After drudging through Sonic’s latest adventure through mediocrity, I felt thoroughly deflated. In all honesty, I was starting to think I was just completely tapped out for this series and it would never give me the same highs it used to. As it turns out, all I needed was a brief refresher with a personal favorite of mine. It’s been a while since this series provided me any pleasure, but boy lemme tell ya, when Sonic hits it really hits.

For many, the predictable choice here would be Mania or 3&K, but despite their obviously quality, it wasn’t the skew of Sonic I was looking for today. Not even Sonic 2, a game I’ve loved for longer than I’ve had cogent memories, would scratch the particular itch I was looking for. Instead I reached for Sonic CD, a game that continues to stand tall as a singular pillar of excellence in this ridiculously far reaching series of games.

If you’ve known me online for the past few years, you should already know how hard I’ve fought on the Sonic CD frontlines in the past, and as such I won’t reiterate everything I’ve previously said of the game in this log - instead I just wanted to gush incessantly for a little bit about one of my favorite games of all time.

In retrospect, bringing in the character designer of Sonic to direct the sequel to the first game was an inspired choice, and this is felt as early as the very first level. Visually and sonically this thing is unparalleled in it’s swag (but you didn’t need me to confirm that), levels and their layouts are as chaotic as the series would ever see in this format, and the pace at which you can breeze through each zone is comical even by Sonic standards. Later titles like 2 or 3&K arguably worked better as 2D platformers for normal people rather than absolute freaks, but no other Sonic game understands the appeal of the character quite as well as this, and it’s obvious in all areas of its design.

Even the time travel, something that continually gets mocked by detractors of the game, is so effortlessly cool and natural for the character that it’s kinda weird playing the other games without the mechanic now. The main sticking points for most have to do with the execution of time travel itself, and its actual mechanical use in the story. If you personally land in this critical group of goblins, I hear you, but I just don’t care. You’re so concerned with traveling through time just for it’s “intended” function as a vehicle for the true ending of the game, when honestly, the best way to enjoy it may be to focus on the purely shallow benefits to it. On my most recent playthrough I disregarded the robot generators entirely, breezed through all seven special stages, and continued to utilize the time travel nearly 40 times in the run just to change the scenery and layouts while leisurely bouncing through all 7 of the game’s magnificent zones. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that bring the most pleasure.

While on the note of the time travel, this most recent playthrough was done on the Sonic CD Restored version of the game along with it’s massive time travel overhaul, and while I’ll always be able to hang with even the nastiest ports of the game, this cleans up the experience to an honestly absurd degree. In fact, it was such a smooth experience I can’t help but wonder if people’s hatred of the game comes more from shitty ports than anything. While some of the changes here could be argued to be somewhat superfluous (from what I understand, time travel in the original CD version of the game is around 35% faster than the 2011 port, with CDR’s time travel being around 16% faster than even that), it’s clearly the closest representation of how the game not only was on release, but how it was always meant to be. Sure the time travel is absurdly fast here to the point where it’s maybe a bit too easy to pull off, but the core of the game shines so clearly with this port that I think it doesn’t take away from the experience at all.



In the bad timeline we landed in where this series is just inconceivably fucked up with no way to turn back, it’s nice to still have a title that shines bright in a sea of never-ending shadow. This game tickles my brain in a way not easily found elsewhere. The joy of flinging this blue bastard through pinball mazes from hell. The joy of effortlessly seeing all eras of time just for the sake of it. The joy of beating a level in 30 seconds or 5 minutes dictated only by how you feel like playing the game rather than by some slapdash gauntlet level design. The joy of true and uncompromising play.

Probably the greatest NES game ever made, but this shouldn’t be a surprise, right? Super Mario Bros. 3 represents Nintendo at the peak of their creativity and technical prowess, with no competition in sight but still blowing the fuck out of everyone around them regardless. A peak so tall that not even Nintendo themselves have been able to make the climb since, at least for this sub-category of Mario games.

I’d rather not get hung up on what was “impressive for the time” since I wasn’t even a cell at its release and only played it years later from the early 2010’s and beyond, but this thing is just an absolute monster on every front. More mechanics, more abilities, more physics tricks, more tech crammed in the cartridge itself, all in 10 times the file size of the original Super Mario Bros. despite only launching a mere 3 years after that game. A save feature is the most obvious omission given its release window and massive campaign relative to other Mario games, but I have to believe they would have included it if they found it practical to cram into the cartridge. It’s an absolute marvel for the hardware, that much is clear, but I wouldn’t be singing its praises if it ultimately amounted to little more than a tech demo.

After a groundbreaking first entry and a successor that amounted to little more than an extra-challenging level pack, Mario 3 sets to evolve the series in every facet, from ancillary elements like the world map and progression, to the actual structure and pacing of the platforming itself. Where modern 2D Mario is most often concerned with the “introduce in safe space -> expand in challenging ways -> throw away idea and start fresh” cycle of design, it was really refreshing to go back to this one and see just how different R&D4’s philosophy was back then. Individual Worlds are still often differentiated by tone and trends in terrain like the repeated encounters with Big Bertha in World 3 or the labyrinth of pipes that make up World 7, but the actual meat of the platforming found in each stage is often ambivalent to the thought of gimmicks or setpieces.

If you asked me, I’d say the defining trait of Mario 3 is its density. Rarely in all of its 90 levels does the game ever give you a moment to breathe, frequently subjecting you to brief dopamine hits of platforming gauntlets to blast through before moving onto the next level. While in a lesser game this could lead to ideas passing right through the player’s subconscious, effectively getting tossed away and lost to the sands of time before you hit the credits, Mario 3 sidesteps this in some pretty clever ways.

Firstly, the game is pretty tough, at least by Mario standards. This is something I never considered as a kid growing up with Super Mario USA as my still-pretty-shitty version of Mario 2, but you have to understand that this is the developer’s follow up to The Lost Levels, not Doki Doki Panic. Mario 3 never gets anywhere close to the cruelty of that game, but this connection reassured me that no, I’m not just bad at the game, but Mario 3 was actually getting kinda tough. Since dead air is all but eliminated and fine control over Mario requires more skill than ever before thanks to the addition of P-Speed and the lack of extended tracks to easily get there, most moments take more mental input on average from the player to lock in on and get through, so even after getting through the game spread out over the course of a few days in-between impassioned sessions with Ninja Gaiden Black (a game that has occupied all available brain space this past month), I doubt any moment will stand out as alien to me when I revisit the game in the future.

Beyond the surface level difficulty, I think the biggest triumph of these levels is the brisk pace in which you get through them. Levels are frequently over and done with in under 30 seconds, and since no moment is wasted, it feels like less of a commitment to munch through them in quick succession after either a full reset or even just a game over within a world. I can absolutely see this becoming the type of game where I just boot it up for a few minutes to mess around in a few levels, only to get caught in its orbit and run through the whole thing in an afternoon, that magnetic sense of flow and pacing is something I find difficult to maintain in a ~3 hour game, but Mario 3 nails it with absolute grace. It’s revealing to me that this is the only(?) 2D Mario that features absolute no checkpoints within any of its levels, further lending to how sticky the full layouts of stages tend to be in the game. Turns out it’s way harder to remember small slices of geometry within a stage if it lands in the half you won’t have to play through nearly as often to succeed completely.

As you progress through each of the 8 Worlds and new arrangements of locales spring to life on the route to the castle, it always feels like a completely fresh journey awaits as soon as you land. The idea of bringing in a world map was probably born of the desire to bring more flavor to progression as well as to house your item inventory, two things that surely smoothed out the flow of play for a wider demographic of people, but surprisingly, laying out a route in disarray has a cool side effect on potential failure. The most obvious benefits to world layouts are the ability to hold secrets and skip levels, but it’s the wipe of progress that comes from a game over that really perked my ears up on this recent playthrough.

Rather than simply wiping all your progress, Mario 3 slowly peels back the world with shortcuts and new routes that open after passing certain milestones or using specific items, with the distinction that main number levels will still be reset when all lives are depleted. If you had to start fresh each time in a challenging section of the game, it could potentially lead to repeated runs becoming more exhausting to play through. While I personally enjoy gauntlet challenges in games as I find them to be interesting tests of endurance when done well, it can get tiring pretty fast (unless, again, you’re as suffocating as say, NGB).

With the middle-ground approach found here, I think it more easily satisfies all types of players rather than catering to one side of the fence. After tearing down a fortress you can start skipping levels you may have already completed, but crucially, they still remain open if you want to go back in for power ups or extra lives. If game overs had truly no downside, walls of progression could potentially drain you of all your resources and become all the more frustrating to push through when you have nothing left to fall back on, but here, you always have time to rethink your approach and plan for your next attack. Alternatively, if your nuts are fat you can always smash your head against the wall more quickly by going straight to these tougher sections, ultimately leading to a faster pace and more rewarding level completions. While it admittedly comes into play mainly at lower skill levels (let’s not kid ourselves, Mario 3 isn’t that hard of a game all things considered), it’s still a consideration I greatly admire. And besides, high level players still get to enjoy the simple pleasures of the map, such as the increase of tension late in the game or the joy of cleaning out an entire screen of content without heavy failure.

While the advent of 3D titles as well as later 2D Mario games are clear canvases for expression from the big N, always keeping this series fresh some 40 years on, so much of their success is owed to this game in particular. You could say the existence of a level hub and level skipping are probably the traits Super Mario 64 are best known for on a wide scale, but they weren’t designed fresh for that game, they started here. It’s not just a case of a game introducing cute ideas for later games to perfect - though a compelling case can and has been made that Super Mario 64 is one of the best to ever do it - it’s a case of a game truly perfecting every pillar of design it tackled. I’m not sure I’ve played another 2D Mario (or maybe Mario in general) that feels so alive and well-realized as this. Beyond its influence for future games, beyond how impressive it stood for the time, beyond how important it is culturally, it nails perhaps the most important trait of a game like this. It’s just really god damn fun to play. For my money, it passes with flying colors and soars into the skies of perfection. It’s Super Mario Bros. 3, man.

Maybe there’s a decent game in here somewhere, perhaps buried under hours of firing yourself at an immovable brick wall or just bending the knee to wiki guides or YouTubers telling you how good the game eventually gets, but I doubt I’ll ever see it. Maybe it’d be one thing if Fear & Hunger made any attempt to sell any central hook for it’s oppressive world beyond an opening text crawl to lure me along, or present any spark of intrigue in its mechanics for me to want to interface with the game on any meaningful level, but I truly feel like there’s just not a whole lot here for me. Is it possible this is spurred on by preconceptions of the JRPG foundation this game is laid upon? Or maybe it’s just a skill issue and I should get good? Sure, Man. On one hand I gotta respect the level of challenge this game presents, but even a version of F&H with a steadier on-ramp still wouldn’t erase all the nasty set-dressing that’s honestly impossible for me to look past. No censor patch in the world is gonna change the fact that maybe conveying the long-lasting horror of SA through an RPG status effect is in poor taste. I tried, and initially I planned on going back for one more shot, but the more I think about this game the less I fuck with it, so I guess I gotta throw in the towel. If you clicked with this that’s dope and I’m glad you have something you want others to experience, but I felt genuinely kinda gross while playing this and i just wanna move on. Here’s to Fear & Hunger 2, I guess

Completely dumbfounded at how this is one of the first rogue games ever made? Beneath Apple Manor and, uh, Rogue both predated E.T. by a few years each, but for many, this was surely their exposure to the genre - I know it was for me, anyway. Assuming you don’t manipulate your RNG and lock in the positions of the phone pieces (and presumably the zones, I’m not sure) in advance by holding the fire button on startup, each reset should essentially result in a completely unique playthrough. For a time where most games didn’t even have an ending, let alone such variable factors to consider in each run, this is a pretty impressive piece of shit, I gotta say. It’s not all glamorous of course, people have torn this game apart for years (and repeatedly recited the same factoids about its history to a more exhausting degree than even the development of Super Mario Bros. 2) and I’m obviously not blind to its faults. Still, I think people can be pretty uncharitable towards it all the same.

First, if you’ve ever belabored that the game is too confusing or doesn’t make sense or whatever, you have to consider that all the game’s mechanics were actually broken down in the manual. No stone is left unturned, it even explains how the scoring system works (or how it’s supposed to work, apparently the way your point total gets tallied during the ending is kinda fucked up). Pits are the mechanic that have seen the most criticism at this point, and while they can certainly be frustrating, they’re not glitched or broken or whatever. People have even pointed towards the collision being the culprit, which isn’t true either. In fact, they work completely perfectly. The real problem is that the collision is too good. E.T. and his sprite is so accurate that it’s incredibly easy to clip the pits while navigating, on top of easily falling back in once you get out. While this can be alleviating beforehand by improving your steering, or afterward by leaving the bottom part of the pit rather than the top, it’s still a mechanic that could have seen some brushing up with some hindsight - shrinking your hurtbox slightly should theoretically fix the issue entirely.

Once you have a grasp of world navigation, finding the phone parts and scraping the map for zones is actually pretty fun. And I hate to say it, but scrambling for and getting to the “go the fuck away” zone icons in-between scuffles with the government agents can actually provide very small bursts of excitement during the game. Getting grabbed by an agent sucks, but since the game is over in three minutes and a fresh start is a reset away, the pace is genuinely kind of electric. Where it does fall apart for me is actually in the home stretch of the game - while placing the Phone Home zone on one single unique spot of the map is a natural evolution of the preexisting rogue mechanics, it’s pretty obnoxious blindly running around each of the game’s five major screens looking for the correct spot while avoiding the rest of the hazards. Oftentimes I’d get all the phone parts, fumble around for the last zone, get caught, and then just reroll the system for better odds. Again, while the game can get away with these weird bumps due to its length, this one in particular feels the most cheap to me - it’s not enough to ruin the game, but definitely holds it back from being something I’ll want to replay often.

If you’re not 5 years old and refuse to read an instruction manual, there’s really no reason to be so vehemently against this one I feel, especially on a system like the Atari 2600 which, in retrospect, wasn’t pumping out the finest of the medium. It’s not high art, and surely there’s a lesson to be gained from how its launch window was handled (not just for this game, but other games launching around the same time), but gimme a break lmao. With 40 years of hindsight, I think it’s fair to say this is easily the 2nd best piece of E.T material that’s ever been made.

As rumors of a follow up to one of the greatest fighting games of the century began circulating, most of the original Under Night’s player base began to wonder how the developers may handle a numbered sequel. I think I can speak for most people when I say UNICLR felt pretty much perfect (at least structurally) and making a brand new game seemed unnecessary at best and worrying at worst. What might French Bread change? Would they bend the knee to casual players and broaden its appeal through simplifications of its systems? Would they go the Type Lumina route and remix things in a such way to not shift the series’ DNA entirely while still feeling completely alien next to Current Code?

As I wandered the EVO floor on that fateful Friday morning and heard the news that the fated successor to our darling Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r] was just announced and playable at that very moment, my personal anticipation and anxiety rose to all new heights. Things seemed promising from the trailer, but it was hard to judge anything for sure until I got my hands on it. After a bit of waiting in line I finally got my hands on the game, and to my absolute delight there wasn’t anything that jumped out to me. To be clear, UNICLR was never a game I was particularly great at, and as such any small tweaks and balances that did exist surely passed me by, but the foundation felt extremely similar to what I had played in the past. Somehow, it seemed like FB did the one thing no one expected but everyone secretly hoped: they didn’t fuck with the formula.

Flash forward five months, and now that I’ve had the full release of the game in my hands for the past few days I can finally confirm that this is functionally just an iterative sequel to the first game - think like how Street Fighter 4 handled its packaged versions back in the day. In fact, I’d almost liken it more to a glorified balance patch or brand new season than an entirely different game. While someone who casually messed with UNI back in the day may have yearned for more of a refresh to give the series another shot, I appreciate the restraint of the devs to understand the value of their game and not second guess themselves on old mechanics. They didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, they didn’t make GRD easier to parse, they didn’t fix what wasn’t broken. “More of the same” is the highest compliment I can give to a game with Vorpal Cycles and Chain Shift in it.

To touch a bit on the adjustments more directly, each small new addition targets the GRD system and gives the player just a few more tools to work with and consider in a match. Things like the new forward roll aren’t terribly substantial on the face of it, but by adding more things to this towering stack of mechanics built off the same central resource, it leads to further complications in how to make the best choices in the heat of the moment. When to spend GRD for a force function, when to hold off and play defense, and when to take a chance on a shield to push the Cycle forward and build massive GRD at the risk of a Break are just a few strings of general choices you can make in a pinch, and this is only from the defending player’s perspective - this doesn’t consider how to play with GRD in neutral to even end up in these intense scrambles to begin with. For a modern comparison, in a game like Street Fighter 6 this type of complex decision-making already feels exhausting in the best ways with a lenient timer and an automatically generating central gauge to spend, so making these potentially higher risk gambles on an ever repeating 16 second timer in UNI2 feels just as if not more exciting in the heat of a match. Additions to the system could have run the risk of tipping the balance of an extremely well considered system, but at its core, UNI2 is still all about the captivating tug-of-war for GRD and the race to achieve Vorpal we all fell in love with before, just further touched up and refined in really intelligent ways.

The true meat of this package as a “sequel” really just comes in everything surrounding the game itself, which I don’t want to get too caught up in for the brevity of this blog, but it must be said that this is absolutely one of the most feature rich and complete fighting game packages ever made. Barring the exclusion of cross-play (forever and always, fuck Sony), no stone was left unturned and nothing was left behind. From intense training mode options to replay takeover functions, this game truly has every tool you could ever want and shit you probably didn’t even know you wanted, it makes you wonder how anyone can accept less complete packages from far more established developers in an era where fucking French Bread of all companies is dropping what’s unquestionably the most accessible and rich fighting game of the year.

This has always been a series I’ve held in high respects - never one I was particularly great at or could understand all the intricacies of beyond the the first layer or two, but always one I kept at the top of the stack when it came to my “casual” fighters. I’ve always been a player who loves obsessing over and gaining a strong understanding of game’s and their mechanics, so while I’m still willing to appreciate Fighting Games largely for their surface level “approachable” aspects, I always try to dig a bit deeper whenever possible. While there’s been many games over the years I’ve dreamt of attaining a greater understanding of, few have occupied as much space in my brain as Under Night. In the past it felt like a far off dream to understand the intricacies of the game, to understand something simultaneously complex and beautiful in its construction yet tragically hidden in the shadows behind passionate local communities bound by the shackles of delay-based hell. It felt impossible to slip in and catch up with everyone else in the moment, but now with the release of UNI2, I feel the spark to play and learn far more than I ever have before. For the first time in a while, the thought of going out to events big or small is alluring to me for a bit more than the usual communal aspects you tend to find with fighting games - as fun as it is to stumble into CoN5 without touching the game for months and hitting B-Tatsu in bracket without a care in the world, the drive to learn and improve for nothing more than the love of the game is something I haven’t felt as often as I’d like these days. It’s one of the many reasons I continue to show up for new fighters despite my adult life constricting the amount of time I can put into them, no other community driven games are gonna give you the same sensations as playing and learning with other community members, and that’s always a high I’ll continue to chase for the rest of my days. As much as I love falling back on old favorites, I’m so thankful companies like French Bread are still capable of lighting that spark of life within me for a new release like this. Even if you’re not into fighting games for the competitive glory or paltry prize pools of small tournaments, if you’re into the genre in literally any capacity at all, I hope this is a game that can light the spark for you too.