Whenever I encounter a shmup on the SNES that isn't annoying me right out of the gate, a weird thing happens where I try to imagine it being in Super R-Type's place during my early childhood. I know comparisons to it have been getting as stale as the bread I had to throw out this morning, but it's my number one frame of reference for this system in particular.

Using my time machine to go backwards and play Darius Twin after turning my brain into sludge from gazing at Super Nova/Darius Force may have successfully drove up my appreciation for Twin. In a vacuum Twin is not that ferocious of a shmup, compared to Super R-Type it is like a paper tiger taking on a storm. On original hardware I was able to beat this in about four tries, and numerous times I found easy safe spots at the top and bottom parts of the screen. Twin lacks fangs, but because of this it flows much better than Super R-Type and doesn't feel like it's trying to turn into gravy due to hideous amounts of slowdown. In a way, it does feel like the developers feared the hardware chugging too much if they introduced more dangerous obstacles and patterns, and thus held themselves back especially towards a console market. If you had released Twin a few years later, you potentially would've had the difficulty inflated with the enemies tanking more shots and the cheat code for 50 ships completely taken out of the game, aka the "Streets of Rage 3" problem, except in a shmup and if Taito had gotten as sour as Sega or Konami did on the rental market.

Of course, it also helps when you're allowed to make mistakes. Twin does not let you continue, but will allow you to respawn on the spot with your full weapons intact. This is heavenly compared to Super Nova which punished you via getting lobotomized by it's use of fade outs and load screens, while Super R-Type may as well give you the electric chair for a single fuck up. I feel like I would've cleared Twin in about a week as a little one assuming I maintained focus on it, and wasn't distracted by Super Mario World or something. I'm not entirely sure how that would've affected my thoughts on it, because in a way Super R-Type feeling insurmountable kinda added to it's allure for me and made it more mysterious and imprint itself onto my mind.

I suppose it's all apples and oranges, because both Darius Twin and Super R-Type are 1991 SNES shmups that are often viewed as 6/10 at best probably. My only conclusion is that it was probably a nostalgia shmup for a few 90s kids growing up. I'm glad to have experienced their personal Super R-Type.

in now-sterilized, man-made familiar locales, we find our hero stripped of her defining characteristics and sense of self.

opposes super metroid’s encouraging game feel with something almost akin to a horror game. you don’t want to continue searching this facility. you want out. to go back to your super days and forget this fusion. danger is always lurking right around the corner. its linearity does away with the extrinsic exploration of yesteryear and forces the player to frantically discover unorthodox pathways and tunnels as samus’ last resort to escape the stale and artificial landscapes that crumble at “her” feet. now you see how it feels to be those Geemers and Kihunters once taken out by the masses within planet zebes. you are the helpless one. powerless in the shadow of your former glory. samus now uses more organic controls to complement her newfound body, creating further distinction between her and her “imposter.”

i find it to be pretty interesting how every game in this series tends to be its own piece yet always feel connected to its companions. they all tie back to their similar atmospheres, exploration and fear obviously but its their executions that each carry their own unprecedented singularities and efficacies. metroid 2: the black sheep that strikes terror via one’s commonly identifiable monotony. super metroid: the crowd-pleaser that invokes its trepidation based off of the unknown. and finally fusion: creating fear centered on what is known. we know our over-powered cold-blooded doppelganger is following us and awaiting our next move. we know monsters like the Nightmare and Ridley are out there. inevitability sweeps up emotion and carries it for as long as it sees fit.

there’s overall a broader focus on creating anxiety and suspicion here, compared to super where those things were more intentional byproducts of how the different areas were designed. fusion senses the player’s discomposure and plays around with it to a shockingly powerful degree. all the more satisfying in its climax where we finally get to strike some mania into our foes. features a story that somewhat subtlety places a critique on the nature of science. our once free alien friends now imprisoned for research along with other past monstrosities. the narrative unfolds cleanly and in just the right amount of doses to not feel too intrusive. the enemy is closer than it seems, but so are our friends.

not sure how i’d rank this one against its siblings but i could say that for all of them, due to their differences as previously mentioned. they work expertly in tandem with one another. this was one of the only nintendo franchises i actually fully enjoyed, hats off to nintendo r&d1. also happy 20th to this game, coincidentally started my playthrough on its release day lol. dread is coming soon….

Mega Turrican and Super Turrican are both enormous steps up from the original two games, but still at times overrun with tedium and strange design choices. They're also not very different at all, although they are separate games (except sharing the dumbass alien hive level). Mega Turrican is probably the better of the two, but only by just a hair.

Something I think this series as a whole thus far is really lacking in (besides good level design) is charm. There's nothing quite distinct about it in gameplay or style, and aesthetically it's not very far removed from the trashfire of other garish Amiga games that randomly spawned out of the United Kingdom. I found that the water level is especially ugly, and while it may be deliberately going for a murky look, I really don't think it's pulled off well. There is a pretty hilariously bad looking animesque opening cutscene too, but that's the closest this gets to any visual appeal really.

The weapons are a bit weaker in this one than Super Turrican. There's no real reason to ever use the blue one, and the freezing laser is replaced with a grappling hook that only really makes way for more tedious level design (though it does help set it apart a little).

To put it simply, Mega Turrican is better than their previous efforts in the series, but it's...still Turrican. If you're going to play any of them, make it Mega or Super. Can't speak on Super Turrican 2 yet, I'll get around to that eventually and then I won't have to bother with these games anymore lmfao

A technical marvel of computer wizardry by Steve Wozniak. However, as I have seen it reiterated time and again, most recently in the (so far) excellent ATARI 50, I wish to stress that Steve Jobs had minimal (read: no) involvement with the development or design of Breakout.

I think it's an interesting enough tale that you should dive into it yourself, but here's the basic rundown:

Wozniak was working at Hewlett-Packard, and got a call from Jobs about the work he was doing at Atari. Jobs' job was to give Atari's games a final test for any tweaks necessary. Bushnell assigned Jobs the task of making a single-player Pong-like where the player would break bricks. Jobs was to receive a ~$750 bonus for every chip under fifty since Bushnell disliked how many chips Atari's games were using. Bushnell offered the job to Jobs because he had heard Jobs' friend Wozniak had made a Pong-clone using only 30 chips. Jobs only told Wozniak that there would be a $700 bonus for getting things under 50 chips, and $1,000 if they were under 40. Jobs told Wozniak they would split that $700/$1,000 fee. To meet the four day deadline, Wozniak worked four nights straight at Atari while performing his main job at Hewlett-Packard. Jobs would breadboard Wozniak's designs and wire the chips. Jobs and Wozniak ended up with mononucleosis. With a finalised design at fourty-four chips, Jobs paid Wozniak half the $700 he told Wozniak they would earn. The actual bonus earned was $5,000, and Wozniak wouldn't find out the truth until years later. In his own words:

"[...]we were kids, you know. He got paid one amount, and told me he got paid another. He wasn't honest with me, and I was hurt. But I didn't make a big deal about it or anything. Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don't really understand why he would've gotten paid one thing and told me he'd gotten paid another. [...] I never let stuff like what happened with Breakout bother me. Though you can disagree -- you can even split from a relationship -- you don't have to hold it against the other. You're just different. That's the best way to live life and be happy."

For further reading, I suggest Steve Wozniak's biography iWoz, this interview from the December 1984 edition of BYTE magazine, and this Q&A from Wozniak's website.

Otocky is one of those games that's really special as you see it isn't just a shmup with a music theme. You actually give your own notes to the song with your own weapon and despite how awful that may sound, it works wonderfully with the added sound used for the Disk System.

Your objective is to collect enough notes for the boss at the end to show up and by the end it can get a little annoying but it's simple enough. The bosses are a little too repetitive for my liking but I'll take that over being frustrated.

Once you beat the game you can do a BGM mode and Music Maker to relax and think about how splendid the music is in this game and you can even set what instrument you want your weapon to sound. It's really nice.

It's a game that I feel like deserves more attention as it's one of the best games on the Disk System. Granted maybe my score is a little too low but it was still a joy to play regardless. Play this game if you haven't, it's worth an hour of your time.

Systematic Genocide Simulator, brought to you by Nintendo. Complete with jump scares, labyrinthian and borderline non-euclidean oppressive spaces to stumble through, bizarre and uncomfortable musical choices, a camera that manages to convey uneasy claustrophobia in a 1991 handheld game, and an ending that gives you the very companion that you set out to kill and makes you contemplate your actions through 5 minutes of uneventful walking set to melancholic yet vaguely friendly music as you realize you're the monster. How did this get made?

A game that desperately wants to evoke Spider-Man: No Way Home but more readily brings to mind Spider-Man 2 - specifically, the moment where the community comes together to protect the identity and reputation of a hero in the aftermath of an excessive strain beyond their means. A testament to the character of Bayonetta is what’s singularly heartening about this: in your thirties it’s rare that all your friends will participate in a simultaneous video game zeitgiest, and only a character with her generational gravity can bring us all together at once, once more, to wilfully overlook myriad flaws with presentation, performance, coherence and competence, united in our defence of something that so so often does not deserve the slightest of kind words. A game that no one - not even the developers - expected to exist; a game that generates such powerful gratitude to the gods of gaming that we can all overlook a bereft of almost everything that made the original a bulletproof classic, appreciating instead the offering made in lieu to us, a fucked up little frankenstinian Marvel vs Capcom 2 equivalent in the CAG set, incoherent character action that’s so broken by virtue of its gilded broken pieces that you can’t help but be glad they were able to stitch together something, anything at all, from bloated shit-pressed platinum non-fungible giblets found floating in the latrines behind the headquarters of Microsoft and Square Enix. I didn’t start enjoying this until it was over forever.

The Cowboys (El Loco x Craig Boone crossover fic)

WARNING: GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE

Characters: Craig Boone (Fallout: New Vegas), El Loco (The Last Bounty Hunter)
Written by: Anonymous_Bird_99
Running series. Last Updated: 3 months ago
Words: 22
Genres: Action, AU, Drama, Fantasy, Fiction, Gamer, Magic, Mystery, Political, Romantic, Sci-Fi, Shoujo, Supernatural, Thriller, Yaoi.

PAGE 1

Boone: My wife is dead.
Loco: Want tequilla?
Boone: My wife is dead.
Loco: El Loco be happy te kill ya hahahaha.
Boone: My wife is dead.

THE END

Likes: 5296
Comments: 32

All rights reserved to Backloggd™️.

There were two big themes very prevalent in the 90s for various types of media, it was tons of blood and gore and/or copious amounts of gross out humor. I'm not entirely sure who was responsible for the latter, but I'm just gonna go ahead and belch it at Ren & Stimpy, since I enjoy farting in the general direction of John K.

As you could imagine, Boogerman is full of that stuff to the point you'd be surprised it didn't come with a bunch of Earthbound scratch and sniff samples or a wad of green substance inside the Genesis case. If that were true that'd probably be the least demanded sealed in-box collectible. A messy situation for any collector when their item has to bring a faint stench of unkempt porta potty to the bookshelf.

Going in I was expecting this to be completely below-average at best, but not quite unplayable. I'm not entirely sure where my very low opinion came from, I guess I just have such a distaste to the decade I grew up in that I was expecting the worst like Bloodstorm. The eponymous Boogerman is actually fairly well-equipped to deal with situations, having access to an arsenal of booger flicking, disrespectful loogie hocking, belching, farting, etc. The only complaint I have is that Boogerman cannot belch while in the air, but it's rare that really mattered too much as boogie flicking worked well enough. The worst thing is actually the ability to jump on top of enemies, whose hitbox is often very finicky to the point I'm scared to death of the little shitball enemies as you need to be a bit precise with it.

The lame supervillains you fight as bosses are probably the most queasy part, not entirely because of the hillbilly stereotype poking fun at my heritage but because they all attack faster than Contra Hard Corp bosses, and seem to have more mysterious i-frames than bosses from an SNK fighter. They all follow the same strategy of "shoot a thing, move to the other side of the screen, do a thing maybe, move to the other side, repeat". It's simple, but still annoying when the final boss uses attacks that sweep 80% of the screen. I personally want to know how long it took them to come up with "Deoder Ant", because that just makes me nauseous. I'm nauseous.....I'm nauseous....

I was a bit hard on this one when I logged a rating at first, but playing it again it's more endearing than other bullshit that was out. I'd rather flick boogies at people than have to suffer through Bloodstorm and the other garbage edgelord shit coming out at the time.

A Dick and Lick Adventure
A Shit and Brick Adventure
A Peepee Poopoo Adventure