Is playing Solitaire still a thing? At least for the generations having this and maybe Minesweeper pre-installed as the only available games at your school or work PC it triggers nostalgia. I didn't play it much back then, but more recently discovered via Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, that I actually enjoy the Klondike variant a lot more than I did with Spider Solitaire.

Whilst the Clubhouse Games Solitaire engine works perfectly fine for me, I own that game physically and with all the digital sales I got most of my Nintendo Switch library in that format despite I usually didn't see a value in it. The thing is though, most games aren't 100% on those cards anyway, so other than classic game cartridges, I wouldn't be able to put them in ready to play without a server connection 20 years later anyway.

Now I'm caught in that vicious circle of being too lazy for swapping physical games, when I've got so much to play available on my Switch directly. And I'm browsing sales frequently, even though I've got almost everything that's of interest in the usual rotation. But, hey! There are all those Solitaire games… and almost all of them are by Baltoro?

Looking at their portfolio it seems like they do stuff in a style I associate with mobile apps and if I would do transactions from my phone, Solitaire would be a good game to add there. But my e-shop points became moldy and it seems like a good idea to buy a game to allow for some quick minutes of Klondike Solitaire when I'm listening to music, audio plays or podcasts.

World of Solitaire wasn't the necessary choice, but Baltoro Games seem to have worked their way to this newer incarnation offering the largest roster of five Solitaire variants (Klondike, Spider, Free Cell, Pyramid, Tri Peaks) in one single product for 0,99€ just like the older titles are priced on discount. Sounds like the best deal, right?

Well, it's not like the internet is full of Solitaire reviews, surprisingly. The only info I squeezed out of there is Baltoro might be able to do a decent Solitaire and I can verify that, even though World of Solitaire starts off with conservative controller activation and quite some loading time for a simple game like this.

You might also want to know a little about Solitaire beforehand, because the included manual didn't feel very helpful to me. I'm mainly speaking for the Klondike and Spider Solitaires when I say playing is as fun as I'd expect from this kind of program. With lack of understanding the other variants appeared more or less enigmatic, leading to me stopping the collection of achievements.

But that's actually how much Baltoro went out of their way to offer more than just simple Solitaires. With playing, you collect points and rise in your rating level to unlock new background music, different card and table designs. Achievements are there to encourage you to play different designs and variants but also include simple math puzzles.

My experience though is that I decided on my favorite simple designs and perspective for Klondike Solitaire mostly and then turned off the music to listen to whatever I want at the moment. I'd still call it a nice addition though, having freedom of choice for your personal playing preference.

Do you enjoy your screen getting dirty? Touch controls are smooth. But after some warming up using your Joy cons or Pro Controller works perfectly fine as well. What I enjoy most is you can use the cursor via d-pad or analogue stick, so you've got the perfect conditions to play World of Solitaire on your arcade stick of choice.

Does that contradict the initial idea of the quick few minutes of play? Totally! But it also gives me the feeling of a card game arcade cabinet and with my passion for playing each and everything on my arcade stick that still makes sense. Clicky microswitches are my ASMR! It's a bonus for me, that I admittedly don't frequent as often as I should with this game, playing most sessions undocked and in bed.

However, this is my perspective on World of Solitaire and even though it seems lucrative enough to produce plenty installments, it still occurs as something like a niche in Switch gaming. So thank you for reading, but I'm not sure I will convince you of playing any Solitaire game if you didn't like it before.

After all it's just a single player card puzzle, a game you wouldn't need a console for in general, but it's still the nice brain teaser it always was. The help function isn't of much assistance if you basically understood the game, but might be as much a tutorial as you get.

So if you consider having a Solitaire game on your Nintendo Switch and you don't already have a version to play, then World of Solitaire in my opinion is a solid choice. It tries to make the game more interesting without changing the classic gameplay and that's more than required. Get it discounted and have everything you need concerning Solitaire.

Gyruss is the lovechild of Tempest and Galaga, rather using raster than vector graphics and pretty much everything from the Namco game, but with the advantage of a tube shooter not being able to get you cornered. It's good. Play it! And that could be everything you want to know about this early Konami shooter.

When I found the remote cabinet at an arcade I will revisit next month hopefully being able to beat my old highscore, I wasn't even aware I already knew Gyruss, but it turned out I did and at first I re-experienced a feeling of alienation. The reason simply is that Gyruss seems to play like a game made for a spinner, but uses a joystick. At least that's what I thought. It turns out using a lever was intended and you'll notice once you've learned the mechanics.

Spinners, or even potentiometers, like I think the controls for old seventies games like Pong would be named more accurately, whilst later games used different optical Spinners like Arkanoid and of course Tempest, ceased to exist for a reason I can't verify. Other than companies riding the Pong train for too long going broke that is and finally often innovative Atari leading into the big western crash of 83. It might have been a maintenance issue for arcade owners.

Video games changed over time and Gyruss creator Yoshiki Okamoto might have either been aiming at a more accessible joystick technology at japanese arcades for cabinet conversions you could do between a lot of then recent Konami machines or at possible home ports not everybody wanted to buy extra peripherals for.

I also couldn't research the exact technology used in japanese Gyruss cabinets. I know the American distributor Centuri used 8-way Monroe sticks that were almost entirely made of metal, using a circular gate and leaf switches. Though some prefer to swap the Time Pilot and Gyruss sticks with the grommet based Wico sticks found in later western Konami cabinets like Crime Fighters, The Simpsons or both Turtles games, a point is made this machine might not be supposed for stock square gate Sanwa JLFs most consider the arcade standard today.

I'm probably nerding out about something the majority of players won't even be bothered with, using control pads for one of the many available emulations like a Konami Arcade Collection. Chance is though, that quite a few users will abandon Gyruss quickly before even noticing why it might play weird on their d-pad and whilst the motions might work halfway decently on an analogue thumbstick once you've figured it out, it seems to be made with the circular gate arcade lever in mind and I'm going to pick up on that later.

So I was standing at the arcade puzzled, and I will actually have to find out what joystick they used, because I simply can't remember. I can recall the increasing fascination though, once I actually moved forward in the solar system towards earth. It's maybe a long way to Tipperary, but only a few warps to Uranus when you're sharp enough.

Bad pun? You might have actually seen a bootleg Easter egg of Gyruss in GTA San Andreas under the name of They Crawled From Uranus more likely than the arcade bootleg called Venus. It's also cloned as a mini game in Contra: Legacy of War and the soundtrack was remixed for Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2.

Anyway, I got a double shot, which is a lot more fun and with the bonus stages I soon managed to set a new highscore on an almost virgin table. They either reset it or nobody's actually caring to learn Gyruss, but I scored and just went on to play other machines to legitimate the flatrate price.

I think it's hard to fully grasp the evolution of arcade's golden age video games in retrospect and even though I started early as a kid in the eighties Gyruss looks aged to me as well. That doesn't mean it's bad though and you can see the genesis of shooters quite clearly. Space Invaders however hit a nerve in 1978, especially as Star Wars just had brought Sci-Fi back into theaters.

Some games just copied the rather static cosmic warfare and others had something to add like Namco did with Galaxian and Galaga. Keep in mind Shmups as we know today had just recently been pioneered with games like Scramble and Defender in 1981 and Xevious in 1982. There was still room for improvement on the Nostromo inspired two-way phalli and their intergalactic bukkake.

What especially the latter have in common is that they are rather simple in game mechanics, looking at them today, when they'd probably run on your microwave display. But at their time, they had to overcome technical difficulties to make them playable so flawlessly precise that you can't really argue it was you, the player who made the mistake in a merciless but clear ruleset, including limitations to few shots at once, so you better be a sniper or wait til your bullet will exit the screen to fire again.

When Konami asked Yoshiki Okamoto to do a driving game, he forced his team to do a shooter anyway and that was his first game Time Pilot that became successful, so the company, instead of firing him, asked for another one leading to the creation of Gyruss. It ended in Okamoto being dumped afterwards over a raise and so he went on to create 1942 and Gun.Smoke with Capcom. He then produced titles like Final Fight and Street Fighter II. Quite a career.

So let's take a short look at Time Pilot to understand Gyruss a little better. Time Pilot starts off as both a thematic anticipation of 1942 (until you meet flying saucers) and an art style that reminded me of the 1985 TwinBee, especially when you look at the clouds. The game plays a little differently though. Your plane is centered and whilst you're forced to scroll, you can move in any direction, putting it more in the Asteroids type of family, despite there you can thrust over the screen.

Yes, that's another spinner based game transferred to 8-way joystick play and it takes some time getting used to as well. The thing with Time Pilot is, whilst the movement might actually include some realism, especially the swirling around the enemy to strike in air to air combat, it just doesn't feel natural to me, because with the nose pointed outwards from the center it's hard for me to transfer this to an outwards circular motion on the stick, when my head wants the ship to follow straight inputs based on cardinal directions.

Yoshiki Okamoto felt he had accomplished what he wanted in shooters, but the fact in Gyruss your ship is fixed on an orbital circumference pointing towards the vanishing point in the center is like an inversion of Time Pilot to the advantage your movement of the lever towards the gate is reflected in the circular motion on screen this time.

It's hard to fully enjoy the discrete audio circuit stereo sound and Masahiro Inoue's interpretation of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565", inspired from the 1980 hit rock arrangement "Toccata" by instrumentalist band Sky in a noisy arcade environment, but that's another plus of Gyruss and pavement for Konami's future strength in game soundtracks, so many steps ahead from the digital fart sounds early space shooters offered.

I couldn't care less why you have to reach Earth, but Gyruss is separated into warps between our solar system's planets and the stage counter goes up even after the set goal was achieved. It's just back to Neptune with an additional warp there and towards Earth again, so my log of completing an endless game is probably more representing the ending of a humongous session in a way beating the main objective to get this review posted in activities, because I think in other cases that doesn't happen.

Zoning into that one-point direction with stars coming at you to create the illusion of movement and dimension left me quite crossed eyed, but I enjoyed getting a lot further than before very much, even though I'm plenty of parsecs away from the world record. If you wrapped your head around the concept it's just as captivating as Galaga, because that's what it basically is.

Okamoto simply envisioned Gyruss as facing the problem of getting caught in the corners of Galaga by using the tube shooter concept of Tempest. So best think of it as Galaga folded to a cone; the straight bottom line of orientation bent around the screen to form a circle and the top becoming the vanishing point. Instead of moving left or right it becomes clockwise or counterclockwise, theoretically allowing you to spin infinitely one or the other way round.

Vectors might have been visionary for a while, but just like the movie Tron went obsolete quickly, a game like Tempest would have had to be improved with textures to stand the test of time. We can look at them with nostalgia spectacles on, but for 1983 the raster graphics used in Gyruss had been the way to go.

The enemy is swirling in formations, so it doesn't look like they're bound to the path like you are and they're a lot smaller when grouping in the back until they charge individually. You've got the luxury of three shots you can fire in quick triplets or aim more carefully to have a shot left before the others hit or leave the screen to refill your ammo.

You then have to swivel to any clock position required to erase the enemy interrupted by hostile fire and indestructible asteroids to dodge as well, leading to sheer excitement when wiggling back and forth on pure instinct to survive the assault. It's only half the fun without the double shot though, so you want the satellites to appear. Shoot the sunlike object in the middle to upgrade.

Just as Galaga of course Gyruss has bonus stages and you want to be in the correct 3, 6, 9 or 12 o'clock position to profit the most. And that's it. The Famicom Disk System/NES version might be called Gyruss, though it's actually not a port, but at least a 1.5 variant of the game adding new obstacles like stage bosses. You can't really compare it and other than the current situation I write this review, that version should be separated into an individual backloggd entry.

Whilst you might prefer that enhanced home version thinking of the original arcade Gyruss as redundant or repetitive, to me the game is an epitomic space shooting challenge just as Space Invaders, Galaxian or Galaga, but with its own twist. It's possible you've got to be a specific type of player to adopt a single game with the task to analyze, understand and beat it to a personal level of satisfaction.

If you are, why not try Gyruss if you haven't? Chance is you get just as hooked as I am, so wheel out your trusty arcade stick, try having a circular or at least octagonal gate and a ball top on it and enjoy!

Other than for the previously reviewed crowdfunded Point'n'clicks Gibbous and Thimbleweed Park I'm actually happy I didn't back the Broken Age Kickstarter, because it would probably have distracted me from the beauty of this adventure.

Though Ron Gilbert later stated he was only at Double Fine to finish The Cave, the promotion clip suggested his involvement in my opinion and I have a hunch Broken Age grew out of the initial pitch with the money that got thrown at them. I'm not even sure though the disappointed had been old adventure aficionados like me, or if it was a newer generation hardly in touch with Grim Fandango and rather entitled to be edgy about not receiving another Brütal Legend.

The Broken Age Kickstarter became a milestone for independent funding in the gaming industry and it might be mandatory for an actual business to have that kind of backing to produce a Point'n'click adventure after Tim Schafer himself expanded his creative freedom at Lucas Arts to a point hundreds of thousands sold copies of Grim Fandango weren't enough to not call it a flop. You'd either need enthusiasts willing to trash away their lifetime 24/7 at almost no guaranteed pay or you've got to keep your business running and I understand that, appreciating every ambitious work in the genre.

For the only $300k initially asked to create the Double Fine Adventure, it might have been even possible to have a representative majority take part in deciding over the game's direction, but with the millions from 87000 backers within a month, what might have become a simpler Point'n'click more likely to be catering to the fans took on a life of its own. Opinions are like arse holes, everybody's got one. And so creating a game everyone would love seems almost impossible to me.

Even though Tim Schafer says in the documentary (now available free on YouTube) having the money takes away the pressure from him, it turns out to be a feeling of responsibility towards future crowdfunding in the industry. With worldwide media attention due to the surprise success they had on Kickstarter with over 70% of newly registered accounts to participate, Broken Age became a singular chance to show the world adventures are relevant.

With the backing, there was also a chance to address a new generation of gamers with a product good enough to convince them and with broad success pave the way for more genre titles to come. I myself probably wouldn't have seen this or that Tim Schafer actually progressed since the Monkey Island games. I might have wished for him to turn back to the good old times before Grim Fandango that I didn't even notice on release and shied away from ever since I hated the controls of Monkey Island 4 that used the same engine.

To be fair, with Deck 13, Wadget Eye and Daedelic for instance there have been other publishers keeping the genre alive, at least as a european phenomenon. Being featured in popular Let's plays by streamers like Gronkh might have helped acquiring fresh blood, too, but none of that was enough to determine if majors turn down Point'n'clicks for a reason. So much so that even I, as a fan in Germany, thought they just had ceased existence until a few years ago.

What some critics also seem to forget is Double Fine didn't just collect the millions and were able to use them on the project. As far as I know Kickstarter gets a cut and money flowing into a company usually has to be taxed sooner or later. They also had to ship a bunch of pledge rewards. Then just running a place with employees to enable the creative process eats away another part of the cake. So they might have gotten away with a simpler product on that budget, but ended up looking for more funds and released Broken Age in two parts to roughly keep a schedule at all.

It will always be a bumpy graph for announcement, hype, disappointment and finally the reasonable level of appreciation and I think Broken Age deserves more than the rushed bashing it received so often. I must add here, that I played the German dub, that doesn't drop as prominent names such as Elijah Wood, Jack Black or Wil Wheaton, who later even invited Tim Schafer to his TableTop format on YouTube. It's also said the translation had to be cut in places due to length of the animation. I can't tell if it was for the good, but I very much enjoyed the results.

And here it's about the actual game, finally, but it's going to be hard to not give away too much before you've played Broken Age and you really should. I will try my best to review it without spoilers and if I'll drop information, it is meant to create an image in your head, but not to reveal crucial twists.

I don't compare this coming of age story to Maniac Mansion specifically, but with the two parallel stories of a boy and a girl, I imagine this could have a similar adventurous effect on the kids of today like it had on us, when we played the Lucas Arts adventure without ever really finishing it at that time. It was fun enough to roam that old house with characters older than us to be someone we would like to impersonate, but not too old to be too absurd. It was about exploring the environment in a way reality wouldn't allow safely.

At first sight, I found the art of Broken Age gorgeous and repulsive at the same time, because I'm that age when you acknowledge the character style as a thing, but especially girls with matchstick thin extremities like in Miraculous and those big eyes aren't really my idea of aesthetic. The fact Schafer's daughter actually decided which "princess" they used might explain the choice and knowing my niece, out of any adventure games I have, Broken Age would be the one I'd introduce her to the genre with.

We could stop here and say this isn't a product for us, but is it? Broken Age didn't feel like being in the wrong place like Pokemon does sometimes for instance. Growing old on not growing up I'd like to say I prefer to consume stuff aimed at kids that transports the comforting feeling from my own childhood over newer productions I don't have any nostalgia for. But I appreciate an included metaphorical level you might not actively acknowledge as a youngster.

I liked very much how Schafer makes it appear as if you pick one of the two protagonists, but then both sides are essential to the story and you can click on the icon to either play teenage girl Vella in some random badlands or the teenage boy Shay on a spaceship. Whilst Vella grows up destined to become the ritual sacrifice at a maiden's feast, Shay seems stuck on groundhog days of playing the hero for his wool puppets and is beginning to look for his purpose in life, just as Vella is putting the ritual in question and would like to defeat the monster.

Double Fine tried to avoid many flaws of previous Point'n'click adventures and so hitboxes for hotspots are quite generous. The number of items to pick up and combine is rather small, so you will not end up hunting pixels. In fact, I even had the impression Broken Age was designed with tablets in mind, especially because you can pick between the way you drag and drop.

What couldn't be avoided is having to go back and forth on the screens and practically the only times I felt stuck was, when what I wanted to do wasn't wrong per se, but the game expected me to go somewhere else first and maybe finish a dialogue to be able to proceed.

I would describe the puzzles as increasingly challenging, because Broken Age welcomes the players very warmly to then require more clues between the stories and it is mandatory to keep track of them. This incline also occurs due to feedback chapter one was too easy.

I did not find any impossibilities though. The game always allows to somehow unveil required information again, so you can't mess up by trying. It's recommended to keep track of information though and I ended up taking photos and short videos with my phone, when back in the day I would have used a pencil. You might not have played older adventures, but Broken Age is actually designed quite well if you expect more than an interactive storybook.

I know, today better Point'n'clicks often have a log to keep track of these things, but that just proves the point that genre games evolved even in the last ten years. If you don't want to get involved into playing at all, then maybe you're better off watching along with a YouTube video, like some people discovered for them to be representative for a game and I don't mind if you're doing so. It's just like when we gathered as viewers at a friend's place back then. But it's not the same feeling of actually finishing the game yourself.

What I understand might have bothered players back then is the cliffhanger. With the luxury of the complete edition I was able to transition seamlessly into the second chapter, which to me only carried on after an expected paradigm shift, that basically applies Plato's cave allegory to adolescence. And it's actually bizarre how protective parents keep their children from recognizing consequences of their behavior, when they simultaneously follow a belief that heavily affects the future of the kids they're trying to keep safe.

Children are born to point out our mistakes and so Broken Age tells a story way beyond the teenager protagonist's Initiation. It might also reveal other layers intertwined with each and everything and will be interpreted and explained with a narrative. It's like the concept of god lies and lives or dies within us. The community of believers will decide for instance if a catastrophe was a sign of a vengeful being, wiping sinners off the earth, or if it was the merciful, showing his kindness by saving the pure.

Not having followed the entire development of Broken Age I can't judge on false promises Tim Schafer might have made. I understand at least, that quite a few backers had a different image in mind of what product they could expect. It's possible this ambivalent conflict even influenced the writing of this adventurous story, which is encapsulated accordingly.

After ten years though, maybe it's time to forget about a possible grudge. Let's focus on the good parts and the possibly good intentions behind a decision that, like stated above, could never have met everybody's expectations anyway. So here's a captivating tale you could pass on your love to the genre with to a new generation.

Broken Age can be a great game for adults and kids alike and though it hints what might happen after by still sketches during the credits inspired by My Neighbor Totoro, there's still enough space to discuss the plot and form an adequate conclusion that may be applied as wishes for the personal future as well.

I must admit I haven't played Grim Fandango to this day, but now I regret not having bought the remaster again, when it was on sale. I should really give it a shot, at least to see if my reservations had been justified. Opening up as parochial I've acted all those years means something, doesn't it?

Maybe it won't become my uttermost personal favorite, but Broken Age is a brilliant story driven Sci-fi/Fantasy adventure nonetheless. It was a fresh take on the genre, juvenile but grim and it pioneered financing for more fantastic games we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Whilst continuous replays of Thimbleweed Park kept the characters alive, adventure game developer Delores might have become a fan favorite, at least for me she is. So what's not to be excited about with Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure we actually got a spin-off dedicated to her?

Well, first things first-a-reno. This isn't presented as an actual game. It's clearly stated it was created as a test run for a new engine reusing graphics from the original Thimbleweed Park and omitting voice acting to fit the non-existent budget, because Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure was made available for free as a thank you to the fans.

It should be very hard to harshly criticize that, but just as the toxic internet would later bash the godlike Return to Monkey Island, before it was even released, to an extent Ron Gilbert would shut down communication, reactions to Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure in part have been astonishingly ignorant.

To me, that can only be caused by either not understanding or not even playing the original Thimbleweed Park, because if you just didn't like it already, which isn't forbidden of course, you wouldn't pick up an appendix that is presented in the form of a rehearsal, expecting it to be better, would you-aboo?

But actually, Terrible Toybox acts as a sign of quality even on that level. Traffic cones are blocking off huge parts of the world already known, most of the stores are closed and Delores returns to take a vacation job as a photographer for the local newspaper. That's odd, innit? Well it seems that this Chapter 10 to Thimbleweed Park is an alternate universe, where Chuck is still alive, Willie is still in business and the murder never happened. Or did it?

Whilst we explore the environment looking for our five photo motives to check from our list, we have the opportunity to recognize occasional glitches that clearly are intentional. Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure does not offer a save feature per se, but after around an hour of fiddling around with each and every opportunity, the game will end abruptly-who once we hand in our work. But the game doesn't end there.

In fact, it saves progress in general and with each reboot we start over with five new photo tasks that require solving another combination of the same puzzles and sometimes can be fulfilled with more than one motif.

If you beeping missed the files, after your sixth playthrough (which I count as one in my log, because only then the super long credits roll) you will meet Ransome for another hint how Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure seamlessly ties in with Thimbleweed Park. So with the spin-off totally confirming the principles of the original, the Upper World esoterically delivers jokes at the cost of the impatient and uninitiated.

Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure could be seen as repetitive for sure, but that way it totally caters to those who would repeatedly play Point'n'click adventures to squeeze out any secret and I'm not ashamed to admit that I wouldn't have found the poem without a hint and though I had the right hunch for the double vision I had to look up how to actually catch it on camera. I had a good four hours of fun in total anyway.

And that's an awesome thing about the present, even for a game rooted in the past. Not only were Terrible Toybox able to patch in additional features to the original Thimbleweed Park. Thanks to the internet they could also distribute more specks of dust to the fans who love to collect them and can't get enough of roaming the beautiful pixel art scenery of the game.

It was also a great sign of life that something is happening and I assume the new engine, that omits the old school verb menu, was leading to the fabulous new Monkey Island that's probably more than I couldn't have dreamt of, though I'm playing this in retrospect now and therefore was totally unprepared for when the Return to Monkey Island release was announced out of nowhere.

Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure is nothing but a love letter to the fans and on the shoestring budget it does the possibly best to give us just a little bit more of an awesome game on the way to the next big whoop and it sure ain't coincidence Return of Monkey Island also builds a little on the moniker of Thimblecon and the weird life of its own fandom can adapt.

If it wasn't for the solitary nostalgia with which some fans claim their interpretation of a franchise as irrefutable to a point they're even defending it against the ideas of its original creator, I'd say what a great time to be alive!

And yeah, haven't we got enough problems in reality? The pandemic, the war, the shortages and inflation? I'm not saying you've got to be as excited about Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure as I am. But if a creator is willing to distract us from the somber world we inhabit just a little for free, shouldn't we at least be kindly thankful?

Have your opinion, but Terrible Toybox has not yet disappointed me with any of their products. I think Ron Gilbert is still in his prime and I'm looking forward to any of his coming ideas, trusting his competence to create additional mature incarnations of his elaborated vision.

I was thinking really hard on how to review Thimbleweed Park or doing it at all, because in general everything should have been said at this point. On the other hand there seems to be enough confusion whether it's a matter of taste or knowledge to like this Point'n'click adventure or not.

For my part, I love and appreciate it, but at the moment I don't feel like bragging in spoilers by putting every last bit in context, because I've matured enough to know how little I actually know. I might have gotten a majority of the references, but that doesn't entitle to pin it down. I've still learned things on this journey, like Ron Gilbert starting his career on developing Graphics Basic for the C64 and that I should have kept my eyes and ears open at the time the Kickstarter went live, because neither had I expected new (interesting) Point'n'clicks being designed, nor would I have expected being able to back their creation then, because I'd sure would have chipped in on this one.

I feel like I'm missing out on the whole initiation process, that I can just try to follow by reading blogs and picking up trails in Interviews or other talk formats. It's a bit like back when the movie Kill Bill found a life of its own on the internet, when there were active discussions on Quentin Tarantino's inspirations and viewers got involved by watching more and more of them to find more clues on his work.

On Thimbleweed Park though, backers even had a limited possibility to take part in the actual creation and this process, along with communities forming like the family of said supporters or players who then went on to discuss their progress and interpretation of the game.

I would have loved to be a part of that family of backers at least, because I feel like being the same kind, loving those brilliant Lucas Arts adventures. It's like there always had been a relation between those dream worlds we liked to dwell in and the designers who not only created the beautiful environments, but also laid out nuts to crack and lure us towards an exit, like guiding parents to finally take us home to reality. And we brats couldn't stop to reboot and live through those awesome adventures all the time.

It's like Thimbleweed Park was created for that specific family of players, who would understand plenty of the shown references unfolding in a surreal Twin Peaks murder mystery that enough players can't understand doesn't have to be the main focus all the time. That's the sad part about today's world where cashing in on explaining origins and tying loose ends shifted consumers to lay back and expect having each and everything explained in detail.

On the other end we have so called nerds, who would look back on Mad Max II rip off movies for instance as a reduction to subjectively summarized core elements due to low budget in best cases enhanced with own additions as a form of critique.

Ron Gilbert's writing genius works in the best essayistic manner comparable to the need to know basis of Tarantino's films, that the majority tries to catch up with by praising the cool dialogues, but then gets lost once he totally geeks out on a flick like Death Proof, which I'd consider one of his best works sheer alone for the big middle finger towards the pretenders giving me the opportunity to enjoy being the only one laughing in a packed theater.

Being backed by fans who would understand enough to still enjoy Thimbleweed Park without necessarily catching any self-revealing train of thought or bringing knowledge about Plato's cave allegory for instance, gives the designers a welcome freedom to geek out about computers or data carriers faded into obscurity, some even in 1987, when the story takes place. But it also lets Gilbert expand on his philosophy of game design with the confidence to better lose players on the way than to make compromises.

And together with old colleagues Gary Winnick, Mark Ferrari and David Fox he paved a solid way by creating retro but completely voice acted state of the pixel art design that emphasizes the impression of a lost game of the late eighties that collected dust unnoticed until now, to have you collect specks of dust instead because of your obsolete pixel hunting OCD and boy, I should have cleaned my screen first, because I didn't reckon being part of the joke. Well played, Gilbert.

Anyway, Thimbleweed Park lets you play as up to five characters simultaneously and making them cooperate to solve plenty of puzzles on a moderate to little advanced level is very natural when you're used to the verb system of games like Maniac Mansion or The Secret of Monkey Island. A later implemented helpline to call for hints in-game should keep you going constantly. You might just have to accept you see paths that will have to open up later in the game.

Still, there are usually enough tasks to work on should you be stuck on one and often this will lead you to new possibilities and ideas. Most of the essential puzzles are designed so that you get an idea what you can pick up or combine and though some items are red herrings, some actually reveal themselves before you get the wrong idea. Knowing the old works helps just as much as it surprises you maybe.

There's a DLC just to make Ransome the clown character swear without censorship and that's totally up to you if that's worth your money. It will just add uncensored audio, but the text will still show the beeping passages. He's a bit like an even more miserable Krusty and like other characters you will play him in a throwback rather than just watching a cutscene.

Ransome has his fans and haters, I guess the two agents aren't as ambivalent and their motivation seems a bit random. I guess it's quite clear the nerds fall for Delores (I did), who even got a small spin off I will play after this. But criticizing depth in all characters would be like arguing the Nazis would have gotten the Ark with or without Indy's involvement. You still did enjoy the ride, didn't you?

And what a foundation shaking ride Thimbleweed Park is! Though I only played it in hard mode, I still wanted to go back and look for things I might have missed, because not everything you can do is essential to the plot. One thing that was patched later is the possibility to actually play for highscores at the arcade, which I missed out first, because I didn't find the tokens. And you know my love for arcades. I really couldn't stop before I made sure to have tried anything except deleting the game.

I'm not yet ready for that step. There might still be something I'm missing out on, because Thimbleweed Park is not only written in computer code to run it, but also encrypted with said references you might enjoy the overall idea without, but could have fun to catch up on, should you not yet be familiar with the essence of the Point'n'click genre and been living in the eighties in general, or as an initiated have the time of your life reliving the good old days in a new way.

Thimbleweed Park in that sense is what so many impostors want to make you believe they are by throwing canonical catchphrases at you without having to add something themselves. You might even prefer that, because it's easy to accept something as cult, get in line and goose-step with the masses, throwing money at reproductions of icons chosen for you.

For Thimbleweed Park this would mean scratching the surface and it's possible you're fine with it. But the more you add yourself, be it by your autobiography or the effort you put into following the details, the more you can enjoy this adventure that grows with you just as Ron Gilbert isn't actually repeating himself, but refining his ideas in the most satisfying way, creating new games. Buy this, so he doesn't have to get a real job and can keep making more of them.

What can you expect from three Romanians going on Kickstarter with another recreation of all the legendary Point'n'click adventures we all love? Yeah, you'd think Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure is just another one of those nice ideas addressing our nostalgia, that will turn out bland after the introduction or trailer material, but this one's different.

Stuck in Attic created beautiful and flawless animations on plenty of hand drawn backgrounds just like it would be the next modern installment after Monkey Island 3, Discworld and Broken Sword and you might want to forget studios ever attempted going 3D after fully interactive cartoons were just on the doorstep. They totally went out of their way to make Gibbous completely dubbed in English and include lots of details they could have already gotten away without.

As a first release Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure might not be 100% perfect when it comes to writing. The developers are great in including reference without rubbing everything in your face and the mix of a playable private detective, a slacker and his talking cat are an awesome base to go from, but I somehow had a hard time picking the game up again for another session without being able to explain why.

Maybe one thing bothering me was you've got a lot of hotspots to interact with, though it's mandatory to find out when a special ability like involving the cat is required, too often the result will be the same "won't do that". That's something they maybe wanted to elaborate in vein of the Edna & Harvey games for instance, but didn't have the resources for anymore. Loving to explore the environment especially once the scenery expanded this became a little frustrating.

For what Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure might lack in that last bit of refinery of storytelling to keep drawing me in all the time, it really offers a lot of smaller gags and spoofs to keep being entertaining. Making this a comedy loosely based on lovecraftian myths isn't much more than a general theme for a mystery in the middle, but probably a good lever to click with popular culture. In my opinion wordplays with locations like Darkham and Fishmouth are good examples for when they're overdoing the comedy, but that's my personal humor.

I understand Stuck in Attic wanted to pay tribute to their Transylvanian heritage by including some funny scenes over there as well and though this offers some of the best moments, actually modernizing the Monkey Island sword fight as a rap battle and putting the mechanics in question at the same time by omitting the learning process, that side plot feels quite random and out of focus. It's promising though for the announced next title Near-Mage that's supposed to take place in Transylvania.

Though some characters you cooperate with are only functional to close gaps between chapters, the general writing of NPCs is a very strong point of Stuck in Attic's design and they're very good at emphasizing quirks to make them unique and funny. I like the somber tone between the lines and the cynical cat was something they could have even expanded on.

I have a hunch the designers either wanted to focus on the storytelling or had a modern puzzle design in mind for Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure, because almost everything fell into place quite naturally for me. That however leaves a slightly bitter taste on my tongue that it could have been a little less straight in thinking. I'm totally fine not having to consult a guide for moon logic and I appreciate the absence of too many red herrings, but I would have liked just a notch more challenge.

Towards the end they try to create that by puzzle mechanics you could actually crack by just trying hard enough, but they always manage to leave enough hints to solve them on your own. It just requires knowing what to do with the information and then it's possible to apply logic. That's fine, it's probably a more user friendly way to do it, but I'm missing some of the best surprises you could get out of the classic Lucas Arts adventures.

At least they also don't have you hunt pixels and that's where the engine is very convenient, even on the Switch version of Gibbous that I got, because it caught my attention instantly on the eShop being on sale for a fiver.

Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure actually plays quite nicely via touch screen especially for the zoom in feature that helps admiring the art's beautiful details. But you can do just the same on your Pro Controller for instance and it doesn't take long to learn all functions. Popping up the inventory and menu, highlighting all hotspots or of course clicking on a hotspot to reveal icons to pick between commands is very pleasant.

So there's really no reason you shouldn't try Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure if you're just the slightest fan of gorgeously animated Point'n'click galore, because you very well will get your money's worth in about 11-12 hours of gameplay, which is a good duration for these programs in my opinion.

Is it an instant classic? That might depend on your reception, but the overall quality can't be denied. It sure has more substance than The Wardrobe, another too overlooked genre highlight I've written a review about some months ago. As another suggestion for further reading The Innsmouth Case comes to mind, because it's the more hilarious Lovecraft spoof in writing, but it can only be that as an illustrated interactive novel.

We definitely shouldn't measure Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure by the romanticizing memory of the moments we had with what we consider classics. Have you played games like Maniac Mansion or Zak McKracken lately for example? Some references can only be understood if you actually lived when those games were made and Lucas Arts improved on their gameplay mechanics a lot. Even Monkey Island could be stripped of things like unnecessary map walking. We should welcome a new generation being able to put the best of what was into a modern context.

So keep in mind this is the debut of a start up and though Stuck in Attic include references and of course draw inspiration from those classics, they deserve to build upon this. What I'm so grateful for is they don't just try to cash in on regurgitating retro triggers. Instead with Gibbous they present themselves as dedicated genre connoisseurs with a mind of their own.

Having to face the usual problem of finishing a story, they even manage to implement a brain teaser referencing the linearity of Point'n'click gameplay and shining like that could be a chance to once elevate to the writing genius of a Ron Gilbert. Until then Gibbous is a brilliant show off what Stuck in Attic are capable of creating, a wholesome experience you would expect from a professional studio. Hopefully this is the first in a long line of future highlights to come.

As late as March 1995, the Varie Corporation came up with a port of Irem's 1992 arcade Beat'em'up for the Super Famicom. According to Wikipedia an American localization was planned but canceled and the SNES game had already received a review in Nintendo Power #58 (interesting, because that's supposedly the March 1994 issue). Having had a chance to play the Super Famicom version, here's my follow up to the arcade review.

While there can never be enough Brawlers on the system, with the Sony Playstation on the horizon and even the Nintendo 64 at least eagerly awaited, a game like Undercover Cops probably wasn't expected to retain enough players during a time games like the Donkey Kong Country series and Killer Instinct were providing some late surprises what the system was capable of.

Other than in Japan, where a mild success of the arcade release was carried on via the Gameboy game Undercover Cops: Hakaishin Garumaa and a Manga published in Gamest Comics, the American audience, if even aware, might have forgotten about the title anyway until the port would have been released.

Luckily, if you wanted to play the import, the necessary menus are in English. Only the rudimentary story is written in Japanese and though I try to actually read those narrations if I can, it's neither crucial to the typical Beat'em'up, nor was the plot very convincing at the arcades, so I can assure you it's not much you're missing out on.

A difference would be the weird Gameboy board game style adaption from 1993, that I couldn't make much sense of, because there you pick one of the three known characters to play on a map with a mix of slot machines, supposedly taken from the Assessment Day segments in Undercover Cops, and turn-based fights. Plenty Japanese text might actually explain what that is about, but due to the language barrier I'm not able to judge.

The question is, would you want to play the more accessible Super Famicom game? That's probably depending on the availability of the arcade original and your general interest. Though limited to one player, that doesn't mean Undercover Cops is any easier than the arcade version as a single contender.

Having read Easy Mode will end after stage 3 asking you to switch to Normal, I've of course picked that difficulty. Having played the Undercover Cops arcade quite recently made me confident enough to try and I can say the Varie port for the Super Famicom stays quite true to the original within its limitations. The screen is smaller at a lower resolution, but it even managed to keep backgrounds and details like the crows, whilst minor censorship like missing blood spray doesn't really affect gameplay.

The enemies don't seem to fight precisely the same, but they either were an even larger pain in the ass like that bat wielding dude or at least as annoying as in the original. And that's my actual issue with Undercover Cops in the first place. I wasn't all that convinced by the arcade machine anyway, but that was capitalist enough to let me pass with enough credits as backup.

I'd be totally with you that having a limited amount of continues (here adjustable to up to five lives and five continues) will enhance a game to the requirement of skill. Knowing the original wasn't much rewarding with the design or even story development, but instead punishes any success by being even more infuriating, my motivation wasn't high enough to not abandon the Super Famicom version after failing at the third boss.

Batman Returns for instance kept me hooked on a rather maddening Super Nintendo game, but Undercover Cops lacks a more unique theme by today's standards. It was too clearly designed with cashing in at arcades in mind, so it's not really supporting an elaborated learning curve and the excellence of execution super hard Irem games like the R-Type series provide just don't translates as well to the Brawling genre.

As an Irem, Super Famicom or Beat'em'up completionist, you might still want Undercover Cops in your collection, but I highly doubt you'll be enjoying it, should you not be a genre dedicated masochist.

Being a mechanical sensation, Pinball machines had to compete with video games at the arcades and though developers tried to implement new functions maybe exactly the increasing cost for more complicated maintenance led to the cease of existence. There must have been a general interest in the gameplay otherwise as there constantly was software for home consoles and computers, trying to emulate the fun to be had with Pinball cabinets.

It's possible more recent computers are capable of an almost perfect recapture, but there's a reason even today enthusiasts are restoring Pinball cabinets and some of them are making them accessible through clubs and museums to work their charme as an attraction. In fact, just a few hours ago, in preparation of my next big arcade trip in May, I stumbled over the featurette for a new Pulp Fiction machine and looking at the details made me realize the fascination for physically moving parts again.

Creating a Pinball video game can't provide that amongst all the realism, but the further you go back in time, the bigger had been the problems to depict a realistic table at all. Pinball Dreams for the Amiga might have been state of the art during the era for instance, but how much reason is there to revisit this game today? I might simultaneously have been playing Revenge of the Gator on my Gameboy back in the day, because it was my option for a Pinball video game on the then recent mobile device and we could take from this that these games rather function as a status quo.

Some of you might already remember I was rarely playing Mega Drive games in the nineties, because most of us had taken the Amiga to SNES route, so you might anticipate with the question why on earth would I enjoy a game like Codemasters' Psycho Pinball that much in retrospect then?

The answer in short is: Because they've gotten something right.

I was just recently playing the Pokemon Pinball games and that Disney's The Little Mermaid II: Pinball Frenzy to reassure me enough in saying a good Pinball video game was created under the awareness it is not a real table. So what does that mean?

Well, I found Psycho Pinball, when I was looking for alternatives to Sonic Spinball, that had disappointed me with its gameplay/physics, even though I liked the idea. I could later find out that an almost similar concept with better execution would convince me in the form of Yoku's Island Express. But a couple of years ago, I was specifically researching hidden gems I might have missed due to my ignorance of Sega during the console war, when there also had been monetary reasons to focus on one platform only.

It seems Codemasters' Psycho Pinball had been a UK or European exclusive anyway, so a huge part of you readers might possibly have missed it too, back then. Codemasters had been known for their Dizzy games and Micro Machines already. They would then later move on to create the TOCA and Colin McRae Rally games, some of my absolute favorite racers on the Sony Playstation. They had actually published Advanced Pinball Simulator in 1988, so maybe another Pinball wasn't exotic in their roster, but let me assure you it's no comparison at all.

Knowing Pinball Dreams the selection of four tables in Psycho Pinball isn't much of a surprise. There's a horror, a western and an underwater theme, all three well thought through tables fun to play on their own, but mostly as training for the fourth, Psycho, that is a complete table, but will have portals to the other ones. Until now, I've probably played hundreds of hours on Psycho, quite a lot at first, but I wheel this game out every other month for years now.

Psycho Pinball for me has just the right amount of craziness on a more or less traditional Pinball layout, because it doesn't try to add too much, like for instance the aforementioned Pokemon Pinball, that's rather limited on the Pinball, so it tries to keep you occupied on the catching and developing of Pokemon, which is a nice touch, but something I'd rather pick up a Pokemon game for and not a Pinball game.

On the contrary, Psycho Pinball has got enough Pinball mechanics to explore the triggering of events on each table. And it totally has the physics for that, which is essential. As a Pinball wizard, you neither need a perfect body nor a perfect soul, but if one thing, you wanna have control. Tilting is a helpful option, but it even feels right to save the ball with the outermost tip of your flipper.

Whilst the scrolling is quite a decent emulation of your view following the ball, there sure is a learning curve from chaotic attempts of keeping the ball in play to increasing highscore chances intentionally. Complemented by minigames on the old school screen or inserts of simple platformer mazes there's enough variability to make the hunt for a score of at least 100000000 most enjoyable.

Psycho Pinball is also fast enough, which is a huge problem with a lot of Pinball video games in general. Often enough the scrolling, if there even is some, isn't smooth enough and the ball just doesn't behave right. In Psycho Pinball even launching the ball feels like you're actually pulling back a spring mechanism and every curve or bounce feels like it should be that way.

I'm avoiding the word authentic, because within the limitations of a Mega Drive Psycho Pinball does a great job at creating an illusion, but there's at least the cost of graphical brilliance. The squeaky score is something not everybody can handle, but I actually think it's quite appropriate thinking of it as an overdriven speaker at a noisy arcade. The graphics appear rather pragmatic, probably aware that too many fancy details would rather slow down the processor, but it is actually the speed and dedication to playability that makes you forget about that swiftly.

In fact, the clear design adds to the orientation during fast bounces and aiming for the Jackpot, emphasized by increased tension of the soundtrack when you've completed the letters for "Psycho", probably works best the way it is. Psycho Pinball even today is addictive and just playing it again, I didn't even realize an hour had passed instantly.

Aiming for the preset highscores is doable by the way, but will need some warming up, because Psycho Pinball doesn't throw points at you for nothing. I remember having played once on an ancient Pinball cabinet my then girlfriend's father owned and on that you hardly scored more than a few thousand.

With more complicated targets an upscaling in numbers makes sense, but scoring almost 3 billion for instance on my first play of the mentioned Little Mermaid Pinball for Gameboy Color was just as ridiculous as that one time I left credits in the Star Trek TNG cabinet, because I didn't manage to lose within the twenty or so minutes we waited for our takeaway food. Just like the person who had left some balls for me to pick up on. They probably didn't make much money with the cabinet at that diner.

That's just one of the many things Psycho Pinball does right, I guess. Scoring the first ten million as a beginner seems like a hard task, but the more you learn the mechanics, the better you get at combining events, increasing your bonus and scoring at mini games. It's sheer pleasurable excitement realizing to be in the zone to beat the next highscore and if there's one thing missing, it's a battery in the cartridge to actually save your success.

But that's not a very bitter pill to swallow in trade for the awesome game Psycho Pinball is. I can understand if you're not much into this kind of gaming or you're more after the state of the art simulation, that this isn't the game for you. But if you're interested in good Pinball games check it out. Especially for the Mega Drive, and I've been playing pretty much any Pinball there is for the console, it is as good as it gets.

When I recently reviewed Irem's rather disappointing Blade Master, I was thinking Hack'n'Slash or Brawlers in general might just not be their thing. Well, with Undercover Cops it turns out that might actually be the case.

Sure, I had expectations, due to the information the Undercover Cops score had been physically released and there had been two Manga issues dedicated to the Beat'em'up as well. You don't see that too often!

Having read Undercover Cops is Streets of Rage vs. Metal Slug wasn't the best introduction either, to be truthfully honest. There is a point in that description, but it's nothing like at least I would have imagined that at all.

It is true, depending on the cabinet, up to two or three players can pick amongst three more or less futuristic law enforcers with random two lines of backstory and it so happens two are male and one is female. And it's a generic Brawler, so it must be declared as Streets of Rage, right?

The team behind Undercover Cops is supposed to have moved on to form Nazca and made Metal Slug. I wouldn't say you see that directly in the art style, because here you don't have the comical cute characters, but the colors actually are from a quite similar palette.

With all the small animals to pick up and especially the vehicles of Undercover Cops you wouldn't necessarily say it's the same world as in Metal Slug, but looking back you kinda see sort of a handwriting. It's just a whole different blueprint.

I wouldn't compare Undercover Cops too much with Blade Master as well, by the way, because the Hack'n'slash, even though you are fighting monsters rather than human enemies in both, was rooting in that Sword and Sorcery aesthetics enough to make it enjoyable for its designs. Details that get lost a lot in the muted, earthy tones of Undercover Cops.

It's true this palette sets the Brawler apart from most of its contemporary rivals and may the remote spray of blood not really make a huge impact, some stages are almost an ossuary with plentiful skeletons and swarms of ravens just there to set the mood. A huge pot of blood stew might have been the most horror you would have been able to get out of a Beat'em'up of its day.

The problem is this doesn't make a game. Undercover Cops uses one button for jump, one for attack and as often pressing the two results in an escape or rescue super move, the kind that draws from your life bar. You can dash or dash attack, which can be helpful at times. Nothing really astonishing.

The reason Brawler aficionados return to those games is a miracle on its own. There seems to be a fascination about getting into the zone, beating along with the score's rhythm, taking an elevator or two and not wasting too many credits. Those games are most pleasant in co-op of course, especially with good friends and maybe playing Undercover Cops on my own was a mistake for exactly that reason.

What Undercover Cops has in common with both Irem games and the Metal Slug it was compared to is being merciless. It begins with not allowing you to approach the enemy from below, so your attacks would more likely hit before you're getting smacked. Keeping the opponents under control is difficult in general.

We are used to face multiple doubles of enemy characters in a Brawler, but Undercover Cops is relentless in introducing one type and then either immediately increasing the wave of the same face until you're definitely fucked, or it pushes the quality of the character's attacks first and then throws six and eight more at you.

It doesn't stop there. You think a cyborg with an arm telescoping over half the screen is a bitch, because if you don't immediately throw it down a trash compactor to kill it, it will do exactly that to you? Again and again? Well, congratulations, you will meet that bastard again a couple of times to have him throw you into the abyss from a helicopter and as you'd instantly lose a life then, you better use your rescue move.

You might want to call that challenging, but this, despite surprises like a screen filling carpet attack from the off, is the basic principle of Undercover Cops. So it may be fun to pick up complete pillars and i-beams as weapons, if all that the game does is swarming you more and more, obviously with the intention to collect your money for more credits, I don't think it's really satisfying.

You might miss to stop the bomb by a simple attack along the way on your first playthrough and realize you could only trigger the bad ending like I did. I don't know how encouraging this would be, if you didn't notice what you did wrong and there was no internet to research, but after my second beating of the game I can tell you it's more like calming my OCD than it was enough of a difference to legitimate another twenty or so credits (luckily played on a flatrate).

By the way, I've played the Undercover Cops Alpha Renewal Version and having compared it to excerpts from both the regular World and Japanese versions I don't think any of them would be worse or more fun than the other. It's basically the same bland game without enough modification (if at all) to make one version more special than the other. I'd especially have replaced the almost loungy score completely to complement the action instead of toning it down.

It's totally possible it's just not for me or maybe I'm just not good enough to find joy in Undercover Cops. I mean, there must be a reason others gave it five stars, right? I can just assume how I would have reacted back in the day.

But since before mentioned Streets of Rage had been out, Final Fight anyway, that kinda finally spawned that Beat'em'up mania originating in Double Dragon and the likes, Violent Storm was just about to be released and games like Vendetta offered the comical fun that is so omitted in the somewhat serious Undercover Cops, I just don't see a huge window in that Irem's game would have had a realistic chance with me.

So I don't know Japanese or Pachinko, but I was curious how that's like, cause it has quite similar origins to Pinball. Anyway, there's that gambling hall in Pachinko Challenger and the machines seem to incorporate slot mechanics here. I started with 5000 balls and managed to make over 51k out of them. Could play any machine just once, but didn't try all cause they're all the same it seems. The guy at the stairs let me pass to the next floor but the first machine with its different design sucked thousands from me and I realized I almost spent two hours watching flickering stuff that doesn't make much sense to me, so I quit. I'm probably more the hold em guy when it comes to gambling. This is very passive, even though you can control the intensity of how balls are pushed into the machine. Then they just hit stuff on their way down, hopefully increasing your score represented by your stock of balls. Could be more fun should it have deeper RPG elements, but since I can't read what the other characters are saying, it doesn't add to the experience. I'm wondering why the hall is that empty anyway. Those places seem to be packed in Japan travel videos on YouTube. The two different kinds of machines I played don't look bad though simplistic, but aren't at all as fascinating as a Pinball table can be. If there is a similar attraction in Pachinko, the game failed at transporting that via the simulation. If there's something else Pachinko Challenger offers I totally missed that due to language problems. I would have kept this crude comment part of my log, but as this is rather special interest it might be the only piece of information ever posted on these pages and I doubt you want to put in the effort to change that. But if you do, I'd like to learn what I might have not understood.

You know the drill. The arcade is crowded, but there's one vacant machine banned to a remote corner. It's just another vertical Shmup, one like many. This one is called Stagger I or Red Hawk. It might be named anything else. Who really cares?

The characters look like drawings from an eighties bootleg game, but the attract mode shows some adequate gameplay. Why not waste some change on that one?

Once familiar with the charge blast things get easier. Stagger I is not exactly bullet hell, but nonetheless requires a fair amount of dodging abilities for sure. You have a chance to memorize opponent behavior as there's not much variability, but the game will also try to fuck you up at moderate occasions. As long as you feed the machine, it will let you pick up at the exact same spot, though.

Your shot patterns are different depending on the character you pick, just like the three bombs you shouldn't hold back and go wasted as you die. You're not about to 1cc Stagger I the first instant, though it was fairly easy to finish on a budget, even for me, returning to the genre after a long hiatus from mostly horizontals like R-Type or Darius.

With my sporadic encounters at arcades and some retro collections plus my recent catching up on vertical Shmups I won't be able to tell you what pioneers exactly inspired each and every detail of Stagger I, but I can tell you quite sincerely, Afega, who appear like spezializing on Korean knock offs on first sight, ungracefully nicked a fair share of tropes and good mechanics to combine them in a game that ain't really convincing or special.

The digitized crew pictures in the credit sequence kinda underline this impression, screaming Agefa had not at all been on par with the industry, rather acting on a stale level of at least five years too late. But even that didn't prevent me from rushing into a second playthrough of Stagger I right after the first one.

Once you have collected enough power ups to rely on satellites backing you up and your shots are filling the screen to clear what a possible second player would have helped you out with, Stagger I is actually not the big deal except for the more resilient enemies. The more saddening it is, should you make a mistake and have to build again from the beginning.

Of course the futuristic military theme is nothing groundbreaking and the score hits a spot between catchy and nerve wracking, but in that introductory scenario of Stagger I or nothing, I wouldn't expect genre aficionados to be completely disappointed and casuals might not even notice in retrospect it's only a substitute. There are worse ways to spend 25 minutes, like figuring out why the hell they thought we needed cut scenes of picking up oil after every stage.

Konami was one of the major video game developers in the eighties and nineties, but a prosperity in amaranthines is usually backed by mediocre titles to fill up the roster. A workhorse in the case of Konami would possibly be seen as a runner in other circumstances, but that didn't prevent them from the occasional odd decision.

I mean, yeah, just as on other games like R-Type back in 1987, H.R.Giger's designs had a significant influence on Contra, so Konami probably liked Aliens, but licensing a movie four years after its release?

I admit, things had been going slower in the eighties. It took quite a while for motion pictures to be distributed internationally and availability of rental tapes was a snail operation. You then often had to wait more than a year until you could actually buy the VHS finally and catching something on TV took ages till it happened. The target group probably was just discovering the movies and meanwhile, the Alien franchise was kept alive in pop culture by the Dark Horse comic books.

One thing though caught my attention, as I was previously researching on Konami's 1992 X-Men Beat'em'up, that somehow was peculiar, too. Marvel had its ups and downs at the time and despite action figures have played a role in their survival, there firstly was a quite popular X-Men cartoon shortly after the brawler got released, though it had nothing in common with the game.

In fact, the brawler was based upon the pilot X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men that didn't convince enough with another baffling choice, the use of designs from a more successful X-Men era around 1980. Probably the writing wasn't the best either. But was it just a cheap license for Konami back then, or did they forecast the X-Men heralding a new era?

Filming for Alien³ finally started in January 1991, after several drafts had been pitched since 1987. Konami could have actually speculated on the revival and echo. If you experienced Batmania around 89/90, you knew movies could still have an impact of enormous proportions and it was then, when Konami's business with western licenses such as Turtles, Simpsons, G.I. Joe or Asterix flourished.

But why then was the game released a whole year before the new movie even was shot? Was there enough anticipation to be exploited before a possible Alien³ license game came out? Did Konami intend to apply for a follow up license or was that already gone to Probe for development of home versions? With Sega's rail shooter Alien³: The Gun hitting the arcades not earlier than 1993, there might have still been an open slot. I rarely have so many unanswered questions about a game.

But back to Aliens. After a few not so noteworthy adaptations on home computers, none other than Square had obtained an Aliens sublicense from Activision to program Aliens: Alien 2 for the MSX in 1987. So there was an actual Run and Gun game before, that kinda stayed true to the movie.

Well, you were clearing areas filled with roaming Facehuggers, Chestbursters and Warriors with the Queen as boss for each stage. Some victims had been woven in the background and some Xenomorph heads and bodies were attached to the walls.

Konami built upon that, loosely adapting the patterns with their formidably matching routines of corridors, shafts, sewers and the random elevator of course. Though digitized images from the movie set the mood as an intro, they supposedly didn't license the actor likenesses for Ripley (player 1) and Hicks (player 2).

We immediately notice one major difference to the Square version, as the characters don't jump, which is realistic, due to the large rifle, but plays counter intuitively within the genre. This sure is neither the next Contra nor your average brawler. You have one action button for a standing and another for a crouched shot.

As you need the hunkered position for the feebles, but will also hit most large critters with it, it is more likely you keep walking stages firing like an epileptic crab, which indeed plays as awkward as it sounds. Also for boss patterns it is therefore more relaxing to team up, just as games like Aliens are intended for.

Konami have made a few additions that I'd like to focus on following the exposition. Aliens was a change for the franchise as it wasn't suspenseful survival inspired by movies like The Thing From Another World, Forbidden World, It! The Terror From Beyond Space or Planet of the Vampires anymore. After we've seen the threat, the theme could easily be transferred into dark eighties action horror. A perfect scenario for a shooter.

But do you remember 1990? Things had been intense primary or neon colors back then, heavy metal has drifted away from being evil and most horror films were comedies. R-Rated movie franchises like Rambo or Robocop had branched out as cartoons aimed at children.

Kenner, known for their Star Wars toys, had already tried to follow the success with the Alien brand in 1979, though it remained a short-lived experiment due to massive resistance against those horror creatures. But we know today that in 1992, Aliens returned to become their next top seller for a couple of waves.

Remember I was mentioning that canceled X-Men show? Well, Kenner came up with the idea to promote their Alien toys as a multimedia brand named Operation: Aliens. Whilst few products got in circulation, the planned cartoon under the same moniker got dumped under mysterious circumstances.

You can speculate it had something to do with the wild production history of Alien³ the line was supposed to complement. Another reason might be Fox thought of the concept as too gruesome, especially after a renewed act for children's TV, that was affecting marketing strategies as well.

The fascinating point is, that we don't know the role Konami played between all that, as their Aliens game seemingly precedes that schedule by roughly two years.

Konami and Kenner, the latter then decided to still release the toys under the Aliens banner, had been facing the same problem: The Alien beastiary at the time was quite limited. So just as Kenner decided to imaginatively create Xenomorphs in motley images of the former lifeform they infested, Konami brought in new organism variants.

Though stage boss designs merged with video game tropes, especially other minions got mocked for their supposedly non-canonical appearance. I'd argue that ideas have been nicked from other Post-Alien media like Carpenter's The Thing, so that a spider, a gargoyle or a zombie can be seen as genre typical embellishment.

The more interesting question to me is, was it just Konami hitting Zeitgeist or was there an actual interaction between creators? Was the more colorful approach a well of ideas to Kenner in the end?

Despite the cinematic ending, Konami's Aliens is otherwise to me nothing but light entertainment within a genre I like and based on a franchise I love. It's good for half an hour of fun every other year, especially accompanied by a good friend.

In my opinion though you're lucky finding a machine based on the Japanese version, that compared to the US cabinet isn't only having the more accurate color palette, but also appears more balanced by omitting the unwieldy vertical vehicle passage.

If it wasn't for the franchise then that version would have to be compared to the contemporary Alien Storm, whose Shinobi inspired cross hairs passages might be from a more static position, but still turns out as the more dynamic (and playable) alternative.

Direct competition might just as well have been a reason Aliens hadn't been unleashed to the Mega Drive, though it could have been released for the SNES that first became available by the end of November 1990 in Japan. On the other hand, Konami had to prioritize their own franchises as well, starting with Gradius III, and as far as I remember Nintendo still limited releases to keep a higher level of quality either.

Based upon those factors Konami might have even decided to only license the movie rights for a one off not to be adapted on other platforms. Before mentioned X-Men is another one of those odd licenses maintaining exclusivity to the arcades, that got challenged by the increasing technical quality of home consoles of course.

On the other hand, Aliens isn't exactly the game I would have picked to be amongst the five or six titles I could afford in a year as a kid. Maybe it's just perfect the way it went. Between a few hidden gems and the classics available on numerous compilations anyway, we still need a couple of programs at recent arcades or video game museums, that we can enjoy without regrets about that we can't really take them home.

As most players will not rush through on a single credit at first try, but the motivation for constant replays isn't all that high in my opinion, Aliens might actually be one of the machines you could be able to quickly set a new high score at your local arcade. That's one more reason to waste some change on a not more than decent license game, whose selling points aren't too strong individually, but add up to compensate for its deficiencies.

I have a heart for arcade oddities that never got a port for home consoles. Being a weird brawler/shmup mashup with rather decent large sprites for 1988, Taito's Superman sure falls into that category.

Back then, I remember, having bought a couple of Superman comic books, so I would probably have played the game as well, should I've been stumbling over it. It was my orientation phase for American superheroes after European and Disney comics and sadly the newsstands in the German countryside only offered a few examples, which also had to do with how those books had been distributed over here.

Anyway, it sure wasn't the best time to grow up on the Man of Steel and complemented by the Spider-Man cartoon show, the webslinger soon became my favorite series instead. Sups on the other hand, don't know if there is really a majority of fans for the late eighties books, had gone downhill from the rather decent Richard Donner movie to some of the rushed fails of Cannon, who broke our small hearts as well with Masters of the Universe in 1987.

The nineties would have something different in store. Manga, Image comics or even real underground splatter comics had been a lot more interesting to my adolescent self than the Lois & Clark soap opera, so please excuse Superman never continued playing a role in my life, especially after discovering Batman through Tim Burton, whose retro-futuristic design framed me to look for somber sides of the eighties Dark Knight and The Killing Joke became one of my most beloved graphic novels.

Decades later, I sure have no memory left for any contemporary Superman characters, but I remember the movie theme Taito used extensively here. The odd inverted color Superman for player 2 isn't canon, I suppose. The creators also decided on a weird gameplay crossover, maybe forgivable in context with the Man of Steel exclusively, because Superman can actually do these things.

1988 isn't exactly the peak for brawlers either. You'd rather still have found run and gun games of varying quality or platformers with sometimes astonishingly wicked physics. Just remember how you've been practically standing in the air to get a jump in Nastar done.

I can only surmise for that reason it might have been less of a surprise at the time, when you realize by pressing up you rise into the air instead of being forced to walk down the alley like you would in any ordinary brawler. You still could do that. In fact to unlock some of the few power up items you also have to destroy objects based on the ground, but as the enemies can fly, you should too.

Whilst you don't use a jump button, the two triggers are punch and kick for both the horizontal ground and the usually following vertical flying passage. But then suddenly Superman speeds up in the air, horizontally again, being able to punch and shoot laser beams. You better use it, as meteorites and missiles are rushing towards you. In higher levels different obstacles are added.

It's a game play's fever dream actually. One moment it's Asteroids and a war game at the same time, then you're dodging boss fire like in R-Type, just that it lacks variable weaponry. In fact, you can only collect some life up, a single projectile shot you don't have to charge for, or a nuke. It might have been a little better, had I known from the beginning you can as well charge a shot by holding punch. I was too busy blasting two finger triplets on the fire button instead.

Just from the looks Superman might have been released in 1991 and still wouldn't have stood out negatively too much. I could also very well imagine though it could have been easily ported to the Amiga 500 and even more so the Sega Mega Drive, allowing for use of both action buttons.

Both systems had enough programs being just as redundant in enemy design and the quite linear formations shouldn't have been much of an issue either. It's possible the license just didn't allow it, as sometimes it feels like arcade producers of the late eighties didn't expect much from a home console port and so they went for just the one option.

Superman though also isn't an exception from typical arcade mechanics, throwing stuff at you in a way to obviously make sure you have to keep feeding coins to the machine. In this case especially enemies catching you in a spider's web or simply clinging to you can be a huge pain in the ass.

As innovative as Superman seems to be at first sight, the novelty shine wears off quickly and the 30-45 minutes playtime is the absolute maximum you'd want to invest. Taito actually gave a good impression of how little was made from the franchise's potential at the time in general, even though it has its moments and might still be the best Superman arcade game ever produced.

They were clearly looking for something different. It might even just have been a year or two too early to come up with a concept like that. The shmup part, gameplay that was well established since the mid 80ies, actually works better than the brawling part, a genre whose epitome was emerging between 1989 and 1991, in my opinion.

Having received rather mixed than good reviews, Superman is quoted to be amongst the most successful machines in Japan for at least a month and so it might have raised some attention with its fresh composition of elements. I find it a little hard to appreciate the game from a contemporary perspective as so much happened in-between. There are so many games I'd prefer to Superman, though it still fascinates me for what it did.

I really appreciate Stilstand as a piece of art. It's about an hour of hatched panels interrupted by small minigames like a Flappy Bird adaptation and it's about the depression, anxiety and loneliness of a woman in Copenhagen.

In a way, I can relate to this stasis, reducing life to few controllable rituals, whilst outside is like a torrent passing by too quickly to keep up. In general it's probably something that needs to be addressed, as it's happening everywhere around us and it's challenging for the affected to escape that maelstrom.

The bitter taste left by Stilstand though is, that involvement of the player is rather an excuse, as there's no difference to the animation or story, if you click a single highlighted area or anywhere else to proceed, if you move the arm to drink and smoke or let it just happen or if you start with one or another of three outfits, when you go through all of them anyway.
I couldn't make any change by picking other dialogue options as well. Stilstand always ends up the same.

Now, it's possible that it's quite a reasonable representation of helplessness with depressed people, as they're not just sad and can't just cheer up, like some might like them to. Maybe just like with the visual novel Lydia the rudimentary interaction is rather meant to integrate the player emotionally than keeping you awake. Stilstand will sure keep you up with ruminative thoughts.

I'm just not sure the game brought me any further. It's literally Stilstand. I didn't learn much from it, that I didn't know and there was no positive release or advice to work from. As a depiction of the problem Stilstand might actually be insightful to the uninitiated and maybe for some it's a nice signal they're not alone or they might be able to paraphrase shown symptoms to break their circle, but if not offering more interactive perspectives like in One Night Stand for instance, I would at least have expected a little encouragement.

It's possible I'm mixing up artist and artisan, because as a work of art in its sheer existence Stilstand is not in question. But on a gaming platform, like the Nintendo Switch in my case, a program should also be measured by its functionality.

Video games have evolved since they've just been simple arcade novelties, simulations of ping pong or trying to shoot random objects, but Lydia has nothing to do with the realms of highly elaborated AAA productions. Instead, it's part of an independent movement, experimenting with what else those programs can actually accomplish and being on a shoestring budget can lead to swerve to new forms of creativity.

Technically, Lydia isn't really worth mentioning. Shadowy scribbled b/w drawings complement mumbled, but subtitled, dialogues to mostly a visual novel. You can sometimes pick the type of your answer or sluggishly roam the screen to basically fall into the next conversation. There is no real option it seems and no challenging puzzle.

Instead, the vestigial participation supports caring for Lydia, a kid lost in the somber void of a deranged family. The chapters jump a little back and forth in time to barely create more than a superficial Rorschach representation of imaginative escapism and facing bitter actuality, yet it is maybe even easier to relate that way.

Every family has its dysfunctionalities and if you managed to grow up with the smallest collateral damage, then you at least witnessed enough comparable scenes at friend's houses or on the playground. Lydia on the other hand presents an hour of downfall to fill you with sustaining consternation for a reason.

In addition to this little game you have the option to buy the #Lydiadonation DLC, that will unlock a coloring book for Lydia and raise funds for charity. I keep it like this is true, as I can't confirm, but after games rather got abused for commercials or promoting an agenda for years, I think the intention of doing something good is refreshing. As an interactive storybook with a similar theme though I'd recommend Little Misfortune instead.