M.U.S.H.A. (Metallic Uniframe Super Hybrid Armor), known in Japan as Musha Aleste: Full Metal Fighter Ellinor, is a stylish, if somewhat standard, shooting them up video game for the Sega Genesis (I played on the Nintendo Switch Online Genesis application). Like Compile's earlier games Blazing Lazers and Gun Nac, the enemy sprite and level designs are pretty impressive; I was really taken aback by Stage IV, where you battle over storm clouds, and as lightning strikes the screen goes white except for the silhouette of your ship and enemies. It's really cool. I'm a sucker for the mecha theme, and really like the robot designs. One of the enemies looks like an off-brand Zaku when they take their stance to point their gun at you; always loved killing those guys.

The final level is kind of a pain, expecting pixel perfect dodges in a constrained space, which had not yet been asked of the player. The way there is pretty breezy though. There's an options system where you can control how your drones behave, and the usual upgrade system that gets more powerful as you pick up more of the same color, but I played through most of the game without realizing which button fired your upgrade weapon, and the drones setting is never necessary to fiddle with. There are upgrades that float around which drop cards, and when you pick up three cards you get another drone added to your bank. I liked that addition; deciding when to shoot the icon to drop the cards reminded me of the Bells from Twinbee.

Altogether a pretty decent time; need to check out the other Aleste games.

A breezy 2 hours. An easy recommendation. A giant, impressive feat for a one man team to have accomplished. It doesn't really get all the way there on the physics—the range on the homing dash is just a tad too short to feel right—but the fact that it gets this close as a one man team is nothing short of impressive.

The only real problem with Spark 2 is that, well, Spark 3 is just the far better game. The full realization of the design. Every element polished to a mirror sheen. The game that actually matches its AAA studio competition.

So is Spark 2 worth playing? Absolutely if you want to track the developer's growth. It was really satisfying to play through the entire series and see this artist grow as a game designer from piece to piece. Seeing the design fully realized in 3 is only boosted by having played a similar game design in 2.

On its own, without that interest? Maybe skip ahead to 3, which contains all of these levels as a post-game bonus. Again, no knock against 2, but... when you have the option of playing these in a better game engine...

Rips inspiration not just from Sonic the Hedgehog but from Mega Man and Kirby as well to create a kind of unique spin on the 2D Sonic formula. Speeding through levels before hitting boss fights that play out like a classic Kirby game, with the player using any of a variety of themed costumes/weapons to take on the foe. From big hammers, to ninja sword, to magic wands, Spark transforms into a variety of forms depending on the weapon you pick for any given fight.

It's good. Nice sprites, really good music, good sense of speed. I honestly don't really know how to rate 2D Sonic games as I'm no real expert on the series, but this is a good copy that has a bit of a unique spin on it.

Ashes 2063's vision of a post-apocalyptic action/RPG Doom II fully realized. This one really benefits from all of the groundwork set by the (already quite good) original. Afterglow takes everything good about Ashes 2063 and blows it up to insane scale. From a 2-3 hour linear Doom-like to a sprawling, 10~ hour light RPG with sprawling massive explorable hubs, side quests, dialog choices, a weapon upgrade and crafting system that has your arsenal evolving as the game goes on, literal moral choices where which factions you pick in the world's conflicts determines how the story goes.

Ashes: Afterglow is structured around two massive hubs that you'll spend about 3-5 hours in each, depending on how much of the side stuff you end up doing. In each hub you'll have a main town full of NPCs to talk to, shops to partake in, side quests, etc.. Each town will give you missions that pull you out into the wider, open hub area which you'll explore either on foot or via your trusty bike (depending on area). The size of these areas gives meaning to the bike. No longer a cinematic traversal element tying together story beats like in the first game; it's a necessary traversal tool for the open wastes in Afterglow. The size of the world also gives meaning to the radiation system in the game, with some outdoor areas being especially hazardous requiring the player to strategically hop from safe building to safe building to minimize exposure to hazardous nuclear radiation.

Every idea from the first Ashes is expanded on and executed to a sheen of perfection. And it carries over all of the strengths: the wonderfully atmospheric art and sound, the powerful and satisfying arsenal, the Doom engine's classic speed.

It's an incredible game. The best Doom TC mod you'll ever play. Insanely enough, one of the best games I'll have played all year. An incredible "retro shooter" that stands up with the best of the genre.

Another World at once feels modern and old style. There's no UX cruft on screen while playing, and the game lacks tutorials—after getting dropped into another world it's up to you to figure out what your two action buttons do, what holding them does, what using them while moving does. The clean pixel art style and the slick presentation, which transitions smoothly in and out of cutscenes, makes it almost feel like an indie game from today. Even it's pace, which moves between puzzle sequences, action/shooting sequences, and short breather exploration sequences, feels incredibly modern—a precursor to the AAA Zelda-likes like the new God of War or Naughty Dog games.

What has not aged as well is the way it feels to play. The puzzles can be annoyingly obtuse in the way adventure game puzzles are, but the real problem is the action and platforming segments that you have to get through to solve them. The absolute worst case of this was the cave section, in which you have to do running jumps over biting pits, some of which have tentacle curtains hanging over them that will also eat you. You have to stop, shoot them one by one with your charged shot, then you can give jumping over the pits a go. Pressing the jump button once while standing will jump over exactly one unit of the ground, which happens to be the same size as the teeth pits. The most annoying room in the game has one biting pit, one unit of normal ground, then two biting pits, so you have to complete a running jump over the first pit and then tap jump again exactly when you land so you can hop to the other side. This annoying room is also centered between two more platforming rooms, and if you die in any of them you're sent to the start of the first room—you have to run through that one, stop, kill the tentacles, try (and fail over and over) to do the long jumps, then jump over a pit and another biting pit in the next room, before making it to a checkpoint. And after you get that checkpoint, you have to do it all over again in the opposite direction. This section climaxes with a platforming section where you are being chased by water that will drown your character if it touches you, and I died over and over trying to get through it. (Another modern touch is the unique death cutscene/animations you get, which is exhausting because you will see them often.) Altogether the cave sequence was a real gauntlet of my patience, and made this short game feel long. That's the worst of the game, but not by much—there's frustrating segments like this throughout.

The platforming and action sequences have an arcade air to them—it certainly expects precision. But I felt like the game wasn't very responsive, and I'm honestly not sure if it actually isn't, or if it's a consequence of the port or what. It never felt good to play or snappy in the way that great arcade games can feel like. This obviously compounds the difficulty of the action sections.

Still I'm glad I played through this game. It's hard to recommend since it's so trying, but the highly modern presentation still feels really unique. The game's plot is a 80s Heavy Metal magazine-style empowerment fantasy—your cool programmer character explicitly drives a Ferrari, and there's even female alien nudity. If you're the kind of person who has a Backloggd account, you'd probably get something from playing through it, or watching a play through.

an awful motion comic with three awful minigames spliced into it. the writing is about on par with the original and extraction, maybe even a bit stronger in spots, but it’s so poorly produced it doesn’t count for anything. not sure if the performances or art is worse; total rush job from everyone involved. i actually kinda like the idea of centering this around a couple but the utter lack of chemistry between the two leads, along with the comically wonky visuals, renders it pretty much dead on arrival. i’m glad the series is still about walking around fixing machines, however i do think it’s important that the fixing machines be fun! and it couldn’t be less so! the reverse tower defense is mindless button tapping and the laser puzzles are a tedious bore; i suppose the obstacle course race is the best of them by default but it’s mostly just “what if jetpack joyride felt sluggish and bad?” — not much to get excited about! careless, cynical, half-assed garbage all around; a real bummer after extraction was so good

props to visceral for actually trying to make a decent wii spinoff. i suppose that’s a low bar, but still, not many studios were clearing it at the time. a totally different genre with a whole new set of mechanics to suit the hardware and yet it still feels like a proper dead space game, much more so than if they had tried to do a crummy port with the wii’s technical limitations. still feels fantastic to play, with combat and collection that is surprisingly deep and challenging. rock solid controls and mechanics in general. not much to complain about, really; definitely one of the best wii games

I've been really excited about the Resident Evil 4 Remake, and couldn't wait to dig into the demo tonight. It looks great, but I wish I liked it more. The encounters feel sparse, broken up with cinematic, tension building exploration sequences that nonetheless feel like filler. There's a few more cutscenes, some of which trigger based on your behavior, like the chainsaw enemy cutting up part of the level as he chases you, which is a cool addition and again looks sick, but snatching away control as you're trying to fight off the village feels terrible and weirdly antiquated. The changes to the combat don't seem to be in its favor either--RE4R is faster than the original game, but also weightier, more animation driven, and as a consequence it doesn't feel half as good as the original game, which is slow, but snappy. Maybe I'll feel differently playing the full remake, as I adjust to these changes, though I feel like I'd just have more fun replaying the old game. There's also a surprising emphasis on stealth, which is the opposite of what I want from this game. I also encountered a bug where Leon got stuck on a corner and got killed, which made the whole experience feel even worse.

I booted up Resident Evil 4 HD immediately after playing the demo, and played through the village for my second time tonight. It's plainly so much more fun, so much more gamey. Enemies fell to their knees and Leon sent them flying, knocking down a group of enemies like bowling pins. I don't know how you modernize such an arcade feeling, perfect action game to modern standards without losing what makes it excellent. And unfortunately, it looks like Capcom doesn't either.

What a refreshing game to have in 2023. Feels like a lost Clover Studio project. Like you could dial back the graphical fidelity and tell me this was one of the Capcom Five for GameCube and I'd believe you.

Just an incredibly, singularly stylish and "cool" totally singleplayer, offline game in a way we don't get so much anymore. Great colorful cast of characters, beautiful visuals, a killer and oddly nostalgic soundtrack—it's like the hottest tunes of 2006—all give this a really unique feel.

Love the combat. Simple and easy to understand, but with no lacking for depth if once you start digging through the combo lists. Me, I'm the kind of stupid guy who picks a handful of go-to combos and abuses the hell out of 'em, though, and that works just fine here as well. Had one hell of a time. Will be surprised if this isn't at least in my top 2 of this year.

Really hope this isn't a one-off and that we get a few more of these kinds of action games from Tango in the future. Would be a shame if they went back to usual business after this felt so refreshing.

the story is whatever. about as generic and derivative as sci-fi horror gets and i care almost nothing for it. distilling planet of the vampires, solaris, 2001, alien(s), event horizon etc into something that is not quite as interesting as any of them. the expansions to lore and character from the first game strike me as massively wrongheaded; the game should be as sparse as possible and isaac should obviously never speak. i honestly don’t need any sort of narrative here — the ideal version of dead space, for me, would offer next to zero context for why this guy is walking across a broken space ship slicing up alien zombies in doom (1993) like fashion. were it that sparse and abstract this would be a contender for like, top 5 game of all time for me. and it’s honestly not too far off as is; all the extraneous lore in the world can’t distract from the core experience which is simply spectacular. what this really resembles, much more so than any of the films it’s trying to replicate, is bresson’s lancelot du lac. it’s a game about the material reality of trudging around a hostile world that wants to kill you in a massive suit of armor, the physical weight of it. it’s a heavy game to play; difficult in a different way than i’m used to in triple-a action titles. you feel the burden of every step and it can be a little bit exhausting to sit with for extended periods, in a compelling way. i could hardly put it down once i started; i was so entirely in it from moment one which is a feeling the game does an exceptional job cultivating — no cutscenes or hud or anything to take you out of isaac’s immediate experience. this is not some slick, fluid shooter, either; it wrings enormous tension out of how cumbersome it is to do basically anything. even when you become familiar with all the systems and learn what weapon combinations work best for you every encounter and kill is challenging and hard won. it communicates the sense that isaac is not some professional killer but a technician who’s been thrust into this violence through terrible circumstance. he’s just trying to fix the damn ship, find his gf and go home! hilarious how mechanical the plotting is in this, and like mechanical in a very literal sense: you’re walking from point a to point b fixing machines the entire time, which is perfectly in tune with the materialist quality of the gameplay. the heady lore stuff is mostly confined to text and audio logs which you can choose to ignore if you wish (altho ofc i can’t allow that); on a moment to moment basis your only concern is trying to survive and get out of there. also rocks that all of your weapons, save for a couple, feel like tools that have been repurposed for killing. in terms of what it’s doing as a remake, i’m not that into how it branches out story and character-wise but there’s real value in updating dead space for next-gen hardware. since it’s such a physical, tactile experience the image quality is essential wrt immersing you in isaac’s reality - the game looks fucking incredible; they really did a number on all of these environments - as is the haptic feedback on the dualsense controller, the best use of the technology i’ve seen yet. there’s just an immediacy to this that no space horror film or novel or game can come close to touching for me. it’s probably the greatest work in the genre, or at the very least on par with the best of them

I'm not sick of God Hand yet so for my third play through I decided to do a Kick Me Sign run—a challenge run in which you can never activate your tension meter, and you can never use your special roulette abilities. It's called a "kick me sign" run because in one of the early stages you get a kick me sign slapped on your back, and it drops off when you use those special abilities—I was surprised to learn that the sign is persistent throughout levels if you don't use your abilities. In fact you are rewarded with unlockable music tracks after completing it, though the game never explicitly mentions this run as far as I know, which is an interesting bit of design in itself. You're never technically locked away from using the special attacks either, so there's a level of self control to it. You can even activate the roulette ability to slow down time and make your character face an enemy, and then back out of the menu without selecting a special ability. I learned the hard way to be extra careful about this—if you accidentally hit the special attack and then let yourself get killed so you can start the level over, you'll actually have to go back to whatever your latest save was to get the sign back on your back.

My experience for the KMS run was surprisingly close to my prior play throughs. It's simple enough to live without "Unleashed Mode," which turns Gene invincible and lets you wail away at an enemy while your Tension Meter ticks down; in lieu of that, you're just forced to put more time and damage into enemies, and to be more careful and consistent about dodging. In other words, you're forced to play better. I felt the most pain without that ability fighting the enemies that were really good at dodging you—Tiger Joe, Devil Hand—since the Unleashed Mode gives you a bit of a breather and a level of essentially guaranteed damage. I also missed this mode when fighting the demons, since they tend to run away from you and it can be very annoying to chase them down.

The inability to use roulette moves are a different story, and really highlighted the gaps in Gene's toolbox. For one thing, there's no gap closing technique, no projectile, no easy crowd control move—without these in your back pocket, it can make certain encounters pretty annoying and hard to deal with at the higher difficulty levels. I eventually learned to rely on juggling enemies and separating them to keep things under control. I still don't have a great solution to when the game sends a whip wielder plus a couple of "leader" characters at you (the tall enemies that have some kind of gimmick—axe wielders, knife throwers, etc.). The whip wielder tends to hide behind these leader types, so your best bet is to do some hit and run attacks, but since they're cloistered together it's just as likely Gene will tackle the wrong enemy, and that's a tedious, fraught way to play already. I wish there was a larger variety of crowd control techniques too—there's the round house kick and the quicker, weaker round kick move, but your best move is to juggle enemies and launch them, which takes a lot of patience and skill to pull off when you're being attacked by multiple enemies.

I had a lot of fun with this challenge run but would be lying if I didn't say I found myself frustrated with certain limitations, but this is the first time, after two complete playthroughs, that I have felt that way about God Hand. I wouldn't recommend this challenge run necessarily unless you're like me and are trying to squeeze as much juice out of the game as possible. The in-game reward doesn't feel worth it, and the game feels designed to be played with the special abilities. But I might not completely feel that way once I finish the game on hard mode...

I'm still not sick of God Hand after finishing the run. After my third playthrough, I just wish I was better at God Hand. This time I managed to stay between second and third difficulty for most of the game, with dips into the fourth difficulty mode, but I felt really challenged in third difficulty already...