, of place. The theme park tour of Dracula’s castle takes you through grounds and gardens, over towers and parapets, down into dungeons and caves, and it all feels like a natural progression. You get that little map screen in between stages that shows your progress through the castle and you can really feel it. Castlevania does the smart thing of mixing you up between moving left-to-right and moving right-to-left too, which doesn’t sound like much but it does make it feel a lot more like you’re working your way through a real building complex and less like only a series of levels. This kind of attention to detail is what elevates those good games to Great ones. It makes Castlevania a real pleasure to experience, it makes it immersive. It’s so cool to find that degree of world in a linear sidescrolling action platformer on the NES. Games are so cool! It’s this kind of shit that keeps me excited for the medium.

FUCK the hallway before the grim reaper though, all my homies hate the hallway before the grim reaper.

NEXT TIME: SIMON'S QUEST

Mega Man X was a series in a somewhat privileged position of being both a subfranchise of something institutional AND built on the back of its own titanically successful and acclaimed first entry. The question of what IS Mega Man X exactly is one that’s been on the table from the beginning and it’s a blessing and a curse. Is it the new flagship evolution of Mega Man or a spinoff? Is it a killer app franchise for the Super Nintendo or another jewel in Sony’s growing crown? Are we dedicating ourselves to narrative in these games or not? Is this series where we play with the possibility space in terms of gameplay in the Mega Man framework? The answer to all of these questions, basically, has always been both yes and no, and in my opinion it’s paid off a lot more often than not so far. Here at what is very obviously a finale, even though very soon it will turn out not to be one, the successes are perhaps more mixed than they’ve been at the series’ highest points, but swinging hard and only connecting halfway is something I admire in a series as famous for its overblown stagnation as it is for anything else.

X5’s narrative is a lot like its gameplay, in that it’s not doing much new for the series but it IS coloring in the lines with some fresh ink. Sigma’s back and this time he’s got a VIRUS except I guess the virus was a thing this whole TIME and it was ACTUALLY the thing that makes people maverick and not the fact that they’re mad about being slaves, which is a stupid fucking choice but WHATEVER it’s Mega Man X it’s hard to be super mad about that particular aspect of these games five deep. In classic MMX fashion, though, the mechanics of the Sigma Virus are extremely, vague, like it also is said to be like harming the environment somehow? It’s the thing that destabilizes the space colony? It seems to have something to do with Zero’s mysterious past (mysterious if you’re five years old I mean), even though Sigma is surprised when he puts together Zero’s origin at the end of the game? Who can say, these things don’t really matter. What matters is the tutorial level ends with a giant Sigma face bursting out of the statue of liberty and then when you blow it up that like, triggers a colony drop or something? I forget the exact mechanics, but it spreads the Sigma Virus all over the world AND starts the countdown for a big orbiting space colony to crash into the earth, which seems needless when you’ve already turned basically everybody on Earth into a Maverick which as far as I know is what he wants??? THIS IS A FOOL’S ERRAND NONE OF THIS MATTERS.

What matters in this game, basically, is X and Zero concluding their character arcs, for a loose definition of those terms, and I think that as low as the bar I’ve set for this series is, X5 clears it. This is the first time these stupid boys and their melancholy has actually had any heft to it, and a lot of that has to do with the stakes of the game. All the stuff that we’ve come to expect from an X game is here: X is upset that he has to kill people who won’t listen to him, aware that the cycle of violence he perpetuates is cruel but unable to appreciate how needless and evil his position as an enforcer of the state is and that that is a primary driver of the misery he loathes. Zero may understand things better or he may not but he doesn’t care, really. He wants to do the job and go home, even when the home he wants to go to at the end of the day is increasingly ruinous; his characteristic angst and introspection seem more justified here in a truly apocalyptic setting as it seems the questions he’s always had about himself are taking on a global importance.

What sells this stuff so much better is the borderline abject bleakness of the game. The framing device for why you’re going from stage to stage has nothing to do with hunting and killing guys for maybe the first time in the series; instead you’re going around to collect parts to enhance the ramshackle rail gun and space shuttle the heroes have cobbled together in a desperate bid to shoot the falling space colony out of the sky. The entire game is haunted by the timer counting down to the impact, losing an hour every time you enter a stage. Every time though, X or Zero are met by the people who live in or own the places you’re going to, stealing from essentially, and some of them are typically MMX villains, maligning their place in society but framed as worthy of dismissal by the game because they’re also bloodthirsty mavericks. Just as many, though, are guys who sincerely would want to help with the effort to save the Earth if not for the fact that they’ve been affected by the Sigma Virus too, and they’ve been taken by it, or they feel it coming for them, and they ask to be put down. That’s the world we’re all fighting to save. One where, as far as we can tell, almost everybody is like this now. According to the text of the game we’re just all fated to be evil killers. It seems like this is reversed in the endings but it’s not REALLY addressed? It’s entirely possible it’s only the people in the heroes’ bunker who escaped. I’m sure this is all completely swept under the rug in Mega Man X6 but in a game that is widely known to have been intended as a series finale it’s a dark spot to leave things on, even when the good ending leaves off on a Mega Man Carries On The Fight note.

I don’t know how much there really is to say about what HAPPENS in the game. They pay off the X vs Zero fight that they’ve been teasing since X2 in the most comically anti-climactic way possible UNLESS you’re on the path for Da Bad Ending which you basically would have to be trying to do on purpose even given the random elements of the game. There are some new characters here, the most impactful one being Alia, the boys’ new Support Radio Guy, and from a narrative perspective I like her a lot, she gives a lot of color commentary on the world which I appreciate and again think enhances the general atmosphere of the game. There’s also this guy Dynamo who is like the secondary villain of the game and he is extremely funny he gets hyped up super hard but he only exists to be the Between Stages Miniboss that Mega Man games like to do, you fight him twice and he’s just gone he’s completely a non-character I love him, fucking loser.

I think this might be a hot take but I think the presentation is pretty great here too. I’m not sure WHAT happened between X4 and now beyond a general uptick in output of both Mega Man games and Capcom games in general in the late 90s/early 2000s, and maybe the looming hardware changeover had something to do with it, but it’s clear there’s less money on the screen here than in X4, which was a lavish production. X5 by comparison does come off looking a little shabby. Sprites that are carried over from the previous game look about as good as they did there which makes it even more noticeable that new ones, while beautifully drawn, animate a lot more stiffly and with fewer frames. Colors pop just a little bit less. They repeat the rotating staircase background in one level and it’s been completely biffed, the perspective is entirely off. Probably the most immediately obvious thing is that hand animated and voice acted cutscenes are OUT, replaced by sprite slideshows and text boxes. I can’t say I miss the anime cutscenes? The new ones are well drawn, and the music and slideshow animations pull enough weight that I didn’t mind at all that a lot of the big ones are digitized cells now instead. I honestly think they fit the tone a little better.

This extends to the play as well. I’ve decided that these PS1 era X games are not my favorites in the series in terms of game feel but X5 offers a LOT of options for tinkering with the way characters move and feel. I think it works out better than X4 in that regard even if the individual level designs aren’t as strong. They repeat a lot of gimmicks which is fine. I’m on the record as preferring this style of giving every level a specific gameplay hook in addition to an aesthetic one, and X5 keeps the variety up throughout. It’s a strong sleight of levels on paper kind of hamstrung by so-so implementation. A really good autoscroller rendered impotent by being too slow to be challenging; switch-based door obstacles that slow things down but don’t require effort to solve; a gravity swapping mechanic that is cool to look at but doesn’t meaningfully affect the way that you play. It’s not a DESERT out there – Burn Dinorex’s stage has a path split in the second half and both paths are cool, with one being a really challenging autoscrolling miniboss fight and the other being the game’s ride armor power fantasy segment. Cresent Gizzly’s stage is a fast-paced series of segments where you jump from truck to truck as you destroy them and it just feels sick. It’s a mixed bag with high highs and very medium lows which is a pretty good spot to find oneself in.

Surely though no one can talk about Mega Man X5 without spending some time talking about the veritable cavalcade of new and mostly very weird mechanics that it slathers over the top of the Mega Man formula to what I would call largely positive outcomes. The biggest one is the aforementioned ticking clock that hangs over the majority of the game; once you stop the threat of the colony in-universe that does go away and you can peruse the stages for collectibles at your leisure. Along with the timers the bosses all have a power level that goes higher the longer you take to beat them. I THINK this only affects their health? It’s a weird choice. When you refight them at the end of the game they’re all level 96 it’s truly tedious. However, if you get a good rank on their stage or fight them at a high enough level you can be rewarded with parts when you beat a boss, which can be developed in your hub menu into equippable items that change all kinds of parameters on X and Zero. They take two in-game hours to develop and you’re limited in equips but they affect shit like movement speed, special moves, attack potency, it’s really versatile. That’s another thing: rather than having separate campaigns, you select X or Zero at the start of every stage and levels are CLEARLY designed with one or the other in mind. It’s never as bad as say, Mega Man & Bass but you can spot it. Zero also just fuckin eats every boss in the game for lunch, tears through them like tissue paper, it’s bananas. There are little guys throughout the stages that you can go out of your way to save and some of them are tricky. There are RNG elements to multiple story points for how things will play into like three different endings. There’s so much WEIRD SHIT going on in this game and you can ignore basically all of it. The only really obtrusive new addition is that Alia interrupts you in every stage with the world’s most obnoxious text box tutorials which are never helpful and a very baffling thing to start doing in game 5 or like, 17 depending on how you’re looking at it.

That one frustration aside though I came out of X5 a lot more positive than I was expecting, given the general reputation of the latter half of the X series. It tries some new stuff and it’s almost entirely successful, which is never a guarantee when Mega Mans go out on a limb. Way more impressively though it ties the story and characters of the X games (well, mostly Zero, come on), which is, generously, a stupid heaping mess that I hate, into something that resembles a satisfying ending. We all know it’s not in any way an ending and that it would go on to have two separate continuations, the well-liked Mega Man Zero and the uh, well, Mega Man X6 is famously the sequel to Mega Man X5. I hope I like that one too! But on its own terms, taken for what it is, I think what we have here is very cool.

It’s been a mixed bag with anniversary games in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series so far; game ten, Secrets of Shadow Ranch was a relative high point at the time of its release that in retrospect shores itself more firmly in the middle of the pack, quality-wise, while game twenty, Ransom of the Seven Ships, is an unmitigated disaster from top to bottom, easily bottom two in the series in terms of gameplay, a story so boring it features precisely one character in it, and racism so overt even by the standards of both its time and this series that Her has since removed it from sale. Luckily for them, we celebrate 25 as readily as we celebrate increments of ten, it’s even a little more special than a twentieth or thirtieth thing in a list might be, so Her got another shot at doing something special for an anniversary project and god damn did they take it.

Her’s Nancy Drew games settled their formula really quickly, as early as the third game and with the core elements in place since arguably the second, so when a game DOES break some element of that formula in a significant way, you do tend to feel like Something Is Happening. In The Final Scene it’s an urgent hostage situation; in Secret of the Old Clock it’s an alternate universe where you’re experiencing the kind of history you might investigate in any other game; in The Phantom of Venice you’re doing uhhh, international espionage sort of?? HERE, things go off the rails IMMEDIATELY, and they stay off the rails for almost the entire game.

In the first twist, the game actually takes place in Nancy’s home town of River Heights. No vacation, no weird internship, no international employers whisking her away to have wacky, garrulous, possibly racist adventures. Nancy is actually, for once, just hanging out with her friends, participating in a town-sponsored team-based clue-hunting event (which seems like an unfair thing to put on when you have a literally world famous consulting detective hanging around like at least ban Nancy guys come on) when she is lured by a mysterious note to town hall one night. Once she’s inside, town hall immediately burns down, and Nancy is framed for the arson, and in the second twist, she’s immediately arrested and spends a good 80? 85? percent of the game in the police station while her trio of Best Buds team up to clear her name on the outside.

you’ll note that I said in the police station and not in a jail cell, because of course, Nancy is on very good terms with the local chief of police, and it takes very little poking to convince him to let Nancy out of her holding cell and roam the station entirely unattended, where she quickly recovers access to her personal cell phone and lock picking tools, breaks into multiple desks and file cabinets, generally commits many crimes, and comes out completely rosy in perhaps Nancy’s greatest flex of power and privilege in the series so far.

The third way that this game is markedly different from usual is in objective. Alibi in Ashes is much more overtly a whodunnit than most of its predecessors. While the “villain” of each game is always one of the characters you interact with throughout, the degree to which they give a shit about Nancy varies wildly, and most of the time they would be entirely content to do their scooby doo real estate scheme or thievery or whatever and leave – Nancy’s meddling is incidental to their schemes and their inevitable confrontations are rarely personal beyond the character being a general asshole who’s smug about murdering her. Here, though, Nancy’s been directly framed for a pretty bad crime, there are four possible suspects, and Nancy’s friends are directly working to both clear her name and finger the actual perp.

To this end there’s a lot of good stuff going on. You can swap perspectives at almost any time between Nancy in the police station, who collects and organizes the group’s aggregate evidence, steals useful police information and documents for them, and within the story is directing the course of the others’ investigations, and any of her friends, each of whom share special relationships with the suspects. Cheerful, feminine Bess is the perpetual enemy of Nancy’s preppy rival Deirdre, gets on great with ice cream parlor owner and councilperson Toni, and immediately gets kicked out of cynical antique shop owner Alexei’s store because upon entering it she breaks a valuable vase, so he won’t even SPEAK with her. Wise tomboy George is more mature than her friends, and gets more out of Alexei than they can because she’s better at manipulating him. POOR FUCKIN NED is an object of desire for Deirdre (just one of many reasons she hates Nancy), and more than once throughout the game he’s forced by Nancy to take advantage of Deirdre’s crush on him to manipulate her, something he’s very uncomfortable with and is ultimately fruitless lmao. This guy is the only person who is physically present in the game who doesn’t get a character model either. You can visit Bess and George when you’re not playing as them, they’re doing specific jobs for the mission. Ned just disappears, it’s wild. The boy stays losing. I love this guy he sucks.

So obviously there’s a lot going on in this game, and from a play perspective it’s maybe a little TOO much? There are a LOT of THINGS to be done here, and juggling three characters who all have unique dialogue puzzles to wade through and each carrying different inventories and more than one puzzle that’s just like “go find me a battery” where’s a battery? Fuck you that’s where, it’s just like, there’s a lot of space in this game and there are a lot of ways to navigate it. Easy to get mixed up, easy to lose track of objectives. But none of that really matters, right, because the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it. Bess and George and to a significantly lesser extent Ned (I write about him a lot because I think the way these games treat him is fascinating but he is undoubtedly the most thinly drawn recurring character in a series where the Hardy Boys have only made like five appearances) are fun characters who never quite feel like they get enough to do, so getting a chance to really shine a spotlight on them in a game that is in large part celebrating the history of this branch of the franchise does feel earned.

The thing that puts Alibi in Ashes over the top, though, is how mean-spirited it is. Something that has emerged from this block of Nancy Drew games (what I’d think of as the third distinct era of the series, games 16 through 25, but especially emerging during the ongoing hotstreak since 21, Waverly Academy) that I feel has done them a great deal of credit, and that’s a willingness to engage in a level of mundane adult emotion that lends an air of Maturity to the proceedings, even as they retain their goofy elements. This incarnation of Nancy Drew has always existed in a weird space of adaptation; one one hand the character’s ages and often the subject matters dealt with are clearly rooted in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys young adult novels of the 80s and 90s which were aimed squarely at older teens and whose edge could border on too sharp (never let the world forget “Joe! Hand me the Uzi!”). On the other, characters’ actual personalities and dispositions and worldviews, the tendency towards overt educational content, and a lot of the weird, often childish humor that strongly characterizes these games is rooted deeply in the earlier Nancy Drew works through the 1970s and the later Nancy Drew Notebooks series that were aimed squarely at children. It lends the series a distinctly all-ages vibe, something I’ve praised and chided in the past.

But while the darker series has always had dark pasts and spooky locales and the occasional attempted murder, I think these last few have gone for something a little more daring (at least, in the context of this series and its framework), in choosing to include and often center a lot of just kind of normal, mundane ugliness. It could be the myriad ways high school kids are beaten down by each other and the systems that govern them, or social norms precluding a family from properly coming together in the wake of a tragedy, or a man letting fear of vulnerability steal years of his life from him – each of the recent games seems interested in letting the quiet sadnesses that everyone collects naturally as part of living weave in and out of their standard Nancy Drew games, along with more of the complexities of adult life in general.

Never is this more apparent than in Alibi in Ashes, where Nancy’s own sterling All-American hometown of River Heights is revealed to be a nest of vipers ready to eat her alive at the very first sign of disharmony. The news people hate her for scooping their hottest stories, the politicians hate her for the weird attentions she brings and for how her successes negatively impact the reputation of the police, who are shown to be as lazy and corrupt as an other police office anywhere else. When Nancy is very obviously framed for a crime that’s wildly out of character and evidence is quickly found to put doubt on her guilt, she’s given no quarter because the people with the power to help her don’t really care and the people who are actually in power have a vested interest in seeing her go down regardless of whether she’s guilty or not.

This isn’t even the first time this has happened – insofar as this game has a “historical subplot,” it’s about Alexei the antique shop owner, who was once a famous teen detective like Nancy, busted for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Nancy doesn’t lose her characteristic pep or her faith in the system, her belief that if she and her friends can just find the right combination of evidence that she’ll be cleared and the real arsonist brought to justice, nor does she ever doubt that this will happen, but Alexei was broken by his experience. As he puts it himself, he spoke truth to power and was swiftly and brutally destroyed for it. Now he’s a pariah, eking out a solitary, bitter existence running a store he hates in a town that hates him. And for what? For allegedly stealing one thing, one time, thirty years ago?

That’s the kind of All-American Town that River Heights is, under the sunny facades and ice cream parlors and colonial architecture. A town where people’s memories are long, and there’s no room for forgiveness, no room for generosity, no room for grace. Where altruism and charity are met, privately, with resentment. Where you can’t rock the boat. Where local town politics are the supreme power. Where your neighbors who were your friends yesterday will throw rocks through your windows and leave threats at your doorstep before you’re even tried for a crime, and once you’re exonerated will act like they were on your side all along. In a way, Deirdre is one of the only real friends Nancy has, because while she doesn’t like Nancy and doesn’t want much to do with her, she’s open about her problems with Nancy, and equally open about being a normal person who just wants Nancy to shut the fuck up and maybe break up with her boyfriend and not like, rot in prison for 10-20 years for a crime she didn’t commit and/or die.

And maybe the most damning thing about Nancy herself is that, as usual, she doesn’t understand any of this is happening to her. It’s bad apples all the way down in her eyes. She’s quite happy to be back in her neighbors’ good graces when all is said and done; quite happy to simply ruin the popularity of one shitty politician in a system that she knows is historically ingrained into the fabric of her town; quite happy to use her own connections to the police and her father’s position as an important and wealthy judge to get her out of a situation that would ruin and has ruined anyone else. This is the dichotomy right? Ever-present in the series and as strong as ever here now that a lot of these disparities and injustices are being brought back to the forefront as explicit text.

There’s a lot to chew on in Alibi in Ashes generally but it IS the Big Twenty-Fifth Game in the series and I do want to note before we end that it works really well in that capacity. The game is chock full of little easter eggs (not counting the literal hidden easter egg items you can be rewarded with for doing weird shit in these, which I didn’t find this time) like all the playable characters having box art for previous games as their phone backgrounds (deep cuts too), or Nancy’s desk drawer having a picture of her friend from The Final Scene in it, or the town map for the game being an exact replica of the map for Secret of the Old Clock, except with many small changes to reflect the modernizations that have been implemented over the intervening 100 years.

Those bits of fanservice are littered throughout and LIBERALLY and that shit matters in a series as long as this one. There’s a real sense of mythology to it, it’s fun to celebrate on a milestone, and it’s frankly a relief to finally have a milestone game worth celebrating. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been generally pleased with this run of Nancy Drew games, a lot of series highs lately imo, and Alibi in Ashes still stands out among what already felt like the cream of the crop. It’s a little bittersweet too – my understanding is that this game closes out this third era of Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series, and with the series kind of perpetually stalled after its ill-fated retool in 2019, it seems likely that the next one will be the beginning of their final stretch. If that’s the case, I can only hope they keep up the pace they’ve set so far in the twenties. I would love to see this series close out strong.

PREVIOUSLY: THE CAPTIVE CURSE

NEXT TIME: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

I’ve been away longer than I’d planned to be but it feels good to get back in the saddle. I’m refreshed and ready to go. I didn’t FEEL burned out on these but sometimes you stop and then damn it’s been six months, time flies. But when the first thing that happens in the game is Nancy won’t be let into the castle she’s taken a case at until she solves a matching puzzles that is pulleyed down to her in a bucket and she just sighs and does it because she knows that she lives in a world that runs on some kind of bizarre transactional puzzle economy, I felt like I was pulling into the driveway after a long time away. When the second thing that happened in the game was Nancy gets a call from her boyfriend and treats him like absolute shit, I felt like I was HOME.

Our previous adventure took place in Japan and on her way home from that adventure Nancy decides on a whim to take a case from a rich man named Markus whose castle/hotel and its surrounding town are being terrorized by a legendary monster that supposedly kidnaps girls when it appears but has yet to actually really do anything lol. This aggravates Nancy’s long-suffering boyfriend Ned, who was planning a romantic reception for her homecoming which he put a lot of effort into, and whom she did not tell about this detour. Anyone who has read my Nancy Drew stuff knows that I love Ned, the most shat-upon boy in the world. He has done nothing to deserve the nonstop contempt Nancy treats him with, nor the patronizing comfort she offers him whenever he has the audacity to act a little put out.

This game is different though because THIS time Ned seems like he’s finally had enough. Not even that actually he’s just like a little bit annoyed and pouty that she has ditched him again for some random case with no notice and she’s immediately like WELL SORRY MY LIFE DOESN’T REVOLVE AROUND YOU NED SORRY YOU’RE NOT HAVING A BETTER TIME IF YOU’RE NOT HAVING FUN WHY DON’T YOU GO OUT BY YOURSELF which is like very clearly not the point he’s trying to make but that IS enough to get them to part on bad terms, which is an interesting twist to this game, there’s not usually a lot of interpersonal conflict on Nancy’s side of things, she’s typically an impartial observer to other people’s problems, a bizarre avatar for the writers to voice their awful views on justice.

It’s fun, then, to see this personal trouble leak into Nancy’s handling of the case and for some small parallel to be drawn between her and this game’s obvious culprit. I’ll go ahead and list all the guys in this game and you just think about who might be dressing up as a Frankenstein to get the place to go out of business. A middle aged man who suffered a tragedy and uses his position as the manager of the castle to not venture into the outside world and who loves to make board games. An old old woman who physically cannot stay awake if she eats ANY food. A nine year old. A woman who is the ex-girlfriend of the now-extremely wealthy man who owns the castle and gets visibly angry when you bring that up to her but swears it’s no big deal but god she hates that guy and thinks he wouldn’t be where he is today without her but don’t worry she’s working here at his castle by complete coincidence. Okay? We’re all just gonna sit with that for a second. Cool.

It’s fine though because the game isn’t about a real mystery as much as it’s about Nancy’s relationship troubles, and it’s very funny to see her go to this woman who is clearly behind everything and ask for advice and RECEIVE completely genuine, sound advice from this person who has absolutely no perspective on healthy romance and also is planning to murder Nancy later. She’s a comically inept villain in general, with the first monster encounter really being more of a prank, where she sets fire to a single potted plant in a stone courtyard, and the second being to try to make nancy’s clothes look slashed up but even the CG render makes it obvious that someone cut them with scissors. It’s possibly the least effective performance by a villain to date in the series and it makes Anja a really charming character, bolstered by a very fun voice performance.

Less fun is the resolution to the BF Fight story. Throughout the game you get calls from the Hardy boys who are consoling Ned after he goes on a PG bender post-argument, and in the end NED apologizes to NANCY and frames it as a thing where he’s jealous of her cool life? Which is not the tenor of the actual fight at all, and Nancy gives him NOTHING on her end. She tells him “you know I would rather you were here with me than not” which is BULLSHIT lmao I was so mad.

I’m basically always mad at Nancy thought so this feels right. Never more than when she’s being the world’s biggest cop which also happens in this game. Long before she knows she’s the villain Nancy finds out that Anja faked her resume to get her position at the castle, a completely harmless crime, but a CRIME NONETHELESS so even though Anja was well-liked and unjustly passed over for work in favor of people with more connections and more privileged backgrounds and Nancy takes this at face value and believes it, AND nobody cares who knows about this AND it’s a completely victimless crime as far as anyone knows, Nancy still blackmails her into confessing under threat that Nancy herself will rat on her if she doesn’t, simply because it was a crime to do this. Mind your fucking business Nancy jesus fuckin christ who cares! The worst person alive I swear to god.

It may sound like I didn’t like this game but actually I had a great time with it. These things are comforts, the kinds of consistencies that you want to see in a series as venerably entrenched as any can be in its twenty-fourth installment. I WANT Nancy to be culturally insensitive (TO WHITE PEOPLE ONLY THANK YOU) I ASSUME she will be the dirt worst pig in the world, I love when the villains are goofy losers, I love when Ned is the world’s (and Nancy’s) punching bag. That’s what these games are! To expect them to be anything else, NOW, would be folly. That’s not to say they’re not worth talking about or criticizing but y’know we take some comfort.

The actual play of the game is pretty excellent too. This series tends to run in cycles of puzzle elements where every once in a while you get a big burst of fresh ideas and stuff and that’s not QUITE what’s happening here but I think there is a strong variety of puzzles on display, none of the ones that are present are bad versions of their format, and nothing breaks the pace. On a similar note this might be the best batch of minigames Nancy Drew has ever seen? Legitimately only winners this time, it’s shocking. And while I don’t think this is a SPOOKY game partially because the threat is so underplayed, it is a very BEAUTIFUL one. The art direction throughout the castle and its dungeon area that you traverse freely late in the game is superb, and while it’s kind of a shame they don’t really cultivate any particularly strong atmosphere with it, it’s good to look at nonetheless.

I’m glad this was the one I took a break on because it’s an excellent cyber mystery to come back to! It’s not a huge shake up game and the stakes are about as low as they get in this series. Real nice hangout vibes. Charming characters, pretty to look at, nice music, rock solid gameplay. It’s all here. The Captive Curse easily goes on that pile with games like Shadow Ranch and Blue Moon Canyon of games that aren’t gonna reinvent the wheel or nothin’ but are nonetheless rollicking good times, and in a series like this you honestly want more of those than anything else.

PREVIOUSLY: SHADOW AT THE WATER'S EDGE
NEXT TIME: ALIBI IN ASHES

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

It’s not uncommon for really popular shows to be adapted for other countries to suit the sensibilities and cultural norms of the native markets. You’ll often see it with stuff that’s designed to be ephemeral, aired once and forgotten, like game shows or reality tv but it happens all the time with narrative stuff too. Here in the USA we often hear about shows our networks are adapting from hits in other countries but we’ve done our share of exporting, and Gossip Girl is a franchise that’s seen itself translated several times to cultures around the globe. They mostly play it pretty straight, with titles like Gossip Girl: Acapulco or Gossip Girl: Thailand, and the characters and stories closely mirror the original 2007 CW show. This makes the first adaptation, Turkey’s Küçük Sırlar (Little Secrets), notable for how willing it is to deviate from the playbook. From the erasure of Blair from existence to the complete rewrite of Chuck’s character (something the US version absolutely wasn’t afraid to do either, and for good reason – we all remember that pilot), the changes come early and often, crafting a unique identity out of the gate for what is ostensibly an import remake.

I can’t keep that up anymore I’m fucking with you I didn’t watch the Turkish Gossip Girl adaptation I have nothing more to say about Gossip Girl I do not spend a lot of time thinking about a show I sort of half-watched like a year ago.

I DO have some thoughts though about Kirby Super Star which is a pretty sick little game. It’s always hard to go back to games in venerable series without trying to find the moments where they like, Found It, right? Like, the game in which all the little bits of identity coalesce into the thing that gives that series its definitive identity and which all of the following games will follow. And I think playing things from their first entry is teaching me how rarely this happens. There’s no moment in Mario or Zelda where they specifically become Mario and Zelda they just kind of accumulate vibes and then eventually there are enough things behind them that they become in a lot of ways more about calling back to those old things than establishing new ones. Even something like Devil May Cry where I think most people agree 3 really crystallized what we’re doing there, it’s not like DMC1 is not an iconic game that laid that foundation, or that many mechanics in 3 aren’t direct improvements upon innovations made by DMC2. It’s almost always baby steps, is I think all I’m saying here, and that’s been true with Kirby too.

The cool thing about where we’re at at this point on the Kirby Timeline is those games came out pretty well-formed and while there are major mechanical experimentations in all of the early games, hitting such a solid game feel and pleasant core approach to level design early on gives Super Star a freedom to continue the trend of trying stuff out rather than just making a straight Kirby game on the shiny new hardware (and indeed, Kirby games almost never come out on shiny new hardware, a trend that holds when this bad boy hits only a couple months before the N64 in Japan, and the much more Normal Game Dream Land 3 will get its American release first in November 1997, over a year AFTER the new console dropped, and not until the MARCH 98 in Japan what HAPPENED). Super Star’s big gimmick is of course it’s very famous billing as EIGHT GAMES IN ONE which is kind of a tongue in cheek way to sell a game packaged into a menu from which you can select a handful of minigames and a few different campaigns of progressive difficulty, each with its own level design philosophy and often a unique mechanic or set of rules.

That last part is important because I really don’t think Super Star puts its best foot forward, generally speaking. The minigame suite here is unassailably iconic, not a bad thing to say about any of them, adorable, beautiful sprite work, challenging. Gourmet Race is in the weird middle zone of too long and not particularly my jam but you can’t argue with that tune, it’s gourmet race, we all love gourmet race. My real issue was jumping into the meat of the game, which I suppose is actually freeform for the most part but I did it in what feels like the intended order, as going through campaigns by their listed difficulty ratings (and later by the orders you unlock them) also leads you through a really satisfying evolving complexity of the game’s mechanical and design ideas. Doing that, the first one is Spring Breeze which reads as kind of an abridged take on the original Kirby’s Dream Land, which is not particularly exciting as someone who has played a lot of Kirbies over the years and who has been back to this well a lot. But even disregarding that, which I tried very hard to do, sanding a lot of the cool nooks and crannies out of a game that I like quite a lot to offer a glorified tutorial wearing its skin was not a great first impression for me. Dyna Blade is little better as a follow-up, with nothing really to distinguish it mechanically other than the introduction of a Mario 3 style world map and a slight uptick in diffiulty. The world map is kind of pointless, existing really only so you can be surprised when a (again) Mario 3-style miniboss shows up on it, because there are only four real levels here, it’s just not enough content to make anything interesting out of. The idea behind Super Star is to make a bunch of sub-games with distinct identities but two of the five that revolve around the act of Playing Kirby do nothing to distinguish themselves from each other or the Kirby experience at large.

Great Cave Offensive is a real breath of fresh air then; an enormous, entirely freeform, complex tunnel network that kirby must navigate full of enemies, bosses, puzzles, and navigational challenges as you quest for CASH MONEY. The map is littered with treasure chests, each of which contains an item worth some cash value, and you can end your adventure essentially whenever you want, whenever you decide you have enough. Giving the player total control over the mode gives it all a relaxed energy, the only thing stopping you from doing it all and seeing it all is your own patience. I left the cave with maybe two thirds of the treasure on my first run, and that felt Good. I appreciate that the game gave me the agency to make that call on my own time, rather than by imposing something like a time limit or a more linear progression where you just leave with whatever you’ve found by the time you hit an end point.

Revenge of Meta Knight is where things start really firing on all cylinders though, in terms of Ina Appeal Elements. Framed as Meta Knight showing up in his first (only?) truly villainous role in a bid to take over Dream Land, launching his big scary ship from Super Smash Bros. staffed with a crew of lovable henchmen who provide color commentary while Kirby infiltrates the craft and dismantles it from within, there’s a much more overt and playful twisting of the presentation to this sub-game than offered previously in the collection. It’s the one that most takes advantage of how discrete all the separate modes are, working its cute narrative into every part of it; the little guys yapping in ever-increasing anxiety as you ruin their plan not only characterizes them and their surly boss but occasionally offers you direction on where precisely to go and context on what exactly Kirby is doing; the urgency of the mission is communicated by the big gimmick of the time limits imposed on each stage, formalized as segment of the ship or parts of the world Kirby is ejected into. It’s here in the level design too – different bits of the ship are variously convoluted and cramped, or spacious and windswept, or full of elevators that lead to rooms approximating living spaces, and enemy types and puzzles are placed thoughtfully to evoke a facsimile of something that might make sense to be where it is. It’s the most cohesive package in the game, a real tour de force.

If there’s less to say about Milky Way Wishes, it’s not because of a lack of quality, only more of an adherence to formula. You could almost hold up a sign that says THE REAL KIRBY STARTS here when you load it up, with its traditional story structure, themed levels set on individual planets, goofy last minute climax with an unexpected shift in tone and scale. The gimmick here, though, is a GOOD GIMMICK: rather than copying powers from swallowed enemies, Kirby must find powers hidden throughout each level, and once they have them you have them permanently, and can equip them whenever you want. It completely changes your relationship with copy abilities and lets the game flex a bit about how fleshed out they are – when Kirby has an ability permanently there’s a lot more safety and application to be found in fucking around, and in Super Star many old abilities with similar elements have been combined and everything here is fleshed out to have multiple inputs that put them on par with any decent beat ‘em up game of its day. They really sing here, some of them are well hidden (I finished the game missing five), and the gentle ramping of the difficulty curve reaches a gentle climax that felt perfectly tuned to me, even if I wish we’d gotten here a little sooner.

The depth on display is highlighted by the final unlockable mode, a boss rush arena which like lmao bro literally every single thing about smash bros is straight lifted from kirby like I know those games are made by all these Kirby guys but it’s so funny to go fill in these gaps years later and I’m STILL finding shit actually Kirby stuff it’s incredible. Put the portal gun in Darksiders, fuck yeah.

I do ultimately think that Super Star is a mixed bag, with two full misses, two strong successes, and great cave offensive kind of hanging out being obviously very cool but not really My Jam, and I’m still walking away from it so impressed. The early going was ominous but the more the game leans into what makes it unique the more successful it is. This is often the case, I think! The cool thing about Kirby games is they’re basically guaranteed to be a solid good time no matter what but it’s always nice to be pleasantly surprised.