Sparkster is so cool! They tick so many random checkboxes for me!

[X] Anthro
[X] Cool Armor
[X] Jet Pack
[X] Goggles (Goggles are cool)
[X] Expert Mech Pilot

What endeared them so much to me too was actually their idle animation! They look so jovial, they're happpy to be the hero! Sparkster doesn't brood (Ignore the NA cover here), he's anxious to start the day and get to the rescue of their fair princess! He's a gallant jet-propelled knight who's a zoom zoomin' all around and beating up all the bad guys! Mr. Nutz, Punky Skunk and Zero The Kamikaze Squirrel are so angry that Sparkster is actually awesome! They are so mad! Sonic's got nothin' on Sparkster! Except merchandise apparently! What gives Konami? Where's my Sparkster nendoroid , Sparkster YGO cards, Sparkster party accessories, and Sparkster line of clothing?

Ah well, knowing my luck they'd use this look instead, and I'd be an absurdly sad rabbit. Fuck that guy, this is the boy you want.

This game rips, it's Saturday Morning Cartoon down to the empowering theme music that blares from the first stage and goes off after every victory. Sparkster's here to fuck shit up! Those damn pigs won't know what hit'em! You got that patented Konami difficulty, but thankfully they kept themselves in line and didn't Bayou Billy this one. As a matter of fact we actually got all the difficulties unlocked by default over here in NA! Thank the lord above that Konami wasn't dumb enough to make their mascot platformer harder than 90% of the Famicom library, although they were cheeky enough to call Japanese "Normal" the "Children" difficulty and cut you off from the final boss if you played on that. Couldn't help yourselves could you?

Konami: "Nope."

Easily one of the most memorable titles I ever played on the Genesis back then, you know it's memorable when I didn't even own this shit and only played on Sega Channel! I so wish I had owned it growing up though! I would've been a master at it and been Rocket Royalty of some sorts.

You're the coolest Sparkster! Look at him! AAAAA HE'S SO FUCKIN' COOL!!!

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is filled with good intentions, it's a tribute to the well beloved franchise Jet Set Radio, the level design is decent for most maps, there are many elements to unlock and places to tag graffitis on, multiple playable characters, on top of that, in addition to the rollerblade, player can also use skate, bmx or even parkour. Despite this blatant generosity, in the end, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a mile wide and an inch deep.

At its core, it's a game of scoring, with a clever combo system encouraging the player to exploit the whole map, unfortunately, with only 5 or 6 tricks available, it gets redundant really fast. That statement applies to every gameplay, it doesn't matter if the player uses skate, bmx or rollerblade, there is a lack of diversity. Also, each trick is pretty much a one button command, which entails, there is no such thing as satisfaction when a trick is pulled off. There is also no switch mechanics mid combo, players are forced to use specific points of interest, in order to change from bmx to skate for instance. Each character plays the same, there is no difference, the grand total of 20 playable characters is rendered useless.

Another dreadful mechanic in this game is that, whenever the player touches the ground, the combo is lost, to maintain it while on the ground, only one solution exists : manual. So not only the move list is pathetic, but the player must use the manual every single time to travel across the map. Like the rest, the manual is brain dead, easy to perform and last forever if you know how to reset it.

The gameplay loop really emanates no single atom of challenge or fun, and somehow the thing they call story, which is mandatory to unlock maps, achieves being even more third rate. The presence of some good OST doesn't help the whole experience either, considering to play a specific song in game, you have to find and unlock it first.

In conclusion, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk proposes a simplistic and boring experience, some mechanics present so little interest that even banks interest looks more inviting. From the story, to the unnecessary cast of playable characters, to the graffitis that I didn't even feel the need to talk about, the developers wasted too much time and effort on those elements. Meanwhile, the gameplay, the most crucial part remains laughable.

I was so bad at this and getting owned so swiftly that it was actually starting to affect my mood. I can't win at Yu-Gi-Oh. Can't even get a single win. No matter how hard I try or study or practice my opponent has drawn every card necessary to summon 3 powerful Fuck You monsters to the field in a single turn. I don't understand. The training mode doesn't even come close to preparing me for this kind of Getting Owned.

I work a shitty job, am in enormous debt, I can't afford new tires or a new battery for my car, nothing works out in my favor, and I can't win at Yu-Gi-Oh. I remember when the Cleveland Browns didn't win a single game all year. I wonder how the QB, Deshone Kizer, felt during that stretch. You practice, you study, you do everything possible and yet a single win constantly eludes you. That was on a pretty grand stage, in front of millions. My torment is just in my bedroom while I watch Colorado Rockies baseball, hoping their perpetual losing and inability to play baseball with even the slightest bit of competency will give me perspective on how small my inability to win a Children's Card Game is. But it doesn't. I look at the Colorado Rockies and all I see is a mirror, it's like looking at the devil himself, mocking me for my near-constant bumbling and giving me a microcosm of my various financial woes in the form of a Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon being summoned to the field on the second turn just to own me.

If I were younger and still had dreams and aspirations I would probably suffer through the near constant losing just to get a glimpse at what winning a game of Yu-Gi-Oh might look like, but this shit is actually bumming me out. At least when I watch the Shitty Ass Fucking Worthless Colorado Rockies, we are divided by a screen and I am not Nolan Jones letting an easy fly-ball pop out of my glove. Actually BEING that hapless loser is too much for me to bear.

Still highly recommended as it is NOT League of Legends, though.

hypothetical life partner walks into the room

"Vee, what are you doing?"

"Playing Balatro."

"It's 4 o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you playing Balatro?"

"Because I've lost control of my life."

I played the Pepper Grinder demo during Next Fest and I really loved it and I was eagerly anticipating the games release, and I immediately picked it up once it launched. Despite some of the good that crops up during the game, overall Pepper Grinder is a massively, MASSIVELY underwhelming game.

Before I get into the issues I have with the game, I just want to mention that the art and the aesthetic of this game is pretty fantastic. The pixel art, the animation, the color palette, how diverse every level looks, it's all really impressive stuff. Drilling through mountains and volcanoes and icebergs and ruined cities all make for really fun settings for the game. It's just disappointing that all of that feels wasted on levels that don't take advantage of what makes this game great.

Pepper Grinder excels when it's just Pepper, the Grinder, and a whole lot of dirt. The movement is tight, its fun, it's fast and it's got a lot of personality to it. The game throws in some fun gimmicks too like dousing lava with water to allow you to quickly drill through the magma before it melts again, or ice that will break behind you as you drill creating exciting moments of platforming in really unique ways. The game just discards these ideas so quickly that with a run time of roughly 3-4 hours, they feel very underutilized. Some of these ideas only appear once, or maybe twice out of 23 total levels and I just wish there was more I could do with them. And it absolutely does not help that there's so many parts of other levels that focus on all the things that don't make the game fun. Having to shoot rockets at ice takes longer than it needs to, 'combat' sections get old after the first one in level 1, and World 4 is almost entirely focused around these slower, less drilling inspired things. One entire level in World 4 has an entire three places to actually drill, and the rest is filled with unfun autoscroller combat with a machine gun. There's just far too much in this pretty short game that's just frustrating or unsatisfying. But even still, there's a lot of fun to be had when the game isn't focused on all the things that aren't fun. If the whole game was like this, it wouldn't feel so bad, except for one giant glaring problem: the bosses.

The boss battle in this game are outright bad. There's unfortunately not a single one that is fun, they're tedious and frustrating to fight and show off every single flaw the game has on offering. This game is just not built for these, they don't add anything to the experience and actively detract from it. The final boss in particular is especially bad, the first phase is fine (even though halfway through the AI broke for me), but the 2nd phase is genuinely a slog to fight. It's like one of the worst combat arenas I've experienced in a game since the good old Capra Demon fight in Dark Souls.
Just all round really frustrating bosses that do nothing to enhance the strengths of this game.

Maybe I went in expecting the wrong things, but this package has overall left me largely disappointed. So if you are like me, and you played the demo and really loved the fast paced drilling action and wanted to get this for more of that, I cannot recommend Pepper Grinder for how misused this games mechanics are that get focused on all the wrong things.

Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.

This game is real fun for no reason. I really enjoy it.
A Robot Basket Roguelite was not something I saw myself going "I have got to play more of that"

I do start gettin' shit on in the later I get into runs but that's jsut because the other robots are insane when not level 1.
But honestly it just makes me more motivated to level up my bots and DUNK ON 'EM

DUNKS ARE LIFE

This game is so slept on it’s crazy. Ubisoft making a AAA metroidvania and it’s actually amazing is wild to me, I would’ve never imaged it. This game lets you express the combat in so many ways. From picking different charms like hollow knight, to even having a parry that’s so satisfying that I might even compare it to Sekiro, the amount of options here are wild. The movement is meant to keep you in motion at all time and it feels just as good as the combat. The jumping, dashing, sliding, wall bouncing and many other moves you get are a delight just as every metroidvania should have. The boss fights are fun, difficult, and good skill checks for an ability that you’ve recently acquired as well as plentiful. The puzzles are the perfect kind of difficult where you’re not stumped looking it up on YouTube because it’s so complicated, but you also need to try a few things to see what works. Art direction good story bad