bitch youuuuuuu are a stranger. this broader aesthetic sense of making art thats like an overtly long talk therapy session with some two faced white woman is becoming maddening to me. i dont think its appropriate to belabor this because the "quiz" here is such a harmless & secondary example of it, and maybe is more self-aware than im pinning it, but also i had a pretty stark realization in here that i've heard this exact voice, story, talk, expression, diction, & conclusion more times than i ever thought possible. u kno both folks here probably said "power differential" 1 too many times in the relationship. forgive me but i gotta talk my shit for a minute: yall's own self-admitted lack of agency & disproptional reactivity dont bother yall?????? self-pitying shit is as much of a power play as anything else u woulda known that if you were up on ur nietzsche by now. might as well let ur fucking nuts hang & make art and say shit about what you would do if you had things your way instead of what would you woulda done were you the perfect lil tweebell them PhDs is tryna get you to be. like the final conclusion here is an overtly self-conscious epigraph about how being too self-conscious is bad. you bitches need an intervention!!! i may be a broke ass bitch ass nigga but trust that rapping along with pap when he goes "hunnid on me...these bitch ass broke ass niggas better not say nothing to me" prepares me to tackle life's problems more than anything coming from this lane. maybe im a sociopath and got a impaired sense of empathy & dont get it but also ian seen nary a post or analysis or even a interpretative lens that would reward deeper investigation of smthn that got this "autoethnography" or whatever stench on it. another big whiff from itch.io 4 me.

this noreason fellow is an interesting character. in comparison to his more crafted and measured works like death in excess or disparate realities, nosp3 is an effigy of slaughter & megaWAD motifs with scribbled Crayola crayon marks and protruding nails. here lies 32 1000+ monster count maps where the bestiaries of valiant, eviternity, scythe 2, and probably some other shit all mix together with some of the most excess combat you can design while being boom-compatible. 'fuck it, we gotta fuse now' is the siren's call: not only is the bestiary getting an exponential increase but so are your ammo limits (200 rockets and 440 energy cells that double with a backpack, can i get a hell yea), your health totals (megasphere brings you to 400% health and 400% armor, 100 dollars on the chain n its not no game), and your weaponry (Plasma Rifle + RL + BFG are often your first 3 pickups, and occasionally an infinite ammo RL with cave's auto fire enabled...i see the opps outside less go catch em 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️). ion think a doom wad has felt like this much of a bootleg since the original chillax, so that noreason is able to craft something mostly coherent out of the 100 different cogs at work? very impressive sir very impressive. i say mostly coherent though because the core combat here is actually being sprite-to-sprite in a monster horde with BFG in tow n holding onto mouse 1 for dear life, until you hit the next megasphere or energy cell pack, then skirting around the edges of the crowd to hit the next objective point. i have and will make a lot of hyperboles bout slaughter but this is the most salmon-swimming-upstream, Ys-bump-combat, kusoge-idea-kamige-execution headass game i played this year, even as i write this 7 months out of my completion. prime example of what im talking bout is map 23, you don't even gotta fight a whole lot in this one the finale is just to light the infighting dynamite and hope you don't die when the hordes start self-combusting. made me feel like riley with the steel chair effect. map pack is low down n dirty but ingenious; i didn't even mention the fact that there's cacodmeon variant here that shoots cyber rockets, but the only visual difference is that its a slightly brighter sprite than the regular one. like what is blud even cooking up in this wad 😭😭😭. crusty & rusty ass game get a tetanus shot after every play session.

and so the long arduous process of adding shit to IGDB begins 🧍‍♂️. haste is a kind of a flashpoint entry in slaughter's "new canon"--it's a revived collaborative project spearheaded by slaughter's own revived pharaoh in insane_gazebo, and features the '92 dream team of guest mappers you'd want for this new era of the genre: the wizard ribbiks delves into his esoterics for two maps, nirvana gets in his monochromatic bag and delivers a really hellish slice of combat for a map, they even plugged benjogami here to craft this really striking, almost Pythagorean challenge map centering 90s slaughter's love of fireblu and obtuse geometry that ends up being a map pack highlight. the "newest" member of this all-star roster is bemused, who also punches in a decent map that shows off his student-like devotion to the genre's grandeur and antagonistic style of crowd control. the rest of the maps are composed mainly by insane_gazebo and former project head scotty: particularly interesting fit for scotty, who i'd deem has become kind of like the p.j. tucker of the genre (or the clefable if you dont follow hoops) in his versatility as a "glue guy" for these map projects, the rare talent in the scene who's able to mesh with the more subtle, congressional slaughter WADs like Fractured Worlds as well as get turnt with the excesses of WADs like Abandon. I'm not the biggest fan of his map output thus far, overall feeling uneven: his usage of hitscanners is more frustrating than provocative but his understanding of finales and how to squeeze multiple cyberdemons in small spaces is really good, maybe the best of the out the group. his maps here didn't necessarily move the needle either way for me, but i think his status as the most agreeable mapper in this scene should be noted for posterity, and its cool that this project of his came to fruition, even if it was by proxy.

so in sum, the shit shoulda been popping, shoulda served as like THE entry point for what this doomworld micro-scene has been cooking up these past three years...but its just straight mids 😑. which is honestly kinda rare for me. my main disappointment was that in spite of the visionaries on board this is a really muted aesthetic overall--there are some maps like the aforementioned nirvana and benjogami maps that break with the style, as well as an insane_gazebo tune that is concordant with late sunder's striking aesthetic (can someone with architectural knowledge spot check me and see if it would be accurate to describe this as Neo-brutalism), but everything else here is just bland. in no small part i think its because the color palette and architecture here are a more revisit of the aesthetic established by the 90's and early 00's WAD canon than the really grandiose OTEX texture wizardry contemporary slaughter is known for. it perhaps draws out a sense of familiarity for folks who haven't been tapped into the Doom scene outside the existing WAD canon, but it in turn made this feel more like a map-pack than the emotionally evocative experience the mapper list had me pumped for. when i play the other hits of these mappers i feel the precariousness, the sense that the shaky alliance of infighting i've generated might explode into uncontrollable hostility at any given moment; i feel the sense of alienation, illuminating a social truth about the dance of coalitions being built not on personal affinity but mutual, dynamic priorities; i feel that perseverance, the 'no easy answers' kind of problem-making that demands arcane knowledge and foresight and yet a sense of play in devising solutions. all of these feelings are latent in these mappers' gameplay motifs sure, and present in this map pack, but it was their individual aesthetics, the mythology of gazebo or the claustrophobia of benjogami, that accented these chords to the forefront. that boldness makes engaging with this micro-scene a really gripping experience in ways other mod scenes have yet to hit, and so to have all these personal styles blend into sights & sounds that already have been so thoroughly replicated is like, damn,,, what a disappointment. should serve as a sharp example that it has been the attention to visual spirit that has made this micro-scene one of the most popular doom things of the past few years as much as it has been the combat revolutions. shit's isn't really all that without it. slaughter's 1train p much.

shit goes crazy why nobody said nothin? important reclamation fiction of what shoulda happened after the #8 seed franks upset the #1 seed umayyads at the battle of tours: the legacy of the caliphates, mythologized into a assassin quasi-prophet who kicks really hard and fast, spinnin back to hit a vicious stain on the now globalized "West" and "Neoliberalism" across 5 side-scroller stages. look i know "the west & neoliberalism" mean absolutely nothing beyond "uh america & profits" in the current critical landscape but the opps here are the Federal Government (proper noun) and an Attorney General who double crosses you after using you to put down a religious cult in the Persian Gulf. shits like a silver bullet made for the Bush family's headtop and a very personal short call of the Dollar System as far as political specificity in video games go. contra strider, osman asks you to put the weapon down and beat ass with two hands and feet--you'll be sliding n gliding n crouching through the mud like any side scroller but the greatest mechanic here is the afterimage system. each powerup you get gives you an brief stationary clone that'll stay in your last attack spot and synchronize with your attack inputs for the next few seconds. seems strong enough right, but the real trick is to plant like 8 of these clones right in somebody's hurtbox, run away, then start whiffing like a ken player to trigger all 8 of those attack clones at once and deal unconscious amounts of damage in quick succession. nomiss runs of this are like 15 minutes because of how much burst damage you can put out in addition to the bombs--bosses here can go out sad in like 20 seconds if you've been on it in keeping your powerups & bombs available. was this intended? maybe, but it made avoiding any death to keep my resources really critical, and some sense of tension along with unhinged ingenuity is all i ask from the MAME experience these days n i got it in spades. there's also some metatext here but honestly just taking this shit at face value was a joy. prescient in recognizing the global south is where the revolution at and we're just kinda pussy.

kinda like that time in g gundam tequila gundam showed up + "i know it smell crazy in there" + mid 90s meta human anxiety + light kaiju metaphors + the GOAT '96 olympics all condensed into a 30 minute sports arcade masher and given 3rd strike's animation budget. to call anything that happens here ridiculous or crazy feels like an understatement to its vibrancy--pretty much every 5 minutes or so i was mouth agape at what i just witnessed but then nodding along, engrossed in the lunacy. mental break was playing the nuke catch & toss challenge, where the "perfect performance" is tossing said nuke (back) at a vaguely Californian nightline. "o word? ianeen kno yall got down like that lemme get it in" i said as i reloaded tryna get my japanese schoolgirl avatar to destroy the worst city on earth. worth noting that the distance required for the perfect performance here is ~8000 "m" and the distance between tokyo japan and los angles is ~8,800 miles. some of you sound very silly when you say videogames arent praxis. shits hard asl and worth taking a few months of your controller.

after churning through most of the 90s-00s metal slug entries this week i was taken by two things. first: the games have a hilarious sense of Vonnegutian violence that makes all entries difficult to be mad at even if i found some of them tedious and grueling. in metal slug 1 & 2 in particular you can be killed by all sorts of 'Top 10 Worst WW2 deaths' sketches, like being crushed by a falling tank in disrepair or getting struck with an ejected shell casing from a Comically Large Cannon, as well as dishing out dark comedy of your own like pumping 20 pistol rounds into a suntanning grenadier or instagibbing a riflemen with 5 grenades as he leaves the latrine. it's hard to single out what gives a metal slug game that approachable aura that makes it a hot commodity but i imagine this aesthetic of humor, along with the plainly good slapstick like the inflation sprites and its death animation, has aided in the series' canonization and perpetual status in the zeitgeist.

second, these titles were alot slower than i remember. after perusing for a bit you can find dev interviews that state that metal slug was conceived as being branched off side-scrolling shmups like Irem's own R-TYPE instead of Contra, and its felt in the way hitboxes in the series are meant to imprison a poor position into a guaranteed death as in the shmup's philosophy rather than hitboxes being quick tests to jump or duck as in contra's philosophy. or at least, that's my perusal of the motivation--i'm nothing but a fledgling to both genres really but my main point is that I often "foresaw" my death happening in metal slug in the same way i "foresaw" my deaths in shmups, realizing too late i had put myself in an unwinnable screen position due to prior mistakes in dodging. i learned to accept this sort of difficulty for what it is as i moved on, but i wondered what a metal slug title might look like if it's challenges was more chaotic & reactive rather than guided & premeditated.

thus i have my question answered in gunforce ii, ironically the closest spiritual predecessor to metal slug, which manages to completely invert these two observations and separate itself out as a underplayed gem with its own sensibilities rather than some historical trivia for metal slug fiends. on the first observation, metal slug's wartime clownery is replaced instead with a mostly self-serious aesthetic of metal (in all forms), mecha, and masculinity: gunforce II stands next to SNK's Search and Rescue as perhaps the most attentive arcade title (to my knowledge) towards the late 80s-90s OVA & TV scene of seinen mecha and go nagai-derivated creature horror. the latter shows up only towards the ending stretch of bosses but this game is knee-deep in the bag of the former--the work of that era's staple mech designers like Katoki or Kawamori seemed like go-to references here, and shit like Bubblegum Crisis, 8th MS Team, Dragonar, L-Gaim, and Mellowlink were constantly running through my mind as i replayed this, not necessarily out of any explicit reference but just as being on the same wavelength as the game. its hard to notice this reference point of design at the game's breakneck speed but watching this HD run really honed it in--the sort of Neue Ziel-esque design of many of the common enemies, the power suited mini boss trio that appears in stage 2-1, a skeleton alien centipede demon inside a tekkaman blade-esque suit as the final boss--all of it feels crafted from a shared appreciation & study for that era's ability to engineer sleek instant classics of designs for narratives of dark melodramas and dystopian vignettes. in fact, the game cares so much for rendering these designs, for showing every healthy/damaged/destroyed state between pinion and gear, driver and driven, shear out and tear out that'll you probably spend at least 10% of your run time here in frame spikes of dropping to around 15 fps. while slowdown in metal slug becomes a crucial aid in assessment, gunforce ii never really ascends above being moderately hard for most of the time, so with slowdown often occurring in the denouement or initialization of encounters you'll just accept it for what it is. (tho I do find it really funny that the first 30 seconds of level one has the game's most noticeable slowdown). but it's rather serious passion for mecha without overt recapitulation or veneration makes it at really pretty & unique to look at it motion, and it's hard not to be charitable towards the title when you because of how singular it looks, in spite of its obvious ties to metal slug in user interface.

on the second observation, gunforce ii diverges from metal slug in being explicitly connected with Contra over any shmup, especially in how every platform, ledge, and wire in this game is scalable, similar to the former's platforming. this adds a much needed (for my tastes) dynamism to the greater metal slug encounter philosophy, letting you craft your own screen real-estate and angles of attack rather than following the rules as the encounter lays out for you. frankly, this scaling element is often not really necessary because again the game isn't that hard (stage 2-2 being a great example of where it's absence isn't even noticed), but there is great fun to be had in abusing the protagonists' absurdly double jointed arms to launch 360-degree assaults while hanging from the ceiling or bear hugging a ledge. it also adds a bit of strategy to the vehicular gameplay--since vehicles often aren't capable of switching vertical planes as easily as you are on foot, and because the game's equivalent of metal slug POWs can roam about both above and below your current height, there is some genuine strategy in regards to whether to abuse the hitpoints and firepower of vehicles for greater safety but miss the POWs, or to trust in your parkour skills and aim for saving all POWs even if it means a riskier section, or to mix the two and believe you can dismount & mount with the proper timings. again not every level engages with this idea to its full extent but it complicates the treatment of vehicles as a strict powerup as in metal slug, where losing a vehicle early often meant playing the rest of an encounter out at a tedious disadvantage.

where i fall off the train is unfortunate in that this is just not enough of a good thing--it's shorter than just about every metal slug title I'm sure, and the levels it really clicks on, the third and final levels, just remind me of how elite this or the planned third entry could have been if Irem didn't get the can right after gunforce ii released. but to be clear i think the rest of the levels are great, occasionally dipping into amazing on select sections and bosses, but not a consistent "damn..." like those two. in my opinion it's pretty tied with metal slug X as this dev's team best attempt at the whole idea honestly. also i'm mentioning it again but god these protagonists' arms are so fucking weird, please look at a clip or something it's like addicting-games.com tier in how you can get the arms to go out at weird angles. really endearing tho

slaughter's I don't like shit I don't go outside, completely bleak and begging for (divine?) retribution to some unknowable crime. idk, probably the crime of being born. an apple from ribbik's tree of mixing slaughter with other gameplay elements, namely platforming, but this isn't the "oops!!!🤭 looks like you missed your jump! here's a teleport to restart ;)" nintenyearold platforming of other wads this is the "nigga fuck you" platforming of olde. maps 01 and 02 are aerial exercises of performing skates & figure eights around eroded neogothic pillars; i thought alot of NES sidescrollers and their derivatives in how benjogami will ask you to route yourself around projectiles, enemy bodies, and vertical gaps in quick succession. except, of course, the trick here being that all enemies are always moving towards you in a doom map, so the option to grind out muscle memory and timing is taken away, and now the requirement is left and right brain knowledge of which direction you need to be going at what speed and pastoral intuition on how you standing behind a wall for two seconds will herd the cyberdemon you can't see and the 12 cacodemons you can't see together to infight with each other. a notebook of Newtonian laws and velocity formulas in one hand and Joseph's shepherd crook in the other, real corpus callosum gaming.

it's claustrophobic and light on breathing room, felt like i needed a damn O2 mask by the time I hit map 03, which of course feeds into the visual work--this is by far benjogami's most striking WAD (not light praise, of the slaughter all-stars he's in the upper tier of aesthetics), undarkening Romero's brown into a low pH value bile of oranges & purples & neons. i love the Babylonian towers of toxins that serve as background to the action here too--depending on whether your philosophy says stalactite or stalagmite it's either god pissing on us or us sending our piss back to god. map 04 is otherworldly, vaguely resembling something akin to ribbik's frog & toad series but drenched in venom and supercharged with electricity. i had many (i.e. 1) drafts of words of map 04 prior to this and i could just not capture it's appeal or how it makes me feel, one of the rare things i feel that just goes beyond my aesthetic appreciation and into the sublime. realllly good shit man

becoming increasingly NFL brained. the sell here is Midway's tender love of turbo mixes with Blitz The League's grisly lust for gore mixes with generic dark fantasy at the 50 yard line--its an alluring alchemy for not real adolescents (surprised if anyone born after janet jackson's super bowl titty has any fondness for NFL Blitz '00) but adolescents in spirit like me. like alot of sports fans of a darker complexion I've developed an understanding that I might be challenged to a game of Madden (or really 2K) wherever & whenever, and so have come to an acceptance of the video game mega franchises for what it is and learned to enjoy it, but there's still a burn to see my favorite actually-kinda-mid QBs shake off 3 tackles in the pocket and then throw a 40 yard dart that the sim games can't give. MFL understands my wants, and provides me the experience of a juiced Matt Ryan (personified here as a skeleton named Ratty Ice) scrambling for an unheard of 15 yards and throwing 40 yard lasers as I desired--but then, it started asking questions that made me deeply uncomfortable. "If you gave Cooper Kupp steroids mid play, how many yards do you think he would get after the catch?" "Let's say Adrian Peterson lit himself on fire after the handoff. He isn't hurt by his own flames. Would the defense still try to tackle him?" "What if Josh Allen had a pump action in his off-hand during his run plays?" "If Trevor Lawrence could literally throw an IED at the opposing cornerbacks every half, would his QBR improve?" The other sell of this game are the "Dirty Plays", normal run option or play action plays that morph into Hanna-Barbera skits after the snap: all the aformentioned questions are scenarios you can find the answer to in here, along with the option to supersize one of your Dline men, jumping the line of scrimmage in an attempt to kill the quarterback within the next 5 seconds, completely Diavolo-ing the last touchdown pass, etc. although imposing at first each dirty play has some form of legitimate counterplay, or at least mitigation, and strategizing around timing and potentiality becomes this game's own unique metagame separating it out from the myriad of other arcade football prospects. And perhaps, most brutally, each player has their own health bar, meaning that taking too many late hits (completely legal btw) or being on the receiving end of a dirty play can actually just kill one of your players, with the only chance of revival being the reward for winning a half-time mini-game. while killing all of the team's opposing QBs is a win condition, and part of this game's market pitch, I've played about 60-70 games and never seen it happen, nor really come close; teams usually have 3 or more QBs on rotation and killing more than 2 requires alot of sacks or a lucky dirty play, and that's assuming a QB doesn't get revived. What I have seen happen though is me instantly killing Aaron Rodgers on the first snap of the game and dominating the ackers from there. if you have any vindications against a signed NFL player this is the time to let it loose.

it's all a good time, and as i plummed deeper into this i found there is a core of being rewarded for playing the rosters of yesteryear the "right way"--running the damn ball with the falcons along with masterminded ref bribe management lead to an easy chip in a season mode, instead of trying to play honest 2008 peyton manning offense with a shit OLine like the 2021 falcons did. still i wasn't able to find a perfect happy medium of difficulty between the relatively somber arcade gameplay and the literal explosives of the series gimmicks for this to be a forever game, in spite of finding the base elements really appealing. turning off stage hazards and lessening the damage a bit was my standard mode of play, but I can't help but feel that more modulation, in spirit of the sim mega franchises, would help here. Being able to adjust or nix the ref bribery metagame, lessening the efficacy of stiff arms, and other under-the-hood tweaks would make this even more of my thing even if the rosters never updated again. there's a thread on the steam forums right now about how easy is too easy and normal is too punishing that I mostly agree with, and the dev rep mentions even more fine-tuning of the difficulty along with a roster update in store,,, which is all well and good but I'd rather have those fine-tuning sliders for myself than have devs try to calibrate for some abstract universal medium. I'm hoping MFL 2 will be a breakthrough in this regard, but for now I don't see this game getting a ring quite yet in spite of its elite talent...that might be for the other bitches

not a shmuphead by any means but i found the 2014 entry surprisingly entertaining and was in a car for 6 hours so I tapped in on this. manipulating bullet patterns on a crusty 2017 ASUS laptop with a suspect shift key is just only a notch below an arcade cabinet in terms of intended shmup experience, and after a bit of mangling with the different modes and ship types i was hittin that rhythmic groove that made me fall in love with PCB & Imperishable Night when I played them way back when. shmups are really good at creating this kind of paradoxical enforcement and lessening of failure anxiety--good performance lessens the feeling that you're gonna lose and builds confidence in your competency, but also said good performance moves you up the linear curve of higher stakes, to where your prior good performance might not cut it anymore, which actually just reinforces the initial anxiety, and so on and so on. new breed trapper imposter syndrome not the fake bullshit for corporate eaters they talk about in litmags. anyway i really like this one because it kind of lets you set the variables for that anxiety game--do you want to be anxious about keeping up a high standard for an indefinite period of time, do you want to be anxious about keeping pace with an ever-evolving environment, do you want to be anxious about the precarious, 'zig when you shoulda zagged' nature of timing your next big move, etc. then the internal slip n slide of affect plays out from there depending on how you've set the board up. idk just really fun stuff at the end of the day.

a kind of surprising entry into the ps1 jank fighter history, shigeru mikuzi's demented yet blemishless circus house yokai meeting with the ground zero dirt & grime that's implied in this era of experimentation. even ignoring my ignorance of mikuzi's work and my general unfamiliarity with this microgenre of fighters, playing and watching this felt like two ghoulified rams run headfirst into each other over and over--nary a movelist exists in game or in my usual EOP resources, forcing me to return to a childlike state of doing button combinations and seeing what happens. Triangle + Circle is a throw and QCF + triangle did something unique, i think, but by the time I figured out there was an OTG attack the stiffness and dullness of this frankenstein had brought me to boredom. make no mistake, there is a genuine uncanniness in mizuki's designs that gets a super saiyan boost with the ps1's polygonal sorcery, that baby beetle being the weirdest shit you'll see tonight. and there's one stage here that has just a raw-ass rain overlay that is as amateurish and as it is atmospheric. but the thrills aren't enough to sustain this past a 1 hour session for most i think. certainly not the worst thing to download off a cdromance dive though.

sony porting their own self-produced "canon" of games that are solid but risk-less and marketing it with irrelevant "exclusive" changes and Advanced Graphics Menu technobabble: A Moment, a changing of the guard, bridge-building, empowering

koei tecmo caving to scant but fervent enthusiast demand and porting their most gluttonous and attention-seeking passion project that has gone onto to find its own niche cult and influence in the musou genre: who cares, sloppy, irrelevant, put a shirt on nigga

nah yall cant fuck with ribbiks tho. map02 is a nice iteration on mixing the purple (stargate) with the blue (oceanic moodiness) but map 03 is on some other other shitt entirely. a flooded amusement park thats actually your prison + doom's most devious sniper cyberdemon + a 40 minute long math problem disguised as "ammo scarcity" are just the base elements, what happens after that are some fucked up fucked up encounters with the demon kind--its "slaughter+plutonia" sort of still yea but this time instead of just straight up negating safety ribbiks is on his manipulator bullshit and will triangulate in third parties to make you understand that safety was nothing more than a delusion. any given 2x2 area of "safe space" in a room is just bait setup so that you get munched by the sniper cyberdemon, or get sent packing by a homing reveant missile from 100 yards away, or get tag teamed by the archville you ran out of ammo to kill 2 rooms back and the one behind the 20 revenants in front of you. or lose 50 health damn near instantly because its a chaingunner right above you. fuck you. and the infamous cyberdemon room in here is just like...damn. you get put into a room with about 40 hell knights and revenants while you're locked in a new york studio apartment-sized box, then 4 cyberdemons teleport into this same box and you're asked to not die instantly within the next 30 seconds. while the difficulty of that isn't as alarming in the 2022 era the immediate flex-or-die demand is still as arresting as it was damn near ten years ago. and when you step onto the final platform and hit the intermission screen you can't help but feel like the #1 stunna despite the sprite of doomguy's no dobut near-death visage on the bottom of your screen just seconds prior...but fuck it we swag n we surf.

(list&writeup of slaughter stuff impending by the way twizzys 🤞there's about 20-25 major entries i needa hit & 50+ entries i need to add in igdb still but im seeing the sunset. gives me grief that i won't have that discovery high anymore but equal excitement that i'll be able to contextualize and narrative this shit cuz literally all of it was fucking crazy lmao. like look @ some of this shit dawg this shit doesn't even look like it was meant to be played by humans anymore lmao its so techno-mystical & esoteric)

maybe banpresto's most earnest attempt at crafting a straight-laced, black & white mecha story a la Toei's mazinger z anime. i mean im firmly in the camp that says pessimism is mecha's strongest quality but its hard to not to smile when a 3 foot kid climbs ontop of a 4 foot mecha and yells 'CANT YOU SEE THAT YOUR BEING RUDE'!!!!!!!! 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡' then cleaves the literal CEO of pollution in half with a dragon. the common criticism against this game is that wataru flattens all the other plots but i honestly though it could use more wataru: lil jit should be everywhere and in both route splits. if wataru isn't on screen other characters should ask 'what would wataru do' etc etc. he's the only true child written in mecha because he sees past deception with an ease that can only come from naivety and engages the future without any concern about hedging against calamity. "children have a stronger reality principle than adults" as they say.