The death of AA games has been (slightly) exaggerated. The folks at Teyon, makers of those Heavy Fire games you see littering the shelves at GameStop and that godawful Rambo game from 2014, have followed up their surprisingly good 2019 effort Terminator: Resistance with another surprisingly good FPS adaptation of a different 80’s sci-fi action film franchise.

Rogue City was clearly made with a lot of love of respect for the original and sticks close to its vision of a comically over the top retro-future dystopia. You can arrest a guy who will thank you for it because it means he gets guaranteed food and shelter. You can find memos from OCP, the evil megacorp that created Robocop, telling employees not to kill themselves because it will create more work for their coworkers. Early in the game there’s a quest concerning the filming of a TV commercial for a sunscreen so toxic that they have to have a stunt double put it on. It all feels like stuff that would be right at home in the original film.

While Rogue City does spend some time examining the tragedy of Robocop and his struggle to reconcile his past life with the not-quite human not-quite machine affront to nature he is now, its primary objective is to sell the fantasy of being Robocop, and it pulls that off in spades. Walking through fire, bullets bouncing off your armored body as you lay waste to legions of gangsters is never gets old, and Robocop has this ridiculous grab that can pick up objects from several feet away. Pick up explosive barrels and chuck them at crowds, snatch enemies off their motorcycles while they’re riding them and chuck them at other enemies and then throw the motorcycle at them too for good measure, the hundredth time you do it is just as fun as the first.

There’s a wide variety of weapons to use but you’ll start each chapter equipped with only one: Robocop’s iconic Auto-9 pistol (with unlimited ammo) and you’ll rarely need to use any other weapon. The Auto-9 has several motherboards you can find and freely switch between that each offer different boosts to its base stats and upgrades like explosive rounds, additional firing mode, and piercing bullets. I spent the latter half of the game rocking a full-auto with bottomless mags and max damage and accuracy, and it was like I was ED-209, and the enemies were that unfortunate OCP executive.
Speaking of ED-209, this game features 4 boss fights and all of them are lame. 3 of these boss fights are against 3 separate ED-209s, and they all boil down to “pummel its weak spot until it dies”, preferably doing so while standing in a sweet spot where you barely have to move to avoid its shots. The game is also a bit rough performance-wise. I noticed frequent texture pop-in and crackly, de-synced audio. During the final stretch of the last boss fight I suddenly lost the ability to aim, forcing me to reload the checkpoint which was all the way at the beginning of the fight.

Teyon has had quite the developer glow-up in recent years. This studio has spent most of its existence pushing out the kind of generic shovelware you see filling the bargain bins at Walmart or polluting GameStop shelves, but it seems they’ve really found their bag now, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of excited to see what they might do next.

história de mistério pincelada pelo oculto, bem parecido com paranormasight nesse sentido, onde não existe uma linha entre o lógico/real e o espiritual (como vemos em muitas histórias de detetive mais "normais"). o que vem de outro lado permeia os acontecimentos sem nunca ser questionado e é abraçado, claro que a conclusão obvia de uma investigação de assassinato é conversar diretamente com o espírito da vitima, nem que seja para trazer resolução a ela e pessoas próximas.


todas as sensações da experiência humana encontrando um lugarzinho pra ficar em outro plano, seja nosso medo da morte tomando forma ou até uma perspectiva positiva sobre ela. a barulheira que a gente não deve deixar por aí só de pensar nessas coisas deve ser grande demais pro nosso mundo aguentar.

as vezes a gente nem percebe que as raízes são fortes... dragon's dogma, em 2012, junto com dark souls deve ter afetado a maneira que meu cérebro funciona ao jogar video game de formas irreparáveis. eu não estava armado nessa época, eu não tinha vocabulário, eu não sabia o que pensar durante o jogo além de "diversão" e as percepções básicas. dark souls me acompanhou a vida toda depois disso - a primeira vez que eu escrevi foi justamente dele! mas dragon's dogma ficou lá no cantinho escondido -não joguei dark arisen!- passei 200 horas nele e sendo sincero nunca pensei a fundo no porquê.

e agora depois de uma jornada de 68 horas e 139 dias (in-game) eu entendo tudo, é óbvio que DD foi feito pra mim, todas as Decisões que eu sou obcecado são feitas com a maior confiança do mundo, eu amo jogo de andar por aí, de se planejar e sair numa caminhada que só deus sabe o que vai acontecer, eu amo gerenciamento de recursos como o poder de teleportar, eu amo limites de tempo e quando achei que não iria criar um vínculo com a história "principal" (não conte para o pessoal da página do jogo que a verdadeira história principal são momentos que acontecem enquanto você está caminhando) ela também é uma história que brinca com meus temas favoritos. agora vou descansar por uns meses, deixar marinar e jogar o dark arisen sabendo que dessa vez estou armado com as palavras certas pra dar o carinho que ele merece.

Replayed for the nostalgia and found the presentation still remarkably effective even when the scares themselves veer toward silly. Horror potential peaked in the early 2000s when grainy digital footage could be combined with the anonymous wild west internet. Now there's too much HD, too many real identities and centralized to too few sites for urban legends to take off and get under your skin the same way. This doesn't actually pass itself off as anything but fiction but the aesthetic, being seemingly made of real modified photos, sets it parallel to found-footage and epistolary horror.

A bit disappointingly amateurish besides the presentation though. The main puzzle is both overly cryptic and easily brute-forced, the story is told through three insanely verbose and blunt text dumps rather than conveyed more organically in smaller pieces, and by the end it leaves no room for the ambiguity that can give horror a "still thinking about it at 3am" kind of half-life.

Still, for a 20-year-old free bit of Flash web design I got my investment's worth of spooks.

Thank you to QuentTheSlayer for giving me the final push that made me play through Super Metroid.

The Super Nintendo was probably the ultimate time of refinement for Video Games. So many game series, that are now held up as timeless classics found their definitive formula on Nintendo's second console generation. Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy and of course today's subject: Metroid. Super Metroid is still considered by many to be the peak of the metroidvania genre, and it's admittedly strange to realize that I had never played it. Even as a huge fan of the series, I just always put it off to the side. I'll get around to it eventually. After all: In the same amount of time it would take me to get into Super Metroid, I could just replay Fusion for the 50th time. I haven't played Prime 2 in a hot minute. What's that shiny new Dread game that just came out ? And so on and so on. But then in 2024, I set aside the excuses, committed, and I can now say that I have finally finished Super Metroid.

Its hard to put into words how much of a mindfuck my first playthrough of Super Metroid was. This almost 30-year-old Super Nintendo game has you in a chokehold the moment the title screen appears. The pan across a quiet, dark laboratory. 1994. Nintendo. Presents. Metroid 3. SUPER METROID. Right there, with the bodies of dead scientist strewn across the floor and the baby metroid trapped in a glass tube, the title of the game towers in gigantic, bold letters. It's one of the most striking introductions to a Video Game I have ever seen. A statement, before you even press a single button.

Of course this strong in medias res opening is only possible due to the fact that Super Metroid is the canonical third entry of the series, continuing on from the ending of Metroid 2: Return of Samus. And the game does an excellent job of catching you up to the events of the previous games. In a moody monologue, Samus recounts her fight against Motherbrain in her first adventure, her mission to eradicate the Metroid species for good and her sparing the last baby Metroid at the end. She brings said baby Metroid to the Galactic Research Station Ceres. There, the baby Metroid is supposed to be further studied while Samus is off hunting another bounty. Of course, she barely makes it out the door before receiving the call that Ceres is under attack. Ridley and his space pirates have decimated Ceres in order to capture the last Metroid. It's here where Super Metroid first gives you control over Samus in an action packed and atmospheric opening. She blasts through the invading space pirates and storms into an inevitable confrontation with long time nemesis Ridley. After an early sneak peek at this late game boss fight, Ridley flees with the baby Metroid in his claws. Samus follows in hot pursuit and lands on the planet Zebes. The setting of the original Metroid. This series story telling has always been and would continue to be very subtle, but even this opening stands tall among its peers in terms of how much you can get across just through a quick opening text crawl and pure gameplay. Really, the recap from our badass heroine is the only dialogue you will get across the entire game, and yet it still manages to tell an engaging story as you make your way down through the underground tunnels of Zebes.

Zebes is what all metroidvania maps should aspire to be in my opinion. Isolating, with long, winding corridors and  incredibly distinct environments. This map is so well-designed that I rarely felt lost or directionless even when I wasnt exacly sure what my next step was. The map screen is there, but it does the bare minimum to give you any general information on the environment. Because it doesn't have to tell you more. The drive to explore and the invisible hand of the developers guiding you are enough. Very, very rarely did I find myself lost as to where to go next and the few times that the game had me stumped, I can attribute to my general impatients I have been trained on due to modern video games. If I spend more than 30 minutes figuring out the way forward, then it must be bad game design, right ?. Fuck you, David Jaffe. By paying close attention to the game, you can always intuit where your way forward is. It's a masterstroke of game design.

The other side of gameplay besides navigating the game world, is combat and finding upgrades. Because Samus isnt badass enough already. That was Metroids bread and butter from the very beginning really. Super doesn't hugely change the formula, but still excels in teaching you its mechanics naturally. The game has you collect all the now famous Metroid tools like Super Missiles, the Grapple Beam and so on, while always showing you how to use them with a reward that seems just out of reach, right after you got that shiny new upgrade. Again, all without a single interruption or textbox. If somebody had to nitpick any aspects of the gameplay, it would probably have to do with Samus jump and the way you switch through different weapon modes. Firstly: Samus jump arc is a weird one to get used to for sure, since she gets an unusual amount of air time for a 2D platformer. The standard jump, which can also be altered into a summersault forward, seems very stiff as well. It almost feels like the Castlevania 1 jump arc as if some weirdo happend to turn on low gravity. Weird maybe, but those quirks still very much lend themselves to the often tubelike level design of Zebes and I rarely had any problems with jumping up to ledges or across platforms. The second, more annoying nitpick would probably be how you switch weapons via the select button. It's an awkward solution that had me often fumble around when I wanted a specific weapon equipped, but it's not a dealbreaker either, just something I wished was a bit better by default. Oh, and there is a run button. Never forget that you have a run button. It had me stuck for a bit and you will thank me later, fellow non-manual readers. Those minor flaws aside, the gameplay is incredibly rewarding to master and once you do master it, the real meta game of Super Metroid begins. Sequence Breaking.

Again: It's an aspect of the genre that Metroid is already famous for and its the game that popularized it, but Super Metroid does it on a whole other level. This game has one technique in particular, one you unknowingly have access to from the very beginning, that is designed to break the game's intended progression. It's a tricky one to execute, and the game will teach it to you in an organic way at some point. Once you fully master it, you might as well throw all preconceived notions out the window that this game was ever linear to begin with. Already deep into my second playthrough, I feel the effects of playing at a higher level. Upgrades and bosses, that seemed so far away in the beginning, can now be acquired basically as early or as late as you want to. The genius decision of teaching you this high level play during your first trip through Zebes does wonders for replayability. Pay attention and the game will infinitely reward you for it. You might of course go to areas you're not equipped for yet, but if you persevere, you get the best abilities incredibly early. Risk vs Reward, entirely on the player's own terms. Genius.

I honestly didn't expect to sing this game's praises so much, and I still haven't talked about the incredible sprite work or the god tier soundtrack. Two aspects I can not find a single flaw in, and talking about them would have me repeating myself again with only superlatives. The game is one of the most gorgeous games I have ever seen, it's like a immaculate painting. The soundtrack gives me goosebumps just thinking about it, and taking the elevator down the Brinstar for the first time is already one of my top 5 magic moments of all time. There you go.

Saving my credibility for reviewing video games, whatever that is even worth, I should probably still mention my one big rage-quit moment. As no game is perfect, but Super Metroid is damn close. Maridia. Maridia fucking sucks and seems to be the one area where the developers couldn't hold back the urge anymore to design a cryptic hell maze. Not only is getting to Maridia a bullshit ordeal all on its own, actually navigating this oversized fish tank with all its invisible walls is a confusing slog. And god help you if managed to come here without the gravity suit, like i did. Now, try to figure out how to get back to dry land while Samus jogs across the ocean floor in slowmotion. Or hope your most recent save isn't too far away. Hey, there is this giant purple tube you can go up and down through, that is clearly showing you an entirely different area in the middle. Well forget that. Ain't going there yet, no matter how hard the game implies it. Finish off the underwater journey with two really sub-par bosses. Please just end me.

Alright. Despite the grueling stretch through the sludge waters of Maridia, despite every bone in my body telling me that now this supposed all-time classic has finally fallen to the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses of fanboys across the globe, it shinesparked back up like a phoenix and stuck the landing. More than that, it destroyed the landing pad and drilled itself deep into my heart to become one of my favorite games of all time. I already know this will get more than one playthrough in the near future, because Super Metroid fucking rules. Go play Super Metroid you cowards!

Alright Crash fans, you've officially lost me again. I'm not seeing what others do in this one. I guess the devs really wanted to add more variety, but instead of expanding on Crash's gameplay and levels, we get a bunch of nonsense. Underwater Crash levels? Boring. Jet ski stages? Why. Motorcycle races? Kinda annoying. A bi-plane dogfight??? I can't fuckin' stand it anymore!

There is one big addition to Crash's gameplay. Actually, it's more like five additions. Every time you beat a boss, you get a new powerup. They're a little superfluous, but I did notice that the level design going forward accounted for whatever new powerup you just earned. It's minor things, like occasional chasms that require the super tornado spin to glide across, but they're there. The game also introduces time trial relics for every stage, and I will come clean right now, I couldn't give a shit about these if I tried. The level design in this game feels weaker in general, and I have to wonder if Naughty Dog designed the stages with the expectation that you'd come back for the relic races. For me personally, gaining access to a couple more levels by earning relics isn't nearly as fun as seeking out cryptic hidden exits like in Crash 2.

Presentation's about as good as the last game. Being taunted by your enemies before stages begin is a really nice touch. Cortex sounds so dejected for most of this game, it's genuinely kind of hilarious, and a bit sad. They take full advantage of the time warp theming with the enemy and area designs too. Shoutouts to the water during the jet ski stages. I honestly have no idea how the geniuses at Naughty Dog got the water looking that good. MARIO WiiU would be proud.

Yeah I got nothing else. Cortex and his gang can keep their gems. I've had enough, personally.

Weeks out from having finished Astro’s Playroom, I find it weighing on my mind. Kenneth Young’s soundtrack has metamorphized into a collective of brain worms that live rent free in my mind all day. My eyes dart longingly to the game’s spot on the PS5 home screen as I scroll past it to launch Game of the Year Contender, Final Fantasy XVI. I didn’t understand; I’d done everything I possibly could have. Collected all the baubles, completed all the puzzles, asserted my dominance as the alpha among my friend group by handily beating their time trial records. But it’s true, all of it: beneath its gimmicky façade, its simple concept and pathetically low difficulty, Astro’s Playroom is FUN. More fun than what is effectively a pack-in demo should be. In fact, it is because of the circumstances of its existence that I was not only pleasantly surprised by the game, but was also left wanting to see much, much more of it.

As a derivative of Japan Studios, it’s probably not surprising that Team Asobi’s first real outing (no, games that require peripherals for girlfriend simulators don’t count) meets certain expectations. The team comes from a lineage of developers who worked on most of the quirkier stuff that has defined Sony’s Japanese identity, though it’s easy to argue that much of this output has gone underappreciated in the west to an offensive degree. Astro and the world he inhabits certainly evokes a similar feeling to something like Ape Escape or Loco Roco, with its simple geometry, eye-popping colors, and all-around cuteness. The game’s raison d'être – the “4D” functionality (term coined by me) of the PS5 controller, is used to pleasant if not mind-blowing effect. I was particularly fond of the vibration employed for Astro’s footsteps hitting surfaces made of various materials, and especially the feeling of the rain hitting his head. I was certainly convinced of the DualSense’s ability to provide a texture to games I didn’t know was ever missing, so it’s disappointing to hear that the vast majority of games on the console don’t really care to take advantage of it.

What is largely surprising about Astro’s Playroom, when I consider how much I enjoyed it, is that it is otherwise a standard “collectathon” in the vein of popular 5th- and 6th-gen platformers. There are no groundbreaking gameplay innovations here, and relatively little time spent doing anything that isn’t running, jumping, and collecting trinkets, and I think perhaps the game’s strength is in the leeway afforded to it, by virtue of its length, that allows it to hone in on making these basic actions feel as good as possible. Now, I know the collectathon genre has seen some revitalized interest over the past decade or so with at least a couple high-profile releases, so perhaps I’m just late to the party on realizing that I actually loved these exercises in absolute tedium all along, but that doesn’t convince me. I really never held any love for the likes of Rare’s output back on the Nintendo 64, and in comparison Astro is much lighter in sheer volume of doodads to pick up. No; instead, I posit that it is the way Astro controls alone that makes it so appealing.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that (barring turn-based games and the like) a video game is only as good as it is fun to move your character around its world. Indeed, though Super Mario 64 owes much of its critical reception to its wonderful level design, it would have been a non-starter without the mastery with which the systems governing Mario’s control and movement were designed. This single focus propelled the game to such status that players and speedrunners to this day remain almost endlessly fascinated by it, both in a broad sense and in discrete contexts including but not limited to flinging Mario into alternate dimensions. On the other hand, a game with even one noticeably poor movement scheme will struggle to overcome it. My thoughts immediately jump to last year’s Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, wherein every module the player’s mount has is defective in one way or another compared to the superior facsimile provided in Pokemon Legends: Arceus the year prior. Not coincidentally, Arceus was the best Pokemon game we’d gotten in something like a decade, while Scarlet only managed to prove that the franchise is more than capable of subverting consumer expectations for just how bad the games can get.

Now, I said all that to say this: I cannot supplement this assertion with any sort of technical reasoning, but controlling Astro feels really good. The arc of his jump, the circumference of the path he takes as you make him run around in a circle, the precision with which he punches the other little robot fellas; it all works flawlessly on both a technical and conceptual level. Perhaps this all sounds like a very basic observation we can take for granted, but look no further than Sony’s own LittleBigPlanet to find an otherwise fun game scarred forever by the fact that Sackboy’s jump feels like complete ass. In fact, that is the primary reason I never really return to the games despite loving nearly everything else about them. Astro’s normal traversal through a level is also punctuated by the occasional gimmick – rock-climbing with the gyro, rolling a ball around with the touch pad, etc. – which mostly maintains momentum and provides a welcome, different sort of challenge in scoping out collectibles. The odd one out here, however, is the frog suit, which plods along a 2D plane via the gyro and shoulder triggers. While it scores full points for platforming precision, and I never felt necessarily frustrated with it, this section slows the game to such a crawl that I could see a less patient player dreading the return to its respective level to grab missing puzzle pieces or “Artefacts,” Astro’s name for the myriad Sony hardware peripherals painstakingly rendered and showcased as towering sculptures in the player’s trophy room as they’re picked up.

The Artefacts are but one part of the theme of Astro’s Playroom which, as everyone is probably well aware, is a celebration of Sony hardware and the software that that has culturally defined it over the past two decades. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a PlayStation fan by any stretch of the imagination. Although I’ve begrudgingly owned every Sony console, I never really vibed with the PlayStation “culture,” either western or Japanese. That said, even I know that Sony is uniquely terrible at celebrating its own history, so I was downright chuffed to find that a lot of love had been put into making Astro shine in that regard. In addition to the aforementioned hardware renders, one type of collectible goes toward completing two murals which form a timeline of PlayStation hardware, and each level is littered with robot friends appropriating and acting out characters and scenes from Sony and Sony-adjacent properties, all of which are fun surprises despite some odd inclusions (The Order: 1886?). While perhaps beyond the scope of a demo, it would have been nice to, as a player, participate in these cameos: maybe a segment where Astro uses Cloud’s sword, jumps into one of Wipeout’s speeders, or could briefly control gravity a la Gravity Rush. Maybe a 20-minute segment where he needs to paddle a fucking canoe down a river, or move half a dozen ladders! Something to chew on.

But really, it’s considering all these largely superficial aspects of the game that makes me realize that Astro’s Playroom, as a package, is simply more than the sum of its parts. There’s just something so satisfying about flinging Astro off a tightrope in just the right way to have him crash head-first into a PlayStation Mouse, then returning to the lab to punch it and rotate it to observe its dirty little trackball. While I would have enjoyed the game dressed up in any skin, the enthusiasm the developers had for making it a comprehensive, nostalgia-bomb showcase pervades every inch of its world and put a big, dumb smile on my face every time I picked it up. To put it simply, Astro’s Playroom has SOVL, and I hope it RETVRNs with a sequel that does not use some dumbass peripheral.

Spider-Man meets Streets of Rage in this competent, yet fairly unremarkable side-scrolling brawler. It’s essentially Maximum Carnage without the coolness factor. It does everything you would expect it to, right down to the (overly) familiar assortment of fan-favorite members of the webhead’s iconic rogues' gallery you'll face. The controls are a touch stiff as you would probably expect given you're using a keypad and boss battles consist solely of dodging all of their attacks until they get tired enough to leave you with an opening to strike back, but honestly the worst aspect might simply be that it's based on the Ultimate universe version of the character so everything Peter says is painfully unfunny, annoying, and not at all how an actual teenager would talk. Well, that and the fact that you apparently can't read any of the collectible comics you find. This is altogether entirely skippable for even the wall-crawler's most devoted fans, but you won't necessarily have a bad time should you choose not to. Just know the highlight of the whole experience is a single stage where you dodge oncoming obstacles as Mary Jane on a moped because that's the only part where it does something unique enough to be somewhat interesting.

6/10

In an interview with IGN in 2020 Senior Producer Fleur Marty commented about Gotham Knights, Warner Brother's newest Batman game that it's, and I quote:

"is very much not designed as a game-as-service."

Now I don't blame him for this comment, it's part of his job when doing PR rounds to help sell the product. I can only imagine with the negative outlook the title was receiving that the Eye of Sauron at Warner Brothers was watching intently. The thing is the reason I don't believe him is to give credit to the talented people that work on WB Montreal as I refuse to believe they would design such an awful system if it wasn't a live service game initially that was repurposed. Now I like the premise of it, playing as the sidekick's when Batman is gone and the launch trailer is superb at really emphasizing that feeling. I like the idea of having the game co-op and having upgradeable RPG mechanics but the way it's implemented is just dreadful.

So it's an open world game similar to it's predecessors where Gotham City is the playground. When you are let loose to explore there are basic repetitive crimes on the map where you can scan to find them then interrogate criminals to find pre meditated crimes and it's utterly pointless. Simply finding them organically exploring would have been better and more interesting. When stopping crimes sometimes there are chests that have resources in them or blueprints for new gear you can make. The resources are just various shades of colours with huge numbers that are never explained. Playing with a friend to tell them I'd found "some green" which I already had 100,000 of just means nothing and is extremely unexciting. I had random unexplained resources coming out of my ears, blueprints for weapons and armour I'd never use equally spilling out of my bat belt pouch. To compound matters further creating one of these items you can do on the fly but you can't equip it until you return to the Belfry which the game makes you do constantly. It just seems to want to break it's own flow all the time with these "not designed as live service" mechanics.

The game generally is a bit of a rough state in various areas. The movement around the city will have you feel constantly stuck on objects like perches and lampposts that Batgirl seems to glue to with the worlds strongest adhesive like she'd made a lifelong commitment she refuses to break. Bless her. Additionally there are constant little things like the lack of a proper jump being only contextual leaving questions if it will actually work, running into other players or walls kills all momentum and you freeze for no reason, a choppy frame rate and playing online co-op auto stops my headset working in private chat forcing me to mute and unmute again in mid conversation for just no reason. All small things, nothing stopping the game being unplayable but they can get frustrating over time.

The thing is if you strip those mechanics out and look past the niggling technical issues there is actually the foundation of a good game here. When playing specific story missions and it's focused on the plot and unique locations it's really good. I like the characters and narrative, there are some touching scenes and funny moments. There is the framework of a great game here just held back by an obviously difficult development and initial design pivot regardless of what Fleur Marty may have been stating on his PR rounds. My friend and I did have fun playing it regardless and certainly don't regret it. Riding through Gotham on a bat-cycle launching into the air to land on an unsuspecting criminal and doing a finisher with a brutal kick to the jaw is really satisfying. I also loved playing as Batgirl and wanted more of that ever since the Arkham Knight - A Matter of Family DLC. Whilst it just doesn't reach that level of quality it was still fun, just extremely flawed.

Worth a try if you're curious as it's constantly on sale, hard one to recommend but it's not as bad as some people make out I feel.

+ Story premise is really good.
+ I like the characters and story beats.
+ I like the presentation though it's not as dense and gothic as it's predecessors.

- Upgrade and open world systems are just awful, clearly was designed as a live service game that pivoted in development but the damage is there.
- Combat and movement isn't smooth enough.
- Some minor bugs and frame rate issues.

I had a blast playing through Tengo Project's Ninja Saviors. I ran through the game mostly as Ninja, a hulking cyborg-ninja with glowing red eyes and huge metal arms. It felt like I was playing through one of those ultraviolent 90s OVAs, and I was playing as the bad guy. Like all beat em ups, there's not very much difficulty here outside of the bosses, and even the majority of those are chumps; unlike most beat em ups, the minute to minute gameplay is really fun and interesting. The different action buttons all change depending on the direction you're holding, and the context—whether you're holding an enemy, on the ground, in the air, dashing, etc. There's a ton of depth to the beating them upping, and getting a handle on your character is really rewarding. My only real complaint is that a few bosses can feel cheap, and that it's just a smidge too long for me to run through on a whim. Looking forward to dipping back into this one and playing with the other characters.

Replay, playing through as Richter. Goatvania. There's the idea that this is a "step back" from Super Castlevania IV since it doesn't have the free whip mechanic. I'm a Castlevania IV liker, but the free whip is almost entirely useless, as fun as it is, and it is fun (an invention of Treasure programmer Mitsuru Yaida). Richter's unique backflip though is fun AND cool looking AND on top of that it's useful—enemies and bosses are built around cleverly using your backflip. And the graphics and levels in Rondo whip every other classicvania's ass.