"sonic had a rough transition into 3d"

cool, weird-ass game that proudly wears its status as sega flexing its shit on the previous gen right upon its sleeve. the monolithic status this game has in the fandom and the historical context of sonic as an entity is pretty interesting to me considering there really isn't that much to it - ten solid sonic levels and then little fragments that more or less exist to flaunt the possibilities of the dreamcast and what all sega was capable of at that point. i'm really endeared by games of this era that were chock full of weird side content and minigames just to show what the fresh hardware was capable of (final fantasy x also comes to mind), and sonic adventure is maybe nothing BUT that. combine that with its weird atmosphere and bizarre, campy writing and it fits right up there with the pantheon of Weird PSX JRPGs of '99.

speaking of writing - i was surprised on a playthrough how this game basically doesn't have a story so much as it has a bunch of isolated events that happen in proximity to one another in an arbitrary and sort of staggered fashion. sonic's story may be the main draw here in terms of gameplay (and clearly the star of the show in general; he's the only one of the stories you can't knock out in an hour tops) but it's also the story where pretty much nothing of note happens. honestly as cute as tails and amy's little mini-character-arcs are the only story worth writing home about here is gamma's, which i still find really poignant and thought-provoking even as an adult... something fatalistic and genuinely dark about this power-hour of pathos, even in comparison to the really dire places that sonic adventure 2's writings and greater themes go. honestly gamma's just the best part of the game in general, between his story, his variant of hot shelter easily being the best level in the game, and the boss fight against beta being one of the game's very best. kinda wish i cared for drakengard 3 at all because i would KILL for a version of his general plot pitch that's not written for children

can't help but feel like some of these little stories deserved a bit more time in the oven; gamma's shooting gameplay and knuckles' hunting were both eventually expanded upon in SA2 but i really like the "puzzle platformer where the female protagonist has to avoid a creepy stalker" idea with amy's gameplay and how tails' levels take sonic's ethos of playing as little of the level as possible to their natural extreme... such a shame their stories take about 11 minutes apiece to complete.

definitely not as polished, focused, effortless or full of finesse as sonic adventure 2, but honestly i don't think being less Good in one linear direction makes it Bad in the opposite linear direction either. sonic adventure is a strange, curious, funky little game, and it's lovely for it.

100% achievements.

November 6th, 2023, marks the day I would begin my journey of playing Hellsinker. 5 months and a day to be exact. With interest spawning from a stray suggestion by a friend of mine, this would quickly result in an obsessive play-through which then graduated to an obsessive achievement hunt which would THEN go on infiltrate my personal life via absolutely wreaking havoc on my sleep schedule, even hijacking my dreams.

And I couldn't be more thankful.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure where to take this review, I'll let my fingers glide along the keyboard and post whatever crops up.

At 89.1 hours, Hellsinker sits comfortably at my #5 most played game on Steam. Despite this, I've only gone on to engage with the game in its entirety through the lens of 1 character. The game features 4 characters, 1 of which has 4 "Ordinance Packages" which change up their loadout. Essentially, this 1 character is 4 though their endings remain the same between loadouts. This leaves me with a staggering 1/7 true completion. In addition to this, each character does have a unique ending depending on their TLB progression, not viewable within the game's text sequence viewer. Though I've already gone ahead and watched a video showing their contents (SPOILERS (DUH!)), I'd still love to play the game to experience them firsthand.

Alright, what more is there left for me do? Surely after that I would have completed EVERYTHING there is to this game... right?

WRONG! THERE'S SO MUCH! THERE'S QUITE FRANKLY TOO MUCH! AND I THINK THE FUNNIEST PART HAS TO BE HOW ABSOLUTELY UNINTENDED MOST OF THE EXTRA STUFF IS!

I'll start by introducing this game's older sibling, Radio Zonde. Yes, I have played the game before, but I haven't really completed in a manner I find acceptable, so there's still this entire game for me to play. Much of the ideas regarding design both graphics and gameplay are very much seen within Hellsinker. 1CC for Radio Zonde TBD.

Following this game would then come Hellsinker but in the form of a demo, kinda? Colloquially the build is known as Hellsinker 0.95. This build is quite.... special. There's a bajillion changes from this version of the game to the Doujin and Steam releases and although I'd like to talk about them all day I'll spare this "review" the word count and cut to the main thing. This game, although presenting itself as a demo, actually holds within itself the entire game but more importantly the final stage(SPOILERS(AGAIN(DUH!))) accessible through dropping in some files graciously provided by the original poster. In a non-patched version, only stages 1-4 are playable. The cut special stages also feature 2 versions from what I understand looking at the channel. One version would then go on to become the Shrine seen in the Doujin and Steam release. The other version cut from the final releases feature something adjacent to a dungeon crawler style level (not spoilers).

Okay so. That's it right? Nothing more? There couldn't possibly be more?

But there is! All of these are from the game's Doujin release era (so like 2007-2011?) I'll tally up everything here:
>Doujin release (PURCHASED)
>Completion of said Doujin release (unsure if I'll do all characters TLB but I'll cross that bridge when I get there)
>Buying the fanzines (warning the page probably has some Not Safe For Work Ads so please use an adblocker <3 ) and then reading said fanzines (currently studying Japanese primarily for that)
>A 3D Hellsinker Railshooter fangame (Completed)
>A Puyo Puyo styled Hellsinker puzzle game (Completed)
>Another Hellsinker fangame though I don't really know what to compare this one to, check the IGDB page for more info (Completed)

...and that's it. At that point, I'll have fully exhausted myself on every possible official and unofficial expression of love for this game. Have I made it obvious enough how much I love this game?

I'm currently in ownership of pretty much every version of the game out there with their fan-patches in addition to the fan-games so if you'd like any of that please contact my either on Twitter or Discord @strawhatcanti. Thank you for reading. Until the next "review" goes up,

Keep your dignity.

Touhou 12: Undefined Fantastic Object has as its strengths what I love most about Touhou: intense treat collection and hard danmaku, and it's my personal favorite Touhou game. the crowd boos, throws tomatoes, a comically large crook appears from offstage to drag me off wait!!! no!! let me finish!!

I will start by saying that the difficulty level is pretty high, the resources that it gives you can frustrating to obtain and the danmaku is among the most difficult in the series imo (like, Kogasa are you kidding me with Monster Sign "A Forgotten Umbrella's Night Train"?? you're a stage 2 boss!) so I wouldn't recommend it to beginners of the series. But if you know your way around a Touhou game (or a shmup in general) you shouldn't let the difficulty intimidate you.

That being said, I love the UFO mechanic, you have a wide variety of shot types to choose from according to your preference, and mechanically it feels responsive and comfortable to maneuver. The UFO mechanic keeps the stages feeling fresh and engaging, contributes to a sense of replayability, and rewards you for skill and courage. It also gives you a great deal of flexibility and agency in stage routing according to whatever resources you might need at the time. And UFO does really throw resources at you, as long as you play with focus, restraint and courage. Honestly, nothing feels as invigorating as collecting the UFOs just right and getting those screen clears and all those sweet, sweet treats. To me, the gameplay is just the right amount of punishing (imo it could even be more punishing).

Music-wise they aren't all winners, but there's some excellent tracks here. Personal favorites include "Captain Murasa", "The Tiger-Patterned Bishamonten" and "Interdimensional Voyage of a Ghostly Passenger Ship". Girls-wise there's some great designs all around and every single boss fight keeps you on your toes (I always say that dying to Nazrin is just burning off bad karma). I also enjoy the overall flavor and the Buddhism of it all. Magic "Mystic Fragrance of a Makai Butterfly" is one of my favorite spell cards to do and it's very beautiful.

You can also really feel the Buddhist theming through the gameplay. For example, attachment (trying to collect the slippery goddamn ufos) leads to suffering (running right into a bullet). And then you have the impermanence of all phenomena (the goddamn ufo changed color right before i grabbed it).

The Buddha himself once said that bombing for treats is just like sweeping sand off the banks of the Ganges river.

SUPERHOT.

What matters is what happens between these two words.

SUPERHOT.

It wants to peel back the layers of your skull.

SUPERHOT.

Feast on my flesh until nothing remains.

.

3 thoughts on SUPER[SUPER]HOT.

Mind - Katana reveals all; the swift executions and parry-play are at the essence of what works within this new framework of roguelike repetition because it prevents the action from jerking-off in bullet-time. The staccato begins to act in service of rhythmic motions where physicality is no longer a disembodied affair of firearms and trajectories locating the feedback loop in the anonymity of manikins instead putting our ever-fragile avatar at the center of the violence in ways that renders frisson by putting emphasis on the cut. Distances and deflections. How to bridge the gap between the two. Invoking. Channeling. SUPERHOT.

Control - Hacks.exe; they elevate the core systems without rendering the whole ugly. It’s impossible to escape the allure of the metagame. “Killheal.hack” and “Lightreflex.hack” are kings. And kings do not matter in sequences whose escalating difficulty so clearly correlates with the aesthetics of kinesthesia - strategies are established in style before substance, a perfect action-run framed in replays, so challenge is (and must remain) a modular canvas here. Strong back-half. Exhausting waves met with zen. Repress the urge to shatter - obsidian is thy weapon. Sliced rubies and broken ores. A mist of forms. I wish the experience went further. I wish I didn’t have so many choices. I wish I could look somewhere else than myself by being tied to the grazing of bullets and the compression of space. At its purest SUPERHOT triggers like a reversion of time itself; me, knowing the momentum of damage and enemies so completely that I can speedrun the game. Play it, actually, at a regular pace. Ain’t that something. A slow game, but present.

Delete - Self-vore; masturbartory reflexivity bores me. But SUPERHOT was so close. Its gradual subtraction of every expansions made to the original concept pushes past the cringe by committing to a proper state of powerlessness. But at the end of each stage, when vision itself has been euthanized and verbs stripped away from the player, we’re given the option to give up. Press [E] to access the text. The game should have left us to rot in there. Let the player figure out new ways to still assert dominance over its environment in the absence of tools to do so. The game’s not inventive enough - in both mechanics and level-design - to do that. A shame. All that’s left, then, is a language only dispensed by the screen - our usual one-way mirrors. Ten minutes of me pressing [E] to get the syllables drooling out of my mouth. Sweet nothingness lost in Amygdalatropolis. Yelling that same sentence into the void.

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

[Just a hollow sense of progression and power]

HOT.

"wait - you haven't played quake?"
~almost everyone who i've gushed about this to game in the past few days

a little about me: i'm partial to industrial grit, my favorite doom games favor grimly edgy atmosphere over 80s thrash worship, i'm a big NIN fan and the downward spiral is one of my top 5 favorite albums. so this should be a no brainer, right?

well - yeah, actually. that's exactly right. throughout my playthrough all i could continually ask myself was, "why the fuck didn't i play this sooner?" and rightfully so. i think the reason quake has eluded me for so long is because its holistic reputation is eclipsed at this point by a diehard multiplayer community that i frankly don't give a shit about. i'm not much of a multiplayer enthusiast for anything - let alone tech-y arena shooters - and honestly i probably would've continued ignoring this absolute fucking masterpiece if not for my pressing curiosity towards trent reznor's involvement

that'd have been a huge mistake; quake is easily the best boomer shooter i've ever played

this is where i could talk about how i adore the weapons and their balancing, the general focus on straightforward maps with powerups everywhere, the difficulty being largely driven by how easy it is to kill yourself in tight spaces - or even the god tier ambient score that has just the right amounts of otherworldly screams and metallic chords strewn about - i COULD go into those things and we could be here for a considerable amount of time - but instead of doing any of that, i'm just going to say that the shambler is one of the greatest enemy designs in any fps. in fact, my feeling towards quake 1 can be summarized roughly with my thoughts on the shambler; he's absolutely perfect. i love this giant, dopey, teethy foreskin man in all his fleshy (not furry - fuck you) glory. and i haven't even begun to MENTION his timbs yet

my mans butters be outright otherworldly

look i'm SORRY i really am but like i'm having a lot of fun checking in on all the stuff i remembered as a kid, this just so happens to be one of them LMAO

I don't have any fun tales to tell or any vibes to reminisce on like I did in my EYX review, which is unfortunate because that means I actually have to try and figure out what I'm supposed to say about "Sonic.EXE" and his game.

But I don't wanna be too negative about it. I actually have some nice things to say, though it's more so just me being surprised and not actually anything I'd call any good. My memory of this game was purely what it started out as, walk right and watch these characters die in about 15 or so minutes. To my shock and surprise, there have actually been some very major changes made in the 11 years since that original release. You are now given the option to, uh... I dunno, see a little more? You can fulfill certain requirements (walking left instead of right) to find extra stages that provide something of a story that I don't care about, culminating in one last little walk to the right as the blue blur himself. Blur as in he's being covered in static, nothing speed wise, he's still just walking. Aside from that, Knuckles can punch now, Robotnik lost his ability to slide (sad!), and sometimes you need to jump instead of it being purely a walk to the right. The art at the end is different, frankly a little more silly looking than the original, but shit I know there's not much you can do about that.

Was fun to see what's new, but it's still a shitty story written by a shitty person turned into a shitty game. As much as I got to gush over the community aspect of it all before, I still can't deny that much. Still not a 1/10 though lmao