Alright, time to go back to my list of "bad games", this time with a gauntlet of atari games back when circles weren't invented yet.
The first one I played was this... thing.

I try to be objective but it's hard when most of the atari 2600 library consists of archaic, obsolete and very small games that nobody without nostalgia would play. The technology has progressed so much that the standard of what's considered good has left most of these pixelated experiments behind.

Having said all that, this game suuuuuucks.

At first I was frustrated because I thought that it was like a zoomed in first person rubik cube. Then I got it... it's just rubik's cube themed. You control a... dude, this dude takes colors and if you press the only button on the controller you swap the color you have with the one you are standing on. That's it. There's a limitation in that I think you can't step on titles of the color you are carrying, so that's where the puzzle element is.

This "puzzle game" is extremely boring. Even back in the days where the atari 2600 was a cutting edge console this was worse than just playing with an actual rubik's cube.

I'll give it a point for the craaaazy 3d effect when swapping sides. I can imagine people of that era being impressed with that.

My thoughts on Gunvein have been varying quite a lot during my almost 10 hours of playing the game as of writing but I've settled on a positive reception overall. Unbalanced and visually generic, but also thrilling and engaging, Gunvein is a shmup for those of us who love playing the genre as aggressively as possible. Seeing just how much you can get away with sticking to the top of the screen while using your bombs as truly intended - as super attacks to melt through enemy formations quickly. All three ship types feel fun to play and the bosses have a nice CAVE feel to them, quickly cycling through different patterns to constantly keep you on your toes. The extra missions and roguelike modes feel a bit undercooked but still add a lot of extra replay value to the game.

If you're looking for a new shmup in the vein of Crimzon Clover and aren't fussed if it's not quite as good as CC, give Gunvein a try.

Slaps the teeth out of Joel Last of Us's mouth when you don't have a bitch in your ear trying to tell ya otherwise.

Sega Rally Championship's legacy was a boon when it came to asking major companies to throw money into their own psuedo-simulation rally racing games, because I can never get enough of that modbogging feel of maneuvering a heavy car around obstacles and hearing my suspension smack into the ground over numerous bumps and jumps to the tune of disgusting guitar riffs echoing through the alpine mountains. A big difference between Rally Cross and it's Sega-alligned counterpart is how absurdly bouncy the cars feel, it's a constant struggle to keep yourself adjacent to the ground and to not send yourself tumbling through a corner. Huge tip if you are playing, the shoulder buttons not only flip yourself right back up, it also helps keep your wheels on the ground when you take a hard corner.

Shoutouts to me as an idiot child who played the demo decades ago, and sat there at the starting line not knowing how to shift out of neutral.

Despite an obvious inspiration, Rally Cross survives as it's own feel of slower-paced rally racing with imaginary cars named "44 monkey" with an emphasis on keeping control of your vehicle rather than just going fast. I am but a creature of chaos, thus I am drawn to chaotic vehicles, whether they fire missiles or bounce like their tires are full of gummi worms. Maybe Sony should have a dedicated rally racing game again, I think that'd be cool. It would also be cool if they shot Jim Ryan out of a cannon too instead of handing him that cushy retirement after 900 people got laid off, but alas!

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.

I think that we, as a society

Should make more games about tiny girls using a drill to do platforming and stuff

But alas, we only got Drill Dozer, Gurumin and this

We're a couple of steps away from the perfect TTGL videogame

One of the first projects I worked on, learned a lot and met some really good people in the process. So much energy and passion was going around, it's a feeling you can only get when working on a small game like this with an even smaller team. It's hard for me to not be sentimental about it and look at this game objectively, I'll always love the game but seeing the reviews here tell me it's not for everyone lol.

Whether you enjoyed it or not, thanks for playing Super Ledgehop and taking a chance on a random indie game, when you could've bought a McChicken.

easily one of the best-looking 8-bit games i've played. its use of color within a limited palette is just stunning, constantly. even the composition of the images, also palette-limited, benefits from the eye of an experienced manga-ka. and the animation! sparse as it is, it really makes this feel like some obscure japanese pc game - not a famicom vn.

the game's story is fairly conventional '80s sci-fi anime mecha fluff punctuated by goofy "flirting" (or just straight perving) and the latter is borderline cringe most of the time (you and your girlfriend seem to be dead-set on brutally negging each other, with your little sister's presence making it weird), but it's all fairly innocent. in the end, we're lucky to have this little gem playable in english, and it makes me wish there was more like it.

Wow, just wow.

It's a shame that this game's legacy is that it was a huge flop and more or less jumpstarted the HAL-Nintendo partnership, because in my opinion, those are the LEAST interesting things about this game, and the Game deserves to be celebrated outside of those factors. As someone whose first console was the NES, I was obsessed with any game that had cutscenes. I've always been fascinated by 8 bit games that push the limits of the console in order to enhance the storytelling, as it leads to both the designers and the player having to use their imagination. Metal Slader Glory destroyes those limits.

Everything from the massive sprites, multiple colour pallets, fluid animation, and even the intricate/dynamic sprite layering, it's all INSANE. I found myself stopping the game and just watching the little details of the characters faces, like how Elina would get upset when you'd talk to Catty, and smoothly shift back to a smile when you talk to her. Or how the characters would react in the foreground to things in the background.

"But the story is predictable, and the antiquated adventure game design is clunky/boring!" - Some jerk off

Look, I don't know how you ended up here if you can't cope with old adventure game tropes or 80s sci-fi anime plots. If you know about this game, you must be VAGUELY interested in one of those things, otherwise, what the fuck were you expecting from such a niche game? And even then, this is by far one of the most polished adventure games from that era, especially out of the Famicom ones.

It's a great game, and I'm glad I finally finished it. Shout-outs to Her-Saki and FandChill, their translation patch was a much needed upgrade, the updated font and more energetic translation made the game that much better.

Some say that the best things are those that take its time in the oven before fully baking, and let me tell ya…

Tour de Pizza fucking COOKED.


It's almost heartwarming to see this realized: I still remember those first Pizza Tower demos on Twitter and Youtube and the Noise always being in the forefront, either as a boss of major part or them or an outright playable character. As we all know, in the final game he’s World 3’s final boss, not even the main antagonist of the game, tho that didn’t stop this psychotic gremlin from being charming as hell… but nah, I really wanted the fucker to be playable, and more than a year later, he’s here, to the dismay of all Italians.

I would have still felt satisfied if Noise felt less interesting or exciting to play as than Peppino, ‘cause I mean, it’s goddam Peppinno, but no, they just HAD to go all out and make a banger move set. I still don’t really know which of the two is my favorite, but that’s just a testIment of how fucking fun Noise is and how it accomplished what it’s going for: to make you feel that you aren’t playing as an overstressed cook, but as a goddam ANIMAL.

If Pepinno was the ‘’fight or flight’’ concept personified, then Noise is just the FIGHT, he cheats the game’s puzzles how many times necessary, he super jumps whenever he wants, he doesn’t need of Gustavo and Brick to save him, he’s got himself! Literally! Like there’s another one of him just becauseWHAT THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER. And I mean, they gave him the sausage gatling, so at this point I’m pretty confident saying the game is finally whole, this is it chief, happiness has been found.

It taps once again into that sheer adrenaline burst that the first playthrough perfect, but in a completely unhinged way. Once you learn how everything about this mad lad works, everything clicks, the levels break open and the amount of tricks you’ll be performing are second nature: skate wall jumps, tornado spins into dives into jumps into more tornado spins, pizza crushers that demolish everything without much of a sweat and using it is super easy, and that’s not even mentioning how ALL extra mechanics, like the ghost transformation or the rocket, are completely changed to fit this rat brain’s way of acting, and it’s exciting to learn and glorious to master. They somehow found a way to make WAR harder yet more fun. HOW.

One would think that, since it isn’t a boss anymore, part of Noise’s completely unhinched persona would be lost in translation to playability, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some levels even change lay-outs to fit him better and be more fun, but at this point I think it was the Noise himself that changed the before entering to make his life easier. His animations, how all title cards just have different drawings of his face on top of the characters, his ‘’no thoughts’’ face each time he fights a boss and how he can DEMOLISH them with the bombs (whoever thought of that should get a raise, they are so fun to use), some new songs that I'm 99% sure are just the sounds that play inside of Noise's head, it’s INSANE, as it should and then some.

It's Pizza Tower, it obviously was gonna be insane and good, but this is next level from what I was expecting, and I’m so happy it’s here. Noise Mouse is real bois, just that justifies completely another playthrough of this game, having bomb combos and level variations is the cherry on top…

Still, huge missed opportunity to not have Noisette or any other bosses playable in the Gustavo and Brick sections, like yeah, more Noise is fun, but I just think that- Oh dear, no I didn’t mean to- OH GOD THERE ARE 100 NOISES SURROUNDING MY HOME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

The odd one out of the original trio of childhood games I had on my N64, which still functions today thankfully. Mario 64 needs no introduction, Wave Race 64 wowed me with it's realistic water effects and attracted me with it's ocean scenery, and Top Gear Rally was kinda just over there chilling and not bothering anyone. Absolutely a dad pick if I had ever seen one.

Very much feels like Nintendo's unofficial secret answer to Sega Rally Championship, with a ton of care obviously put into the weighty movement of the cars, realistic suspension systems, and actual damage modeling. Using the control stick to steer of course means the handling becomes about as touchy as me on a bad Saturday morning with no caffeine. This is where the customization before each race becomes crucial to making or breaking how the driving feels on the course under certain weather conditions. I feel this is where most people give up on this game, but with such a small set of options to experiment with it shouldn't take much time to find your favorite setup. I definitely don't recommend the default steering/handling 1 for beginners, it's quite a tight endeavor~

What Wave Race 64 did with water and sea for me, was what Top Gear Rally tried to do for me with land and dirt. The depiction of the jungle track under rainy conditions looked simply remarkable to me in 1997, the N64's infamous ability to utilize fog to hide draw distance was done masterfully here and coming back to it as an adult reminded me of that along with realizing the little things like the headlights blaring from the front of the cars. It was something I hadn't seen quite yet even on Playstation or Saturn, and this game along with Wave Race really showed off how powerful the N64 was. It's a small wonder what would happen if the console were not held back by the storage capacity of it's cartridge format, but alas...I just wish I could've used the paint tool option, because I never had a memory pack growing up. ;-;

The crown jewel of the package however is Barry Leitch's soundtrack. I'm not sure if some prohibition era gangsters held his family hostage to force him into making one of the most beautiful menu themes I ever heard or what, but it's a drop dead gorgeous piece that I remember listening to for ages as a kid. Meanwhile PAL/JP got this insane energetic piece that has the exact opposite energy. The actual course themes are nothing to sneeze at either, the music for the Jungle course is crazy good with a side of crazy bread, and really gets your adrenaline pumping for racing in the rain. It really brings me back to realizing how good we had it for music during this era for all kinds of genres. These days if you boot up a mainstream rally game on Steam nine times out of ten it would blare some forgettable licensed garbage at you, which I would turn off near instantly and start playing my own stuff on Spotify.....or perhaps start playing music from Sega Rally, Top Gear Rally, etc...

sighs

I miss game composers man...