Being an early 3DS adopter sucked. I didn't really feel it back then, and I'd end up having a better time with the system than with its predecessor for some reason. But it's no surprise that a low-scale free eShop release like 3D Classics: Excitebike would have, um, excited launch players desperate for some variety. The promise of no-bullshit stereoscopic 3D on the go, plus improved hardware and online functionality, should have had more of an initial offering. For what it's worth, Arika's first experiment with a full-3D remake of an NES icon went well, albeit conspicuously lacking in new content or multiplayer options. It's nonetheless among the 3DS' best pick-up-and-play software, a natural outcome when the source material's strong to begin with.

The original game needs some context. Excitebike introduced many Famicom gamers to fast, relatively detailed side-scrolling action on their TVs. Its motocross theme stood out in a throng of otherwise predictable racing titles, either from the VCS/Intellivision/ColecoVision era or SEGA's recent SG-1000 lineup. Most importantly, this was one of Shigeru Miyamoto's baby steps towards the game engine needed to make Super Mario Bros. a reality. Only a month after Namco's own Pac-Land showed the arcade-going populace what a side-scrolling athletic adventure could be, here's a similarly ambitious cartridge toying with what was previously a choppy, taxing graphical experiment on home machines. (Let's not forget all the fairly smooth scrolling titles coming out on MSX or Sharp X1 during this time, though!)

Miyamoto's team could easily have settled for a low-risk, multi-lane derby racer with a motorbiking skin. What they instead made was one of the earliest innovations in this genre, a hybrid incorporating the developers' platformer concepts. I think it's best to approach Excitebike today as a physics experiment in disguise, with either game mode asking players to balance dexterity with urgency. You've got just as many awkward jumps to land at awkward angles as you do opponents to dodge and overtake. And the swift pace of play ensures there's always some thrilling combo of track pieces and drivers in clumps to manage. Getting used to the controls and ideal riding positions for each scenario takes practice, but I always feel rewarded for nailing each course. The low amount of content wouldn't have stung in 1984, either, since this still dwarfed almost every other Famicom cart in replayability.

Combined with a nifty track editor which Japanese players could use to save creations on the Data Recorder add-on, this was yet another system seller for Nintendo's soon dominant platform. How fitting, then, to use it again as freeware on a rather underequipped new console decades later! Sadly this was one of the most notable games one could try prior to staples like Pushmo, Etrian Odyssey IV, Bravely Default, Kid Icarus: Uprising, etc. And that meant extra scrutiny and emphasis for 3D Classics: Excitebike which it couldn't possibly live up to. Of course, I was having too much fun with Pilotwings Resort and the surprise Ambassador freebies, but I don't envy anyone making this at Arika as news of middling pre-orders and launch attention trickled in.

This remake doesn't try to reinvent the two-wheels, for the better. All the Famicom game's pros and cons remain, now magnified by the dev team's mix of polygonal models, flat shading, and glasses-free 3D. Going from the active 3DS operating system to the static eShop didn't sell me on these 3D capabilities, but games like this sure did. There's still something special about the bizarre diorama effect these 3D Classics provide, a kind of immersion which M2 carried forward into their own series. In terms of aiding the game loop, the 3D implementation doesn't do a whole lot; I'm just glad it's as unobtrusive and flattering to the visual style as Excitebike deserves. Increased view distance thanks to widescreen's easily the biggest win here, making the game easier and more satisfying for all but the most masochistic players.

Where 3D Classics: Excitebike fails to deliver is its multiplayer feature set. That is, if there was any. I'm baffled that Nintendo and Arika skipped out on letting players share track editor courses with each other. No online leaderboards flies in the face of score play, dis-incentivizing players from learning every quirk of the engine to attain impressive results. And no versus mode, or any pro-oriented extras like mirrored stages, further reduces this remake's value. Whether these were oversights and rushing or conscious omissions to save on time and resources, I come away disappointed with what could have been. It doesn't really get in the way of what's already great here, but it stings for anyone buying this now before the eShop closes. Make this free again, Big N!

Even more regrettable was the demise of Nintendo & Arika's 3D Classics to come. Who in hell asked for a redux of Urban Champions?! At least they got around to highlights like Kid Icarus and especially Kirby's Adventure, both of which shine in stereoscopy even without the polygonal/voxel treatment. But then this line just stopped dead, either because of poor sales or their priorities going elsewhere. This didn't happen with SEGA & M2, thankfully, yet they weren't ever going to try the more liberal approach Arika took with 3D Classics: Excitebike's presentation. The voxel-esque look, bolstered controls and visibility, and having multiple save slots for usermade courses makes it the definitive way to play this '84 NES notable today. Citra runs this perfectly, too, but the ideal experience for an early 3DS tech demo requires the system itself. Get this now before it's pulled alongside the rest of the eShop—I'm not paying extra for 3D glasses my PC monitor would vibe with.

SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD — Herbie Hopperheap

Object Class: Safe

Standard Containment Procedures: SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD is to be contained within a regular MAME installation or period-appropriate arcade video game cabinet and PCB board. This housing must always be enclosed in a small human-sized room, with all surveillance from beyond one-way mirrors to prevent radiation of vibes onto observers. All personnel must interact with and stimulate the entity via a digital-to-physical interface such as a keyboard, joystick, console controller, etc. Familiarity with similar arcade-based media from the 1970s and early 1980s is advisable. Please use remote robot arm to insert coins and otherwise tamper with specimen. As ever, we enforce these rules to protect you from dangerous hazards—even those cloaked behind the façade of an appealing interactive media apparatus like this.

[NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION: ALL NEURO-LUDOLOGICAL EXPOSURE TO THE VEHICULAR CREATURE RISKS PERMANENT MENTAL TRANSFORMATION WITH SYMPTOMS INCLUDING ADDICTION, EYE STRAIN, KINNING, MANUFACTURED NOSTALGIA, ETC. — REFRAIN FROM EXCESSIVE DURATION OF TESTING, OR "HOPPING" DURING SESSIONS, UNLESS PROPER O5 COUNCIL CLEARANCE AND SUPERVISION GRANTED]

Temporary "lives" structure of play can be bypassed for purposes of experimentation via preserving machine states in memory, but is advised against following past anomalies and accidents. Researchers and security must wear quote-unquote "Cool '80s VR Shades" when in presence of SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD at any time to prevent sensory damage. Using on-site equipment ensures safety of multiple tests upon subject without damage or evidence tampering for personnel. Bear in mind that these measures are not fool-proof and remain subject to review and risk evaluation as we continue to study the subject. A prior outbreak, SCP-4163 [Not unlike the fabled "Tetris Effect", but worse — Ed.], and its transmission of sub-anomalies to similar interfaces sets precedent here, hence the supervision of all control devices and, if needed, isolation and disintegration of them.

Description: Sales sheet refers to initial development contractor, Hoei Sangyo. Creator attribution is yet unknown, but the subject was born from multiple minicomputer environments operated by Alpha Denshi Corporation on behalf of Hoei Sangyo and distributor SEGA Enterprises. This electronic printed circuit board (PCB), plus accompanying means of human interaction and presentation, was first sold to game centers, movie theaters, and other recreational venues sometime in 1981, starting in Japan. Ever since, dwindling units of "Jump Bug" have appeared in the hands of collectors, or idling and decaying within landfills or warehouses. Wherever found, the entity's reported to occasionally entice, entrance, haunt, and finally consume its players' faculties through processes still undetermined.

Upon receiving power, subject board device activates and transmits binary-encoded signals to cabinet housing and attached monitor, displaying series of vibrant, colorful animated worlds on black background. Inserting coinage of proper weight (ex. Standard U.S. quarter) into designated slot one or more times to prepare subject for testing. So far, all our tests conclude with a "Game Over" prompt on-screen, after which one can feed the thing more cupronickel currency or proceed to power it down. Successful adherence to procedures and methodology have so far spared our rotating teams from falling into purported existential traps laid out by the software and its means of conveyance.

Addendum [author's subtitle: THE ACTUAL DAMN REVIEW] The following journal from Dr. [REDACTED] is a useful summary of knowledge gained from "1CC"-ing the provided experience:

"March 26, 2023, 1732 hours: I've finished a few so-called "loops" of this odd video game, a demon in disguise if I may conjecture. The side-scrolling progression mostly resembles Konami's Scramble from earlier that year, at least until one reaches the dungeon section which doesn't auto-scroll. Because the eponymous Herbie-like vehicle can't stop bounding, the driver has to control its air velocity and direction, all while shooting down various monsters and collecting money bags for score and extra chances. In short, it's got a devilish game loop, hooking me whenever I let down my guard and haven't any TPS reports or other busywork to distract me.”

"…Wait a minute, this thing's what's been distracting me! Excuse my irreverence towards Foundation duties, but that's just one side-effect the subject can displace upon its witnesses. Other phenomena this machine expresses, like its psychedelic graphical changes demarcating new sections of the game world, threatens to overcome me with delight, a microprocessor prescribing desertion of my daily worries. Come to think of it, I don't understand why the Council keeps putting me on this project every time I politely back out and work elsewhere. Do they want me to let my guard down and become a true victim of something this fun, replayable, and unique among all those innocuous arcade pastimes?"

"Never mind that I can truly see the appeal here. It's a deft fusion of Donkey Kong and Scramble which could attain a cult-classic reputation where it re-released to market at the level of those games. This was Alpha Denshi's most notable early product, which I can both respect and disfavor given its tantalizing qualities. Reigning in this spirited VW Beetle across cityscapes, wastelands, castles, and seas takes a lot of dexterity and memorization, but gives players much reward as they uncover hidden tricks and strategies for skillful play. There's an anarchy here which dares you to get as high on life as it does, albeit a seductive, ultimately slight and repetitive reality limited by ROM storage."

"In their later ADK years, Alpha Denshi would remake a couple vintage hits like Crush Roller, but not this for some reason. Damn shame, really. The DNA of something as formative as Pac-Land or even Super Mario Bros. goes back to clever genre hybrids like this, a known quantity and charting arcade release in its era. Jump Bug is also more transparent with its challenge and means of mastery than almost all of its competitors in '81, with the bags-for-1ups system and ability to brake and reposition mid-air making this very fair for the era. Anyone prone to deeming these Golden Age cabinets as "coin-munchers" ought to give this a try and see if that generalization holds up. Well, only if they take all necessary preventative measures—I'm not suggesting one should expose their minds to this subject with such fervor as I've contemplated."

A couple days later, Dr. [REDACTED] was nowhere to be found on the containment facility premises. Our preliminary search-and-rescue operation turned up no trace of his body, belongings, or other data. CCTV facility at the site was also corrupt and unreadable, and a forensic autopsy of the entity revealed its contents had been copied to external storage. Until further notice, we are taking even stricter precautions regarding access to and use of SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD, so as to prevent losses of human resources. In the subject site manager's words: "That darn Herbie Hopperheap whatchamacallit really bugged him out, 's all I can gather."

Inclement weather on the horizon: bullet rain, blood runoff in the streets, industrial parks desecrated by their own designs. No glorious anthems play in the background, just stings of death, the musique concrete of battle. A Wellsian steam-plane leads the charge, swerving and shooting past all that approach it. The pilot smirks, then grins in morbid delight. "Let 'em wail, like any of them can stop me!", he cries. Like a flying shark, the well-dressed dilletante in his top hat and goggles then gores the seas, cities, and alien motherships of his time. It's just the flight man's burden.

"Earth, 1999. But the Earth [is] of a different timeline. There are no microwave ovens and TV is still in black and white." Banshee's manual tells a simple premise: as Sven Svardensvart, steampunk viking he is, you must defeat the imposing Styx Empire, first by liberating a thinly-disguised United States from the aliens before hijacking their technology to escape Earth and face the Styxians on their own planet. It's a humans vs. invaders plot in a vertical arcade shooter, what more does one need? In the peanut gallery, I hear five words: "Anything but an Amiga shmup!" And make no mistake, I did a lot of research before settling on my first Western STG from the microcomputer glory days. There's a wide range in quality between, say, Tyrian and Xenon 2: Megablast (it's okay, Bitmap Brothers, you made up with The Chaos Engine later). American and European PC shooters tend to suffer in key ways which reflect either (a) developers' crippling isolation from Japanese arcades and fan communities around which major innovations could foment, and/or (b) a focus on presentation and pushing technology at the expense of fun, skillful play, and optimized controls. Extra negative points if the game in question targets a genuinely obscure or difficult-to-obtain platform like the 3DO or, in this case, the ill-fated Amiga CD32. With so many CD32-first games bombing commercially and critically, how well could this one hope to do?!

I'm happy to say that Banshee mostly avoids those pitfalls. This ended up less like a poor Scandinavian take on Toaplan, Capcom, and Konami STGs than I feared; at times I felt like I was instead playing the best parts of Flying Shark or 1943, now without the fuss or bumps in difficulty (at least until the end). Though hardly without flaws, or any ambition beyond a polished take on WWII-adjacent STGs, I was impressed by the first impression this title gave me, and those new expectations held up for the most part.

| Fly with me and the daring Swedes |

Banshee wouldn't exist without the rakish vision of Søren "Hannibal" Hansen and Jacob Anderson, who brought their game to Core Design and got the publishing greenlight for a cross-Europe release. To their credit, Core also provided Martin Iveson, their veteran in-house musician, to help score the small but groovy EDM soundtrack introducing and ending each playthrough. But beyond manufacturing, distributing, and paying royalty checks, Core left this program to its contract creators. There aren't any differences between the Amiga 1200 (floppy) and CD32 (uh, CD) versions, apart from loading times for the latter. Emulating the latter was actually more consistent on my end when playing in WinUAE, but I'll chalk that up to misconfiguration.

Right away the game launches into stage 1, a vast expanse of ocean spanning multiple screens' worth of playfield. Enemies only respawn within the player's view frustum, as is typical, and astute players will quickly notice the health-bar on left. Banshee only commits one of the supposed cardinal sins of Euro-shooters by letting your plane take multiple hits before meeting its violent end. Here, though, the developers have very good reason to give players some leeway: this game has no continues. Yep, you just read that. It's 1994 and some devs somewhere still had the courage to prevent quarter-feeding entirely. Just learning the first stage, then, becomes a priority simply to gain ground and attune to Hansen & Jacobsen's rhythm of design.

Of the more classic influences here, 1942 and Twinbee stick out the most, with loop-de-loop attacks and shootable power-ups in play. The former allows you to temporarily escape fire, damaging anything under your path in the process, while the latter gives players the chance to switch power-up types so long as they can keep the item on-screen. That 'ol juggling act's back, in steampunk form, with a need to both defend against enemy waves, evade tricky patterns, and keep the ship in tip-top shape for what's to come. I found myself using loops as infrequently as expected, while I took my time on each run flipping pickups until I got just what I needed. Need to wreck some large but ponderous aircraft? Cycle to the missiles and get ready to dodge more fire than normal. Scared of incessant UFOs and boulders on the horizon? Like most shooters, there's a perfectly usable spread-shot ability worth nabbing. Best of all is the "build-up" system. Upon collecting three of the eponymous upgrades, your best weapon status gets saved for your next life. This reduces the frustration of accidentally dying to a boss and only having a pea-shooter upon revival, or when forgetting to pick up shield upgrades partway through a level. Overall, there's solid meat-and-potatoes STG design happening here—nothing revelatory, but more considerate than its Amiga peers by and large.

| "Blardax Maldrear, uglier than a Phreenian Foot-toad" |

Making one's way to Planet Veenix, the throne-world of this story's antagonist, won't be easy even with the aforementioned abilities and lifelines. Banshee's true sin is not pacing itself better, featuring four very long levels which, while diverse in environs, tend to drag like in weaker Compile STGs. Couple this format with no way to continue and we've got ourselves an often frustrating adventure. Hitting 1-up thresholds and keeping the build-up meter at max becomes its own game, one you'd be foolish not to master. Hannibal & Jacobsen are perfectly happy to take their time, slowly iterating on enemy groups and shot patterns with breathing room to spare. This feels great when the run's going according to plan (or, in the learning stages, at least feels manageable), but one bad turn and the urge to restart grows. This urge comes upon me something fierce in stricter genre examples, like Raiden or Hishousame, so to sense it here saps some of my enjoyment. Many patterns and mini-bosses felt a bit underbaked, too, though not enough to ruin the experience. While this program could stand to run at a faster framerate, it's decently smooth as is, and the keyboards controls are as intuitive as the glossy brass UI.

Something this game never falters with is its B-movie sense of humor, both in visuals and sound design. I've seen a couple reviewers compare the art-style in Banshee to a mix of Cannon Fodder and Metal Slug (maybe some Boogie Wings as well), with deep earthy colors and attention to detail in the unlikeliest places. Pseudo-World War vehicles and soldiers all scramble to swat you down from the skies, yet their own deaths range from grisly to gallows humor. Burnt lackeys wither to bone and dust; city-goers mind their own business while a 1 vs. 1000 war rages across avenues; lighthouses, factories, and hulking ships all go up in brilliant flame and debris once the titular craft has its way. I'm not sure what's more sad, the fate of these brainwashed Gis or the thought of having one less unexpectedly hilarious STG to play. Canned PCM-audio cries of agony and constructs shredding into chaos make great use of the Amiga's Paula sound chip. And let's not sleep on Iveson's moody electronica during loading screens, a helpful reminder of just how '90s this game is.

The latter half of Banshee takes off the kid gloves, moving us from seaside bases and an Edwardian metropolis to icy, arid wastes before taking a climactic journey into the stars that'll make Metal Slug 3 blush. It's here where the no-continues, no-checkpoints structure can either heighten tension for the better or spoil a good run. The key factor which Hansen & Jacobsen nailed was balance; rarely did I ever feel unfairly outgunned or juked by the game. It's honestly designed from start to finish, even in the final half-hour's worth of intertwining projectiles and kamikaze attacks. Don't go in expecting a swerve towards danmaku leanings, or any overabundance of stage hazards (though some sequences dabble in them to great effect). Think Jamestown but with a more conventional arcade-y template and a comparatively refined minute-to-minute game loop. For lack of a true Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow shoot-em-up, this can fill in the blank for the foreseeable future.

| Stir in an Alternative Dimension |

Core Design had a talent in the early '90s for featuring the best works of just anyone they could find off the proverbial Amiga street. Sure, most of their releases were self-developed projects, but they had a frequent collaborator in The 8th Day (Heimdall [2], Premiere) and adopted other outside teams' works a few times, always to great results. I think it's telling that something like Banshee arrived in time to herald the CD32's push for games that could directly compete with better offerings on NEC, Nintendo, and SEGA platforms. Don't get me wrong—these efforts weren't successful, and the CD32 was stillborn despite the occasional bright spot like this game. But there's a fascinating "what if?" to consider where Core, Team17, Psygnosis, Rainbow Arts, Ubi-Soft, Cryo, etc. put their all into accessible yet unique games that could have buoyed the ailing Amiga marketplace.

Banshee in particular feels like the kind of throwback arcade shooter which rarely happens today. Its level of sincerity, genre awareness, and muted presentation is a hard sell to those browsing digital stores now, expecting more "bang for your buck" features and runtime. But back in 1994, this could still pass for a full-price release; some groans about just four levels aside, there's plenty to engage with here when playing for score. I haven't yet tried Hard difficulty yet, but Normal feels, well, the way a normal and engaging STG of the time should. Press outlets all had loads of praise for the title, with many proclaiming it the new standard in Amiga shooters against a slate of competing games. Most of those accolades are hard to take for granted, given the dearth of strong original STGs on any Western PC by then, but reviewers and fan letters were on to something, however quaint their opinions have become.

The transition to 3D and multimedia-driven consoles, along with dwindling outlooks on the arcade industry and its game design trends, meant there'd be little room for something like Banshee to take root and thrive. If Japanese shooters were starting to have trouble staying relevant to all but a niche audience, then what more could those dubious Euroshooters hope for? Banshee could handily showcase some of the finest AGA-accelerated Amiga graphics around, but the pursuit of 2D excellence largely became the task of versus fighters and xRPGs. Hansen & Jacobsen must have seen these changes coming, soon joining Scavenger Inc. to work on their technically-outstanding games A.M.O.K. and Scorcher for PC and Sega Saturn. The coder eventually worked his way up into Shiny Entertainment and then Microsoft, while the artist found footing later at IO and now Unity. I hope this game, among other formative Amiga-era works, hasn't just become a footnote to overlook, but a case study in how to nail design fundamentals and make something more than the sum of its parts.

All my waffling aside, Banshee is worth one's time when looking for a solid mid-'90s PC shooter. Worst case, you could even play through this for the "I beat a Euroshmup!" credo without feeling robbed of that hypothetical better game. It's a bit janky in spots, but only noticeably so due to the game otherwise working as well as it does. There's enemy variety for days, a lonely but fitting soundscape, and four rounds of generally well-paced action to dig into. I doubt it sold any CD32 units back in the day, but that's no longer a concern when WinUAE makes this easy to boot up and enjoy with a controller of one's choice. Now, if only *I* could get my hands on an impossibly well-equipped biplane for my own battles…

lol, uh, I'm concerned that anyone might actually think the Speccy games this "homage" references were ever this bad

It's not horrible for a 5-10 minute romp through hastily-made, gorily garish mazes until you find the somewhat hidden secret room that ends it. The music choices remind me of the earlier Space Funeral in a good way, and its commitment to just being a little fucked-up guy of a game, only loved by its creator, is admirable. Sadly, Fucker Gamer Scum Get Fucked almost entirely misunderstands the source material it's deriving from. Both of John George Jones' splatterpunk classics for the ZX Spectrum, Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly, are both more playable than this and offer an ironically meaningful kind of Thatcher-era nihilism. They were emblematic "video nasties" taken to the computer's known limits, while FGSGS would barely escape the Newgrounds blam-hammer with how much it tries my patience.

From the start, you're bombarded with Speccy-like colors-on-black aesthetics, albeit balking that platform's infamous graphical restrictions (ex. sprite color clash). None of this looks as cohesive as I think the creator intended. More detailed sprites and objects stand out in an uncanny but uninteresting way, like an overworked collage canvas. We're supposed to be floating a bizarre nightmare maze of sorts, the kind of Grand Guignol show turned gore film that Go to Hell did so well. But I wasn't even a bit spooked or put-off by the imagery, just bored. At least this doesn't fall into the same traps as fashionable mascot horror one-offs these days, but the baneful bits of J.G. Jones' duo have lasting power this doesn't. Used syringes, nondescript projectiles, and a cheap glut of bloody surfaces does not a fun horror show make. Gimme me the conjoined babies, flying guillotines, walls made of Hell's victims spanning all its rings, distorted scrimblo faces to make Otto from Berzerk proud...all that you'll get in the actual '80s games.

Now, you won't catch me saying there's any trenchant narrative or commentary in something like Soft & Cuddly. Transgression was by far the most important goal for Jones, using the Sinclair PC's inimitable visual strengths to transform horror cliches into something more compelling. But his creations weren't lumped into the more literary splatterpunk movement without good reason. There's a distinct air of anti-Tory, pro-creators ethos felt throughout either adventure, from the mercurial hells you explore to cute humor like the game over screen punchlines. All the grim, strange sights on offer, plus shrill soundscapes, evokes the evolving, never-ending drudgery of living through miners' strikes, predatory capitalism, and Mary Whitehouse screeds against non-conservative art in general. Jones made these shambling but nonetheless enjoyable scare houses for himself and friends, something the punks and outsiders could share in common.

I'm not sure who the audience for this modern retread is. Parts of FGSGS look too polished, too modern game engine-based to fit a visual style made under technical constraints. Go to Hell wasn't much more than a decent if tedious maze adventure, but this has barely any progression at all. You quickly jet your way through not nearly enough screens to feel as complete as its inspiration, all while seemingly anything kills you without logic. The life-draining walls and enemies in Go to Hell are very punitive, but possible to work around and feel some accomplishment for reaching each cross. FGSGS just has nothing like that. It's a big nothingburger of an attempted mid-2000s Flash game in its current state. Less like an amateur's earnest riff on Clive Barker, Alan Moore, Tanith Lee, or any other icons of '80s UK pulp fiction—more like My First VVVVVV Fangame v0.3.

But worst of all, this just doesn't get the kind of socio-economic nihilism that makes Jones' games so interesting today. I couldn't come across any weird level design, enemy type, or wacky set-piece here suggesting that vibe of "we're stuck in a hellish war-torn ghost town world with nowhere to go, hounded by those above us". Go to Hell has you playing a very simple but recognizably Manic Miner-like character, traveling through corridors adorned with commodified villains, symbols, and unfortunates like yourself. The crosses you seek are themselves distorted, flashing neon facsimiles of the real thing, lighting up a night of meticulous wandering. Jones' hell feels surprisingly barren despite its content overload, a telling contrast. Reaching each cross and finally Alice Cooper's digitized mug may not mean much, but there's something to feel accomplished about. FGSGS really just throws everything and the kitchen sink at you, hoping something sticks.

IDK, there's not much more to say for this one. Throw it on if you love watching your PC monitor forcibly switch to 640x480 resolution, or want a quick laugh. I get more enjoyment from Livesey Walk animations, let alone a quality YouTube Poop with the same runtime. Normally I'd just give this kind of game a 2-star rating and move on, but it's hurt a bit by having such a dismissive attitude towards Jones' games and the "ZX Spectrum aesthetic" in general. (Not that I fault anyone for disliking how Speccy games almost always look, but developers have crafted very artistically interesting works on it for a long time.) The most praise I'll give to Fucker Game Scrum Get Stabbed is that I finally played Go to Hell because of it—now that's what I call Entertainment.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 28 – Mar. 6, 2023

Shelley Day, Ron Gilbert & co. making a cute 'lil kids adventure dominoes falling Humungous Entertainment co-founder convicted of defrauding bank to buy a dream home next door to Paul Allen

Oh, there's an actual game to talk about here, not just the sad irony of Humungous' downfall. It's just a rather simplistic experience aside from its then innovative take on the edutainment adventure. Most PC DOS & Mac software oriented towards this demographic at the time talked down to kids, rather than taking their wants and fears seriously. No more forced, obviously pedantic lessons you'd snooze through in the computer lab—Putt-Putt has an actual story to tell. And you're right in it with him, from proving your civic responsibility to homing a stray dog. It's a bit problematic in the sense that our purple funky four-wheeler mainly does this to, well, Join the Parade and all, but engaging and meaningful enough for almost any kindergartener. Just ignore how he could be saving lost puppies for its own sake. I got my start with Putt-Putt starting from the lunar sequel, but this felt oh so cozy and familiar in similar ways.

Gilbert's goals of empowering young players and avoiding condescension already show results here. The game opens with an effortless "tutorial" where Putt-Putt awakens at home and gets to toy around in the garage. It's here where you first encounter the studio's famous "click points", where seemingly mundane set dressing comes to life as you click around. Even the diegetic HUD, Putt-Putt's dashboard, has its own easter eggs, encouraging you to try interacting with anything on screen. From simple animations to complex multi-step interactions, these click points evolved from similar examples in earlier LucasArts and Cyan Worlds adventures, now used to intuitively advance the player's story by giving them a toybox of sorts.

That's really what saves this from a lower rating, as the plot is as basic and A-to-B as a Junior Adventure gets. Mowing lawns makes up the bulk of any challenge you'll find, and the puzzles couldn't be more elementary if they tried. Figuring out where to go and how to get the needed key items takes no time at all, for better or worse. This makes it a nice one-sitting game for its age group, no doubt. But the sequels add more interesting questing, click points, story sequences, etc. that Joins the Parade sorely lacks. It's the blueprint they'd all quickly surpass. I can't really poo-poo this adventure as such, nor can I rate it higher.

Can we at least talk about how uncanny Putt-Putt and his world looks in these first two MS-DOS entries? Pixel-era Humungous games had a lot of art jank, especially when characters look at the camera. Putt-Putt's proportions and facial expressions run the gamut from mildly off-model to humorously off-putting (pun intended). Some like to joke about him making a serial killer face here and in Goes to the Moon—I can totally see it. But that's also a charming reminder of the studio's beginnings, a bit before they moved to high-quality art and animation with Freddi Fish and their Windows 9x-era Junior Adventures.

What Myst did for the adult multimedia games market, Putt-Putt achieved for multimedia kids' games. This was an important step into the public eye for similar works like The Manhole, and a masterfully dialed-down, less lethal take on the point-and-click adventure during the genre's heyday. I just wish I could get more out of it nowadays, but that's what happens when you're used to the excellence of Pajama Sam or Spy Fox. Things only got more ambitious for the Junior Adventures in a short span of time, and it wasn't long before the parade left Putt-Putt's original story far behind.

On today's episode of Georama: turban boy loots cool knives, Goro jobs again, the town NIMBYs residents complain about some missing orbs (wait, that's Jak), a gun-toting moon rabbit breaks the game in half, literal "dark Cloud" dumps his backstory all in the final dungeon, and the player runs out of water or weapon health again!

Just a day in the life of Level-5's debut game, a less-than-clever but earnest homage to ActRaiser & other mid-'90s alternative ARPGs and dungeon-crawlers. I keep reading reviews from others who bounce off due to awkward controls, even more awkward mechanics, and truly awkward moments in the story and progression further in. But I think it's that awkwardness which set my expectations to a reasonable level. You're not getting a polished experience here, not in the slightest. This was an experiment, a way for ex-Riverhill Soft veterans to dip their feet in a genre their former employers shied away from. And ever since, Dark Cloud's hung over them, looming in the distance as a reminder of when Level-5 made standalone adventures. They've been chasing media-mix behemoths like Inazuma Eleven, Yokai Watch, and Megaton Musashi since the HD era, but I wish they'd consider making something quaint like this title again.

That said, I don't blame anyone for jumping straight to the sequel, even considering its own jank. A journey around the world rebuilding towns and people's lives sounds great, but you spend most of your time in randomly generated dungeons, dealing with combat and item/equipment management. The game's enemies usually aren't hard to deal with, having just one or two predictable attacks. It's things like weapon deterioration, imperfect hitboxes, and certain dungeon floors forcing you to use a subpar character (ex. Goro…) which sully the fun. At least you get more than enough consumables for repairing your gear or haste-ing through levels. For all its rough bits, the crawling-fighting loop here is competent enough, and often bite-sized in a way that makes it easy to return to at any time.

Dark Cloud shines with its Georama system, where you use the Cool Orbs found in dungeons to rebuild whichever town they correspond to. This means not just placing buildings and land features in ways that make sense, but re- enabling the lives and schedules of others. Norune Village at the beginning sums this up very well, as any opening part of a game should. Talking with each and every villager you rescue from purgatory gives usable hints on how to improve their homes and hearth. Get things wrong and you suffer consequences, such as Gaffer falling from his ladder and only selling a limited shop inventory if you don't add items in order. Maximizing your ratings with each Georama section involves a rewarding loop of conversing with everyone to find that right balance, then scouring the premises for bonus item chests you get from higher ratings. I wish you didn't have some key moments tied to gimmicky quick-time rhythm games, but at least those are over quick.

Much like ActRaiser back in the day, Level-5's game thrives on the symbiosis between two game loops—one consumptive and one creative—with dungeon crawling playing into world creation and then back. Neither part of the game's that complex or involving on their own, but mesh so well in the midst of a playthrough. This works great for most of the game, but then the last two areas (Moon and Gallery of Time) sag in quality by misusing the dynamic. At the same time you're doing more, harder levels testing your character/weapon builds and inventory, the Georama segments get very linear and predictable. What before offered an illusion of a customizable, in-depth experience becomes more obvious, more repetitive. Now sure, I love to upgrade and evolve weapons in this game, but that system works best in service to tangible progress. As mentioned, awkward elements are easier to forgive when the story's active, the world's offering something new, and the end's somewhere in sight.

That leads me to another glaring issue: Dark Cloud's story is comically backloaded, to the detriment of earlier, better designed sequences like Matataki and Queens. It's already a simple tragic tale of an antihero's love interrupted, leading to even greater calamity across time. But shoving the majority of that larger narrative into the final dungeon reeks of "we had to rush this part, sorry!". Until then, you're left with a rather generic "defeat the Dark Genie" plot which gets stuck in the background until Muska Lacka. By contrast, Dark Cloud 2 does a way better job of revealing and twisting the main plot from start to finish, albeit via some more blockbuster tropes and framing. The prequel's so much more about atmosphere and light character interactions up until the last stretch. Again, it's less that the story's bad, more that it's needlessly thin and tangential to what you're doing for most of your playthrough. (What I've heard of the studio's following non-Dragon Quest games tells me Akihiro Hino still doesn't know how to write a rock-solid story or world, honestly.)

However, atmosphere is one way this game rises above that problem. Part of this might just come down to my own nostalgia, having played the game multiple times since the late 2000s, but it's just so charming. Dark Cloud's visual design takes a refreshing turn away from ye olde JRPG stylings, starting with the Weird West village Toan's from. The generally colorful, decently detailed town areas give life to their more sparsely constructed dungeons, both through architecture and NPC designs/dialogue. Tomohito Nishiura offers the first of many great Level-5 soundtracks, with its simple and clean arrangement of melodious multi-genre tunes. I could listen to tracks for locales like the Wise Owl Wood, Shipwreck, Matataki Village, or Queens all day. The user interface shows its age in terms of usability—far from bad, far from ideal—but it's easy enough to navigate and has a comfortable leather-and-parchment feel too. Cozy's an accurate word for this game in general, even during its darkest story moments (some unnerving enemies aside).

If you haven't tried either Dark Cloud game, I'd recommend at least trying this one before moving on to the sequel. It's definitely not as polished, expansive, or impressive, but the original's elegance and much shorter time to completion make it a closer contest. Beating the game lets you play through a very tricky bonus dungeon, ideal for testing out your super-weapons and enjoying that excellent ambiance. Both series entries are available on recent PlayStation systems and can emulate very well. Overall, I'd have a fun time replaying this right now, assuming I didn't have bigger priorities in my backlog. So many of the aspects that define Level-5's better-known, more recent games appear here in a primordial form. At the very least, it's a strong launch-period PS2 release which is worth experience both in that context and on its own merits.

P.S. Make sure to level Ruby towards the back half of the game. The final boss is weak to certain elements which are best targeted using either her magic or the right magic-infused weapon with Xiao or Osmond. Regardless, don't skimp on ranged combat!

Ice-cream duck unfairly named after Tories loses their cone to Insert Itch.io Scaryguy Here and ends up becoming the new Ninpen Manmaru for half an hour, 10/10 gg ez

The slow but steady low-poly revival in this industry, starting around a decade ago and now flourishing with notables like A Short Hike and Signalis, has had its share of wannabe mascots. Everyone from the heroine of Lunistice to Haunted PS1's garbed skeleton has auditioned for the role, and Toree's no different. This game's developer, Siactro, has made a small stable of mascots already, all of them suspiciously cute, identifiable, and resalable in today's nostalgia market. Disposable heroes are always in vogue, just easier to sugarcoat when hidden behind the veneer of aesthetic authenticity. So it goes. Toree 3D is exactly the kind of small, pleasing half-hour snack that game jams are known for, previously the domain of classic Flash or Shockwave releases. It's very easy to replay and a worthy title despite its shallowness. If I ain't seeing Fangamer merch for this in a year or so, then I'm going to be very confused.

Our premise doesn't get much simpler: you play the titular bird thing, flightless and defenseless save for a double jump and dash. All the player's worried about is getting from point A to B, either with all the star pickups or the fastest time possible to hit that top level rank. Toree 3D nails almost all its basics, from intuitive controls to reproducible physics and scenarios. I know, for instance, that airborne momentum is a constant, which makes jumping across icy platforms that much trickier. A lack of auto-adjusting camera means you'll need to force center or move the right stick more often than should feel necessary, though. This degree of polish is easier to achieve nowadays thanks to widely-known tricks and prefabs in middleware engines like Unity, but it still takes work and testing. So I can't hold anything against Siactro for making a solid platformer loop, one which can't rely on much content or gimmicks to distract from potentially poor playability.

Make no mistake, however. Toree 3D is proud to be derivative, following not just one but two social media bandwagons. Why develop a more distinct identity for this avian anybody and the world they're exploring when you can just slap that low-res filter atop what feel like prototype assets? And why not hastily add a so-light-it's-nothing horror/spooky theme to the opening and final stages, just so it can technically qualify alongside the other Haunted PS1 jam entries? Again, I can't blame Siactro for making these savvy decisions. They're smart compromises to spread the game way farther on Twitter, Discord, Tumblr, Backloggd, etc. than was once possible. I'm a sucker for low-poly art in general, enough to lament its popularization as a micro-trend that'll risks being recycled into meaninglessness. For 1 buck, a mini foray into this style cost me practically nothing and offered so much in return.

All nine levels are well-designed for what they are, though quick to repeat their ideas. One could argue there's only so much these simple jump and run mechanics could offer, yet I'd hoped for more puzzles and enemy variety. There was certainly room in the snow stages for less mindless auto-scrolling down slopes with fences. I'd have added sections where skillful players can quickly hop between panels to activate temporary platforms, perhaps a little icy hopscotch across lava. There's a lotta clash between the game's autopilot segments (ex. the moving scaffolds in the city) and the light speedrunning angle Siactro's going for.

The only incentives you get for pushing Toree to the finale as fast as possible are two extra characters, for that matter. It's thankfully satisfying on its own to master these obstacle courses, and I messed around with Macbat's free flight for a bit of fun. But the game's truly over by that point; we're far from a Pilotwings 64 scenario where the game's worlds remain intriguing to explore without win states. Siactro's reverence for, and ability to replicate, nostalgic echoes of '90s pop art and software also holds him back from doing anything that unique here. My favorite theme here was chaotic New Osaka, which itself teeters too close to the vaporwave Orientalism I see in other contemporaries.

Games that exist to remind me of older, more fleshed-out experiences put themselves in a tricky situation. As I played the ocean levels so obviously cribbing from Sonic Adventure (2), I couldn't help but think, "why not just go for that A rank and emblems on Metal Harbor?". Indeed, Toree 3D tends to trap itself into these comparisons. Evoking nostalgia for that era of bigger-budgeted console games runs the risk of bouncing one towards replays, assuming nothing substantially new or unique is offered. Whereas Sonic became a mascot for cool, challenging setpiece-driven adventures in his heyday, Toree feels like the runt of that litter, an adorable ode to some unreachable past. I want the best for this scrimblo, though, even if I'd rather not play something like this for more than an hour. Efficiently packing a more diverse and meaningful array of challenges into this runtime, like boss encounters or side modes leveraging the mechanics, seems like a logical next step.

A lot of my comments so far are closer to nitpicks than deep criticisms, plus expressing my regular disdain for pandemic-era trend hopping. (That behavior is itself partly excusable for a lot reasons, most of them coming back to the world likely ending as we know it, but I don't want to cramp Toree's style with that talk here.) But hey, it's hard to dislike, let alone hate this kind of game. It just doesn't compel me that much by design, as vibes...aesthetic...charm...whatever aren't enough for me. Siactro's found a place in this market no different from many other solo devs, expectedly polishing up quick prototypes into lightweight scene darlings. And this one's still a big leap forward from Kiwi 64, showing how much this guy's learned and improved upon in eight or so years. I've designed enough Doom maps to know one shouldn't be so harsh towards even the slightest works in this category, no matter how trivial or commodified.

In a sense, I think Toree 3D is well worth its price and promises, though hardly the ambassador of Three Strings and the Soul Gaming that some like to categorize it as. (Hell, I don't even lionize Cave Story to that degree, and that genuinely moved past its influences and somewhat against trends familiar to its original audience.) Here's just an inoffensive, inauspicious, Twitch-friendly ditty that plays well with just about anyone. It's like Gunman Clive back in those desperate early days of 3DS software, insofar as we've only just started to get low-poly, PS1-/Saturn-/N64-esque low-poly experiments of this quality. I'm just hoping to feel something more when I inevitable blast through Toree 2 and other games indulging this aesthetic. Nothing in this one actually feels cowardly, just missing out on its potential—my ire's saved for copycat low-poly horror games at this point. (Or that big Mega Man Legends 3 fangame which could have happened by now, given the talent and interest surrounding this style.)

Now, Toree 3D but condensed to 13kb of filesize? That would excite me. I'm not sure how one could reasonably compress the excellent poppy soundtrack into those limits, but that's one reason Pixel wrote his own sound tech for Cave Story to keep the size down. Regardless, everything I've heard about Toree 2 says I should enjoy that one a lot more on its own merits, not just as an exercise in clever imitation. Maybe I'll play that later this year when I've got nothing better to do.

Santa's jokerified and you get to kill Scrupulous Fingore. 11/10 ludopoints!

For a holiday season checklist-ticking release, Daze Before Christmas is rather humble, content with being one of the few enjoyable titles solely dedicated to the season. I'm not sure which was Funcom's first game precisely, this or the seemingly abysmal We're Back! tie-in A Dinosaur's Tale, but it seems like Sunsoft saw something of worth in this one. Going from these dinky platformers to big MMORPGs like The Secret World and Age of Conan—let alone anything as acclaimed as The Longest Journey—must have been wild for this Norwegian startup. It's hardly as if they lacked in other options: most Scandinavian developers stuck to popular PCs like the Amiga during the early-1990s, for good reason. Developing games for cartridge is way more expensive, and riskier due to manufacturers' quality auditing, than putting out mail-order floppy software. So let's give credit where it's due and assume even something like this, which outwardly resembles shovelware, took plenty of effort and tender loving care to create too.

| The presents were mutilated beyond recognition |

With all of the kids' presents missing and a bona fide Gang of Four terrorizing the holiday spirits all over the world, it's now your job to guide Fake Tim Allen through 24 levels of comfortably numbing platformer tropes. Everything's introduced via a cute "T'was the Night Before Christmas"-styled lyric, with each stage laid out via an advent calendar. Honestly, the most memorable parts of Daze Before Christmas are the intro artworks preceding levels, particularly those which look deranged or ominous. Lead artists Ole-Petter Rosenlund had come from the Amiga scene, drawing for works like Psionic Systems' Assassin, so it stands to reason a bit of the 'ol European PC weirdness has snuck into an outwardly unassuming family-friendly game. Baddies and obstacles range from wily rats to industrial machinery, plus all sorts of toys now animated to attack poor Saint Nick. The antagonists themselves look real goofy; I love "Mr. Weather" for how much he resembles Fingore, but also The Timekeeper for looking like a lost Clockwork Knight boss. Shout outs to the floating hearts in the Wood Factory level, you saucy fellas.

Moment-to-moment play in Daze Before Christmas follows a neat formula: hop and skip from A to B, collecting and opening presents to rack up score and lives/health, and occasionally pick up a hot cuppa to transform into Anti-Santa. It's very standard stuff, and I wish your alter ego had meaningful new mechanics beyond temporarily hurting a roadblock enemy, but the controls feel just weighty and responsive enough that I can't complain much. Many level designs feel like the best bits of Earthworm Jim and other Western platformers mimicking the more ambitious Eastern examples, for better or worse. Maybe they could have cut down on the number of pace-killing hazards and auto-scrolling sections; those bumpers and magic carpets got old fast. I think kids would have had a challenge in navigating the ice caves and sewers, but the homes and snowy hills are straightforward to navigate, albeit with a smattering of secret goodies to find off the main path(s). There's also the odd flying stage, where you float your sleigh all over to chuck gifts down chimneys like it's a bombing raid. Lack of variety, repetitive props and sequences, and plenty more déjà vu hold this game way back from greatness, but it's the kind of mediocrity I can understand and let flow right by me.

| Oh what Fun it is to Com |

If I'm making this out to be some flavorless adventure, then you'd be partly correct; this Norwegian oddity has some strange vibes I didn't expect to encounter, though. One stage essentially reworks the Boo House concept as a more setpiece-driven gauntlet of boxing cacti, hurtful ghost rats, and an end boss which requires players to repeatedly stun Louse the Mouse with an Eggman-like spike ball. Another couple runs have Santa dropping into gradually flooding sewers to muck around for elves and their stolen handiwork, with bits of platforming that require actual engagement (comparing well to the factory stages with their many bottomless pits and elevation spikes). Coupled with how little of the game occurs during the day, there's a subtle gothic flair to everything one can experience in Daze Before Christmas, reinforced by a groovy set of rearranged tunes and carols within a smooth FM-synthesis palette.

Summing up a game this brief and frankly shallow feels just a bit difficult when looking at its surprisingly rich presentation. Right away, the options menu gives more control to players than so many of its peers, from audio levels to how long the Anti-Santa morph lasts. Difficulty modes don't vary much in practice; I suppose they affect how frequently a red box gives out bombs and other traps, rather than freeing Santa's helpers or health hats. Then there's the aforementioned soundtrack, which properly conforms to strengths of both the SNES and Mega Drive sound chips, using pleasant instrumentation and sometimes taking unexpected turns (ex. the ripping guitar solo during boss fights!). And for all its missed potential, whether due to inexperience or a short turnover time (which I won't know until the History of Sunsoft Vol. 2 book releases), Daze Before Christmas is certainly a competent romp that anyone can bounce in and out of. Playthrough take around an hour or two at most, password saves are available, and the button layout's totally standard for 1994. The package here is well tested to a fault, other than some momentary collision glitching.

Hope everyone's enjoying their Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Saturnalia, and whatever festivities we seem to obsess over every year at this time. I'll do my part and speak respect for what Funcom did here with Daze Before Christmas, regardless of time, budget, or scope the studio had back then. Its bizzaro Australia-only release on Mega Drive, only expanded to Europe for SNES, meant it had little impact during the 16-to-32-bit transitional period, while later Xmas-themed works like Christmas NiGHTS have rightly shown how much more ambitious game developers can get with holiday theming. Still, I think it's impressive how effortlessly Funcom's title plays compared to many derided Euro-platformers it shares heritage with, to the point that I rarely see any comments making that connection. That's a valuable accomplishment for the period! I'm just sad I can't make a Midsummer pun for this Midplatformer…whoops.

More like Bromance of the Twink Kingdoms, amirite Backlo—shot

While I was away from Backloggd (long story), I got so far removed from my Japanese PC game schedule that I somehow drifted back around to it via Koei. The company's extensive library of sim/strategy classics has always taunted me from the gallery, begging me to try and parse its magnanimity. So here I am, marching across all of classical China with a growing retinue of generals, politicians, and all-around badasses trying to undo the mess the eunuchs and warlords have made. It ain't easy, but it's an honest living, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII was probably the best way I could have started with this franchise now that I've tried more of the PS2-era releases.

In short, this RoTK entry plays mostly like the others: choose a starting scenario from some point in the Three Kingdoms era (end of the Han to rise of the Jin), then try and reunite the land under one power through whatever means necessary. Before VII, this meant taking the role of liege (ruler, aka ye olde Cao Cao and the like) and campaigning against other lords for hegemony, first through obtaining officers and then by conquering each province. RoTK VII was a paradigm shift for the series, then 15 years old, by introducing "officer play". Now you start off as just one individual out of hundreds spanning the huaxia realm, meaning you can play your own custom officer or a vaunted icon of the period in whatever position they initially had. By doing this, RoTK expanded its definition of grand strategy to include more role-playing opportunities, where famous officials can resign to wander the land and other vagabonds could instead rise to significance.

The average game flow in RoTK VII, discounting leaders, has players working their way up from wanderers ("ronin" in Koei's parlage) to vassals (regular officers), prefects (city leaders), and lieges, always with the choice to forgo those positions and/or switch alliances. Contrasting the "dream" system of Romance of the Three Kingdoms VI, which set a lifelong aspiration for each character, this installment now gives you the Fame and Deeds statistics for measuring one's influence across China, arguably the endgame goal for everyone in the game. With both Northern and Southern Mystics periodically evaluating who has the greatest Fame in the land (and rewarding the best with money and a Bless skill), there's many reasons to prioritize hoarding Fame over just reuniting the land in record time to end a playthrough. I had a lot of fun helping out the common people by investigating corruption and banditry, or personally capturing the toughest officers in battle, just to hit the top 10 list of famous officers during my runs.

Every officer has an Action Points total determining how many actions one can take during a turn (one month). The game's very much a matter of managing your action economy, delegating minor tasks to others when possible while reserving important stuff for your own guy. Since many actions cost 50 AP for you and not others, this especially matters when working to develop a city's economy, comprised of agriculture, commerce, safety, and defense stats which mostly falter during warfare and natural disasters. Methodical development of cities is a great way to build fame and one's own stats, albeit at the cost of not visiting other regions, networking with officers and leaders, etc. Every RoTK installment has a challenging balancing act of priorities to manage, whether just for leaders or for all the potential characters to play, and RoTK VII ultimately favors new players a lot more than most of the games. It takes just 10 AP, out of likely above a hundred, to mail an officer and build bond points with them. And since most historical personas have hidden bonuses with others (reflecting their connections from the source novel), playing the likes of Guan Yu, Lu Xun, or the Xiahou brothers can be extra lenient for anyone wanting a smooth introduction to the series.

Winning the game technically only matters insofar as characters will die of old age, with the game moving you to the officer most bonded to your initial one. The open-ended progression and objectives of this RoTK design era makes it engaging just to pursue one's own excellence as much as leading your force to dominance over the country, but only the latter ends the game for good. And believe me, you'll spend a lot of time accomplishing that. There are more devious, "peaceful" means of swaying cities and leaders to your control, whether as liege or an underling, but combat's inevitable and the game's sketchy AI makes it risky to even engage, let alone defend against invasion. Because all movement across China happens rigidly through roads of different quality (ex. plains and waterways vs. mountain and gallery passes), it's smart to turtle up in a promising city, build up its economy and defenses, while developing an army and set of officers ready to march onward. The overworld's design makes it possible and entertaining to start a whole new force at a neglected corner of the map, traveling through other provinces to meet and acquire officers, before finally striking out and holding your own against greater powers via choke points and subterfuge.

Should any mix of induced riots, defections, coups, or annexation fail, there's always the battlefield. Battles in RoTK VII deviate from the hex-grids of old, instead using a Fire Emblem-esque square grid and turn-based systems to dictate combat flow. Battle prep starts with March commands or reacting to another force marching on you (or your allies requesting your reinforcements); this involves selecting officers/troop numbers, choosing weapon types (ex. crossbows, Rattan armor, cavalry et al.), and who leads as commander and tactician. Whether as offense or defense, you always get a briefing screen prior to matches where one can define strategy and ploys/traps. Combat units all move according to their WAR stats and troop counts—no one side moves all at once here—and winning fights sometimes boils down to just capturing the enemy commander or lowering a force's morale to 0. Many of my battles ended via abusing the latter condition to no end, often by squatting on the invaders' captured outposts to cut off their supply lines and thus their morale across turns.

Compared to what I've played of RoTK VIII (which in many ways exceeds this game), combat in RoTK VII plays much faster and distinguishes itself nicely vs. the slower, deliberate pace of the sequel. I had a grand 'ol time surrounding enemy troops with my own to gain massive damage boosts during attacks, or using weak but cunning officers' tactics and ranged attacks to disable and whittle down the game's most powerful units (think Lu Bu or Ma Chao). Battles themselves transition into castle sieges should some enemy units escape capture or retreat early, which results in a fun minigame where you ram down walls and use ploys like Feint or Riot to hurt the enemy without getting touched. Speaking of tactics and ploys, there's a bunch of them, some way better than others and restricted to field or siege modes. Pro tip: Rush, Rumor, and Rally ploys are supreme for getting faster reinforcements, scaring enemies off the map, and keeping your own morale/officer ailments in check. It's a great feeling when you finally get that Doctor skill item and can finally heal all those injured troops without having to camp at outposts for valuable turns on end (of which you only get 30 per battle).

Of all the myriad systems to master in RoTK VII, character skills are maybe the easiest and most personally satisfying. Making custom officers is engaging partly due to the chance to roll for some great starting skills such as Spy (better scouting), Trade (cheaper market prices), Reversal (turn an enemy's failed tactics against them), and it just goes on. RoTK VI had a similar skills framework before, but its successor fills out the roster and makes it easier to learn new skills via random when training (itself augmented by earning your base city's trust). The right combos of skills and stat-buff items can make any officer potentially a total winner! And that's why I think RoTK VII is maybe the easiest way to get into the series today, both because of its relative simplicity and the ease with which one can snowball. Worst case, a game ends quickly and you can move on to the next run, which might go far better. I can certainly see how the series earned its legacy in East Asia thanks to this addictive one-more-turn pace.

When comparing the PS2 and PC versions, I'm happy to say you aren't missing much with the former's lack of Power-Up Kit expansion. Later installments lean much heavier on their PUK to add critical features like child-raising for custom officers, but RoTK VII just predates Koei starting to punish players who don't/can't opt in. On the other hand, this entry's arguably the last which prizes sheer accessibility over all else, so it makes sense that a PUK wouldn't add much beyond a couple hundred extra officers (most of which are minor even by hardcore RoTK standards). Menus are easy to navigate in either version, though I bet the extra HUD elements on PC can help when figuring out strategies from the city screen. And while I ended up playing this much more for its mechanics and game loop, RoTK VII has solid presentation for its genre, with detailed 2D/pseudo-3D graphics (sober vs. Dynasty Warriors, but luscious) and a small but memorable soundtrack ranging from modern Chinese-styled orchestral to wild prog rock during combat. RoTK VII on PC now has an English fan patch for anyone unable to get a rare-ish PS2 copy, thankfully.

It's obviously hard to recommend most Koei strategy games to just anyone, given the lack of Western familiarity with stories like the Romance or Sengoku-era Japan for Nobunaga's Ambition, plus the complex systems at play. But I'm surprised these games aren't more widely played and discussed now in an age of successful grand strategy series from Paradox (ex. Crusader Kings) and Creative Assembly (Total War). Koei pioneered the genre and succeeded with it in ways that Western developers/publishers wouldn't for decades, and I'm unsurprised at how strong this earliest PS2 entry holds up. And it's insulting how Koei has run their oldest series into the ground via exploitative DLC and pricing schemes, making it easier to ignore them than ever. These games deserve much better treatment, that's for certain. While I can't wait to dig into more of their older PC output, RoTK VII might end up as my comfort Romance simulator of choice, just for how fast I can play through a what-if scenario and its more SRPG-esque battle dynamics. These qualities should make it a good starting place for others, too, who balk at the more complicated sequels and wonder how anyone could get onboard with RoTK wargaming.

tl;dr Do, in fact, pursue Lu Bu in this one. He's easy to confuse, can get misled into attacking his own guys, and is fun after the fight because he can tutor your own officer to become China's greatest warrior. Then proceed to curbstomp the countryside with him if one desires, but never forget about your cities' safety because it sucks when the mayors betray you for another ruler. Let the power of Rumor ploys compel you!

WHEN_ON_HIGH_THE_HEAVEN_HAD_NOT_BEEN_NAMED, reads the remote terminal prompt, beamed to you across the wastes of a forgotten earth. These radio waves, and the data carrying your scout bot's readings, struggle to reach you intact, hampered by signal interference and the irreproducible context of these ruins. Like uncovering the mounds and errata of ancient Sumeria, this process of scouring and understanding takes time and rigor—how much can you really glean or comprehend from this dustbin, flooded and mangled as it is? But a new history beckons deep within the underworld, where Tiamat again surfaces from Abzu and the answer to old apocalyptic riddles presents itself. The post-mortem of lost millennia can finally begin. You're just the first observer.

I've yet to try June Flower's previous games, exercises in minimalism and conjuration dabbling in archaeology and the unknown. Their pixel art and music, both just as mystifying yet inviting, got me interested while scanning Twitter for Itch.io shareware found off the beaten paths. (Plus Thyme's short blurb!) June describes Gunkprotocol as a way to learn coding with Godot, an experience they found vexing and of questionable utility in the end. Even if this didn't work out as hoped, the game itself confidently about the author's artistry and ability to coax fascinating stories from so little. What I've seen of Remnants and Washout Spire, two longer and more ambitious releases, still doesn't seem nearly this economic in size and design. This 15-minute romp through a walled-off world lasts much longer in the back of my mind than expected, and for only good reasons. Going from Samorost to this, a 20-year gap between either program, showed me how far the quote-unquote "walking sim" has evolved without losing sight of minimalism and prodding the imagination.

All you're obligated to do in Gunkprotocol is wander around, exploring and piecing together a simple data transaction between "blobot" and you, a far-off observer investigating these caves. Exactly what happened to this forsaken city, sitting abandoned among gardens and tunnels, becomes clear at the end in a cute moment of meta-fiction. As you sink into the pulsating trip-hop reverberations, June's inimitable pixelated artwork conveys the grit, murkiness, and alien atmosphere of each environment. Much of the visual style harkens back to eye-searing, captivating limited-palette graphics found in ZX Spectrum or Amstrad CPC games from the '80s like Go to Hell. (Given the use of Manic Miner-like room names in Remnants, I suspect this resemblance has precedent.) We're tantalized both by buried wonders and fear of what lies around the corner, though the only horrors here are existential. There's no one down in these depths left to greet us, just crusty legends and vestiges of the almighty.

What closure players get at the end of this very short explore-a-thon also dodges explication, almost like any "lore" here has become garbled beyond recognition. Is this all the work of divine intervention sometime in our near-future, or the result of an AI lashing out at human hubris? Can new life and new memories bubble into being from these grounds, or is our protagonist's belated tour merely an appraisal of what was and no longer can be? Gunkprotocol maybe spends more effort on obfuscation than I'd like, but I won't doubt it succeeds at that. It's a bit repetitive to actually play through due to non-persistent keyboard inputs, meaning you'll have to tap the cursor keys a lot to navigate around the map. Still, something this intriguing in bite-sized form has me excited to try June's other works, let alone what they've got in mind next. Entrancing presentation and a thought-provoking final report, tucked away in a password-locked .zip archive outside the game, has me sated and ready for more.

ngl tho, the Puyo Puyo/Madou Monogatari cast have the drip, like they actually resemble their personalities. Of course Arle wears baggy pants, Schezo is the maracas himbo, Satan's our fishnet sexyman, and Rulue hangs out at Hot Topic. I'm sure someone at Compile just got hammered one night and asked "why don't we just dress the gang in American urban wear and have them dance like PaRappa?" That's one big problem with bosses taking you out to drink: you never know what random thing you'll say that later becomes a 1999 PaRappa the Rapper-like.

| The rise and fall of Puyo, Madou, Compile, and more |

There's both little to say and so much to cover with Puyo Puyo DA!, one of Compile's final releases. It's a hastily made, simplistic rhythm title bandwagoning on the hip-hop dog's success. There's a scant eight songs for eight minimally different characters, with only the most basic single-player and multi-player modes. And the actual rhythm game part of this package isn't much to speak for, either. I can sense that the devs generally matched distinct notes, rhythms, and other musical bits to the button charts they designed, but the laggy input processing means you're always tapping a bit behind the beat. Must I explain why that's frustrating and should have gotten at least a week to test-fix? Neither are the charts and songs varied enough to compete with its direct inspiration, let alone so many BEMANI series which trounced it in content and playability. The crust is real, folks—presentation and a great soundtrack save this from the trashcan, but how'd Compile go from one of Japan's most consistent self-publishers to…whatever greenlit this?

Prior to folding and its IPs scattering to the winds, the company had dug itself into a corner in every way. Masamitsu "Moo" Niitani and other leaders had drastically shifted Compile's direction away from their varied arcade-y shooters, puzzlers, xRPGs, etc. which brought them critical and commercial success. These still existed and even thrived on Disc Station subscription disks/CDs for various PCs, but on consoles and in arcades, Puyo Puyo and its parent series Madou Monogatari were the cash crops de jour. [1] Puyo Puyo did so damn well in game centers, rivaling many popular versus fighters in popularity, that Niitani centered most of the studio's resources around sequels and spinoffs. And all those largely similar Madou remakes for different machines proved fruitful, for a time. I mean, sure, they've effectively spurned their STG developers away by throwing all their resources at excuses to spread le smug Carbuncle face everywhere, which is why talent like Yuichi Toyama left sometime in 1992 to form Raizing (8ing). That's not a bad sign, right?

You bet it was. Things went far worse in other market sectors that Compile soon targeted. Though various Puyo-Madou merch sold well during the series' heyday, like the Puyoman manju candies, the cooling (though not dead) interest in these combat puzzlers left the corporation and its partners saddled with inventory and frustrated distributors. [2] Both an ill-advised new office in Fukuoka and a dead-on-arrival business software suite called Power Acty tightened their slim wallets even further. Worst of all, though, Compile just didn't have the mainstream console and PC presence they used to. Cash-cropping Puyo-Madou to such degrees hurt not only their blockbuster action games, but even the smaller faire reserved for Disc Station and handhelds. Difficulty courting new talent, insubstantial series entries sent to die on nearly dead consoles (all those late-stage Mega Drive carts!), an unwillingness to experiment with MMOs or get more involved with their surprising Disc Station hype in South Korea…I could go on. Compile found Incredible New Ways to Bleed Money seemingly every quarter from around 1996 to 1998, which eventually had them filing for bankruptcy and promising Puyo-Madou's rights to SEGA if unable to pay them back by 2002.

With some fresh cash from restructuring, Compile had precious few years left to use the Puyo-Madou IP intact before ceding them to the new owners. So, not learning any lessons from this outcome, they doubled down on the franchise even harder. Their lack of confidence in starting new big properties, let alone bringing any non-Puyo games to the PS1 while it was hot, led to quick, often copycat products on the SEGA systems they were overly familiar with. Wait, that's a great idea: have our Puyo-Madou guys make us some hit DC software! I'll admit that a Puyo spinoff's still got more immediate appeal to our Western eyes than something wholly new or remade from the Disc Station catalog. Except the latter's what happened anyway. Puyo Puyo DA! exists partly thanks to an earlier PC-98 minigame called Broadway Legend Elena. Now both games can be done dirty for the good of getting Compile off its bruised back! And I'd even be fine with that if this GD-ROM had sold well enough to save at least the development studio. No dice. Our beleaguered company limped along until 2003, with very few games releasing that late except on PC and handhelds. Zanac X Zanac and Guru Logic Champ deserved better than this, as did Wander Wonder, After Devil Force, Geo Conflict…argh. IGDB doesn't even many of these games listed yet, a telling sign of the studio's late-stage irrelevance.

We live in one of the timelines ever, and this one sadly saddles us with Compile Heart, SEGA arguably mishandling the Puyo-Madou war chest over time, and most other IPs receiving basic re-releases by the Project EGG people. Quite the downfall from the company's mid-'90s apex, back when you could find ads and broadcasts showcasing their swag and software on major networks. [3] You'd think that a Compile flush with cash would have tried bringing way more of their products out West during this time, a wise investment that would have made banks and investors plenty happy. Of course, why take that risk when you could just hire the army of staff needed to draft up a Puyo-Madou theme park, buy the land, and start construction? [4] Genius planning there, guys. It's almost like chasing trends which were clearly fads ended up kneecapping this corp in no time flat, a pattern as old as the consumer electronics industries in Japan, the U.S., etc. going back to the '60s. Localization efforts to broaden their market beyond this domestic audience wouldn't have seemed as glamorous, sure, yet they could have kept Compile going on its own terms for a long time.

| Grooving out like there's no tomorrow |

Oh, right, where does Puyo Puyo DA! factor into all of this? I doubt this game exists in place of some unknown better project (though I won't rule it out), yet it's still bittersweet to try out today. One could get quite a bit of fun from this if they're a fan of the genre, and/or love to watch these Puyo masters dabbing on each other for an hour. There's also Elena (or Ellena, IDK), no longer having a funny story mode like in her original game. She's not even one of the easy characters to play as, getting harder charts than Arle or Suke-T despite having subtitle spotlight on the game's cover. As I booted in, skipped the minimal options menu, and started a regular game using Ellena, this was beginning to look dicey. At least the window dressing's cute; chunky lower-poly modeling on this platform almost always looks nicer than it should. Each level is colorful, readable, and thematically appropriate. Everyone on stage has a hypnotic cadence, and

I keep bringing up Ellena's game because it did, in fact, predate PaRappa and other Simon Says-style rhythm classics from that hardware cycle, a legacy which the game loop in Puyo Puyo DA! neither advances nor matches in quality. Broadway Legend Ellena didn't have the combo chaining mechanic you can mildly synergize with here, yet that still felt like a dream compared to this. Set aside the aforementioned lack of music-input sync and we're stuck with a very limited set of commands to dance with. Face buttons and that blistering DC d-pad let you tap all four colors of Puyo while shoulder buttons handle the sun Puyo—where the fuck's the analog stick?! Every instance of tapping three or more 16th-note Puyos, wondering if input lag or my fingers would mess up first, has me wishing I could instead twist quarter-circles to accomplish the same. Better yet, having to use both Puyos and analog-based dancing motions would have added something meaningful to the pace and diversity of charts. All the characters feel too same-y without that extra layer, and the most engagement I found here came from executing some downright evil split-second segments.

Puyo combos are a minor mix-up to the formula, too, which I noticed mainly when the tide of duels went against me. Like in a classic Puyo match, nailing all your inputs in a row showers the opponent's "junk" bar with evil blobs. However, this presents a false sense of strategy; either player, real or AI, will lose the match if even one junk Puyo remains on their side. Compile could have added scaling thresholds of how much trash you can take on before toggling that lose state, but no, it's truly all or nothing, and the final rounds against Satan and Rulue on Hard become needlessly evil. Hell, the main series' concept of a filling, claustrophobic playfield is absent here, which makes death-by-grey-goo feel even weirder. It really grinds my gears to witness this much potential being squandered for reasons I have no way to verify. Did the team run out of time or money later in development? Was this always a cheapie, recycling nearly its whole soundtrack from Compile's own albums while tasking their few 3D modelers to do the real work? One day we'll uncover the truth; I've known the Puyo Puyo fandom long enough to vouch for their dedication and persistence.

| When all's lost, shout from your soul! |

All these grievances haven't overshadowed the main reason I can still play this, thankfully, which is that perverse delight of watching Compile's mascots gyrating to, as the kids call them these days, Absolute Bangers. The studio's sound team, like so many from Japanese developers in this period, had their own in-house vocalists and live band, performing and recording many catchy tunes throughout the '90s. Taken this way, Puyo Puyo DA! unironically succeeds as a sampler disc and playable jukebox in one, entertaining less for how it plays and more through its curated set of discotheque-grade jams. I bring up disco because, relative to the aggressive IDM booming around Y2K, what's offered here might seem tame, cheesy, or downright laughable at times. Maybe I'm a sucker for MIDI synth-brass, karaoke bravado, and canned drum loops, though. Pair this camp soundscape with suitably stiff but charming animation and we've got a winner! Even good 'ol Niitani sings on some of the tracks—good for him.

For all its shortcomings, plus misreading a market moving on to Dance Dance Revolution and other rhythm innovators, I kind of love Puyo Puyo DA! the way only a video game historian can. This absolutely was not the kind of game that could save Compile, and I wonder if it managed to break even considering the Dreamcast's abysmal performance in Japan. Still, it's a hoot for any self-styled Puyo-Madou heads, which I am one of. From those awkwardly easy opening moments to the trial-and-error irritations later on, I still bopped along to Katsumi Tanaka's cheery vocals, no less powerful than Takenobu Mitsuyoshi when you need him. And glancing at my avatar's comical reaction to missing a chain, or the very same from an opponent, kept me going well past the point of dropping this in disgust. Little details here and there tell me that someone at Compile had fun and passion while developing this, even if it started life as yet another hail-Mary from a dying soft house trying to avert disaster. At the very least, we'll have learned more from this event than Moo Niitani ever did—seriously, does he think he can capture lightning in a bottle twice, or are Puyo-style puzzlers the only thing he has left to pitch when starting a new doomed company? What a cursed franchise. Pardon me, it's closing time and I gotta pour one out for Kazunari Yonemitsu and the gang (don't worry, he and the rest at Sting are doing alright).

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Apr. 4 - 10, 2023

| Bibliography |

[1] discstation. “コンパイル@DiscStation Wiki.” コンパイル@discstation wiki. アットウィキ, November 19, 2022. https://w.atwiki.jp/discstation/.
[2] compile.co.jp, webmaster @, ed. “Puyoman Products -FOODS-.” Compile. Compile Corporation, November 1, 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/19961101080505/http://www.compile.co.jp/puyoman/goods/foods/index2.html.
[3] Iwaki, Toshiaki, and Yoshito Onishi. “Tokyo Game Show: Puyo Puyo.” Broadcast. Tonight 2 1996, no. August 28. Tokyo, Kanto: TV Asahi, August 28, 1996. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtZB1QNdsi0&t=879s.
[4] さん blitz753challenge, ed. “貴重 ゲーム ぷよぷよ 魔導ランド 直筆絵画 コン...” ヤフオク! Yahoo! Japan, August 17, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220818105430/https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d1060882018.

A hyperlinking manifesto for the funny lil' guy in all of us. You exit that clean Mac OS desktop and meet the eponymous object, framed like a Mayan calendar in all its majesty. Then the camera snaps to a more bizarre scene, a fantastically mundane fire hydrant separate from the hatch. Futzing with it either spews water from the spout or invites you to "Touch Me!", upon which begins an adventure in juxtaposition that would make Carroll proud. It's a non-Euclidean, all-inclusive sojourn into an information age lucid dream, a palate cleanser for our inner child, that most surreal utopia.

It can't be understated just how much Bill Atkinson's 1987 invention of HyperCard (and its scripting language, HyperTalk) democratized multimedia software creation. That's a lot of words to say that Rand & Robyn Miller never would made Cyan Worlds the atelier it is today without such a simple but feature-rich engine like this. And they were far from the first to start probing HyperCard's potential. Earlier digital storybooks, like '87's Inigo Gets Out, showed how you could make a simple but amusing story from postcards and duct tape. This software suit did for collages, graphic adventures, and even more real-time games what The Quill had for text adventures, or Pinball Construction Kit for that genre. We know The Manhole today both for its connection to later masterworks like Riven, but it matters more to me as an ambassador for so many ambitious HyperCard works made up to the advent of Mac OS X. Together with the puzzle-oriented, point-and-click paradigm first codified in Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion a year before, Rand & Robyn's earliest title pushed the medium in new directions.

One could look at this short trip and call it slight or too tedious for what unique content's actually included. It's true you spend a lot of time waiting through laborious scene transitions, a compromise worth making at the time. Not only was HyperCard generally not the fastest or most efficient way to make a Mac game (though certainly the easiest), but all the cool animations and sounds the Miller brothers packed in here slow the pacing down further. I'd argue this gives ample time for reflection on the things you've just encountered, however—let alone how they all connect together. From the start, the Millers had their own predilection towards meditation, with a world that beckons your attention but doesn't demand concentration.

The Manhole feels like a dérive, an anarchic dive through unexpected portals to events and characters both showy and quaint. First comes the beanstalk, casting aside the concrete status of the titular object in favor of the unknown. Climbing up and down the vine brings you to the heavens and seas, followed by yet more turns around the proverbial corner. My stroll through this world became a circular rhythm of entering, leaving, and returning to personable spaces, from hub & spokes to beguiling dead ends. And every personality you meet seems to know and accept this bewilderment, the unexplained but hardly unexpected confusion of time, location, and cause-effect.

I doubt the Millers had any Situationist or psychogeographical angle of critique to communicate here. They improvised nearly the whole game as a pet project, a simple consequence of learning how to work with Atkinson's tools and having fun in the process. It's that ease of transferring their creative processes and hobbies into a previously inaccessible venue, the personal computer, that makes this adventure so compelling. Sure, I could criticize how short the stack is, as well as the bits more obviously categorized as edutainment just for Rand's two daughters. (Even then, the rabbit's bookcase of classics has its own idiosyncracies, like the book Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy which isn't about anything.) Well before the highly regarded, non-condescending storytelling approach Humungous Entertainment's adventures used, I see The Manhole treating any player of any age with empathy and intelligence. Hierarchies and transactions need not exist here. There's a better, more equitable reality promised by the laggy, monochrome disk in your floppy drive.

Enough big words. Let's talk about Mr. Dragon's disco clothes, the elephant boating you through the white rabbit's teacup, and all the linking books and frames later used in Myst for dramatic effect. Observe how easily you can click around each slide, finding new angles in odd places or a delightful audiovisual gag where least expected. Just as Mac OS was the iconic "digital workbench" full of easter eggs and creative potential, The Manhole puts itself aside so that you can just explore, appreciate, and vibe all throughout. It's nice to not have puzzles or roadblocks for the sake of them—if anything's here to challenge you, it's the absence of game-y mechanics or progression. This might as well have been the original walking simulator of its day with how loose it's structured and what few interactions you need to use. And it's entirely in service to the amorphous but memorable, personalized sabbatical you take through Wonderland.

HyperCard cut out the hard parts of multimedia creation, expediting the processes once interfering with non-coders' motivation to finish their work. As such, The Manhole remains a convincing demo of the benefits, philosophies, and cultural impact this technology made possible. Even the initial floppy release I played has a lot of digitized speech and music for its time, and the CD release would leverage that format's increased storage and sample rate to improve this further. Compare this with just the first island of Myst, a place as enshrined in gaming history's pantheon as it is loathed by players seeking to make progress in that game. That single, setpiece-driven location couldn't have its staying power or sense of discovery were it not for Cyan's '88 debut. So much of this game's simple wonder, interconnections, and whimsy would get encapsulated into the '93 title's opening hour, showing how far the Millers had come. This kind of design continuity is hard to accomplish today, let alone back then.

Honestly, I could go on and on and on about this adventure often dismissed as just a children's intro to the point-and-click adventure. In the context of Mac gaming, this was an important distillation of the genre that the platform's earliest game of note, Enchanted Scepters, had pioneered. In my so far short acquaintance with Cyan's library, the parallels between this and Myst are too hard and meaningful to ignore. In The Manhole's defense, you need not play it to understand through cultural osmosis the message and principles it luxuriates in. That's what makes this so perplexing on an analytic level. Though Rand & Robyn made this ditty to satisfy their urges and ultimately start selling software, it's more introspective and uncaring of what you think about it than usual. One can sense the confidence and ease with which this colorful 1-bit universe exists and presents itself. Why rush or insist itself upon any and all who wander in? How can it know who we are, other than a friendly traveler? Our dialogue with such a game should respect both its outward simplicity and the subtleties that creep into view.

I first played The Manhole maybe a decade and a half ago, back when my ex-Mac user dad tried introducing me to this genre and Mac OS software at large. Predictably, I bounced off of it hard, sticking to my fancy PS2, DS, and Windows XP games. But beyond just having a vested interest in older video games and their history now, I've grokked what this unassuming pop-up storybook wanted to communicate. Food for thought, perhaps. Nothing in The Manhole strikes me as therapeutic, though—hardly chicken soup for the gamer's soul. It's as cartoonish, surreal, and irreverent as ever, a brief respite that one can claw into or bask in. Akin to something contemporary like If Monks Had Macs, this piece of history delights in playing the part of a media crossroad, a frame through which new perspectives can be found. I think there's a lot of value in that; if and when I write my own interactive stories, I'll be revisiting this to remind myself of what I cherish in this medium.

Only a year after the first wave of indie throwback shooters (Dusk, Amid Evil, etc.), Australian jam band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (what a name) saw the potential in promoting their thrash metal album via a mini-FPS. I'm not about to say it went well, or did anything a more evocative music video could have done better, but the effort's appreciated. Infest the Rats' Nest deserved way better, though. Back in my day [grandpa voice] our free FPS flash games let us shoot Bill Gates for the crime of Microshaft Winblows! This honestly just does way too little with the single's subject matter and feels like a last-minute promo.

We've basically got just one little combat arena available from the jump, with usable but very basic movement and controls. Then there's a super limited bestiary to fight, pulling as much from the iconography of albums like Nonagon Infinity as it does Infest the Rats' Nest. Building even a small demo game for the latter's top single—a roaring banger satirizing Elon Musk and other techbro imperialists' dreams of abandoning Earth—shouldn't be difficult. Just have two or three punchy guns, simple yet replayable levels to blast through, and some of that juicy, inscrutable Jason Galea psychedelia. What could go wrong?

It could just be a big fat nothingburger, that's what. The arena's all you get, as are a bunch of annoying bats to shoot at. Low-end Serious Sam/Painkiller noodling under weed-excited skies isn't all that engaging, sorry fellas. And while the music does the heavy lifting as it should, I just don't think Flightless Records committed any ambition to this beyond ticking a marketing checklist. Seriously, the very idea of a King Gizzard boomer shooter is awesome. The band's variety of genres, their loosely-connected musical multiverse with albums and videos nodding to each other...so much potential, yet it's hardly hinted at here. The most I'll say is that this isn't abominable to play, just an annoying reminder of what could be. Maybe I just gotta work on my Doom mapping chops and start a community project to fill the gap.

A full-bore King Gizzard WAD would have to cover the following key points:
•Has to loop in on itself (last map leads into the first)
•Total conversion of all graphics, monsters, weapons, and power-ups (aka some real GZDoom shit)
•Copious references to everything throughout the Gizzverse, from Han-Tyumi's barf bag to a trip down The River and into the Crumbling Castle
•Game flow that just feels like a series of effortless, chaotic band jams, transitioning between incidental and slaughter combat
•Some breather levels playing off the folk pop/rock songs; similarly, the secret maps could use concepts from Gumboot Soup and the band's demos
•Full MIDI remixes of relevant KGatLW songs, alongside the originals themselves if the player desires
•The band's gotta stream themselves attempting to play the thing on Ultra-Violent at least once

I could go on. Basically what I'm saying is we live in a timeline where masterpieces of music industry multimedia like Frankie, Ed Hunter, Spice World, Tomarunner Vs L'Arc En Ciel, and Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style exist (among others). Something's going terribly wrong if the likes of zero-to-hero Aussie maximalist rockers are settling for this by contrast. They can go harder, cheesier, zanier...more extra in every way, just like their music videos and performances, yet look what the Mars for the Rich online game has amounted to. Sorry state of affairs, or just a mistimed and under-resourced gift to fans excited for the album? I don't know—it just irks me. Maybe I'm underestimating the labor and budgeting a longer ludonarrative experience requires, but I doubt it'd break the bank to make something simple but more involved and replayable than this.

And now, the first MAME Mondays write-up of 2024, wherein I subject myself to the coin-op horrors.

Panic sets in when you realize that ladders don’t count as open spaces, meaning aliens can't fall down them when trapped from atop. If I'm going to play a Heiankyo Alien follow-up with emphasis on using verticality (and thus gravity) to defeat monsters, then having only one way to deal with higher-tier aliens (two or more blank pits atop each other) is a problem. Both Space Panic and its predecessor rely on players making the right tactical move to surround themselves with pits, knowing they have limited movement and must guess where the baddies might move. But at least the 1979 game didn't bother with punishing you for not running over to a trapped critter in time; here, that's practically a death sentence since it enrages the monster, meaning now I have to double-put the thing before oxygen runs out.

And there's the rub: with a strict time limit per life and the enemies gaining more advantage from mistimed traps than players, Universal's take on the maze trapping formula feels claustrophobic in ways Heiankyo Alien simply didn't. Sure, I can also fall down the pits I've made to reach safety, and thankfully Kazutoshi Ueda didn't add death from falling here. But the win state's the same as ever. Dodging monsters means nothing if I can't reliably get rid of them, especially if I now have to time not one, but two pit placements against the timer and the AI's whims. Now let's couple this with a rather high time-to-bonus-life factor (3000 or 5000 points depending on DIP switch), plus how mooks will speed up across stages, and we've got an exponential difficulty curve to make long-form play even riskier. I wouldn't say the University of Tokyo's crack game hobbyists had all the acumen of veteran designers, but they at least wanted random arcade-goers to make progress and regularly get high and higher scores. Its slower monsters and time limit meant one could strategically camp at an intersection if desired, or take risks with pit placement to maximize clear bonuses much easier. Compared to Digger, Ueda's game seems downright hostile, and just as aesthetically spare without the gentler ramping-up of its inspiration.

It's impressive how quickly Universal cloned and, in some cases, matched up to outdid the games and developers they copied, but this plan doesn't seem to have worked out with Space Panic. To its credit, the game sold well and influenced the design of Donkey Kong and Lode Runner among others, but those genre evolutions were inevitable. This title's main new mechanic, using physics to defeat and avoid monsters you could previously only corner, feels both under-utilized and skewed against the player at all skill levels. Adding gravity and risks associated with multiple height levels was the logical next step from flat mazes. Other pure maze games like Pac-Man and Lock 'n Chase would find new ways to restrict but also empower the protagonist, adding verbs like power-ups and lockable doors to discourage turtling while reorienting game flow around dashing for safe spaces. In these earliest trap-em-ups, though, the hierarchy's all flat, with only the largest spaces between ladders and intersections having any priority. So there's a disconnect between what Ueda's added to distinguish this from Heiankyo Alien and what designers elsewhere in the industry would do to innovate the maze game genre. Consider that "platforming" came about by accident, the serendipitous result of imbuing the player character with more and better internal logic relative to their environment.

I guess this isn't too bad for 1980, just underwhelming as a missing link between Heiankyo-likes and the complex maze games to come. The concept's just too underdeveloped and unkind to its target audience, even knowing enough people clamored for a new trapping game to plunk considerable coin onto this one. The cleverest thing happening here, I'd argue, is reusing assets to make a unique hi-score entry screen. It feels quite playful to clamber around and dig for the letters vs. just tapping buttons to type my name in. Honestly, I might enjoy that more than the all-or-nothing dynamic of isolating my guy between pits halfway up the maze or running after the aliens, hoping I don't work myself into an ambush. Whereas I can appreciate the primordial beginnings of the genre in Head-On and Heiankyo Alien, this maze game is too small a jump in complexity and too much of a killjoy whenever I'm about to hit a groove playing it. Here's hoping Lady-Bug and the Mr. Do series can make up for this!

Young Walter Mitty for Japan's jilted generation, a show hazily recalled but always produced. For the residents of Setagaya, it's a St. Vitus dance every end of the week, with too many interpretations to reconcile before the day-to-day grind begins anew. For us, there's a calm before the storm followed by the euphoria of living through a kind disaster, as mild as it is transformative. For the developers, all this presents a release from the simple, sorrowful nostalgia of their past games, a more cynical yet still passionate affair. For Level 5, it's another lauded product in their catalog, a shining example of what Nintendo's 3DS offered to players. For around five hours, this was an bewildering piece of fiction I couldn't get enough of, until somehow I did…and then it couldn't stop. For all of that, I'd feel like a fool to rate this any lower, both for its quality and for how much I esteem the life's work of its creator. Yet this appraisal yearns to be higher.

Consider lead developer Kaz Ayabe, who describes spending a chunk of his post-high school days listening to techno and IDM. Going to rave parties in the countryside, finding his inner caveman…all that energy, melancholy, and plenty of inaka nostalgia fed into what became the Boku no Natsuyasumi series. But where the Bokunatsu games revel in remembered childhood, free from all but the most sensible restrictions, Attack of the Friday Monsters deals directly with a modernity you can't escape, the waking dream of life under smoky layers. Our frame hero, Sohta, is stuck coming of age in a shared stupor, watching and acting through the post-war obsoletion of an imperfect arcadia. And we're brought along for the ride, encapsulated in one interminable day of discovery.

This project was developer Millennium Kitchen's chance to subvert their formula, to leave the proverbial family ramen stall and make a divebar izakaya of a game, both more childish and more adult. It wasn't ever going to be as glamorous or idyllic, but the old recipes and principles which sublimated Bokunatsu into such a masterwork all remain. I just wish Level-5's stipulations and some less well-considered design choices hadn't gotten in the way of this experiment.

Let's settle L5's role in the equation. Their Guild brand of 3DS-exclusive smaller titles—produced/developed together with studios like Nextech, Comcept, Vivarium, and Grasshopper Manufacture—was a smart way to jumpstart the system's paltry launch-window lineup. Why settle for Steel Diver, neat as it is, when cheaper, more immediate larks like Liberation Maiden or Aero Porter are available? Nor did this brand skimp on deeper experiences, like the Yasumi Matsuno-penned Crimson Shroud or the publisher's own Starship Damrey? Among this smorgasbord, Friday Monsters claims its spot as the most relatable, uncompromising adventure within the 3DS' early days. It hardly feels as lacking in meaningful hours of play as you'd expect from a 4-to-6-hour story.

As a Guild02 release, the final product had a similarly low budget and developer count, a budget take on what Ayabe's team and their partners @ Aquria were used to. I can't help but marvel at how they accomplished so much within these limits. While I appreciate L5's former willingness to bankroll and promote other creators' works with little intervention, they clearly signaled their partners to consider how few early adopters the platform had, and how their games should account for that. Finding that balance between "content" and artistic integrity must have been worth the challenge for Ayabe's team, and it leads to an excellent, ambitious yet rougher take on their usual slice-of-life toyboxes.

This makes itself very apparent in the interesting but tedious card collecting & battling system you use throughout Friday Monsters. I knew this was going to get awkward once I noticed the conspicuous lack of tutorializing for anything else in the whole game. Running around, talking to neighbors, and solving simple puzzles all explains itself, but the Monster Glim scavenging and combat rules needed explication. So that's one mark against the game loop's sense of immersion, even if, again, this kind of artifice isn't unusual throughout the experience. I've learned to distinguish the "good" kind of artifice—that which dissuades me from considering the story's events and interactions through realistic terms—and the other, more distracting kind which begs me to question its use or inclusion.

Card battling usually boils down to getting as many gems as you can find, combining cards of a set to increase their power, and then hoping your utterly random placement puts you on the losing end. Rounds come down to who makes the correct rock-paper-scissors predictions, or just has the larger numbers. This all ties into other themes of mutually understood but lightly lampooned adult rules and hierarchies that tie us down, but the player has to go through all this on Sohta's behalf, rather than just existing in plot and dialogue regardless.

Bokunatsu's game loop almost always manages to avoid this pitfall by having you engage in more obvious, more rewarding activities like bug-catching, environmental puzzles, or just managing the passage of time by moving between camera angles. Friday Monsters uses a less chronologically fixed premise, encouraging completion by removing time skips across screens in favor of a loose episodic structure. But even these are more like bookmarks to tracks and remind you of ongoing plot threads, while Ayabe & co. nudge players towards methodically circling the town during each beat. If the typical Bokunatsu day uses its style of progression to force a basic amount of player priority, then what Friday Monsters has instead emphasizes the periphery events and observations of the village's afternoon and evening.

All this comes back to the Guild series' need for back-of-box justification for spending your precious $8, something that Millennium Kitchen's other works aren't so concerned with. What I'm trying to say is that, more than any other Guild release, this one shouldn't have had to include a post-game, or any hinted insecurities about what's "missing". Extra stuff for its own sake is generally optional here, but incentivized by the narrator + promises of extra story which you neither need nor actually get much of in the end.

Much of the story's strengths and staying power comes from what it insinuates, with characters' routines and tribulations shown in enough depth yet elided when necessary to preserve dignity and mystery. After all, it's not just Sohta's tale, the aimless but excited wanderings of a kid trying to take his golden years at a slippery pace. Friday Monsters is just as much concerned with his parents, especially the downtrodden father who wants a courage to live he's never had. While the children only know TV, a story around every corner no matter how slight or recycled, the parents and post-teens stuck on Tokyo's recovering borderlands still remember the tragedies and romance of the cinema or puppet theater.

Sohta's mom and dad are struggling to keep their love and dedication as they enter middle age, denied the economic and cultural promises emblemized in classic Shochiku dramas. Megami and Akebi's dad now have to reconicle their own free time and hobbies with devoting their energy and resources to creating and supporting the tokusatsu shows that seem all too real for Tokyo's new youth, but no different from genre pictures by Toei or Toho. Emiko and her police officer father share an intimate Ozu-esque dialogue while a kaiju duel rages behind them, Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu's archetypes juxtaposed against superhero depictions of the country's calamities, environmental injustices, and looming specters of globalization. All of them could fit right onto the silver screen, if they weren't too wrapped up in their comfortable itineraries.

At least he kids are all right. School's always over when they wake up to play, and the simpler joys of learning their vernacular and playing absurd master-servant games never gets old. Two of the boys even reduce their identities to family professions, as Ramen and Billboard both exude their working-class roots in place of stodgy, less memorable formal names. It's precisely that contrast of Sohta & S-chan's mundane but precious growing up with all the frustrations of adulthood which drives not just the plot, but the dive into magical realism this game unleashes upon players.

One example is the protagonist's baffling ability to warp from a seemingly inescapable bad ending back into Ramen's family's diner. Context clues from talking with friends and acquaintances tell the player that Sohta had almost passed out, not remembering his feverish journey to the watering hole, but he doesn't recall nor care that much about it. Any grown-up would understand the gravity of the situation, yet our "hero" plays helpless ghost and witness to an imagination shared with his close circle. Dreams and willpower make any outcome possible on a dog day like this, be it becoming the new cosmic hero of your hometown or falling from Godzilla's claws back into reality. And if they don't even know how to overthink it (discounting A-Plus' genre savvy mumblings), why should we? There's always time later for crack theories about how our protagonist and the "6th cutest girl in class" represent Izanagi and Izanami, after all.

How about the big 'ol kaiju, then? They all look impressive, even if most are reduced to card illustrations. Only Frankasaurus and Cleaner Man get the big 3D showdown, but their wrestling and interactions with Setagaya and the surrounding wards are so damn effective I don't need to see the other giants in action. Nowhere better does Friday Monsters nail its sense of scale and romanticism, that contrast between you and the wider world around you waiting to be explored, than with its climactic fight. Again, it's likely these science fantasy events happening in front of us could be the result of a community's exposure to harmful pollution and chemical from nearby factories, causing hallucinations. But what we're shown could just as well be the real deal, a marvelous if frightening set of circumstances always repeating but rarely understood. This isn't your typical Friday Monsters, uh, Friday twilight—now the unready man of the house becomes an avatar of justice and moral fulfillment, playing Ultraman to Ayabe's hazily remembered Tokyo suburbia. We're not stuck in Sohta's story, nor in his dad's or anyone else's. There's an undercurrent of Japan's indigenous and regional mythology metamorphizing in response to foreign influences, with communal storytelling traditions used here to comment on the transition into the modern.

A great example of Friday Monsters' writing chops is this funny guy named Frank, a well-dressed European gentleman who looks waaaaaaay too much like the original Doctor Who. He's the broadest caricature in this story, an ambassador of weird Western invasion who's nonetheless become part of the community. What part he plays in it, though, remains up to interpretation. Ayaba presents possibilities as wide-ranging as Frank being Sohta's imaginary friend, born from playing with sausages in his bento box. Or he's an elaborate tarento personality working for the local TV station, an example of outside talent brought in from abroad or the local subculture. Maybe this William Hartnell look-a-like really is an alien, the spitting image of an English sophisticate intervening with local affairs for increasingly imperialistic reasons.

No matter what, this one character can go from a cute little sideshow to a narrative-warping anti-hero, stuck between the suspected real and the seductively imagined. That's a lot of adjectives to say this game's full of similarly compelling individuals, each of whom interact with others and the setting in unique ways. Nanafumi, angsty loner and bully in the making, runs the gamut from puzzle obstacle you must solve to a minor hero later in the story, as much a moral example as a person to acknowledge on his own merits. I can remember almost everyone's name here, and not because there's anyone I ever wanted to avoid talking to.

Maybe the story's biggest theme is the theatrical nature of modern life, from Meiji-era home businesses upon farmland to the unavoidable broadcasts and pageantries these families engage in. Friday Monsters indulges you in rituals, from small details like Sohta not wearing his shoes at home to the "ninjutsu" he and the other kids use on each other to show dominance. Pre-rendered 3D environs come to us through carefully chosen camera angles, often disobeying Hollywood's rules of visual progression for the sake of dramatic and thematic effect. Sightlines clue you in on the separation between rural and suburban Tokyo, as well as the pervasive eternal railway walling you off from the picket line and other harsh politics of this era. If anything, I wish there was just a bit more area to explore, or more to interact with on the scenic routes (something Bokunatsu balances well with its lack of urgency). But the game's visual splendor and lush audio design makes it so easy to stay in this world for longer than you'd expect.

Much longer indeed, as I found out when trying the post-game before eventually bouncing off to write this review. There's a simple reason why, as I'd hinted earlier: the "bonus story" of Friday Monsters is antithetical to the game's design and messages. Sure, it'd be nice to learn even more about these people and the weird stories defining them, but we've spent enough time in Sohta's community to know it's worth moving on from. Why crawl around to dig up the scraps when I could just play the core game again? It's like Ayabe & co. are nudging players towards the realization that completionism is a trap both in media and in our own lives, but L5 told them to develop this post-game anyway.

What we're left with is a slower, even more decompressed village to hang out in where Sohta semi-randomly switches conversation topics and more focus goes to card battling or snooping around for the final Monster Glims. This can be fun if played in short bursts, but definitely not as much as the few hours of well-paced, slow and steady social adventuring beforehand. And actually reaching 100% makes this game the kind of slog some of Bokunatsu's skeptics wrongly deem it. Diminishing returns is the last situation I expected here, and it almost sours an otherwise awe-inspiring experience. We even already had a clean opening and ending like you'd see in an anime or children's show from the time, cute theme song and all. Dragging this out threatens to cheapen all the player's just enjoyed.

Encompassing all the intricacies behind this game and its wider context is a battle between idealism and cynicism, with childhood nostalgia as the battleground. I'm unsure if this spinoff's any darker or lighter than the most rigorous Bokunatsu titles, but that almost decade-long gap between this and Millennium Kitchen's recent Shin-chan game stands out to me. After making four summer vacation games with more content, iteration, and repetition than the last, here comes a more constrained, more wanting variation on the genre. (Let's not forget Bokura no Kazoku, a promising inversion of this formula idealizing urban Japan.) Friday Monsters achieves so much immersion and introspection via its clash of ideas against labors, feeling like more than a set of tropes or binaries thrown into its confined space. Perhaps this was Ayabe's own journey to stretch outside the Bokunatsu comfort zone, even knowing he'd have to compromise with his publisher as he'd did with Sony and Contrail years prior. Embracing fantasy to this degree was more than a novelty that would appease Akihiro Hino and other higer-ups; it was the natural next step.

For me, it's just frustrating how close this gets to becoming the masterpiece it hints at. A telltale sign early on was seeing the fairly barebones, clunky UI which makes Bokunatsu's skeuomorphic menus look like fine art. I pressed on and enjoyed myself oh so much anyway, but I can only nod in agreement with Ayabe about the perils of funding these more niche adventures without leaning too far into conventions or market trends. What flaws and missed opportunities crop up here manage to highlight all that Friday Monsters succeeds with, though. Other reviewers have rightly pointed out the sheer charm, verisimilitude, and admirable qualities found all throughout, making it the most complete Guild series entry by some distance. You can't stay in this world forever, no matter how much you want to, but the fond memories of this suburban fantasy can last a lifetime. Here's a story that understands the impossibility of utopia yet lets us yearn for an exciting and sustainable social contract between kids, taller kids, and the processes and solidarity making it all possible.

Nintendo should get raked over the coals for letting media marvels like this fall into unavailability because they can't be bothered to spend chump change on server and network maintenance. Little stories like this are what inspire me to keep playing video games, no matter how much I think I've seen or what I might miss out on. That's most valuable of all.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023