Horizontal shooter. SNES version removes some opening scenes from the original X68000 version but offers a more enjoyable game by allowing you to cycle between weapons and movement speed, also has a different soundtrack which is just ok. Gives you a health bar and weapon powerups will also add to your health. Some backgrounds and good mechanics that allow different weapon types, missiles, and sacrificing weapons as different types of bombs can be strong options at different times but it can take a long time to see a particular kind of weapon drop again and some of their bomb features are very lacking compared to others. Dull enemy and boss design with little animation to them, overly long, and full of fairly repetitive sections where the same patterns of enemies can keep coming at you two or three times more than is normal for the genre. Apart from stage five which has you destroying a ship where the screen only scrolls based on your movement and you can blow up parts of it and its guns to enter little passages to get to three openings that lead you to mini boss fights, it's a fairly generic shooter (and apart from the US box art that they chose just to confuse people into having to look at a generic shooter).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676111806455255040

A short visual novel about the developing relationship of a two woman that happen to meet while one is on a road trip dealing with the recent loss of her grandpa and the other is hunting treasure. Decently written but doesn't spend enough time with what matters or adds to the main women's characterizations, instead often focused on bad or ridiculous elements, seems to forget about or ignore what should be more important parts, and falls into too many cliches. Nothing special artwork wise but the voice acting is good.

A large part of the story is focused on a ridiculous treasure hunt road trip that would be ok serving as a macguffin just to bring the women together at first, but with so much time spent finding different parts of the treasure, introducing a weird and unlikable side character and her group as people looking for the treasure and apparently related to the guy who hid it, and actually having the characters find the treasure but it never really mattering or meaning anything to the plot really makes it seems like any other excuse to have the characters together would have made more sense. Looking for the treasure also involves them trespassing on native American territory to try to find gold and the more unlikable side character wanting to blow up landmarks and for no real reason being the only ones to find the parts of the treasure compared to massive crowds of other people looking just because Amber has read some landmark/road attraction flyers and pamphlets while on other trips in the past. There are multiple parts of the plot that just seem to get dropped where you don't know what one of the characters was doing when she says she will be away for a few hours to get a surprise for the other one, you never really learn what Marina wanted the treasure for even though it seemed that the question created awkwardness at first but was then forgotten about, Amber's issues with being in a relationship while dealing with her Grandpa's recent death both seem a bit ridiculous and overblown in a way that isn't really addressed well more so when it portrays her in a more abusive way at some parts.

There seems to be a problem with the game, that has lasted for some time now, where the achievements just don't unlock. One scene had one of the character being removed for a few lines with some placeholder text put over where they used to be saying the game was unable to find a certain image.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1675673408284278784

Great update to the original SNES game with two new characters added that have their own playstyles and two new stages with one replacing a stage on normal and both replacing a stage on hard.

Wild Guns is an action gallery shooter with a mixture of western and steampunk visual design. Holding down the fire button locks you into place while you can move the reticle around, it also changes your jump and double jump button into a roll that avoids attacks while you are preforming the move. Some enemies move to your plane and attempt to melee you and getting near them turns your shot into a melee attack of your own that launches them across the screen. Tapping the shot button multiple times allows you to aim a lasso that will stun hit enemies. Bombs can be found that do high damage to most of the screen and since shooting enemy bullets destroys them it also tends to keep you safe while used. There is a wide variety of enemies across the stages that have their own movement styles, types of attacks, and some have multiple ways of being killed or destroyed depending on where you shoot them. Destroying objects in the environment can get you points for extra lives, bombs, or a variety of sub weapons that you can use until the ammo runs out.

The two new characters add more gameplay variety. You can play as a dog with much faster movement who is followed around by a drone that automatically aims at enemies within a certain range of the section of the map you are aiming at and the dog can latch onto the drone to momentarily fly up into the air. The other new character is a much slower strongwoman when it comes to her walking speed but she is able to preform very fast dashes that can get her out of the way of shots but will not provide her with invincibility. Her method of attacking is different as she has no guns or weapon pickups and instead throws bombs where the longer you hold the attack button the more bombs she throws at once with the number going up to seven. She also has a lightning ground punch she can do by jumping into the air and slamming down.

The two new stages are probably the worst part of the game. There are some visually interesting but they are overly easy (even on hard as you need to play on hard to even see one of them) with simple early sections then followed by overly difficult bosses that require to know what you are doing ahead of time to know where to shoot them or how to even begin to dodge their attacks. The airship stage is also over quickly while the underground stage drags on a bit too long.

Playthrough Video: https://youtu.be/ewWkL12UPS4

Mad Games Tycoon 2 offers a lot of options and it can be fun to run your own game company but more so here if you are more focused on numbers and imagining what your business is like because the lack of detail and personality can easily lower that enjoyment and really hurts some features.

You will build up your studio over time by hiring employees that focus on fields such as game designer, programmer, graphic artist, sound artist, office worker, technician, tester, and researcher and building up job focused rooms to fill the kind of tasks that you need done. Outside of just making a game there is a wide variety of things to do be they major options like creating your own console or producing your own arcade cabinets, creating production runs of the game's you develop or produce, and making server rooms to support your MMOs, to minor details like setting prices of fan merchandise for the IPs you own, buying a license from some form of media to make a game around, setting amount of or ending crunch time, deciding how much you want to charge for your games and what you want to include with each regular, deluxe, collectible box. From the years 1976-2030 set events will see the release of new consoles, handhelds, computers, phones, technology, and genres for you to work with.

Your game's sales and review scores are determined by a large number of things such as platform market, engine specialty, your skill with genres/topics/platforms/technology, employee numbers working on the game and skills in each area, features your engine allows to be in a game, marketing, genre and possible sub genre combination, topics chosen for the game to be about based on the genre, using support offices that focus on things like graphics design, recording music and sounds, motion capture, bug testing, and managing a variety of sliders that when set to certain levels for a particular genre can lead to better or worse games being made. It sounds like a lot but once you figure out or look up where to set the sliders (game testers can create game reports that tell you if sliders were optimal and you can automatically set them to optimal settings you have identified whenever you make a game of the same genre), you are mostly just clicking on the same kind of things over and over again. Getting extremely high reviews does become more difficult on hard and legendary difficulties as you might need to adjust some developer area focus mid development to fill lacking areas but it's still a similar feeling game. An option can be chosen to randomize those perfect genre options in each game but then you tend to be moving even further away from it feeling in any way like a realistic kind of game as the natural position of the sliders tends to at least make decent sense for a genre (you probably won't have much luck making a children targeted heavy military violence focused puzzle game with a massive focus on story, character design, and game length over the options that would influence level and puzzle design).

Because there is no real personality to employees or other developers and publishers it does tend to make certain options much less interesting than they could be. Unless you are fully committed to the roleplay of your company there is just very little reason money or content wise to getting into publishing games for other people or buying out other companies. Developing retro games for off the market consoles or creating old bundles, abandonware, or re-releases of your old games and filling out your published game boxes with maps, figures, and posters doesn't really have any feeling to it. Even more so because, while you can create a support department to gain new fans and answer fan mail and calls, you don't really have interactions with fans outside of occasional message in a few readable fan mails and reviews that include a small number of generic comments.

There are a lot of useless or almost useless employee perks. There are some that are obviously nice to have like talented to increase skills faster, faster movement, no bathroom breaks, no breaks, completes tasks slightly faster. Then you can have extremely minor situational skills like working on engines faster or doing slighter better when games are sequels that mean very little in the long run. There are a large number of completely worthless perks like not making a mess, not caring about being in a mess, not caring about overcrowded offices, not quitting, half the jobs only focus on one skill so a perk that gives their non specialized areas higher maximums doesn't do anything for them, etc. These perks are worthless because you end up in a situation where lets say you have comfortable room for 30 people and you put 50 in there and the office is a mess, if two people don't care about crowds and two don't care about a mess that only takes care of half their problems and 46 others are still 100% upset. Without your employees even showing any kind of personality many of these traits just feel throw in just to be there even after all this time of development, it would actually be easy to fix the one that doesn't care about crowds by just making them not count to the total office crowd limit (maybe everyone likes them because they are attractive, smell nice, and bring in donuts).

The look of the game is another lacking area. The character models themselves are bland enough but there is a surprising lack of options when it comes to office decorations and options. You have posters, pictures, carpets, and plants to make people enjoy their environment more and more necessary objects like water, trash cans, fridge, seats and benches for breaks (oddly the benches take the space of two chairs and should fit two people but your employees end up taking a break by sitting on the middle of a bench), and things like arcade cabinets, treadmills, and dart boards to increase motivation when they need to unwind but there is such a lack of variety of options in these areas and almost every type of room contains the exact same type of décor that actually growing and designing your building layout and rooms just isn't interesting so you aren't really able to make a visually interesting environment. There are helpful and time saving features such as having your rooms automatically set up after choosing the size of the room, updating all outdated work areas as improved versions are unlocked over the years, and the ability to just pick up and move entire rooms if you end up wanting to quickly change your building layout or the size of certain rooms.

If you're playing to chase those high numbers, watch your office grow over time, and to imagine your long running IP about fire fighters just trying to do their job in a world of dangerous fire breathing dragons you can have a great time. But if you want a more detailed personality driven side where you have employee events or them giving out ideas for a game or suddenly demanding a raise or quitting, having more direct struggles against competitors aside from just not wanting to fill the market with too much of the same genre and topics, you wanted a more varied highly detailed and decorated office, or if you wanted to see some kind of either visual or just descriptive version of the kind of game your employees ended up making then you will likely start to get tired of the game sooner than later.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1674297005559128071

Decent story with likable characters and a good battle system. It doesn't do anything too interesting though and the terrible environments often made to just waste your time, dull side activities, and continued series obsession with never trying to make the demons their own interesting characters outside of their appearance keep it in the more average territory. The overpriced launch DLC that includes some more iconic demon summons and story content also doesn't help.

The end of the world is predicted by the artificial intelligence Aion who normally maintains neutrality to the events effecting the world as they watch over humanity. In order to prevent the worlds ending Aion creates two agents from parts of itself and puts them inside human bodies. You control one of these two agents and early on in her mission she soul hacks three recently killed devil summoners to help her with her assignment with each of them having their own ties to the events and factions surrounding the coming apocalypse.

Gameplay wise it changes up what has become the normal battle system by removing the system of gaining extra turns or losing turns based on attacks hitting character or demon element weaknesses or strengths or getting critical hits. This system has been replaced by the Sabbath system where hitting weaknesses adds stacks throughout your party's turn, at the end of your turn the main character will summon a number of demons that you currently hold based on the number of stacks that will do damage to all enemies. As you play the system is expanded a bit by having characters gain twice as many stacks when using their favored element or physical attack type to hit a weakness, commander skills can change how the system works slightly by focusing attacks on one enemy or making gaining stacks easier for a turn, and some demons gain Sabbath skills and when they are part of a stack they might activate an ability that can heal you, do more damage, put enemies to sleep, steal items, etc. Like pretty much everything the franchise does it comes with its own positive and negatives. It's nice to see a change and it makes things a bit less punishing for both you (and your enemy) if you are unsure of opponent weaknesses, and because you aren't directly punished for hitting enemies strong to an element it means that for the first time in a long time skills that hit random enemies aren't as potentially dangerous and the skills that hit all enemies aren't worthless due to demon skill number limits. There really isn't all that much strategy to the system or interesting ways your demons react to it though, and the system does tend to cause to put less focus into using support skills or certain attack enhancing skills once characters unlock their passives that will gain you bonus stacks for just attacking with their elements. Like past games, items are still better used for status effect healing and resistance instead of wasting your 4-6 skill slots for demons with abilities that heal or prevent them. There are still odd decisions like giving some of the most powerful demons in the game useless final skill like healing the party after a battle.

Characters also have their own upgradeable weapons that offer a few passive skills and affinity levels with each type of attack, support, and healing and raising those levels allows you to equip items that can enhance your power with a certain element, give elements bonus effects, reduce their cost, etc. Demons that you have in your party are also sent out to explore the map, not giving anything like using their abilities to interact with the environment or characters like in the Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha games, but if you run into them on the field they will give you important material, side quest items, money, introduce you to demons you can get to join you, and they say a few lines based on their type.

There is a slightly Persona element to the game where you are paired with a party of four characters that are together for the entire game and that join together probably faster than I've seen a cast come together in any other RPG. You get conversation choices every now and then that increases your bond with the other three characters, as well as hangout events at an outdoor bar where you will have conversations with different combinations of party members. Raising your bond allows to push further into each characters soul matrix where you view and discuss some of their memories and unlock new character skills for them. You can also eat a variety of meals at your safehouse for minor passive bonuses that are further influenced by how much each character likes the meal, though this is a pretty minor part of the gameplay each meal type does come with its own conversation.

The main things holding back the game is the either dull or terrible dungeon design and the focus on backtracking or going back to find demon's for upgrade parts. The maps are either bland, generic, and simple to get through or when you go into the soul matrix for characters they become even blander and start adding elements solely to waste your time like teleporters that take you to random areas until you guess the correct patterns. They did at least make looking for upgrade parts easier by allowing you to see a list of enemies that shows where they are located and what they drop, and giving you the option to mark them so enemy figures on the field have a mark over them if their party includes one of those demons. The demons themselves aren't given much focus as they have a very limited number of spoken lines when ran into on the field, there is no conversation system to recruit them, and they did not keep one of the only good features of Shin Megami Tensei V where certain demons have unique skills with more detailed animations.

Not long after the release of the game an update added a button that speeds up battle animations if used in a fight and that allows you to dash (not so much dashing as making a variety of things go faster) in the field. If I had played the game before the in field dash option was added, I probably would have stopped playing, or at the very least just rushed through the main story not wasting my time with sidequests or loot drops.

Atlus has also done what has now become commonplace with the series and created massively overpriced DLC that should be free that includes certain series iconic demons to summon, multiple more story based side missions that are tied together for a new character, and the usual things to make the grind more bearable like summoner and demon level up items and high priced sellable items. If you are wanting to mess around creating new or all of the demons and getting upgrades, it's a massive waste of time to acquire that much money through normal means.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1672737761768669185

A three player co-op spin off of Rainbow Six Siege where many of the playable characters of Siege fight against an alien threat. Not at all what I would want out of the franchise or made from Siege that has some of the best feeling shooting in a video game, but not that bad. Varied enemies, difficulties, character abilities, types of missions mixing stealth/defense/rescue/etc, good location variety, good visual style, unlockable modes that offer more difficult but rewarding consecutive missions.

Not all characters seem that useful. Not that much staying power as the mission types will start to get repetitive. The experience system just seems like an afterthought that doesn't work well as getting basic abilities or weapon unlocks from level 1-10 can keep you from being on the level of your friends, you can rank characters up fairly quickly, and you can lose XP if you lose all your health and are unable to rescue a character in a new playthrough of the level but your XP is save from dropping when you reach 10 and you can just put it on a lower difficulty for a rescue. It feels like it wanted to make death and needing to get into a desperate extraction situation as a major source of gameplay but it never really matters much. Ranking up your intel for new gadget unlocks ends up mostly being following generic objectives that are unlocked in sets of three that force you to play the same area again and again as you try to complete them.

It can be fun for a bit but unlikely to hold interest for long for you or two other friends willing to try it out, and it was just a strange thing to have done with the series in the first place.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1523519326552133633

A puzzle and platforming focused title with some action elements and a great art style. The gameplay involves you changing the color of objects to make them repel or attract each other, or to push or pull you away from or towards them. Items can be found that give you new powers, such as the ability to teleport forward. Most of the puzzles are fairly easy to solve which can make sudden increases in difficulty can be frustrating, there is no real gradual increase in difficulty only certain puzzles that are much more challenging than the others either because of the thought needed to get through, the precise controls needed, or just needing the physics of the game to work properly.

The story is told without words or dialogue, instead using puppet theaters to explain the backstory of your family and of the people you are fighting against. While finding where to go for the story is easy, the map and having no quick way to get to certain areas can make going back to look for collectibles can be tedious. The game requires you to find a certain number of hidden collectibles to get to the end and final boss but the amount needed is not too high and many of them aren't that well hidden, which should make things easier for people that just wanted to see the end of the story without spending time hunting down every item. I would have liked exploring the city more than being in the tower the entire time after the opening of the game had such a beautiful background and how enjoyable it was running along the rooftops.

Short action adventure game about an AI in a combat suit trying to save the unconscious human inside by taking control of the suit and adapting its programming to try to find ways to access its locked functions, breaking the rules by following them. Good use of puzzle solving by having limitation based on programming rather than the usual problem of the person you are controlling just being incompetent. Good atmosphere. A sequel is out now but the game could have felt like a complete experience on its own.

Mediocre twin stick shooter with four playable characters that each have their own ranged and melee weapon and special attack. Technical issues and the poor camera can occasionally make things slightly difficult or might make it nearly impossible to see. Some people are experiencing frequent crashes, I had to reinstall the game to get it to pass the developer logo. Next time I played it crashed when I started it, then froze again forcing me to reinstall the game again to play it. It wouldn't even be worth playing even if it did not have the frequent technical issues.

Plays like Resident Evil 4 and 5 without the gun attachment upgrades, dodge actions, and fun melee attacks, but with added stealth kills. The story and characters are pretty uninteresting and the dialogue is often poor. The environments are nothing that hasn't been seen before in the genre countless times small villages, hospitals, churches, abandoned cities. There are annoying trapped areas that you could easily just crawl through, if your character could crawl, you are easily able to get through these parts most of the time with the only thing making it difficult is often the camera. There are a few chase segments where you will die only because of the poor camera. Film style black bars on the screen, that have no place in a video game, can make it difficult to see in certain areas. Small annoyances like being unable to run in water that might only be going up to your foot. You have an extremely weak punch attack, and will sometimes try to stomp on dead bodies instead of attacking what is in front of you, or will kick at enemies instead of swinging a one hit kill hatchet if you the high ground. Even if you have done a good job saving ammo and upgrading your capacity by the end of the game when combat becomes more frequent and enemies more numerous it becomes very likely that you will run out of ammo.

They were too hung up on Resident Evil when they made this game, the first few areas is basically a more boring version of the opening village in RE4, even having you looking through binoculars at one point at enemies like Leon did in RE4, no idea why you would even have those. One of the levels takes place in what is pretty much a recreation of the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil 1. While it might be nice for some people to see similar areas remade again, this reliance on the past without making improvements is one of the Evil Within's primary flaws. The game ends up feeling like a mediocre Resident Evil, where nothing is learned from similar past games, and the game ends up making even more mistakes or leaves poor elements in rather than improving on anything that came before.

Sequel was much improved.

Realms of the Haunting is a lengthy FPS and point and click hybrid that will have you fighting enemies with ranged and melee weapons as your progress through the environments but will also pick up items and notes that can be looked at and used to advance to new areas or just to learn more about the plot. You can find hidden areas by interacting with the correct objects, such as hidden passages behind bookshelves or hidden objectives behind pictures. Realms of the Haunting's story is told through full motion video cutscenes and through voiced dialogue during gameplay for story moments and when examining objects in the environment, the voice acting is well done with a nice combination of serious and amusing. For some sections of the game you will have another character with you, not visible or helping you fight, but they will comment on objects and events with you. For the game's time the music, graphics, and sound are all excellent and give the game a great atmosphere, though the old CGI and green screen effects don't look very good. You will travel through increasing outlandish environments compared to the house that you begin in, which helps make the game more unique visually and was a good choice because due to the old graphics normal locations don't look very realistic.

The game has a terrible controls scheme that has you needing to use the mouse and buttons all over the keyboard, but there is a patch that will improve things. The motion bob when moving remains annoying. Enemies have poor AI that sometimes has them ignoring you and that has some of them unable to leave rooms, allowing you to stand outside while shooting them in some areas.

While Realms of the Haunting won't be as impressive now as it once was, it is still worth playing for an entertaining story and with the exception of a lot of mazes and backtracking the gameplay is enjoyable.

Great opening theme, well made dungeons (which is not something I would usually say since I never liked smaller more confined areas in games), good secret areas, good puzzles.

Enemy AI is easy to exploit, proper movement prevents hits almost entirely. Limited number of skill points means you should only increase one skill per character since they cap at 50 and you will probably only get around 60 or less by the end, skills can give useless abilities like bonus energy to ranged characters who don't actually use energy. Spells can take too long to set up to cast. Movement commands queue which will likely cause you to run into traps or fall into pits even though you have let go of the button. Food is kind of pointless, acting as little more than a callback to older games, since you shouldn't run out with the amount you are able to find.

Turn based game with a focus on maintaining stealth. Campaign or endless mode can be played, both giving you a lot of different ways to customize how the game works. 10 Agents (14 with DLC), agent variants, and different items for your AI hacker give you a lot of ways to play. Spend resources on weapons, traps, items, and augmentations for agents or on upgrading their base stats. Choose between different mission types, each one focusing on different rewards or upgrades. Security is strengthened as each in game day passes. An excellent combination of stealth and turn based gameplay and one of the most enjoyable games I've played in both genres.