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

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

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

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

hoi peeplz, I'm bak 4rom da ded, hapy eastah ig [proceeds to whack you, me, and everyone else reading with the Biblically Inaccurate God Stick] blessed be thy shit, now go, my angle frens are dragon me to Scotland cuz we gotta piss on maggie thacther too

Once upon a time, Koei made a video game of the greatest story ever told. It wasn't Nobunaga's Ambition; that guy was about as far from sacred and pious as you could imagine (boy did Mitsuhide make him pay for it). And it certainly couldn't have been Do Dutch Wives Dream of Electic Eels?, not unless you worship at the altar of ancient erotic adventures. Rather, the company's non-sim game division in the early-1980s, dubbed Comix, released a very loose adaptation of Christ's struggles towards salvation in '84, utterly unlike the rest of their output. This side-scrolling, arcade-style action thing for the relatively underpowered (but surprisingly capable) PC-6001mkII didn't have much presence in its own market. Koei would soon pour the lion's share of their talent and resources into complex, richly themed grand strategy and military simulations over the coming decades. Somehow, though, I think Chrith: Ai no Tabidachi (or Journey of Love) perfectly represents the studio's origins, which were far from prestigious and instead reflected the anything-goes attitudes of early Japanese PC games.

Jesus ain't living on Earth here, but the alien planet Lourdes, ruled by an evil crown prince and ravaged by famine. Now this guy's still prophesied to become humanity's guiding light, working miracles before all is lost, and so this child of peasants finally gets the gig many years later. His katakana name is actually "kurisu", a nod to how this isn't really Christ but a weird alternate universe version Koei's using to get out of trouble with the few Christians in Japan who'd even care. Players control Christ as he must move west across the land, blessing every lost soul in sight with his holy staff while avoiding snakes, soldiers, and other manifestations of the devil. If this sounds pretty simple, that's because it is. Chrith tends to resemble a reverse-direction MagMax or Seicross, as the play area auto-scrolls from right to left with peasants and pests moving in different lanes. Just move onto each lost soul to save them, ending when you've hit 50 people or have lost all your lives. I guess resurrection's a limited-chance offer on this world.

So we're playing not-Christ on not-Earth and it's totally not got a lot going on. Stages all look the same, with the barest of details like silhouetted mountains and a starry night sky. Check out that sick wireframe ground, though. Someone would peg this as an '80s throwback game if released today just because of the grid! It serves a purpose here, though, since a lack of sprite scaling means the developers had to convey depth perception somehow. Chrith hardly plays that bad in the moment thanks to considerations like this, but the choppy, all-in-software scrolling and lack of any music or audio design means this feels limp from start to finish. It's as shallow and repetitive as many players today think the Golden Age arcade classics must be. All I have to do for high scores is run wild around the track, racking up as many worshipers as possible while avoiding one-hit deaths from baddies. No secrets, no hidden mechanics, no nuthin'. Any potential this had to integrate miracles, sermons, aphorisms, and other New Testament-themed nuances just wasn't on the dev team's to-do list, I suppose.

Chrith: Journey of Love has a certain je-ne-sais-qois, mainly due to how it distorts bubble-era Japanese pop perceptions of Christianity (also influenced by U.S. media exports like Cecil B. DeMille's lavish Hollywood epics). Players will immediately notice and likely laugh at the voice synthesis dialogue during stage intermissions. This was possible on PC-6001 models thanks to an add-on chip which a select number of software used, including games like this and NEC's graphic adventure Colony Odyssey. And what you'll hear sounds worse than the best lines from Evil Otto in Berzerk, let alone the iconic taunts of Sinistar. But this at least adds character and a sense of mystery to the game's aesthetic, where an unidentified light (God? Heaven? Some angels?) briefs our hero on principles and goals before heading back into the moral melee. The spartan color choices, typical for this system and akin to early CGA graphics on DOS PCs, also render this ersatz pilgrimage as uncanny as possible. Sitting down with this disk for even a few minutes gives me the heebie-jeebies, like some creepypasta's about to happen right on screen. Bewildering stuff, I tell ya. Just watch Umbrella Terms' review and play this with her fan translation patch for more strangeness!

While this is the first PC-6000 series game I've covered here on Backloggd, it's definitely an outlier in that library, a dying gasp of Koei's origins as this hobbyist venture Yoichi Erikawa started to supplement his family's chemicals business. You'll never hear this mentioned in any official histories beyond maybe a mention in some timeline graphic. And the next Christianity-themed effort by the corporation came nearly a decade later with Tamashii no Mon - Dante's Odyssey, an Xmas '92 adventure platformer sticking closer to its source material than Chrith ever bothered. I enjoy the contrasts between these reverent but stylistically opposed translations of religious lit into mainstream games. Whereas Dante's Odyssey seamlessly blends its game-y bits in with recognizable moments from the original poem, Chrith salvages the surface-level trappings of a generic Christ biopic or children's book for the sake of camp. Neither approach is that faithful, nor sacrilegious. Syncretism among different Japanese faiths predisposed these products' creators to treat Western-import religions and iconography very similarly. It is entirely seemly for a Japanese micro-computer game riffing on Jesus to take liberties via this inter-cultural mangling. In the author's death, all things appear fair. (Wait, that's the Iliad, not the Bible…)

Koei quickly crafted a veneer of majesty, attention to detail, and historic fidelity throughout the mid-/late-'80s, something which they've let go of recently but can still point to and say "we know what we're doing". Yet Chrith: Journey of Love remains a sobering reminder of when this wasn't the case, a period when the Erikawas and co. just messed around, producing whatever silly idea could work on whichever PC they were targeting. This was the same company behind the very first eroge, after all. If you ask me, I think the C-suite and tastemakers at Koei-Tecmo are cowards to deny their beginnings and heritage. Unless this really was a troubled production or something they need to disavow for legal or sensitivity reasons, I think it'd help them to show a little pride for their first efforts. What would Chrith do? Probably send me to the pearly gates with his superweap—er, uh, I mean holy staff, yes, but the King of Kings would have enough love in his heart for even an homage this mediocre and misguided. This wouldn't even be the last time Kou Shibusawa himself diverged heavily from a known mythology just to make a fun enough game, yet I don't hear Imperial scholars complaining about all the inaccuracies in Kamigami no Daichi's version of Onamuchi's labors in primordial Japan. I dunno, maybe Koei should cut itself some slack.

Citizens! Look around! Can you hear that fearsome sound? It’s that corpse of a game done dirty, killed off by the 3DS' closing! Enjoy the meme, that so-called Code Name S.T.E.A.M.~! (Load up your drive to fight back the reductive menace) What a dream~, why hate on Code Name S.T.E.A.M.~?! United they stand with every Valkyria, XCOM, and—[record scratch] erm, just those two and Fire Emblem mainly.

| Trouble Brewing |

I speak of Intelligent Systems’ 3DS character strategy experiment that debuted alongside Splatoon yet couldn’t have had a worse fate. It came a long way from rocky origins and launch reception, yet now so few are interested. At best, physical copies go on sale at different stores, retailing far cheaper than any other evergreen Nintendo titles I know. Then people pay attention, or remark that the game deserved its bomba-stic fate. With the death of the 3DS eShop and any pull the system had outside its fans and retro enthusiast press, there's an increasing risk of this becoming a mere footnote, something misunderstood back in 2015 and only a bit less so now.

Code Name S.T.E.A.M. deserves better, both because it plays well and because it’s a great example of the developers' ambitions, even as the Awakening/Fates gravy train steamrolled all in its path. We’re talking about an alternate late-1800s steampunk Earth where Lincoln’s alive, everything looks like pulp fiction, and public-domain American literature heroes work together to defeat Lovecraftian horrors before everyone’s dead. Yes, the premise sounds as bonkers as it gets, including a multi-stage trip to Oz and invading Antarctica with the likes of Tom Sawyer and Tiger Lily in your crew. Compare this to the florid, but often predictable, heightened medieval exteriors of most Fire Emblem worlds. Int-Sys gets extra mileage from fresh settings like late-Victorian London, the bowels of Miskatonic University, and what might as well be the Schwarzwelt from Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.

This wargame’s more puzzle than adventure, but it feels like both. Due to challenges like relying on units’ sightlines and exploring every nuance of each map to progress, I had to really apply myself in ways I'd expect mainly from a classic Jagged Alliance title. Here’s a game where replaying missions becomes more comfortable and advantageous because nearly every character and strategy can become viable. Want to turtle through long maps, abusing overwatch during the enemy phase while moving across every inch? How about rampaging through on the first try, surviving close calls and leaving collectibles untouched for a replay? It all works! The final set of maps epitomize what’s great about this mix. Elevation conflicts, alien baddies acting in cycles, sightline control, and clutch aiming for weak points are all so satisfying to juggle. Intimidating, also, since your lack of a top-down view, or any map really, enforces a fog of war linked to your guys' individual and combined vision. (Those who hold this decision against Int-Sys when it's clearly a way to solve the age-old problems associated with FoW in Fire Emblem's paradigm will always amuse me!)

I have to admit the game’s pacing isn’t all there, same with do-or-die motivation to complete it (and I only completed this a few years after buying it full price…). The problem almost everyone had around launch—enemy phase speed, which got patched up not nearly quick enough to cool down the anti-hype—didn’t help at all. I think waiting around to see enemies move, take position, and wreck my last move keeps my interest, but it doesn’t appeal to everyone. Beyond that, it’s hard to get in the mood for maps featuring constant reinforcements or intimidating boss encounters. Adding the ABE mini-game at story intervals makes a bit of difference, though, as do the shorter, more puzzle-slanted maps. Code Name S.T.E.A.M. strikes a good balance of map types, mission designs, and introducing new element when needed. Maybe they could have tightened up the mecha mini-game's controls and given it a lot more substance, though.

S.T.EA.M.’s strengths take a bit to properly describe, likely the reason why this will remain a cult classic. The game’s frustrating but rarely unfair, presenting a ton of maps where you find new ways to abuse your party’s advantages. It’s got excellent replayability thanks to later character introductions (meaning new ways to replay earlier maps) and extra modes like Merciless or multiplayer. Eschewing traditional strategy game tropes, like an overhead map or the inability to extend visibility and movement for a unit, gives this game a strong identity. Peeking around corners, hoping to not aggro a counterattack or worse, means there's almost always some healthy morsels of tension to feed on. And the presentation’s quite excellent: catchy progressive rock, the comic-book story sequences, and a short but very memorable eldritch-invasion steampunk story works so well for me. (Shout-out to the voice acting! I loathe Adam Baldwin’s involvement, but everyone fits their roles perfectly, especially James Urbaniak as Randolph Carter.)

| Deadly Dance |

Here’s a list of awesome things you can do in Code Name S.T.E.A.M.:
•Launch bomb aliens onto mines (using John Henry or another explosives user) to create a domino effect of explosions that tears through spawners and enemy lines
•Stun literally every enemy, then have a scout fighter pick them off thanks to extra damage on stunned foes
•Jump from wall to tower to behind the enemy’s weak point using Lion, picking up Gears and plenty of extra steam packs along the way for maximum damage in a round
•Explode enemy squads from afar with penguin droids; waste them with specials like Queeqeeg’s harpoon
•In general, do ridiculous stunts with North American literary legends (plus Abraham Lincoln) that are super silly yet serious—you might call this camp, even

| Intersection: Me vs. You |

I highly recommend trying this bad boy out if you want something like Intelligent Systems’ 3DS puzzlers, wrapped into a wargame premise that’s rather unlike the games it’s frequently compared to. Yes, you have interception fire and squad-level combat like in XCOM or Valkyria Chronicles, but this game emphasizes exploring very precisely-designed environments with stakes changing a lot of the time. Reinforcements, too, are a big No to players who tried or wanted to try this, but I think they’re more manageable here than usual because of your skill pool. Knowledge of character skills, shot-to-hitbox detection, and the foibles of managing your steam gauge makes for a satisfying feedback loop.

Quick note: play this on a New 3DS for maximum enjoyment. That system gives you a 3x enemy phase speed toggle for situations where you really need to skip enemy actions or replay a mission. I used an OG 3DS + Circle Pad Pro to get analog camera movement, so consider that if you want to minimize stylus or face button use. Consult a guide when necessary to find all the Gears so you can get different steam boilers early on. Getting better equipment up through mid-game helps a lot later on while pushing you to understand each map in depth.

In oh so many ways, Code Name S.T.E.A.M. was Int-Sys' attempt to prove they could bring their wargame design chops outside the Fire Emblem mold, synthesizing many well-appreciated aspects of other big-name character tactics games into a unique whole. Woeful release-period impressions. and a lack of retrospective coverage from outlets that ought to have one or two writers interested, basically sunk this title's reputation and left it unable to resurface. It's hardly the fault of some conspiracy of journalists or FE fanboys as some will resort to suggesting. Nor is this (or any) Nintendo software exempt from incisive critique, as I can understand where the detractors are coming from WRT no map, slow between-turn waits, and an emphasis on puzzle solving over constantly improvising to hobble through the campaign. Yet I'm hopeful that this and other 3DS-era experiments like Rusty's Real Deal Baseball can eventually attain some prominence and reevaluation in the system's library, an era of tumult and risk-taking uncommon for the publisher.

(In case you couldn't tell, I wrote this review a few years before joining Backloggd, hence the somewhat different style. Alas, ResetEra wasn't too interested in *Code Name S.T.E.A.M. at the time, and anyone wanting to give it a go now might as well visit a certain website rhyming with "ache chop" to get a digital copy for Citra or their homebrewed 3DS. Thankfully the game runs and plays like a dream in emulation, as this detailed r/FireEmblem poster can testify. I'm sure a replay would reveal some bullshit to me, but also various things I couldn't appreciate at the time.)

Name's right, I love me so googly-eyed Giger bois. Video pinball should try to be this homoerotic more often. I mean, we're whacking balls around in a dungeon, what more can I ask for?! The Crush Pinball series has this almost sexual energy to it, an addictive game loop I find hard to resist. You quickly understand all that's possible, desirable, and repeatable with just one main table and a few mini-tables to spice things up. It's the familiar rhythm of the plunger, flippers, bumpers, and multipliers throwing the odds across screens, from 0 digits to 999 million, threatening us with imminent loss but also the possibility of success. And I think there's something delightfully sleazy about the thrill of it all. Forget the joysticks, the video nasties, the banes of "concerned parents" and the policymakers who answer to them with curfews and dress codes. We want the real thing!

Whether you're just giving it a 15-minute try or aiming to counter-stop, Alien Crush remains as fun and relevant to the genre as it must have been in 1988. This was the best pinball romp of the '80s, stacking up to ye olde Black Knight 2000 and Pin-Bot in presentation and execution. The counter-cultural, tongue-in-cheek pairing of eldritch horrors with a well-balanced table design allowed developers Compile and Red Company to take risks other microchip adaptations hadn't. Unlockable "boss" stages and multiple ways to nab new balls, or toggle safety zones amidst the chaos, makes for a very fair experience overall. Most importantly, though, the pinball physics here are impeccable. Rarely does it feel like sloppy coding's the source of a failed run, and there's almost always some way to recover by smartly timing flips and tilts to control your trajectory. This may not have the sheer amount of stuff that Devil's Crush and its progeny brought, but this inaugural entry in the "not quite pinball" style has held its own against those successors.

| Lunar Eclipse |

Whoever at Compile led development on this, Devil's Crush, and an ever-overlooked Jaki Crush clearly loved post-WWII pinball and similar amusements. (Interviews with ex-Compile staff suggest that Takafumi Tanida was the Crush Pinball games' lead developer, supported by his work on The Pinball of the Dead a decade later) (Szczepaniak 2018, 112). Arcades, dive bars, movie theaters, and other third spaces benefited from the blaring clangs and klaxons these four-legged monstrosities put out. Before our age of eye-straining, dexterity testing shooters and eSports curricula, skill-based bagatelle was the next best way to hone one's reflexes and proudly scream to the world "I'm a creature of leisure!" with enough carpe diem to make Robin Williams blush. It's fitting that pinball video carts and disks would struggle to replicate, let alone enhance, the electromechanical stimuli and complexity of contemporary tables from Bally, Williams, Stern, Gottlieb, and other manufacturers in and outside of Chicago. Few console or micro-computer examples of the genre had much success until the late-'80s, when the likes of Pinball Quest and then DICE's Pinball Dreams showed how upgraded ROM chips and clever design could allow richer, more complex tables and player progression than even the priciest cabinet competitors.

Ironically, though pinball has always had more presence in the U.S. and other parts of the Global West, it's mainly Japanese video game creators who pushed the limits of this style of arcade staple for home audiences. I'm not downplaying the revolution that was Pinball Construction Set, either. Bill Budge's proto-amateur game dev toolkit offered many options to players, from building layouts to tweaking gravity, but it strictly adhered to the possibility space of mid-1900s pinball. Replicating the flashy LED banners, sampled audio, and exuberant light shows popular in '80s arcade-adjacent spaces wasn't going to work on an Apple II, not without compromises. Even virtuosic pseudo-replica tables in releases like System Sacom's Moon Ball still fell prey to wonky physics or a lack of variety. It's telling that the earliest signs of video games advancing pinball tropes came via genre hybrids like Toru Iwatani's Bomb Bee, combining Breakout into the formula to some success. Realistic pinball recreations, on the other hand, wouldn't arrive in force until the '90s, when works like Little Wing's Tristan from '91 became popular on various PCs (Fujita 2010).

Though Sacom and their star coder Mark Flint brought Moon Ball Magic to the Famicom Disk System, expanding the original into a multi-level adventure with some deft, it was a nascent Naxat Soft who'd publish the first majorly acclaimed contender to the video-ball throne that same year. The newborn publisher contracted Red Entertainment, then working on other big PC Engine projects like Far East of Eden, to design and produce an action-packed crowd pleaser alongside technical staff from the ever-reliable Compile. Even if Red was still just as inexperienced with making their own games as Naxat was to publishing, they clearly made a lot of smart decisions. Tanida and co. needed roughly a half-year to craft and gold-master Alien Crush, which gained a global cult following unlike Sacom's product. It may not have been a launch title in Japan (though close enough in concept and legacy), but the Turbo-Grafx 16 localization was a boon for the platform, already struggling against the NES despite its advantages.

| Demon's Undulate |

Alien Crush boots into a minimalist, fleshy-formed splash screen with ominous HuC6280 waveforms purring in stereo. Tap Run, choose Fast or Slow, and then choose one of two music tracks to regale you as the ballistics begin. The opening pull-and-plunge does a proper job of introducing players to an otherwise troublesome quirk, its fade-to-black flipping between halves of the table. Split-second blanks take a bit of getting used to if you've only experienced newer full-scrolling pinball games; any fading here feels unobtrusive after a minute or two, thankfully. Despite the busy visuals, it's easy to keep track of the silver ball leaping from corner to corner, top to bottom, at least on the main table where one can actually lose it. Two sets of flippers, multiple point indicators baked into a grotesque root system, portentous open aisles leading to either the motherlode or the next ball down…it's plenty to take in, but never too much.

The core loop takes our metallic traveler around a circuit of enough cybernetic guts and gnasties to make Ridley Scott proud. In the center-bottom rests the phallic-formed demiurge, with its retinue of x-number panels and fallen angels in the gallery for you to strike down. Contrast this with dual brains and their head henchmen on top, vying for control and kept at tendrils' length by the standard four pass-thru switches. It's the very model of a modern major pinball table, corrupted and reshaped into a torture device for completionists. "Beating" this nets only the most barebones of endings and bragging rights expected from a big-budget machine, the kind you'd just walk away from to find something else worth playing. Playing this with today's content-first mindset is a trap. While there are innovators like Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball and Yoku's Island Express which effectively meld scoring and completionism paradigms, Alien Crush works as much as it can from its limited but compelling set-up. Some would call this a "vibe game", in fact, which is close enough to describing the thick atmosphere roping me back into this hellscape.

Activating each nib, greeble, ramp, and gargoyle nets you some numbers, but also access to a few interesting "secret areas" which break up the pacing in ways a non-console table can't. I wish Tanida and the rest had gone even farther with this idea, which is why I suspect I'll enjoy the sequels more for doubling down on them. These diversions all use the block kuzushi style of ball-and-paddle play that Breakout had popularized in Japan a decade earlier, just using proper pinball physics. It's crunchy and satisfying to bounce skulls back into their hidey holes, or figure out how to juggle between sets of bumpers without the ball jumping down right between the flippers. Unlike the main table and its perpetual endurance tests, players can actually complete these side areas for a perfect score bonus, plus a hidden extra ball in one of the rooms. It'd take Devil's Crush and beyond to really iterate on this concept, but everything works here despite the repetitive, somewhat underwhelming amount of unique bosses and baddies to bop.

| The Best Five |

Most of the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16's initial lineup suffered from stinkers and well-meaning but flawed software. I can't think of many out there clamoring to play Victory Run or Keith Courage in Alpha Zones nowadays, except myself maybe. Hudson Soft and NEC did their damnedest to make this platform work, though, and their third-party talent scouting paid off with classics like Alien Crush, Blazing Lazers, Cyber Knight, and CD-ROM extravaganzas like, uh, J.B. Harold Murder Club. OK, not all of these are so prestigious, and rarely did the most well-received games venture out of genre norms. (Hudson's own catalog did well enough to avoid obvious blunders, even if they also weren't rocking the proverbial boat with Bonk's Adventure or Nectaris.) Still, if you had to get any of the original four TG-16 HuCards back in '89, this once cutting-edge take on pinball was the smart choice. What better means to showcase the advanced spriting, scrolling, and thematic exploring one could create on this new hardware?

For reasons both selfish and convenient, I wanted to start my PC Engine journey off with a Certified Hood Classic™. All the Crush Pinball titles would have worked, so starting with the original made too much sense. But imagine how difficult a sell this would have seemed in '88 or '89. Who needs video pinball when high quality tables are available at every laundromat, community center, etc.? The highest achievement this series reached was justifying its genre's relevance beyond the realms of coin-boxes and carnival barkers, largely by hooking players with what the big pinball companies refused to provide. I love me some blockbuster '80s cabs from Williams, followed by the lofty heights Stern reached heading into the '90s, but they couldn't sweep the main-table ideal off its feet like Alien Crush did. This underdog of a printed circuit soon had its own imitators, like the oft-maligned Sonic Spinball and similar mascot pinball-ers. It showed to a developing enthusiast press that even the most seemingly impossible of genre hybrids weren't just possible, but laudable! Just as the PC Engine/TG-16 had to prove itself against Nintendo and SEGA's status quo from start to bitter end, so too have creations like this needed to justify their relevance from one era to another. I think everyone working on this at Compile, Red Company, and Naxat Soft outdid themselves.

—Bibliography—

Fujita, Yoshikatsu. “Tristan.” LittleWing PINBALL Official Website. LittleWing Co. Ltd., November 2, 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20101102014644/http://www.littlewingpinball.com/doc/en/gameinfo/tristan/index.html.
Accessed via Internet Archive.

Szczepaniak, John. “Takayuki HIRONO & Satoshi FUJISHIMA.” The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 3, 112–113. SMG Szczepaniak, 2018.

Six unlucky victims of a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. One island full of hunger, secrets, indigenous peoples, and more. No rescue in sight—just the hope of salvaging the wreckage and radioing for any help out there, or somehow completing one of a few viable vehicles to escape in. It's a rough life, surviving on a deserted island leagues away from home, but Mujintou Monogatari (or "Deserted Island Story") livens up this cute Crusoe-de with raising sim tropes and an optimistic aesthetic. Years before the Survival Kids and Lost in Blue series (plus The Sims 2: Castaway Life!), KSS & Open Sesame produced one of classic Japanese PC gaming's best strategy adventures, and I've played enough to say that with confidence. Its lack of exposure and fan translation, even within the PC-98's Anglosphere fandom, saddens me.

| Marooned in Blue |

The story begins like any good disaster movie: a Boeing passenger jet drifts through stormy weather, doing fine until its systems fail for some reason. With pilots scrambling to avert the worst and the civilians on-board panicking at their descent, it's a small miracle that the player-named protagonist awakens intact on a sunny summer beach. Guiding our high-school boy across the coast, we bump into a motley band of castaways: young and precocious Ayase, girlboss sophisticated flight attendant Erina, overbearing but helpful team dad "Professor", talented college-level computer diva Rika, and dependable tomboy student Saori. Teamwork ensues! They set up a simple shack, promise to put aside their misgivings and differences, and set about collecting the food, water, tools, and know-how to thrive here and eventually return home. As I mentioned earlier, this involves drafting plans (blueprints, in fact) for a few potential vessels, from a sail-less boat to a MFing zeppelin! Story scenes happen as you explore more of the island, earn enough trust with your co-habitants, and inch ever closer to the fateful day.

Where to begin with all the systems Mujintou Monogatari throws at you? The game largely revolves around a top-down view of your current location, usually the beach camp where you'll need to return to for rest and planning. Moving the cursor's pretty much required, some hotkeys aside, as you select commands from a sidebar and then many deliciously decorated menus. KSS wisely avoided any minigames or sequences revolving around reflexes, let alone the typically awkward numpad key controls of contemporary PC-X8 software. Instead, players just have to manage a wide variety of stats, both for characters and the camp's resources. Collecting potable water and fruits becomes a daily ritual, even for the exhausted. Raw materials needed to craft even basic tools, like machetes and rope, require extensive forays into the jungles, streams, and plains of this seemingly untamed land. Everyone can build up new and current skills over time, but at the cost of temporarily lower yields or wrecking someone's mental state. It's the kind of careful juggling act you'd expect from Princess Maker 2, with just as many variables for thankfully more predictable outcomes.

| Deserted Island Foibles |

Unlike in Gainax's iconic raising sim series, though, KSS and the developers offer more plot and cast interactions to maintain the opening's strong pacing. For example, I met the island's major tribe a bit before halfway through the game, a pleasant encounter with locals just as curious about us as we are about them. The Professor gets giddy at the sight of seemingly unexplored ruins; Erina struggles to adapt to a life without Western amenities; Ayase and Saori both vie for the title of Genki Girl, if only to mask their loneliness; and an aloof Rika, seemingly the most capable of the bunch, confides her self-doubt with the protagonist she's starting to fall for. There's enough crisscrossing threads and details that the often repetitive tasks and ventures into unknown territory remain intriguing. As the player nears any of the endings they're pursuing, Mujintou Monogatari also starts to probe interesting ideas—mainly the discomfort of both living here and soon having to depart and leave this tight-knight, caring group of people. Additional interludes like a drunken going-away party (which the whole band participates in, concerningly), plus evidence of WWII-era Imperial presence on the island via a long marooned serviceman, enrich the narrative.

All this gets reinforced in the game loop itself, as you must set up search parties with each person's compatibility in mind. Pair the wrong two characters up and they'll fail spectacularly! On the flipside, smart combinations can lead to discovering secret areas or items earlier, and these dynamic duos also do better at item crafting. Almost every aspect here conveys the importance of communication, compromise, and cooperation in desperate circumstances. The group hardly avoids conflict, but they work through these ups-and-downs in a naturalistic manner, which matches the occasionally silly but serious tone of the story. And this really helps because Mujintou Monogatari, though not brutally hard, is still a demanding piece of software. Players have to not just understand the island, its residents, and where you can forage from, but they also need to raise the "civilization" rating back at camp to progress further.

Crafting becomes increasingly important even before you've fully mapped out the island, and it's the clunkiest system for sure. Every team member can equip various items to aid in exploration, most of which are only accessible after checking out enough hotspots or surveying a given range of the wilderness. Once you've found key items in the wild and added them to a ramshackle crafts shop, then the manufacturing can commence! This involves a lot of less-than-satisfying fiddling around in menus, flipping between screens to assess resources needed for creation vs. what's available at the moment. Still, this spate of poor user interface design didn't bother me for too long. Arguably the trickiest section in this game is the opening hour itself since you've only got a lifeboat's worth of rations and liquids to work with. Moving quick and taking a few risks early on pays off.

| All the Pretty Sights |

Beyond how well it plays and immerses one in this torrid scenario, Mujintou Monogatari has lush, memorable audiovisuals and style to accompany players through their journey. I think people had to work harder than usual to make an ugly PC-98 pixel art experience, and KSS certainly succeeds at visualizing a gorgeous, inviting tropical realm. So many UI windows, land textures, and background CGs pop out in their 640x400 resolution glory, working with the platform's system rather than against. Maybe the music could have been catchier or better developed to match, but it's still a nice set of tunes, ranging from poppy marches to pensive background orchestration. A lot of people clamor to these mid-'90s "aesthetic" PC-X8 adventures and xRPGs for the character designs, among other often pervy reasons. I'm glad to report that the characters here are distinctive and as fashionably dressed as expected from the genre; illustrator VOGUE renders all the men, women, and woodland critters in glittering detail, yet still portrays them in dirty and less flattering situations without issue. So much thought clearly went into how the game looks, sounds, and portrays its subjects, more than I'd expect from a '94 raising sim targeting a largely male otaku audience.

And that's another area in which this excels: a general lack of pandering to any one market. There's a couple raunchy moments (yes, there's the Obligatory Hot Springs Episode), and something of a romance towards the end with one of the leading ladies, but it's tame compared to even KSS' other raising sims back then. We're far from blatantly erotic Wrestle Angels or sussy Princess Maker stuff, for better or worse. Sequels to Mujintou Monogatari would dabble with more fanservice, sure, but it wasn't until Mujintou Monogatari R and then a separate 18+ series that KSS and the remaining developers settled for easy money. The original game acquits itself nicely, balancing the occasional red meat for otaku gamers with no-nonsense, respectful treatment of each heroine's agency and complex characterization. (It's kind of weird how the Professor gets the least development here despite his age, but at least he's not just an oji-san stereotype played for laughs. Cold comfort, I guess.) I'd hesitate to deem this entirely wholesome, yet I'd be more justified in recommending this to anyone curious about PC-98 ADV/proto-VN soft than, well, a bit under half the commercial library which sits firmly in NSFWville.

KSS had found a strong niche by '94 thanks to intimidating but rewarding sims like Mujintou Monogatari, and they wouldn't be going anywhere awful for years to come. They remained one of the last well-balanced publishers releasing PC-98 exclusives into its waning years, and their exploits on Sony's ascendant PlayStation proved even more fruitful. While the first sequel to this desert-island fantasy largely reused the premise and tried out a different set of tropes, Mujintou Monogatari 3: A.D. 1999 transplanted the gather-craft-escape format to an earthquake-ravaged Tokyo, evoking the majesty and it-can-happen-here horrors of kaiju media and certainly the '95 Kobe quakes from that period. Sadly, like many once acclaimed but overlooked Japanese PC game franchises, this one ended up in the easy-horny pit, a victim of cash-grabs and hastily made ero-anime from KSS' own in-house animation firm, Pink Pineapple. Let's not allow that to become the legacy of this obscure series out West. Rather than settle for that or the downgraded (though admirable) Super Famicom port, I hope communities like this endeavor to try out and appreciate the PC-98 original, and ideally get some fan translators interested. Mujintou Monogatari earned a kind of prestige few other sims on the system could, hence its console successors, and it'd be a shame if this didn't get the historic reappraisal it deserves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xtreme sports gaming and the British fascination with motorsports—name a more iconic combo. Then rizz it up with Fyre Festival's acceptable cousin and you get this game, predating the Forza Horizon series and the paradigm it's established. While modern Forza trades on its easy open-world structure and room for customization, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift hails from a time when impressive audiovisuals and tight arcade-y campaigns were more than enough. Ex-Psygnosis staffers at Evolution Studios not only had a competitor in Bizarre Creations to keep them honest, but enough cachet with Sony at large to try something this extravagant. The original MotorStorm played a key role in selling the PS3 to wider audiences, so all its sequel had to do was iterate louder, longer, and harder more confident than ever. Challenge accepted, I guess. In the end, Evolution made something reaching well beyond expectations, for better or worse, with much more stuff and challenge to offer.

| Bodies and bikes beyond repair |

Pacific Rift knows what it wants and how to deliver it. We're no longer on the continent, sliding through muddy canyons or atop arid cliffs, but having a once-in-a-lifetime demolition derby across a suspiciously tidy tropical isle. Like every amalgam of Hawaii, Tahiti, and New Zealand ever featured in games, this resort island has it all: pristine beaches, fiery volcanoes, dense jungle, and treacherous peaks to race upon. Let's put aside the cavalier desecration of Earth's last refuges, all for the amusement of the bourgeosie, and accept that Evolution just wants players to perform awe-inspiring feats of racing and stunt-craft. It's still the '90s in these developers' teary eyes, and that means no end of leagues, minigames, and gleefully impolite road raging for hours on end. We get nothing less than the decline of Western civilization dressed up as pop punk, off-roaders wearing brand sponsorships, and air pollution thick enough to send the crowds into a fugue. As a hypothetical funeral ceremony for the xtreme sports age, it ticks many boxes.

For as much sheer exhilaration as Evolution's down-and-dirty racer gives me, there's plenty more frustration than I had hoped for. This mainly boils down to excessive rubber-banding—lightweight early on, but quite noticeable heading into the later stages and leagues. If you ever end up on a teeny lil' bike or have to race big rigs in an ATV, then godspeed! The AI loves to punt, shove, shunt, and wreck the player as much it can after the opening hour or so of racing, which makes driving anything but the tankiest vehicles a chore when having to restart. Rather than give more leeway via a qualifying lap to learn each course, or a way to reduce/disable rubber-banding entirely, Pacific Rift enforces its "our way or bust" progression and difficulty balance to a fault. Not a fan.

| The smell of oil and gas in the air |

Thankfully the game offers 16 race-tracks and many variations on the iconic MotorStorm ride types to keep things varied. I especially love how the buggies, bikes, and rally cars handle throughout each level, with different track surfaces having a tangible effect on each vehicle. Controls are weighty, almost simcade-like compared to the golden age of Burnout, but refined from the prequel and nary hard enough to use when navigating traffic. Part of this ease comes from the level designs themselves, with ample space to corner around opponents and room enough to go several racers wide in spots. Evolution balks at the claustrophobia of other racers, instead asking "what if all our courses were as expansive as battlefields?" And they made the right choice. Watching and participating in the sheer carnage that is high-level Pacific Rift racing, from Knievel-ish leaps of faith to hardcore brawls in the dirt and sand with neither contestant coming out on top.

Customization, though present via choosing multiple driver skins and liveries, never becomes the centerpiece it ought to. I'd have loved to tinker around with custom skins and other ways of tuning up vehicles beyond a few selectable adjustments. Had I been around for the game's online scene, this would have brought some much-needed longevity into the game loop. With no way to really make any ride your own or set up custom race series, Evolution must have figured their average player was already overwhelmed and needed a simpler structure to keep the chaos parse-able. I've got no better way to explain why, despite building off the original MotorStorm's framework, the sequel lacks that ambition in meaningful playtime which the Horizon games at least try to attain. Regardless, I'd bet this ended up more fun with humans than when going up against an AI mainly interested in forcing you to wipeout, let alone race competitively.

| And the glint of a solitary shaft of chromium steel |

What I can't ruthlessly criticize is the presentation in Pacific Rift. No amount of aging textures, lower-poly environments, or carefully hacked VFX can take away from how succulent these graphics are. It's a great combo of arcade realism and baffling technical wizardry, something the PS3 could have used more of. Water ripples and shines convincingly, the earth molds and deforms according to tectonic and artificial pressures, and particles leap up from all directions onto the screen in so much detail. At most, I'll concede that this game and its prequel are some of the more visually busy racers one can play, but never enough to make following the racing line and other drivers difficult or annoying. I really wish I had proper minimap, however!

Sony just couldn't deny itself the chance to add a record store's worth of its own labels' licensed music, either, following the tradition they started with Gran Turismo. I struggle to remember a lot of these tracks, even ones from bands like Queens of the Stone Age, but damn if the overall atmosphere isn't fitting. Part of this pleasant amnesia comes from the game's sound design, which outdoes the predecessor's raucous mix of engine roars, crunching metal, and sudden silence when watching yourself careen in slow motion. Combine all this with plenty of post-processing (visual and aural) and the whole thing becomes phantasmagoric, a whirlwind of athleticism and sensory overload that would make Mad Max proud.

Despite only making small improvements over the formula and falling into a bit of an irritating, repetitive slump partway through, I had a damn fun time with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, just as I hoped. Without having yet played Drive Club, it's easy for me to grasp why people mourn the loss of Evolution Studios, Bizarre, Studio Liverpool, and other arcade racer studios of old. This series shows almost precisely how you can translate the goofy, unrealistic blockbuster delights of '90s racing classics into the HD+ era, what with MotorStorm: Apocalypse going all in on surviving one set-piece after another. Here, though, the action's more organic, shaped by capricious crowds swerving and overtaking against each other to dodge peril and take the podium. It's tempting to compare this to kart racers, so I'll compromise and deem this more of a modern take on what SEGA's Power Drift evoked back in the '80s: a semblance of real motorsports corrupted by ballooning budgets, loud personalities, and proudly throwing caution to the wind. The eternal weekend of motor mayhem lives on.

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

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

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

| Fly with me and the daring Swedes |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Stir in an Alternative Dimension |

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

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

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

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

[AVGN voice] More like faxing in a doodie! [Cue skit]

Simon's Quest never stood a chance. Zelda II? Just another competitor for the best NES action-RPG of 1987. Xanadu who? That ain't affordable! Why buy a home computer when you can get the [approximate] thrills of computer role-playing action on your TV?! Faxanadu, baby. It's only the lovechild of two of Japan's most lauded developers, seizing the chance to entertain untold numbers of schoolboys with fantasy swashbuckling and dungeoneering like nothing else. Well, maybe that last part's an exaggeration. Maybe this was the best you could get on a cartridge, but any kid lucky enough to own a Famicom Disk System had similar titles well within reach, all iterating on the likes of Xanadu, Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania.

Poisoned roots flow from the base of World Tree, our hero's old home now corrupted by a cosmic evil. Faxanadu toys with a kind of dark fantasy that had so far evaded the Famicom's library, bewitching its owners with sojourns into caverns, forests, castles, and places that should not be. The people once called Dwarfs now scour this Yggdrasil in mutated forms, and the wise men of the realm wait patiently by desecrated fountains and shrines, hoping for a hero patient and skilled enough to heed their call. While I'm happy to report the game comports itself admirably versus the other ARPGs in the room, its niggling flaws and inability to transcend its inspirations pose a problem for the game today. Nonetheless, it's a testament to how quickly its developers improved at making Famicom exclusives, and one of the breeziest but filling genre exercises that Hudson Soft made for the system.

| "Daggers and wingboots, mantras and monsters await you." |

Famicom Xanadu, as the portmanteau suggests, had a mission to fulfill: bring Nihon Falcom's seminal 1985 PC RPG to the console-bound masses, no matter what it costed Hudson. The two companies knew each other distantly via the Japanese PC games market already, and this collaboration marked the start of a several years' long partnership. Hudson later ported key Falcom titles like Ys I & II and Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes to the former's new console of choice, the PC Engine (CD). Falcom, meanwhile, reaped the crop, collecting hefty residuals from sales of their games on platforms they had no experience with, expertly handled by their partners from Hokkaido. From '87 onward, Falcom made inroads on the far larger console market without having to divert their staff away from the tighter, more competitive J-PC realm, at least until they made their own PC-to-console push in the early '90s.

What we now deem the side-scrolling ARPG had blossomed beyond its niche by '87, thanks to early hits like Namco's Dragon Buster and the diversification shown with cult classics like Layla and Mugen Senshi Valis. Developers tackling the genre sought to meld dungeon crawling, cinematic pacing, and skillful play into something you could play on the simplest of systems. In that sense, '87 was maybe the most important year in ARPG history: Falcom came out swinging with three of the genre's all-time classics (Ys, Sorcerian, and Drasle Family), followed by the likes of Konami (Maze of Gailous, Arumana no Kiseki), Capcom (Black Tiger), Westone (Wonder Boy in Monster Land), Game Arts (Zeliard), and even the NES remake of Rygar. I bring all these up to explain why I've rated Faxanadu roughly in the middle of the pack. There was a lot of competition in the ARPG space at this point in time, and Hudson arguably came in on the back foot.

You'd be right to doubt Hudson's record with console-oriented adventures after the janky results of Challenger, Milon's Secret Castle, Mickey Mousecapade, and arguably the first Adventure Island. The company had triumphed early on with solid renditions of Lode Runner and former J-PC games like Binary Land, but their competitors had leapfrogged them in the art of hours-long Famicom blockbusters. 1987 saw a lot of ups and downs for Hudson's various Famicom teams, with Faxanadu thankfully indicating an end to all but the occasional abject failure. Such a turning point helped double-fold for their upcoming PC Engine projects. Neutopia and Dungeon Explorer, derivative as they are, benefited greatly from the lessons in relatively consistent design that the developer learned this fateful year. I wish we knew who precisely worked on Faxanadu other than musical maestros Jun Chikuma and Toshiaki Takimoto, but good job to everyone else!

The adventure starts off in the main castle town, Eolis, beneath our once verdant World Tree. Despondent residents mill around streets and dim rooms, waiting for relief. The "dwarfs", now resembling creatures from the likes of Alien or Metroid, creep around the town walls, forcing new players to learn the jumping mechanics within the first few minutes. A desperate passer-by hands over their ring, the symbol of Elf kind and one's ticket to an audience with Eolis' king. He tells of a meteorite, crash landed high up within the World Tree, which has poisoned most of the waterways and especially the Dwarf fortress, leading to decay and depression all throughout. After receiving 1500 "golds" and the opportunity to train strength or magic (which just fills those bars, no stat increases here…), players must set off to reactivate the fountains, subdue the Dwarf incursions, and vanquish the evil brought here from outer space.

| "I am free from injury because of the ointment!" |

An immediate strength of Faxanadu is its pacing, with most of the game following a linear progression from below to atop the Tree, foisting small and large challenges upon you with plenty of leniency. The protagonist mainly grows via obtaining new equipment: swords, magic spells, armor, and shields, all buyable or present in corners of the world. Stat progression happens invisibly via changing equipment, while the visible EXP state simply correlates to each title a guru/priest bestows upon you at each temple. This all ties into a robust password save feature, allowing players to recover their progress (ex. equipment, key items, story flags, etc.) and rarely have to retread familiar ground. It took me roughly 7-to-8 hours to clear my first playthrough (not counting fiddling with emulator settings), and maybe an hour of that time involved any notable backtracking.

So, like with Ys and other item-focused ARPGs, there's never much worry about character building, just a well-incentivized goal of getting the best loot (which appears on your guy!) and reaching victory via guile and quick reactions. Controls are mostly well adjusted, both for '87 and compared to the larger Famicom library. Up +/down + A to either use magic or your active item takes some getting used to, but there's little in the way of obscure combat/movement mechanics to complicate things. What I will criticize, however, is the stiff, inconsistent jumping and collision physics. It's admirable of Hudson to test players' ability to time jumps and approach enemies with caution, yet I had way too many close calls where I should have just landed on platforms, only to fall and subsequently retry a section. Regarding enemy hitboxes, these are fine for the most part, but vexing when their attacks bump you back as far as they do. Since Faxanadu is a flip-screen adventure, not a fully scrolling one, this means baddies can and will force you off-screen, prompting extra loading times and enemy respawns which hurt an already precarious balance between affordances for players and the AI alike.

There's way to mitigate getting cornered or too low on health to continue, thankfully, as Faxanadu offers Red Potions, Hourglasses, and other power-ups that let you tank damage, stop time, so on and so forth. Most of the time one should stock up on these at shops in-town, but it's possible to find them out in the wild, either reappearing indefinitely or spawned after defeating a specific set of monsters on the right screen. Better yet, just use magic to avoid risking upfront damage entirely! The spells here evoke their counterparts from Falcom's Xanadu, but are generally simpler, being mostly front-ejecting projectiles and a late-game option which curves and flies upward. Judicious alternation between melee and magic makes the biggest difference in clearing dungeons and traversing the overworld. I would have appreciated more variety in types of weapons, spells, and restoratives on offer, but altogether there's plenty to work with here, especially compared to most Famicom contemporaries.

| "The power of the Hourglass is gone." |

It's by the halfway point—a daredevil trip into the skies, preceding a long and arduous trip through the World Tree's foggy, forlorn trunk full of abandoned sites—that Faxanadu shows its hand, warts and all. This game excels most when rewarding the player's tenacity with a sense of discovery, the feeling of a larger universe than can feasibly be shown. Lengthy hallways inside roots and branches give way to dusty castles possessed by the deranged, where warlocks, monstrosities, and confused soldiers patrol for Elves to slaughter. Each "tower" offers its own set of action, platforming, and item challenges, striving to fully exploit the game's possibility space. I always had a hoot strapping on some Wing Boots, levitating high above foes and hazards (bottomless death pits never appear, thankfully), only to slam right into a miniboss or something cool like that.

See, there's just one (or two, or three) problem(s) with what Faxanadu's, uh, doing here: it rarely if ever captures the tension and complexity of its source material. Xanadu on PC-88 had many flaws of its own, but one couldn't deny the sheer ambition, variety of traps and monsters, and involved leveling + customization Yoshio Kiya and co. managed to squeeze onto those floppies. Here, with limited storage (no Disk System upgrade here!) and a need to accommodate much younger players, Hudson's take on the concept finds itself at an awkward crossroads. The line between regular enemy, miniboss, and boss blurs without confidence. Chikuma's soundtrack, though somewhat catchy and appropriate, struggles to rise above the aural noise reserving sound channels she really needed for her arrangements. A mix of engaging but merely competent platforming and simplistic hack 'n' cast combat makes locations like the Tower of Suffer feel like, erm, suffering. Some truly ill-thought level design comes to mind, too, like mooks patrolling right in front of doors you need to exit and enter (meaning certain death in some scenarios), let alone the lack of unlockable shortcuts or fast travel by late-game.

To further illustrate my reservations, let's look at the keys system, maybe the most belabored aspect of Faxanadu. Many doors throughout the adventure require you to manually equip specific keys (jack, joker, king, queen, and ace) from the inventory, then use them to proceed. Since you can't drop any expendable items at any point, this can lead to accidentally stocking up the wrong type of key, and there's only 8 item slots to work with! So let's say I try selling them off in town, the logical thing to try. It turns out you can only sell specific types to key vendors who already stock them, meaning I'm stuck with early-game items by endgame unless I do way more backtracking than should be necessary. Going in, I honestly thought I'd get more frustrated with the Pendant bug than something like this, but here we are. In terms of which problems are intentional design or just coincidental, I'm unsure where the Pendant's infamous (and seemingly contradictory) damage debuff falls, but Hudson knew what they were doing with keys here. Inventory management, coupled with slow-ass text speeds, can quickly put a damper on one's fun if you aren't careful.

Though Faxanadu is still more intuitive and less guide-dependent than its spiritual predecessor, I find Falcom's game so much more consistent, dedicated to stumping the player while making their accomplishments feel that much more meaningful (and avoiding many aforementioned pitfalls like with keys!). Obtaining better gear and then demolishing them through hitbox cheese is fun, but I wish Hudson could have either added more features to enrich the experience, or taken a bit more time to sand off the edges which remind you this game's trying to evoke Japanese PC RPG jank. For example, where the hell's crouching in this ARPG full of monsters that attack from above and below? Why can't I attack at all on ladders except after getting hit, thus bugging out my hero's sprite and letting me act? With all these omissions and issues working against the player, it's hard not to feel like the latter half of the game becomes a slog. It all starts to feel rushed by the end, especially when fighting the final boss in all its Giger-esque glory. Perhaps the droning, repetitive nature of OG Xanadu is hard to stomach now, yet I find more conviction in that release's design direction than here. Close but no cigar, I feel.

| "Don't have negative thoughts. Remember your mantras." |

I don't hold any production difficulties or inexperience against Hudson staff, despite my hangups, and Faxanadu accomplishes more than it's often given credit. One's moxie in battle and exploration often leads to hidden rewards, or the satisfaction of clobbering bad guys before they ever get the chance to react. Minibosses show up frequently as the story progresses, with each posing a unique problem to solve (will I jump over fireballs or block them with my shield? or how about pinning these jumping eldritch things against the wall to not dodge all the time?). While it can be tedious to backtrack all the way to the beginning or grind for a big wallet early on, doing so grants access to a couple of the best items in the game, rewarding anyone who takes their time to learn the game ASAP and preserve one's life long enough.

Hudson seemed to have a knack for immediately following poor design choices with smart ones; one screen filled with hard-to-hit ranged attackers can just as quickly lead to another with health-dropping fodder! I find Faxanadu pleasantly accessible for an ARPG of its vintage despite the pendulum swinging from quite (sometimes) very good sequences to weak ones. Hit feedback's always satisfying, as is the crunchy but legible audiovisual design. Having just eight items means, in an ideal run, you can stock a bevy of potions and powerful items to seize the advantage, especially when fighting those damn flying bees or disabling bigger guys' means of claiming space. At its best, the game makes you feel empowered through both well-paced encounters and some of the more satisfyingly cheesy strategies one can pull off in an ARPG. Figuring out simply where to go and what to do is also a highlight, thanks to nicely written NPCs throughout the realm giving you hints and clearly delineating questlines.

However, Faxanadu's most convincing strengths lie in the atmospheres it evokes, defying the Famicom's limitations to create something rarely matched in 8-bit xRPGs. Simply put, it looks incredible for an '87 console game. Tile upon tile of ornate details, greebles, and textures found both in pixels and CRT blurs combine to illustrate an otherwise fairly generic world in greater depth. Florid passages transition into harsh fortresses, then heading into the Tree's ethereal insides, without ever feeling thrown together. This game does much better at capturing the interminable, oppressive sadness and claustrophobia of Falcom's Xanadu while providing real variety in environments. (I wish each town looked more unique after Eolis, but I doubt they had enough memory to achieve that.) By the game's finale, I felt that creeping dread on my back which the best gothic adventures provide, somehow captured within the confines of Hudson's simple premise and handiwork.

In a year of superlative action role-playing titans, Faxanadu takes a pratfall or two, desperate to keep up, and I can't help but admire it.

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

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

| The presents were mutilated beyond recognition |

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

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

| Oh what Fun it is to Com |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEGA AGES and Arcade Archives have dominated the Switch eShop's retro re-release scene for too long—now it's Project EGG's turn to share the money fun, bringing '80s/'90s Japanese PC classics back into circulation for today's players. It's a bit questionable, then, that despite all the added quality-of-life features, they've kept Game Arts' Thexder just as comically difficult as ever. I'm going to find it hard to play this without save states now, aren't I. No matter what, anyone keen to try an unforgiving but surprisingly rich action platformer, a computer-bound refraction of Super Mario Bros. that same year, should give this a look-see.

I reviewed Thexder earlier this year while trawling through memories of playing localized and untouched J-PC games back in college, wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.Ghosts 'n Goblins hadn't yet reached the PC-88 by 1985, but its sheer level of brutality finds a fellow traveler in this title. Thankfully it's not as outright misanthropic and impenetrable as Capcom's infamous side-scroller, yet I wonder if it's not too far off. A studio like M2 or Hamster would have included some kind of easier mode or options to favor players (that aren't just saves), but not D4 Enterprises. They're confident that this will hold up well in the people's court, and I respect their moxie. Let's not act too surprised to see *Xanadu selling way better, though, whether because of the Falcom bump or how it's just slower and affable from the onset.

| Robo-Dexter's Laboratory |

Even the slowed-down DOS port of the game, released by Sierra in 1987, slices you in two with a proverbial laser beam before reassembling your sad self in not quite the right order. This may not have the design of a Mario kaizo hack, but it's very happy to sucker in players with a challenging but reasonable first stage before laying down the gauntlet. Level 2 asks a simple question: to shield or not to shield? One can choose to barrel through enemies, losing a mere 10 energy to replenish the barrier. Someone more daring may try and avoid as many enemies as possible, ending the level with no shield use and gaining a free 150 energy and raised energy cap as reward. Each following level begins to feel less like a robotic defense installation, more akin to a series of puzzles testing your resource management and ability to juke the droids into sticking on walls or each other.

Routing Thexder involves figuring out which stages are best tanked with shields or are possible to clear while taking minimal damage vs. the no-shield bonus. This becomes easier the further the player gets because designers Hibiki Godai and Satoshi Uesaka decided to recycle level layouts towards the end of the main loop, albeit with changed tilesets and enemies to keep it all fresh (no recolors!). So while it's as tough to learn as any memo-oriented shooter, there's some lenience here and there which retains the game's first impression of Mario meets Major Havoc and Macross. The only notably slow bits are "boss fights", which take the form of multi-object structures containing enemies within. It's fun to pick off each robot in just the right order to avoid releasing them from their prisons to attack you. These sections get a lot more use out of the plane morph than one might expect, all because you need a focused stream of fire instead of the auto-targeting projectile in mech form.

| Preservation, incubation, what's the difference? |

I was apprehensive about whether or not Project EGG's jump from subscription-based Windows emulation to Switch would shake out, and my worries were far from unjustified. As much as I admire Thexder in its historic context, the game's a hard sell today without offering more invasive ways to alleviate its ruthlessness. Save states are limited to just five slots here, along with a few game speed options which let you play slower or faster at the expense of audio design. Button remapping works very well, but the lack of turbo functions spells trouble in the future (or right now in Silpheed's case, though I need to play that port to know for sure). Including the manual is a nice touch, yet it also highlights the lack of other contextual materials like magazine articles, production materials, etc. There's a lot more D4 could have added to round out the package without using excessive time and budget they understandably would want for upcoming releases.

On the other hand, maybe five save slots and a minimalist approach works fine for this era of J-PC game soft, not swinging too hard towards purism nor revisionism. I think players should have the final say in how a game's played, with developers ideally accommodating multiple audiences' needs through options vs. forcing a one-size-fits-all approach. And it's hard to tell if Project EGG currently sees an opening in the retro games fandom to attract newer, younger players or if they'll lay the commercial onus strictly on aging dads and salarypeople from the '60s, '70s, and '80s who are already familiar with the J-PC library. When the software you're trying to sell is interesting yet somewhat inaccessible by design—front-loaded with challenge and gotcha moments meant to prolong playtime while encouraging the game's community through shared secrets—what can a modern digital distributor really do the bridge the gap in player demographic mindsets?

The EGGCONSOLE releases of RELICS and Thexder feel tentative and spare, very much testing the waters of how far these ancient J-PC legends can evolve to meet EGG's market needs. But I also doubt one can really do more with a game this honest and straightforward, not without designing basically a whole new game via difficulty rebalancing. M2's able to go that far because SEGA and other large firms back them up on projects big and small, whereas D4 and Hamster only have so much capital to buoy their teams. The mere threat of drastic changes turning off long-time EGG players might be enough of a problem to outweigh creating a full-on modern remake (ex. Thexder Neo). It's a tough call for the company to make, but I think they should still try to push the envelope more than this. Something as simple as letting players keep the end-of-level energy bonus even when using barriers, for instance, wouldn't deviate too far from Godai & Uesaka's design. It'd just speed up the average player's learning process, letting them chomp at the later levels earlier.

| Moonlight Sonata |

D4's imperative with EGGCONSOLE, ultimately, is to thread the needle on fidelity vs. accessibility while escaping the chokehold that their PC service's subscription model's kept them in for decades. I've rarely been able to convince anyone to pay upfront for an account, and then buy access to the games EGG carries, vs. just directing folks to emulation and the Neo Kobe packs on Internet Archive instead. Not only is this release a way better value for returning players who no longer have to lug a laptop with them to play Thexder (assuming the Steam Deck can't run the EGG Player, which is likely), but it's a cheaper buy-in for anyone encountering this and similar software for the first time. (Granted, you've always been able to play EGG games without an Internet connection and/or active sub, but that doesn't remove the stink it seems.) Make no mistake, there are worse ways of handling this big an emulation library—AntStream says hello from the bleachers.

I hope and expect this move onto Switch will get Project EGG out of the rut it's been stuck in, and that more will at least try to crack Thexder's tough exterior now that save states are available. There's quite a bit more that the company could have done to improve their emulation package here, so I hope any broadly applicable add-ons to later releases get backported here. It's hilarious how much they've improved on the basic Windows-bound emulation of Thexder, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that EGGCONSOLE's grossly outperforming the traditional PC service now as a result. Well, enough musing. I've got a saveless run to figure out when I'm not thinking about ancient Rom—erm, sorry, I meant Bouken Roman and other weirdo platformers confined to PC and arcade obscurity. Thexder's lucky…it's got a sizable legacy, being the game that sold the PC-88 in '85, and that shines on nearly 40 years later thanks to its solid, addictive design. All these titles coming to Switch now, late as it is, just means I get to see more of y'all try and hopefully enjoy these old standards on their own terms.

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

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

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

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

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

"Chicken, fight like a robot!" blares the cabinet speaker as I generously leave some killbots alive, moving on to the next room. There's no end to them: monochrome sentinels of death, all bunching up along the walls, all waiting to fire. I ready the ray-gun and trudge forward, fingers on the trigger, reflected through the joystick. This continues for untold iterations as the numbers go up, the Evil Otto bounces down upon its hapless allies, and the rhythm of combat multiplies. Everyone has their place here, the guards uncaring for their neighbors and the smiley-faced custodian uniquely aware of this realm's absurdity.

Ok, ok, it's Berzerk, and it's not that complex aside from catalyzing the deaths of two hapless players. Compared to both emerging maze games and shooters like Space Invaders, this one's appeal must have been immediate: unpredictable gunfights, a sassy robotic narrator, and more chaos than something as scandalous as Death Race could have imagined. The origins of the run 'n gun style arguably trace back farther to Tank and its clones, but changing out vehicles for humanoid avatars lets the pacing slacken and rev up more granularly. Crashing into electrified walls becomes more of a threat than colliding with far-off aggressors, who now threaten more with split-second lasers than an opposite player careening into you. So the dynamic's similar but different enough from the motion-full Asteroids, with danger coming from less angles but requiring quicker reactions.

What undoubtedly helped Berzerk survive its encounter with Williams' Defender is the touted "sense of humor" seen with Evil Otto and how it affects players and AI alike. After all, why risk visiting the next dungeon screen and quickly dying when one could just stay put, safe and sound? The danger and necessary push of Evil Otto remains one of the golden age's most iconic symbols, both scary and ironic. And it only gets better when a savvy player sicks the boisterous bounding ball on unsuspecting droids, racking up points while kiting Otto around each arena. Counting score by each enemy's death, rather than players' successful shots, was maybe the smartest move to extend the game's longevity. There's an upper human limit of how long someone's going to traverse one nondescript room after another, but surviving long enough to abuse this scoring mechanic? Why the hell not!

I'd much rather try and master Jarvis' side-scrolling shooter if I'm having to choose between these games (that, and Defender technically started location testing and initial distribution at the start of '81). But there's a simple charm to creator Alan McNeil's attempt at crossing genre lines, evoking the first dungeon crawlers without their labored pace of play. McNeil himself came up with Berzerk's premise based on his own nightmare of robots chasing him through hallways, let alone the memory of security browbeater David Otto haunting the designer from his time working with Dave Nutting Associates. [1] People always talk about how this game feels like wandering through a dreamscape they can't escape, and I think there's some truth to that. On the bright side, it's cool to see McNeil take the early micro-processor lessons learned with Midway's Gun Fight (a recreation of Taito's TTL-chip classic Western Gun). We're talking about the guy who later laid the foundation of Macromedia Director and other technology, so it's unsurprising he could get so much from basic hardware.

Juking bots with Otto and luring them into fences calls an earlier game to mind: CHASE, a derivation of a 1976 BASIC game where players have to crash pursuers into objects and each other [2]. This puts Berzerk in the same conversation as other PC-to-arcade transitional software; in fact, it's one of the earliest examples. It's fascinating how much Stern's 1980 smash success treads the line between hobbyist sleeper hit and a throwback to much earlier media like the Berserker novels and publications like Creative Computing. From here, the tendrils extend towards Robotron and its ilk, let alone a direct sequel in Frenzy. I may be moving on from this weird and seemingly simple curiosity, yet it's going to reappear in one form or another as the '80s arcade era marches on.

Bibliography

[1] Hunter, William. “Berzerk.” The Dot Eaters (blog). Accessed January 1, 2024. <https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/berzerk>
[2] David, Ahl, and Cotter Bill. “Chase (High Voltage Maze) - Cotter.” Creative Computing, January 1976. Accessed via Internet Archive. <http://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_v02n01_Jan-Feb1976> Retrieved on January 6, 2024.

Humanity sleeps in the machine. It gurgles for breath, suffocating beneath smoke and gunfire within the netherworld. I grip the joystick with hands like claws; the sweat feels wrong, like oil on water. Heads-up display signals flare all around my vision as I wrench the exoskeletal warrior through warehouses, space stations, and forlorn caverns. When the foes aren't robots, they're pilots just as feckless and desperate as I. The job is king—morals are optional. Captains of industry march us inexorably towards doom, and I'm just trying to keep my head down, chin up against the rising tide. The harder I fight, the deeper I explore, the more I sense the great chain of being start to fray.

Armored Core…that pit of vitality lying within the most veteran of mercenaries, and an apt title for the series to follow King's Field. From Software staff would tell us they bungled their way into developing this game to begin with, but it's appropriate they'd shift from one dark fantasy to another. Both series deal in obscure, arcane worlds, just with divergent approaches to non-linearity and game complexity. They started life as 3D tech demos before unfolding into realms of mystery and danger hitherto unseen on consoles—the kind of innovative experience Sony hoped would set their PlayStation apart from the competition. And for all the nitpicks and missed potential I can (and will) bring up, it's impressive how effectively this studio captured the one-man-army appeal of mecha media versus other developers' outings at the time. From a simple animation test to one of the studio's core franchises, it's a hell of a leap. [1]

| From this point on, you are…a Raven… |

Mecha action games on the PlayStation weren't in short supply before Armored Core (AC) arrived, though I'd forgive you for believing that. The earliest examples—Metal Jacket, Robo Pit, and Extreme Power—all featured some amount of mech customization and variety in scenarios, but always with caveats. None of them had the storytelling emphasis that From Soft's game introduced. At most, Extreme Power let players choose which missions to attempt first, acquiring points to buy new parts if successful. But that still lacked elements like e-mail chains and running a deficit after overusing ammo and/or failing missions. Robo Pit introduced the extensive parts system within a 3D versus fighter context, and Metal Jacket focused on simpler open-field battles a la MechWarrior. (Though the latter remains maybe the biggest influence on so many mecha games to come, it didn't receive a PS1 port until the same year as Armored Core.)

If anything, I see a lot of commonality between the first AC and Front Mission: Gun Hazard, the latter releasing in 1996 with some notability. Combining the series' heavy geopolitical tone and intrigue with a game loop and structure akin to Assault Suit Valken, Squaresoft's game reviewed well and prefigured the genre hybrids they'd produce for Sony's machine. Critically, they also reworked the parts-as-equipment framework from Front Mission, balancing it with arcade-style pacing and more wiggle room for players wanting to test drive multiple builds. The trouble with mecha xRPGs, then and now, is motivating constant character creation (aka editing your mecha) in order to complete stages, ideally while avoiding damage and long-term costs that could ruin a playthrough. I have no way of knowing if the original AC devs were familiar with Gun Hazard and how it elegantly solves these issues via its mix of complex story, set-pieces, and missions designed to reward creativity.

It's hard enough to make a sci-future this dreadful so enchanting and replayable. Armored Core's semi-linear plot and trickle feed of environmental worldbuilding go far in reifying the player's ascension to ace pilot, a new hero of chaos. People are right to point out the jarring, confrontational "initiation" battle, a middle finger to trends of tutorialization beginning in the mid-'90s. Surviving this teaches one to never fully trust the world they're thrust into, be it the obtuse mecha controls or the machinations of agents, corporations, and other Ravens contracting and challenging you. The fun comes from accepting these additive layers of masochism, a reflection of the decaying worldview which From Soft presents without irony or pomp and circumstance. It's on the player to investigate and understand their predicament. Future series entries add fleeting moments of cooperation and optimism to mitigate the grim bits, but the tone here's consistently muted and adverse. Absent are the triumphant flourishes of Gundam or even VOTOMS, replaced by an engaging but ever-present indifference to the erasure of people and elevation of proxy warfare.

| You have the right…the duty to find out. |

Opening missions in this game settle into a formula of scout, destroy, rinse and repeat, followed by a shopping spree. It's never quite as comfortable as you'd hope; browsing for a new radar attachment after gunning down protesters feels ever so morbid. Nor are you interacting with fellow Ravens during the majority of a playthrough, instead fighting or helping a select few through happenstance. Armored Core keeps players at arm's length from the consequences they wreak upon the world, often chiding them through AI monologues and tetchy e-mail chains. This odd pacing and story presentation lets From Soft transition between unusual missions and plot beats without breaking a sweat. The further you work for Chrome or Murakumo to the other's downfall, the murkier the mystery gets, with ulterior motives of anonymous agents pressuring you into service.

Thankfully there's a decently balanced in-game economy to support the amount of experiments and risk-taking the campaign requires, though not without problems. Buying and selling are 1-to-1 on cash return; you'll never enter the red just through shopping. Instead, the way most players wreck their run is by abusing ammo-based weapons and continuing after failing missions with mech damage. Save scumming isn't a thing Armored Core looks down on, but it will go out of its way to promote ammo-less tactics with energy swords and simply dodging past optional foes. Around halfway through the game, it arguably becomes more important to scour levels for hidden parts instead of relying on the diminishing returns from Raven's Nest inventory. I wish this first entry had done better at keeping the market relevant, but it wasn't to be.

My go-to build throughout the story was an agile, energy-focused quadrupedal range specialist dressed to the nines with secret parts. (If the game let me use the Karasawa with these legs, oh boy would I have been unstoppable!) Sure, there's a lot of fun one can have with beefy machine guns and missile options, but getting the most cash out of missions requires plasma rifles and mastery of lightsaber stabbing to play efficiently. While Project Phantasma struggled to balance the economy back towards non-energy offense, it wouldn't be until Master of Arena that the series largely evened out the trade-offs between common mecha archetypes. For instance, tank-tread mecha in this first game are actually damn powerful due to a lack of movement tricks for the bipeds, but it all falls apart when it's time for platforming or quickly escaping. Bipeds often get the class-favorite treatment in this genre, yet struggle to wield a variety of parts and weapons to handle most challenges this game throws at you later on. That leaves quad-legs builds as the most flexible and resilient option at higher levels of play, a flawed but interesting subversion of what's usually seen in mecha anime and manga. (Ed: Yes, I'm aware reverse joint legs exist. No, I don't use them in a game that punishes jumping all the time. Later AC games handle it better.)

With all these incentives combined, the pressure to learn the classic Armored Core control scheme and physics becomes bearable, if still overbearing. I've come from other tank-y mecha games like Gungriffon, so the adjustment period wasn't too bad for me, but I get why many newcomers stick with analog-patched versions of the earlier entries. Memorizing the timings for boosting before landing to minimize lag, or how to effectively pitch the lock-on reticule and snap back to center, matters more than anything in the first couple of hours. Then add on tricks for circle strafing back away from enemies, often while firing guns or launching missiles, and the combat evolves from awkward plodding into a dance of destruction. And there's no arena mode here to let you practice these techniques in a consistent, scaling environment. A veteran Raven or horse of robots can descend upon you in any of the mid-game/late-game missions, requiring quick reactions and establishing a zone of control (or retreat). It's sink or swim in the truest sense. Past the teething phase, it's easy to return to this control scheme and feel one with the AC, even after years have passed. I won't doubt that full dual-stick analog controls will work even better and enable a longer skill progression, but I adapted to the famous claw-grip style quicker than expected.

| "Pledge allegiance to no one!" |

Any problems significant enough to keep Armored Core below a 4-out-of-5 rating or higher must be deep-rooted in the game's loop and structure; that's sadly true for the level and encounter design here. I'm far from opposed to dungeon crawling in my semi-linear mecha action-RPGs, at least when there's room enough to blast around duels (plus verticality to reduce the claustrophobia). Still, a few too many stages in this debut feel like holdover concepts from King's Field II instead of properly scaled settings to wrangle a mech through. The difference between enjoying "Kill 'Struggle' Leader" and dreading "Destroy Base Computer" boils down to whether or not the story framing is compelling enough to justify zooming through non-descript (though nicely textured) hallways for most of their runtime. Occasionally the designers get clever with metal-corroding gas, inconveniently placed explosives, and other traps to keep the spelunking varied; I had a hoot tearing through the insectoid lairs like I was playing an antique musou game! But later series installments improved these confined missions with more arena-like rooms and affordances to players who make it far in and then can't win due to a sub-optimal build.

If I had to speculate, wide open-ended maps are less common here simply due to hardware constraints, be it rendering ACs and other actors in any abundance (regardless of level-of-detail scaling) or the enemy AI struggling with pathfinding in combat on a broader scale. It's a shame regardless since bombarding installations across water ("Reclaim Oil Facility"), going en guarde with a berserker atop a skyscraper ("Destroy Plus Escapee"), and rampaging down public avenues ("Attack Urban Center") offer some of the best thrills in Armored Core. Objective variety and complexity never reaches especially high regardless of mission category, so just getting to rip up groups of MTs, droids, and ACs goes a long way. Defending a cargo train in the desert starts off humble, then escalates to defeating a full-bore Human Plus combatant interceding on the situation. A series of undersea tunnels and chambers, well-defended and secretly primed to implode, threaten to bury you while avenues of escape close off. A select few dungeon crawls also open up in unexpected ways, particularly those set on space stations where vertical engagements come into play. I didn't think mecha and sewer levels could work, but here I am grinning as I pursue Struggle operatives down waterways or methodically undo their bombs within a rat's maze of air treatment tunnels.

Armored Core rarely has bad missions so much as disappointing or overachieving ones, which makes the finale so uniquely odd. By this point, the entropic cycle ensnaring Chrome, Murakumo, Struggle, and adjacent organizations has caused untold devastation across the earth. Now even the Raven's Nest falls, revealed as the illusory sham of governance it always was. Even bit players in the narrative pitch in, waxing over e-mail about the futility of these conflicts and what's really driving it all behind the scenes. So, with all this build-up and conspiracy baiting, I had high hopes for the last hour, wishing for an epic battle and world-shattering revelations to boot. Sure, I got the latter (if in a minimal, trope-adherent form), but instead of satisfying gladiatorial action, I had to ascend the fucking cubes. Everyone's got a horror story about "Destroy Floating Mines", it seems, and I'm just glad to have survived this much awkward, drawn-out platforming using my quad-leg AC. Squaring off against Nine-Ball afterward isn't quite enough to compensate either, not unless you can have an even pitched fight against this iconic rival and win the first couple of attempts. (The penultimate chambers also reflect poorly on the camera's ability to track fast-moving combatants, even if it makes for an exciting sequence.) I can still appreciate how From Soft didn't explicate too much at the end, instead trying to confound players with interesting questions and non sequiturs in the level design itself. It's all a big joke and we get to grimace through it.

| Shape Memory Alloys |

In conclusion, it's a good thing From Soft nailed all their game loop, distinctive mechanics, and interweaving systems here. The original Armored Core is unfortunately limited with how it challenges players, both in level design and mission pacing. Not having an arena to lean on makes completing the missions with maximum efficiency more of a priority, which can lead to excess retries and scrimping on investments in hopes of affording something better later vs. smoother upgrades in the short term. (I do appreciate how only fighting other ranked ACs within missions makes the Ravens' dynamic more hostile and contradictory, but the game does so little to expand on that angle.) These problems sting less knowing that, as a prototype of adventures to come, this game still accomplishes so much with so little.

Not many series strive to reach a profile this high while teasing players with details out of reach and mysteries about its development unanswered. Anyone invested in the wider world Armored Core hints at, from the shadowy groups running these underground beehive cities to the horrors hiding behind Human Plus, has to read through "data books" (artbooks) and track down magazine previews for scraps. We're only now getting English translations of the artbooks and related articles, all of which are coloring the fringes of the AC universe while only letting trace amounts of humanity through the barrier [2]. And as far as these games are concerned, pilots' backstories and white papers on neural augmentation procedures amount to nothing. Heroes and villains drop in and out of history like mayflies—only shocks to the system register on the scale From Soft's using. We're just along for the ride.

It feels like there's still so much else to analyze here: how the studio crowbar-ed their King's Field engine into handling these pyrotechnics, the peculiarities of Human Plus endings as difficulty modifiers, let alone the timely yet appropriate electronica soundtrack. A lot of PS1 releases from this period struggle to make the best use of their developers' skills, assets, and remaining CD space. I wouldn't say Armored Core succeeds at the latter, using only a few FMV sequences at key points in the story, but it's a remarkably lean and appealing game relative to its own premise. Replays come naturally thanks to multiple Human Plus tiers and the freedom to play all missions upon completing the story (plus making new saves to transfer into Project Phantasma). The controls here, though lacking in finesse, carry forward into a good chunk of the later games, with concepts like boost canceling staying relevant even after the switch to analog. Contrast this maturity with all the pratfalls From Soft made during their King's Field days. They'd learned how to not just lead in with a better start, but retain their creative momentum on budgets larger and smaller with each sequel.

Armored Core represents a coming-of-age for the PlayStation as it entered the midpoint of its lifespan, setting a bar other mid-sized studios could aspire to. Its rough edges hardly mar what I'd call one of my favorite experiences in the system's library so far. Maybe I'm going easier on this one due to my enthusiasm for the genre and the myriad themes this game explores, from cyberpunk dystopia to the malleability of history in the post-modern. It could just be that the core game's so, uh, solid after all this time. I chose not to rely on Human Plus for my first playthrough and that might have helped. No matter how you approach the series today, it's awesome to see it debut this confidently, and plenty of players must have thought so too. The Armored Core series became From Soft's backbone for a decade before the Souls-likes came to replace it, and what AC achieved for mecha games (and ARPGs in general) can't be overstated.

| Bibliography |

[1] Alex “blackoak,” trans. “Armored Core – 1997 Developer Interview - Shmuplations.Com.” PlayStation Magazine. 1997. Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/armoredcore/.
[2] Reddit. “Translations of Pages 103 to 105 from the Book Armored Core Official Data Book.” Accessed January 14, 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/x940dj/translations_of_pages_103_to_105_from_the_book/.