Playing the Capcom Beat 'em up bundle I was really starting to think that only Capcom's licensed games like Aliens vs. Predator, The Punisher etc. were truly worth playing. With my friend and I generally being pretty uninspired by Knights of Round, Warriors of Fate and Final Fight we weren't expecting much with Armored Warriors next in our playlist but it came out and kicked us in the teeth out of nowhere.

Simply put it plays superbly well. It's incredibly fluid with smooth animations, frame rate and unique attacks. The mechs you pilot all have melee attacks as well as ranged weapons with limited ammo. As you destroy enemies they will drop more guns, missile launchers, claws, drill arms among other weapons which have completely different animations and attacks. This all gives the game a lot of variety but that doesn't even include replaceable legs like tank tracks that allow you to jump like a spiked ball, spider legs that allow you to spin jump and launch an orbital bombardment or a flying rocket pack. The attack options are pretty exceptional for a beat 'em up that only mech customization of swapping parts would really allow. Other interesting things we noticed for the genre was a difference between solo and co-op play that some sections will drop a huge tank like unit exclusive to multiplayer both your mechs will attach too as weapons. One character controls it moving and attacks while the others only attack. It's only for a limited time but it's a pretty cool feature allowing you to have dealt some boss damage additionally.

Visually I think the game is stunning. It's sprite work is Capcom at it's peak and everything is colourful yet designed in a way to be as clear to the player as possible from each other, enemies and backgrounds. The mech designs are excellent, my favorite being the super fast yellow one allowing me to dash and jump around the screen like a lunatic. There are four to choose from and similar to any beat 'em up they have their pros and cons for speed to power ratios depending on which character you choose.

The story isn't much to write home about and there is some small niggles around picking up weapons by accident I often have due to button limitations on arcade machines. They are tiny issues, inconsequential at worst to an otherwise fantastic looking and playing arcade beat 'em up. I had an absolute blast playing this and will easily come back to this time and time again. Who doesn't love a chunky mech firing a volley of rockets off before power drilling through several enemies while their friend shouts "use the vulcan!" as they fire their gun quoting a line from 90's anime New Dominion Tank Police they know off by heart? I mean who?

Recommended.

+ Gorgeous Visuals.
+ Swapping parts is a great mechanic adding variety.
+ Smooth playing with excellent visual and mechanical design.

I don't know what I expected from this game. I'm a fan of Sailor Moon, with the S series being where I started at, and honestly this game was a neat little distraction. It wasn't super impressive, but it also didn't suck either. It made some use of villains of the show, but surprisingly the charm was in how stylish the mini games and sprite work for the scouts were.

On the surface, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S is just a run of the mill beat'em platformer. It's not particularly challenging when it comes to fighting, and the jumping over pits can be a wonky. The levels aren't particularly note worthy nor is any of the story or enemies. Still, to say this game is an average license game feels a bit too disheartening for what it does. If it only had the levels I wouldn't be impressed by it, and if it only had the mini games it feel like nothing was really there. But dividing the two consistently through out, with the mini games using different sprites or art work mixed together with different styles makes this game feel a little more put together. Plus when the game is able to do close ups of any sprite work or use voice clips it just tickles me pink. It's a shame the west never got this, but I am glad it existed for all the young Sailor Moon fans out there.

Over the years of my life I've grown to respect others who believe in some form of spirituality or other such things we theoretically just can't comprehend or explain. Obviously it's still important to remain in the real world and believe what's in front of our eyes and keep a proper balance between it and practicality.

With that said, you also really shouldn't trust an NES game made by a bunch of Brits to give you lottery numbers for drawings held in the States, let alone getting an accurate tarot reading. There's also zero gameplay here, so I really feel bad for anyone who wasted money on it back in the day.

At least there's tits.

For us who have been involved with the fighting genre and (unfortunately) pay attention to some of the personalities involved with it online, we tend to have our random obscure picks we found from either watching Super Best Friends Scrublords or randomly booting them up in a hail mary of boredom in FinalBurn Neo. You know the ones, the legitimate yet virtually unknown stuff outside of the special circle, from Asura Buster to Zero Divide. "W-who is Breaker? Why are they having their revenge?!"

Rabbit is another one of them, albeit possibly even more obscure. Beyond it's four-button control scheme and Jojo Stand system that predates Heritage for the Future; it's yet another example of why some nice colorful sprites will always be my favored form of visuals. Rabbit is cartoonish and full of expression, from the standard normal attacks to the funny reactions to being walloped in the face and eating shit. A colorful cast featuring such concepts like a cute blue-haired girl with an umbrella, a little round singing fella who finger snaps during his idle pose as he wields his mic, and a theater guy who got so into his jiangshi character that it became real to him. All of these hooligans are also equipped with demented looking animal spirits that resemble the old style of MGM and Warner Brothers, checking off yet another box that makes this game the apple of my eye. The characters even have their own footstep sounds, for goodness sake.

It's got parries, it's got dash cancels, it's got all the nice stuff you would want in a fluid fighter; as well as a neat gimmick where you can use other fighters' beast supers as you acquire orbs through the arcade mode (both players just have them in a versus match). If you're looking for a Survival Arts or Battle Monsters-esque kusoge fighter this won't be it I'm afraid, sorry to disappoint.

Charming, pretty, never gets old seeing it in action. If you're looking for something new to play with the group over a weekend, absolutely check it out on fightcade. Even if the gameplay might not click with you, it's time worth spent regardless just watching it. It is it's year after all!

Could really use less confusing level design, particularly in episode 3, but it's insane how well this aged for one of the earliest FPS games released. Definitely as good as people say. It makes you wonder if the team working on this knew at the time that it would be essentially medium-defining for decades to come.

This has a lot of really fucking funny ports out there. Maybe I'll give a few a shot some day or another, purely for kicks. I think I've joked with friends about the 32x version's insanely ass soundtrack for years now.

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.