”Get to fuck, and when you come back, fuck off again”

Finally playing a game that isn’t voice-acted by Americans feels like surfacing from water for air.
Enjoyed this so much I played it in one sitting, probably because my favourite genre is “Guy In a Crumbling Facility”, to an extent where I’m certain they copied the homework of not only Infra but the HBO Chernobyl TV show in the game’s opening hours. Easy to bemoan the incredibly 2010’s cat-and-mouse horror gameplay during the moments you’re skirting around an enemy - as well as the fact that the entire game is hyper linear with a constant throughline of the game design yellow paint carrot-on-stick. There were certainly points where I went ah fuck this again when met with another Uncharted climbing sequence, but I felt that the entire game was paced very consistently, and the dialogue was pitch-perfect I love Roy and Caz.

Still Wakes the Deep really is only a short hop away from The Chinese Room’s prior A Machine For Pigs in schema, it feels to me that they were able to put what they learned from that project to task and lean into their strengths to make something that comes across as more whole, even if it took them surrendering A:AMFP’s fun thematics for something closer to a BBC One Original Drama.

Small notes:
-A shame that they couldn’t get Jessica Curry back on the soundtrack, which only ended up kind of middling here if I’m honest!!!!
-The rig was incredibly well-realised, I loved that you could see it bend and warp and shake in the wind and against the waves
-When the Horrific Otherworldly Entity is kind of beautiful to look at I really like dat.
-Maybe it’s just because I got motion sickness a few times, but the game feels like it could have been a VR game? The way the character’s arms respond to the environment was so Boneworks
-Enjoyed seeing real 70’s health and safety posters dotted around, they go so dumb hard
-It's not funny but I find it very funny that oil rigs have a "Mud Handling" facility

The Hing

I cannae tell you how nice it is to hear actual Scottish folk voicing Scottish characters. I'm so used to it obviously being English actors, or Americans sounding more Irish than anything else. Never did I think I'd be playing a game where I heard "scunnert", or "cunt" used so correctly and not sounding forced.

It sounds silly to talk about R E P R E S E N T A T I O N when you're white and bald with a beard. I've been well catered to appearace-wise for many years, but I never knew I wanted Scottish stuff so badly until I got it. A single line in this near the end made me burst into tears, and I just don't know if it hits the same way if you're not from here.

SCOTLAND FOREVER

Zero Mission doesn't fuck you about. You go to Chozo Statue and it cuts to a big map screen showing you where your objective is. Thanks, Metroid! Since when were you so nice?

This isn't a game you play if you're looking for a gripping story, but as a bridge between Prime and the numbered entries, Metroid 1 has gained a kind of Ocarina of Time-level significance as the central point of the series, so it's great to be able to play a version that doesn't feel like a DOS platformer. There's very little real narrative, but this is Samus returning to Zebes, where she was raised, to take on the Metroid infestation. With hindsight, they've been able to go back and incorporate some stuff from Super and Fusion, and it feels like there's much more to discover in the game now than the realisation that your spaceman is a girl.

Though it's using the engine and controls from Fusion, Zero Mission feels closest to Super, with its sprawling open environment and teases of locked areas you only get to explore several hours later. It's a much tighter game, though. Never quite as confonding or abstract, and the backtracking never gets quite as elaborate. If there's a particularly vague puzzle solution, the map is designed to contain you in a fairly tight spot, so you don't waste an hour searching the rest of the map. Maybe this comes at the cost of some of that crucial Metroid loneliness or player satisfaction, but it's refreshing to play an entry that seems to care about whether or not its players stick with it through to the end.

Zero Mission starts off very bloody punchy. You're acquiring a new upgrade every other minute. The pace does slow to a familiar stroll, but it remains a condensed experience. I don't want every Metroid to be like this, but just this once, it's nice to play one that's this quick and gratifying. I know people who bounced right off the series after getting stuck a couple of times, and I don't think Zero Mission would really give them the chance to. I guess it's probably the game I'd recommend people start with. Maybe. Just don't expect them all to be like this.

I guess I've been a little dismissive to Metroid 1. I think it's cool that they made a NES game like that, when they did. It's a damn sight better than Kid Icarus or Zelda II. It's just so barebones in its presentation and control. There isn't much of a sense of pay-off when you finally open a pathway to another black corridor. In Zero Mission, they paint in the blank spaces, and each location feels far more distinct. They've also become very aware of how these games benefit from a proper map system. I don't believe every copy of Metroid 1 now belongs in a bin, but I'm certainly not shelling out for a PAL NES copy.

The bosses are proper bosses now, too. Not just a different sprite that appears in one room. They're elaborate and huge, with bespoke attack patterns and little weakspots and everything. Players coming from Samus Returns or Dread are bound to find it all a bit rudimentary and irritating, but I've seen it done much worse. Be thankful for what you're getting here.

A big selling point of this remake was the "Zero Suit" section. I mean, it wasn't effective enough to get even a million copies sold worldwide, but that was the tactic they tried. It's a welcome addition to a fairly short game, building upon Metroid lore and providing a more concrete connection to the following titles, but playing it now, it kind of undermines the significance of the Metroid 1 Mother Brain ending, and feels a lot like playing a DLC campaign over a decade after its release. A little tacked-on, and awkward, but still fun. Coming back to it after Dread, the light stealth and chase sequences feel like a test bed for the EMMI stuff, back when Metroid 5 was intended to release a couple years down the line on Nintendo's next handheld. It seems that Yoshio Sakamoto's plans for the game remained fairly consistent through its many years of production delays, and it makes me more appreciative that he got the opportunity to finally make it.

I don't think of Zero Mission as the core Metroid experience, but it's a bit of a treat. It won't take you long, and if you go in with the wrong expectations, it could easily underwhelm, but appreciate it for what it is. You might find yourself needing to be in the mood to stick with a Metroid, but it's hard to stop Zero Mission once you've started. It's nowhere near as cool or immersive as Super, but it's a wee gift. Don't tell me you're going to leave it untouched on your NSO app.

Rough.

I went in quite open minded. I knew this wasn't a very well received compilation, and after a year of Evercade ownership, I'm fine with not every game on the cart being good, but this one is a case of none of the games being good.

The Ninja Warriors looks great. Considering this would've been across 3 screens and was designed to suit crt's, it's damn fine looking, but unfortunately the looks are doing the heavy lifting with this one.

Qix is also quite fun. The rest are OK for a couple of minutes but soon wear out their welcome. A very substandard package, that is hopefully rectified in the next one as it at least looks better on paper.

I played this game to death back in the mid 2010s, and while the microtransactions of the ftp version are infuriating (I'm trying to CATCH POKEMON, not WAIT AROUND to EARN DIAMONDS so I can BUY BALLOONS), I really liked the gameplay and the visual style.

I love going around to the different areas and bonking each Pokemon on the head until they fall down and I can simply pick them up and take them home. I love the cute, low-poly style that fits in well with miis. And it had just enough customisation options to please me (catch me in my sailor fuku, standing in the log cabin with my Celebi).

I found it pretty addictive and fun to collect incrementally more powerful Pokemon to wind up and battle with, I like the way the movesets vary, and I like simply being a little creature, toddling around.

Unfortunately, the way the diamonds are implemented here robs the game of a lot of its joy by forcing wait times and diamond-based cut-off points, but I had a lot of fun playing it over the years, disposing of 5000 rusty and/or low HP Pawniards.

Even autobattling this just for massive Nintendo points drained several important brain cells right out of me.

A dull, lifeless app with boring, clunky combat, bizarre levels of overly breast-y character art that make it look like the game was slapped together by a few choice warped Deviantart teens, and a convoluted labyrinth of menus and upgrade/gacha systems that make your eyes glaze over.

It's simply Raid: Shadow Legends, but worse.

I do not want these orbs.

Guilty of the unfathomable evil of making Strider Hiryu less cunty, so I’m not crazy on this one, but I do think it’s worth putting a spotlight on a metroidvania this lean. Strider 2014 occupies a weird in-between space between schema by having the bones of Strider 2 (blisteringly fast arcade score attack action), and being a metroidvania (wallhug like a dopey trout picking up Fisher-Price blocks to place into shaped slots) and it straddles the line…………. decently well?? Has an incredibly scant 4 hours completion time accomplished through carving story progression in a linear track across the world map, reminiscent of Metroid Fusion if anything. It keeps up the momentum surprisingly well and it’s complemented by Strider’s fast and responsive freewheeling toolset. The main issue for me is that Strider 2014 is surprisingly averse to any form of vertical progression, so the open world aspect feels like a bloated afterthought. It doesn’t help that the ratio of secrets/pickups being actual upgrades is completely overshadowed by how many of them are fucking unlockable secret missions, intel and concept art. Puts its best foot forward with a great opening hour; the rooftop-hopping set design is gorgeous and dynamic before it turns into sewer & techno corridor mulch, simple-to-counter enemies so your charge is rarely halted. As the difficulty ramps up it becomes less of a sleek and stylish action game and more of an exercise in frustration as the screen is littered with knockback bullets and colour-coded shielded enemies that take a steadily increasing number of hits to kill. This all culminates into a ridiculously grating final act that feels like a complete misread on what makes Strider halfway compelling. You can tell Shadow Complex was a key reference point and maybe it farcking shouldn’t have been. All this being said this is my favourite Strider game lol.

I mentally started writing this while I was waiting for a monkey bar to move very slowly into the right position for me to progress. I started watching it move. How is it moving? A hovering rock. Why is it moving? Because halfway through development somebody wrote "friction" on a whiteboard and it accidentally got into everybody's heads that this was a huge fuckin priority.

Everything about this game, apart from the combat itself, is a barrier to enjoyment. It's like they held a company-wide focus group and implemented every single idea. It's all menus and tutorials and virtual collectables and skins and seasons and XP and poses and please just shut up I want to shoot the monsters.

And it's so patronising. Look at the map! Here's where you'll be having a fight! Oh just wait up a moment, I know you've not even seen this enemy yet, but here's a little video of exactly how to defeat it optimally! Off you pop! Don't worry about missing secrets, we've put big yellow question marks up, and you can zip back to them any time! Have fun!

Like others have said, all the lore guff feels like a big misstep too. Mind in 2016 where someone tried to explain the plot and Doomguy just ripped the comms panel off the wall and went towards the nearest demon? Good times. Here you spend the first half hour fighting to get to a meeting, you listen to what they're saying and let them escape, then the next job is to track them down and kill them? THEY WERE RIGHT THERE!

When I went to play today, I noticed that the icon on the console dashboard said "Doom Eternal Battlemode". I thought maybe I could remove the battlemode bit, save some drive space, but no that's the eighty gig main game. The campaign is a ten gig add-on that can be deleted. The focus here was always live service shite with a mobile game style interface. Obnoxious.

Combat's real good though eh