You know not a lick of FOMO until you peer into the Library of Babel that is original The Sims modding homepages. I ended up spending so much time modding this game that I realized I'd be better off messing around with the official expansions instead. And then I remembered that The Sims 2 effectively carries over all the original game's charm, and then some. Then again, I think the Second Life community inherited more of the "casual fever dream" creative aspirations that had been possessing social games like this since the days of MUDs (let alone worlds.com).

As something I played all the way back in kindergarten, not understanding an iota of the classic Maxis humor & sim details, The Sims has maintained its mystique well into modern day. From impromptu fires to questionable adulting skills, there's just a lot to take in whenever you start playing a new family. I learned how to play rotationally here before moving on to the sequels, knowing those would be even more intimidating. Consider this the training grounds for getting the most out of the series proper, perhaps.

One thing The Sims 2, 3, and definitely 4 are lacking in is Jerry Martin. His iteration on the long-form improvisations of virtuosos like Keith Jarrett & George Winston always puts a smile on my face, even knowing how simple, even workmanlike the chord cycles are. And the eclectic mix of big band, latin, & fusion jazz elsewhere sets this well apart from the more hyperactive, genre-agnostic work Mark Mothersbaugh excels at in the sequels. All in all, the audio direction is so damn focused.

Even if you skip this for more moddable, sophisticated series entries, it's both a fun nostalgia trip & one of the not-so-secretly best sim game soundtracks ever. The Sims remains very accessible today thanks to new installers & quality-of-life mods, plus a clean user interface enabling you in all the key areas. This was the Little Computer People of the Internet, even more than early MMOs like Ultima Online hinted at. A timeline w/o Maxis' quintessential suburban simulator would look unrecognizable, and I'm not sure I'd want it any other way.

Jet Set Trick-or-Treat: How the Anti-Establishment Halloween Gurrl Liberates the Means of Fun-duction via Xtreme Sports and Magic

It's a 15-to-20 minute demo of the best indie arena action-meets-skateboarding games yet to be made. That fact really doesn't mesh well with the program's filesize, a whopping ~8 GB freeware package courtesy of the DigiPen Institute. (For a student project, they've already nailed their industry's tendency towards comically unoptimized assets and downloads!) Don't be fooled or alarmed by that short runtime, however. Witchpunk comes with a simple, nifty ranking system based on how well you score against its limited waves of baddies, mini-bosses, and the big bad herself. And reaching that top rank means playing as fast, tight, and smart as one would hope for in a character action classic, now condensed into a small but expertly interwoven skate park of horrors.

The premise explains itself: a villainous girlboss has invaded your local grounds with an army of silvery Halloween battle-bots, seeking profitable victory over the festivities. It's up to our heroine to stop this uncool reign of terror, bashing the bots into junk heaps before taking on the aggressor herself. I didn't go in expecting any Trenchant Insight on class warfare, capitalism, or punk ethos and attitudes in general, but Witchpunk does a good job of embodying these themes in spirit. Your swagful attire, zesty cat familiar, and resilient set of wheels do a lot to instill confidence, as does the excellent audiovisual style found and heard all throughout. I could easily compare it to the aforementioned graffiti-spraying blockbuster from SEGA, or even something recent like Friday Night Funkin', but I think this manages to stand out on its own, even in a sea of other dalliances with cel shading and angular, colorful designs.

While I wouldn't say Witchpunk is style over substance, it can come a bit too close to that for comfort. The main issue stems from a relatively limited moveset: no button-combo tricking, advanced melee or magic options, etc. It counterbalances this with an emphasis on boosting, going faster and faster around the map to increase your damage multiplier and dodge enemy fire. This feels like a meld between precision action-platformers and the extreme sports genre, albeit a bit simplistic in areas. Controls are thankfully quite responsive and fine-tuned to make this game loop work, with tons of space to maneuver and herd squads together for juicy combos. It's always satisfying to master different racing lines and hopping between tiers of elevation, defending through evasion and attacking with just the right amount of hesitation.

A lotta love went into this undergraduate effort, but I really wish it had a level editor for us to mess with, or an outright "full" version at all. Much like Narbacular Drop oh so many years ago, this feels like an ambitious but rushed DigiPen showcase that can surely become something great, with better fleshed-out boss fights and missing essentials like gamepad controls. It's a decadent vertical slice even compared to its peers from the school, brimming with "the vibes" as some would say; I'm legit surprised there isn't a soundtrack release for this yet! We're living through a renaissance in Jet Set Radio-inspired experiences, each honing in on different strengths which that series pioneered or refined to a sheen, and I'm glad to say these guys are already mostly there.

Why this hasn't blown up on streams the way other DigiPen-borne releases like FPS Chess has is beyond me. Like, who wouldn't want to hop around, get down, bop clowns, and clean up town in an urban fantasy like this? Witchpunk answers this question quite ably, and I only wish it had more examples with which to demonstrate its proof of real skate-bonking sorcery.

"The Great Escape" has inspired quite a lot of prison-break games, or even just sequences of that sort across the medium. Who doesn't have fond stories of humiliating those Nazis just to get some fresh air outside Castle Wolfenstein? How can I forget Codemasters' own Prisoners of War, a game all about playing a chronic escapee? Just as interesting are the more arcade-y translations of this premise, from Silas Warner's genre codifier to SNK's P.O.W.. Conveying the gravity of this scenario while still entertaining players is no small feat. I wish I could say Carry Lab's Daidassou was more successful at that, but it remains one of the best early puzzle action games for FM-7, PC-88, and similar Japanese PCs. It eschews realism in favor of fun farce, giving players just enough means to dash in, liberate each camp, and shoot or explode guards along the way.

Rather than playing a POW ready to break out, you're an outside operative instead, trotting into each stage with a pistol, scarce ammunition and grenades, and just a few lives. The game loop's simple: dodge or remove German troops on their patrols, nab their keys and other collectibles (either ammo or score items), and unlock cell doors to gather up GIs. Then you've got to escort one or more trails of POWs back to the starting point—think Flicky and other maze games of that vintage. Every level tries its best to iterate on this simple premise, with layouts becoming increasingly Escher-like and full of surprises. The isometric perspective both adds useful depth to the mazes and works against players in a frustrating but meaningful way. Just having the top-down view would equate this to Wolfenstein and other game center faire; this skewed angle instead makes you work to decipher these layouts, planning and improvising the further in you go.

Carry Lab usually wasn't the type to develop distinctly Golden Age-like arcade games for PC users. At most, they'd done third-person racing titles like F2 Grand Prix, or technically impressive pseudo-sprite scaling stuff a la SEGA's Buck Rogers. Nonetheless, I think Daidassou became a cult classic for good reason. It handles its fake sprites very well, with nary any slowdown nor worsening input delay. Controls are as clunky to learn and master as you'd expect from a mid-'80s numpad-based game, but the measured pace of play, and emphasis on routing to avoid enemies when reasonable, makes this easier to overlook. Whoever coded and/or designed these stages and systems had a grasp on what keeps players like me coming back. One's never powerful enough to just gun all the Nazis down, but on the flipside, a little bit of ingenuity and stealthy action goes a long way here.

This odd mashup of genres can lead to some fun scenarios. For example, the worst thing that can happen is when a guard recaptures one of The Boys you've just saved. Usually they just get thrown back in their initial quarters, but sometimes the enemy will instead place them inside a pink-doored cell which one can't just unlock. Now you gotta blow it open with a grenade you might not even have! Chasing those high scores (of which the default is already substantial) means using resources wisely and anticipating the worst, be it German reinforcements or snagging on corners long enough for them to catch you. Waves upon waves of mazes, soldiers, and wild goose chases start to blur together—the banality of war seeps into even a supposedly heroic effort. Should you finally fall in the line of duty, all one gets is a spot on the score table, nothing like a Purple Heart or Medal of Honor. But then again, it's the journey that counts, and Daidassou does well with its fundamentals no matter how slight it is elsewhere.

Many won't even touch this game once they see its art style, a garish blend of tans, browns, greens, and pinks befitting the 8-color high resolution video mode. And there's no cute, memorable audio to speak of, just tinny foot-taps, gunfire, and beeper jingles. I can describe Daidassou's aesthetic in one word: spartan. What's here is a no-frills, inglorious trudge through castles of combat and collect-a-Joe, with only these silly deformed caricatures of U.S. and German soldiers exuding any charm. The aforementioned depth-bending level designs also lend identity, but aren't as impressive as the game's pre-Cannon Fodder irreverence towards the Great War era. I can't accuse Carry Lab's product of lacking in content, as there's a huge amount of levels to complete, but I won't blame others for bouncing off once the repetition sets in. PC players back in the day got their money's worth here, assuming they weren't spending their days editing levels in Sokoban or Lode Runner, or just trying to solve the ordeals of xRPGs like Xanadu. This kind of anti-Great Escape must have seemed odd then, let alone now, yet it found an audience back when weird but compelling premises like this were commercially viable.

I'd ultimately love to say Daidassou got a worthwhile console or arcade port. Sadly it remained exclusive to these 8-bit J-PCs, with no follow-up titles to speak of. Carry Lab themselves got involved with Famicom development via their Disk System releases under Square's Disk Original Group (DOG) label, but they still didn't make a sequel while they had the chance. Like many once notable self-publishing developers of the early J-PC days, this company lasted up till the end of the '80s before financial woes led them to bankruptcy. (Entering a legal fight with dB-SOFT over plagiarizing their JET dictionary products for word processing didn't help, nor did a staff exodus around '87.) The game's designers at tabletop company Ad Technos are even more anonymous, much to my dismay. It's funny how the slow fade-out of Carry Lab and its classic games led to the founding of Alfa System, well known today for so many JRPGs, ADVs, etc. Still, I recommend this '85 prison action ditty despite getting lost in the shuffle of its creators' history and the more impressive games releasing around that time.

Proof of what? The most charming, accessible yet busted, facile and creatively compromised Link to the Past ROM-hack you've ever imagined? That's Gunple and then some. If there's ever an iceberg meme for "seemingly innocuous but critically bizarre video games", this will rest near the bottom.

There's more angles to analyzing this bemusing ride of a Zelda-meets-Commando experiment than you'd think. (I also see the Zombies Ate My Neighbors! resemblance, but this calls to mind more arcade-y faire.) We've got, what, around 5 hours of fast-paced action adventuring with standout themes, politics, odd designs, and rehashed yonkoma comedy? The latter's all the handiwork of Gunple's key artist, Isami Nakagawa, a mangaka specializing in four-panel gag comics since the turn of the 1990s. His success with Kuma no Putaro, serialized in Big Comic Spirits from '89 to '95, is likely why Lenar worked with him on Gunple. The game's story is rich with recycled tropes, meta-humor, and a general irreverence the artist is familiar with. And it's that slightness, that refuge in audacity at its own expense, that both saves and curtails this game.

Everything starts out quite innocuous. You've got a meteor crash landing on a small frontier island, somehow not absolutely destroying it given the speed and size of impact. None of the villagers care. Then an alien outlaw emerges, transforming the local fauna, flora, and lore-a into monsters of his own design. Now the Western-style colonists are shook, unable to fight back. How the turn tables! Except you play from the viewpoint of a boy-turned-deputy, tasked with stopping this big bad by the same space sheriff that body-snatches him. Oooooooooooookay, that's just a little off-putting. But it's also a convenient framing device on Lenar's part, allowing them to spare the kid any real trauma or growth while you get to cosplay as a murderhobo in cowboy's clothing.

The game loop is simple but effective for what it's trying to do. You stock up on key items and skills in town, get a basic progress hint from the sheriff, explore the overworld until you find the right dungeon, beat it, and return home to claim your bounty. Rinse and repeat until endgame. Character advancement's just as predictable, with static weapon upgrades in dungeons and health boosts either tucked away on the overworld or rewarded for beating bosses a la Zelda. Anyone hoping this has the same amount of elegant, varied progression you find in LTTP should lower their expectations. Repetition sets in rather quickly. It's an early sign of the game's rushed production colliding with clearly larger ambitions from a developer known most charitably for contract game production. (The less we talk about Bird Week or Deadly Towers, the better.)

Gunple's overworld itself isn't on par with a detailed Zelda or Metroidvania, not that I'd necessarily want that. Navigation is quite painless, as is finding the few secrets off the beaten path. The game's nice enough to hand you a very detailed world map right at the start, too, with only one required location sneakily hidden behind the "Map" label itself. Lenar managed to tuck some areas and items behind skill-locked blockers, like deep water zones you can only traverse with a late-game snorkel. But you're also blatantly denied entry to the northeast by a self-described Blocking Ghost, only passable once you buy a crucifix in town. Exploring this frontier island may not bring much, yet I think it's got a joie de vivre the game would otherwise sorely miss.

You do get a larger roster of skills as the game progresses, from boulder-breaking punches to rapid-fire gun spam. No alien powers, though. Space Sheriff Zero may have all the skill and know-how of our nemesis Demi, but he's strictly playing to the lone-ranger playbook with this boy. And only one villager ever learns that this isn't the boy suddenly whupping Demiseed ass, but a visitor from beyond. Finally, there's an interesting lives system, where treasures chests and high scores at the ends of dungeons will give you a second chance. That's all on top of infinite continues. Did I mention this Zelda clone has a scoring system?!

It's wild to me because this feels much less like a score attack experience and more like a speedrunning one. Because completing each dungeon triggers a summary where you're awarded a higher rank (and score) based on how fast you cleared that part of the game, it makes sense to play quick. But collecting dungeon treasures while preserving your healthbar adds to that, and you get extra 1ups in turn. It's far from complex, but a somewhat clever way to reward swift play. Much of Gunple's fun comes from the strong pacing this structure allows, alongside good controls via shoulder strafing and 8-way ranged attacks. Hopping between town and dungeon rarely feels tedious due to the well-designed aboveground map, and there's always that "one more room!" feeling once you're actually underground.

Of course, when lives are abundant and fail states so rare, the economy hardly means much. Maxing out that 9999 rupee pou—sorry, dollar pouch also only factors into one mid-game dungeon that doesn't make a huge dent in it with paywalls. And since your main gun's ammo never runs out (so you never have to pay for more), why bother with all these optional power-up weapons you learn to use across the playthrough? A big problem with Gunple's combat is that you always want to strafe—after all, that's the best way to avoid enemy fire. (Ducking's also an option, but enemy hitboxes are jank enough to make it too risky should they glomp you while prone.) Most of the extra weapons keep you stationary while firing, making the flamethrower supreme among them. And even that armament fails to keep up with the fully upgraded pistol you get soon after. It doesn't help that you middling kinaesthetic feedback during fights, especially during boss battles where wimpy animations and sound effects make it seem like you aren't hitting a weak point or doing any damage.

Shoutouts to Robaton, this game's equivalent of Epona. It's nice to play an LTTP-like where you actually have a cool, relevant mount that even plays a story role. As another alien trapped in an earthling's form—this time a goofy, highly expressive horse—Robaton's the beating heart of this game's comedy. He goes from a trapped buffoon of a space sheriff to your only rescue at Demi's lair, after all. And he's the fastest way to get around the overworld…when you can rent his services. Enemies drop carrots which, upon pick-up, summons him to the screen. He's not just speedy, but a way to one-hit-KO any enemy, at least until the equine power-up wears off and you're back to walking. I certainly didn't have much trouble one-shotting enemies by late-game, yet this power-up felt most useful of them all whenever I got stuck in the dungeon-crawling doldrums.

Couple all this with competent but uninspired enemy variety and you've got a pleasant but overly easy and tiresome few hours of C-rate Smash TV. Dungeons themselves lack any notable puzzles, except in the form of dodging puzzles involving bats or unkillable entities. Drops like health hearts and power-ups come from every other enemy you down, and treasure chests couldn't be more obvious everywhere you go. I think Gunple would be a legit great choice for anyone new to 2D Zelda-like action adventures, but it's much less satisfying if you know even a few of those games' tropes. Only a couple of boss fights have patterns I'd consider threatening or simply interesting; the hitboxes on many attacks are a bit jank and misshapen, too. Most of the time I'm just barreling through copy-paste rooms and corridors with nary a fight, having some fun zipping by. I suppose your kid's fast jog and overpowered arsenal remedies things.

What can't be remedied, or easily explained, is this game's wildly vacillating tone and presentation. It goes from super-deformed frolicking among green hills and dusty canyons to your own dad abusing you up because you want to leave home and defeat the evil. We have these wild-west aliens running the plot, from the space sheriff possessing the protagonist to Demi corrupting this island's indigenous everything into your opposition. Though many of the NPCs have enough dialogue across the game to give me a sensible chuckle or two, it never gets that cute or amusing like EarthBound before it. As other reviews point out, there's a shallowness to the trope use, slapstick, and stereotyping used here which gets under your skin after an hour or two. It's hard to shake the feeling that Gunple's just action-packed Mother 2 fastened onto a Link to the Past weaving pattern.

Hardest to shake off would be the golliwogs. These foes, the first bandit baddies you meet and defeat, look so much like ye olde Mr. Popo or a classic minstrel doll that it leaves a strong first impression. Not a good one, might I add. You also fight tomahawk-throwing, Indigenous American-looking soldiers very late in the game, yet I'm torn on what that's actually suggesting. The wrench this game's story throws in its importation of White America-borne racial pejoratives is that Demi, the villain, is outright said to be creating, brainwashing, or working with everyone you fight. As such, it's left to interpretation whether the golliwog cowboys are, in fact, just some kind of life or matter he's morphed into a form familiar and threatening enough to the Western villagers he's encroaching on. Same goes with the tomahawk guys, who resemble the idols and statuary in their ancient abandoned tower on the edge of this world.

You see this kind of design and narrative which feels offensive at first, but then just frustratingly ambiguous all over the game. Another example: the martial artist monkeys in the northwestern tower, matching the dungeon's bosses in theme but also prompting other questions. Where these simians a fully-fledged society of their own before Demi and his Demiseed gang arrived? Did they make the tower to begin with? Have they always had these skills and smarts, or was that just the antagonist's own invention, using his tech wizardry to fashion monkeys into sentient apes? I ask all this because the game tries to go for a sort of environmental lore at one key junction in the plot: the ghost town.

This once-inhabited colony, clearly resembling your own village in scope and culture, now houses an army of the undead. Given their hostility towards you and their bosses' allegiance to Demi, I'd wager the evil alien awoke the spirits of the deceased (who all died on the surface, as if from an acute plague) to harness their disquiet. So, in the process of defeating Demi and his posse, you're inevitably returning the island to a peaceful, sustainable status quo, both for your village and the larger ecosystem. Gunple suggests that these distorted stereotypes of native things you're fighting are going to be better off once your quest's over. I don't think I'm stretching with this interpretation so much as the game simply cannot decide whether or not it's going to be clever with its lore, and how that plays into the story's themes.

Rather than actively pushing a white man's burden at the expense of all those outside the white village's purview, Gunple just seems to make a mockery of it all. If there's any critique or praise of imperialism happening in the background, it's mostly coming from the Demiseeds' transformation of this island into a colorful wasteland. And if doing a little tomb raiding for 1UPs helps you save the village from destruction, what's to say that isn't a better alternative? Sure, it's all way too frivolous to mean much of anything, but I disagree with interpretations of this as subliminal Manifest Destiny apologia.

(Except the whole Lara Croft-style looting of archaeological artifacts from dungeons, namely the aforementioned towers. They only end up as score points, but for whom? The space police keeping track of all this? Not like the villagers care—they're just happy to inflate your wallet for clearing a bounty on each boss.)

The child-beating and damsel-in-distress moments are more damning to me, especially since they happen at key turns in the game's plot. Gunple paints your hero's journey as a test of manhood, a lightly patriarchal "man's gotta do what he must" story echoing the classic western media that artist Nakagawa was familiar with in the manga sphere. And for all the spoofs and cast's laughing at you, the most amusing thing is how easy this game portrays your rite of passage. Hell, it pokes fun at itself, with most of the village slack-jawed in awe at this kid mercilessly gunning down a whole range of bosses and bestiary. Only the obligatory childhood sweetheart realizes and learns to her dismay who's really behind the heroics. This makes for a cute happy ending after all the chaos, but the aftertaste is foul.

Despite all my prior critique, I managed to have fun playing Gunman's Proof in one go. A lot of that comes down to generally excellent audiovisuals, from the lavishly animated main characters to richly illustrated landscapes. Sure, many of the dungeons are basically copying Link to the Past's presentation, but they also try different types of decoration and art stylings than Lenar's inspiration. At the very least, having such a nice backdrop makes traveling the world pleasing despite other hang-ups. Many bosses and enemies also have appealing, fantastical designs and animations, specifically guys like Ghost Suzuki (who you fight twice) and Baron Alps (whose hubris contrasts with him losing his pants) wielding their bevy of gizmos and secret weapons. The art budget here exceeds what time and resources the team had for making a more coherent game elsewhere.

Same goes for the music, which is surprisingly great! I really wish Gunple had any credits screen at all so I could learn who wrote and/or programmed the soundtrack. Plenty of tracks evoke the island's history and surroundings, while others create moods of adventure or sheer menace. In this Strange World, the dulcet tones of home mix well with a galloping hoedown across the land.

For as chaotically mid as the game is, Gunple: Gunman's Proof is, well, proof that the whole can exceed its parts. Definitely approach this one with a grain of salt, but if you find the game loop enjoyable, don't hesitate to surrender to its whims for a while. I think it's decent enough for the 5-hour runtime, even if I'll very likely never replay it. This gave me such a wickedly up-and-down ride that I can't recommend it in good conscience, but maybe you'll get a kick out of this. Others have pointed out worse ways to spend a few hours than an inconsistent Zelda-clone turned run 'n' gun. At least there's some cool tokusatsu-style villain interactions, and fun easter eggs like the developers apologizing to you when trying to open a chest upon Robato.

But above all, I believe this game would be perfect ROM-hack material for any intrepid 6502 coders out there! It hints at such a better game that I can't help but wonder what we'd get from its assets and mechanics today. A remake could turn this from an entertaining but misguided story of heroics into a more complex Western reckoning with the frontier's past and future. Dungeons could get new, simple puzzles and other set-pieces for variety, plus a tangible use for that scoring system beyond 1UPs. The late-game difficulty sorely needs a boost, as do your power-up weapons and moveset in general. And removing the golliwogs + other problematic content in favor of appropriate but less offensive material would help so much. I'd give a yeehaw for any of that!

And so another game nearly too simple to deserve my ravings races off into the sunset. Here's to the next highly questionable but fascinating game of its, uh, caliber.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023

It is the year 198X. Fragile lives persist in the flow of electric frames, traveling wide across the pre-Internet infrastructure, looking for someone or something. The progeny of the ARPANET, Community Memory, and PLATO networks now spread from one bulletin board system (BBS) to another, bringing the soapbox nature of CB radio into the information age. But danger lurks beneath all this novelty and optimism. The Cold War looms as ever, and rogue threats come in many guises, from hackers to aberrant chatbots. Anything can happen in this world, so long as it runs on telephone wire.

That's the romanticized frame through which this early standout from the 2010 RenPy scene immerses and involves you. A few older puzzle and adventure titles had already dabbled with diegetic story-telling about and set within earlier, tight-knit computerized communities. There's the seminal Hacker from 1985, combining illicit access with a cinematic plot (later succeeded by 2001's Uplink). La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs, also an '85 release, told a more personal tale of a woman dealing with sexual harassment on France's proto-BBS system called Minitel. But a fully character-driven plot combining these BBS-era subjects into one cohesive story, yet relatable to a post-Internet age? It's hardly what author Christine Love had set out to accomplish, yet here we are.

Today you can find plenty of these "literal computing games" where you mainly interact with a fictional PC or terminal interface, doing anything from traversing networks to forensics or surveillance work, etc. Digital manages to do a bit of everything without spreading itself too thin. You start off just learning the basics of your Amie Workbench OS (oh how I love the blatant Amiga-ness throughout!) before meeting welcoming strangers on your local nets. This quickly turns into a larger mystery when your new friend and potential lover Emilia goes missing, all while the BBS you chatted on has gone up in smoke. Thankfully you know a few others willing to help figure out what's going on, either by providing shady software in messages or giving you useful information like phone numbers. You do all this while jamming out to what sounds suspiciously like mod-tracker music, complementing the Amiga stylings of your desktop.

C. Love was already a known quantity in NaNoRenMo game jams, writing one or more short but satiating visual novels within a month. This wasn't meant to be any different, but the game made a strong first impression that lasts to this day. Booting into Amie, laboriously typing in each address to dial up networks, and hearing that gloriously shrill modem song every time…it's all here, fellas. The UI mechanics used in Digital: A Love Story make it easy to slip into a period-accurate mindset; clever quality-of-life shortcuts, like your notepad switching tabs based on context, keep your playthrough smooth and well-paced despite the intentional tedium. I had a lot of fun just downloading & replying to each public or private message, as well as guessing passwords or even the penultimate BBS' address before the story gave me a direct clue.

So there's a strong interplay between these light textual puzzles and the simple but engrossing alternate history you uncover along the way. The whole concept of accidentally creating a self-evolving AI, which itself needs to create separate network nodes to store its compartmentalized personalities, is compelling on its own (if not exactly original). We quickly go from thinking we were talking to a basic chatbot this whole time to grokking the sheer scope of techno-existential advancement. Digital excels at wrapping an idealized history of the real BBS milieu with an alternate history needed both for plot and after-the-fact critique. This also allows C. Love to justify your main cast interactions by having a unifying antagonist, which you only deal with indirectly. The game provides more than a few good reasons to care about Emilia and the friends you make along the way, inching towards a suitably cyberpunk-ish calamity.

Digital isn't afraid to indulge many classic cyberpunk ideas, usually for good reason. You're not going to bust down any corporation's doors or upset the military-industrial complex here, but spoofing long-distance calling card numbers rarely gets old. I wish the game provided many more gizmos to download and use from your desktop, not just one or two plot trinkets like a brute-force password cracker or C recompiler. Still, having these interface doodads to mess with is fun even before their progression utility. I've already spoiled quite a bit for this admittedly 2-hour game, but I'll say its take on near-future AIs and their human interactions is serviceable. Nothing here's as compelling as the William Gibson examples alluded to mid-way through, just solidly characterized in that late-'80s genre mold. The most cyberpunk we get here, otherwise, is a positive outlook on casual hacking in a time before federal regulations and enforced oversight curbed the power of grassroots networks, thus incentivizing adoption of the Internet & WWW.

What's clearly more on C. Love's mind this whole time is the nature of remote relationships. Finding out the truth behind Eliza's disappearance may be the main plot thrust, but understanding why she's fallen in love with you is nearly as important. The creator's said in later blogs & interviews how she wanted to balance a universal love story with romantic themes relatable to a queer audience much like herself. (Any cursory look at her works since will show much this matters to her!) The whole premise of finding a deep, inter-personal connection via the most remote means a lot more when talking about historically marginalized LGBTQIA+ people. Running into a sapphic chatbot, one whose first post on your home BBS is literally a love poem, is all too believable and relevant. Later on, you'll run into a user posting a series of fantasy wargames (which, like other games warez, isn't playable here due to the game's quick dev time), all of which involve a lesbian warrior queen. Cyberpunk can and should highlight people forced into the periphery of the mainstream, those who fight back against a harmful status quo even at their own expense.

Story ending spoilers ahead!





This all comes together when, after reviving Eliza on your Amie PC using a compiler and her crash dump/log, she endeavors to defeat Reaper at the cost of her own digital life. For as much as she loves you, the player, her biggest concern now is saving all the aspects of Mother from this rogue worm meant to keep them all in check. Sure enough, trying to access any networks at end-game is futile, as Reaper's bulldozed through every system it can, with nothing but black screens of death remaining. Putting a larger existential goal before one's love is no easy decision, and I'm still not convinced this works much better than a typical kill-your-gays plot resolution. To the writer's credit, Eliza gives you all the warning, apologies, and resignation one could while asking to be armed with an anti-viral payload that will destroy her as well. It's your choice whether or not to see this tragic comedy through to the end.

Plot spoilers end here





Given the unsubtle nods to Shakespeare, and Digital's generally hopeful outlook on how cyberpunk elements can bleed into our world without destroying us or enriching the 1%, I think the story ended on steady ground. There's a cool outro with commentary from BBS users recalling the plot's events, and the game has an unction of replay value in case you want to look for more lore hidden in plain sight. I could do this all over again just for the smartly written bantz between amateurs and pros across each node! But this ended up being a memorable one-and-done too, effortlessly meshing its diegetic play with a likable dramedy. Digital: A Love Story became a surprise cause celebre not long after its release, making C. Love's career and paving the way for countless newer computing adventures throughout indie circles. It's a swift play and, for me, practically required to understand the origins of this genre movement as it exists now.

The smell of tarnished metal...the steely iron clash. You're just one more pilot among them. Their fathers spoke proudly of serving the greater good, and their mothers saw the devastation lying ahead. It wages on into this 21st century of late-capitalist warfare, trading out cavalry for HIGH-MACS mechs. Nations conglomerate under defense pacts, water and other resources run scarce, and you're either going to survive a conqueror or become a statistic.

Gungriffon doesn't bash you over the head with its themes. Like similar mech action series (think Armored Core), it's about having a blast first & thinking of questions later. You can go from portentous briefing screens to hard-rockin' gunfights to a cheery high scores menu in a matter of minutes. The game combines a simple, fast, and engaging game loop with just enough worldbuilding depth to keep you hooked. As the first Saturn title I ever played & completed, I couldn't have asked for anything better.

This 1996 Saturn exclusive was something of a passion project for the late Takeshi Miyaji, one of Game Arts' co-founders. His fondness for Kee Games' '70s battler Tank, plus his work on previous successes like Silpheed, eventually led him & co-developers to make a 3D mech game pushing the Saturn to its early limits. In short, they saw the ailing system as a way to achieve something even more impressive. Game Arts had built their reputation on squeezing incredible audiovisuals & playability out of tricky platforms like the PC-8801. Even with the Saturn's faults, they could make something even the PlayStation would covet.

Rather than make either a strict simulation or arcade romp, Game Arts blended both approaches. Gungriffon isn't the easiest mecha game out there to learn, but it's on the easier end of simcade. Your face buttons handle everything from acceleration & deceleration to jumping & night vision. Movement involves a mix of the D-pad and holding down strafe. You can cycle through weapons quickly, turn only your turret while moving in a direction...there's a good amount of fluidity & skillful play here. Even if you're unused to first-person mecha action, the game's initial missions aren't that punishing, letting you get to grips with controls & mission progression.

Gungriffon consists of 8 main missions, 2 training sorties, and replay incentives such as end-of-level rankings & difficult modes. I wouldn't call it a content-rich experience, but what's here is quality over quantity. After a standard kill-em-all opening battle, your objectives branch out into escort jobs, stealth missions, & base invasions. The game ends on a tense, oppressive dive into a nuclear missile silo where you fight past other HIGH-MACS pilots of your caliber to deactivate a launch. You're able to simultaneously save in-between missions a run & redo missions for a higher score ranking. For its time, this was a player-friendly package.

Granular controls, well-balanced difficulty, a bevy of different foes, & mission variety are all well and good. But what sets this apart from MechWarrior 2, Thunder Strike 2, & other mid-'90s mechanized action classics is the aforementioned score aspect. Like other score-heavy Saturn greats (ex. NiGHTS), this emphasis on player skill & performance isn't just for earning bragging rights. The game wants you to play fast & aggressive, albeit with intelligence. Turtling is both harder & less desirable here than in Gungriffon's more sim-heavy brethren, but still viable when necessary.

None of this would be all that fun without the technical prowess needed for even early 3D military combat. I brought up Armored Core earlier for a reason. Both games wrought fast 3D graphics for the genre at key intervals in their systems' lifecycles. Gungriffon's solid draw distance, environment detail, & elevation in level design keeps it competitive with more ambitious titles later in the Saturn's life. You also get an aesthetically enticing but usable HUD mimicking that of cockpits from mecha anime & figher jets. With all the chaos happening on-screen, Gungriffon's a technical triumph for a console saddled with 3D woes.

Game Arts hardly skimped on the rest of the game's polish & presentation, either. Story scenes are efficient, painting a dire picture of a weaponized near-future forever embroiled in conflict. Sound design ranges from heavy clanking to atmospheric ambiance to the strident cries of your perishing comrades. Above all, the mercurial, genre-spanning soundtrack from ex-Shining composer Motoaki Takenouchi dominates the soundscape. I became a fan of his classically-tinged prog rock & ambient style here, finally shackled from FM synthesis & able to either rouse or discomfort any player. Were it remastered today, Gungriffon would retain its mystique through audiovisuals alone.

That's another thing it shares with Armored Core: an alluring combination of tests & tropes to keep you coming back. Mecha games struggle so often with presenting distant, sometimes alienating worlds of war in an entertaining fashion. They risk boring or frustrating players almost as often as they risk compromising the harsh worldviews they portray. Gungriffon succeeds at balancing the gravity of its story conflict with player agency & replayability. Much like From Soft's later take on the genre (just without the customization angle), Game Arts wants you to stay in high spirits even as you obliterate enemy camps & ace pilots like yourself.

Thanks to strong sales & critical reception, Gungriffon would become a small but notable series on Saturn, PS2, & Xbox. It dwindled away as Game Arts' other major IP, the RPG series Grandia, fell on hard times. The difficult move to HD game development ultimately pushed Game Arts and its properties into an identity-robbing merger with GungHo, but I hold out a sliver of hope for Gungriffon's return in my lifetime. At the very least, I'd love to see some developers create a throwback first-person mecha game in this vein, perhaps with more of an arcade bent to contrast the recent crop of Armored Core-like indies.

If you've got a Saturn or means to emulate it, Gungriffon's one banger of a system-pushing mecha classic. I've yet to try its Saturn sequel (which doesn't need an English fan patch, but could benefit from one), and the Xbox game's a blind spot for me also. I'll confidently recommend the PS2 entry, Gungriffon Blaze, strips away some of the sim-y bits while nearly perfecting the original's structure, adding analog controls & other modernizations. But I'll get into that later with a proper review. Until then, I hope the seminal Game Arts mecha FPS is now on your radar or higher up your shortlist!

(Shout-outs to Thexder & Veigues for paving the way. Those are much simpler mecha action titles compared to what Game Arts later made, but you can see the evolution towards Gungriffon within them.)

Quadrupedal horses gallop down the derby, each performing their own dressage. A blue sky the Greeks would deny carpets every horizon. You wrench the stick every which way, hoping to drift into pole position. First came the crooked oval—then those canyons of pleasure—now into a motor metropolis. That which pollutes the planet now powers you through turns, collisions, spinouts, and victories. It's all too human, all too sublime.

The world no longer needs NASCAR. It's a vestigial organ of the North American auto-infrastructural complex, the enemy of a sustainable society. Hundreds of thousands squeeze into bleachers just to see drivers bailing and crashing in-between stretches of predictable slipstreaming. Why bother when, all the way back in 1993, SEGA extracted all the essential fun you could have with stock car racing? And they made it better, too!

Daytona USA was to NASCAR games what Hot Shots Golf did for, well, golf. Toshihiro Nagoshi's team at AM2 did their research on the sport, but instead chose to recreate the excitement one hopes in this kind of racing. Two racecars and three courses sounds like not nearly enough to keep you hooked, but the depth of this game's controls, stage design, and time-attack challenge never fail me. Here was an arcade revelation, transcending coin-feeding without losing the "one more try!" addictiveness of its predecessors.

Not to say Ridge Racer was that much less compelling, however. Both SEGA and Namco competed to make the best possible tech-pushing arcade racers, followed by rivals Taito and Konami. And this resulted in so many eminently replayable classics, from Battle Gear to GTI Club. Yet SEGA's 1993 debut for their Model 2 hardware outdid nearly all its challengers for years to come. I can't stress enough how simple yet skill-demanding the downshift drifting in this game and sequel is. That harsh turn towards the end of the Beginner track has upset so many eight-player races over the years. The Advanced run covers the whole gamut of driving lines and dubious PIT maneuvers. Sliding around the Expert course evokes the bliss of commanding a lead at Watkins Glen and other Actually Interesting NASCAR Races. Mastering these mechanics brings tangible rewards, and the ceiling for superior times and skill seems endless.

On top of how well it plays, Daytona USA's sights and sounds are somehow timeless in a sea of dated 3D contemporaries. (Again, something Ridge Racer excels at too.) How many times have I read "blue skies in games" with regards to Daytona and other SEGA classics? Who hasn't once sung along with Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's delightfully sampled songs while playing or in the shower? The vibrant colors, chunky but endearing texturing, and elegant shapes on-screen mesh so well with all the cheesy, life-affirming music and rumbling in your ears. Compared to the diminishing returns of today's triple-A games, this was and remains a paradigm shift in what I'd consider top-end, the confluence of price and immersion.

SEGA's had a hard time keeping this monumental game in circulation over the years, sadly. That license ain't cheap, and neither is porting the game to newer systems. I'm glad the PS3/X360 remaster could happen, even if it's unavailable to buy today. (Beats me why they haven't put the non-licensed Sega Racing Classic version up on storefronts; at least the 360 version is BC ready.) AM2's port team did as excellent a job as they could under what I'd speculate was a limited time & budget. Image quality's crisp, controls map naturally to dual-analog gamepads, and they managed to slot some useful bonus modes in for content-needy home players like myself.

Karaoke mode explains itself: you simply play through a race like normal, but trading out Mitsuyoshi vocals for on-screen lyrics. I know what mode I'm using when the gang and I load this up in VC. Then there's Challenge mode, which introduces new players to concepts like racing lines and shift drifting. I loved going through these even as an experience player; their brief nature lends well to retries. Sure, I'd have loved to race on entirely new tracks made in the original's style, but I also know how previous versions sporting those made compromises in playability or performance. That seems to be a curse for the more content-rich SEGA racers, something Namco avoided for much longer. Still, there's much to enjoy here beyond the arcade mode.

Playing Daytona today should be a lot easier than it is. I hope SEGA sees the adoration this game's had over the past decade. Any chance of them relicensing the HD release for recent platforms, or just porting Sega Racing Classic to avoid the fees, would be awesome. Until then, sailing the blue seas under blue skies is always an option. Any local (b)arcade with a twin or eight-player cab is great, too, assuming they've been maintaining it. This game's too important in arcade history to let slip into unavailability!

So what are you waiting for? We should all be rolling under blue blue skies, playing fun soundbites on the name entry table, and nailing those U-turns around tough corners. Just don't go and lose your sponsors!

The only wizarding Legacy I've been playing this year, and a much better use of coin than a certain transphobic, anti-Semitic dumpster fire released today.

1980 saw an observable increase in Dungeons & Dragon's influence on arcade game design, mainly among U.S. developers. Berzerk is the best-known example of this for anyone who's dabbled in the Golden Age classics, but I think Wizard of Wor qualifies too. It helped popularize the maze chase genre alongside Pac-Man, but also adds fantasy stylings and a very Gygax-ian bestiary to shoot down. With limited lives + an AI rival to finish off, each round's got lots of action and chances to whiff or vanquish the opposition.

Of course, you've also got an early co-op multiplayer mode, which lets you and a buddy gun down the monsters in tandem. It's cute how your extra lives are represented as reserve troops, lining up like pinball, er, balls waiting to get launched into the fray. There's not much complexity to the game loop as my description would imply, but it's enough to keep me invested for multiple waves of claustrophobic shootouts. Later levels add the usual harder, faster, baddies with more ways to screw yourself over, all while a speech-synthesized emcee taunts you from the peanut gallery.

While Berzerk has the more obvious emphasis on clearing or skipping through successive randomized mazes for its dungeon crawling feel, Wizard of Wor has a more compelling distillation of early DRPG battling for arcades. The tighter spaces and seconds-till-confrontation aspect makes for better pacing, and the presentation's quite a bit nicer thanks to added speech and visual flourishes. It's one of those easily overlooked, maybe less influential/notable but arguably more entertaining turn-of-the-'80s arcade romps. Nutting one-upped the competition simply by making this a co-op experience, but every little detail beyond that adds up. And the titular Wizard counts as one of the first bosses in video games, right alongside the fortress from Phoenix that same year.

Give this a go if you haven't yet already! I'd stick to the arcade original found in various Midway collections, but the PC ports look decent as well. Whichever one you go with, it's gotta be better and more replayable than Unspoken TERF Game this season.

Apply directly to the forehead! Wait, that's a joystick in your hand, not some placebo wax scam. (It's disgraceful how antique software like this never got on my local station's Jeopardy block while that snake oil did.) Now there's a car rolling right towards you in this garish maze, and you're weaving in and out of lanes. This isn't Pac-Man, but it's the beginnings of that formula, with dots to grab and Game Over-s to avoid. Sega-Gremlin had pioneered today's Snake clones with 1976's Blockade; Head On did much the same for maze games before the decade's end.

When this first released in Japan's arcades and adjacent venues, Space Invaders had spent a good half of a year dominating players' attention and wallets. Both games took some time to achieve their breakout sales, but Sega's success with this innovative, US-developed microprocessor board showed the industry that neither Atari's Pong nor Taito's alien shooter were fads. Genre variety was steadily creeping into game centers the world over, and Head On itself was one of the first hybrid titles moving past a ball-and-paddle model. In a sea of sit-down Breakout clones and taikan racers emphasizing the wheel and cabinet, Gremlin's new versus screen-clearing duel of wits must have seemed oddly esoteric.

It's very simple to us today, of course. You drive one car, the AI another, circling a single-screen maze of corridors filled with collectibles. The goal: grab every ball to get that score bonus, all while avoiding a direct collision! But it's easier said than done. Head On's secret sauce is the computer player's tenacity to run you down, driving faster and faster the more pellets you snag. Rather than accelerating in the same lane, you can move up and down to exit and enter the nearest two paths, which works to throw off the AI. The player's only got so much time before the other racer's just too fast to dodge, though, so slam that pedal and finish the course before then!

No extends, a barebones high scoring system, and limited variation across loops means this symmetrical battle of wits gets old fast. There's a bit of strategy to waiting for the AI driver to pass over dots and turn them red, which you can then grab for more points than before. By and large, though, this is as simple as the classic lives-based maze experience gets. I heartily recommend the sequel from that same year, which uses a more complex maze and a second AI racer to keep you invested for much longer. Even so, the original Head On more than earned its popularity. It improved and codified a genre merely toyed with earlier that decade. Gotcha and The Amazing Maze look like prototypes compared to this, something designer Lane Hauck probably knew at the time. Contemporary challengers from later that year, like Taito's Space Chaser or Exidy's Side Trak, each tried new gimmicks to stand out, but the Gremlin originals are frankly more polished and intuitive to play.

While Gremlin never again made such an impact on the Golden Age arcade game milieu, this formed part of Sega's big break into a market then led by Atari, Taito, and Midway. Monaco GP that same year kept up this momentum, as did Head On 2, and many clones spawned in the years to come. Namco 's own Rally-X iterates directly on this premise, though most know a certain pizza-shaped fellow's 1980 maze game better. Gremlin Industries arguably became more important as Sega's vector developer and U.S. board distributor going forward, but none of that would have happened if these early creations never went into production.

Anyone can give this a try nowadays on MAME or the Internet Archive. I'll also mention the various Sega Ages ports via the Memorial Collection discs for Saturn and PS2. This never got a more in-depth remake a la Monaco GP, and that's a shame given Head On's historic significance.

Frank Welker & Jason Marsden goof off as Lennie & George on cartoon-ium for a couple hours and some folks just loathe this game? I'd hate to be y'all.

Usually I wouldn't hesitate to give this a flat 2-and-a-half stars rating. It's a blatantly unfinished, underbaked game based on a promising concept that's hard to do right. Think back to A Boy and His Blob, or another finicky partner-based puzzle platformer with loads of personality. When cute and/or funny characters chafe against a mediocre or simply bad game loop, that's enough of a put-off to get the whole genre condemned. (Ironic, given how the Floigan's property could actually be condemned, what with spiders on the lot and a blue-blooded realtor swooping in to snag the joint.) So it's unsurprising that Floigan Bros. has become the object of ridicule, both light and serious, in today's retro streaming landscape. So I'm gonna be a bit nice to this doomed duo, the Stolar-approved console mascots no one wanted.

Consider, though, how much this game just doesn't care whether you like, dislike, love, or hate it. Sometimes you just need Two Men. They're two himbos, they're loony, and they'll do what they want. Yes, their flaws are strong, but their irreverence is stronger. They've been critically neglected for over 22 years. Of course there have been bugs and jank, but they always come to terms with their differences because games like this comes once in a console's lifetime. By playing Floigan Bros. you will receive not just the Marx Brothers-ness of their antics, but the weirdness of the game's history as well. no apologies for the copypasta

Knowing anything, the game's original creator, ex-Bubsy voice actor Brian Silva, has too many horror stories about getting it into production. Floigan Bros. started life as an ill-fated attempt to recreate the glory days of Laurel & Hardy or the Three Stooges for a modern gamer audience. Accolade did some pre-production for it as a PlayStation game to release in 1996, but that company's decline led to the game's hiatus until SEGA & Visual Concepts picked up Silva's pitch. Mind you, the latter studio mainly created the Dreamcast's best known sports games, from NFL 2K to Ooga Booga (yeah, that's a stretch, but online minigames can get competitive!). Back in the 16-bit console era, though, VC had done a couple of their own puzzly, platformer-y games with mixed success. Them working on this previously abandoned Marx Brothers-esque pastiche wasn't so out of place after all. The original 1995 design document showed a lot of confidence already.

Just one look at that nutty cover art, and what you can actually do in this piece of interactive media, seems beyond belief. It's half puzzle platformer, half minigame collection, all with a coat of cheesy, unironic '40s Hollywood ham and humor. Hoigle & Moigle would fit right into a Termite Terrace parody of the popular comedy double-acts from that period. And the Of Mice and Men comparison is hardly unfounded. Moigle's soft spot for woodland critters isn't far removed from Lennie's fatal love for bunnies. There's something of a dark undercurrent at play here, from the Rocky & Bullwinkle-esque villainy threatening the brothers, to the uncanny spiders you teach Moigle to finally ground-pound despite his fears.

Kooky jokes and jukes define Hoigle & Moigle's daily life. The minigames and emotion system both play into the characters' expressiveness, and I almost always have a smile or sensible chuckle at what they're doing. Sure, most of this game's simple and easy to blaze through, almost simplistic with its riddles and sidekick manipulation. And the brownie points grind needed just to teach Moigle critical skills pads out the runtime more than I'd like. But it makes for a quaint pick-up-and-play experience which perfectly fits what the developers went for. I also get a kick out of chasing down magpies, screwing with Moigle's pathfinding during tag, and the musical transitions tied to his changing moods.

Realistically, this game's release was always a long shot. It took the efforts of Visual Concept's skeleton crew, led by Andy Ashcraft (War of the Monsters, PS2) and help from ex-Sonic designer Hirokazu Yasuhara, to get this out late in the Dreamcast's life. And while this technically pioneered or at least promised the episodic game format we know today, it only ever received a smattering of minor DLC add-ons which didn't see the light of day until last decade! This arguably might have done better if SEGA promoted it to an enhanced XBOX release, but having that last-minute platform exclusive clearly mattered more. This all explains the game's relative lack of content and playtime vs. what you would have payed back in the day. DC owners probably overlooked the price-to-value ratio just because any exclusive this interesting was worth the money then, though.

Obscure as it is, Floigan Bros. continues to entice and beguile all but the most hardy of classic game fans. Jerma, WayneRadioTV, and other streamers can't help but poke and prod at the game for a bemused audience. The few speedrunners I've seen playing this have their own commentary on it, often pointing out the somewhat buggy, janky programming you'll notice. For me, this remains one of the most interesting examples of SEGA's swan song ambitions. It hails from a time when the Dreamcast hosted all kinds of design experiments, from the successful (Shenmue, Jet Set Radio) to the forgotten (Headhunter, OutTrigger). Something told me there was more to this game than most would consider, given its "mid"-ness. I vaguely recall browsing the original SEGA website for it, confused by the classic American film humor and references but intrigued regardless.

What's one to do when an adventure in game development this unusual has so little coverage outside of memes? I had my own solution back in high school (Fall 2011, start of my junior year). After learning about designer Andy Ashcraft's role in fleshing out and finishing Floigan Bros., I e-mailed him some questions and thankfully got a considerate reply. Silva's been interviewed about the game recently, but I'd like to ask Yasuhara and other ex-devs some questions before compiling these primary comments into a fully-fledged retrospective. What I learned from Ashcraft alone tells me how much of a labor of love this game became.

Likely because Yasuhara came into the project very late, Ashcraft didn't have a lot to share about working with him, other than having a strong working relationship. Visual Concepts mainly started making the game back in '97, led by studio head Scott Patterson and a newly-recruited Ashcraft. The first problem they encountered was how to naturally integrate everything about Moigle into an accessible game loop. As I learned in the email chain, the big galoot had to be "somewhat unpredictable and be able to (or seem to) make decisions on his own about what to do and when to do it". On the other hand, VC considered how Moigle needed to "know what the player is wanting to do at all times, especially in tight life-or-death situations". They swiftly abandoned the do-or-die part, going for a less stressful set of puzzles and sequences which players could better manage.

In every part of the game's environments, the devs placed "distraction points" that Moigle responds to, a veritable sheep to your shepherd. It's easy for players to notice how the chatty, scheming cat-tagonist laps up Moigle's attention when nearby. Same goes for the aforementioned spiders, being one of the few entities strong enough to wreck his mood. Tweaking all these fragile variables, often with only one programmer available due to VC focusing on sports games (and talented staff leaving for greener pastures), greatly delayed production. It's a small miracle the game came out at all, even as Ashcraft and then Yasuhara had plenty of time to design it. Production woes aside, the former designer still considers this project an early triumph in building a game around a relatively natural, lively AI character dynamics...better than contemporaries like Daikatana, anyway.

Nothing like this existed on consoles at the time. Even the PlayStation port of the original Creatures wouldn't release until 2002, so almost a year after. Sure, you could argue that Chao raising in the Sonic Adventure games was close enough, but combining a learning AI with simple but elaborate world-puzzle progression was no mean feat. It's debatable how fun this actually is as a concept, but I'm far from deeming this as odd shovelware the way some do. Floigan Bros. has a lot of body and soul you can still experience, even without the historic context (though that helps!). Its mini-games are short enough to never get on my nerves—most are at least a little fun—and the junkyard possesses a palpable sekaikan, that lived-in verisimilitude which brings this beyond mere slapstick. This could have aged a bit better graphically, but the excellent animations and Jazz Age soundtrack feels like an early go at what games like Cuphead have accomplished recently. Tons to appreciate, overall.

Give the Floigan Bros. experience a shot, people! Maybe I'm a lot softer towards this than I should be, and I won't argue against anyone pointing out the jank or how it feels like a misbegotten Amiga-era oddity. But it still feels like too many rush to judge this one as harshly as I've seen. Few vaporware games emerge from their pupa into anything this polished, especially towards the end of a troubled console's lifecycle. Even fewer tackle a style of humor and homage this unattractive yet admirable, then or now. There's still a lot of room in the indie space for throwback Depression-era comedy games, something Floigan Bros. doesn't exactly nail either. The game's just too funny, replayable, and earnest for me to rag on, and we're still discovering neat parts of it today, from developer histories to previously-lost DLC. It's a relevant part of not just the Dreamcast's legacy, but the tales behind many decorated game developers. Plus it's got Fred from Scooby-Doo playing one of his all-time great Scrimblo roles, so what's not to love?

Fuck, maybe I'm just Floigan pilled after all.

Kuso gamer! You've save-stated so much in the Mesen scene; oh, what's becoming of me…~ Like 'ol R-Type, you can feel Irem's getting really mean. Why is this game such a fiend? It's not unbeatable, theoretically—just a very frustrating feat to accomplish without save states. I wouldn't have beaten this in under a month otherwise, and part of me wonders if the final 1/3 was ever fully tested, start to finish, under normal play conditions. Something of a circular debate looms around Holy Diver today, where some about how hardcore it is while others lament its impenetrable difficulty. Slot me into the camp that laments all the potential squandered in this title, a casualty of the developer's focus on similarly brutal (but more fair) arcade releases.

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

Let's start with how this game ostensibly recreates Dio's famous album in action game form. I wish it had, but we're stuck with a lightly dressed-up imitation of better-known games, from Castlevania to Mega Man and beyond. Recontextualizing this non-committal attempt to iterate on other, better Famicom staples via a heavy metal coat of paint isn't the worst idea. Too bad this just doesn't evoke anything specifically like the musical influences it takes from. Where are the tigers?! The rainbows in the dark? Or anything beyond what the opening crawl exposits? I love the idea of saving the King Crimson family name just as much as anyone should, but here they've just slapped these references atop an otherwise workmanlike dark fantasy side-scroller. Compare this with the studio's old arcade dev chief, Tetsuo Nakano, asserting how you shouldn't "just set out to imitate someone else, for instance, you’ll always be behind the times".

I'll be fair and also criticize SEGA's Jewel Master for appropriating progressive rock and metal inspirations around the same time. There's a key difference, however: the Mega Drive game actually has a fitting prog soundtrack. Rarely do I start digging into a non-rhythm game via its music, but that's what separates something like Jewel Master from countless other throwaway action-platformers of the era. Holy Diver (the game, not the timeless work of Ronnie James Dio & co.) has a solid musical score from Irem soundsmith Masahiko Ishida, but I wouldn't call it one of his best. There's a few driving baroque gallops to enjoy here, a departure from his more avant-garde arcade work; shame the final stage and boss tracks are so irritating. Dissonance can work well for a game like this, just not when it accentuates the feeling that you, the player, aren't meant to have made it this far.

Nothing in this bastardization of the term "holy diver" feels player-friendly. It's one thing to be "hardcore" and another to just grind you down without any purpose beyond disincentivizing game rentals. The game loop starts out barbed and eventually becomes relentlessly lethal, going from tricky but learnable enemy patterns to minibosses every other screen with plenty of backup. Sure, I could viably learn and route the first half before this club week's end, but certainly not the latter portion. Irem's console developers decided to center most of the fatal encounters around rapid enemy spawns, which combine with pathetically short I-frames when hit to keep you on the backfoot. Now let's couple this with inexplicable, inconsistent input delays for essentials like crouching and jumping! It seems like they knew the game engine and physics have these issues, thus compensating via conspicuously fluid air control. (Diagonal attack aiming would have been nice…) From the very beginning, your reliable mobility and attack options aren't adequate for handling even the most basic foes with comfort. So here I am, stuck fighting basic right-to-left mooks I'd down quick in any other game like this, just with an unsatisfying handicap.

I've got not real investment in the story or in my conventional character advancement progression, either. What few new spells and items you get are necessary, but less than satisfying to use for the most part. You're often so deprived of magic points that using the more advanced offensive spells (Breaker and Thunder) gives diminishing returns. (Shoutouts to the former in stage 5, though, as its boss only seems possible with it.) On the other hand, Blizzard and Overdrive are practically required no matter your resources, whether for freezing lava & weaker enemies or to traverse later levels and survive their trap fights. Your basic pea-shooter attack loses its utility around mid-game except for saving mana, so the game revolves around mastering and carefully timing your spells. In my experience, this meant so many more retries than felt right for the scale of combat/puzzle complexity on offer. None of the lava sections are interesting by themselves, and the sheer repetition & re-skinning of enemy types left me wanting for any new interactions with my action verbs.

My time playing through to the end saw maybe hundreds of save states and reloads, enough to make me feel like Dio in the recording studio. I'm giving this software way too much credit with such a metaphor, but that's maybe the most relevant connection between it and those musical touchstones. Not that Holy Diver has any monopoly on the state-or-suffer experience among other kusoge or ball-busting challenges from this period. I'm just trying to process how a game can be this fascinatingly bad at delivering its purported narrative. Infinite continues mean little to me when that entails starting Kaizo-like levels over and over again, with not much gratification for learning the exact timing and enemy management between rooms. Our hero comes across less like a powerful, destined knight defeating evil, more like a renn-faire weekend warrior bumbling into the actual hell fathomed in medieval times. The best part of this game involves nothing about him—rather, I actually had a lot of fun using his dragon form to play a janky, all too short but empowering side-scrolling shooter.

So little about Holy Diver's sekaikan connects together, another symptom of rushed development. Take for instance any play on the titular song's lyrical depth vs. what one could charitably discern from the game. I'm not saving the people of the land from vice, temptations, or lack of faith; the only inhabitants in this world are monsters already. There's no higher justification of the protagonist's self-sacrificial fight against the Black Slayer, only a royalist desire to vanquish evil for his family's sake. Where even the hardest 'Vania faire in '89 gave you a fighting chance via wall-meat and other playground secrets, there's strikingly few optional risky rewards to find, just an unending torrent of trouble. Above all, this game can't decide if it's a prototype rushed to market, a failure of Nintendo's product testing system, or a loving fuck-you to Famicom gamers asking Irem for a taste of their arcade titles' famous difficulty walls. Also imagine if you were one of those highly-skilled players encountering the first half's bosses, all of whom are much easier than the levels before them for no good reason. Outdated stage design resembling Dragon Buster + inconsistent challenge and telegraphing to players = a weird 'ol time.

You know what this reminds me of? Psycho World for MSX2 and Master System, also released the same year. Hertz' sci-fantasy take on this combo of action-adventuring tropes pioneered by Konami, Capcom, etc. has an actual difficulty curve. It's got better visuals, a more pleasant soundtrack, and similar but far better mechanics + implementation in every way. The idea of tying your combat options into world progression exists in both games, but I'd much rather learn the ins and outs of the latter. Holy Diver constantly feels like a C-team effort finishing the work started by Irem's B-team, hence the gulf in quality between its nice visuals and shoddy backbone. Hell, the huge amount of slowdown throughout suggests unmet ambitions, and a commensurate lack of testing to account for enemy projectiles hiding in plain sight during the lag. I died so much just because I literally couldn't see bullets heading where I was—normally I love it when that happens in a classic arcade shooter! But we're nowhere near the harsh but fair likes of R-Type or Image Fight…just this ramshackle attempt to ride off other games' laurels.

What's baffling to me is how Irem/Tamtex's other '89 Famicom exclusive of note, a delightful riff on Rally-X called Gekitotsu Yonku Battle, feels more complete and supportive of its players but gets less attention overseas. This likely boils down to the haha-funny-lol rock references and familiar aesthetic of Holy Diver, but the difference in notability vs. quality really gets on my nerves. More aptly, it's that contrast between the hares and tortoises of the cult game sphere which stands out. Why play a solid, plainly iterative, score-focused arcade-y romp when this shambling but somehow appealing mess of an adventure beckons you? Playing through Holy Diver with 1989 skills, knowledge, and help from a talented friend or two (plus not knowing anything better to play) would have sweetened the deal. Today, though, I'm just glad this wasn't the best Irem had to offer for its Famicom audience. Metal Storm proved a year later how they could transfer their arcade greatness to the home with nary a compromise, too.

In summary, play Holy Diver if you're hankering for the '80s heavy metal garage band mixtape that sorely needed rehearsals and an original song or two. You might have to scrub or rewind a lot to reach the good moments, and there's plenty of studio-grade material from that milieu hitting the same vibes but with less pain. Just know that you'll either love this game's recalcitrance and irreverent attitude towards its cultural imprints, or you'll sigh and move on from this jalopy. I think it's worth a try for reasons beyond the kusoge reputation, mainly as an example of what Irem's console teams would avoid going forward. But I also had hopes that it'd hook me and having more staying power, even as a nigh unplayable crawl through chaos. The best I'll say is it often has pretty backgrounds & music, just nothing exemplary enough to transcend the game around them. Between my velvet cries, there's a truth that's hard as steel. You might even say ambition never dies; crimes against players are real~~~~~~

Since the other reviews (so far) are only covering the very not good PC-88 & PC-98 ports, let's talk about the X1 original.

This isn't an amazing arcade shooter, at least not compared to Xevious or Star Force from the era. But it's a lot better than given credit, at least on Sharp X1 & MZ micros. I first got into playing this several years ago, each time warming up a bit more to how it plays. For comparison's sake, even the mighty Famicom wouldn't have any original STGs of this caliber & ambition until 1985 onward. Kotori Yoshimura built this turn-of-'84 tech showpiece all on her own, yet it's still fun if you like a more strategic open-range shooter. (I play this on an X1 emulator using cursor keys with no other enhancements or major changes.)

A big issue I see players having is keeping track of shots while landing your own, whether in air or on ground. Thankfully the game's soundscape, though sparse, makes enemy fire identifiable enough for quick dodging. Pay attention to the dull blips of enemy shots, and also keep a mental bead on where enemies are spawning. Certain foes will intercept you & lead shots better; they're usually a light pinkish-red in this version. I make sure to eliminate or avoid them as much as I can while bombing targets to find the real prize: the Dyradeizer bomb-ables.

It's possible to meticulously clear each stage, but the smart play for seeing more of the game (let alone clearing a loop) is to reach the stages' second phase quickly. Reaching the Dyradeizer side of each stage simplifies matters a lot since there's less dogfighting & more dodging turret fire. It's also simple to just destroy the Dyradeizer core ASAP if you're ready to proceed, rather than continuing to bomb out the rest. Getting through stages like this helps with learning movement & spawning behavior, which in turn makes playing for score much more manageable.

Enough strategy. What's the deal with Thunder Force on X1?! /seinfeld

I liken it to a long-lost pen pal of Raid on Bungeling Bay, but with more obvious Namco influences (ex. Xevious, Bosconian) and more impressive visuals. The X1 original uses the PC's built-in spriting hardware (the PCG chip) to handle stage objects & actors faster than any other PC STG of its time. This doesn't make it unplayable, but certainly zippier than you'd expect from a mid-era 8-bit micro. The simple control scheme, level progression, & enemy roster means it's easy to get started with Thunder Force. It's a very difficult game for sure, yet hardly a mystery. Maybe the enemy bullets could have been drawn more visibly, but they're readable enough after playing for 15 minutes.

The game's ports retain the solid game loop, particularly the scoring system & map/enemy variety, but massively lose out in other areas. (I'll exempt the MZ-1500 version here for being fairly close to X1 and arguably a better speed for some players who want to learn the game.) At that time, the PC-88 really couldn't handle this kind of game, even with the fastest pseudo-sprite coding in games like Kazuro Morita's Alphos. Surprisingly, even the more underpowered PC-6001 port feels better to play (and a lot more impressive) than that of its bigger cousin. And since the FM-7 release basically matches the PC-88 one, that makes for a poor but unsurprising showing. Yoshimura & her co-programmers had to make not just these ports in rapid succession, but tons of other quick ports during those pre-Mega Drive years at Tecno Soft. Rushed ports were common, and it's a travesty how many people get their first glance at this game via its less-than-representative versions.

One flaw that's always irked me is how the game handles shot collisions. You really have to commit to your own ground bombs, ex. not changing direction immediately while the shot lands, or else you risk not blowing something up. It's much less problematic with air fire thankfully, but hardly ideal. And there's the old problem of not being able to stop mid-flight, requiring you to manage your direction at all times. This leads to a lot of circular movement around parts of each stage if you're trying to destroy everything. Even I get a bit exhausted by this! But it's a matter of getting used to these weird physics & building your tactics around them. Pro tip: the game calculates enemy fire direction based on where you're flying when it's calculating their attacks. Use that to manipulate enemy fire away from you, then make your attack.

It's worth dealing with some odd collision detection & tricky enemy patterns for one of the best pick-up-and-play arcade originals defining the early J-PC software lineup. Yoshimura & her colleagues would proceed to form Arsys Soft a year or so later, where they made much better works like WiBARM & Star Cruiser. But games like Thunder Force showed her ability to evolve arcade-style play on a home platform—no mean feat at a time when Japanese PCs' hardware & developer support was more fragmented. Both as a history piece & a game today, Thunder Force on X1 is worth a shot if you like the rest of the series or want to experience how the early post-Galaga shooters began to evolve.

Also, I'm glad to say there's no quaint, irritating rendition of the William Tell Overture in this version. You can put on any music you'd like!

Making cartridge games in the pre-Famicom years posed a dilemma: they couldn't store much game without costing customers and manufacturers out the butt. It's no surprise that Nintendo later made their own disk add-on, among others, in order to distribute cheaper, larger software. All the excess cart inventory that flooded North American console markets, thus precipitating the region's early-'80s crash, finally got discounted to rates we'd expect today. And it's in that period of decline where something like Miner 2049er would have appealed to Atari PC owners normally priced out of cart games.

This 16K double-board release promised 10 levels of arcade-y, highly replayable platform adventuring, among other items of praise littering the pages of newsletters and magazines. Just one problem: it's a poor mash-up of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and other better cabinet faire you'd lose less quarters from and enjoy more. This was the same year one could find awesome, innovative experiences like Moon Patrol down at the bar or civic center, let alone Activision's Pitfall and other tech-pushing Atari VCS works. Hell, I'd rather deal with all the exhausting RNG-laden dungeons of Castle Wolfenstein right now than bother with a jack of all trades + master of none such as this.

I don't mean to bag on Bill Hogue's 1982 work that much, knowing the trials and tribulations of bedroom coding in those days. He'd made a modest living off many TRS-80 clones of arcade staples, only having to make this once Radio Shack/Tandy discontinued that platform. His studio Big Five debuted on Apple II & Atari 800 with this unwieldy thing, so large they couldn't smush it into the standard cartridge size of the latter machine. Contrast this with David Crane's masterful compression of Pitfall into just 4 kiloybytes, a quarter as big yet much more enjoyable a play. Surely all these unique stages in Miner 2049er would have given it the edge on other primordial platformers, right? That's what I hoped for going in, not that I expected anything amazing. To my disappointment, its mechanics, progression, and overall game-feel just seems diluted to the point of disrespecting its inspirations.

The premise doesn't make a great impression: rather than reaching an apex or collecting an item quota to clear the stage, you must walk across each and every colorable tile to proceed. Anyone who's played Crush Roller or that stamp minigame in Mario Party 4 (among other odd examples) should recognize this. The only bits of land you need not worry about are elevator/teleporter floors and ladders, but the game requires you to complete a tour of everything else. In addition to padding out my playthrough without much sense of accomplishment, this also let me spend more time with Miner 2049er's platforming physics. And the verdict is they're not good. Falling for even a couple seconds kills you, and a lack of air control means mistimed jumps are fatal. The way jumps carry more horizontal inertia than vertical always throws me off a bit, too. Folks love to complain about a lack of agility or failure avoidance in something like Spelunker, but that game and Donkey Kong at least feel more intuitive and consistent than this.

It wouldn't be so bad if the level designs weren't also full of one-hit-kill monsters and platforms with only the slightest elevation differences. The maze game influences come in strong with this game's enemies, which you can remove from the equation by grabbing bonus items, usually shovels or pickaxes and the like. Managing the critters' patterns, your available route(s), and proximity to these power-ups becomes more important the further in you get. But I rarely if ever felt satisfied by this game loop; the flatter, more fluid and tactical plane of action in Pac-Man et al. works way better. Combine all this with getting undone by the least expected missed jump, or running out of invincibility time right before touching a mook, and there's just more frustration than gratification.

Now it's far from an awful time, as the game hands you multiple lives and extends in case anything bad happens. The game occasionally exudes this charming, irreverent attitude towards Nintendo's precursor and the absurdity of this miner's predicament. Mediocrity wasn't as much of a sin back then, especially not when developers are trying to imitate and expand on new ideas. But I think Miner 2049er is a telltale case of how back-of-the-box features can't compensate for lack of polish or substance. For example, it took less than a year for Doug Smith's Lode Runner to do everything here way better, combining Donkey Kong & Heiankyo Alien with other osmotic influences to make a timeless puzzle platformer. The arcade adventure-platformer took on a distinct identity with Matthew Smith's Manic Miner, part of the European/UK PC game pantheon and itself born from the Trash 80's legacy. One could charitably claims that this pre-crash title never aspired to those competitors' ambitions, that it finds refuge in elegance or something. I wish I could agree, especially given its popularity and number of ports over the decade. All I know is this one ain't got a level editor, or subtle anti-Tory/-Thatcher political commentary. The only identity I can, erm, identify is that silly box art of the shaggy prospector and bovine buddy.

Give this a shot if you appreciate the history and context behind it, or just want something distinctly proto-shareware. I just can't muster much enthusiasm for a game this subpar and oddly mundane, both now and then. None of the conversions and remakes seem all that special either, though props to Epoch for bringing it to the Super Cassette Vision in '85. By the time this could have made a grand comeback on handhelds, Boulder Dash and other spelunking sorties basically obsoleted it. Minor 2049er indeed.

The hell's a "narbacular", anyway? It's very rare to find a word this unique which hasn't received some definition in Urban Dictionary or somewhere else. Even more bizarre since we're talking about one of the most important 2000s indie titles. Project co-lead Jeep Barnett says they invented the term to improve SEO and online virality, which is good enough for me. One wonders if "Portacular Drop" would have been more appropriate in hindsight. As the tech demo for the seminal puzzler Portal, which this team later made at Valve, Narbacular Drop mostly gets written off as an unfinished curiosity. I think it's got a bit more going on, though, once you figure community levels into the picture. This had a small but active fanbase prior to the funny fake cake game obsoleting it, which counts for something. You can still play this (and other notables borne from the DigiPen Institute's student body) for free today, albeit with some troubleshooting.

Compared to its successor, the story and content on offer is a lot more slim. You play Princess No-Knees, a brave young lady who's cursed with an inability to jump. An ill-fated walk in the woods leads to a demon kidnapping and imprisoning her in an active volcano. Rather than dealing with the devil, she meets the mountain spirit Wally, who can manipulate space via portals, and they must work together to free themselves from this evil. So we've got a neat premise which tells players this isn't your average puzzle platformer. But there's basically no story past the opening narration, and the game itself ends with a largely unfinished boss fight arena. After all, developers Nuclear Monkey Software had been hired by Valve before they could ever finish this parting gift to their DigiPen audience. Their new employers moved fast.

Narbacular Drop uses once innovative DirectX 9 features to carve up its confined worlds through portals and multiple view options. There's always a blue and red portal active, either of which you can plant on dirt surfaces to solve puzzle steps and/or peek around corners. Anyone who's ever beaten a test chamber, hugged a Companion Cube, or regaled GLaDOS' dulcet damnations will recognize the game loop here: use your basic movement options to move through dimensions and manipulate the environment to proceed through levels. No jumping or use key for holding items means these verbs are more limited than you'd expect, though. The focus rests almost entirely on Portal basics like slingshot-ing and activating switches to open up progression. Your only "companion" here is the occasional lava turtle who can ferry you across the instakill depths, even if that means dropping them through rifts into the drink first.

This simpler-than-simple approach made sense at a time when players expected hall-of-mirrors effects when blowing holes in maps this compact. Just the revelation that you can experience seemingly large spaces despite their size was enough. Economy of design allows Narbacular Drop to remain somewhat as enjoyable as its spiritual sequel, at least if there's enough puzzles to play. Only five levels of note, with the first few suffering from tutorializing, meant the onus fell upon fans to explore the game's possibilities. As fun as this brief playthrough was, I totally get why these former DigiPen students wanted to move beyond thesis project roots and do an entirely new product using the key mechanics. It's just a shame that Princess No-Knees, Wally, and the big bad never got a resolution. As these programmers, designers, and artists later note in Portal's commentary nodes, the lack of a strong plot, cast, and world-building means no disguise for what's a solid but underdeveloped set of brain-twisters.

…And that's where community packs came in. Perhaps presaging their involvement with Valve not long after, Narbacular Drop uses the Hammer editor for map making and compiling, which let folks like Hank Warkentin design and release level packs very soon after official release. I'd argue the Portal mapping community really got started as far back as this, and it's just as likely that Nuclear Monkey devs like Kim Swift kept an eye on the ideas and tropes these creators explored in this prototype. Hank's own maps recreate the main campaign with extra challenges and an actual conclusion, much to my amusement. A young yet talented Robert Yang released one of, if not the earliest custom maps back in 2005; it's not even mentioned on his portfolio page, oddly enough. Enough of a scene developed that someone had to collect all these maps under one set! There's more history here if you know where to dig, which is a shame since it's almost like everything working on this fantastic journey has moved on in more ways than one.

Playing this formative work today can be frustrating, of course. I had to slap dgVoodoo 2.8 and its DLLs into the install directory just to get the portal effect working properly, let alone setup graphical enhancements. Nor does the program document its console commands, including those you'll need to skip or load any levels. Our princess' physics and controls definitely aren't as polished as Portal, among other obviously janky elements. But I still had a lot of fun bending reality throughout original and external stages, zooming across gaps and navigating vertical limbos. Turning obstacles that normally end your run into puzzle solutions, or even speedrunning tricks, all feels natural here. Compared to most other early DigiPen projects from the mid-2000s, this had more of a hook and potential to evolve, which it certainly did.

As mentioned earlier, Narbacular Drop is freeware and can run well on Windows 10 today if you've got the right drivers. Barnett's site still archives a lot of behind-the-scenes materials, too, including that sick trip-hop groove soundtrack. I haven't touched a whole lot on the audiovisuals, but they're quite charming, from the earthy industrial environments, clashing against cute characters, to the aforementioned tunes which compensate for the middling sound design. So much love went into this that seeing it reduced to a footnote today—just that odd thing that led to Portal and endless other physics-based 3D puzzle platformers on the market—feels wrong to me. I'd love to see ex-Nuclear Monkey people do a reunion tour and playthrough of this now that they've had lengthy careers and time to process the aftermath. It's a brief but enlightening chapter in the complex history of what we call indie games, well worth a try.

The very first "realistic" arcade racing video games started off simplistic and barely evocative of what they promised players, but Speed Freak, the first example using vector graphics, does the night-racer concept best out of them all. It must have seemed like a huge leap forward upon release in 1979, three years after Atari engineer Dave Shepperd and his team used Reiner Forest's Nurburgring-1 as the basis for Night Driver (and then Midway's close competitor, 280 Zzzap). Representing the road with just scaling road markers zooming by, in and out of the vanishing point, was impressive enough in the late-'70s, yet Vectorbeam saw the potential for this concept if brought into wireframe 3D. Without changing the simple and immediate goal of driving as fast, far, and crash-less as possible, the company made what I'd tentatively call the best commercial driving sim of the decade, albeit without the fancy skeuomorphic cabinets of something like Fire Truck.

One coin nets players two minutes total of driving, dodging, shifting, and hopefully some high scorin'. Like its stylistic predecessors, the cabinet features a wheel and gated stick shift, giving you something tactile to steer and manage speed with other than the pedals. And that vector display! This expensive but awe-inspiring video tech debuted in arcade format back in '77 when Larry Rosenthal from MIT debuted a fast yet affordable Spacewar! recreation using these new screen drawing methods. Whereas Dr. Forest's early '76 German racing sim drew a basic road surface and lit up bulbs placed towards the glass to fake road edges, Atari and Midway used very early microprocessors and video ROM chips to render rasterized equivalents. Here, though, vivid scanlines of light emanated from the screen at a human-readable refresh rate, with far more on-road and off-road detail than before. Clever scaling of wiry objects on screen gives the impression of 3D perspective, and crashing leads to a broken windshield effect! All these features would have made this feel more comprehensive and immersive for arcade-goers than its peers, even compared to the most luxurious of electromechanical racing installations.

Speed Freak itself, though, isn't a big leap in complexity and depth of play, nor does it use the extended-time mechanic found in 280 Zzzap. You just have to reach and maintain max speed without crashing either off the course or into oncoming objects, like other cars or signposts. It's all about speeding down the darkness with reckless abandon, nabbing those top scores over drivers who keep bailing within this strict time limit. Momentum's a little funky at first, but no more unlifelike or difficult to work with than in Night Driver and its direct precursor. The game does let you know if you're in danger of an accident by sounding a tire squeal, among other small details that build an illusion of world-building here. I wish there was not just a way to extend play, but also see recommended cornering speeds for upcoming turns, rather than having to guess at a glance how far to brake and/or shift. That's one aspect 280 Zzzap has over this and the Atari game, for what it's worth.

Vector-based 3D driving faire like this had a brief heyday in '79 and the following year, but it wouldn't be long until both SEGA and Namco fought back. Their jaw-dropping third-person racers Turbo and Pole Position proved that colorful, "super-scaling" raster graphics were just as much a match for the relatively spartan but flexible vector stuff. In fact, more players cottoned on to these Japanese competitors, both for the added skill ceiling and game loop variety which developers at neither Cinematronic nor Vectorbeam could match. Still, despite how much more I love those Golden Age 2D and pseudo-3D skidfests from the industry titans, I think there was a lot of potential explored in Speed Freak, something more akin to military simulators but for the masses. Affordable home computers and their game creators wouldn't touch this genre for years to come, and the closest you could get on VCS and competing any-game consoles never stood a chance at reproducing this experience. Rosenthal's brief stint running Vectorbeam, a bright light of innovation and visual achievement in the industry, ended the same year this came out, all because Barrer bombed and its manufacturing costs fatally wounded the company. If they had found more market success and iterated on vector tech as fast as he'd introduced it, who knows if the Vectrex and similar projects might have fared better?

Today you can only play Speed Freak on a properly maintained real-life board or, thankfully, through MAME. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, easy to rebind for controllers and a neat subject for screenshots. Maybe the likes of Digital Eclipse, Night Dive, or another prestigious studio could figure out the licensing situation for these formative vector games and get all the experts in one room to make an Atari 50-caliber collection one day. Or maybe that window's passed, given how many industry people from the time have passed on or simply become unavailable. Give this a try regardless! It's simultaneously the start and end of an era, hiding in plain sight among its own kind.