PasokonDeacon
1980
At the turn of the 1980s, Data East wasn't much of a big player in the Japanese video arcade market, having mainly released clones of recent titles like Space Invaders. Their clone Astro Fighter triggered a legal fight with Taito over claims of IP violation due to its similarities. Thankfully such a fate never hung over HWY Chase, despite its obvious resemblance to something like Galaxian from the year before. Rather, this kit-bashed take on both SEGA's Monaco GP and Namco's aforementioned early shooter would itself usher in the DECO Cassette System, the earliest successful inter-changeable arcade board/PCB architecture. On top of that, it's just a fun, thrilling thing to play in small bursts.
How appropriate that this humble but well-executed blend of endless racing & combat should arrive in a similarly minute form factor. Arcade operators no longer had to swap boards in and out of the cabinet housing to switch programs. Now you could let the DECO tape loader read data for a couple minutes and then your game's up and running! This brought many technical difficulties and cut corners with it, as many North American arcade techs and owners lamented, but this groundbreaking, relatively low-cost platform paved the way for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and other successors. Preserving said tape games in MAME has been a struggle, with some notables still left to recover and make playable. So it’s good that this early genre hybrid, predating Spy Hunter and other better-known examples, is as easy to run as I’d hope.
HWY Chase itself must have made for quite the system seller. You've got the usual suspects: chunky but colorful Golden Age pixel designs, formations of enemy vehicles to blast through, and a highway full of hazards both innocuous and truly threatening. Data East's developers had already made some important strides from their earlier non-DECO games that year, with this title having multiple screens in multiple settings to keep the action well-paced and varied. For example, going from a sunlit paved road, held back by well-armed four-wheelers, to a dark, headlight-lit tunnel with autos trying to collide with you never gets old. It's really that most simple but elaborate kind of composite hybrid you'd hope for at after the '70s' pure and repetitive game loops. Hitting high scores, dodging both bullets and blowouts...pair that with solid audio and busy but detailed graphics for one hell of a debut.
It wouldn't be long before Data East pushed beyond these comfortable limits to make innovative software like Flash Boy or even something unusual like Manhattan. Still, I'd give this a go if you're looking for a more unusual but accessible riff on the big boys' static shoot-em-ups from that period. Before works like Scramble and then Xevious radically changed notions of what an STG could be, this was more than enough to keep the cabinet busy and hone your reflexes on. I've found myself revisiting a couple times already.
How appropriate that this humble but well-executed blend of endless racing & combat should arrive in a similarly minute form factor. Arcade operators no longer had to swap boards in and out of the cabinet housing to switch programs. Now you could let the DECO tape loader read data for a couple minutes and then your game's up and running! This brought many technical difficulties and cut corners with it, as many North American arcade techs and owners lamented, but this groundbreaking, relatively low-cost platform paved the way for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and other successors. Preserving said tape games in MAME has been a struggle, with some notables still left to recover and make playable. So it’s good that this early genre hybrid, predating Spy Hunter and other better-known examples, is as easy to run as I’d hope.
HWY Chase itself must have made for quite the system seller. You've got the usual suspects: chunky but colorful Golden Age pixel designs, formations of enemy vehicles to blast through, and a highway full of hazards both innocuous and truly threatening. Data East's developers had already made some important strides from their earlier non-DECO games that year, with this title having multiple screens in multiple settings to keep the action well-paced and varied. For example, going from a sunlit paved road, held back by well-armed four-wheelers, to a dark, headlight-lit tunnel with autos trying to collide with you never gets old. It's really that most simple but elaborate kind of composite hybrid you'd hope for at after the '70s' pure and repetitive game loops. Hitting high scores, dodging both bullets and blowouts...pair that with solid audio and busy but detailed graphics for one hell of a debut.
It wouldn't be long before Data East pushed beyond these comfortable limits to make innovative software like Flash Boy or even something unusual like Manhattan. Still, I'd give this a go if you're looking for a more unusual but accessible riff on the big boys' static shoot-em-ups from that period. Before works like Scramble and then Xevious radically changed notions of what an STG could be, this was more than enough to keep the cabinet busy and hone your reflexes on. I've found myself revisiting a couple times already.
1976
Where does the versus arcade game go after Atari's Pong or Tank? Both games stuck to the ball-and-paddle paradigm in one way or another. Blockade was the solution: turn Etch-A-Sketch into an entropic competition to fill the screen. Negative space becomes the battleground for a duel of wits and reflexes, as either player tries to snake around each other without colliding. Gremlin's "money magnet" of '76 spawned a whole genre of imitators, leading to the modern snake game as popularized on Nokia phones and the Internet.
It's funny how you can't really play the original snake game, despite its outward simplicity and ease of emulation. We think of the genre today as a single-player experience when it started in the realm of 1-on-1 coin munchers. Arcade-goers still desired the kind of simple competitive pleasures Pong had provided, just with a novel game mechanic. From the moment you and your opponent start moving, with no way to stop, there's a clear, immediate tension. You're all walled in, and you've got nowhere to go but closer to your foe.
Pong, Tank, and Spacewar! before them worked because they provided the illusion of an open space you could play in, even if you either stuck to one plane of movement or had limited room for exchanging fire. I think the genius of Blockade comes from dispelling that notion entirely. You're never in any doubt about your opportunities to corner and trick the other player. And you've always got the harsh green borders of the screen to keep you focused, mentally hemmed in by the game. Clash is inevitable in this slowly filling digital world, promising not the freedom of an open space but a ruthless drive to destruction.
Today, it all seems a bit quaint. We're many decades separated from Blockade—the progenitor of not just snake games all about managing a depleting space, but the confinement of the fighting game genre too. As fast as this must have seemed in '76, it's laborious and simply dull to play today. Indeed, Gremlin engineer Lane Hauck's creation "wasn't a good game from the standpoint of making money...The industry loved Blockade but the public yawned.". Creators like him recognized the sea change this game proved was feasible, though. It wouldn't be long before Disney's TRON demonstrated how exciting this concept could be. Moreover, Blockade's success with operators showed that Tank was no fluke, that plenty of multiplayer dueling concepts beyond the ball and paddle were not just viable, but desirable.
All in all, I can't really hold much against a game that did well enough to get clones with names like Bigfoot Bonkers. I'd have never grown up chomping down every little dot on my flip-phone LCD screen were it not for this. (Hell, where would Head-On or Pac-Man be if Blockade hadn't paved the way?!) Of their pre-SEGA achievements, Gremlin's original screen filler has earned its place in arcade game history.
It's funny how you can't really play the original snake game, despite its outward simplicity and ease of emulation. We think of the genre today as a single-player experience when it started in the realm of 1-on-1 coin munchers. Arcade-goers still desired the kind of simple competitive pleasures Pong had provided, just with a novel game mechanic. From the moment you and your opponent start moving, with no way to stop, there's a clear, immediate tension. You're all walled in, and you've got nowhere to go but closer to your foe.
Pong, Tank, and Spacewar! before them worked because they provided the illusion of an open space you could play in, even if you either stuck to one plane of movement or had limited room for exchanging fire. I think the genius of Blockade comes from dispelling that notion entirely. You're never in any doubt about your opportunities to corner and trick the other player. And you've always got the harsh green borders of the screen to keep you focused, mentally hemmed in by the game. Clash is inevitable in this slowly filling digital world, promising not the freedom of an open space but a ruthless drive to destruction.
Today, it all seems a bit quaint. We're many decades separated from Blockade—the progenitor of not just snake games all about managing a depleting space, but the confinement of the fighting game genre too. As fast as this must have seemed in '76, it's laborious and simply dull to play today. Indeed, Gremlin engineer Lane Hauck's creation "wasn't a good game from the standpoint of making money...The industry loved Blockade but the public yawned.". Creators like him recognized the sea change this game proved was feasible, though. It wouldn't be long before Disney's TRON demonstrated how exciting this concept could be. Moreover, Blockade's success with operators showed that Tank was no fluke, that plenty of multiplayer dueling concepts beyond the ball and paddle were not just viable, but desirable.
All in all, I can't really hold much against a game that did well enough to get clones with names like Bigfoot Bonkers. I'd have never grown up chomping down every little dot on my flip-phone LCD screen were it not for this. (Hell, where would Head-On or Pac-Man be if Blockade hadn't paved the way?!) Of their pre-SEGA achievements, Gremlin's original screen filler has earned its place in arcade game history.
1991
Remember when games started with saucy sorceresses blasting both of your pauldron-wearing badasses down into the cursed underworld? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Nihon Falcom already had a history of making some of the best dungeon-crawling odysseys a Japanese PC player could buy. Brandish kept that legacy relevant, and then some. Modern players can laugh at the snappy, initially jarring over-the-shoulder camera, or wonder where the hell they're going in the game's early labyrinths. But I love how this game rewards an unction of patience, a mentality of adapt or die befitting the premise. What would you do if you were Ares Toraernos, decorated mercenary now marooned in the depths of a fallen kingdom? How would you worm your way out of this hell, beleaguered by monsters, deathtraps, and mysteries on all sides? We peer down into this man's trials by fire, yet are thrown to and thro as he methodically rounds corners into one gauntlet after another. To say nothing of his unwanted nemesis Dela Delon, the aforementioned magical minimally clothed madame hunting you down! This wouldn't be the last time Ares—and you, his far-off companion—has to face the bowels of madness and come out intact.
Speaking of jarring, that camera. It's definitely something you can get used to, unless it gives you genuine motion sickness. (Dramamine works for that…unless you're allergic, in which case I understand.) Swapping between mouse and keyboard controls, something new for a Falcom title of this vintage, also asks for some dexterity. But I don't consider this the kind of filter that you can find in more demanding ARPGs like Sekiro or Ninja Gaiden Black. Getting to grips with Brandish asks for a mix of tenacity, analysis, and maybe a few false starts. It's a breezy play, coming in around 8 to 12 hours, give or take. Replays are even encouraged by the game's own ending sequence, which summarizes your playtime and related stats before awarding a ranking. This system would later pop up in Falcom's own Xanadu Next, a boon sign if any.
Should you try Brandish out for size and the split-second camera snaps throws you off, don't panic! Getting used to it took me some time, and yet it paid off so well. I almost want to pity folks like SNESDrunk who, having played the SNES conversion, wrote this game off entirely because of this aspect. Keep an eye on the map and your compass to reorient when needed—even better if the version you're playing has both on-screen at all times.
I'll let you in on a secret: you should be playing the PC-98 version. Or the PSP remake, if experiencing the minimal albeit charming story matters to you. Yes, only the SNES port was ever localized, but I'd take the PC original over it any day. The awkwardness of the console version stems mainly from its reduced HUD and lack of mouse controls. Brandish's lead developers, first Yoshio Kiya (of Xanadu fame) and then Yukio Takahashi, wanted to move Falcom's game designs beyond simple keyboard or joystick schemes. While both Dinosaur and Popful Mail started off Falcom's 1990s stretch with PC-88 era controls, Brandish & its cousin Lord Monarch would explicitly target mouse users, keeping keyboard as an alternative. I tend to use both options, with keys for strafing and mouse to switch between interactions.
Brandish has you crawling through several multi-floor dungeons, each increasingly challenging and claustrophobic through a variety of means. Like the older, arguably more brutal CRPGs Kiya & co. had made, you have limited resources to work with, from deteriorating weapons to a set number of loot chests per level. One thing you'll always have is a chance to rest—if you aren't maybe fatally interrupted, that is. Resting works here much like in classic Rogue-likes, with harsh consequences should a monster attack you as you sleep. But it's your main way to recover health & mana, and an incentive to learn each part of every dungeon. Finding one-way tunnels with doors is a blessing, and managing your limited-space inventory comes naturally. I think Brandish often feels harder than it is; being able to rest & save progress anywhere plays into this. We're years ahead of actually brutal classics like 1985's Xanadu, or even something contemporary like SEGA's Fatal Labyrinth.
Character advancement is also just as interesting here as in Kiya's earlier works. You have to balance between growing physical and magical strength, as well as health, via how you fight enemies. It's very elegant: striking and killing with weapons raises the former, and doing it with spell scrolls helps the latter. This maps almost dead-on to Xanadu's physical-magical dichotomy, just without that game's emphasis on leveling individual weapon experience. Here you can easily switch between armaments, choosing which mix of speed, power, and animation frames works best. Fire and cure spells come quickly, too, enriching your action economy as early as the Vittorian Ruins. By the time I get to truly challenging areas like the Dark Zone, I've maxed out my stats and can only hope to find better gear for my travails. This brings in a bit of that Ys I feeling, where you know only your skills and wisdom can get you through this struggle, not just grinding.
Wisdom is something the people who built these tunnels clearly lacked. The old king of Vittoria, having plunged him and his people into this condemned netherland, had done a fine job setting up spiky pits, poisonous wells, mechanical log rams…the works! Much of Brandish's joy comes from solving all these navigation micro-puzzles while keeping distance from wandering foes. It's hard to fall out of the game's quick "one more floor!" flow. You're never truly alone, either. Shopkeepers occasionally pop up throughout most dungeons, offering both supplies and musings on their lives and the surrounding lore. A certain woman warlock loves to show up and taunt you, only to get bamboozled by the same hazards you've faced (or are about to!). It may be a crunchy 1990 action-RPG with all the aged aspects that entails, but I'd never accuse Brandish of being lifeless. The sequels would only improve in this sense, adding more and more NPCs and story without ever sacrificing that essential oppressive atmosphere and isolation.
Nothing's quite as gratifying as reaching the king's Fortress, packing more heat than a whole army of knights, fearing not so much the bestiary as you do the conundrums. Why is everything so damn fleshy here? How are these pillars moving around the room in such a bizarre way? Will I have to tango with invisible enemies again, or golems awakening around me as I open a suspicious chest? And where am I going anyway?! Brandish avoids the potential worsts of these questions by equipping you with one of gaming history's best mapping systems. Predating the likes of Etrian Odyssey by more than a decade, the game's minimap demonstrates why this game would always have a tough time converting to console play. This precise mouse-based minimap, with multiple swatches you can use to mark map items & boundaries, is itself quite fun to tinker with. Later games would challenge your map-making skills further, going as far as adding enemies that passively destroy your map over time and space! That's not an issue in this first game, thankfully. Falcom's maybe a bit too nice in that regard.
For that matter, I can't shake the feeling that Falcom, still reeling from their turn-of-the-'90s staff exodus (to new studios like Ancient and Quintet), held back on Brandish's ambitions. Popful Mail shares something of a similar fate: these are two wonderfully made adventures, no doubt, but also compromise in key areas. For the former, difficulty balance and repetition can set in later on. For Ares' first expedition into darkness, it's more so the developer's restraint in making truly complex dungeons. I just wish the complexity of both puzzles and combat areas ramped up quicker here, something the rest of the series fixes. Sure, a lot of folks might get stumped at the3 and 5 floor tiles puzzle in Tower, but there's maybe a couple headscratchers here at best. Likewise, combat's sometimes trivialized by the ease of jumping over and away from foes, many of which lack ranged attacks. I can forgive all of this since the rest is just so good, but the creative compromises I've noticed on replays mean I can't really rate this higher. (Brandish 2, incidentally, gets an extra half star for its ambitions despite introducing some more jank of its own.)
Kudos to the boss designs though, especially later on. I'm especially fond of the Black Widow, Lobster, and final boss fights for how they make use your available space to the maximum. Yes, you fight a gigantic lobster towards the end. Brandish sort of gets the Giant Enemy Crab stamp of approval.
All that said, the original Brandish was as awesome & appropriate a successor to Xanadu's legacy as Falcom fans could have hoped for. Hell, it even reminds me of the best parts from Sorcerian and Drasle Family (aka Legacy of the Wizard). Rare is it that an ARPG this old still feels relevant to modern play-styles, from Souls-style character building to the simple but effective itch.io puzzlers made today. It's telling how only Falcom could effectively bring this series to consoles, despite Koei arguably having more resources at the time for their SNES ports. Kiya, Takahashi, and others soon working on this series would iterate on the rock-solid foundation set here. The real downer is how quickly folks turn away from the series itself because it's either funnier or more convenient to crap on the third-first-person perspective. Few ARPG-dungeon crawler hybrids are as consistent, engrossing, and replayable as this.
The studio's largely moved on to more profitable pastures, with Ys and Trails being such huge tentpole series sucking up their time and resources. My kingdom for even a simple port of Brandish: The Dark Revenant to modern platforms! And my heart to those who give this series a chance.
Nihon Falcom already had a history of making some of the best dungeon-crawling odysseys a Japanese PC player could buy. Brandish kept that legacy relevant, and then some. Modern players can laugh at the snappy, initially jarring over-the-shoulder camera, or wonder where the hell they're going in the game's early labyrinths. But I love how this game rewards an unction of patience, a mentality of adapt or die befitting the premise. What would you do if you were Ares Toraernos, decorated mercenary now marooned in the depths of a fallen kingdom? How would you worm your way out of this hell, beleaguered by monsters, deathtraps, and mysteries on all sides? We peer down into this man's trials by fire, yet are thrown to and thro as he methodically rounds corners into one gauntlet after another. To say nothing of his unwanted nemesis Dela Delon, the aforementioned magical minimally clothed madame hunting you down! This wouldn't be the last time Ares—and you, his far-off companion—has to face the bowels of madness and come out intact.
Speaking of jarring, that camera. It's definitely something you can get used to, unless it gives you genuine motion sickness. (Dramamine works for that…unless you're allergic, in which case I understand.) Swapping between mouse and keyboard controls, something new for a Falcom title of this vintage, also asks for some dexterity. But I don't consider this the kind of filter that you can find in more demanding ARPGs like Sekiro or Ninja Gaiden Black. Getting to grips with Brandish asks for a mix of tenacity, analysis, and maybe a few false starts. It's a breezy play, coming in around 8 to 12 hours, give or take. Replays are even encouraged by the game's own ending sequence, which summarizes your playtime and related stats before awarding a ranking. This system would later pop up in Falcom's own Xanadu Next, a boon sign if any.
Should you try Brandish out for size and the split-second camera snaps throws you off, don't panic! Getting used to it took me some time, and yet it paid off so well. I almost want to pity folks like SNESDrunk who, having played the SNES conversion, wrote this game off entirely because of this aspect. Keep an eye on the map and your compass to reorient when needed—even better if the version you're playing has both on-screen at all times.
I'll let you in on a secret: you should be playing the PC-98 version. Or the PSP remake, if experiencing the minimal albeit charming story matters to you. Yes, only the SNES port was ever localized, but I'd take the PC original over it any day. The awkwardness of the console version stems mainly from its reduced HUD and lack of mouse controls. Brandish's lead developers, first Yoshio Kiya (of Xanadu fame) and then Yukio Takahashi, wanted to move Falcom's game designs beyond simple keyboard or joystick schemes. While both Dinosaur and Popful Mail started off Falcom's 1990s stretch with PC-88 era controls, Brandish & its cousin Lord Monarch would explicitly target mouse users, keeping keyboard as an alternative. I tend to use both options, with keys for strafing and mouse to switch between interactions.
Brandish has you crawling through several multi-floor dungeons, each increasingly challenging and claustrophobic through a variety of means. Like the older, arguably more brutal CRPGs Kiya & co. had made, you have limited resources to work with, from deteriorating weapons to a set number of loot chests per level. One thing you'll always have is a chance to rest—if you aren't maybe fatally interrupted, that is. Resting works here much like in classic Rogue-likes, with harsh consequences should a monster attack you as you sleep. But it's your main way to recover health & mana, and an incentive to learn each part of every dungeon. Finding one-way tunnels with doors is a blessing, and managing your limited-space inventory comes naturally. I think Brandish often feels harder than it is; being able to rest & save progress anywhere plays into this. We're years ahead of actually brutal classics like 1985's Xanadu, or even something contemporary like SEGA's Fatal Labyrinth.
Character advancement is also just as interesting here as in Kiya's earlier works. You have to balance between growing physical and magical strength, as well as health, via how you fight enemies. It's very elegant: striking and killing with weapons raises the former, and doing it with spell scrolls helps the latter. This maps almost dead-on to Xanadu's physical-magical dichotomy, just without that game's emphasis on leveling individual weapon experience. Here you can easily switch between armaments, choosing which mix of speed, power, and animation frames works best. Fire and cure spells come quickly, too, enriching your action economy as early as the Vittorian Ruins. By the time I get to truly challenging areas like the Dark Zone, I've maxed out my stats and can only hope to find better gear for my travails. This brings in a bit of that Ys I feeling, where you know only your skills and wisdom can get you through this struggle, not just grinding.
Wisdom is something the people who built these tunnels clearly lacked. The old king of Vittoria, having plunged him and his people into this condemned netherland, had done a fine job setting up spiky pits, poisonous wells, mechanical log rams…the works! Much of Brandish's joy comes from solving all these navigation micro-puzzles while keeping distance from wandering foes. It's hard to fall out of the game's quick "one more floor!" flow. You're never truly alone, either. Shopkeepers occasionally pop up throughout most dungeons, offering both supplies and musings on their lives and the surrounding lore. A certain woman warlock loves to show up and taunt you, only to get bamboozled by the same hazards you've faced (or are about to!). It may be a crunchy 1990 action-RPG with all the aged aspects that entails, but I'd never accuse Brandish of being lifeless. The sequels would only improve in this sense, adding more and more NPCs and story without ever sacrificing that essential oppressive atmosphere and isolation.
Nothing's quite as gratifying as reaching the king's Fortress, packing more heat than a whole army of knights, fearing not so much the bestiary as you do the conundrums. Why is everything so damn fleshy here? How are these pillars moving around the room in such a bizarre way? Will I have to tango with invisible enemies again, or golems awakening around me as I open a suspicious chest? And where am I going anyway?! Brandish avoids the potential worsts of these questions by equipping you with one of gaming history's best mapping systems. Predating the likes of Etrian Odyssey by more than a decade, the game's minimap demonstrates why this game would always have a tough time converting to console play. This precise mouse-based minimap, with multiple swatches you can use to mark map items & boundaries, is itself quite fun to tinker with. Later games would challenge your map-making skills further, going as far as adding enemies that passively destroy your map over time and space! That's not an issue in this first game, thankfully. Falcom's maybe a bit too nice in that regard.
For that matter, I can't shake the feeling that Falcom, still reeling from their turn-of-the-'90s staff exodus (to new studios like Ancient and Quintet), held back on Brandish's ambitions. Popful Mail shares something of a similar fate: these are two wonderfully made adventures, no doubt, but also compromise in key areas. For the former, difficulty balance and repetition can set in later on. For Ares' first expedition into darkness, it's more so the developer's restraint in making truly complex dungeons. I just wish the complexity of both puzzles and combat areas ramped up quicker here, something the rest of the series fixes. Sure, a lot of folks might get stumped at the
Kudos to the boss designs though, especially later on. I'm especially fond of the Black Widow, Lobster, and final boss fights for how they make use your available space to the maximum. Yes, you fight a gigantic lobster towards the end. Brandish sort of gets the Giant Enemy Crab stamp of approval.
All that said, the original Brandish was as awesome & appropriate a successor to Xanadu's legacy as Falcom fans could have hoped for. Hell, it even reminds me of the best parts from Sorcerian and Drasle Family (aka Legacy of the Wizard). Rare is it that an ARPG this old still feels relevant to modern play-styles, from Souls-style character building to the simple but effective itch.io puzzlers made today. It's telling how only Falcom could effectively bring this series to consoles, despite Koei arguably having more resources at the time for their SNES ports. Kiya, Takahashi, and others soon working on this series would iterate on the rock-solid foundation set here. The real downer is how quickly folks turn away from the series itself because it's either funnier or more convenient to crap on the third-first-person perspective. Few ARPG-dungeon crawler hybrids are as consistent, engrossing, and replayable as this.
The studio's largely moved on to more profitable pastures, with Ys and Trails being such huge tentpole series sucking up their time and resources. My kingdom for even a simple port of Brandish: The Dark Revenant to modern platforms! And my heart to those who give this series a chance.
Stale isn't strong enough a word. The content recycling is one thing, though disappointing given the years between this & Wild World. But the dialogue looping is inexcusable. The original Animal Crossing & its DS sequel both offered just enough variety in conversations across villagers to keep the game loop working. With your neighbors getting stuck on one damn thing so often in City Folk, the illusion's dispelled.
Then you see how, even with some added content like new holidays & collectibles, the city itself is just a demystified way to access previously event-only features. Sure, it's awesome that I can get my hair done anytime vs. the dumb unlocking method in WW. But why not simply give & tell players a way to get the hairdresser at Nookington's? Then you can stay in the village—you know, the actually relevant setting of the game. Instead of finding better ways to let players unlock & integrate new functions into the village, City Folk took the easy way out, and it's harmed it ever since.
The developers must have realized (or learned through market research) how badly they missed the mark on most players' expectations. New Leaf fixes so many of CF's omissions & questionable decisions. But for all the fun I can still have with this entry, it just has me pining for a WW decompilation so we can get proper content & mechanics mods for it already. I loved this as a kid, but would much rather play the idiosyncratic GC versions or WW for those neat villager hobbies & pictures. Even returning now with cheats & emulation niceties doesn't make a dent in CF's mediocrity.
I haven't even touched on dirt paths, barely improved online, using the pointer for typing, and other exhausting but well-trodden topics. All I can do now is ponder how much worse this could have turned out if not for the core developers' consistency in porting the working bits of GC & WW over. I'm just glad even the most mid of pre-New Horizons entries is still a little fun. (N64 is a glorified prototype, so I'm not counting it here.)
Then you see how, even with some added content like new holidays & collectibles, the city itself is just a demystified way to access previously event-only features. Sure, it's awesome that I can get my hair done anytime vs. the dumb unlocking method in WW. But why not simply give & tell players a way to get the hairdresser at Nookington's? Then you can stay in the village—you know, the actually relevant setting of the game. Instead of finding better ways to let players unlock & integrate new functions into the village, City Folk took the easy way out, and it's harmed it ever since.
The developers must have realized (or learned through market research) how badly they missed the mark on most players' expectations. New Leaf fixes so many of CF's omissions & questionable decisions. But for all the fun I can still have with this entry, it just has me pining for a WW decompilation so we can get proper content & mechanics mods for it already. I loved this as a kid, but would much rather play the idiosyncratic GC versions or WW for those neat villager hobbies & pictures. Even returning now with cheats & emulation niceties doesn't make a dent in CF's mediocrity.
I haven't even touched on dirt paths, barely improved online, using the pointer for typing, and other exhausting but well-trodden topics. All I can do now is ponder how much worse this could have turned out if not for the core developers' consistency in porting the working bits of GC & WW over. I'm just glad even the most mid of pre-New Horizons entries is still a little fun. (N64 is a glorified prototype, so I'm not counting it here.)
2021
What should one expect from a JavaScript game jam exercise less than half the size of a mid-'90s Doom WAD? That's the question Phoboslab and other js13k participants try to answer each year. Some contest entries successfully provide a full game, often a puzzler like Road Blocks or something more adventurous like Greeble. Minimal logic, procedurally generated assets, and ingenious reuse of game systems can go a long way in reducing your program's size. But there's also something to be said for demaking a larger, well-known title into something pushing the limits of this coding paradigm. That's something Q1K3 accomplishes with aplomb. It's not even the first throwback FPS to rank high in a js13k roster, but only this one's received a Super Special award just for its technical achievements.
Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!
In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.
There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.
If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.
Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!
In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.
There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.
If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.
An invitation to takehata's Cards Goetia, trapped in forking paths known only to the old ones. Tread carefully and curate your arcana wisely. At the end lies no mere relief, but the cessation of a nightmare, precipitated by loss. Reality fragments into haze, distortion, and sepia dreams. We're almost beyond the realms of vaporwave or mere "aestheticccccc" here, travelers.
Majin and Sacrificial Girl mainly exists as an interactive art gallery for this baffling, Bosch-ian bestiary, having you fight deeper into the tunnels to meet more of them. Honestly, you could just admire the title screen and leave satisfied. Three funny-looking guys, a world of white noise here and beyond the dungeon walls, and the sense that you're entering a realm of boundless, incomprehensible fantasy. I love this part, and it's definitely what takehata's most proud to display. There's not a whole lot of worthwhile game beyond this point, though it's far from bad. But the execution's lacking in key areas, from generally buggy performance to multiple admissions of defeat in designing this deck-builder.
Others have started on this little freeware exercise's failings, but I'll lead with what it's best at: the audiovisual immersion. Past the potentially iconic opening scene, you'll find rich contrasts between a claustrophobic, Wizardry-esque stone maze and the abstract battle screens you jump into. Like better-known examples such as Signalis or World of Horror, Majin uses a heavy amount of dithering and other post-processing tricks to create this grainy, fragile world you crawl through. The lines of things wobble incessantly, the colors oscillate in and out of certainty, and the barebones user interface juxtaposes with how vividly animated these demons are. takehata chose a spare but fitting set of noveau orchestral pieces to accompany battles, and the brief bits of lore you get on each floor are enough to contextualize your adventure.
This also gets some points with me for being a very easy deck-builder in a sea of brutal challenges. Granted, that's because you can't ever die and can save anywhere at any time. The author wants you to meet every odd thing he's designed in this phantasmagorical zoo, so it makes sense that finding, managing, and using cards is as fast and painless to retry as it is. Battles often boil down to "is my RNG good or bad?", but rarely go too long to become dull or frustrating. The card selection itself is very typical for the fantasy-themed games in this genre, so set your expectations accordingly.
What I'd give for better pacing, though! You spend so much time on each floor not to get more cards or something else important, but to increase your health. Because takehata tied the groovy mushroom man's HP service to what currency you get in fights, you're pretty much fighting everything you see. I even found myself grinding for a few minutes before the final boss just to afford one last useful boost. This means seeing a lot of the same few enemies in a game that frankly has less of them than you'd hope. This means Majin fails at facilitating an effortless trip through takehata's creations, with a playable but minimally competent DRPG deck-builder taking up more of your time.
In key ways, this feels like a mid-1990s Mac/Windows 3.1 hybrid adventure gone wrong. I'd rather be hopping from screen to screen, toying with each setpiece and little puzzle knowing I'd get further invested with all these monsters and their uncanny, uncomfortable universe. Instead I'm stuck in a bog-standard labyrinth, using predictable genre mechanics that only artificially elongate my playthrough. And because the combat balance itself is more than a bit busted, I can't really appreciate that system on its own terms either.
So it's weird how this game defies aesthetic trends with its unique not-too-retro multimedia stylings, then rigidly conforms to a current indie trope-set which only hurts it. I'm not saying this could only work as an adventure without explicit fail-states, but that would be the quickest way for me to enjoy it more. It's annoying to juggle thoughts of "these entities are so baffling and intriguing" and "why couldn't the dungeons and combat be as imaginative?". So, while I can recommend this to anyone wanting a more modern take on the mid-'90s low-res, highly-abstract aesthetics that Haruhiko Shono and others mastered, that's about it.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 7 – Feb. 14, 2023
Majin and Sacrificial Girl mainly exists as an interactive art gallery for this baffling, Bosch-ian bestiary, having you fight deeper into the tunnels to meet more of them. Honestly, you could just admire the title screen and leave satisfied. Three funny-looking guys, a world of white noise here and beyond the dungeon walls, and the sense that you're entering a realm of boundless, incomprehensible fantasy. I love this part, and it's definitely what takehata's most proud to display. There's not a whole lot of worthwhile game beyond this point, though it's far from bad. But the execution's lacking in key areas, from generally buggy performance to multiple admissions of defeat in designing this deck-builder.
Others have started on this little freeware exercise's failings, but I'll lead with what it's best at: the audiovisual immersion. Past the potentially iconic opening scene, you'll find rich contrasts between a claustrophobic, Wizardry-esque stone maze and the abstract battle screens you jump into. Like better-known examples such as Signalis or World of Horror, Majin uses a heavy amount of dithering and other post-processing tricks to create this grainy, fragile world you crawl through. The lines of things wobble incessantly, the colors oscillate in and out of certainty, and the barebones user interface juxtaposes with how vividly animated these demons are. takehata chose a spare but fitting set of noveau orchestral pieces to accompany battles, and the brief bits of lore you get on each floor are enough to contextualize your adventure.
This also gets some points with me for being a very easy deck-builder in a sea of brutal challenges. Granted, that's because you can't ever die and can save anywhere at any time. The author wants you to meet every odd thing he's designed in this phantasmagorical zoo, so it makes sense that finding, managing, and using cards is as fast and painless to retry as it is. Battles often boil down to "is my RNG good or bad?", but rarely go too long to become dull or frustrating. The card selection itself is very typical for the fantasy-themed games in this genre, so set your expectations accordingly.
What I'd give for better pacing, though! You spend so much time on each floor not to get more cards or something else important, but to increase your health. Because takehata tied the groovy mushroom man's HP service to what currency you get in fights, you're pretty much fighting everything you see. I even found myself grinding for a few minutes before the final boss just to afford one last useful boost. This means seeing a lot of the same few enemies in a game that frankly has less of them than you'd hope. This means Majin fails at facilitating an effortless trip through takehata's creations, with a playable but minimally competent DRPG deck-builder taking up more of your time.
In key ways, this feels like a mid-1990s Mac/Windows 3.1 hybrid adventure gone wrong. I'd rather be hopping from screen to screen, toying with each setpiece and little puzzle knowing I'd get further invested with all these monsters and their uncanny, uncomfortable universe. Instead I'm stuck in a bog-standard labyrinth, using predictable genre mechanics that only artificially elongate my playthrough. And because the combat balance itself is more than a bit busted, I can't really appreciate that system on its own terms either.
So it's weird how this game defies aesthetic trends with its unique not-too-retro multimedia stylings, then rigidly conforms to a current indie trope-set which only hurts it. I'm not saying this could only work as an adventure without explicit fail-states, but that would be the quickest way for me to enjoy it more. It's annoying to juggle thoughts of "these entities are so baffling and intriguing" and "why couldn't the dungeons and combat be as imaginative?". So, while I can recommend this to anyone wanting a more modern take on the mid-'90s low-res, highly-abstract aesthetics that Haruhiko Shono and others mastered, that's about it.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 7 – Feb. 14, 2023
PoPoLoCrops! FarmPG cuteness from start to finish. Add a tad of Ghibli-esque darkness on the fringes, perhaps. It's an odd way to start my PoPoLoCrois journey, but far from an unfitting one. I had worries about how well the Story of Seasons systems would integrate with what's otherwise a regular series entry, spinoff status aside. So I'm glad to say that you neither have to rely on farming too much, nor simply ignore it for other items & buffs. Good QoL features & menu design helps out here, but also the strong pacing elsewhere.
The whole premise of a foreign country's purported leaders being parasitic conquerors of both your home & theirs gets things rolling. You go from a fun if slight celebration of Pietro's accomplishments to date (something I'll be more familiar with later) to getting marooned in a strange land, fighting on the backfoot. Early dungeons & world traversal hardly take much time. This definitely feels more like a JRPG for fans of towns & characters, less so encounters. Much of the game loop teeters between quick trips to your ranch (economy) & engaging with story areas and events.
Sorry Pokemon, but this adventure has the superior Galar(iland) region. Epics & Marvelous do a stellar job of balancing the new cast, populace, & worldbuilding with returning parts of the PoPoLoCrois world. I had such a smile on my face when finally getting to fight alongside a distraught GamiGami trying to regain his big bad status. Or how about realizing who the conspicuous wolf at your side really is? (An old friend indeed!) All the towns are fun to explore & talk your way through, and I certainly can't recall any bad dungeons...just some less than interesting ones.
While the farming & story elements have a satisfying synergy, the combat here is almost as standard as it gets for a modern handheld JRPG. Not a bad thing, but it's hard for me to get excited about this when something like The Alliance Alive arrived shortly after on this system. The most notable aspect is the grid-based movement & diversity of AoE/position-based abilities on offer. It's mostly harmless, and the difficulty balance is solid. Just don't get into this for the sake of challenging battles. You can mess with the optional ranch battles for a bit more loot & leveling, but I never finished that side-mode.
I hope this gets a proper remaster at some point. It's way more PoPoLoCrois than Story of Seasons, for the better I'd argue. Among XSEED's other localizations, this remains one of the most unsung, and changing that would be awesome.
The whole premise of a foreign country's purported leaders being parasitic conquerors of both your home & theirs gets things rolling. You go from a fun if slight celebration of Pietro's accomplishments to date (something I'll be more familiar with later) to getting marooned in a strange land, fighting on the backfoot. Early dungeons & world traversal hardly take much time. This definitely feels more like a JRPG for fans of towns & characters, less so encounters. Much of the game loop teeters between quick trips to your ranch (economy) & engaging with story areas and events.
Sorry Pokemon, but this adventure has the superior Galar(iland) region. Epics & Marvelous do a stellar job of balancing the new cast, populace, & worldbuilding with returning parts of the PoPoLoCrois world. I had such a smile on my face when finally getting to fight alongside a distraught GamiGami trying to regain his big bad status. Or how about realizing who the conspicuous wolf at your side really is? (An old friend indeed!) All the towns are fun to explore & talk your way through, and I certainly can't recall any bad dungeons...just some less than interesting ones.
While the farming & story elements have a satisfying synergy, the combat here is almost as standard as it gets for a modern handheld JRPG. Not a bad thing, but it's hard for me to get excited about this when something like The Alliance Alive arrived shortly after on this system. The most notable aspect is the grid-based movement & diversity of AoE/position-based abilities on offer. It's mostly harmless, and the difficulty balance is solid. Just don't get into this for the sake of challenging battles. You can mess with the optional ranch battles for a bit more loot & leveling, but I never finished that side-mode.
I hope this gets a proper remaster at some point. It's way more PoPoLoCrois than Story of Seasons, for the better I'd argue. Among XSEED's other localizations, this remains one of the most unsung, and changing that would be awesome.
2001
For the people, it was just another exhilarating day, punching and rocketing through a deformed, deranged B-movie. For a decorated Pangea Software, this was maybe their most passionate, prestigious creation. Brian Greenstone and his frequent co-developers had the notion to refine their previous Macintosh action platformers, Nanosaur and Bugdom, into nostalgia for cheesy, laughable Hollywood science fantasy films. As the 2000s got started, this studio wasn't as pressured to prove the PowerPC Mac's polygonal potential, but Otto Matic still fits in with its other pack-in game brethren. All that's changed is Greenstone's attention to detail and playability, previously more of a secondary concern. This Flash Gordon reel gone wrong doesn't deviate from the collect-a-thon adventure template of its predecessors, yet it delivers on the promises they'd made but couldn't quite realize. Greenstone had finally delivered; the eponymous hero had arrived in both style and substance.
Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincialUFO bait humans awaiting doom, and this dorky but capable android who kind of resembles Rayman. Start a new game and you're greeted with something rather familiar, yet different: simple keyboard-mouse controls, hostages to rescue, plentiful cartoon violence, and a designer's mean streak hiding in plain sight. The delight's in the details, as Otto has an assortment of weapons and power-ups with which to defeat the alien invaders and warp these humans to safety. It's just as likely you'll fall into a puddle and short-circuit, though, or mistime a long distance jump-jet only to fall into an abyss. What I really liked in even the earliest Pangea soft I've tried, Mighty Mike, is this disarming aesthetic tied closely with such dangers. I hesitate to claim this mix of Ed Wood, Forbidden Planet, and '90s mascot platformers will appeal to everyone (some find it disturbing, let alone off-putting), but it's far from forgettable in a sea of similar titles. It helps that the modern open-source port's as usable as others.
The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.
So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!
Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.
Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.
I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.
And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.
Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.
Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.
The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincial
The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.
So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!
Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.
Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.
I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.
And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.
Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.
Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.
The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
No grail. Necropolis only. Mandate of Heaven.
Is there anything as amusing here as a Scooby-Doo chase around the map, with one deathball vs. a bunch of under-supplied riders? That's the average HoMM3 late-game on some maps. You learn to fuck with the AI as much as possible, just in case some pathfinding manipulation buys you time to restock troops. Maybe beelining for those magic artifacts—a 5th level spells hat, for instance—can turn the tide in battle. The final scenario in Restoration of Erathia had me playing cat-and-mouse this way. It got frustrating at times, but persistence pays off in any of these games. I sunk more than a hundred hours to stop a cursed king, and I felt redeemed.
There's much I could say about HoMM3 in general, one of PC gaming's evergreen staples. As for the base game's campaigns, I'll note how well the scenarios inch upward in length & complexity. The first three campaigns, with three missions each, covers much of the basics & common strategies you'll need to master. Juggling multiple town types leveling up your heroes to cover more ground (before creating that aforementioned deathball) is all crucial to later success. I just have to laugh at the actual tutorial since it teaches you relatively intuitive actions while the early-game gives you useful hints in a story context. The difficulty curve is balanced enough, at least in the Complete Edition, to ensure you'll get through the game's first half.
Things get nuts once you reach Steadwick's Liberation. The game knows you've learned how Castle heroes, troops, & buildings work. But now you'll be fighting your own kind turned heel, with way more resources & action economy than you can muster. It's here where I learned just how much of a numbers game HoMM3 can become. Trading makes or breaks your game, low morale can ruin your battle tactics on a whim, and unit upgrades only work so well when you're running out of gold for other things. I got used to taking my spellcasters anywhere they could fight & then restock MP, just abusing their magic attacks to compensate for having so few units.
Compared to its predecessors, base HoMM3 already has a more muted, aged aesthetic that clashes against the story's cheesy moments. It's fun to witness characters & concepts derived from the main Might & Magic games (themselves derived from many late-night D&D pizza parties) utterly destroying each other. New World Computing clearly loves the world they're working with, no matter how simple & blockbuster in scope. For lack of an essential AD&D Birthright game, this era of HoMM feels like the proper off-brand equivalent, a realm of enormous warfare contained in charismatic personages.
It's a shame, then, that the post-game campaign is such a whimper. I love the idea of people from Erathia & AvLee joining up to form their own equitable, sovereign country. There's just not a lot to really do in these last few scenarios, however. Learning how to dig up the Grail is nice and all, and nothing here ought to match For King and Country's harsh skill wall, but I'm not playing this game for a victory lap. Any chance to reach high-level spells & army crafting, then go ham on my opponents, is much more fun.
Still, I've been loving my time with HoMM3 so far. It's living up to the hype and then some. Excellent map design, meaningfully diverse units & character advancement...it's all here. I grew up with HoMM4 and will hopefully still enjoy it, yet I can already see why others consider that sequel such a downgrade. Here's hoping the upcoming expansions keep this up.
Is there anything as amusing here as a Scooby-Doo chase around the map, with one deathball vs. a bunch of under-supplied riders? That's the average HoMM3 late-game on some maps. You learn to fuck with the AI as much as possible, just in case some pathfinding manipulation buys you time to restock troops. Maybe beelining for those magic artifacts—a 5th level spells hat, for instance—can turn the tide in battle. The final scenario in Restoration of Erathia had me playing cat-and-mouse this way. It got frustrating at times, but persistence pays off in any of these games. I sunk more than a hundred hours to stop a cursed king, and I felt redeemed.
There's much I could say about HoMM3 in general, one of PC gaming's evergreen staples. As for the base game's campaigns, I'll note how well the scenarios inch upward in length & complexity. The first three campaigns, with three missions each, covers much of the basics & common strategies you'll need to master. Juggling multiple town types leveling up your heroes to cover more ground (before creating that aforementioned deathball) is all crucial to later success. I just have to laugh at the actual tutorial since it teaches you relatively intuitive actions while the early-game gives you useful hints in a story context. The difficulty curve is balanced enough, at least in the Complete Edition, to ensure you'll get through the game's first half.
Things get nuts once you reach Steadwick's Liberation. The game knows you've learned how Castle heroes, troops, & buildings work. But now you'll be fighting your own kind turned heel, with way more resources & action economy than you can muster. It's here where I learned just how much of a numbers game HoMM3 can become. Trading makes or breaks your game, low morale can ruin your battle tactics on a whim, and unit upgrades only work so well when you're running out of gold for other things. I got used to taking my spellcasters anywhere they could fight & then restock MP, just abusing their magic attacks to compensate for having so few units.
Compared to its predecessors, base HoMM3 already has a more muted, aged aesthetic that clashes against the story's cheesy moments. It's fun to witness characters & concepts derived from the main Might & Magic games (themselves derived from many late-night D&D pizza parties) utterly destroying each other. New World Computing clearly loves the world they're working with, no matter how simple & blockbuster in scope. For lack of an essential AD&D Birthright game, this era of HoMM feels like the proper off-brand equivalent, a realm of enormous warfare contained in charismatic personages.
It's a shame, then, that the post-game campaign is such a whimper. I love the idea of people from Erathia & AvLee joining up to form their own equitable, sovereign country. There's just not a lot to really do in these last few scenarios, however. Learning how to dig up the Grail is nice and all, and nothing here ought to match For King and Country's harsh skill wall, but I'm not playing this game for a victory lap. Any chance to reach high-level spells & army crafting, then go ham on my opponents, is much more fun.
Still, I've been loving my time with HoMM3 so far. It's living up to the hype and then some. Excellent map design, meaningfully diverse units & character advancement...it's all here. I grew up with HoMM4 and will hopefully still enjoy it, yet I can already see why others consider that sequel such a downgrade. Here's hoping the upcoming expansions keep this up.
1995
Gotta see some games to believe 'em, and this might well be the most pop art looking-ass OutRun clone in existence. It's the spitting image of what an indie take on AM2's classic with Atari 2600 graphics could resemble today. Bio_100% (programmer "metys" specifically) first distributed this in 1994 across various Japanese BBS networks before the final version arrived a year later, both online and via shareware collections. Playing any racer this fast, arcade-y, and devil-may-care on an aging PC-98 platform must have been a revelation.
No one's gonna fool themselves into deeming this a realistic driving sim(-cade) experience, and it's better off for that. Polestar's got the kind of DIY spirit and a style all its own that newer takes on classic Super Scaler racers could learn from. You've got two sets of increasingly complex circuits to lap, a sleek sports car to learn the handling of, and the most uncanny, smoothly performing arts-and-crafts visual style I've seen in this genre. It's all clearly working within the boundaries of what a primarily text & static graphics-focused system can do best. And I love that kind of platform-pushing pride which acknowledges the limits of the PC-98 (let alone other home computers back then) but leads to seemingly impossible achievements anyway.
This short but sweet game runs best at on 486 chips running 20 MHz or more, a rather low figure which many users reached or exceeded, so it managed all its feats without becoming the Crysis of its community. Controls are the standard but responsive pedal, brake, and low-to-high shifter seen in OutRun and countless titles like it. What's nice is the detailed options/configuration screen Bio_100% provides, letting you change everything from the measurement system to in-game FOV! There's just enough customization here to compensate for a lack of extra vehicles, plus the low amount of content and novel replayability. It's also a rare later game to only use PSG or MIDI music, forgoing the PC-98's usual FM-synth sound chip even at the expense of some players. (Then again, never a better time to slap Tatsuro Yamashita in your Walkman.)
Simple keyboard & gamepad commands, plus ways to achieve a solid 60 FPS feeling even on 25 KHz refresh monitors, all fortify Polestar's gamefeel. Getting used to the game's sometimes slipper road physics can take a couple tries, but comes naturally over time. You're sharing lanes with hazards like errant trucks and breaks in the pavement; avoiding any off-roading when crossing water or passing by a big creepy clown animatronic (among other things) gives you plenty of challenge. But like any arcade auto-sseys worth a damn, you're mostly racing the time limit and your past records, zipping around with glee as the numbers tick up. There's not a whole lot for me to say here except that metys and his Bio_100% collaborators loved their classic racers and effortlessly brought the genre's strengths to an unlikely venue.
At this point in the PC-98's lifecycle, Windows 95 was beginning its reign of terror upon the once relatively isolated Japanese PC market. Commercial game makers either tried to work with Microsoft's initial, admittedly shoddy development tools for the new OS, or they bailed on their PC strongholds to find success on consoles instead. This left a big variety gap for doujin creators like metys, a coder accustomed to working remotely over BBS and now the Internet. Whether creating for the whole online country or just Comiket runs, Japan's changing PC gaming landscape behooved smaller, less financially bound game makers to pick up where studios like Telenet and Micro Cabin left off. Bio_100%'s renown in the doujin freeware space reached its peak at the middle of the decade, and Polestar represents this in so many ways.
Above all, it's rare to play an arcade-style racer this imbued with a bubble-era ethos and optimism, yet staunchly opposed to commercialization and any related baggage. So many players invested in the PC-98 could dial up their local ASCII net, pay much less to download this than even a Takeru vending-machine floppy game, and have a nightly favorite running on their turn-of-the-'90s PC within a day. The slow but sure democratization of online networking and doujin free-/shareware in mid-'90s Japan did wonders to buoy an ecosystem transitioning from one dominant power, NEC, to another under Windows. Polestar may not have a hydraulic taikan cabinet with cool gizmos, nor a bevy of extra tracks like you'd expect from the hot new racers on PS1 & Saturn. But with all else it offers at such high quality, it filled a niche in that special way only Bio_100% and a few other doujin creators could at the time. Perhaps a certain Team Shanghai Alice learned a thing or two from this group's smart decisions.
Like with most Bio_100% releases from '90-'96, Polestar's easily accessible via PC-98 emulator running either the floppies or a multi-game compilation. Jumping between this and the group's earlier, rougher but similarly joyful titles makes it even easier to appreciate what the '94 racer accomplished. It's a shame how the group basically died down and soon disbanded as Windows really took over, with Bio_100% creators moving further into their careers away from doujin development. But if that meant ending on such a high note between this and Sengoku TURB for Dreamcast, then I can't complain much. Polestar's a sporty circuit racer for the people, and one of the best PC-98 games you can just jump into right now, no extra work or mental prep required.
No one's gonna fool themselves into deeming this a realistic driving sim(-cade) experience, and it's better off for that. Polestar's got the kind of DIY spirit and a style all its own that newer takes on classic Super Scaler racers could learn from. You've got two sets of increasingly complex circuits to lap, a sleek sports car to learn the handling of, and the most uncanny, smoothly performing arts-and-crafts visual style I've seen in this genre. It's all clearly working within the boundaries of what a primarily text & static graphics-focused system can do best. And I love that kind of platform-pushing pride which acknowledges the limits of the PC-98 (let alone other home computers back then) but leads to seemingly impossible achievements anyway.
This short but sweet game runs best at on 486 chips running 20 MHz or more, a rather low figure which many users reached or exceeded, so it managed all its feats without becoming the Crysis of its community. Controls are the standard but responsive pedal, brake, and low-to-high shifter seen in OutRun and countless titles like it. What's nice is the detailed options/configuration screen Bio_100% provides, letting you change everything from the measurement system to in-game FOV! There's just enough customization here to compensate for a lack of extra vehicles, plus the low amount of content and novel replayability. It's also a rare later game to only use PSG or MIDI music, forgoing the PC-98's usual FM-synth sound chip even at the expense of some players. (Then again, never a better time to slap Tatsuro Yamashita in your Walkman.)
Simple keyboard & gamepad commands, plus ways to achieve a solid 60 FPS feeling even on 25 KHz refresh monitors, all fortify Polestar's gamefeel. Getting used to the game's sometimes slipper road physics can take a couple tries, but comes naturally over time. You're sharing lanes with hazards like errant trucks and breaks in the pavement; avoiding any off-roading when crossing water or passing by a big creepy clown animatronic (among other things) gives you plenty of challenge. But like any arcade auto-sseys worth a damn, you're mostly racing the time limit and your past records, zipping around with glee as the numbers tick up. There's not a whole lot for me to say here except that metys and his Bio_100% collaborators loved their classic racers and effortlessly brought the genre's strengths to an unlikely venue.
At this point in the PC-98's lifecycle, Windows 95 was beginning its reign of terror upon the once relatively isolated Japanese PC market. Commercial game makers either tried to work with Microsoft's initial, admittedly shoddy development tools for the new OS, or they bailed on their PC strongholds to find success on consoles instead. This left a big variety gap for doujin creators like metys, a coder accustomed to working remotely over BBS and now the Internet. Whether creating for the whole online country or just Comiket runs, Japan's changing PC gaming landscape behooved smaller, less financially bound game makers to pick up where studios like Telenet and Micro Cabin left off. Bio_100%'s renown in the doujin freeware space reached its peak at the middle of the decade, and Polestar represents this in so many ways.
Above all, it's rare to play an arcade-style racer this imbued with a bubble-era ethos and optimism, yet staunchly opposed to commercialization and any related baggage. So many players invested in the PC-98 could dial up their local ASCII net, pay much less to download this than even a Takeru vending-machine floppy game, and have a nightly favorite running on their turn-of-the-'90s PC within a day. The slow but sure democratization of online networking and doujin free-/shareware in mid-'90s Japan did wonders to buoy an ecosystem transitioning from one dominant power, NEC, to another under Windows. Polestar may not have a hydraulic taikan cabinet with cool gizmos, nor a bevy of extra tracks like you'd expect from the hot new racers on PS1 & Saturn. But with all else it offers at such high quality, it filled a niche in that special way only Bio_100% and a few other doujin creators could at the time. Perhaps a certain Team Shanghai Alice learned a thing or two from this group's smart decisions.
Like with most Bio_100% releases from '90-'96, Polestar's easily accessible via PC-98 emulator running either the floppies or a multi-game compilation. Jumping between this and the group's earlier, rougher but similarly joyful titles makes it even easier to appreciate what the '94 racer accomplished. It's a shame how the group basically died down and soon disbanded as Windows really took over, with Bio_100% creators moving further into their careers away from doujin development. But if that meant ending on such a high note between this and Sengoku TURB for Dreamcast, then I can't complain much. Polestar's a sporty circuit racer for the people, and one of the best PC-98 games you can just jump into right now, no extra work or mental prep required.
2010
Polemic for a once uncertain future of indie JRPG-adjacent creations. The scrapbook acerbic, playing in the same mud it slings. Baudelaire imbues and narrates this dirge with an overpowering thesis: "unshackle yourselves from the entropy of tradition, lest it affix your form to creative insolvency". Even Dracula's taking lessons in this brave new world (and sharing the boof!!). BBC Radiophonic library music plays off an ever-morphic realm of irreverence, accompanying the idolatry of and tribute to the RPG Maker sub-culture of old.
It's also just fucking dumb, but in surprisingly funny ways. thecatamites finds such glee in devising and sharing spoonerisms of JRPG design language, one example being the intentionally overcomplicated combat verbiage. I'd be surprised if anyone went into this expecting a focus on battles anyway, but the game quickly tells you to let go of that notion entirely. Like the irony of horror games getting scarier when you have usable weapons that highlight your nakedness without them, Space Funeral's vestigial JRPG-ness contrasts harshly with the rest of the ludonarrative essay. It's much funnier when the game earnestly tries to do classic-style boss fights while you directly mock them via the Mystery action or using insta-win items like bibles and old movies. Couple that with increasingly absurd dialogues and other self-indulgement for a fun time.
Others have gone more in-depth about the messaging behind this game and subsequent works by thecatamites. It's as invested in critiquing the likes of Laxius Power as much as it approaches the creative process from a Plato-vs-Heraclitus dialectic. Think of Ovid, an exile in many ways but most prominently for his poetic deviance. A similar kind of ire-meets-reverence flows through Space Funeral as it did ages ago in the Metamorphoses, criticizing as much as it homages. Comparing him to Ovid is a little ridiculous (if I had to guess, he'd call this whole laborious review silly), of course. But there's clear themes behind the craziness on display.
What elevates this experience for me is how it avoids any simple binaries. Chaos of experimentation vs. order of convention is the major theme here, of course, but it doesn't forget there's a world beyond that. Amidst contemporaries like OFF and Earthbound Halloween Hack, this hour-long corrupted pantomime still has character hiding within it. Sometimes you just wanna chill with dancing death mummies, or turn into a fish on the overworld for daring to be happy. All the game's a stage, and its players and NPCs merely figures.
So, next time when I try some truly ancient RPG Maker games from the '90s, I'll be grateful to know just how much the international community canon and aspirations have evolved. ASCII's amateur development tools have gotten us this far, presaging the rise of similar suites and deviations for visual novel creators. This first playthrough reminded me a lot of OMGWTFOTL, but now including all kinds of authorial touches, integrity, and story through form that was once lacking. All this under the guise of such anarchy! It's just an incredible, bloody mess of a game.
It's also just fucking dumb, but in surprisingly funny ways. thecatamites finds such glee in devising and sharing spoonerisms of JRPG design language, one example being the intentionally overcomplicated combat verbiage. I'd be surprised if anyone went into this expecting a focus on battles anyway, but the game quickly tells you to let go of that notion entirely. Like the irony of horror games getting scarier when you have usable weapons that highlight your nakedness without them, Space Funeral's vestigial JRPG-ness contrasts harshly with the rest of the ludonarrative essay. It's much funnier when the game earnestly tries to do classic-style boss fights while you directly mock them via the Mystery action or using insta-win items like bibles and old movies. Couple that with increasingly absurd dialogues and other self-indulgement for a fun time.
Others have gone more in-depth about the messaging behind this game and subsequent works by thecatamites. It's as invested in critiquing the likes of Laxius Power as much as it approaches the creative process from a Plato-vs-Heraclitus dialectic. Think of Ovid, an exile in many ways but most prominently for his poetic deviance. A similar kind of ire-meets-reverence flows through Space Funeral as it did ages ago in the Metamorphoses, criticizing as much as it homages. Comparing him to Ovid is a little ridiculous (if I had to guess, he'd call this whole laborious review silly), of course. But there's clear themes behind the craziness on display.
What elevates this experience for me is how it avoids any simple binaries. Chaos of experimentation vs. order of convention is the major theme here, of course, but it doesn't forget there's a world beyond that. Amidst contemporaries like OFF and Earthbound Halloween Hack, this hour-long corrupted pantomime still has character hiding within it. Sometimes you just wanna chill with dancing death mummies, or turn into a fish on the overworld for daring to be happy. All the game's a stage, and its players and NPCs merely figures.
So, next time when I try some truly ancient RPG Maker games from the '90s, I'll be grateful to know just how much the international community canon and aspirations have evolved. ASCII's amateur development tools have gotten us this far, presaging the rise of similar suites and deviations for visual novel creators. This first playthrough reminded me a lot of OMGWTFOTL, but now including all kinds of authorial touches, integrity, and story through form that was once lacking. All this under the guise of such anarchy! It's just an incredible, bloody mess of a game.
Whoever escaped the Abenomics-era Konami developer prison to make this and keep it mostly ad-free for a couple of years: I salute you. May your cockles be warm and your curry plate tasty.
Jupiter took their precious sweet time doing more Picross collabs with IPs from corps like SEGA, yet the company no one expected put this out for free. And it barely feels like a free-to-play monstrosity, either! I picked up Pixel Puzzle Collection back around release since I wanted a meaty mobile game for the road, but got plenty more than I'd hoped for. There's a decades-spanning rogues' gallery of cool references made into nonograms here, from Frogger to Tokimeki Memorial. Playing these in a randomized sequence, albeit tuned for difficulty, makes it a smooth stop-and-go experience. I didn't realize that I'd gotten far into the total puzzles list until reaching the first batch of big multi-piece pictures, a good sign if ever.
UI and touch precision responsiveness are everything in a mobile nonogram app like this. I'm happy to report that, while a little stiff at times, this still feels better to use than the much bigger, easily discoverable competitors on the iOS marketplace. It rarely feels like I'm fat-fingering myself into a misplaced pip I'll regret later, or that I can't quickly redo grid sections when needed. This matters once you reach the game's second loop (its "Hard Mode"), where the inability to mark X pips means you must fill each line more carefully. After all, how am I gonna make my Shiori Fujisaki solutions come true if I keep messing up thirty minutes back?! (That's still more generous than the games she's from, no doubt.)
Pixel Puzzle Collection feels like an M2 employee's pet project at times, the kind of passionate mega-mini-game you'd make in the shadows and then slap into one of their compilations like it's nothing. This stood out five years ago mainly because it stood against all the stereotypes Konami's earned in recent years, most of which oppose that which this Picross set exalts. It's telling how classic Hudson Soft icons and characters from many games share plenty of space with the core Konami crew, as the corporation had become awfully good at erasing Hudson's history from digital stores by this point. There's nothing quite like hopping from Ganbare Goemon to Star Solider in a moment's notice, let's just put it that way.
For less experienced nonogram heads, there's a smartly designed hint system in play here. You get three daily solutions to use for any puzzle (plus the add for "boss" grids), and then a 10-minute cooldown for each new one after those. I like this more than the overly generous equivalents I see on my other phone Picross apps, and it feels naturally tuned to how much attention I'd give a hard puzzle before moving on. All I want now is more, which I guess is too much for Konami since they've done nothing for Pixel Puzzle Collection these past few years except shove more ads in. They really want you playing any other mobile game that could squeeze more coin, as if a prestige experience like this is somehow hurting their bottom line enough to deserve such harm. I hope whoever coded/designed the game is having an alright time, wherever they are.
All this sounds frustrating and it is when you consider how well Nintendo treats Jupiter's Picross works. Even then, the official Picross games you can get on the eShop now feel creatively stagnant, or just unwilling to toy with riskier concepts like that company used to. I'm not saying this weird misbegotten Konami counterpart is innovative, either, but it had so much sequel potential that's just getting squandered over time. Indie scene developers are taking the genre in all sorts of new directions while those who can access the kinds of resources Nintendo & Konami have are getting screwed. And I find it harder to recommend Pixel Puzzle Collection now because, while the core game's unchanged, all the new ads and annoyances remind you of what could have been. But I think it's still an easy choice for game fans who are either into nonograms or could use a cute diversion playing on nostalgia without feeling like a copout.
Jupiter took their precious sweet time doing more Picross collabs with IPs from corps like SEGA, yet the company no one expected put this out for free. And it barely feels like a free-to-play monstrosity, either! I picked up Pixel Puzzle Collection back around release since I wanted a meaty mobile game for the road, but got plenty more than I'd hoped for. There's a decades-spanning rogues' gallery of cool references made into nonograms here, from Frogger to Tokimeki Memorial. Playing these in a randomized sequence, albeit tuned for difficulty, makes it a smooth stop-and-go experience. I didn't realize that I'd gotten far into the total puzzles list until reaching the first batch of big multi-piece pictures, a good sign if ever.
UI and touch precision responsiveness are everything in a mobile nonogram app like this. I'm happy to report that, while a little stiff at times, this still feels better to use than the much bigger, easily discoverable competitors on the iOS marketplace. It rarely feels like I'm fat-fingering myself into a misplaced pip I'll regret later, or that I can't quickly redo grid sections when needed. This matters once you reach the game's second loop (its "Hard Mode"), where the inability to mark X pips means you must fill each line more carefully. After all, how am I gonna make my Shiori Fujisaki solutions come true if I keep messing up thirty minutes back?! (That's still more generous than the games she's from, no doubt.)
Pixel Puzzle Collection feels like an M2 employee's pet project at times, the kind of passionate mega-mini-game you'd make in the shadows and then slap into one of their compilations like it's nothing. This stood out five years ago mainly because it stood against all the stereotypes Konami's earned in recent years, most of which oppose that which this Picross set exalts. It's telling how classic Hudson Soft icons and characters from many games share plenty of space with the core Konami crew, as the corporation had become awfully good at erasing Hudson's history from digital stores by this point. There's nothing quite like hopping from Ganbare Goemon to Star Solider in a moment's notice, let's just put it that way.
For less experienced nonogram heads, there's a smartly designed hint system in play here. You get three daily solutions to use for any puzzle (plus the add for "boss" grids), and then a 10-minute cooldown for each new one after those. I like this more than the overly generous equivalents I see on my other phone Picross apps, and it feels naturally tuned to how much attention I'd give a hard puzzle before moving on. All I want now is more, which I guess is too much for Konami since they've done nothing for Pixel Puzzle Collection these past few years except shove more ads in. They really want you playing any other mobile game that could squeeze more coin, as if a prestige experience like this is somehow hurting their bottom line enough to deserve such harm. I hope whoever coded/designed the game is having an alright time, wherever they are.
All this sounds frustrating and it is when you consider how well Nintendo treats Jupiter's Picross works. Even then, the official Picross games you can get on the eShop now feel creatively stagnant, or just unwilling to toy with riskier concepts like that company used to. I'm not saying this weird misbegotten Konami counterpart is innovative, either, but it had so much sequel potential that's just getting squandered over time. Indie scene developers are taking the genre in all sorts of new directions while those who can access the kinds of resources Nintendo & Konami have are getting screwed. And I find it harder to recommend Pixel Puzzle Collection now because, while the core game's unchanged, all the new ads and annoyances remind you of what could have been. But I think it's still an easy choice for game fans who are either into nonograms or could use a cute diversion playing on nostalgia without feeling like a copout.
2000
Welcome to driving schools, pirate ships, dragon coasters...the stuff plastic dreams are made of. Too bad you have to run the place.
Maybe it's not so bad—in fact, it's comically easy. You do have a semblance of time limits in the later missions, but building and maintaining parks is very straightforward. I wish the developers hadn't missed the boat on RollerCoaster Tycoon's additions to the park tycoon format; this one's much closer to Theme Park. While I don't have anything against Bullfrog's game, Chris Sawyer had quickly advanced the genre's complexity without sacrificing accessibility for new players. Most importantly, RCT & its ilk were much more about creatively designing & planning your realm, not just working with repetitive prefabs.
This makes Legoland a solid enough Windows 9x tycoon romp, but a rather shallow one too. It's fine when you're starting with tutorials offering limited attractions, scenery, and staff to manage, yet it doesn't ramp up much beyond that. A lot of the budget instead went to making as sleek & colorful a package as Lego Media could muster, with memorable FMV movies and the like. Music & sound design's also pleasant on the ears, so I can't complain there. As a kid, this seemed like the coolest game, a better structured alternative to Lego Creator that also let me feel like I was at the parks.
Assuming you can get it running on your PC (I fear for Steam Deck users...), Legoland's a reliably entertaining example of how diverse Lego games once were. Its controls & QoL features are definitely dated, but you're rarely if ever challenged to the point that you'll need modern streamlining. (Not that I'd ever complain about folks modding this game to a higher tier than it currently sits in!) Temper you expectations, though. The repetition, somewhat low amount of content, & constrained potential for sandbox play makes this more of a one-and-done for me.
P.S. The game's spokesperson & tutorial guy wouldn't last a day on social media. What a clown.
Maybe it's not so bad—in fact, it's comically easy. You do have a semblance of time limits in the later missions, but building and maintaining parks is very straightforward. I wish the developers hadn't missed the boat on RollerCoaster Tycoon's additions to the park tycoon format; this one's much closer to Theme Park. While I don't have anything against Bullfrog's game, Chris Sawyer had quickly advanced the genre's complexity without sacrificing accessibility for new players. Most importantly, RCT & its ilk were much more about creatively designing & planning your realm, not just working with repetitive prefabs.
This makes Legoland a solid enough Windows 9x tycoon romp, but a rather shallow one too. It's fine when you're starting with tutorials offering limited attractions, scenery, and staff to manage, yet it doesn't ramp up much beyond that. A lot of the budget instead went to making as sleek & colorful a package as Lego Media could muster, with memorable FMV movies and the like. Music & sound design's also pleasant on the ears, so I can't complain there. As a kid, this seemed like the coolest game, a better structured alternative to Lego Creator that also let me feel like I was at the parks.
Assuming you can get it running on your PC (I fear for Steam Deck users...), Legoland's a reliably entertaining example of how diverse Lego games once were. Its controls & QoL features are definitely dated, but you're rarely if ever challenged to the point that you'll need modern streamlining. (Not that I'd ever complain about folks modding this game to a higher tier than it currently sits in!) Temper you expectations, though. The repetition, somewhat low amount of content, & constrained potential for sandbox play makes this more of a one-and-done for me.
P.S. The game's spokesperson & tutorial guy wouldn't last a day on social media. What a clown.
2003
Credit where it's due: at least the Game Boy Camera and SEGA's DreamEye got treated with enough dignity to never suffer a minigame collection this lame.
More credit goes to London Studio for injecting some much-needed, if dated amount of personality where it counts. I'll always fondly remember unpacking this honestly not terrible webcam (Logitech wasn't much better in '03), then loading into the cheeky, very post-Psygnosis tutorial movie explaining how to use the peripheral. Watching what might as well be the queen mother and her clones dancing to stock library disco as the Stanley Parable narrator goodbye-s you is still surreal. I wish the game itself had as much family-friendly anarchy. Part of me wants to argue the inconsistent art direction between minigames brings this closer to WarioWare or a modern game jam, but it's just not there.
With 12 minigames of varying quality on offer, Sony's making a go at matching its competitors in silly gimmickry. A good chunk of the experience revolves around variations on whack-a-mole, or something like those Moorhuhn (Crazy Chicken) shovelware titles you see every now and then. This whole idea of pairing a novel, limited but intriguing add-on console toy with what amounts to a prototype Carnival Games worked at the time. The folks & I had a solid time looking stupid in front of the TV, though my sister stuck mostly to our metal DDR pad since those games had far more substance. Little did we know this would have us wibblin' and wobblin' in the living room some years later—that was Wii Sports, though, which remains far more replayable in 2023.
EyeToy Play is fun enough for what it is, a serviceable pack-in game which took the safe route with proving that this idea could even work. Nintendo's aforementioned handheld lens toy has somehow managed to age better by dint of offering a uniquely lo-fi experience, though. Going from harsh but exotic monochrome games and photo printing to the blurry, often out-of-focus mess EyeToy provides seems a bit underwhelming nowadays. What I really lament, though, is the C-rate Y2K aesthetic dominating this collection. (Half of the game looks like it's recycling unused Psybadek concepts, mashing them up with Gorillaz and other post-Y2K intercontinental mascot designs.) It just reminds me too much of when these developers, a mix of ex-Psygnosis fellas and The Getaway's team, had more creative projects to work on.
Again, this isn't a strictly bad game. Most minigames work properly with the EyeToy in most room settings, and it's a bit amusing to wave your arms around, a kind of bastardized ParaPara Paradise or Samba de Amigo for the new era. Just temper your expectations if you collect one of these square, googly things and stick this in your PS2. I'd personally rather play SEGA Superstars if only for the IP variety and actual Samba de Amigo experience. However, the lack of ambition and increasingly quaint presentation behind this pack-in was kind of the point. If it was too good a free disc to keep playing, would you have bought all those other EyeToy games coming later? Consider how Nintendo fell into that trap later, with Wii Sports & Play offering enough for most owners to just skip out on following minigame collections (or settle for the bargain bin equivalents).
See, this is exactly what Thursday does to an oldhead like me. I get vaguely nostalgic thoughts about what passed muster for party night amusement at the end of elementary school, and then I think harder about what this was actually like. Youngsters have it so much easier in these social media dog days. EyeToy: Play was the offline TikTok dance simulator of its day, cheaper than a ParaPara cab every weekend but not much more advanced than some plastic maracas. Games like this fall through the cracks of half-remembered cringe and convenient historic amnesia—some would say for the better. I just feel sorry for all the UK devs Sony chopped into teams like London Studio, who then had to take any mid project they could get by their corporate sponsor. tl;dr Where the hell's the Wipeout minigame in this set?!
More credit goes to London Studio for injecting some much-needed, if dated amount of personality where it counts. I'll always fondly remember unpacking this honestly not terrible webcam (Logitech wasn't much better in '03), then loading into the cheeky, very post-Psygnosis tutorial movie explaining how to use the peripheral. Watching what might as well be the queen mother and her clones dancing to stock library disco as the Stanley Parable narrator goodbye-s you is still surreal. I wish the game itself had as much family-friendly anarchy. Part of me wants to argue the inconsistent art direction between minigames brings this closer to WarioWare or a modern game jam, but it's just not there.
With 12 minigames of varying quality on offer, Sony's making a go at matching its competitors in silly gimmickry. A good chunk of the experience revolves around variations on whack-a-mole, or something like those Moorhuhn (Crazy Chicken) shovelware titles you see every now and then. This whole idea of pairing a novel, limited but intriguing add-on console toy with what amounts to a prototype Carnival Games worked at the time. The folks & I had a solid time looking stupid in front of the TV, though my sister stuck mostly to our metal DDR pad since those games had far more substance. Little did we know this would have us wibblin' and wobblin' in the living room some years later—that was Wii Sports, though, which remains far more replayable in 2023.
EyeToy Play is fun enough for what it is, a serviceable pack-in game which took the safe route with proving that this idea could even work. Nintendo's aforementioned handheld lens toy has somehow managed to age better by dint of offering a uniquely lo-fi experience, though. Going from harsh but exotic monochrome games and photo printing to the blurry, often out-of-focus mess EyeToy provides seems a bit underwhelming nowadays. What I really lament, though, is the C-rate Y2K aesthetic dominating this collection. (Half of the game looks like it's recycling unused Psybadek concepts, mashing them up with Gorillaz and other post-Y2K intercontinental mascot designs.) It just reminds me too much of when these developers, a mix of ex-Psygnosis fellas and The Getaway's team, had more creative projects to work on.
Again, this isn't a strictly bad game. Most minigames work properly with the EyeToy in most room settings, and it's a bit amusing to wave your arms around, a kind of bastardized ParaPara Paradise or Samba de Amigo for the new era. Just temper your expectations if you collect one of these square, googly things and stick this in your PS2. I'd personally rather play SEGA Superstars if only for the IP variety and actual Samba de Amigo experience. However, the lack of ambition and increasingly quaint presentation behind this pack-in was kind of the point. If it was too good a free disc to keep playing, would you have bought all those other EyeToy games coming later? Consider how Nintendo fell into that trap later, with Wii Sports & Play offering enough for most owners to just skip out on following minigame collections (or settle for the bargain bin equivalents).
See, this is exactly what Thursday does to an oldhead like me. I get vaguely nostalgic thoughts about what passed muster for party night amusement at the end of elementary school, and then I think harder about what this was actually like. Youngsters have it so much easier in these social media dog days. EyeToy: Play was the offline TikTok dance simulator of its day, cheaper than a ParaPara cab every weekend but not much more advanced than some plastic maracas. Games like this fall through the cracks of half-remembered cringe and convenient historic amnesia—some would say for the better. I just feel sorry for all the UK devs Sony chopped into teams like London Studio, who then had to take any mid project they could get by their corporate sponsor. tl;dr Where the hell's the Wipeout minigame in this set?!
1983
WOW! YOU LOSE!! (by playing the downgraded Famicom port of a 1983 game?)
Bokosuka Wars was to Japan's real-time sim/strategy genres what Utopia, Stonkers, & Cytron Masters were to '80s Western PC RTSes. I'd argue this game was more important than them simply for its influence on Tecno Soft's Herzog series, which itself inspired Westwood developers who'd later make the seminal Dune II. That's a lot of words to say this isn't some throwaway footnote in the Famicom library. Japanese PC game conversions to Nintendo's machine were a big event in those early years, and Bokosuka Wars had a genuine wow factor that still matters.
ASCII published this lone creation by Koji Sumii (today a traditional craftsman & puppeteer) on cassette for Sharp's X1 micro-computer back in '83 to much acclaim. It got an expansion/sequel the year later and ports to other PCs before reaching the Famicom. Despite a modern sequel being well-received, the Nintendo rendition has gone down in kusoge history. After all, why try & play this experimental proto-RTS on its own terms when you can bumble into an early wipe & laugh at the game over screen? /s
Context aside, I still have a lot of fun with the PC original, which combines basic real-time strategy mechanics with a light RNG layer & simple to understand progression. Unlike the Famicom port where you start with no soldiers at all, the X1 original gives you a big starting squad. This lets you get used to the controls & your units' frailty before you dive headfirst into the front-lines. Learning how to make new units from trees, plus how to quickly reposition grunts in front of you to do battles, becomes second nature after a while. I wouldn't call this an easy game, but it's hardly as ill-designed or inscrutable as retro discussions make it out to be.
I'd mainly recommend playing this if you're interested in the RTS genre's history or would enjoy a simple, sometimes frustrating but ultimately compelling arcade wargame. The X1 version's not too hard to find out in the digital wilderness, but I wish it was officially accessible via a modern remake or even through Project EGG for PC users. It's an important & distinctive piece of software which paved the way not just for Herzog (Zwei) & Dune II, but other oddities like Kure Software's Silver Ghost & First Queen series.
Bokosuka Wars was to Japan's real-time sim/strategy genres what Utopia, Stonkers, & Cytron Masters were to '80s Western PC RTSes. I'd argue this game was more important than them simply for its influence on Tecno Soft's Herzog series, which itself inspired Westwood developers who'd later make the seminal Dune II. That's a lot of words to say this isn't some throwaway footnote in the Famicom library. Japanese PC game conversions to Nintendo's machine were a big event in those early years, and Bokosuka Wars had a genuine wow factor that still matters.
ASCII published this lone creation by Koji Sumii (today a traditional craftsman & puppeteer) on cassette for Sharp's X1 micro-computer back in '83 to much acclaim. It got an expansion/sequel the year later and ports to other PCs before reaching the Famicom. Despite a modern sequel being well-received, the Nintendo rendition has gone down in kusoge history. After all, why try & play this experimental proto-RTS on its own terms when you can bumble into an early wipe & laugh at the game over screen? /s
Context aside, I still have a lot of fun with the PC original, which combines basic real-time strategy mechanics with a light RNG layer & simple to understand progression. Unlike the Famicom port where you start with no soldiers at all, the X1 original gives you a big starting squad. This lets you get used to the controls & your units' frailty before you dive headfirst into the front-lines. Learning how to make new units from trees, plus how to quickly reposition grunts in front of you to do battles, becomes second nature after a while. I wouldn't call this an easy game, but it's hardly as ill-designed or inscrutable as retro discussions make it out to be.
I'd mainly recommend playing this if you're interested in the RTS genre's history or would enjoy a simple, sometimes frustrating but ultimately compelling arcade wargame. The X1 version's not too hard to find out in the digital wilderness, but I wish it was officially accessible via a modern remake or even through Project EGG for PC users. It's an important & distinctive piece of software which paved the way not just for Herzog (Zwei) & Dune II, but other oddities like Kure Software's Silver Ghost & First Queen series.