Played as part of Atari 50.

It's Centipede. Again. After the very mild improvements that the Millipede games brought like the DDT bombs, it's really hard to give much leeway to a version of the game without them.

You know, I see Atari releasing the same 3 simple arcade games for every console, over and over again, and it's really easy to see why they crashed so hard, lol.

Incredibly rewarding game that asks so much executional precision by the end, but is always fair.

(warning most of this review is actually about the Souls games, coming from someone who hasn't liked them so far and who also hasn't put more than like 4 hours total into the whole series lol)

When it comes to these sorts of skill games, I feel like I'm always going to prefer visually clean games that let you get immediately back into the action on a failure. Your obstacles are always 100% clear and every single mistake is immediately obvious and understood. There's no bloat, no wasted space or time, just pure execution.

I like to write them off a lot as a joke, but I do really think my tastes are just fundamentally incompatible with the Souls games as they currently exist. I am never going to enjoy a game that asks a lot of me, and then punishes failure with even as little as 2 seconds of waiting before I'm allowed to try again. When you're locked in, 2 seconds is a long fucking time and it will almost always knock you out of the zone.

And I feel like once you put these execution games into 3D, there's a million more things that can go wrong as far as visual clarity is concerned, and when every boss has different animations and attack patterns, it stops feeling like a challenge you can chip away at and slowly improve with. My go-to examples of mechanically challenging games that I actually like are usually Katana Zero and Celeste, but playing this I realize that it's not just the fast respawn, it's the clarity and total control that 2D offers (and also some 3D shooters, my explanation for including these would just be the same as this part of this Matthewmatosis video that explains why shooters got big during the switch to 3d so just watch that if you're interested).

Back to the topic, trying a level 40 times in Kurukuru Kururin is hardly out of the ordinary. Trying a boss in a souls game 40 times is, from what I understand, a nightmare and something you only get to if you're really having trouble with something. In Kurukuru Kururin, trying something 40 times and seeing that slow, incremental progress, getting just a bit further in the level each time, culminating in beating it? That's perfect, that's exactly what I want from games that ask me to "get good". I just don't see that happening for me with the souls games--given the time length of bosses, the actual mechanical difficulty is going to have to go down, and so the maneuvers feel less satisfying to pull off, and when you're getting knocked out of the zone every time you do make a mistake. Nightmare. "Get good" games should, ideally, maximize the amount of time spent on getting good at them, a loss is punishment enough. Kurukuru Kururin trims every single piece of fat, you're controlling a spinning rod in a maze, nothing more, nothing less, and in its simplicity it's definitely one of the best skill-based games I've played so far.

Played as part of Atari 50.

Oh, this one sucks. 8-directional movement, which doesn't sound like it's worth mentioning for a pacman clone, but you're not locked to the grid and need to fumble your way around the map trying to hit the hitboxes for all the "dots". The elevators similarly have annoyingly small areas and don't feel like you can stick yourself in them like you can with the arcade one. Maybe the first game in this collection that's invoked an actual face of disgust for most of the playtime here. Wasn't the biggest fan of the arcade version anyways, but it plays like fine art compared to this lmao