The rose campion, a perennial pink-ish carnation found throughout temperate regions, has long been the study of biologists and botanists, from Darwin to Mendel. Now called silene coronaria, it formerly bore the designation lychnis, associated with a herbivorous moth of the same name, both fragile and humble. In this sense, this duo's unlikely contributions to modern life sciences mirror that of the original Korean PC platformer sharing the moniker, itself a key release for its field. I wish I could more easily recommend Softmax's first release beyond its historic significance, as the game itself is frustratingly unpolished and shows so much missed potential. But like its namesake, one shouldn't expect too much from what's just the beginnings of these ludo-scientists' forays into genres once untenable in this realm.

Video games in South Korea during the early '90s (well before today's glut of MMOs and mobile Skinner boxes) fell into two boxes: action-packed arcade releases and slower, more story-driven xRPGs and puzzlers on IBM-compatible PCs. The relative lack of consoles in the country—first because of low-quality bootlegs and second due to government bans on certain Japanese exports in the aftermath of WWII—meant that home enthusiasts needed a desktop computer to try anything outside the game centers. Anyone in the Anglosphere from that era can attest to so many CGA-/EGA-age struggles with rendering fast scrolling scenes and action, a feat relegated to works like Commander Keen or the occasional shoot-em-up such as Dragon Force: The Day 3. Even ambitious early iterations on JP-imported genres like the action-RPG suffered from choppy performance and limited colors, as was the case for Zinnia. VGA video and graphics accelerators, plus the rise of Windows 95 and GPUs, meant that PC compatibles could finally compete with TV hardware on arcade-like visuals and the aspirations that made possible. Lychnis was arguably the first non-STG Korean home title to herald this change.

Made by Artcraft, a grassroots team led by Hyak-kun Kim (later head of Gravity, creators of Ragnarok Online) and Yeon-kyu Choe (main director at publisher Softmax, leading tentpole series like War of Genesis), this was hardly an auspicious project. Yes, proving that VGA-equipped PCs just entering the market could handle something akin to Super Mario World was a challenge, but they didn't have much time or budget to make this a reality. And that shows throughout most of Lychnis' 15 levels, varying wildly in design quality, variety, and conveyance to players. I suspect that, like so many Korean PC games up through the turn of the millennium, this didn't get much playtesting beyond the developers themselves, who obviously knew how to play their own game quite well. Nor does this floppy-only game always play ball in DOSBox; whatever you do, keep the sound effects set to PC speaker, or this thing will just crash before you can even get past the vanity plate!

Still, the Falcom-esque opening sequence and fantasy artwork, vibrant and rich with that signature '90s D&D-inspired look, shows a lot of promise for new players. Same goes for the AdLib FM-synth soundtrack and crunchy PCM sound throughout your playthrough, with bubbly driving melodies fitting each world and a solid amount of aural feedback during tough action or platforming. There's a surprising amount of polish clashing against jank, which made my experience all the more beguiling. How could a team this evidently talented drop the ball in some very key areas? Was this the result of a rocky dev cycle, perhaps the main reason why Kim and Choe both splintered after this game and brought different friends to different companies? Just as the moth feeds upon the flower, this experiment in translating arcade and console play to monitor and keyboard was just one more casualty that would repeat itself, followed by other small studios making action/platformer/etc. debuts before working towards beefier software.

Lychnis drew in crowds of malnourished PC gamers with its heavy amount of smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling, harkening to the likes of Sonic and other mascots. (There's even a porcupine baddie early in the game which feels like an ode to SEGA's superstar.) Its premise also has a cute young adult appeal, with you choosing either the wall-jumping titular character in knight's armor, or his friend Iris, a cheeky mage with a very useful double jump and projectiles. Either way, we're off to defeat an evil sorcerer hell-bent on reviving ancient powers to conquer the continent of Laurasia. The worlds we visit reflect that treacherous journey away from home, starting in verdant fields, hills, and skies before ending within Sakiski's dread citadel full of traps and monsters. Anyone who's played a classic Ys story should recognize the similarities, and parts of this adventure brought Adol's trials in Esteria or Felghana to mind.

However, this still most resembles a platformer more like Wardner, Rastan, or the aforementioned Mario titles on Super Nintendo. The game loop consists of reaching each level's crystalline endpoint and then visiting the shop if you've acquired the requisite keycard. Pro tip: raise max continues to 5 and lives to 7. Lychnis doesn't ramp up its difficult right from the get-go, but World 1-3 presents the first big challenge, an arduous auto-scrolling climb from trees to clouds with no checkpoints whatsoever. I couldn't help but feel the designers struggled to decide if this would focus on 1CC play or heavy continues usage. There's a couple levels, both auto-scrollers, placed around mid-game which are very clearly meant to force Game Overs upon unsuspecting players who aren't concentrating and memorizing. Your lack of control per jump makes Iris the easy pick just for having more opportunities to correct trajectory, both for gaps and to keep distance from enemies and their attacks. Progressing through stages rarely feels that confusing in a navigation sense, but most present puzzles of varying efficacy which can impede you and lead to retries. With no saves or passwords, nor ways to gain continues or lives through high scores, this journey's very unforgiving for most today.

Thankfully there's only one case of multiple dubiously engineered levels in a row, unfortunately coming a bit early with 2-2 and 2-3. The former's just outright broken unless you play a certain way, having to time your attacks and positioning upon each set of mine-carts as tons of obstacles threaten to knock you off. Someone in the office must have had a penchant for auto-scrollers, which live up to their foul reputation whenever they appear here. (I'll cut 3-3 some slack for having a more unique combat-heavy approach, plus being a lot shorter, but it's still a waste of space vs. a fully fleshed-out exploratory jaunt across the seas.) 2-3, meanwhile, shows how masochistic Lychnis can get, with many blind jumps, sudden bursts of enemies from off-screen knocking you down bottomless pits, and lava eruptions casting extra hazards down upon you for insult to injury. Contrast this with the demanding but far fairer platforming gauntlets in 2-1, 3-2, and all of World 4's surprisingly non-slippery icy reaches. "All over the place" describes the content on offer here, and I could hardly accuse Artcraft of, um, crafting a boring or indistinct trip across these biomes.

What Lychnis does excel at is its pacing and means of livening up potential filler via an upgrades system. Thoroughly exploring stages, and clearing as many enemies and chests as you can find, builds up your coffers over time. Survive long enough, farm those 1-Ups and gold sacks, and eventually those top-tier weapons and armor are affordable, plus the ever nifty elixir that refills your life once between shops. This learn-die-hoard-buy loop takes most of the sting away from otherwise mirthless runs through these worlds, but is unfortunately tied to the game's most egregious failing: its one and only boss fight. Ever wonder how the rock-paper-scissors encounters from classic Alex Kidd games could get worse?! This game manages it by basically having you play slots with the big bad, where one either matches all symbols for damage or fails and takes a beating themselves. Only having the best gear makes this climactic moment reliably winnable, which I think is a step too far towards punishing all players, even the most skilled. It sucks because I kind of enjoy 5-3 right before, a very dungeon crawler-esque finale with lots of mooks to juggle and careful resource management. The ending sequence itself is as nice and triumphant as I'd expect, but what came right before was a killjoy.

I've shown a lot of mixed feelings for this so far, yet I still would recommend Lychnis to any classic 2D bump-and-jump aficionados who can appreciate the history behind this Frankenstein. For all my misgivings, it still felt to satisfying to learn the ins and outs, optimize my times, and somewhat put to rest that sorcerer's curse of not having played many Korean PC games. Of course, both Softmax and its offshoot Gravity would soon well surpass this impressive but unready foundation, whose success led to the frenetic sci-fi blockbuster Antman 2 and idiosyncratic pre-StarCraft strategy faire like Panthalassa. I suspect this thorny rose among Korean classics won't rank with many others waiting in my backlog, not that it's done a disservice by those later games fulfilling Artcraft's vision and promises of DOS-/Windows-era software finally reaching the mainstream. The biggest shame is how fragile that region's games industry has always been, from early dalliances with bootlegs and largely text-driven titles to the market constricting massively towards MMOs and other stuff built only for Internet cafes (no shade to those, though).

Just about the biggest advantage these classic Korean floppy and CD releases have over, say, anything for PC-98 is their ease of emulation. Lychnis remains abandonware, the result of its publisher not caring to re-release or even remaster this for Steam and other distributors. Free downloads are just a hop and a skip away, though none of these games have anything like the GOG treatment. With recent news of Project EGG bringing classic Japanese PC games to Switch, though, perhaps there's a chance that other East Asian gems and curiosities can find a place in the sun once more. Well, I can dream.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023 LATE

no one:
me, slicing tanks outside Polis Massa to asphyxiate those Clones, or leading scrimblo bears through Endor's undergrowth to stab some fascists: "yeah I prefer Lapti Nek, but Jedi Rocks kinda bops too"

2005, a year of great changeover in the mainstream console gaming world. HD systems are just arriving, many developers are adopting extensive middleware (think Source or Unreal Engine), and giants like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts are beginning an acquisition spree. Two victims of EA's consolidation plan were first DICE, the Swedish group behind Battlefield 1942, and then Pandemic Studios of Destroy All Monsters fame, who themselves had been absorbed a couple times already. Separate from all this was LucasArts, the game software division of Lucasfilm which had juggled both Star Wars and original properties for decades. Star Wars: Battlefront and its immediate sequels sprang in some way from the influence of these companies, but its legacy has since been defined by a fanbase eager to redefine and reclaim the series' best aspects.

Battlefront II isn't quite the masterpiece my 4.5/5 rating suggests. The game loop, usually based around command point control or capture the flag, can get repetitive. Neither infantry nor vehicle controls are as polished or responsive as in the best multi-mode multiplayer military massacres. I've got more than a few nitpicks about some level and class designs, plus the instability of Pandemic's Zero Engine on modern PCs. And truth be told, its marquee single-player options, the story campaign and Galactic Conquest, aren't as in-depth as they should be. Yet this remains one of my all-time favorites not just in the genre and source franchise, but simply in general.

Pandemic found a practically perfect balance between accessible controls, involved objectives, addictive gunplay and vehicular combat...the list of "great enough" things goes on. These fundamentals which largely worked in the original Battlefront only improved after a couple more years, alongside the usual audiovisual garnishes. No longer are players stuck ambling across overly-large battlezones, also lacking in secondary items/weapons or class-based techniques with risks and rewards. This sequel delivers on the promises of its predecessor while demonstrating how ambitious a licensed take on Battlefield games can get. Being able to embody anyone from the lowliest Droid soldier to Darth Vader stomping across the hall, often within the same round of play, rarely gets better than this

Take an Imperials vs. Rebels conquest map like Death Star, for example. All these laser-congested lanes, nooks and crannies of teammates globbing into each other, and temptations of jumping over endless pits for speed—they add up into a frantic fight which one can nonetheless master. Chaining killstreaks to acquire upgrades, usually while rolling and hopping between spheres of crossfire and resource control, eventually becomes natural. I'll gladly lob 'nades into the Naboo courtyard, even as I risk drawing fire and the ire of AATs, just so I can quickly snatch those post-mortem power-ups and keep the pressure on after base capture. Wandering the backhalls of Echo Base can be tricky at first, but the end goal of taking that Rebel base from behind them justifies everything.

There's enough nuances lying beneath Battlefront II's pick-up-and-play surface, even in something as arguably tacked on as the story missions. Others have mentioned, time and again, how elegantly the Clone narrator's journey takes us from a patriotic, republican cause to fighting on the side of undeniable, structural evil. This remains fun despite the chilling themes and characters' resignation to process and subservience under Sith order. And yet this doesn't feel like glorification of the Empire because you're ultimately going through the same motions, victories, and humiliations as your opponents. There's something both mundane and admirable in retaking bastions, methodically disabling flagships, and mowing down everything in your path with saber throws and force lightning.

One of the biggest additions in Battlefront II, its space battles, illustrate this effectively. Nothing really changes between each orbital map, all consisting of two main ships flanked by frigates and supplied with endless waves of dogfighters and bombers. But the process of departing the hangar, blasting TIEs outta the skies, and then docking in hostile territory rarely gets old. Combine this with unique objectives in story mode, or modded levels adding these mechanics to otherwise earthbound combat, and you've got what feels like the full essence of Star Wars' iconic armed struggles.

What brings this indelible piece of software a half-star up is the mod scene. A cursory glance shows just the usual suspects you'd find in communities like Skyrim or Counter-Strike: player skins, new game modes, and way too much attention thrown upon the heroes and villains. (I get it, though. Playing as Jedi, Sith, and other big names in-between always feels great, especially thanks to Hero Assault extravaganzas on Mos Eisley.) Look deeper and there's almost too many custom maps and campaigns for single-player and beyond, from excellent recreations of places from the Battlefront and Jedi Knight series to all new, mechanically ambitious works like the ground-to-sky megalopolis Suun Ra. Hell, there's a whole package simply for building a brand new Galactic Conquest playlist entirely from user-added maps! It's sadly a bit fiddly to get this all working, but that's always something EA could fix if they weren't busy forcing DICE to produce disappointing new games chasing after this one.

The aforementioned Galactic Conquest points to the strategic possibilities beyond the light tactical layer already present here. Having to manage and defense multiple fleets and planets, all while balancing your per-turn income against temporary boosts for battles, makes for an engaging time...most of the time. It's when the AI wants to drown you in endless space duels, or simply fail to provide any threat to your planetary march, that I fall back into custom Instant Action sessions. Fan mods can pick up the slack, especially those which appropriate this part of the game to tell a unique plot rivaling what Pandemic made. I feel like there's still so much one can push the Zero Engine, as seen with Dark Times or the oft-discussed fan remasters full of gizmos and doodads. This scene deserves the kind of attention and critique that's benefited better-knowns like Doom for decades now.

I could go on and on and on about what Battlefront II achieves, and what it's meant to me over the years. There's a whole meta to unlocking the Elite badges and proceeding to curbstomp round after round with once puny unit classes. We could simply imbibe the bevy of memorable, often hilarious radio banter heard across each factions' grunts and officers. I have to hold myself back from doing in-depth writeups on the strats and trivia of each stage, whether original or brought forward from the original Battlefront. One cannot simply spend well over a hundred hours, part of it just fucking around on a comically huge recreation of Naboo's Theed City with all its Florentine halls and courtyards, and lack in minutiae and remembrance to share.

If you haven't yet tried classic Battlefront II for some reason or another, I hope that changes in the near-future. A few hours of trying the campaign, Galactic Conquest playthroughs, and some Instant Action will more than suffice to experience this in full. But the ease with which this remains so replayable, despite the sea of similarly invigorating big-team-battle software out there, is commendable. This remains one of my comfort food games, hardly slacking after all these years. It reminds me of a time when we got not just more Star Wars interactive media of note, but when there was still a lot of creative risk and confidence in the franchise's games. You had this, Jedi Outcast, Knights of the Old Republic, Empire at War, etc. vs. mainly Jedi Survivor and the recently middling DICE games by contrast. The era's dearly missed, but not quite missing in action, so long as we're watching those wrist rockets and 360 no-scoping Gamorreans from the depths of Jabba's Palace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was only several months after the release of Half-Life in Fall 1998 that its first major fan mod went viral. As much as that was possible in a pre-social media age, of course, but USS Darkstar became the model for "breakout success" in the early days of GoldSrc. The mod first met the public at the original Half-Life Mod Expo that July, and would release a month later via publisher PC Gamer's magazine. Following in the footsteps of seminal Doom and Quake campaigns like Aliens TC and Beyond Belief, this 1-hour adventure by Neil Manke and friends showed off the potential of Valve's then new 3D engine for amateur creators. It's also a cracking good remix of HL1's tropes and encounters, styled after a certain Xenomorph-ic style of sci-fi cinema and echoing aspects that appeared in System Shock 2 that same year.

The story hasn't much concern for following canon, as we awaken as Gordon Freeman aboard the eponymous spaceship to observe and conduct experiments yet again. However, players are firmly absolved of any culpability this time, as a planetary away team returns with alien invaders in tow, including a chest-burster! There's no grand lore or plot included with USS Darkstar so much as of an Alien(s) mashup using mostly base-game assets, but it was a compelling shift in setting at the time.

Manke's level and puzzle designs also aren't sophisticated as any from the Valve team, but they're more than perfunctory. Early chapters have you procuring weapons and power-ups as expected, retaining the '98 original's survival horror bent. USS Darkstar sticks to the mold of HL1's less action-packed first half, content to work you through vents, elevator puzzles, and other kinds of industrial monkeying around. It excels most when dialing up the uneasy ennui of these degrading environments, much like what transpires on the Von Braun in SS2. There's some fun bursts of adrenaline when protecting scientists from an unexpected Xen soldier, or using low-gravity chambers to bounce around Controller crossfire like I'm playing Ziggurat Vertigo from Quake.

More conspicuous are the added voice lines, mainly to delineate level progression or add some humor where appropriate. Einstein moaning to Gordon about trying to run a PC Gamer freeware game, oblivious to the chaos and doom around them, always brings a chuckle. Sadly the voice direction and mixing are as mediocre as you'd expect from this era of mods, but it's all easy to ignore as you traverse the spider's web of corridors, lab rooms, and infrastructure comprising the Darkstar. I really enjoyed the later labs sequences, involving multiple new routes through limited real estate. And who could forget the awesome Honey I Shrunk the Kids sequence, with a miniaturized Gordon hopping across now giant office cubicles and infiltrating a microscopic computer board to disable ship security? Combined with standard Half-Life combat and mechanics, there's a lot of variety here for such a short runtime.

For as close as this gets to surpassing something like Blue Shift, it's not quite there yet. The opening minutes have you wandering a somewhat arduous maze of Xen zoos and science rooms before the plot actually begins, followed by a retread of these areas. And I don't know if any bugs or scripting errors were simply the result of Half-Life on Steam not being that compatible with old releases, but some later doors and events didn't seem to work that well. One definitely feels the lack of Valve's smooth, unobtrusive conveyance to players. For better or worse, there's more vertical platforming and puzzling here which felt curtailed for most of Black Mesa—a couple sections reminded me of the Interloper chapter, though much more palatable and interesting. I can forgive the jank, though, knowing there's a snappy battle around the corner or excellent attention to detail.

USS Darkstar starts and ends on strong footing despite some mundane or drawn out sequences in-between. It's definitely not that polished or exciting compared to modern GoldSrc projects, but the high level of ambition, design goals, and atmosphere shown here has me excited to try Black Widow's following HL1 release They Hunger. The team's model of producing cover-disc mods for PC Gamer and other outlets was only feasible from the Quake era to before Half-Life 2, but it led to cool experiences like this. It's my first go-around with a single-player HL1 fan work of such caliber, and hopefully not the last. The PS2 port of HL1's scrapped mod-loading feature really must have stung for creators like Manke in retrospect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eons of memes and bantz about many portrayals of, and commentaries on, gods and religion in Japanese pop media all threaten to frame Quintet's debut as a schmaltzy creation myth. The last thing I expected was a translation of Japan's cosmogony into a commentary on the monomyth, hiding its version of the pre-Imperial hero god Okuninushi (or Onamushi) behind a Judeo-Christian façade. But that's the level of creativity and innovation that the studio's founding staff and contractors strived for. Set aside the simple yet subversive premise and you'll still have one of the most fun and clever hybrids in console software history. ActRaiser's influence never traveled as far as it ought to, largely materialized in series like Dark Cloud, yet it's more than earned its cult classic reputation. Not that I'd call this the Velvet Underground & Nico of xRPGs, but it's a valid comparison. Few if any video games marketed for a wide audience tackled such a broad, charged set of themes and sensations in such a formative period for the medium, no matter the imperfections.

As unwieldy as it sounds, this fusion of two strongly contrasting genres—side-scrolling action platforming and the primordial god simulator—likely couldn't have been bettered in 1990. Bullfrog's seminal Populous had only arrived on Japanese PCs in March, and I've found no evidence of PC-98 developers working with Peter Molyneux's blueprint. We know, however, that the founding members of Quintet, having left Nihon Falcom during the development of Ys III, had finished 70% of what became ActRaiser before having second thoughts. Whether or not they'd seen or played a certain PC-based god game is yet unknown. (Ironically, their former employer's own Lord Monarch shows Yoshio Kiya's own infatuation with Western imports like Populous, though that game's an early real-time strategy wargame.) The group's growth and frustrations while working on Ys and related PC xRPGs might have pushed them to do something risky for a console audience they hadn't yet catered to. Why not bring the essence of a complex Japanese PC simulation title to a workmanlike action platformer a la Dragon Buster or Castlevania?

The waxing and waning divine works its wonders amidst spirits and sovereigns. It takes on forms both distinct and recondite, like shadow to light. Beyond the waking minds of souls freed into a bourgeoning world lives the idyllic hero, desirable yet unknowable, a paragon which leads through belief up until that faith is no longer needed or traditional. Such tales of good versus evil, or many shades past, endure across time, often as aspirations, warnings, and the subject matter of popular art and entertainment. It's this fascination with mythology, and what it means to people and their worldviews, which anyone playing ActRaiser (among other games letting you "play god") must engage with.

Now the goal was to evoke that feeling of playing god, a paradox given the player's inability to shape the game outside those possibilities which developers set for them. They compromised with a dual-avatar story, where both a chiseled holy warrior and boon cherubic messenger shape separate but linked sections of the world. Main writer and planner Tomoyoshi Miyazaki wisely chose to represent this god's duality of presence. In the sky castle, we are without form, and the angel merely a presenter for this abstract interface set among the clouds. But it's not long before the player descends, their guiding light inseparable from the extra-textual, animating a statuesque warrior into action, all to smite and vanquish the dark. On the flipside, the winged child soon becomes our vessel with which to reinvent this realm we've conquered, swapping out fantastic inhabitants for mundane, moldable men and women. Both characters exemplify the almighty in ways we can bond to, but never deny questions about the powers, limits, and mysteries behind what's sublime and what's imagined. To "play god" is also to probe one's identity and ability in context.

Though we're ostensibly the alpha and omega, mortality still matters to us, as The Master incarnates on this Earth in a limited extension of being. Nothing in this game holds back from trying to kill you, whether it's insta-death pits and lava or just an odd thing flying from the side of the screen. ActRaiser plays nice, though, particularly in its NA and EU versions with reduced difficulty and added extra lives. Most levels have smartly-placed checkpoints, letting you learn each segment without running out of time that easily. There's only a few collectible power-ups, either for score or health and 1-ups, but finding those breakables and wisely rationing magic use for the tougher fights is critical. Even if you can't ever Game Over for obvious reasons, starting the action stages from scratch can feel crushing, the good kind that encourages skill and concentration. The "fail state" in sim mode comes from your angel losing all their health to enemy attacks or collisions, at which point you can't fire any arrows. Overworld nasties will take advantage of this temporary vulnerability, snatching up residents, destroying homes, and even razing all your hard work with earthquakes (damn those skulls!). All these challenges and setbacks mirror those of the families we're fostering, or even the monsters one slaughters for that juicy high score. It's a piece of humble pie to counterbalance these grand themes.

All this came to mind as I flew from one region to another, enjoying the safe game loop that ActRaiser makes the most of. On their own, neither the action or sim sequences rank with the best in those genres, even at the time. The Master's stiff controls and lack of mobility options (my kingdom for a Mega Man-ish slide!) often don't match the severity of enemy attacks and zone control later on. I'd be hard-pressed to call the town management engaging just on its own, with very few means to affect what villagers build and very straightforward terraforming puzzles. If one really wanted a top-notch, side-scrolling action game for SNES, let alone other systems and arcade boards, then there's no shortage of options. SimCity might not exactly classify as a god game now, but it fit the earliest definitions back when most started playing it on PCs or, of course, Nintendo's enhanced port. It's the mutual interactions between these modes, simple to understand and swap between, which creates that vaunted positive loop of advancement. The game's main coder and director, Masaya Hashimoto, had figured out with Ys that you could mix even a decent graphic adventure and Hydlide-like action RPG to create something special. No wonder it works here!

The salad of once contradictory, now inter-weaving ideas continues with ActRaiser's locales and cultural tropes. Fillmore's mysterious, metamorphic forest of foes gives way to a city-state in the making, with one of the shrine worshipers playing oracle and then martyr for The Master's cause. Way later on comes Marahna, a Southeast Asia-like region whose darkest jungles and ornate temple of evil clashes against the hardy, pragmatic people you guide to self-sufficiency. Enemy and boss designs range across typical European and Asian fantasy faire, from dwarfs and lycanthropes to serpents and tengu, with big bads like the centaur knight and ice dragon playing to regional theme. These entities would seem banal and rehashed from competing games, but regain some staying power when framed via this conflict between them and amorphous monotheism which you embody. One can sense the sensory and conceptual distance between this god and its subjects, either those it subjugates or the civilizations it cultivates. No one prays to you from the comfort of their own homes; all must congregate in shrines to communicate with the great beyond, something they can imagine but never fathom. Only by your actions does the world change, reflecting values of nurture over nature and other Abrahamic virtues. Any dialogue between this universe's denizens necessarily involves upheaval.

In this way, the final level, a boss rush much like any other from the era, becomes more than just content reuse. It's the cataclysm of God vs. gods, a refutation of polytheism. But it's just as likely a nod to the religious lore Miyazaki would have been most familiar with, the Kojiki and its narrative of Japan's beginnings. Following in the wake of Susanoo, that hero of chaos, Okuninushi emerged from exile in the underworld to defeat his evil brothers who had forced him there. In its manual, ActRaiser draws a direct parallel, with The Master having fallen in battle to Tanzra (or Satan in the JP version) and his cunning siblings. Only after a period of recovery does our god return to the world, long forgotten but ready to reassert a moral order of society and positivity. The Master and Onamuchi both face trials, personages, and climactic battles to unite their lands and usher their peoples from prehistory into history. As such, the dynamic between The Master and Tanzra, already Manichean and inextricable by definition, is also a less than didactic allegory for the national myth Miyazaki & co. (and players) were familiar with.

Quintet uses these devices, both subtle and obvious, to motivate your journey as expected, and to pull the proverbial rug out from underneath. Imagine doing all this hard work, slicing and jumping through obstacle courses, then sparing villagers from demonic intervention as you pave new roads and fields for them, only to become invisible, beyond recognition. Onamuchi himself acquiesced to this fate, ceding the earthly kami's rulership of Japan to Amaterasu's heavenly lineage. The concept of divinity you brought to these societies was once pivotal to their survival and eventual growth, a uniting force transcending the chaos surrounding them. But in a stable, almost arcadian state of affairs, this godly example now has each and every human finding faith in themselves and others, not in The Master and its herald. ActRaiser ends with a striking inversion of the game's most iconic cinematic tool, the constant Mode 7 zooming in on each action stage you visit. Finally, after the bittersweet revelation that no one visits any shrines anymore—that your own creation has moved on from you, emotionally and ritualistically—the game zooms out, the continents shrinking into nothing as this reality ceases to consider you, or vice versa.

I was genuinely agape when this happened. The game had shown some forward-thinking use of video games' formal elements, mainly to emphasize the uncanny gulf between the clean user interface and what diegetic actions/consequences the buttons led to. But this moment went well beyond those little touches, demonstrating how Miyazaki, Hashimoto, and others at Quintet sought a novel style of storytelling, moving on from the face-value imitation of manga and anime in previous works. For all its issues and missed opportunities, ActRaiser nails these once one-of-a-kind twists that shake you up, simultaneously indulging in new audiovisual potential while using it to the medium's advantage. These surprises aren't as common as I'd hope for throughout the game, but when they happen, oh do they succeed! Moments like Teddy's bad luck in Bloodpool, the archetypal albatross appearing both in Kasandora and Marahna, and the implied Sigurd-Gudrun couple reincarnated by the world tree in Northwall all stick out here. Everything of this sort is still all too simple compared to ye olde Disco Elysium of today, yet effective as a kind of heightened fairytale in-between the melee and management.

The word I'm looking for is alchemy, the transmutation of ordinary elements into a greater whole. It describes the very compound term ActRaiser, a portmanteau I'd expect to see in a game jam ditty. What distinguished this amalgalm of systems from others around the turn of the '90s was this focus on story, not just another player-fellating genre hybrid for its own sake. It's because this adventure makes a micro-critique of our indulgence in power fantasies, and their relation to founding myths, that the individually unpolished bits you interact with remain fun and worthwhile. Perhaps the harvesting and trading of offerings between the cities is a fetch quest underneath, but it rarely feels that meaningless. I just want to gift the Kasadoran a far-off tropical remedy for their troubles, or clothe the citizens of icy Northwall in wool from Aitos. And yes, the final platforming gauntlet might as well be a greatest hits of the adventure's most irritating design quirks, but damn does it push all your skills and patience to the limit. This potion Quintet's concocted leaves a mysterious aftertaste.

Debut software on vintage PCs & consoles could often vary wildly in robustness. Every developer getting something to market on Day 1 has to learn a newly enhanced architecture as quick as is feasible, a feat many can't achieve. ActRaiser stands toe to toe with ritzier, more sophisticated SNES classics that were still on the drawing board in 1990. Koji Yokota and Ayano Koshiro of Telenet & Falcom heritage, among a host of talented artists, go ham with color schemes that the PC-88 and Famicom could merely have dreamed of, enriching the greebles and decorative patterns of dungeons and biomes. Tasteful use of parallax scrolling, alpha-blending transparencies, and other visual effects works in tandem with clean yet florid art direction, bearing the hallmarks of paperback book covers and Dungeons & Dragons. Ayano's brother took up the mantle of music and sound design, a daunting role considering the SNES' new sample-based sound chip. I'm more a fan of Yuzo Koshiro's orchestral work within the confines of FM synthesis, another tall order for musicians and programmers of the day. But this remains one of the system's most memorable and defining soundtracks, with melodious militant marches and more pensive ambiance in abundance. Figuring out how to cram so many instruments, pitch and volume bends, etc. must have been an ordeal for him. My ears tell me it was worth it.

It's a shame, then, that the Koshiro siblings only helped Quintet again for this game's long-debated sequel. The rest of the company continued to evolve, recruiting new talent to develop more ambitious xRPGs dealing with stories and personalities both grandiose and relatable. Hashimoto and Miyazaki's startup had firmly diverged from their old employers' conservative milieu, and future triumphs like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Brightis, and Planet Laika are testament to Quintet's longevity. Us players, having embodied the holiest in both mortal and supernatural ways, can only look back on the studio's works and progeny, subject to critical reverence and dismantlement alike. Somewhere, out in the cosmos, The Master could be liberating new planets, or perhaps dooming them to the curse of civilization we're all too familiar with. That builder's spirit, a lathe of heaven…it's rarely if ever about reaching the end, but savoring the stops along the way, those flips in perspective. ActRaiser toys with players and the perspectives offered to them, engrossing us in the champion's cause while suggesting that this isn't the best of all possible worlds—just the one we must cherish.

Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to all the gratuitous changes I'm spotting in ActRaiser Renaissance. The most I can gather is that its deviations can't harm the original ex post facto. Until next time, I'll just be listening to Fillmore's FM-synth beta version in the green room.

A duck walked up to a lemonade stand, and he said to the man, running the stand, "Hey, got any grapes?" (CW: old YouTube Poop humor) MECC, those pioneers of edutainment software from the former Silicon Valley of the Twin Cities, had a difficult task in the early-'70s: getting kids familiar with computing before the rise of personal computers. Their earliest and best known work, the perennial favorite Oregon Trail by Don Rawitsch & co., managed to spread across the United States over the decade—first in Minnesota, then in magazines and BASIC program publications. Meanwhile, this 1973 business game wouldn't have as much luck until later. Lemonade Stand remained a regular offering at local MECC-serviced schools until the consortium ultimately chose the new Apple II platform as their flagship microcomputer standard in '78. It took only a year for Charlie Kellner to port Bob Jamison's soft drink sales simulator, and Apple was so impressed they began bundling the game with new units via Applesoft BASIC catalogs.

Lemonade Stand became a staple on Woz & Jobs' iconic people's computer, either as an activity for one classroom to a PC, or just another doodad at home. It's the first notable translation of Hamurabi's numbers game into a simpler, more immediate package, among many others up till today. While that '68 precursor evolved over time through successors like Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio, Jamison's take on the concept meant distilling its profits-and-losses text interactions and formulas to their essence. We're not planning for the survival and growth of a Mesopotamian city, just trying to run daily profits and manage assets for the local beverage counter. All the player's worried about are how many drinks to make, how many ad signs to buy, and how much to charge customers for a cup. It's as straightforward as it sounds, with only the occasional thunderstorm or street market threatening your sales.

Yes, this sounds as simplistic and repetitive as it is. Maybe that's the point, though. Running shop isn't as glamorous as it looks, even in this most accessible form. Players merely need to hunt and peck some keys, then watch the results fly by. There's some cute lil' intermissions for each new day (or inclement weather), accompanied by beeper sound arrangements of tunes from Singin' in the Rain and other classics. By and large, though, the game's beaten once you eliminate obviously bad or sub-optimal mathematical choices, eventually finding the optimal sales formulas for each scenario. Doing this on your first go, all within 12 days in most versions, is a bit more of a challenge, but irrelevant when it's so easy to just start over and steamroll past the RNG for a high cash total.

Back then, even this all-ages rendition of the resource management experience first digitized in Hamurabi would have seemed tricky, or at least addictive. It promotes a 1-to-1 narrative of modern capitalism as rational, mostly predictable, and viable at any rung of society. After all, if a mere kid can solicit this much money from passers-by on the sidewalk during a heat wave, then what's stopping you from making it onto Shark Tank, huh?! Well?! Let's just overlook any possibility of, oh I don't know, selling a bad product while your competitors run you out with any mixture of better or more cunning practices. Lemonade Stand doesn't wants its K-6 audience to consider bad guys robbing your startup business, or the HOA banning this (and garage sales, and solar panels, and [insert cool thing here]) entirely. Nice sentiments are nice, but trying to sugarcoat capitalism only works for so long. It's one thing if I'm playing a hyper-detailed and demanding economy sim, of course. I never expected any trenchant critique of, or answer to, the social-economic hierarchy failing us for the benefit of a few. MECC themselves would do that way later with Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, thankfully.

It's no secret that the lemonade stand's been a trojan-horse metaphor normalizing the American Dream to kids for who knows how long. The concept, its connotations, and all that pop culture imagery was practically inescapable for me, growing up in sunbaked suburban Texas. I never ran such an establishment, being too shy and awkward to exercise that entrepreneurial spirit still reinforced today. Moreover, it seemed increasingly irrelevant—theoretically sound, but way harder than it looks in practice. Girl Scout cookies are the closest equivalent I see in my area nowadays, and it's telling how the most successful kids only sell those thousands of batches because it's their parents' side-gig. The myth of the all-American lemonade stand and its variations dates back to a pre-Internet, pre-9/11 era of good feelings and busy neighborhoods which I've only had the smallest taste of as a late millennial.

Emulating this now is easy-peasy thanks to the Internet Archive. I played this on lunch break, even knowing pretty much exactly how it would go. The more interesting thing is to imagine those coat-swaddled students piling into class, early on a snowy Midwestern morning, expecting the same 'ol usual as their teacher introduces this odd monitor and keyboard to them all. The CRT's green glow fades into view, the floppy disk drive whirrs excitedly, and this impressionable set of youngsters get their first peek into the Information Age at their fingertips. Lemonade Stand always worked best as an educational tool, letting everyone share this technology which you once needed a teletype and printer to enjoy. By selling these games and Apple IIs to so many faculty, MECC themselves promoted a unique edu-tech model that itself mirrors the allegory of the kid's streetside booth. I'm glad to see that history's vindicated the story-driven, more ambiguous paradigm of Oregon Trail and other adventurous software, but I think this game represents the organization's classic era best. Pixel pedagogy would only go up in design efficacy and ambition from here, not that it's bad place to start—just one that's happy to date itself, a self-deprecating lesson if any.

I watch the funny cacti boundin', gyrating on screen, racking up points faster than a day trader, and I just think they're neat. /marge

Other reviews have pointed out how Saboten Bombers takes after Snow Bros. or the much earlier Bubble Bobble mold of single-screen elimination platformers. To me, knowing a few things about NMK's catalog, this brought something like Buta-san to mind first. The developer was no stranger to iterating on notable contemporaries like Bomberman, having removed that series' mazes in favor of open-range puzzle combat. Now we have a more conventional take on the genre, albeit with its own unmistakable zest. Simply put, filling the screen with balls of explosive fun couldn't be more pivotal and delightful than in a game like this.

Those '80s pigs' carefully-timed bombs are traded in fun for chaotic physics and the (relatively) unique mechanic of traveling within your projectiles. It's a risky and rewarding proposition to the player: do you lob the balls from a comfortable position, never getting into the thick of it, or is riding into the fray to score higher and faster more your thing? Saboten Bombers does a great job of letting players adapt to the cadence of each stage, allowing both safety and surprise attacks on these floral & faunal interlopers. Much like the whack-a-mole rhythm found in Buta-san, most foes tend to waddle around and languish until finally prepping any attacks, so the difficulty curve here is also friendlier than you'd expect for an early-'90s cabinet game.

Trouble is, there's really not a lot of variance in play and content to justify the length for a 1CC, or even just feeding through to the end. Clearing Buta-san takes scarcely more than 15 or so minutes, yet this can go past an hour even with quick, skillful tactics. One can get a vertical slice of this '92 bonanza in less than 300 seconds, and a lot of repetition sets in around the 25 to 30 minute mark. Of course, I'd never play something like Saboten Bombers simply to see all the major enemies, settings, and situations it throws at you. This genre's all about taking big chances for big prizes, and so the adrenaline and unexpected humor in this particular game shores up these other problems. It's hard to really hold the few types of baddies and predictable stage layouts against this ROM given it's best played and learned in spurts.

NMK almost always had to punch above its weight, making idiosyncratic forays within a market often dominated by Taito, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, etc. So it's cool to see all the little details they crammed in here which liven up an already cute and inviting action-platformer. Each critter's got smooth, stretchy animation with tons of frames and rare idle variations. The color palette's rich beyond its years, looking like something made for Sega Saturn later in the decade. And while Saboten Bombers wisely avoids shoving in huge sprites for the sake of it, every design's readable at a glance and has plenty of meaningful detail. So even if an expert playthrough will end up repeating itself, all this meticulous production ensures it won't feel that stale.

Add in two kinds of boss stages, a ridiculously detailed (if opaque) scoring system, and one of those crunchy, catchy PCM-only soundtracks for a delicious time overall. Maybe there are more polished examples of this style of scrappy screen-clearing software snack. I'm not yet experienced enough with this era to highlight them, though, so any bit of cruft I found here is possibly more palatable as a result. What can I say other than that Saboten Bombers nails both the essentials and many extra you'd hope for in anything this straightforward? Sometimes all you need are pyrotechnics, pizzaz, and wacky fruit collecting all inside the family restroom. These electronic eudicots have nothing better to do than trash the place, and I'm all here for that!

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023

What should one expect from a JavaScript game jam exercise less than half the size of a mid-'90s Doom WAD? That's the question Phoboslab and other js13k participants try to answer each year. Some contest entries successfully provide a full game, often a puzzler like Road Blocks or something more adventurous like Greeble. Minimal logic, procedurally generated assets, and ingenious reuse of game systems can go a long way in reducing your program's size. But there's also something to be said for demaking a larger, well-known title into something pushing the limits of this coding paradigm. That's something Q1K3 accomplishes with aplomb. It's not even the first throwback FPS to rank high in a js13k roster, but only this one's received a Super Special award just for its technical achievements.

Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!

In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.

There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.

If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two years before the birth of my favorite PBS documentary series, two monumental arcade shooters released in Japanese game centers. We mostly talk about Namco's Xevious today, but that's not to say Taito's Front Line is just a footnote. Real-time games had toyed with replicating the modern ground combat experience before, from Konami's tank excursion Strategy-X to the more tactical, stealth-focused Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner. The former stuck true to the reflexes-driven loop of contemporary vehicle action, whereas the latter hinted at a more realistic approach, boiling the essentials of wargame combat down into an accessible format. It's really Taito's game that first united vehicular and infantry play into a cohesive whole, albeit with many rough edges and quite the jump in difficulty.

Front Line stars a non-descript 20th-century doughboy thrust into the action, with no squad or commanding officers to lead you through the battlefield. This front observer's got just a regular automatic rifle and seemingly no end of grenades, but also an aptitude with commandeering armored cannons on treads. Fighting through interminable waves of conspicuously Axis-like troops and juggernauts requires players to manage their distance, time shots and lobs correctly, and find a sustainable rhythm in the heat of battle.

I make this sound all too simple when it really isn't. Each loop, from the starting woods to the enemy HQ's boss, demands concentration and, often, the kind of luck any frontline soldier hopes for. One can tangibly feel the do-or-die atmosphere of battlefields even in a game as early as this. You won't ever find me calling this "gritty" or "visceral", but the simple audiovisuals and play dynamics mask a somewhat effective depiction of the entropy and senselessness found in a mid-'40s skirmish.

Front Line's creation is usually attributed to one Tetsuya Sasaki, but sources for this escape me. The most prolific person in games with said name worked at Alfa System as a producer, in fact. Whoever developed this '82 board sure didn't have the prominence of Tomohiro Nishikado. Ever since his most famous work Space Invaders, the corporation had deal with naught but imitators and less noteworthy successors to that missing link between the shooter and ball-and-paddle genres. A refresh was due...but how to accomplish it?

Adopting a loose WWII setting, with players controlling a G.I. fighting alone and within either light or heavy tanks, helped separate this game from the crowd. The critical and commercial success of two distinct but rigorously designed arcade shooters, this and Namco's sci-fi classic, set a precedent we see in triple-A shooters today. In one corner sit the futuristic, generally single-mode action of Vanquish or Returnal. In the other resides all those (alt) historic combat titles, from ye olde Call of Duty to everything with a Tom Clancy label slapped on.

Unlike Xevious, however, there's a few too many missteps and needless frustrations throughout Front Line which hold back its potential. First and foremost are the graphics themselves. Character sprites and environments all stick out without becoming garish, but it's often hard to distinguish enemy shots from your own, especially because all gun-fire dissipates after a split-second of travel. Just as loathsome is how the game handles scrolling: you have to move way too close towards the screen edge before the playfield adjusts, meaning AI soldiers or tanks can get cheap shots in on you as soon as they appear. The player's neither able to jump or dash out of the way when a potshot's heading their way, nor is the walking speed all that fast to begin with.

I'd forgive Taito's team for this decision if you could survive more than one hit, but that's just not the case. So this adherence to one-shot-and-you're-dead verisimilitude crashes right into the reality of stiff, limited player agility which itself doesn't reflect what this soldier's likely capable of. Keeping track of crossfire works great when you're in the middle, but definitely not when this game forces you towards the edge. Loathe those tank hitboxes, too, though the ability to cheat death through a quick ejection removes most of the sting there. After that, it's just a frantic jog to the nearest undamaged hunk of metal, assuming nothing guns you down in the meantime.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had no choice but to use said scrolling technique to make Front Line work within hardware limits of the era, though. Both this and Xevious crested new highs of on-screen color, sprite processing, and fluid action that impressed Japanese audiences. They couldn't have had more different approaches, though, with Sasaki's vision of a dour, muddy and torn warscape contrasting hard against Masanobu Endo's preference for green plains, sleek metallic bases, and the Nazca Lines. Anyone would have noticed similar audio design between the games, though, trading out melodic chiptunes for repetitive, dehumanized SFX and short jingles. These developers understood how to strike a balance between highlighting their products on the arcade floor and keeping players immersed without annoying their senses. In short, I'd rather expose my eardrums to all the shrill footsteps and explosions here than 1942's insufferable drill march.

Likewise, the spartan game loop used in Front Line feels tuned to an extent rarely found in Golden Age designs. This unfortunately works against players more often than not due to the scrolling problems, all because the computer fighters can handle it better than us. Yet I get a kick out of rotating that dial (or analog stick in my modern MAME environment), then letting loose bullets and pineapples on these bucketheads. There's much joy here in managing clumps of foes, weaving between their projectiles, and mastering these early but responsive twin-stick controls. Actually surviving to the end of a loop is still way too hard for comfort, but I can understand why this became so popular with Taito's domestic market at the turn of '83.

Front Line may lack the variety, evocative world-building, or fully intuitive playability of its close competitor Xevious, but I still recommend trying it to understand the roots of the history-futurist divide in shooter games persisting today. Here was evidence that Taito's new and veteran creators could confidently emerge from the specter of Space Invaders and Qix, soon followed by other divisive experiments like Chack 'n' Pop. Hints of the following year's Elevator Action also crop up in this predecessor, too. For example, jumping out of tanks after being hit to avoid the explosion parallels frantic hopping between shafts to find cover from henchmen. Hell, that even sounds like a distant inspiration for Metal Slug's escape hatch mechanic.

Like Namco's similarly beloved '82 blaster, though, this arcade icon made little headway overseas, with North American and European arcade-goers rebuffing these more skill-oriented shooters. (I wish the same excitement they had for Konami's Scramble or Super Cobra extended beyond.) Western gamers instead cottoned on to more contained twin-stick standouts like Robotron 2084, and eventually to SNK's Ikari Warriors once this control paradigm had become familiar. Even so, this early innovator would itself reach us in Capcom's more popular Commando, helping to popularize difficult action-packed World War faire in arcades and at home.

You can find Front Line in some recent company compilations these days, or just fire it up in MAME like I did. The dual dial interface maps fairly well to a DualShock 4, among other gamepads, and the game's hard enough that I won't fault anyone for needing save states (especially since there's no continues!).

For the people, it was just another exhilarating day, punching and rocketing through a deformed, deranged B-movie. For a decorated Pangea Software, this was maybe their most passionate, prestigious creation. Brian Greenstone and his frequent co-developers had the notion to refine their previous Macintosh action platformers, Nanosaur and Bugdom, into nostalgia for cheesy, laughable Hollywood science fantasy films. As the 2000s got started, this studio wasn't as pressured to prove the PowerPC Mac's polygonal potential, but Otto Matic still fits in with its other pack-in game brethren. All that's changed is Greenstone's attention to detail and playability, previously more of a secondary concern. This Flash Gordon reel gone wrong doesn't deviate from the collect-a-thon adventure template of its predecessors, yet it delivers on the promises they'd made but couldn't quite realize. Greenstone had finally delivered; the eponymous hero had arrived in both style and substance.

Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincial UFO bait humans awaiting doom, and this dorky but capable android who kind of resembles Rayman. Start a new game and you're greeted with something rather familiar, yet different: simple keyboard-mouse controls, hostages to rescue, plentiful cartoon violence, and a designer's mean streak hiding in plain sight. The delight's in the details, as Otto has an assortment of weapons and power-ups with which to defeat the alien invaders and warp these humans to safety. It's just as likely you'll fall into a puddle and short-circuit, though, or mistime a long distance jump-jet only to fall into an abyss. What I really liked in even the earliest Pangea soft I've tried, Mighty Mike, is this disarming aesthetic tied closely with such dangers. I hesitate to claim this mix of Ed Wood, Forbidden Planet, and '90s mascot platformers will appeal to everyone (some find it disturbing, let alone off-putting), but it's far from forgettable in a sea of similar titles. It helps that the modern open-source port's as usable as others.

The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.

So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!

Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.

Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.

I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.

And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.

Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.

Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.

The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023

At the turn of the 1980s, Data East wasn't much of a big player in the Japanese video arcade market, having mainly released clones of recent titles like Space Invaders. Their clone Astro Fighter triggered a legal fight with Taito over claims of IP violation due to its similarities. Thankfully such a fate never hung over HWY Chase, despite its obvious resemblance to something like Galaxian from the year before. Rather, this kit-bashed take on both SEGA's Monaco GP and Namco's aforementioned early shooter would itself usher in the DECO Cassette System, the earliest successful inter-changeable arcade board/PCB architecture. On top of that, it's just a fun, thrilling thing to play in small bursts.

How appropriate that this humble but well-executed blend of endless racing & combat should arrive in a similarly minute form factor. Arcade operators no longer had to swap boards in and out of the cabinet housing to switch programs. Now you could let the DECO tape loader read data for a couple minutes and then your game's up and running! This brought many technical difficulties and cut corners with it, as many North American arcade techs and owners lamented, but this groundbreaking, relatively low-cost platform paved the way for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and other successors. Preserving said tape games in MAME has been a struggle, with some notables still left to recover and make playable. So it’s good that this early genre hybrid, predating Spy Hunter and other better-known examples, is as easy to run as I’d hope.

HWY Chase itself must have made for quite the system seller. You've got the usual suspects: chunky but colorful Golden Age pixel designs, formations of enemy vehicles to blast through, and a highway full of hazards both innocuous and truly threatening. Data East's developers had already made some important strides from their earlier non-DECO games that year, with this title having multiple screens in multiple settings to keep the action well-paced and varied. For example, going from a sunlit paved road, held back by well-armed four-wheelers, to a dark, headlight-lit tunnel with autos trying to collide with you never gets old. It's really that most simple but elaborate kind of composite hybrid you'd hope for at after the '70s' pure and repetitive game loops. Hitting high scores, dodging both bullets and blowouts...pair that with solid audio and busy but detailed graphics for one hell of a debut.

It wouldn't be long before Data East pushed beyond these comfortable limits to make innovative software like Flash Boy or even something unusual like Manhattan. Still, I'd give this a go if you're looking for a more unusual but accessible riff on the big boys' static shoot-em-ups from that period. Before works like Scramble and then Xevious radically changed notions of what an STG could be, this was more than enough to keep the cabinet busy and hone your reflexes on. I've found myself revisiting a couple times already.

"Peter, which is better: Antz or A Bug's Life?"
"Doesn't matter, Uncle Ben; Bugdom's better than both!"

If Nanosaur was the standard-bearer for Apple's rescue, then this 1999 pack-in pint-size platformer was their marketplace mascot. Pangea Software had delivered them one impressive playable demo, and it stood to reason they'd ask for another. But this go-around would be different for the developer, with lead coder and designer Brian Greenstone had a choice to make. As Cadensia mentioned in her write-up, either he'd keep his current job helping Apple's QuickDraw 3D team, or he and his contractor co-developers would make a successor to their '98 game as bundled shareware for the next generation iMac. He chose the latter, for the better it turns out. (Considering he'd just about bailed on Mac software publishing entirely prior to Nanosaur, all because of Apple's managerial incompetence and imminent failure, this amount of caution makes sense.) Rollie McFly's quest to save the titular 'dom from King Thorax's red ants and accomplices became another windfall for Apple and Pangea, the kind of game even a picky Steve Jobs could feel proud of. Still, I felt a bit of fatigue and disappointment after finishing my playthrough, wishing it had been more of a leap in polish and consistency.

Today it's a solid romp, more ambitious than its predecessor; it also hits higher highs and lower lows. Playing it now's pretty easy thanks Iliyas Jorio's modern PC/Mac port, too. Compared to Nanosaur's 20-minute single stage, Bugdom puts you through 10 untimed ones, with three of them mainly focusing on boss fights. To account for the longer playthrough, players get three save slots, plus the usual assortment of tweaks and control settings found in other Pangea works. Our goals aren't all that different from those games, either: collect rescue the trapped ladybugs, dodge or destroy the realm's disgruntled inhabitants, and use items like keys or power-ups to reach each level's end. But I think Greenstone's able to recontextualize these fundamental elements appropriately, keeping his earlier games' arcade-style antics while opening up the world you explore through both layout and mechanics.

Players start under a blue sky amidst grasses, fungi, and a healthy forest of dirt and foliage. Bugdom manages to cycle through several types of environments, so it's apt that we learn the controls, game loop, and objects of note in a friendly setting. Rollie's most useful technique, beyond just a basic jump and kick, is his Sonic-like ball roll (pun intended), a move that lets the plucky pill-bug dash across most areas in a flash. Careening into enemies damages them, and I had a lot of fun just zooming off of hills and cliffs to clear gaps or leave clumps of baddies in the dust. It's overly sensitive to analog controls on my gamepad, however, making a case for manipulating him and the camera with keyboard & mouse. Unlike Greenstone & Harper's earlier designs, this game does a much better job of using said peripherals, which now included Apple's infamous Y2K USB mice. Both configurations having such pros and cons is an improvement for sure, as the keys-only approach in Mighty Mike and company was less comfortable. I didn't feel a lot of jank or awkwardness moving Rollie around these environments compared to the raptor or knock-off G.I. Joe in those precursors.

However, it's when you reach the water taxi and dragonfly levels that Bugdom shows off its less than pleasant side, starting with hit-or-miss collision detection. The opening two rounds only required that players get through doors and light sections of water or trenches, with little precision platforming needed. Moving into the mosquito swamp complicates things, as fish leap into the air and can easily one-hit-kill you with all their aquatic speed. Getting a token and riding the silt strider's quite fun, but also noticeably chaotic due to a large hitbox and, sure enough, misleading level geometry you can get caught on. Thankfully it goes both ways, as no enemy's gonna knock you off this ride easily. Same goes for the next map, a twilight flight in a garden where humans trample and caterpillars crawl through bramble. Greenstone wisely gives players an invert toggle for the dragonfly section, which is a nice change of pace from dodging huge feet and kicking spear-toting, rock-throwing ants in the kisser.

Collision issues also crop up with combat and the momentum rolling, which isn't too much of an issue until later in-game. See, many of Bugdom's foes take multiple hits to defeat, a given since Rollie's more about agility than pure offense. Continuing the circle of life in this violent manner often leads to tense close-quarters combat, whether it's dodging flies with boxing gloves amidst a maze of deadly Pikmin-esque slugs, or eventually manipulating Thorax's fire-breathing soldiers into detonating cherry bombs around them. The player could try and just kick the whole time, as reliable as that is, but there's extra risk & reward from headbutting the baddies in ball mode, which even lets you sink them into deadly water, honey, or magma. Hell, the final non-boss level punishes players for not punting troops into the fiery goop, as killing them on land just lets their ghost come back to haunt you! Learning how to deal with aggressors while platforming and exploring each maze keeps the pace up, only devolving into molasses towards the end.

After the game's first half concludes with an initially confusing but thrilling dogfight against bees as you shoot down their hive, Pangea starts to seriously challenge anyone who's hoped for a gauntlet. The hive's insides, now wrecked and abuzz with angry apidae, present a series of tunnels, molten honey caves, and dead ends where you must jump on conveniently placed plungers to bomb your way open. This had some irritating, less than clear moments—namely how landing in the sweet stuff ends your life, but grabbing an invincibility drop lets you wade through for a time—but otherwise I consider this Bugdom's finest 15 minutes. The difficulty's just right, and Greenstone wrings a lot of blood from the level's concept, with hordes of drones kamikaze-ing you in vain while you snoop out both hostages and lucky clovers for extra points.

By this point I'd gotten a couple hours in and could really appreciate the audiovisual splendor, at least for the hardware Pangea had to work with. 2nd-gen iMac desktops and laptops weren't a huge leap in power or functionality over the previous year's models, but Bugdom was built to push ATI's newer Rage Pro and Rage 2 GPUs, as well as increased color depth on these displays. Sure, the vibrant hues and more rounded modeling wasn't all that unexpected from a high-end N64 platformer like those this one measures against, but who am I to complain? Kids saw these memorable critters and a decently realized world at a higher resolution without compromises, stripped from the fuzzy TV signal defining console peers. I can even forgive the short draw distance here, as it's improved over Nanosaur and extends far enough to facilitate fast rolling without bumping into everything. Mostly. There's also generally better music and sound design, from jaunty jigs and polkas at the beginning to moodier marches and electronica as one reaches deeper into the evil king's dominion. I vaguely remember fiddling around with a store demo version back when my old man brought to the local Apple store, immediately taken with how much it resembled and evoked the Dreamcast games I was enjoying.

Sadly this level of quality doesn't quite last through to the adventure's conclusion. I can appreciate the increased steps to completing every threatening area across Thorax's ant hills, with so many bombs to explode and dodge while evading those intimidating cockroaches and Floormasters fireflies. But it's here where Bugdom turns rather mean, not providing enough 1-ups and other pickups to compensate for abrupt first encounters with these puzzles. Nor are there a lot of checkpoints to prevent needless runbacks, something I rarely had a problem with earlier. It feels like Pangea fell into that classic game dev trap of testing earlier content with less experienced players, camouflaging the more unfriendly bits later on as testers had practiced so much they'd fly past said tough spots. Perhaps they went a bit too far in demonstrating Thorax's power, with such recalcitrance manifesting as overstuffed rooms with a few too many things going on.

The penultimate stage really goes off the rails, though. It starts off fine, introducing firefighting puzzles where you must locate and turn valves to quench the deadly embers. But then come the Tarzan leaps over lava, beset by unclear jumping angles and timing. I only had to restart any level once before this after biffing it right at the last anthill above-ground, but I had to end this last stretch early rather than suffer several loops of deaths I felt were unwarranted. Moreover, the player's actually punished for using the level's gimmick without prior experience, since new water pools can prevent you from breaking open nuts lying on the floor and thus getting extra score and power-up items. Having to route the best, least risky path through these miniature Moria is just asking too much on a first run. At least the final boss fight's much better, as Rollie just has to get Thorax all soggy via the broken garden pipes and then headbutt him for victory. Contrast that with level 7, the Queen Bee duel, which quickly becomes an unintuitive slog as you try to spin into her abdomen while staying out of honey globs which slow you down. Bleh…what a messy climax to a once spick-and-span undertaking.

Ending Bugdom on such a sour note means I can't rate it as high as I'd hoped, but I'm hardly at a loss for praise elsewhere. Adapting the appealing parts of Mighty Mike and Nanosaur into a mascot platformer took Greenstone & co. much longer than previous projects, eight months vs. a few at best. And I think these efforts pay off in a sometimes frustrating, but generally satisfying small-sized sojourn. It soon graced the raster fade-in of monitors in bedrooms, computer labs, and trend-chasing venues like museums across North America, sustaining plenty of attention. Pangea made so much profit and mindshare from this classic of Mac gaming that Greenstone could effectively run it full-time, no longer having to make his shareware titles when free time or contracting allowed. The new millennium saw not just Bugdom 2 for Apple's long-awaited modern operating system, but Pangea's next take on the action-platformer adventure with Otto Matic, among other early Mac OS X notables.

In a way, Bugdom was Mac OS' most accessible swan song—far from the esoterica of modding scenes for Marathon and Escape Velocity, the literary depths of Riven and Obsidian, or the now aging but ever present HyperCard scene that early-to-mid-'90s Mac owners subsisted on. Whereas Pangea's earlier dino romp dovetailed with an unexpected revival of the Apple brand, Rollie's handsome have-at-you with the king's unending formicae presents the Cult of Mac's commercially coherent legend, with Jobs returning hope to a land ransacked by corporate hatchet-men and the PC world invading and overriding this ecosystem. I'd like to think of Rollie less as Jobs, though, more so Greenstone taking on the visage of mascot platformer classics to stretch and refine a winning formula. I only wish that he hadn't feel this obligation to remake the same game so much, even if something as "out there" as Xenocide on Apple IIGS could only have worked all those years back, before genre codification mattered to more players.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023