I am Generation 1’s strongest soldier.

- Small limited inventory makes you actually consider every item you pick up and I think that’s neat. Putting this one at the start to filter anyone who can’t stand the idea of someone defending gen 1 inventory management. But if you actually go through and check what items you need and what ones you don’t every so often you won’t often cap out on bag space and you’ll probably make a good bit of money from all the vitamins and TMs and other random stuff you don’t really need. It’s just another aspect of preparation, and it makes sense for prep to be important when setting out on an adventure.

- The region layout is fun, there’s just enough freedom to let you poke around in places where you don’t really belong. It’s probably a bit awkward to navigate for someone getting into it for the first time, but on the other hand the lack of explicit guidance or scripted events benefit the sense of freedom - both in the literal exploration of the region (though it is a little more railroaded than I remember early on), and thematically in allowing it to feel like your own journey (something I find important in a Pokemon game, where the core mechanic of catching and teambuilding leans heavily into individuality).

- The region thematically is probably the most compelling. It’s incredibly ‘raw’ - putting its warts fully on display and having 10 year old kids freely wander around in it all. Future games have your protagonist take on moustache-twirling supervillains whose plans are varying degrees of nonsense, whereas Team Rocket acts and operates very much how Yakuza organisations might do (limited knowledge of this admittedly), with parallels to real life such as the Game Corner acting as both a front for their operations as well as mirroring the legal loopholes real-life pachinko parlours use to evade gambling laws (social commentary, in *my* Pokemon game??). There’s so many cute, weird and uncomfortable little details there to pick up on that sell the workings of the region, no matter how weird, with a joyful yet disarming honesty. (One of the less serious, more entertaining things I picked up on was that the Fighting Dojo lost its gym status because they got the shit kicked out of them by the Psychic gym which, like, yeah of course they did! It’s funny, but it’s also an interesting look into how the world actually functions.)

- The game has the purest and most unfiltered vision of a 'complete' Pokemon experience. Filling the dex is heavily encouraged/mandatory (you wouldn’t use a map for Rock Tunnel, would you…….), though admittedly not handled with the most elegance, and in-game trades are much more frequent than later games, as well as being more desirable - there’s a good few Pokemon that are otherwise unobtainable, and in Yellow in particular you can just get a Machamp from an in-game trade! Though exploration and battling are clearly at the forefront, it puts much more emphasis on these other elements of Pokemon that would end up being eroded away over time. (Admittedly features like the GTS and Wonder Trade help keep trading alive, though those two definitely have their own issues)

- Barren movesets and HMs come together in a really strange way. Moveslots have the least value out of any Pokemon game in most cases because most of your options just aren’t that good, so you’ll be sticking to your few good ones. This makes HMs easier than ever to slot onto your team! You can have a slot taken by Flash or Cut or even Dig or Teleport for the whole game and you probably won’t feel it all that much! Not to mention that half the mandatory HMs - Surf and Strength - are actually just really good moves (more than half if you’re not using Flash, but you WOULDN’T use a map for Rock Tunnel, WOULD you???).

- When Pikachu faints it makes the most horrifying blood-curdling scream that a GB could ever produce and I think that’s awesome

Sure there are more than enough valid criticisms of these games and I still can’t blame anyone for not liking them. Someone in the 8th gym used tackle on me. Tackle! Like I don’t mind the limited movesets that much but I think that’s a bit excessive. But I think they tend to get weirdly overhated nowadays and for reasons that don’t really make much sense? Either complaining about very specific quirks and glitches (‘The AI is so bad!!’, I yell, as I intentionally send out a poison type to make Lorelei’s Dewgong spam Rest), or comparing them to later entries when they are not those later entries (limited movesets being a big one, I won’t fight tooth and nail to defend them but they really don’t feel as bad as you’d expect coming from, like, Gen 4 onwards). And I think there’s a lot of value in these silly little games that’s easy to overlook.

It's ironic this is considered the de-facto Master System game - and it is! It's an iconic and unique classic, and for some, the pinnacle of the Wonder Boy series.

The problem is it's best played elsewhere. The Charisma system makes this Master System original a drag. It's removed from both the later Game Gear port and the DotEmu remake. Play either of those instead. (no idea how the PC-Engine version handles this)

I would've finished a full run of this but I kept re-doing the same Dragon Mail subquest over and over - first cause I locked my charisma out of purchasing it, and then again because the password I generated to get enough charisma to buy it locked me out of my mouse transformation. I don't have the motivation to give it another go rn, so I think I'm gonna focus on other RPG's for the meantime.

It’s honestly not even that fundamentally different from your standard 2D Mario but as somebody who’s only ever seen permutations on the New Super formula in his lifetime the added emphasis on creative presentation and imaginative stage gimmicks really skyrockets this into the stratosphere for me. It just feels so alive in a way New Soup never could. A really brilliantly paced little adventure too, it feels like there‘s some new wacky idea hiding around every corner til the very end. I’ve logged an embarrassing amount of time into both Mario Makers so this type gameplay should feel endlessly repetitive yet somehow it does not! Haven’t fucked around with the postgame or the multiplayer quite yet but if it’s anything like the campaign I can’t wait

Ernest Hemingway once said that, “the first draft of anything is shit.” But Ernest Hemingway was a homophobe who loved big game hunting almost as much as he loved infidelity, so maybe we don’t have to take his word on everything. Also, I’m pretty sure he never played Metroid, so I’m not sure why I brought him up in the first place. Anyway, video games!

I know a lot of people say to skip over this one when getting into Metroid, but I think that’s silly. If I’m immersing myself in a franchise, I’m invested in seeing how its mechanics evolve over time. Sure it might be jank, but I want to see how that jank informs the rest of the series. And hey, I get it—I’ve played Zero Mission, that’s a great game! But I feel like you’re missing the point if you think these two games are offering interchangeable experiences.

While Zero Mission is great at making you feel like the toughest bounty hunter in the galaxy, Metroid NES excels at making you feel truly out of your depth on a hostile alien world. The first hour or so of my playthrough felt almost comically unforgiving, constantly barraged by enemies I couldn’t reach, lava pits I couldn’t avoid and long, monotonous hallways I couldn’t wait to be done with. I honestly really respect it as a tone-setter: Samus is NOT welcome here, and you as the player feel that too.

I think the plain black backgrounds also do wonders for that unforgiving atmosphere. I adore Zero Mission’s vibrant backdrops, but something about the cold void of Metroid NES makes this Zebes feel so much more unknowable, like you don’t even get to see what lurks in the distance. These environments feel truly alien, and you only get a glimpse of them.

Of course, the game REALLY begins once you start exploring and unlocking upgrades and familiarizing yourself with that environment, and by then it’s… I mean, I guess it’s alright? While that first hour is brutally compelling, and the mid-game item hunt legitimately satisfying, once you start to get the hang of Metroid it becomes clear that there’s just not a ton of depth here. Rooms are pretty basic and repetitive without a lot to distinguish one from the other, and while the upgrades are a lot of fun to use, they do seriously trivialize combat. It feels unfair to fault a game for a lack of complexity when it’s the first of its kind, but it’s hard not to dwell on as you make your way through Zebes’ seemingly endless supply of identical vertical shafts.

While the first half of my playthrough was filled with frustration and intrigue and overcoming hardship, the second was mostly a lot of meandering zigzagging as I searched for new hordes of creepy crawlies to effortlessly dispatch. Not an altogether bad way to spend a Saturday, but not a remarkably engaging one either. For what it’s worth, the challenge does ramp up by the final boss, but that fight is so atrociously designed that I’m not going to dignify it with another sentence.

The bones of a great series and a great genre are here, and that IS worth seeing for yourself. Like I said, I’m glad I didn’t skip it. But truthfully, Metroid is more interesting in its atmosphere and ambition than as a cohesive, finished whole. As it stands, Metroid is too singular an experience to be outright dismissed, but too genuinely flawed to be truly great.

(Special thanks to Phil Summers and his excellent Hand-Drawn Game Guides, which I consulted throughout my playthrough. Yeah that’s right, I used a guide! Bite me! You can check out Phil’s beautiful Metroid guide for yourself here: https://sites.google.com/view/handdrawngameguides/free-guides/metroid-presented-by-hand-drawn-game-guides?authuser=0)

There’s a brief moment halfway through Castlevania where you’re scaling a crumbling castle wall. As you march forwards, you catch a glimpse of a tower in the background. The game doesn’t even really draw any attention to it, but any player who takes notice would immediately understand—that must be Dracula’s tower. In an instant you’re struck by how much progress you’ve made since first storming his gates, how expansive this castle truly is, and how much farther your enemy may still lie in wait. It’s this really remarkable moment of honest-to-god world building in an NES game, a testament to the unparalleled attention to detail that covers every corner of Castlevania.

And then, in all likelihood, you get hit by a fireball and fall to your death.

It’s always great when you can play a classic for the first time and discover that it still absolutely holds up. Everything about Castlevania is still just the absolute shit. This is a video game’s video game, through and through. Tight gameplay, killer presentation and a truly insane soundtrack. Seriously, there’s only like 30 minutes of music total and somehow every note is iconic. It’s a game that’s schlocky and thoughtful in equal measure—just the way I like ‘em. I really can’t believe it took me this long to finally give it a shot.

More than anything, I find myself completely obsessed with how Castlevania feels to control. Simon Belmont moves like a sack of bricks, whips like he’s shaking off carpal tunnel and jumps with all the flexibility of a steel beam. It’s stiff, incredibly stiff, but everything in the game is designed around it. You don’t have the mobility to brute force through stages like you can in comparable action platformers, and even if you could, the overbearing enemy placement would bite you in the ass. It forced me to play very deliberately, assessing each step carefully, while still being aggressive enough that I didn’t leave any openings for enemies. It’s a game that asks a lot of the player, but if you’re willing to rise to the challenge, I found it to be an incredibly rich, rewarding experience.

For what it’s worth, aside from allowing myself some practice runs on Death’s Hallway and circumventing grinding for hearts before each Dracula attempt, I beat this without the use of save states. And I’m really glad I did, as I don’t think this would have been nearly as captivating had I allowed myself to save after each tough section. The fun of Castlevania lies in the trial and error, in getting better with each attempt, figuring out the perfect route, building muscle memory, committing each stage to memory to the point it becomes second nature until finally, FINALLY you overcome a challenge that once seemed insurmountable. I can totally respect why that gameplay loop won’t connect with some, but personally, I loved it. The sheer thrill of shoving holy water so far up Dracula’s ass that it causes his entire infrastructure to crumble and finally seeing those goofy-ass credits roll is some of the most satisfied I’ve felt beating a game in my life. Man, what an adventure.

Recently, I’ve found myself in possession of a lot of free time and a brand-new Retroid Pocket 2S. I wanted a chance to test out some of the emulators, so I decided I’m gonna marathon some more classic Castlevania. But since I’m a sicko, I’m ALSO going to be marathoning some 2D Metroid. At the same time. I’ve got 14 more games to go across both franchises, so wish me luck. If this first step was any indication, I’m gonna need it.

Sonic Superstars is so bad that it has me questioning the narrative of Balan Wonderworld.

Yuji Naka was famously booted off the Balan project by Arzest, an effort that supposedly involved former collaborator and creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, Naoto Oshima. Naka has since alleged that his ouster was the result of speaking out against the unauthorized use of fan music in one of Balan's trailers among other things, but a long history of abrasive behavior and eventual arrest for insider trading has cemented him as the villain in Balan's story. However, to see how poorly Sonic Superstars turned out has given me perspective on another of Naka's accusations: that Arzest was intent on putting out a buggy game and that he was trying to do his best to save it. I think the son of a bitch might've been telling the truth. Yuji Naka is being held as a political prisoner.

On paper, a classic Sonic game produced by series veterans Iizuka and Oshima sounds like a good idea. Even people with more functional neurons than me looked at Arzest's catalog and thought it might still turn out good. Great even. Sonic's pappy is back, it's a real meeting of the minds over there at Sega HQ. I'm sure they're both great guys, but I'm to the point where I think they're about as capable of leading a project as Keiji Inafune, they're so far from their lanes they're driving through a corn field. Nothing about Superstars captures the magic of the classic games or Mania for that matter, but instead parades around in its physics, no better at displaying reverence or understanding for the material it is inspired by than Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Any sense of spectacle provided by Sonic's speed is dulled by bad stage design and an overuse of set pieces, which are applied cookie-cutter between levels along with gimmicks and enemies, even those that might at first seem bespoke in the way a classic Sonic game ought to be. The creative bankruptcy is astonishing even when viewed in a vacuum, two whole zones reuse the same pinball trope and one of them even has an extra act. The last level's second act is just the first act in reverse, and watching the counter tick down from the seven minutes it took to complete act 1 made my stomach hurt.

Zones have an inconsistent number of acts, with some getting two, some three, and others one single monstrously sized act that can take as long to beat as a full zone. These single act zones play like a gamified lobotomy, with stage elements both unique and borrowed stagnating under their average clear time. Everyone who talks about Superstars likes to bring up how bosses can at times take as long to beat as a level, and this is both a true and fair criticism, but I think it's indicative of a larger problem the game has with its pacing.

You can speed these fights up somewhat by using one or two of your chaos emerald powers, and I do mean literally one or two. Most of these powers have such specific use cases that they're rendered all but useless outside of a small handful of instances, but the rush attack you get for collecting the first chaos emerald is good for getting two or three hits in the second a boss' invulnerability drops. That's my tip to you. Actually my tip to you is to not buy this game, and if you feel compelled to do so, smash all of your fingers with a brick so you cannot.

Superstars doesn't even get music right, man. Tee Lopes is credited among others, and you know how badly I'd love to say he's got another hit on his hands, but the dude just sounds like he's phoning it in on this one. I've never heard a single piece of music Tee has done feel quite so tired as some of what he's contributed to this game. Jun has also broke fucking containment AGAIN and is still pumping out dogwater 10 second loops that sound as close to real Genesis music as La Croix does to flavor.

There's a lack of cohesion across the entire soundtrack which also bothers me. You go from Tee's stuff to Jun's mess and then a bunch of other composers that are churning out crap that sounds like Mr. Blue Sky with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (this joke was submitted by Appreciations, age 9.) At least if you buy this game on PC - which, again, you should not - you can mod the soundtrack so it actually become listenable.

When Superstars was announced, I made a comment that the game looked like some tripe you'd download off the app store. I got pushback over this and changed my tune so I could fit in, a little lie I told because I didn't want to seem like an annoying pessimist. I should've held my ground because Superstar's art direction is pretty flat and its fidelity weak. Some zone have backgrounds that, without hyperbole, look like Nintendo 64 textures. I'm not even sure what I'm looking at here.(source.)

Iizuka recently made a statement that "pixel art isn't viable", and that does speak to an uncomfortable truth about how consumers view sprite-based games. Take a look at the Game Awards, which faced controversy after Nexon's Dave the Diver got nominated for Best Indie. A cynical assessment would be that it got the nom because it uses sprites and sprites = indie which means you can't reasonably charge full price. Counterargument: nothing about Sonic Superstars is worth 60$, it looks bad and plays bad too. I paid 35$ because, true to form, Sega put this out near Black Friday and their games drop in value faster than the coconut that hit me in the head and made me think it was still worth buying for nearly half price. I bought Sonic Mania four times, I'm willing to shell out for sprite games that I think are good, I am straight up mad I paid 35$ once for Superstars and I think I should be allowed to grab Oshima and shake him by his ankles until I get every cent back.

So, yes, you could say I went into this with some pretty negative biases. That's a fair criticism of me, the player. The fool, as it were, stepping in big mud pies for the amusement of everyone else. But somehow, Superstars managed to sink even further below my expectations. I thought I might walk out of this a little poorer, but that I may think the game is a 2.5. You know, mediocre. Didn't think I'd have a great time, but had no reason to believe I'd like it less than, say, Knuckles' Chaotix or fucking Sonic Frontiers. I didn't just step in another mud pie, I slipped on it and fell head first into a ravine. I got a neck brace on and I look all fucked up now.

You hurt me. We're not friends anymore.

Most of the conversation I’ve seen around Venba has revolved around the story of the entire family the game is about, but centered on the point of view of Kavin, the child. A second generation immigrant, Kavin experiences the social pressures of otherness growing up and we see this expressed through his own insecurities with his situation and his attempts to fit in throughout his life as well as via the way his mother Venba vents her frustrations with how she feels he’s rejecting his culture and his family, with his dad Paavalankind of caught in an empathetic middle ground. I get why this happens – I think a lot of the people who like, actually play the game are more likely to identify with Kavin, and the game shifts more focally to his perspective in the back half, and he’s admittedly something of a reflection of the lived experiences of the game’s lead designer, whose life the game is heavily drawn upon. And I don’t want to downplay Kavin’s experience; obviously modern second gen kids’ relationships with their parents are stories that a lot of people connect strongly to – it’s a really common thing in my generation. But when I was playing the game I couldn’t help but find myself so much more drawn to Venba herself.

My wife is from India, and while it seems kind of funny in hindsight there was in fact a lot of hubbub when we first got together. We were dating in secret for a long time because there was sure to be controversy over my whiteness and my religion. When we got found out it was a little longer before I was allowed to meet her parents and then a lot longer before I felt like, actually accepted, which is fair. Things were very different from how they were expecting things to go, even if my wife herself never really planned to adhere to these expectations. I always thought her mom HATED me though, even after the CONTROVERSY of our relationship cooled off. She was so quiet around me, so distant, and I never knew how to talk to her. But it turned out she also felt that way about me. Insecure and weird about this stranger that she felt like she had zero common ground with.

Eventually we bonded over two things: our mutual love of roasting the shit out of my wife and my sincere appreciation for her cooking. She’s got this deep well of recipes and they’re all so fuckin good dude but neither of her kids have any real interest in cooking like at all, even before my wife became too disabled for that to be something she could realistically do, so I think she took some genuine pleasure from it when I started asking persistently for her to teach me how to make some of her stuff when we would visit each other, and now I have a pretty good stock of family recipes that’s still steadily growing, with my wife and mother-in-law’s seal of approval. (In fact I would say that if you have a working knowledge of how to cook most basic Indian foods then most of the puzzle elements of Venba will be essentially negated because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal, a masala is a masala and a biryani is a biryani and a dosa is a dosa). But I’ve also spent a lot of time with her now over the years, doing this stuff, and a pretty good amount of time with her alone, and you start to know people, and I see so much of her in Venba.

A woman who moves about as far away from her life, her home, her family as it is possible to move, unwillingly, as a matter of practicality, Venba never quite assimilates. A qualified, highly educated worker in her home country arbitrarily unable to find work in her new one for racist reasons, relying on a stressed partner to make ends meet while she handles domestic duties and isolates herself, partially because her new society rejects her and partially because she rejects it. “I have Paavalan,” she says at one point. “I have Kavin.” There are all kinds of reasons why and they might even create a twisted ouroboros sometimes but ultimately Venba just doesn’t like it in Canada, and she did like it in India, and if she had her way she would probably just like, go home. It hurts her to be apart from her parents when they get old and get sick. It hurts her to see her son so easily slip into this culture she feels embittered towards and treat her like part of the embarrassing thing to leave behind.

I think my mother in law feels that way a lot of the time, especially since both of her children have left the nest, although this is where her experience diverges from Venba’s. My wife and her brother are very close to their mom, and I think that’s part of what anchors her here, despite everything. They don’t have the contentious relationship that Venba and Kavin have that gives Venba kind of a freedom to return to where she’s happy, or to necessitate the reunion and reconciliation that they loosely share in the final chapter. ac

While my secondhand experience with a life that Venba so strongly evokes in my mind’s eye does make me feel a little frustrated at how cleanly this game resolves its lingering conflicts by the end of it all, I don’t think it falls into the trap of, as a friend of mine wisely phrased it yesterday, “barren sentimentality” that I think even well-meaning games often fall into when they try to tackle real subject matter. Venba may be a short game whose focus on food and small scope limits the windows into these lives that we’re allowed to peer into, but its dialogue is often cutting, it knows when not to pull punches, and it says a lot without words.

The writing is uniformly excellent but I think the best stuff is consistently the way the game communicates without words. The way Kavin’s letters unfold more slowly across his word balloons when he speaks Tamil vs when his parents do or when he’s speaking English for most of the game because he’s less comfortable with the language; the way that the last time you play as Venba there’s minimal interactivity because at this point in her life she’s memorized her recipes and developed her own techniques and using newer equipment for the most part, so there are no puzzles to solve and all the game asks from the player is a couple of button presses or stick rotations; the way that when you’re playing as Kavin he just kind of drops or tosses ingredient containers gracelessly back onto the counter vs the way Venba would put them back down like a normal person. There’s a moment where you’re texting and the game is auto-advancing the conversation but once you’re given the freedom to exit the conversation you can actually scroll up and see the entire thing again, including the beginning chunk of it that you weren’t originally shown and it is as horrible as you would imagine. Venba is such a short game and its vignettes are necessarily so focused that this intimate attention to detail makes a huge difference in the texture of the world.

Applicability is very real, I suppose. On its face Venba is an incredibly generic immigrant story, with only the food angle making it stand out narratively, but even then it isn’t even the only “wholesome indie game about a second generation immigrant trying to reconnect somehow to a parent via family recipes” that I know of off the top of my head. We all know people who have lived the broad details of this family’s story. But the particular voices that come out of their mouths are bold and articulate and human. Enough for it to evoke specific traumas in my wife, who loved this game, enough to make me wistful about my relationship with her mother, which is occasionally complicated. And I know other people who have felt similarly. It’s easy for me to imagine a lesser version of this game and I’m glad I don’t have to talk about that one haha.

As I write this we’re four days into a six day visit from my wife’s dad, whom I often struggle to get along with, and who doesn’t know that I’m transgender, and her brother, who is cool but who left early this afternoon. Today has been the first time we’ve had a break from work or being around them constantly since they arrived. It’s been a long and stressful week, but getting a couple hours to play through this game was in turns relaxing and sad and fun and cathartic. And we’re about to go out to eat at a South Indian restaurant with her dad, which was a happy coincidence that we’ve had planned for a couple of weeks. I think we’re gonna go ham on some dosas. Maybe try not to cry about Venba while we do.

Beaten on 8Mhz (in the M88 emulator) as that is what Japanese consumers would have been playing this on at the time of release. Full disclosure, I did use savestates to act as "extra lives" but beat every level normally in one sitting. I'd like to see if I can beat this with "FF" lives at some point but that will wait for a bit. I'm writing this review basically immediately after beating this game at like 5 in the morning

This game is like genuinely one of the worst games I have ever played, but also incredibly fun if you have the mindset for it. It's extremely difficult. It's just absolutely baffling that it exists at all, a weird Super Mario Bros sequel for a couple of two japanese home computers. It even predates the Lost Levels! There's a bit of a misunderstanding about this game online since I think there's a fair amount of people who just assume it's a port, and some who are just aware of some of its surface level stuff (there's stuff based on the arcade games, the scrolling is messed up etc).

The game just feels like complete shit to play. I'm under the suspicion that the PC-88 port was fairly low effort, and it is incredibly aggressive to play. I will not refer to its aesthetics as while they are pretty ugly I don't think it particularly detracts from the game. The game has some fun ideas like introducing enemies from the Arcade games but most of them are just unkillable and painful to deal with. The additional items introduced are also far too sparse and situational.

Mario controls ridiculously terribly in 8mhz mode (which again, is what PC-88 owners would have been using for videogames) and I frankly think it has to be played to be believed. Every single jump in the game becomes a challenge and you have to be incredibly methodical with your movement, while still being fast due to the strict time limits on the stages. This game even frequently makes you do jumps from 1x1 block to 1x1 block, which is incredibly difficult. Making things worse, the game actually slows down if you have a mushroom, since Super Mario is made from two objects, as opposed to small Mario who is just one. As a result of this, a mushroom is vital due to giving you far better reaction times, given how absurdly fast this game is. The amount of blind jumps in this game that are hidden away by screen transitions insane by the way. I mean like actual blind jumps, no hints. There's even a blind jump from a 1x1 block to another! It's ridiculous!

I don't think people are quite aware that this game is just genuinely broken in a lot of ways. One notable example that walled me for months was when a platform refused to spawn in 4-3. I had assumed that I had emulation issues, or maybe even a bad dump, and I had been searching around ages for a solution. I later discovered that you are supposed to collapse a pair of platforms earlier in the level, because there too many platforms in existence. If you do not, that platform, which is vital for progression, does not spawn. It's insane how consistent this is, given that the game has a pretty frequent issue with just not spawning enemies or powerups sometimes.

It's strange because while I do genuinely think this game is completely awful, and blatantly the worst Mario game ever made, I think it must be played to be believed. I had so much fun progressing through this game over a long time with my friends in calls, it was such a spectacle and the game just kept giving in how obscene it was. I hope more people talk about this game because it's genuinely one of the most fascinating things relating to the Mario series, and another example of how strange third party Mario offerings were (perhaps the most interesting, in my opinion).

Side note, do not play this in Retroarch! 4-4 broke for me in it and lead to me having to switch to M88, which worked flawlessly.

I don't often share information about myself online, but I think the fact that I'm a musician is relevant to my thoughts here. Most musicians who play an important rhythmic role (conductors, drummers, etc.) all keep a mental list of songs they are intimately familiar with at every tempo for reference's sake; for example, if I need to lead something that I know is at 80 beats per minute, I play a couple of bars of Cbat in my head before I start. Well, the beats here are so earwormingly catchy that I've scratched "120bpm - Stars and Stripes Forever" out of my mind palace and replaced it with "Patapon".

Patapon is one of those games that just works - like the rare piece of music where you don't know if the composer came up with the melody or the chords first (because that melody only makes sense with that specific harmony and vice versa, and both of those only make sense with that specific rhythm), each one of Patapon's mishmash of genres somehow comes together. Part rhythm game and part strategy game with a dash of RPG and town-builder sim thrown in, the player is cast as the god of the Patapon tribe, issuing commands to its soldiers in the form of 4-beat button commands. The need to relentlessly sound the drums without skipping a beat in order for the army to operate at full effectiveness elevates Patapon above its individual genres - rather than just being about issuing the right commands or following the right rhythms, this is a game about multitasking and planning ahead. Since the Patapons essentially follow your commands on a 4-beat lag, you need to read the battlefield situation (unit positioning and things like wind direction), decide what to do, then input the right button combination while thinking 2-4 seconds into the future and taking care not to skip any beats. It's amazingly engaging! The town building and RPG elements also have an important role here, allowing players to gradually unlock and access a variety of unit and equipment types which allow for different playstyles.

I have to say that Patapon appealed to me despite me generally not being a big fan of its main genres. As someone who doesn't enjoy the busywork of strategy games, Patapon's unique mechanics allowed me to issue more general commands and not get caught up in micromanagement, without being boring. And (sorry to brag a bit) as someone who can play lots of stuff by ear and therefore doesn't really see much of a point in most rhythm games, Patapon engaged me by having its rhythm mechanics as a tactical means to an end, rather than simply being "press buttons to play song".

Really, the only reason I'm not rating this higher is that there are certain things that could be more refined (it's pretty easy to get screwed by some enemy attacks that simply give you no time to react, the game doesn't always communicate how you can improve, the movements of some Patapons are ever so slightly de-sycned from the beat so as to be misleading, the minigames lack variety), and I know there are a couple of sequels which I'm really hoping will address those issues.

But this is one of the gaming highlights of the year for me. It's brilliant, it's unique, and it's going to be playing in my head for quite some time.

They dared to change, just like Simon dared to rid himself of Dracula's affliction in the face of ridicule by his fellow townsfolk.

At the approach of midnight, I began my journey home, my boots trudging through the mud as I pumped my fists to the Dance of Monsters. The chill of the wind rustles through the trees as I keep myself at the ready, for any moment the skeleton or wolfman could walk out from the brush begging for death's sweet release by the hand of my mighty whip passed down to me by my ancestors. Upon entry to town the sunrise brings about temporary peace, wherein I decide to visit the local grocery and throw my bottled water at it's floor to reveal the garlic salesman hiding underneath the floorboards from minions of the Count who has decreed that garlic was illegal.

Perhaps I'm obsessed with the idea of pretending to be Simon, perhaps he really is just the world's biggest badass being able to beat Dracula by himself and then again later while he's dying of a curse placed on him by the same guy. You think I wouldn't want to role play as him?

A color palette of putrid dilapidation, reminiscent of Hammer horror films, a land that continues to be ravaged by monsters chaotically stalking about despite the Count's destruction. Simon himself now as pale as a ghost due to the curse that has been sapping away at him for the past seven years, a depressing tone for what should've been a peaceful reconstruction after our past victory. The last town in the game Ghulash is completely monochrome in color with only one person residing in it, showcasing the devastation that has expanded from Dracula's castle. The townsfolk talk in riddles and lies, done in either genuine good faith or as an act of sabotage to keep Simon from completing his quest for fear of Dracula's early return. The ringing of tears flowing from a ballroom mask echo across the land, a most legendary composition.

They say if you wish to follow up perfection, then you better hit strong, differently, or both.

As I have once said before, a game that becomes more enjoyable the more you replay is but a sign of perfection. For the original Castlevania it became more enjoyable as I grew quicker at conquering it from sheer skill, and for Simon's Quest it became more enjoyable as I grew more wary of it's tricks. Instead of a test of strength, it is a test of shrewdness and clever understanding. Whereas the original opted to try and beat you into the grave, Simon's Quest looks to baffle you with illusions and misdirection. Typos appaering, translations such as the Fist of the North Star reference getting turned into a weird shout out to the Galactic Empire's infamous space station, and signs of a rushed development seem to only help it, perhaps it is perfectly imperfect. A perfect sibling to what was a perfect game.

Maybe I am obsessed, maybe Dracula exists and he put a curse on me to forever defend Simon's Quest from the never ending ridicule that comes it's way thanks to videos that were made for humor back in the times of the ancients. Simon's last adventure now cursed to being used as the butt of a joke, and constantly used as a punching bag by armchair game designers. Those who hate are numerous, and me and my fellow Simon supporters are small in number, but we are steadfast and strong in our beliefs. We stand together in the face of hostility and look onward at the army in front of us, I unsheathe my whip, brandishing it in hand and turn to my allies with but two quiet words, "For Simon", I rush into the ensuing battle leading the charge into our forever war.

Our battle is never over, but despite our curse we forever fight to the bitter end just as a Belmont would.

On the surface, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX appears to be a pretty faithful remake of the original Blue and Red Rescue Team. It’s the same turn-based dungeon-crawler roguelike Pokemon battling translation that I had grew up with almost two decades ago, coupled with the same storyline and a rearranged orchestral version of the original’s DS soundtrack. Minus the lack of walkable Friend Areas, DX’s atmosphere and core gameplay mechanics seemed accurate to my previous experience of the original games at first, and thus it seemed like a forgone conclusion that I’d naturally enjoy the remake. However, the more I played through the game, the more things felt off.

Further investigation into DX’s inner workings revealed that while DX preserves the core formula of Blue Rescue Team’s structure and basic combat mechanics, much of the surrounding survival mechanics have actually been pulled from the latest iteration of PMD via Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon on the 3DS to “modernize” the mechanics as opposed to adapting mechanics from the original games in Red/Blue Rescue Team or the DS successors in Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky. I started noticing that in DX, the hunger mechanic felt much more prevalent; my Pokemon’s belly appeared to empty much more quickly than in the originals, and I found myself consuming an Apple every few minutes or so. There’s a variety of changes that contribute to this: the belly decreases by 1/7 of a point every action (instead of 1/10 for Blue and EoS), Max Ethers/Elixirs no longer restore BP, consuming berries & seeds only restore 2 BP as opposed to 5 in the originals, and so on. Similarly, Power Point (PP) management regarding move usage limits became far more grating in DX as opposed to the original. The obvious culprit is removing the standard attack that could be used at any time for a weaker strike that preserved PP (meaning players now have to utilize moves far more often), but to compensate for this, Spike Chunsoft had to supply the player with far more PP restoration items. However, instead of supplying them with Max Elixirs that fully restore PP for all moves used, the most common PP restoration item is now the Max Ether, which only restores PP for a single move. The optimal strategy then, is to spam the same move over and over again so you get the most bang for your buck out of using Max Ethers. Finally, weather feels much more intrusive in the remake as opposed to the originals, because DX removes the ability to naturally heal HP over time during sandstorms/hail if you’re not of a resistant type, meaning that you have to either pack a lot more Oran Berries or waste more time outside of damaging weather to heal up.

None of these changes would feel too problematic in isolation, but together, this results in DX overemphasizing its resource management in comparison to Blue Rescue Team or Explorers of Sky, meaning that overloading your toolbox with the necessary buffers or grinding in easier dungeons to stock up on said buffers is pretty much a given to succeed (especially when Apple/Sticky Traps in dungeons can further spoil your resources). I unfortunately find this shift in focus somewhat ill-fitting to a remake of Blue Rescue Team; while the structure and core gameplay remained the same, the circumstances dictating how the player had to interact with the structure changed, and thus it feels to me like the remake struggled to serve its intended purpose. Needless to say, I’m far more interested in the turn-based combat than the resource management of PMD, and DX felt far more imbalanced to where I felt like I was spending most of my time watching my health/PP/belly and menuing rather than focusing on the play-by-play.

In a broader sense, I’ve said before that Pokemon’s greatest weakness is the presence of excessive RNG and grinding. That’s not to say that these weaknesses were absent from PMD, but rather, PMD often prevailed in the face of bullshit RNG and grinding because of how the game’s structure and gameplay mechanics leaned into them. Once again though, for a remake that seemed faithful on the outside, DX regrettably makes changes that worsen the RNG and grinding to extents that were not necessarily present in the originals.

I’ll come right out and say that I’m not a fan of DX’s changes regarding team size and recruitment. Blue Rescue Team and EoS kept the max party size to four Pokemon at a time (with Blue only letting you bring in three Pokemon at a time while EoS let you bring four; if you wanted a fourth in Blue, it had to be recruited in the dungeon), but DX has a max party size of up to eight Pokemon despite only letting you bring in three recruited members. The short and thick of it is that these recruits are a necessary liability for successful runs. They’re a liability because you have to bring them back through the end of the dungeon run to permanently recruit them on your team (unlike the originals, which let you send them back immediately to base), but keeping them alive will naturally eat into your resources, and letting them faint once they’ve been temporarily recruited as a guest will cause enemy Pokemon to become “awakened” and pose an immediate threat via significant stat increases. It’s also extremely unwieldy to try and micromanage five guests at the same time, especially when you can’t give guest Pokemon exact move commands or control their tactics, and you’ll often find them getting attacked at the end of a single-file line in corridors, unable to lend a helping hand to fend off enemy ambushes. At the same time, these guests can be absolute godsends to runs: they often come with Rare Qualities that affect the entire team, such as Small Stomach (which lets you consume any seed/berry/apple and immediately fills the belly to max capacity) or Strike Back (which lowers the Attack and Special Attack stats of an enemy Pokemon, including bosses, that deals damage to your team). You can’t see what rare qualities an enemy Pokemon may have while fighting them, so it’s in your best interest to recruit as many guests as possible in hopes of getting more Rare Qualities to bolster your team. Essentially, this is yet another resource grind that’s present only in the remake. At best, getting the Rare Quality recruits you need is extremely time-consuming and luck-based, but at least lets you steamroll boss fights. At worst, not getting the Rare Quality recruits you need feels like an active detriment when you’re running low on supplies and the dungeon isn’t giving you the item drops you need to survive.

Perhaps this resource grind would be more forgivable if the level scaling were up to par, but as it stands, I find enemy XP drops during the main game to be rather lacking. You’ll have to stick around and roam entire floors to sufficiently scale up with the enemy Pokemon level increases as the story progresses, and that’s often not the best idea when you’ve only got limited resources in your toolbox to manage HP/PP/BP and you’ll likely end up spotting the stairs before mapping out the entire floor. The best way then, is to train in Makuhita Dojo. This too, has been drastically altered from the original. Instead of challenge-room type and boss mazes, the dojo has been repurposed into a straight XP grindfest. You now have to spend limited tickets to defeat as many enemy Pokemon as you can in a real-time limit (i.e. a Bronze Dojo Ticket gives you 50 seconds of real time), and because experience is significantly multiplied both by the ticket itself (3x for Bronze, 5x for Silver, 7x for Gold) and by using super effective attacks, it’s simply too good to pass up considering the meager XP earnings from story dungeons. Unfortunately, this is also extremely tedious due to the time limits, as excess animations from randomly doubling attacks or outright missing attacks/failing to OHKO from random enemy buffs feels particularly punishing when Dojo tickets are a limited commodity that have to be scored as job rewards or randomly from dungeon treasure chests/mail. It also doesn’t help that the ticket allocation itself is not scaled: you’ll still be receiving Bronze tickets far into the post-game when you’ll likely need to use up 3 or more tickets to level-up, and you can only use one ticket at a time instead of stacking time limits. The result then, is that Makuhita’s dojo outright breaks the difficulty curve of the game: I found myself significantly overleveled during the main story using it, but after the significant difficulty spike during the post-game, it failed to provide much benefit for my main team since I was inundated with Bronze/Silver tickets and thus led to even more time spent grinding both in and outside of dungeons.

Gummis have also been reworked in DX, and are a slight improvement over the original, yet aren't completely rectified. Gummi grinding was likely the weakest aspect of the original games: you needed them to level up the IQ of each individual Pokemon for basic skills such as not stepping on visible traps and not using status moves on Pokemon that have already been statused. Fortunately, these IQ skills have been entirely removed and as a result the AI has been improved significantly: you no longer have to micromanage every single member of your team to avoid making silly mistakes, and in fact teammates can aid you subtly like positioning themselves to target ranged enemies or deviating slightly from the path to pick up floor objects so the leader doesn’t have to pick up every object themselves. That said, gummies still serve a purpose, because they provide random permanent stat boosts (invaluable when level-ups are often just a simple +1 to all stats) and they’re the only way to add/change Rare Qualities attached to your team members. Obtaining gummis is actually more obnoxious than even the original games, because just like Dojo Tickets, they can only be obtained via job rewards or found randomly in treasure chests, and you’ll often need to run through a few just to get the right Rare Quality for a specific team member (or a Rare Quality at all, because Rainbow Gummis are not guaranteed to give a Rare Quality). At least in the original games, you could obtain Gummis as random item drops on dungeon floors.

The above three changes basically represent a trend of changing aspects from the original in a way that left something to be desired, and lead me to believe that the remake is somewhat misguided. It’s quite confusing: sometimes there are obvious improvements, like expanding the toolbox capacity from 20 to 48 (carrying this from Explorers of Time/Darkness forward) and adding in all evolution lines for Pokemon from Generations 1-3 + bringing in new moves that have been added since Gen 8, but then sometimes the game feels far more punishing than difficult in a way that the original never did, like how fainting in dungeons now makes you lose all of your money and items (whereas you’d only lose half of your items in the DS originals and at least in EoS, only lose half of your money), so you really better hope you’ve got the resources to rescue yourself with a second team or someone online spots your request promptly.

What is more damning though, is that for as many things as they did change, there’s a lot of not great things about the original that I’d argue they should have changed/improved upon but didn’t (or at the very least, didn't improve upon enough), such as the aforementioned issue of gummi grinding Ironically, the qualities left in from the original are what led me to realize that Blue/Red Rescue Team are more flawed than I had originally remembered. For example, the original wasn’t great at pacing either (I found myself equally bored in the main-game at times, forced to grind during one particular story-heavy section where I was limited to my protagonist + partner), but I think it was more forgivable at the time given that it was the debut of the series and was greatly improved upon in Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky. DX feels far more egregious in context now that I have several points of comparison, for not fixing a lot of the grinding/RNG issues of the original (and in fact exacerbating a few of them) and transitioning the at-least involved main-story into an underwhelming post-game narrative, of which 80% can be summed up as “fight this powerful Pokemon because you can.” Take this with a grain of salt since my point of view is colored from extensively playing the original (albeit, almost a decade and a half ago), but I unfortunately found my time spent during the main story to be quite forgettable (as I breezed through the dungeons with little difficulty) and a good chunk of the post-game to be aggravatingly tedious while I scaled up my team to better deal with the far more competent foes and spongier bosses.

I suppose I did eventually come around on the post-game nevertheless, considering that at the time of writing I’ve now logged just over sixty hours on my save file. It’s a pity that it took hours of forgettable missions and grinding (instead of the game adequately scaling my gains throughout the story’s runtime) to get to that point and that my satisfaction was in spite of rather than as a result of the altered resource management (since these elements become minimal once you have the right Rare Qualities and a stockpile of Perfect Apples/Max Elixirs to throw at the problem), but a few of the game’s climatic dungeons really do bring out the best qualities of PMD’s gameplay. One dungeon that stands out is Meteor Cave: in it, you are constantly assaulted by infinite waves of different Deoxys forms that force you to consider the totality of your actions, considering each form has significantly stratified stats/moves that must be dealt with promptly before you run out of resources due to Pressure doubling your PP usage. In just twenty floors, this dungeon where you cannot be rescued challenged me in ways that Silver Trench couldn’t do in ninety-nine. This isn’t even my favorite dungeon in the game though: surprisingly, that title goes to Purity Forest. Considered by many to be the toughest dungeon in the game, Purity Forest drops you in with no items, no Poke, and only one team member, resetting your level to five and forcing you to fight and earn your way out to even hope to survive against fully evolved Pokemon by the end of your run. The caveat to my final hours savored in the game was that I had to slog through multiple other ninety-nine floor dungeons around the same time as tackling Purity Forest (and it doesn’t help that two of them, Wish Cave and Joyous Tower, are basically Purity Forest Jr since the only differences are that Wish Cave lets you bring items + teammates and Joyous Tower only lets you bring teammates), but ultimately, I can at least say I finished my run on a high note, even if I felt like my run was diluted somewhat by the lackluster pacing and never quite hit the perfect difficulty until the very end.

So the big question remains: do I recommend Rescue Team DX? While I ultimately got some enjoyment out of the game, I'm conflicted regarding its overall quality and lean towards no. All things considered, I don’t really know what audience this game appeals to or if it even excels in any particular category. Newbies will likely find this game too hard and too grindy during the main story, while veterans will likely find this game initially too easy and too grindy during the post-game. DX introduces enough quality-of-life changes, but it also doesn’t change certain exasperating elements from the original (or in some cases, outright fumbles the bag) and makes me question if the remake was necessary in the first place. The climactic gameplay, once the player gets past any resource and leveling barriers, is fantastic, but as I’ve mentioned earlier, is dragged down by a layer of RNG and grinding that often feels more tedious than challenging. Finally, I'd say that the story’s adequate given its time, but it can’t hold a candle to the emotional peaks reached by Explorers of Sky (due in part to Sky’s side stories).

If anything, my time with DX has confirmed that I see modern Pokemon games far differently than I once did as a kid. Obvious statements aside, I find that I tend to view the newer Pokemon games (of the ones I’ve played anyways, as I only have a few hours in Sword/Shield and haven’t touched Scarlet/Violet) more as sandboxes than well-rounded experiences. Granted, it might be a little unfair to assign this to a remake of a 2005 DS/GBA game, and it doesn’t even sound like a significant issue at first given that I’m usually able to dig deep and find the player motivation to thoroughly approach games on their own terms. That said, I would also say that there was once a time where Pokemon games excelled in both world-building/atmosphere and gameplay (Explorers of Sky being the obvious candidate), and as such it’s hard to see DX as anything but a personal disappointment at best. Even so, it might not be my ideal experience, but I’m still glad that others were able to fully savor what DX brings to the table even if I’m stuck in the past reminiscing about the glory days of PMD, and that’s okay too.

I'm still over here wasting my money on Super Famicom carts, and I've now entered the "only buy CIBs" phase of my illness, which you might note is a breath away from being terminal. Unfortunately, I also suffer a debilitating comorbidity where I habitually buy Puyo Puyo games. My family has begun discussing hospice options.

I didn't have a great time with Puyo Puyo Sun for the Sega Saturn and found it to be somewhat dull given how flat its difficulty curve is. Its Summertime aesthetics keep it on the shelf, but if I want to actually play a Puyo Puyo game, I'm more likely to throw in Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, which I find to be more challenging. Brutal, even. In fact, there's a good chance my perception of Puyo Puyo has been warped by Mean Bean and it's rendered me incapable of valuing the series beyond its capability for dickishness.

Well, good news, Super Puyo Puyo Tsuu Remix is pretty dickish, and that means it's a good Puyo game! I'm not having fun if I'm not stuck on the final boss, watching junk pieces come down with precision timing to choke off combos I've been setting up. Oh, half the screen is full now - that's nice, this match has only been going on for ummm.... ten seconds.

That's just what I like to call peak Puyo. Because you're always playing at the peak of your well.

I'm not being entirely fair to Remix here, because I do think its difficulty pacing is overall better than Mean Bean Machine. I was able to beat the game on normal difficulty with some perseverance, whereas Mean Bean has been an unclimbable wall on any difficulty level other than easy. I think this actually puts Remix in the sweet spot for me. Just hard enough to be engaging but not so insane as to be unwinnable.

It's also just cute as hell. Arle is such a great character, I genuinely felt bad beating Cait Sith. It's a shame I can't read any of this dialog, but the animations and overall presentation of Remix is fun. Even the box itself looks good, the manual is packed full of great character art, and it came with a foil sticker to celebrate the first printing that I swear hasn't been touched. I managed to grab a pristine copy for about 27$, which is only a few bucks more than a complete copy of the base Puyo Puyo Tsuu will run you, which lacks the expert mode and practice course introduced in Remix. Not a bad price if you're looking to build your own CIB collection, and it's just a damn fun game, too.