Love was blooming in paradise. One day fights broke out. Couples stopped talking. Something was wrong. The culprit shows himself: Infernal Trickster is here to ruin everything. It's up to Hamtaro and Bijou to stop him.

Ham-Ham Heartbreak is an adventure game. You walk around, talk to people, solve diegetic puzzles.

Probably the most interesting part of this game is how literally it takes the concept of player verbs. The 'A' button opens up your Ham-Chat window. The game filters out all possible words into a select few that could, make sense to use here. You select it, a cute animation plays, whatever you were interacting with reacts to you. This is how you solve puzzles, its great. You start the game with very few unlocked verbs. As you play Hamtaro will see someone do one and copy it like a baby. Sometimes characters will just teach you one. They made talking to characters into a mechanic. Sort of.

Most of the cutscene will be exactly how you'd expect them. You open conversations by Ham-Chat, but after you will just read through text as the characters speak to eachother. This flows fairly well, and is probably a lot less awkward than selecting each response yourself. You can think of it more as different ways to greet someone.

Ham-Chat is also used for actions, for example reaching a higher place by having our two protagonists stack up, or knocking something down by stomping. It's a very cute system.

The cutesy aesthetic is plastered on everything with a thick coat of paint. They really don't make them like they used to. It's probably just my nostalgia speaking, but this game feels like the Alpha of those cute fansites children used to make in the early aughts. A wonderful time capsule of my youth. If that era interest you, this game is worth visiting just to see all of that in motion.

OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast is probably canon.

The light turns green. The engine you've been reving starts putting power down the pavement. A few seconds pass and everything gets squished on the screen as speed really kicks in. You have a passenger. 'I wanna go far away' she says. Boy, me too.

The game is quite a package. Starting up you can choose between two games: Coast 2 Coast and Outrun 2 are both on the disk. You could log in to Outrun Online to play multiplayer via the internet and share unlocks with the PSP version. Some music tracks can only be unlocked in specific versions, so if you are playing the PlayStation 2 version a few music tracks will be unavailable to you. Just a little something to remind you that everything dies one day.

I'll explain the titular OutRun for those who have somehow never seen this concept, you get in a Ferrari, you drive on a highway. At the end of the stage the road diverts: you can choose between two stages. The map builds out like a binary tree from these choices. A timer ticks down. Reach a new stage and get some extra time. It's a classic for a reason, just prime video games.

Other than the classic OutRun mode, two other modes are also present. In Heartbreak your companion gives you mini challenges for each stage, ranking you on how well you do on them. Get a high overall ranking and you will unlock a new girlfriend. Race mode turns the map into a linear line of stages to drive through, throwing in a reversed mode and playing around with their order. Both of these are fun additions, I could easily imagine being satisfied if these were the only modes I played in the game.

The game's arcadey physics are heavily exaggerated. Ferraris are sliding around like Initial D cars here. Do a powerslide at 250 and barely lose speed. Engine response acts as if you had the biggest turbos on them, step on the gas and the power only really kicks in a second later. You are wrestling with the car just enough to use steering sparingly. The physics feel like what an eight year old thinks driving fast must feel like. It's so goddamn good.

To be frank, I was never really a Ferrari guy, but this game changed this. I love these cars. These versions are as real as they gonna get for me. The cars are grouped by difficulty, and it doesn't seem to have any differences in them within a category. The difference between categories is also negligible in feeling. I'm not entirely convinced that easier cars feel easier purely because the game tells me so.

We have two main mechanics. Slam the handbrake while turning and step on the gas again to do a Powerslide. They let you take tight turns at high speeds, but coming out of the turn you'll have to stabilize. At best you won't accelerate, at worst you will crash. It takes a while to learn when to use them, but the game usually is nice enough to warn you with big red arrows on the side of the road indicating harder turns. Now stay behind a car to Slipstream. Less air resistance means you accelerate quicker, this even allows you surpass the maximum your engine can do. Stay too focused on sticking to someones behind and you will miss the road. Both of these mechanics focus on bringing more out of your car than the manufacturer intended. They seduce you towards the edge. It's a delicious balancing act.

In the original OutRun (1986, as seen in Yakuza 0 (2015)) the cars simply had two gears: LOW/HIGH like a tractor. This served its purpose very well, you kept the car in low to let the torque get you moving, slammed it into high to start scraping the bottom of 300 kilometers an hour. All you really needed. In Coast 2 Coast however, the cars feature more realistic gears, ranging from 5 to 6. The vast majority of your time will be spent in max gear, very rarely shifting down to the one before it. It's fine I guess, not the biggest issue. I do feel like the low/high system was a lot cleaner. That was video games. This is something that sounds cool in a marketing blurb.

Please don't play this in automatic. Do yourself a favor.

I feel like I'm being too negative. Am I nitpicking? A normal person would not notice any of the things I'm talking about. Trust me on this though: go "far away" enough and your sanity too will shred off. The scenery relentlessly passes by. Every second you look at this game as an outsider is nonsense. Drive it and it all makes sense suddenly. This is Sega at their finest.

24 killers is kindling for your coldest days.

You play as an interdimensional being known as Home, who is forcefully shoved into the body of a dead soldier by an all-powerful entity. You awaken to your newfound existence on the beach of an old abandoned military outpost. It only gets worse from here: this procedure wrecked you, you cannot go back to your shenanigans until you are healed. Thankfully your new friend knows exactly how to fix this. You see this island is not abandoned at all, it's just that most of it's residents are stuck in a bunker. Bring them out one by one, help them with their grievances, and then you can go home.

The whole game takes place on this small island. Each day you wake up in the same bed, and can go about your business for as long as your limited energy allows you. Repetition is the name of the game here, and it's used masterfully the maximize the game's already high hangoutability.

Your eyeballs will rejoice from the steaming mixed-media-esque graphics. Featuring prendered 3d sprites, drawn sprites and photographs for ground textures. Vivid colors and whimsical designs. This game is garish in exactly the way you want. It's the funky expensive fruit tea that many readers of a review like this probably enjoy.

The protagonist starts fairly weak. Helping people gets you the opportunity to take photos of characters, this allows you to take their form later on. These forms usually carry an ability with them: the tough looking guy can lift heavy things for example. And maybe a big rock was all that was standing between you and a new place to check out. Screens usually connect to at least two other screens, so moving around is fairly easy.

A decent chunk of the game will be spent looking for money. On each screen a random challenge related to your unlocked abilities will spawn. Depending on how well you do you will get a set amount of cash for it. Your wallet will be fairly stacked if you just collect these as you go about your business. I did find myself slacking in this regard, so I ended up having to spend quite a few in game days just running around the island scrounging for cash.

The main gameplay loop consist of talking to characters. They usually want something from you. Sometimes you have to explore the map, use one of your powers to solve a challenge, sometimes you need money to buy the thing they need. Or any combination of these. You do the thing, you take a picture of the guy, you get some new powers. Or something unlocks. Maybe someone will sing you an acoustic song about there is a little more to life than what's in your head. You know how these things go. Most puzzles except a few are fairly simple: it's easy to just sit down with this game and see a few new things before heading to bed. I'd even say it's the ideal way to play 24 killers.


It's been a while since I played moon (1997, rereleased with an official English translation in 2021). I was in a different place back then. It feels very far away. This game takes heavy inspiration from it, but I did not want to mention this in the main body of this review. I believe it stands on it's own, you don't need to be a love-de-lic guy to enjoy this. But the similarities touched a warm melancholy in me. A feeling that I fear I don't get to experience as much anymore.

Pay these guys a visit. I promise you with an honest heart, it will end too soon.

Mundaun is the devil in the corner.

When I was a small child, around ten years old, my school had a German Language Studies camp. During the winter, kids who applied would spend one week at a resort in the Alps. It was as idyllic as one's childhood memories could be. The winding roads took you up to a sole building at the mountaintop. I was in a room with my closest friends. My crush was on the same floor. Everything set for rambunctious child activities. Yet when the night has truly fallen, none of us would leave our rooms. We'd be too afraid to even look outside of the window. The wind would lay an incessant siege on our building. Dark forms would look down on us from the peaks. It was a nightmare.

The game's start unearthed all those memories. Opening up with a bus ride to your beloved grandfather's town. Those winding mountain roads are something else man. At the end of the line, you will find yourself in a few scattered buildings. So few residents still live there that you can count them on your hand. Whatever bureaucrat named this a town sure had a sense of humor. The old buildings carry history with them, marks of the war still scattered around. The devil has slept in every corner. The horrors of mundaun are not a desecration of it's idyll. It fits right in, almost as if they were part of it since its conception. That's because technically AND figuratively, it has been.

Immediately, a strong impression made by the sepia toned, "hand drawn" look of the game. Textures are monochromatic, painted beige by the camera filter. Faces and models look rough. The low poly meshes twist into different shapes during horror segments. These graphics are exciting! I'd say it's worth checking this game out just to see something new done with 3D.

The combat is a puzzle. Your enemies are blind to fire, so you can lure them straight into burning hay. You can charge at them with a pitchfork that breaks after a few stabs. It's stiff as hell. Sneaking is always an option. They will shriek when they see you.

The environments are fairly open. There is a linear progression to the maps, but the space is big enough to warrant having a cute truck for you to drive. To inspire you for exploration, a lot of spaces carry optional upgrades. Your three stats are health, sanity, or marksmanship. This latter stat is somewhat puzzling, only coming into play in the last hour of the game. You aren't strictly required to gather all of these, but they do make the game easier. It can be hard to sneak by enemies undetected, and you can't take on multiple enemies at once.

Should you play this? The game uses it's five to six hour runtime excellently. Mechanics are simple, but they are used in clever ways to provide you with new situations. You can pet the goats. It's fresh.

Terra Nil is a drop of water on my desiccated tongue.

In line with the heritage of our literally classics, many games tackle the theme of Man Versus Nature. Tame the wildlands, shape it to your image. Even the more environmentally minded works usually focus on turning it into a human habitat. And then came Terra Nil. It's luscious beauty touched the primordial soul of all whove seen it. Housing, industry, worker management? Wrong door pal, we only got flora and fauna here. If you saw it, it got on your wishlist.

This was followed up by a fairly modest launch. I've certainly never met anyone else who played it.

All maps can be divided into three phases. First, you have to make most of it habitable. Second, you introduce different biomes. Last, you clean up your machines and check if your work is habitable by wildlife.

Terra Nil is not a simulation. It's a board game with mostly discrete turns, where tiles transform into different tiles based only on their current state. The game isn't concerned with how much of the sun's energy is turned into heat, how much carbon-dioxide is in the atmosphere. There are larger markers, such as humidity and temperature that introduce some complexity into this. These do provide the challenge of the game. Burning forest tiles will increase the temperature, but you need a certain percentage of forest tiles on a map to complete it. Most of the time paying attention to these values is only required if you wish to complete the myriad secondary objectives each map provides you with.

While the maps themselves are fairly small, we almost except there to be some sort of interplay between them. Planets are complex system, and ecosystems affect eachother across the globe. It would make sense that our achievements in one zone would affect the other. But they don't. There is no metaprogression to speak of. All eight maps of the game stand on their own, independent of one another. We are trained to see this as a missed opportunity, but I think we should stop and really look at this. In game design, metaprogression is generally considered a compulsion loop. It comes from the gambling industry. It's the systems that make you play the game even when you don't really want to. Grind some thing out, get your daily login bonus, all that crap. Gameplay you won't remember despite spending most of your time on. Sure, Duolingo and whatever uses compulsion loops to educate, but it doesn't still doesn't leave a good taste in my mouth. If this game would have met our modern expectations, just a little thinking about it would soil it for me. Maybe it would soil even without us thinking about it. The absence of something gives more than the presence of it. This is a healthy game.

Terra Nil rejects the apocalypse that we are so keen on falling into.

Raw Danger! is the essence of video games unfiltered.

Let me give it to you straight: this is the stupidest video game I love. Early in a scene a character will try to climb through a hole. They stop a few centimeters away from some sparking wires. The camera uncomfortably zooms in on their face. 'Ugh, no. That's electricity!' our protagonist says annoyed. It's beautiful, honest, pure schlock. There are dramatic action sequences feature objects falling on your head. They like someone behind the camera is throwing props at an actor. It's great.

One particular trend of it's era were multiple playable protagonists, and Raw Danger! is no exception to this. The overall story spans a few days, but we see the events happen through various characters. One of the most marketed features of the game also shine through here. Actions done as one character can affect the story with another. Open a door here, and someone else will be able to take that path. Help someone, and later play through the section of the person you helped. When you see your characters from past episodes they'll even be wearing the stupid outfits you put on them. If you are playing with someone else, there will be many moment where both of you point at the screen with joy and exclaim 'Oh there is that guy!'.

Geo City itself is a character. The setting is 2010 how people in the mid 00's imagined it. The foundations lay on optimism, it's painted out to be a high tech architectural marvel. You would never describe this as sci-fi though, the everyday lives of its citizens are the same as they were before. There are cute convenience stores and boring beige office buildings. Little parks with pagolas in them. Here is an atmosphere here that you could take a 5 second gif anywhere and have a viral vibe in your hands. Put this setting anywhere from the last 30 years and it would fit. Only thing dating this game is nobody having a smartphone on them.

The game features some of the most idiotic villains you will ever see. Conversely, it also features the most realistic depiction of the police I have ever seen. One character is running away from a detective who just won't go down. He keeps being swept up by horrible disaster, only to reappear later like the terminator. Can't keep a pig down.

Raw Danger! is non-violent without falling into the creepy "wholesome" forced positivity hole. Some of the choices you can make are violent. Some people you can straight up murder. But there is little focus on this, you wouldn't refer to any of these characters as killers. I think its more apt to describe Raw Danger! as an action game with non-violent protagonists.

The goal for each level is simple: get to the exit. Characters are heading somewhere. But the moment to moment flow of the game is where the solemn beauty lies. Some dramatic scenes have music. Most of the soundscape is just the ambience of the ruins around you, the wind howling, the flood flowing, the rain falling. Sometimes you just stop under some cover to assess the situation you are faced with. Sometimes someone you are escorting is freezing to death, and you have to run back and help them. Maybe you have nothing to save them with, and you just slowly walk with them, hoping the janky pathfinding has as little work to do as possible. It's tense. While the level design controls these, these really strong, emotional moments mostly emerge from the gameplay systems in place, making a serene and strange dichotomy to the overall goofiness of the cutscenes. When the game is in your hands, the human heart beats.

Serene moments come sparsely though. The system of the game keep you moving from save point to save point, as your characters are constantly losing body temperature (BT), which reduces your speed. Get wet and the BT evaporates even faster. And boy it's raining hard, you will get soaked very fast. You have to earn the moments of rest, making them feel even more special.

One thing that makes this game very easy to play is how light all the systems feel. It's a game with many verbs. Usually this is very antipathic to me, but all the systems are very light in this. A lot of them feel more like allusions to a more complex system. You have limited inventory but its just a simple number based system, and you really dont need all the things you can find. You can give items to characters, and the game just applies its effect immediately, if it's health kit they get healed, if a piece of clothing they put it on. You can craft a few things if you want. Each character has a special ability that you can ignore if you want, but has some fun interactions if you figure out where to use them. It feels like an arcade version of survival simulation roguelikes. Enough to grasp the concept, not so much to have to read a two thousand word wiki guide to really understand it.

I think a lot of people like this game ironically because of the stupid cutscenes and jerk decisions you can make. Instead, I would like to inspire anyone reading this to love this game with an honest heart. It will give back as much as you put into it.

Paradise Killer is a disease many of us carry.

Every day I go to the office for my day job. Ten or so minutes before my lunch arrives, I get up from my desk so I can meet the delivery guy at the entrance. I go to the employee vending machine, which a cool tech company like the one I work for must obviously have to give sugary goods to its workforce of adult children. I type in thirteen on the numerical keyboard to get my coke zero. People behind me talk about a minor inconvenience from someone smarter than them halting their work, therefore Ruining Their Life. I’d like to think that they have enough spirit in them that this comes from jealousy for the guy who still has the ability to not care. I drink my coke zero outside while I smoke my cigarette. I wish the delivery guy a nice day. The app I ordered through immediately prompts me to “rate my experience”. I give both the courier and the restaurant the maximum rating. There is only one elevator at the ground floor, and a person just got in. His eyes meet mine. He pretends not to notice. The elevator leaves right as I arrive in front of it. I think about Paradise Killer again.

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Some (including me) might scoff when hearing the dreaded phrase "vaporwave aesthetic". It's something that was entirely built on disparaged community efforts for an entire decade, so it can mean different things to different people. Most of the time it's nothing but shallow images, memes grabbed from the garbage that builds social media feeds. Ironically, this is somewhat trve to the original concept, but usually frauds do not go deep enough to understand the intricacies of the hauntology that ties it all together.

Vaporwave fundamentally is a twisted corporate aesthetic. A decaying tape of consumerism and new age hubris. Each part is present to an extent, though the proportions are flexible. It could hark on back to the advertisements your brain was blasted with as a child. Many stop here. But I think the new age is part is where the really interesting stuff can happen. You see, new age at it's core was a product for the lamest people you will ever meet. Management people who forgot what life is needed spirituality, and so grifters emerged to meet their demand. There was no fundamental change required, it was an distraction they could leave in their car when they clocked into work. It wasn't real. It was an aesthetic to buy into.

Paradise Killer has a firm grasp on this. You are in a society obsessed with reviving Evil Dead Gods. Your paradise is dying, and most people are already on the next one. A world of decadence for the elite, maintained by the literal sacrifice of the lower classes. This game is for the real ones.

Betraying expectation, the music is more reminiscent of jazzy city pop classics rather than the ambient sampledelia people usually associate with vaporwave. The inspiration is a lot more Tatsuro Yamashita's excellent nostalgia heartwrencher For You (1982) than Vektroid's haunting fever dream Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe (2011 (god I remember when this album was only a month old)). The reason might be practicality as projects like Floral Shoppe are entrenched in copyright hell. The music is meant to be diegetic, there are speakers all around the island. Also people oppressed under a cult would not be listening to ironic remixes of their own life. Not that they get a choice, there are no controls on those speakers. Regardless, easy listening city pop is not just more fitting, but makes for incredible bangers.

I would assume that if you are reading reviews of this game on Backloggd, you are already aware that this is The One Good Detective Game. If you didn't, well now you do. The plot is stringed around the game's world, giving you as much control as possible in unearthing it. And you will dig deep. There is only one solution to a problem, but there are many problems to solve, and no route is presented as the "true path". This is not a visual novel with some puzzles.

It's shocking how well this is implemented. You can follow a hunch! How many games have this? You are connecting clues in your head as you walk around the empty streets. You get an idea, you check your notes, you think of a way you could confirm this. If you know something, the game will not gaslight you for 20 minutes while the main character catches up.

Ten minutes into the game, you are free to begin the final confrontation any time you want. Do your facts build a truth? The game won't tell you. In fact let me spoil it a little bit for you: the game will never spell it out for you. It respects you enough to just present itself, and leave it up to you to interpret it.

Is the mystery really that important? The world is so alluring. A twisted image of the corporate world I submerge in five times a week. A big crime happened. Residents sure don't seem to care that much, they just want it behind them. There is work they must do. Some of them are not that happy about the cult thing. You can give answers where you are critical of it. But you cannot give answers where you long for a life. Most people (you included) is defined by nothing but their work. The system is larger than any individual. One of the first collectables you find triggers a short cutscene. It will tell you that there will be a next Paradise Island. No matter what your actions are, it will not end this madness. Solving a crime does not solve the Genocide Machine, it is part of it.

The gameplay has a similar structure to the story. There are no levels or segments, the island is open from the start for you to explore. In order to guide you in this exploration, the developer decided to take the collectathon approach. The map is littered with all kinds of trinkets for you to grab, some meaningful, most not. Readers of peculiar taste would need no inclenation to let every vertex of Paradise Island 24 seep into their pores. For the more well adjusted, the collectibles will beckon them to check every alley, every patch of grass for a new vending machine or a tape. The map feels the exact right size, and is quite varied despite each area only being a 2 minute walk from eachother. The surrealism really comes into play here, the pristine vacation town will do its best to evoke nostalgia in you for a time that never was.

I was a little reminded of the liminal space craze from a year ago while playing. I felt things from some of those images. The concept is this: it usually shows a place that was designed to have tons of people move through it, like a mall. But instead you are shown when its empty and kinda dimly lit. Your brain freaks out a little from this. People who live in the city know this feeling well. You are unsafe alone. You get used to the noise other people generate. A commercial building is not a place where this should be amiss. The game didn't quite manage to catch on this, but I feel like it should have. It reminds me of old chat worlds I loved exploring when I was younger. Did I ever see an online 3d chatroom with tons of players in it? I can't remember if I did. Extra points for hitting my personal vaporwave senses without ever presenting your game world as defunct metaverse or whatever.

After I finished the game, I felt satisfied. Yet when the elevator comes back to take me back to my coworkers my mind is still on Paradise Island 24. Make no mistake I love the people I work with. Before I felt nothing but rage on how The Machine was breaking them in. Paradise Killer grabbed me by this thread in my soul and choked me with it. Give it a spin the next time you find yourself in an energy drink fueled haze at one in the morning.

Way of the Samurai is a pack of red Marlboros for people who never smoked.

The age of the samurai dawns. Two families fighting over a single metal foundry. A desolate town suffers. The Meiji government looms over the valley, a force larger than any man ever will be. Time marches relentlessly. You are here to witness the end.

The game presents a delightful PlayStation 2 depiction of a samurai western. As you walk around the map scenes happen, most of them consequential, and if you are there you can affect the outcome. There is an illusion, that the story progresses whether you are there to witness it or not. Sometimes you save someone from being kidnapped, other times you take a baby on an evening stroll. Almost all of the fighting you will do are the consequences of these scenes. This makes them all meaningful, gives them a natural place in the plot. You never slaughter 200 faceless goons "because thats how video games are supposed to be". The restraint shown from the devs really pays off. Gameplay and plot form a cohesive narrative with elegance that even the most regarded creators of this field can only dream of. It's remarkable to find such an early example of this type of storytelling.

After selecting the difficulty the arcade sensibilities become imminent. There is no save point to go back to when you die. You have to start over from the beginning. You get some points for failure, that mostly unlock extras, but nothing that will get you closer to beating the game. For that you'll need stronger swords, things that are mostly available at the end of the story, and you don't get to keep them if you are defeated. Cowards may visit the blacksmith and have their sword delivered, if they have the funds for it. The bold must go for a clear and risk losing it all. This makes early runs very interesting, but becomes kind of meaningless as you start to amass a pretty big collection. Still, it manages to circumvent a lot of problems roguelikes face by simply discouraging suiciding. Rewards are at the finale. The game has more class than to shower you with garbage for a cheap dopamine kick.

The tutorials are ironically modern. Only one features gameplay, it's about how you press the circle button to speak to other characters. Rest of them get unlocked via the progression system, and are all just videos of advanced techniques. It reminds me of some fighting games, where your only resource for game mechanics are crusty YouTube tutorials. These videos the game gives you don't even have voice over, just subtitles. I kinda love this. Definitely a read the manual game.

One of the advanced moves you learn about early on are the off-balance techniques, the star of which is the push. While doing weak attacks you can push the other to break their defense. This feels realistic, as almost all the injuries I got from kendo were from people pushing like this. There was a girl there who started a few weeks after I did. I was assigned to spar with her. We crossed our swords and I looked into her blue eyes. She seemed like she was ready to kill me. She hit real hard too. I kinda loved her. Anyway the game puts a big emphasis on the push but its very situational. If you want to humble them I recommend kicking their shins.

It was such a joy to have this in my library. The design makes it excellent to pick up for an hour and leave fulfilled. A quaint samurai diorama behind my screen for me to behold. If you gonna stop playing video games for good, this might be the one exception you should keep.

SkyGunner is not the son you wanted, it's the son you loved.

The game's intro blasted my brain with impeccable vibes I have not experienced since the first time I watched Aria: The Animation twelve years ago. We are presented with vast blue skies, shimmering sea, a quaint little Italian town, a character bringing a plate of spaghetti on spinach with cocktail wieners to a cafe table. The intro fades out and the title screen triumphantly appears against a bright blue sky while a distinctively digital sounding orchestral main theme blasts from your speakers. Any button will lead you to an elegant sepia toned menu beckoning you to begin playing. This luxurious PS2 game from 2001 features both the original Japanese and English voice acting in the US release.

For a game of its time I was delighted that it was playable even without reading the manual. The developers clearly loved their creation, even if their child was not one who did well in school, or had many friends, or were noticed at family gatherings. While dogfighting games already had a large history at the time of release, a 3D shooter with lock-on and all axes of control was mostly still uncharted territory. Game's got a steep learning curve for something that you can beat under 2 hours. Yet love shines through the cracks, as the developers implemented an extensive tutorial. Each segment ends with an optional mode that lets you practice each mechanic of the plane indefinitely. In the two decades since the release, games engineered to be played like a sport don't feature learning tools like this.

Game developers and other weirdos will be enamored from what I'm about to say. What makes this game feel and play different from most of its counterparts is that the camera is pivoted to your target. This is where the heart of the game lies. Just turning towards your enemy looks like a cool maneuver. An arcade shooter from 2001 will supply you with cinematic moments without any scripted camera sequences. You will see your enemies blow up, your bullets tearing through their wings, giant battle zeppelins plummet to the sea in a burning inferno. Visual direction in the moment to moment gameplay, elegantly provided by one of the game's core systems. It's beautiful.

A would be player will be presented with two control schemes: Novice and Expert. Novice will give you two axes: pitch and yaw. Expert will also let you control your roll. Expert was an afterthought, though according to the developers they were split on which is the "better" way to play the game. Expert straight up rules. On the other hand, ask yourself this: how likely are you to play this over 20 years old game multiple times? Go with novice. I won't judge. You can do expert when you pick it up for the second time.

With cutscenes and a few continues, the game takes around an hour or two to clear, if you skip the cutscenes this cuts down to around 45 minutes. This is a pick up and play game, you don't really have to dedicate your entire day to it. You can quit a run and the game will save your progress and let you continue from where you left off, so you don't even really have to do it in one sitting.

You might ask: the character design seems a little childish, is this a game I could play in front of my girlfriend? Rest easy my friend, if they would break up with you over this they probably already had a million other reasons to leave you. Or maybe they just suck, they too are only human. If I were you, I would be booking a date right now. A high tempo two hour long date with you and SkyGunner. Maybe it won't work out. But it will stick with you.