Been cutting it ever closer the past two years, so not sure if I can make 52 again. But let's optimistically shoot for a 5th medal.
01. Huntdown (2020, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Side-scrolling action game with a Sega Genesis-on-steroids grimy 80s urban setting, pulpy voice acting, and a delicious Kung Fury-esque soundtrack. I wish this skewed closer to run & gun territory, because ducking into cover and popping up to shoot gets a little tedious, whereas the game really shines in the last few boss fights which significantly up the projectile count. Luckily levels are nicely bite-sized and all have unique bosses, which keeps it from going stale. I do have a minor gripe with the way you lose control of movement if hit in the air, which can lead to punishing multi-hits or outright deaths if falling off the stage. Feels weirdly archaic for an otherwise modern take on this type of action game.
02. Hell Blasters (2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Vertically scrolling bullet hell with a surprisingly large feature-set given its tiny dev team. Unfortunately its solid core, centered around bullet cancelling, struggles to hold the rest of the project in orbit. Considerable effort went into a story mode, for instance, and while I hate to be dismissive - almost none of that effort was worth it.
The story mode chops the 5 arcade levels up into 30+ microscopic chunks, interspersed with cut-scenes. The writing in these is tonally all over the place. One sentence our protagonists come to grips with killing an enemy, only to start vacation-planning literally the next line. None of this is aided by a wonky translation, and the length of the cut-scenes length kills the otherwise decent pace of the arcade mode. Lastly, they also highlight the game's art style, which one might charitably describe as Spartan at best.
Visuals really are where this extra effort should've gone instead: the game has half a theme going on with mechanical animals serving as bosses, but all the regular enemies are generic tanks and planes. It doesn't even carry the animal theme through either, with some bosses being rocketships and mechs. Granted, the team is truly tiny, but a sequel would be much improved if a more cohesive style could be established.
03. R-Type Final 2 - Stage Pass Volume 2 (2021 & 2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Despite its annoyances and glacial pacing, I can never resist the siren song of more R-Type Final 2. The 2nd Stage Pass compiles 3 DLC sets into a single package, remaking 4 previous R-Type stages, alongside 3 more experimental adaptations. Two of those are maps from R-Type Tactics/R-Type Command remade into shooter levels, no doubt to drum up interest for the upcoming remakes of those games. More notable however is the inclusion of an ImageFight stage, now retooled into horizontal orientation, which signals intent to branch out into other IREM franchises. The whole package is a little too corridor heavy, and the underwater levels never look good on Switch, but the later stages are real winners.
04. R-Type Final 2 - Stage Pass Volume 3 (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Like the Bydo themselves, R-Type Final 2 continues to absorb other IREM franchises into its folds. ImageFight is drawn in further with a second level, and there are even more outlandish takes in this Stage Pass. Most notable are the opening stages paying back-to-back homage to the pre-Metal Slug submarine shooter In The Hunt, as well as the colourful Mr. Heli/Battle Chopper.
At this point, R-Type Final 2 contains 4½ games worth of stages, around 100 playable ships, and lots of weird stuff like a little base-building mode it likes to pretend is a "metaverse". It's never going to address my core complaints with the game's foundation (load times, punishing checkpoints, branching paths feeling perfunctory, lots of little QOL issues), choosing instead to build ever more content upon said foundation, no doubt with the soon-releasing R-Type Final 3 Evolved in mind. It's never becoming the best shmup in town, but it sure will be the one I play the longest.
05. In The Hunt (1993, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Got curious about this submarine-themed shooter after its inclusion in R-Type Final 2. It predates Metal Slug, but many of the hallmarks were already in place: intricate pixel art of densely packed machines, and lots of incoming shots. It's probably inspired by Hunt For Red October, and primarily impresses in the presentation department. The actual gameplay doesn't evolve much beyond just mashing fire. You'll find some power-ups, but good luck holding onto them. This must've been a merciless quarter-muncher back in the day. Luckily the Arcade Archives release adds auto-fire to save your thumbs.
06. Sol Cresta: Dramatic Edition (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
One I initially skipped due to its art style looking downright hideous in videos. Bit of a mistake, it turns out, because Sol Cresta is a good-to-great vertical shoot-'em-up. Mind, it's still hardly a looker - sporting crummy Sega Saturn visuals at the best of times, and obscuring foes and incoming fire with fuzzy backgrounds at the worst of times.
What is compelling however, is how Sol Cresta layers several systems which, once grokked, overlap quite satisfyingly. It's a little daunting at first: you control three ships docked together, and can activate slow-mo to rearrange them mid-flight. Additionally, if you arrange them in certain Formations, you get special attacks (which seems not unlike the Unite Morph system of Platinum's earlier title The Wonderful 101). Separate from Formations, there's a medal-based meter which grants you attacks which require fighting game style button inputs to execute. I was not a fan of this in Cotton 2, but here the inputs are simpler, and the slow-mo makes it easier to see what you have access to.
Unlike classic shmups in which you upgrade your build incrementally, Sol Cresta sees your arsenal shift constantly, based on pick-ups and which Formations/Medal attacks you expend. I was absolutely sceptical at first, but this inclusion of Character Action-esque mechanics works much better than I thought. The game has a dynamic and ever-shifting feel to it, forcing you to adapt instead of relying on tried-and-true approaches. Stringing together a series of wild moves really does feel like it makes the most of the Cresta series' unique identity.
That said, there are downsides here which are hard to overlook beyond the aforementioned visual style. The story mode (which is sold separately or included in the Dramatic Edtion), is a perfunctory shounen anime plot with appropriate (Japanese only) voice acting. Worse yet, actually reading all the translated text is a strain, since it's displayed on the sides of a hectic action game (similarly to how Raiden V handled this). Another disappointment is the curious lack of unique bosses, especially by PlatinumGames standards. The game recycles 3 of its forgettable bosses with slight moveset variations to fill out the first 6 levels, leaving just the final stage with a memorable design and unique feel to it.
07. Sophstar (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Surprisingly fully-featured vertical shooter from Brazilian studio Banana Bytes. Multiple ships with significantly different playstyles to choose from, several modes, and it has a unique teleportation gimmick to set it apart from contemporaries. The story it tries to tell is rather middling: a very generic pilot-with-mysterious-past affair, which might've been better to excise. There are a few odd issues such as button mapping not displaying correctly, but I don't know if that affects other versions than just Switch. One thing to note: don't play this if you're at all photosensitive, it has some heavy flashing.
08. About An Elf (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Rather basic point & click adventure with a very light turn-based combat element. Excels in its incredible presentation, comprised of glossy, plasticene, hyperrealist dioramas set to short, dinky drum machine loops. Your unreliable narrator is telling her friend about various (possibly untrue) adventures, while occasionally breaking the 4th wall in a punchy, jokey script. It doesn't seem to have much to say, and your methods of interaction do not meaningfully change over the game either. As a result it felt a little long in the tooth, despite only clocking in around 4 hours. But it presents a very cohesive vision, and stays firmly in its lane - a solid result for a tiny development team.
09. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (2019/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Mecha-themed time-travel game which mixes adventure game storytelling with tactics combat. Well, I say mix, but the modes are fairly rigidly separated. You're given significant freedom in selecting the order in which you experience all the events on its 2 century spanning timeline, and can do the battles whenever you please.
Much of the writing in 13 Sentinels isn't so much plot-heavy, as it is dense exposition and world-building. Scenes are short enough to maintain a break-neck pace while juggling 13 character arcs, and stack cliffhangers atop previous cliffhangers. It's impressive to consider how other players will reach revelations in different orders, yet will still be guided to the same cohesive picture. This comes at the cost of making it a story easily spoiled, since even an understanding of its setting may vary depending which branches you explore first.
It's a reference-heavy script, leaning hard on mainstream sci-fi intertextuality (straight up cribbing a storyline from E.T., for example). This serves a function beyond borrowing themes, though. Some characters from the World War 2 timeline are confronted with the losing battle they're fighting for the Imperial Japanese Army in 1945, only for the game to jump-cut to 1985, and present a Japan steeped in American pop-culture influences.
An aspect I found entirely unnecessary however, was the decision to have the (teenage) pilots control their mechs in the nude. For a script which frequently highlights how violating others' bodily autonomy will cause harm, it doesn't seem to consider how the game's character portraits may be read by its audience. Granted, the imagery is hardly explicit, and the game eventually wheels out a half-baked in-universe explanation, but my initial response was to worry whether this game would go on to sexualise minors in order to court a sketchy audience.
The tactics battles are amusing, but gesture towards much more depth than I actually encountered. In retrospect I should've upped the difficulty, because I sailed through every mission getting undeserved S-Ranks despite blatantly ignoring helpful advice the game was giving me. Luckily they're breezy levels, which mirrors most of the story chapters, too.
10. Bastion (2011/2018, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Re-release of the XBLA game which put Supergiant Games on the map. Cool to see how their trademarks (excellent score & voice acting, isometric combat, in-universe difficulty modifiers and narration, base building etc.) date back to their very first release. The action is already serviceable here, albeit a tad simple: a dodge roll + strike will carry you throughout the game if you want. Coupled with the absence of enough systems with which to distract you from the combat, it does grow monotonous though.
The story is presented in small enough chunks to establish a sense of it unraveling. Unfortunately, it did frustrate me at times. Particularly when it becomes clear your mission is to finish a genocide, and the game simply offers you no ways to cease participation or resist until the very end. Regardless of which ending you pursue, if we take the game at face value, your character remains complicit. Either he commits mass murder to reset the world, hoping to avoid said genocide and mass murders from happening in a future loop (the presence of a New Game+ mode suggests the cycle of violence never ends, however). Or he kills a lot of Ura people in service of nothing beyond learning a lesson at the expense of their lives. Only to then return to live with a manipulator who, had they been upfront with you, could have prevented the countless senseless murders. For the game to paint the latter as the hopeful of the two endings, without offering a way to opt-out entirely feels weirdly tone-deaf, as if its implications were not fully considered.
This lack of character agency around such a topic reminds me of another, albeit vastly different, 2011 release: The Last Story, which features an oddly similar storyline. Speaking of character agency in Bastion, it feels like a missed opportunity for the only named female character to make notably less unprompted decisions by herself than the other characters. Her backstory provides plenty of tragic material to work with, but she's left to complete her character arc mostly off-screen.
11. Transistor (2014/2018) ★★★☆☆
Very ambivalent on this one. On paper I think it all works. It ticks the usual Supergiant boxes (gorgeous art, soundtrack, diegetic integration of options), and has a unique combat system which mixes real-time and pre-planned elements like some hypothetical hybrid of Faselei! and Bayonetta. Said combat has decent depth too, with weapon aspects you can arrange in dozens of combinations to achieve slightly different effects. The game encourages experimentation through penalties and optional challenges, too.
In practice though, half my battles consisted of unloading a pre-planned sequence, and then either hiding or spamming the one move Jaunt allowed me to, while waiting until a meter refilled. I'm sure there were better defensive options, but the old adage of players optimising the fun out of games rang true for me.
Sticking to just a few trusty combinations also meant I unlocked fewer character profiles. Tying exposition to combat experimentation seems like a good idea, but I found myself bored by these text dumps. Thus I quickly stopped trying to unlock them. It's a lot of telling, rather than showing, which is frustrating since Transistor's writing is otherwise quite competent.
Sure, some elements feel a bit basic (voiceless lady teams up with a bodiless voice), but the game finds touching ways for Red to communicate via humming and writing-then-deleting questions on message boards. The script clearly has things to say about the commodification of attention via social media platforms, initially demonstrating how hive-mind thinking will lead to fickle populaces chasing momentary convictions over cohesive long-term policies. It's subsequently also clever enough to realise how such commentary is easily hijacked by technocrats with visionary claims, though. That said, the game's intentionally vague delivery does slightly hinder its ability to speak to real-world topics. Unfortunate, since the foundation for a convicing thesis feels laid, but the game offers its players too much wiggle room to insert their own interpretations.
12. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (Switch, 2021) ★★★★☆
Remake of two classics, one of which was new to me. The core design of short, fast-paced bursts still holds up very well, and naturally invites retrying to improve. The iconic soundtracks return largely intact, with some appropriate modern additions. It still controls like a dream, but the decreased floatiness took some getting used to. I do like how they've modernised some aspects, like renaming the Mute Grab to Weddle Grab to honour the Deaf skater who invented the trick. Similarly, the game emphasises a new generation of skaters (such as Nyjah Huston and Aori Nishimura), which feels like an appropriate passing of the torch as Tony Hawk and his late 90s contemporaries wind down their athletic careers.
13. Graze Counter GM (2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
The chibi character art and sub-par story initially turned me away, but this remake of Graze Counter has a lot more to offer than it lets on. It's a short, fast-paced bullet hell with precise controls, several modes, and 16 subtly different ships (including one which unsubtly nods to DoDonPachi Blissful Death). By just barely letting enemy fire graze your ship (think Psyvariar Delta), you gain access to the titular Graze Counter. This short blast works in tandem with the less frequently earned Break mode to plow your way through dense curtains of bright pink fire. I do wish your hitbox was more obviously marked, but it's a generous, newcomer-friendly entry in a daunting genre.
14. Picross S Genesis & Master System Edition (2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Another solid Picross S title from Jupiter, with dozens of hours of puzzles. That said, it does feel like a missed opportunity to have all these classic Sega franchises to draw on, but not use any of their iconic tunes. If the fear is for the music to spoil puzzle outcome, then at least play a sound effect from the corresponding game when the puzzle is solved. They're also still recycling the puzzle solutions across regular and Mega Picross modes, and keep insisting on including no more than 30 Color Picross puzzles - despite this clearly being the best new mode since Picross S3.
15. Citizen Sleeper - Episode: Purge (2023, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The 3rd and final (free!) expansion to last year's GOTY sat atop my list of anticipated releases this year, so it's a bit deflating to realise it didn't fully connect with me. Structurally it's very solid: the Flux event's mysterious veil is lifted, and revealed to be a banal form of DRM software, operated by hypercapitalist space landlords trying to reposess "their" property.
Thus, the inhabitants of the Eye, who long denied access to the refugee flotilla, are now forced to rely on the kindness of people they othered. The metaphor is made literal: capitalism will push anyone into the periphery, regardless of social status. Refugees and citizens are social constructs; arbitrary lines of division which the ultra-rich will gladly uphold to keep the masses at each others' throats. But the moment these social groups stand in the way of extractable resources, the real division becomes clear: there are haves, and have-nots. It all mirrors neatly at a character level, too: while inhabitants become refugees, the Sleeper and Peake can in turn transition from refugees into citizens.
The Switch port seems to really strain under this last expansion, running considerably more sluggish than before, and it even hard-crashed on me once. While presumably unintended, this does amusingly mirror the Eye straining under the Flux events.
On paper this is a slam-dunk finale, and I have a hard time articulating why it disappointed me slightly. It's still good, but Citizen Sleeper has much higher highs in both the main game and the 2nd expansion. Normally this game is great at instilling urgency, but an odd lack of pushback makes its finale a total breeze. Even a late-stage antagonist can be pushed aside with near-zero consequences. Perhaps I came in with unrealistic expectations, but Citizen Sleeper set those expectations itself. This script has routinely pulled off poignancy, heartbreak, despair, tension, and glimpses of pure tranquility. I was hoping for one last such moment.
16. Rolling Gunner + Over Power (2019/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Extremely elegantly designed horizontal bullet hell shooter, directed by ex-CAVE programmer Daisuke Koizumi. Rolling Gunner has a simple, intuitively grasped concept: your ship fires forward, while a secondary cannon fires in opposite direction of your movement. You can also freeze its position for more targeted fire. The Over Power DLC lets you control the auxiliary cannon with the right joystick, moving the game into twin-stick shooter territory. In some ways this feels like the true vision of the project, especially since it makes the game easier. The art style and story are quite generic, but it does impress in presentation thanks to very short end-of-stage cinematics upping the production values.
17. DeltaZeal a.k.a. ΔZeal (2002/2023, Switch) ★★★★★
Vertical shooter initially released to Japanese arcades as G-Stream G2020, on supposedly crummy arcade hardware, and allegedly without properly paying its 3 developers. Later the lead developer got to re-release it as ΔZeal, retroactively making this the start of the Zeal franchise, which also includes XII Stag/XII Zeal, TriZeal, and ExZeal. On the surface this looks like a more intricately designed, slightly futuristic military take on Raiden Fighters, but there's enough happening under the hood to set it apart.
Its weapon system is simple, but neat: you have 10 weapon slots to fill with 3 varieties of pick-ups. Want more lasers? Grab the blue icons. Prefer missiles? Go for green, etc. This lets you either mix and match a balanced set, or go for a full set of a single colour. Doing the latter nets you extra powerful vulcans/lasers/missiles, but also means you'll have to be careful not to grab a different icon and lose a fully matching set. The devious scoring, which revolves around medal-chaining, invites you to take more risks to keep a chain going. It's further complicated by secret extra routes and branching paths, which add sections to levels if you're doing well, but simultaneously introduce more possibilities to meet an early demise.
ΔZeal feels slightly out of time, like it grazed the impact of the then-emerging bullet hell sub-genre, rather than fully absorbed it. Instead, it hews closer to Psikyo's output, or perhaps even RayForce: games which upped the speed of enemies and bullets, but still aimed them all at the player, rather than the aimless, fanning shots found in bullet hell. As a result, death comes at you quick, from places it wouldn't in other games - its contemporary developers at Cave would never allow units spawning under your sprite to point-blank kill you, but ΔZeal requires you either learn their spawn positions, or eat some cheap deaths.
There are further frictions I normally wouldn't excuse in other games: Bullet visibility isn't always great when both sides are exchanging pink fire. The game doesn't explain what triggers extra sections, or how routes branch. It won't let you practice a level before beating it in a run. In general there's a lot of ways the game punishes you, but outside of scoring it has relatively few rewards. Elsewhere these minor annoyances would add up, but here I felt oddly charmed by them. ΔZeal has a lot of secrets, and no intentions of spilling them. Instead, it's up to the player: do you want to take on more risk, or purposefully play worse to shorten levels and increase odds of survival?
I recognise my score is probably a tad higher than the ~4 stars I'd imagine this getting in consumer information style reviews. I'm absolutely choosing to either overlook or outright embrace some annoyances. ΔZeal puts me in that Guitar Hero-esque flow state, but adds much higher risk-reward wagers, and a punishing sense of danger to the affair. Its minor flaws are reduced to more variables to consider when reading the proverbial Matrix underpinning the programming, while the catchy music and hypnotically fast gameplay remain. The added developer commentary is the icing on the cake in this re-release, its text-to-speech delivery feeling rudimentary, while its contents feel more candid - which I suppose mirrors the whole game, really.
18. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (2023, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Remake which combines Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (2003/2004) and Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life (2005) into a single package. The town map, sound design, and general structure of the game remain largely unchanged, but there are improvements to inventory, menus, and general interface. Most dramatic is the stylistic overhaul: the new cartoony art style, with cutely redesigned characters, and pink fluffy sheep, is a distinct departure from the originals' GameCube grime.
This remake largely succeeds in reducing points of friction of the originals, but goes a bit too far in my opinion. Animals will no longer get sick and die, greatly reducing consequences if you treat them poorly. Similarly, cows and goats will give milk perenially, rather than only for a short period after giving birth. Viewed purely as a game, this is an improvement: it lets you maintain a more varied stable rather than one filled with cows, since you had to keep breeding them to keep milk production going (as in real life). But as a farming sim it does mean some realism is sacrificed. Likewise, the original games purposefully taunted you with the prospect of a cheap goat, only to make them economically useless after a year, which felt like a lesson in greed. Your short-sighted desire to exploit the goat's milk in year 2 saddled you with an animal who would only cost you fodder and the lost opportunity cost of a valuable barn spot for another 7 years.
Field farming is somewhat streamlined too, so you're left with more time to kill in the town, which inadvertently highlights how limited the social aspects truly are. Some NPCs have routines they repeat their whole lives, others will happily recycle a single phrase to say across multiple years. In year 1 you have 8 theoretical bachelor(ette)s to pursue, each with multiple cut-scenes, and a decent amount of dialogue. But by year 2 you'll have reduced 7 of them back to generic NPCs with 5 lines a year. As a result, the town grows uninteresting far too quickly, which makes running an efficient farm almost a punishment. Yes, the pace of the story has been substantially improved by reducing every chapter to a single year, but nonetheless I felt boredom already set in by hour 20 (of 50+). The game runs out of goals to pursue at the halfway point, and that's already well past the point where its loop grew stale.
A Wonderful Life remains a cozy farm/life sim, and this is a generous remake in a market where a shoddy port would've sold too. It brings upsides, like combining 2 games into one, features a new localisation, adds same-sex relationships and a non-binary option, looks great, and runs at 60fps to boot. That said, it sands off a few too many edges, which ends up highlighting how it doesn't address the core issue of the originals: a severely front-loaded story with way too long of a boring, repetitive tail.
19. Batsugun Saturn Tribute Boosted (1993/2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Re-release of Toaplan's last shooter from 1993, containing 2 versions (and 4 soundtracks) of Batsugun. This is often considered an early progenitor of the bullet hell style shooter, along with Toaplan's other 1993 release V-V (a.k.a. Grind Stormer). Batsugun still bears the hallmarks of classic shoot-'em-ups (collectible power-ups, losing some power when hit), but enemy shot patterns are dense, and your hitbox size is reduced. The game's Special Version features more iterations, reducing the hitbox even further, and brightening the entire colour palette to make incoming fire more distinct. The latter is a double-edged change, both improving legibility, but simultaneously diminishing the grimy neon look. There's a garish quality to the original's art, and it's not hard to see how Junya Inoue iterated upon Batsugun to later design the cleaner characters for ESP.Ra.De., which fully commited to an urban setting. Even the hornet iconography is already present, which would later show up in DonPachi.
Historical significance aside, Batsugun does hold up on its own, but there's a real sense the developers were reinventing the genre mid-way through. Stages 1-3 are relative pushovers, in which you feel overpowered, before stage 4 pulls out all the stops and coats the screen in bullets. Shots of all colours rain down at you fast and in clusters, requiring quick reflexes, big sweeping evasive movements, and memorisation of enemy placement. This sharply contrasts with later genre innovations, which reduce bullet speed dramatically, pick from more limited shot colour palettes, and focus on micro-dodges over constant player movements.
Batsugun's back half is a demanding game, with few moments to zone out to. I also think the game lacks a bit of context for the action, since the mix of human and mechanical foes don't make for the clearest story. There's connective tissue between the level themes, but Batsugun feels most iconic when gliding through its early aquatic levels, so it's a small bummer when those get traded for more generic cityscapes.
20. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (2010/2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Remaster of the 2010 release on DS. Smoothly animated adventure game, where a ghost tries to solve his own murder. This is from the Ace Attorney creator, and has a similarly colourful cast of cartoony characters zipping through a fast-paced, punchy script. It's amusing to watch the game invent new in-universe explanations everytime it wants to break/amend a previously established "rule". Some of the music gets repetitive, and towards the end the plot does jump a few sharks - but overall this is a fun romp.
21. Operation Logic Bomb (1993, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Went spelunking in the NSO apps and fired this up, thinking it would be a puzzle game based on the title. Instead, it's a slightly drab, overhead sci-fi action game, reminiscent of twin-stick shooters. Maybe it's due to low expectations, but I came away positively surprised! Granted, the action is not very strategic - everything boils down to picking foes off from angles their shots can't reach. And yes, the more novel weapons (like a decoy clone of yourself) don't show up until past the halfway point.
But it's interesting how the game attempts to do wordless storytelling by showing scans of areas and CCTV footage. It's no Metroid Prime by any means, but they've arrived upon a similar solution here. The colourful finale also weirdly impresses after 2 hours of grimy Alien vs. Predator environments, and I like how enemies stay dead even when backtracking. I don't want to oversell this game - it's needlessly difficult, barely establishes a plot, and I got lost a few times. But if you're not opposed to using save-states, and enjoy the weekend-rental vibes of the NSO catalogue, you could do worse than this.
22. Joy Mech Fight (1993, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★★☆
Another one from the pits of the NSO mines which I assumed would be garbage at first blush. Instead this turns out to be Nintendo published and uh, feels like a contender for a top-tier Famicom game? It's a fighting game starring abstract robots with Rayman-esque detached limbs, and there's a shocking amount of playable characters with individual move sets. Even better, the actual fighting feels snappy, slowdown is minimal, and everyone feels incredibly easy to learn in a Smash Bros. kind of way. Admittedly, the surprise factor helps a lot, but this seems super impressive for its hardware.
23. BurgerTime Deluxe (1991, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★☆☆
Have heard this series get mentioned once or twice in retro gaming videos, but this was entirely unfamiliar to me. Turns out it's a nifty puzzle game. You're a tiny chef in a big kitchen, climbing ladders (like in Donkey Kong) to reach hamburger ingredients, and drop them onto stacks. Meanwhile, various angry ingredients follow you around like ghosts from Pac-Man, who you'll want to squash between falling hamburger layers. The chef's movement speed is very slow, and the music gets repetitive fast, but the tiny cut-scenes between levels inject just enough personality to keep you going.
24. Gargoyle's Quest (1990/1991, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★☆☆
Ghosts 'n' Goblins spin-off in which you play as Firebrand, the Red Arremer who ended many early runs in Ghosts 'n' Goblins. I've never invested the time to get even remotely competent at that series, since the frantic enemy spawn rate feels exhausting. Gargoyle's Quest is a slow-paced affair, by contrast. Its platforming sections still require reflexes and precision, but it feels like you set the pace of the game, rather than being forced to contend with its whims.
When you're not platforming, the game changes to an overhead RPG perspective of sorts. You go from town to town, collect items, gain abilities, get into random (sidescrolling) battles, talk to locals (with truly incredibly slow text speed), and try to decode what its absurdly vague localisation is trying to tell you. In a roundabout way the cryptic translations and unique creature designs lend the game an air of mystery, which meshes well with the organ-esque soundtrack attempting to escape the Game Boy's sound chip. Gargoyle's Quest often feels uneven, barely giving you time to appreciate new abilities before bestowing the next one upon you already, but it punches well above its weight most of the time.
25. Demon's Crest (1994/1995, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Third game in the Gargoyle's Quest sub-series. Another ambitious title, another uneven result. This one does away with the overhead RPG perspective, focusing on sidescrolling everywhere except for the Mode 7 style world map. Presumably those were impressive at the time, but I'd rather pick stages from a menu; the world map gestures at more secrets than it really holds, and winds up as a minor nuisance. The actual stages are varied enough, and manage to establish atmosphere thanks to an organ-heavy soundtrack and once again terrific monster designs. You're encouraged to go back to stages with future power-ups, but this isn't a full Metroidvania.
Once again there's a cryptic vibe to the game, since you'll need to replay stages to find different exits. Maybe I'm just too impatient, but some exits did not seem obvious (why do you need to jump into a tornado in a stage where wind is an obstacle?). Likewise, there are certain spells I couldn't figure out (a quick search suggests some of them flat-out don't work due to a bug), the game does a poor job communicating how you need to collect everything to fight the true last boss, and there are some very late difficulty spikes. Still an impressive release, but I lost patience with it towards the end.
26. Eigengrau (2023, Switch) ★★★★★
Surprise GOTY contender for me! It's like someone looked at WarioWare's new-idea-every-30-seconds pace and asked "but what if this was a bullet hell?" The result is a 2 hour ballet of bullets, pulling all sorts of gimmicks and references, daring the player to keep up. Tetris shaped incoming fire? Check. Pac-Man style maze section? We got it. Triggerheart Exelica inspired wrecking ball? Sure! The bounce attack from Crimzon Clover? Of course! There's even Snake and Dance Dance Revolution style sections. With all these homages the game risks losing its own sense of identity, but the colour vs. grey theming provides just enough of a frame for the game to maintain a cohesive vision, and it has an oddly calming, string-heavy soundtrack. Besides, it has plenty novel tricks of its own amidst the references: most memorable is the boss who reverses all its outgoing fire, requiring you to dodge backwards through the hail of bullets you just passed.
There are elements to critique: the bosses always replicate hazards from the preceding levels, which feels like it follows the axiom of bosses needing to be skill-checks for players a little too rigidly. Likewise, on subsequent runs the surprising elements obviously hit diminishing returns, although it does offer a mirror mode and various hidden sub-objectives to keep things fresh. I don't fully know who to recommend this to, since its closest reference points are perhaps MileStone Inc.'s Radirgy, or Shmups Skill Test from Triangle Service, but I feel like Eigengrau's appeal could be a lot wider - if you like twin-stick shooters and surprises, check this out. Even has a free demo on PC/Mac!
27. Devil World (1984/1987, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Probably mostly known in trivia contexts as that Miyamoto & Tezuka take on maze games which never got released in America due to Christian imagery. As usual the kerfuffle is entirely unwarranted: a lil' dinosaur shoots demons with crosses and Bibles, while a blue Devil dances atop the screen to move the borders of the play area. The Pac-Man influence is impossible to miss, but the moving play area adds some dynamism not found in static single screen maze games, and Devil World varies in objectives per phase of each round. It also varies in how you can't collect pellets without carrying a cross, the Power Pellet equivalent here, but there's so many of them it's rarely a problem. The legacy of this game is stuck somewhere between a fun fact and its assist trophy presence is Smash Bros., but its reputation as a clone game feels unfairly dismissive.
28. Dr. Mario (1990, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★★★
Falling block puzzle game where Dr. Mario tries to line up pills to destroy viruses. Has a lot in common with Tetris, but rather than starting with a clean slate it's as if you're inheriting a messy stack and need to gradually unwind it. I got to the end of the Low Speed mode, but the SP version on NSO lets you see the Hi Speed mode's last level and true ending, which is worth seeing too. Definitely a contender for my favourite NES game.
29. Dr. Mario 64 (2001, Switch - N64 NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Very late N64 release. The core gameplay is still good, but there are minor bugs like being able to stack half a pill higher in the top-left corner than you ought to be able to, and the timer can freeze after 99 minutes of playtime. The visual presentation got an overhaul, but the soft, fuzzy visuals aren't really an improvement over the clarity the NES offered. More annoyingly, the music is a lot worse, and several irritating sound effects were added too.
Chief addition here was the 4-player multiplayer, but instead I want to complain about the story mode - essentially a series of versus matches strung together by a weak comedy plot. It features some hideous character designs with awful names like Mad Scienstein and a clown called Rudy. Apparently they hail from Wario Land 3, but they give off real Original Character, Do Not Steal vibes. The entire mode winds up feeling like a detriment rather than a boon.
30. Magical Drop II (1996, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Surprisingly addictive 1-v-1 puzzle game with the fast pace (and extensive cast) of a fighting game. You rearrange coloured orbs to create chains of 3 or more identical ones, which sends garbage to your opponent's field. Setting off chain reactions is the real play of course, and they feel easier to manufacture than in PuyoPuyo. Mind, I'm not great at Magical Drop by any means, but despite its evidently high skill ceiling, it's also very easy to learn (this version in particular is newcomer friendly as it uses 1 fewer orb column than the arcade & Neo Geo versions).
MagiDrop 2 has a surprisingly large cast of characters (all themed around the Major Arcana in a Tarot deck), but they have very little to say to each other. The game does have individual ending cut-scenes, but whether you'll find them all rewarding partially depends on your tolerance for vaguely implied nudity and repeated feet jokes. It looks like Magical Drop III andVI are the real fan-favourites, but I don't see a reason to avoid this one if you're curious.
31. Pokémon Puzzle League (2000, Switch - N64 NSO) ★★★☆☆
Quite blatant Pokémon themed reskin of Panel de Pon which was never released in Japan. Interestingly this draws much more upon the anime than the Pokémon games tend to: it features original animation and voicing, and even the music tries to sound like the 2.B.A. Master soundtrack. Gameplay is solid too, with several neat modes, and a weird 3D cylinder shaped play field to experiment with too. I didn't manage to clear it higher than normal mode, but it has a secret ending for the harder modes too.
32. Kirby's Dream Land (1992, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★☆☆
This is the first Kirby game ever, back when he was still white rather than pink, and could not absorb foes yet. A lot of future series staples were already present though, including bosses like Whispy Woods, Kracko the thundercloud, and of course King DeDeDe. The game is a short, breezy, 5-level affair, clocking in well under an hour tops (and that's including a boss rush to stall for time). Its runtime works in its favour though: the game can continually impress with new big sprites and level backgrounds, which might grow stale if they were drawn out over entire worlds.
33. Kirby's Dream Land 2 (1995, Switch - GB NSO) ★★☆☆☆
By this time Kirby was already a full-fledged franchise, with pinball and mini-golf spin-offs already out before this sequel landed. His characteristics were rapidly solidifying too, with copy abilities originating from Kirby's Adventure on NES, and animal companions getting introduced here. Their addition is a mixed bag however: they speed up your movement, but if you show up with the wrong one you'll wind up platforming with a fish on land, or swimming with the owl. Occasionally the game does this on purpose, and in those cases it works to add some light extra challenge, but just as often you're ditching your buddy to stop them dragging you down.
Unfortunately Dream Land 2 grows stale quite fast. The last set of mirrored stages are neat, but half the worlds feel extraneous, and it doesn't help how they get progressively longer. I'm not into its SNES sequel either, so maybe these non-Sakurai directed platformers just aren't quite for me.
34. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000, Switch - N64 NSO) ★☆☆☆☆
Bit of a hot take perhaps, since the game isn't awful, but I liked almost nothing about playing it besides the environments and cute picnic moments. It's a slow, dull platformer with forgettable music relative to the franchise's pedigree. It's got several good tunes, but also a lot of meandering synthscapes and tracks full of irritating chimes and bells. There are some selling points to Kirby 64, but few of them come without reservations. For e.g.: the "2.5D" backgrounds hold up well thanks to their angular designs, but the camera sometimes chooses angles which result in situations where you can't see ahead, or enemy traps get purposefully obscured to engineer cheap gotcha-moments.
Likewise, the game's main innovation of combining 2 copy abilities to form new ones unfortunately results in a shallow novelty. Sure, it's funny to turn Kirby into a fridge or snowman, but with so many possible combinations picking up new powers after finding one you like becomes a risk, rather than a reward. The only reason to interact with the system outside of curiosity and short-term amusement is to collect 100% of the items (which feels damning for the game's main raison d'être), and doing so presupposes an interest in prolonging your stay in the already quite boring levels.
Some stages have strong theming (the factory), but outside of a single chase and some vehicles sections you're going through level 1 exactly the same way as the last one. Iteration within the game feels very minimal, resulting in a samey experience spread very thinly across its runtime.
35. Kirby & The Amazing Mirror (2004, Switch - GBA NSO) ★★★☆☆
Coming straight ouf of Kirby 64 the movement in Amazing Mirror feels like a breath of fresh air. If it wasn't for Kirby's slow turning, I'd invoke comparisons to Shovel Knight degrees of speed. Amazing Mirror features an interconnected world, and at times approaches Metroid-like world design. Unlike in that series however, it's mostly a detriment here. Without persistent upgrades outside of heart containers, you frequently run across obstacles you can't clear without a certain power-up you last saw 8 screens ago. Add the amount of one-way doors into the equation, and suddenly that short trek back involves looping around the entire area. It also doesn't help how the game's map system is impressively uninformative, so it's difficult to remember which power-up you need to bring to which precise map square.
Admittedly it does seem impressive how the game can track 4 players across the game world, and the idea of 2 players simultaneously fighting different bosses across the map to speed up completion is cool. As a solo player however, you need to mop up the entire world yourself, and will get irritated at the constantly respawning enemies and frequent backtracking. Luckily the strong finale means the game ends on a high note.
36. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble (2000/2001, Switch - GBC NSO) ★★★☆☆
Puzzle game centered around rolling Kirby through stages using motion controls. Pretty novel for its time and hardware, but it's not a game I've heard about often. Inititally I found the controls quite annoying, especially since jumping is mapped to a shaking motion (a mistake you'd see Wii games like DeBlob make too). But from level 4 onwards you're combining mild puzzle elements with the longer hallways and can really gain some speed. The game gets surprisingly gnarly towards the end, but the final boss fight ends on a cute note to make it worth it.
37. F-Zero 99 (2023, Switch) ★★★★★
The mad lads finally made the F-Zero online death race people have been fantasising about for years! I will admit to being slightly disappointed at seeing this go for the SNES aesthetic upon reveal, but I couldn't have been more wrong. This is a very natural evolution for the franchise, with the aggressive risk-reward managing of mid-pack battles found in F-Zero GX now done with 98 other human opponents. The progression systems are super addictive, always giving you things to strive for, even if you're never winning races.
38. F-Zero (1990/1991, Switch) ★★★★☆
Got curious to try the original after F-Zero 99, and found it holds up really well. It is lacking the attacking moves of later entries, and also doesn't combine health and boost into a single bar like its sequels, so there's more emphasis on risk mitigation rather than taking risks. But a lot of the series' trademarks are already here: a remarkable sense of speed, excellent soundtrack, and the enduring futuristic vision. It's missing some obvious features like a trophy ceremony after every Grand Prix, and multiplayer. But while Nintendo would introduce those in Super Mario Kart, that game feels like it runs choppier, with less precise controls, and with tighter, more angular tracks than F-Zero's wider, more legible circuits.
39. Super Mario Kart (1992, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
The first Mario Kart has a dinky feel to it, with very obvious limitations imposed by its hardware. Many of the hallmarks were already present: most of the cast would return in every instalment, items like banana peels and shells are introduced here, and even some track themes would become mainstays (ghost houses, Bowser's castle, Rainbow Road). However, the lack of verticality requires some suspension of disbelief on the player's part to work. Why can't you go over certain lines? Well they represent walls, obviously, and no your short hop doesn't clear them.
I do like how coins and item boxes (both also flat here) disappear in future laps, requiring you to take slightly different racing lines. Speaking of racing lines, the CPU opponents drive near flawlessly here, and sometimes it feels like your rivals are flat-out cheating since they seemingly always have an invincibility star in their back pocket. Decent game overall, even it has been made thoroughly obsolete.
40. Mario Kart 64 (1996/1997, Switch - N64 NSO) ★★★★★ Replay
Still one of the best entries in the series. Probably the most iconic character roster, and the item balance is better here too by cutting the fairly inconsequential coins and feathers, while introducing the rare blue shell. Music is much better too, and it features several enduring course designs (D.K. Parkway), as well as the best-in-series Battle stage (Block Fort). Not every course is a winner in single player, but even the annoying ones become hilarious in multiplayer. My only complaints are how the CPUs blatantly cheat on 150cc, and I guess the drifting isn't as refined yet as Double Dash!! would eventually make it.
41. Mario Kart: Super Circuit a.k.a. Mario Kart Advance (2001, Switch - GBA NSO) ★★★☆☆
Somewhat perfunctory third instalment in the series. It's not outright bad, mashing the flat surface tracks of Super Mario Kart with Mario Kart 64's character models, items, and voices. However, it adds very little to the series, other than bringing it to handhelds. Perhaps that was enough at the time, but through a modern lens the lack of verticality is very noticeable once again. The track selection is lacking too, with many themes getting repeated (did we really need 4 Bowser Castle variants?), although it does include all the SNES tracks if you take the time to unlock them. There's a few winners here, like Sunset Wilds with its changing sky, and Rainbow Road with its ample opportunities for risky jumps. But overall this feels like a step back for the series until Double Dash!! would introduce new innovations.
42. Suika Game a.k.a. Watermelon Game (2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Highly addictive puzzle game where you try to match fruits. The slightly unreliable gravity results in that intoxicating mix of unpredictable rewards for repetitive actions. It's got only one, super annoying song, and I wonder if something like an (optional) basketball shot clock might be worth adding since you can theoretically take forever to drop your next fruit.
43. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ (2003, Switch - GBA NSO) ★★★★☆
The first WarioWare title is a startlingly complete vision of what the franchise would become. The pace is fast, jokes come quick, and the trollish sense of humour is a natural fit for the character. The art style in this entry is all over the place, ranging from beautiful pixel art to MS Paint crudeness. Only minor bummer is how it reuses some microgames without many changes to them, but at the breakneck pace that's a short-lived complaint.
44. Fighter's History (1994, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
I've never played Street Fighter II and even I can tell this is blatantly following SF2's footsteps. Looking into it, Data East even got (unsuccessfully) sued over this game by Capcom. That's probably the most interesting fact about Fighter's History, but I will say the game feels perfectly competent on its own, despite an utter lack of identity. It has 9 playable characters plus 2 bosses, all with unique move sets, and decently detailed arenas for everyone. All the fighters are entirely forgettable, except for final boss Karnov, who I believe is from a different game series. It feels like there's some political commentary happening, with the Soviet-coded Karnov disguised with keffiyeh & agal in a Middle-Eastern oil field, but I'm not informed enough on these topics to fully grasp its significance.
The fighting itself works well: it's a fast game with simple inputs, and impacts feel crunchy. Perhaps there could've been a bit more time between moves to punish button mashing, but that'd come at the expense of the current responsive controls. I don't know how much depth there really is for true fighting game fans, but as a scrub I had an okay time mashing buttons for 4 hours.
45. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts (1991, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★★☆
Gave this franchise another shot after liking its spin-off series Gargoyle's Quest. Had bounced off of Ghosts 'n Goblins previously, but this third game drew me in with its opening cinematic, and fantasic visuals. The series already has a unique style, and for an early SNES game this looks particularly impressive. Mind, it's still a very difficult precision platformer loaded with traps, and an inflexible double jump which doesn't let you change directions once in the air. But the surprisingly generous continue system and the NSO addition of save states greatly help at tipping the scales against a game which is clearly giddy about trolling you with blind jumps, surprise spawning enemies, or outright flooding the screen. There's a sense of humour to poor Arthur's terrible fate, between running around in his underwear after losing his armour, and getting sent back all the way for a 2nd loop right before facing the (rather disappointing) final boss.
46. Dig Dug II a.k.a. Dig Dug II: Trouble in Paradise (1985, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Sequel to a Namco arcade classic I haven't played. Unlike the side-view underground digging of the original, which looks similar to Mr. Driller or SteamWorld Dig to me, this is an overhead action-puzzle game set above ground instead. You need to clear levels of enemies, by either inflating them 'til they pop, or by sinking parts of the island they're on. Quite addictive, but the game never introduces new foes, so its difficulty can only increase by upping enemy numbers, and more restrictive level designs. Later levels get fiendishly difficult, but on NSO you can trial & error your way through using savestates. Impressive amount of levels (72!) for a game this old, and there's a funny, morbid touch where sometimes the last surviving enemy will choose to drown themselves instead of facing you.
47. M.U.S.H.A. a.k.a. Musha Aleste: Fullmetal Fighter Ellinor (1990/1991, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★★★★
This got a stupid backcronym for the American release, and does a good job at masking behind an Edo/Tokugawa era aesthetic, but it's unmistakenly an Aleste game with the serial numbers filed off. MUSHA feels on the easier side for the franchise, especially if you get good at cycling through phases for your Options. The metal soundtrack isn't my jam, but it's a good fit on Genesis, and meshes well with the bombast the storytelling attempts. Great game, feels like a top-tier release on the system.
48. GyroBlade (2020/2023, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Helicopter-themed vertical shooter trying emulate an 80s arcade aesthetic. Having never played Tiger Heli or Twin Cobra, I imagine those were fairly similar, although mercifully GyroBlade at least has autofire, and an ending. It's a pretty competent, albeit repetitive game, with good music, and a bit more challenge than I expected. Unfortunately, not all said challenge derives from the stage and encounter designs. Rather, it uses tanky enemies and the Gradius punishment of losing power-ups upon death. The latter I understand in a retro throwback, but it feels severe since it takes almost two full stages to get fully powered up again. While I think GyroBlade achieves the goals it sets for itself, it lacks some identity to set itself apart.
49. GyroGunner (2023, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The sequel to GyroBlade maintains the helicopter theme, but this time it's an omni-directional shooter. You're given more tools to work with, both offensively (lock-on missiles) and defensively (flares), and this time the game places limits on both (jammers can disrupt your lock-on system, flares are finite). This results in more layered gameplay, where you need to weigh which targets to pursue first (do you take out the jammer first, or sources of incoming fire?), and being too cautious risks your fuel running out. The addition of a world map, and a more climactic final level also help in giving the game a more perceptable arc, which GyroBlade lacked. Granted, GyroGunner is still a retro throwback from a single developer working on a tiny budget, but it's cool to see their progress.
50. Zero Gunner 2- (2001/2018, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Another helicopter shooting game, this one being a rebuilt port of a Sega Naomi/DreamCast game. Production values seem quite high, and the polygonal models mostly clean up nicely (except for the grainy texture on your helicopters, amusingly). It's a short, fast-paced 7-stager with less jokes than Psikyo's Gunbird series, and offers nicely scaled difficulty levels. The central idea revolves around letting players angle their chopper 360 degrees, but since this predates the twin-stick era the turning is a little convoluted. Not a bad game, but not especially memorable either.
51. Steredenn: Binary Stars (2018, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Very mixed on this run-based, procedurally generated horizontal shooter. It frontloads a lot of immediate annoyances which you'll just need to accept if you want to get anywhere. These include basic things like many weapons not autofiring, or how switching weapons interrupts your fire, both of which require separate, semi-randomly dropped upgrades to solve. Initially the enemy designs blend together too; you'll just need to learn to recognise them. Most annoying is how you can't practice boss fights in the practice mode until after you've beaten those bosses. So if you're stuck on the level 6 boss your only way to practice is to repeatedly replay a 20 minute run before getting another go at him
In those moments the procedurally generated structure really works against the player - as every run the stages are different, so focusing squarely on learning a boss cannot be separated from adjusting to a set of newly rearranged levels and upgrades (unless you replay a fixed Seed, but that often requires entering a 6+ digit number and the game doesn't use the on-device software keyboard). I understand doing repeated runs is the point, but this game is brutally difficult at first, to the point where I think it goes overboard. Especially since you can do multiple loops of all stages, I don't see why the first one had to be this difficult already.
Last complaint: I know music is highly subjective, and I've certainly seen people online praise Steredenn's soundtrack. But personally the butt-rock got on my nerves very fast, and since turning it down still left the crunchy sound effects, this quickly became Mute & Podcast Game to me.
For a while this game was headed straight to the two-star pile, but i will say its "one more go" draw hooked me. And 45 hours later a lot of my initial reservations had been solved by time. I had all the bosses down pat, knew how to reliably trigger secret bosses, and was shooting for a third complete loop. It's not a game I would recommend to many people: it's way too hard, visually on the uninteresting side, and has music I dislike. The procedurally generated levels will be an immediate turn off to shooting game fans who want to study levels by heart, but the game also doesn't draw enough on the persistent upgrades found in rogue-lites to appeal to that crowd. If you're somewhere in between both groups, this offers a functionally endless experience which stays interesting long beyond your first cleared loop. But I don't know how much the Venn diagram truly overlaps.
52. Yoshi's Story (1998, Switch - N64 NSO) ★☆☆☆☆
Cute, but very dull platformer, with grating music, and level design that seems to go nowhere since stages end whenever you've collected enough fruit. The visuals are nice, and I didn't realise how much the Smash Bros. series lifted from this release, but this feels like an enormous drop in quality after Yoshi's Island. When you make a platforming game and the best level is the water level where you do no jumping at all, something went wrong. The way you can choose levels might make for a good speedrunning game perhaps, or as a first game for very young children?
Finished: 52
01. Huntdown (2020, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Side-scrolling action game with a Sega Genesis-on-steroids grimy 80s urban setting, pulpy voice acting, and a delicious Kung Fury-esque soundtrack. I wish this skewed closer to run & gun territory, because ducking into cover and popping up to shoot gets a little tedious, whereas the game really shines in the last few boss fights which significantly up the projectile count. Luckily levels are nicely bite-sized and all have unique bosses, which keeps it from going stale. I do have a minor gripe with the way you lose control of movement if hit in the air, which can lead to punishing multi-hits or outright deaths if falling off the stage. Feels weirdly archaic for an otherwise modern take on this type of action game.
02. Hell Blasters (2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Vertically scrolling bullet hell with a surprisingly large feature-set given its tiny dev team. Unfortunately its solid core, centered around bullet cancelling, struggles to hold the rest of the project in orbit. Considerable effort went into a story mode, for instance, and while I hate to be dismissive - almost none of that effort was worth it.
The story mode chops the 5 arcade levels up into 30+ microscopic chunks, interspersed with cut-scenes. The writing in these is tonally all over the place. One sentence our protagonists come to grips with killing an enemy, only to start vacation-planning literally the next line. None of this is aided by a wonky translation, and the length of the cut-scenes length kills the otherwise decent pace of the arcade mode. Lastly, they also highlight the game's art style, which one might charitably describe as Spartan at best.
Visuals really are where this extra effort should've gone instead: the game has half a theme going on with mechanical animals serving as bosses, but all the regular enemies are generic tanks and planes. It doesn't even carry the animal theme through either, with some bosses being rocketships and mechs. Granted, the team is truly tiny, but a sequel would be much improved if a more cohesive style could be established.
03. R-Type Final 2 - Stage Pass Volume 2 (2021 & 2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Despite its annoyances and glacial pacing, I can never resist the siren song of more R-Type Final 2. The 2nd Stage Pass compiles 3 DLC sets into a single package, remaking 4 previous R-Type stages, alongside 3 more experimental adaptations. Two of those are maps from R-Type Tactics/R-Type Command remade into shooter levels, no doubt to drum up interest for the upcoming remakes of those games. More notable however is the inclusion of an ImageFight stage, now retooled into horizontal orientation, which signals intent to branch out into other IREM franchises. The whole package is a little too corridor heavy, and the underwater levels never look good on Switch, but the later stages are real winners.
04. R-Type Final 2 - Stage Pass Volume 3 (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Like the Bydo themselves, R-Type Final 2 continues to absorb other IREM franchises into its folds. ImageFight is drawn in further with a second level, and there are even more outlandish takes in this Stage Pass. Most notable are the opening stages paying back-to-back homage to the pre-Metal Slug submarine shooter In The Hunt, as well as the colourful Mr. Heli/Battle Chopper.
At this point, R-Type Final 2 contains 4½ games worth of stages, around 100 playable ships, and lots of weird stuff like a little base-building mode it likes to pretend is a "metaverse". It's never going to address my core complaints with the game's foundation (load times, punishing checkpoints, branching paths feeling perfunctory, lots of little QOL issues), choosing instead to build ever more content upon said foundation, no doubt with the soon-releasing R-Type Final 3 Evolved in mind. It's never becoming the best shmup in town, but it sure will be the one I play the longest.
05. In The Hunt (1993, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Got curious about this submarine-themed shooter after its inclusion in R-Type Final 2. It predates Metal Slug, but many of the hallmarks were already in place: intricate pixel art of densely packed machines, and lots of incoming shots. It's probably inspired by Hunt For Red October, and primarily impresses in the presentation department. The actual gameplay doesn't evolve much beyond just mashing fire. You'll find some power-ups, but good luck holding onto them. This must've been a merciless quarter-muncher back in the day. Luckily the Arcade Archives release adds auto-fire to save your thumbs.
06. Sol Cresta: Dramatic Edition (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
One I initially skipped due to its art style looking downright hideous in videos. Bit of a mistake, it turns out, because Sol Cresta is a good-to-great vertical shoot-'em-up. Mind, it's still hardly a looker - sporting crummy Sega Saturn visuals at the best of times, and obscuring foes and incoming fire with fuzzy backgrounds at the worst of times.
What is compelling however, is how Sol Cresta layers several systems which, once grokked, overlap quite satisfyingly. It's a little daunting at first: you control three ships docked together, and can activate slow-mo to rearrange them mid-flight. Additionally, if you arrange them in certain Formations, you get special attacks (which seems not unlike the Unite Morph system of Platinum's earlier title The Wonderful 101). Separate from Formations, there's a medal-based meter which grants you attacks which require fighting game style button inputs to execute. I was not a fan of this in Cotton 2, but here the inputs are simpler, and the slow-mo makes it easier to see what you have access to.
Unlike classic shmups in which you upgrade your build incrementally, Sol Cresta sees your arsenal shift constantly, based on pick-ups and which Formations/Medal attacks you expend. I was absolutely sceptical at first, but this inclusion of Character Action-esque mechanics works much better than I thought. The game has a dynamic and ever-shifting feel to it, forcing you to adapt instead of relying on tried-and-true approaches. Stringing together a series of wild moves really does feel like it makes the most of the Cresta series' unique identity.
That said, there are downsides here which are hard to overlook beyond the aforementioned visual style. The story mode (which is sold separately or included in the Dramatic Edtion), is a perfunctory shounen anime plot with appropriate (Japanese only) voice acting. Worse yet, actually reading all the translated text is a strain, since it's displayed on the sides of a hectic action game (similarly to how Raiden V handled this). Another disappointment is the curious lack of unique bosses, especially by PlatinumGames standards. The game recycles 3 of its forgettable bosses with slight moveset variations to fill out the first 6 levels, leaving just the final stage with a memorable design and unique feel to it.
07. Sophstar (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Surprisingly fully-featured vertical shooter from Brazilian studio Banana Bytes. Multiple ships with significantly different playstyles to choose from, several modes, and it has a unique teleportation gimmick to set it apart from contemporaries. The story it tries to tell is rather middling: a very generic pilot-with-mysterious-past affair, which might've been better to excise. There are a few odd issues such as button mapping not displaying correctly, but I don't know if that affects other versions than just Switch. One thing to note: don't play this if you're at all photosensitive, it has some heavy flashing.
08. About An Elf (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Rather basic point & click adventure with a very light turn-based combat element. Excels in its incredible presentation, comprised of glossy, plasticene, hyperrealist dioramas set to short, dinky drum machine loops. Your unreliable narrator is telling her friend about various (possibly untrue) adventures, while occasionally breaking the 4th wall in a punchy, jokey script. It doesn't seem to have much to say, and your methods of interaction do not meaningfully change over the game either. As a result it felt a little long in the tooth, despite only clocking in around 4 hours. But it presents a very cohesive vision, and stays firmly in its lane - a solid result for a tiny development team.
09. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (2019/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Mecha-themed time-travel game which mixes adventure game storytelling with tactics combat. Well, I say mix, but the modes are fairly rigidly separated. You're given significant freedom in selecting the order in which you experience all the events on its 2 century spanning timeline, and can do the battles whenever you please.
Much of the writing in 13 Sentinels isn't so much plot-heavy, as it is dense exposition and world-building. Scenes are short enough to maintain a break-neck pace while juggling 13 character arcs, and stack cliffhangers atop previous cliffhangers. It's impressive to consider how other players will reach revelations in different orders, yet will still be guided to the same cohesive picture. This comes at the cost of making it a story easily spoiled, since even an understanding of its setting may vary depending which branches you explore first.
It's a reference-heavy script, leaning hard on mainstream sci-fi intertextuality (straight up cribbing a storyline from E.T., for example). This serves a function beyond borrowing themes, though. Some characters from the World War 2 timeline are confronted with the losing battle they're fighting for the Imperial Japanese Army in 1945, only for the game to jump-cut to 1985, and present a Japan steeped in American pop-culture influences.
An aspect I found entirely unnecessary however, was the decision to have the (teenage) pilots control their mechs in the nude. For a script which frequently highlights how violating others' bodily autonomy will cause harm, it doesn't seem to consider how the game's character portraits may be read by its audience. Granted, the imagery is hardly explicit, and the game eventually wheels out a half-baked in-universe explanation, but my initial response was to worry whether this game would go on to sexualise minors in order to court a sketchy audience.
The tactics battles are amusing, but gesture towards much more depth than I actually encountered. In retrospect I should've upped the difficulty, because I sailed through every mission getting undeserved S-Ranks despite blatantly ignoring helpful advice the game was giving me. Luckily they're breezy levels, which mirrors most of the story chapters, too.
10. Bastion (2011/2018, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Re-release of the XBLA game which put Supergiant Games on the map. Cool to see how their trademarks (excellent score & voice acting, isometric combat, in-universe difficulty modifiers and narration, base building etc.) date back to their very first release. The action is already serviceable here, albeit a tad simple: a dodge roll + strike will carry you throughout the game if you want. Coupled with the absence of enough systems with which to distract you from the combat, it does grow monotonous though.
The story is presented in small enough chunks to establish a sense of it unraveling. Unfortunately, it did frustrate me at times. Particularly when it becomes clear your mission is to finish a genocide, and the game simply offers you no ways to cease participation or resist until the very end. Regardless of which ending you pursue, if we take the game at face value, your character remains complicit. Either he commits mass murder to reset the world, hoping to avoid said genocide and mass murders from happening in a future loop (the presence of a New Game+ mode suggests the cycle of violence never ends, however). Or he kills a lot of Ura people in service of nothing beyond learning a lesson at the expense of their lives. Only to then return to live with a manipulator who, had they been upfront with you, could have prevented the countless senseless murders. For the game to paint the latter as the hopeful of the two endings, without offering a way to opt-out entirely feels weirdly tone-deaf, as if its implications were not fully considered.
This lack of character agency around such a topic reminds me of another, albeit vastly different, 2011 release: The Last Story, which features an oddly similar storyline. Speaking of character agency in Bastion, it feels like a missed opportunity for the only named female character to make notably less unprompted decisions by herself than the other characters. Her backstory provides plenty of tragic material to work with, but she's left to complete her character arc mostly off-screen.
11. Transistor (2014/2018) ★★★☆☆
Very ambivalent on this one. On paper I think it all works. It ticks the usual Supergiant boxes (gorgeous art, soundtrack, diegetic integration of options), and has a unique combat system which mixes real-time and pre-planned elements like some hypothetical hybrid of Faselei! and Bayonetta. Said combat has decent depth too, with weapon aspects you can arrange in dozens of combinations to achieve slightly different effects. The game encourages experimentation through penalties and optional challenges, too.
In practice though, half my battles consisted of unloading a pre-planned sequence, and then either hiding or spamming the one move Jaunt allowed me to, while waiting until a meter refilled. I'm sure there were better defensive options, but the old adage of players optimising the fun out of games rang true for me.
Sticking to just a few trusty combinations also meant I unlocked fewer character profiles. Tying exposition to combat experimentation seems like a good idea, but I found myself bored by these text dumps. Thus I quickly stopped trying to unlock them. It's a lot of telling, rather than showing, which is frustrating since Transistor's writing is otherwise quite competent.
Sure, some elements feel a bit basic (voiceless lady teams up with a bodiless voice), but the game finds touching ways for Red to communicate via humming and writing-then-deleting questions on message boards. The script clearly has things to say about the commodification of attention via social media platforms, initially demonstrating how hive-mind thinking will lead to fickle populaces chasing momentary convictions over cohesive long-term policies. It's subsequently also clever enough to realise how such commentary is easily hijacked by technocrats with visionary claims, though. That said, the game's intentionally vague delivery does slightly hinder its ability to speak to real-world topics. Unfortunate, since the foundation for a convicing thesis feels laid, but the game offers its players too much wiggle room to insert their own interpretations.
12. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (Switch, 2021) ★★★★☆
Remake of two classics, one of which was new to me. The core design of short, fast-paced bursts still holds up very well, and naturally invites retrying to improve. The iconic soundtracks return largely intact, with some appropriate modern additions. It still controls like a dream, but the decreased floatiness took some getting used to. I do like how they've modernised some aspects, like renaming the Mute Grab to Weddle Grab to honour the Deaf skater who invented the trick. Similarly, the game emphasises a new generation of skaters (such as Nyjah Huston and Aori Nishimura), which feels like an appropriate passing of the torch as Tony Hawk and his late 90s contemporaries wind down their athletic careers.
13. Graze Counter GM (2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
The chibi character art and sub-par story initially turned me away, but this remake of Graze Counter has a lot more to offer than it lets on. It's a short, fast-paced bullet hell with precise controls, several modes, and 16 subtly different ships (including one which unsubtly nods to DoDonPachi Blissful Death). By just barely letting enemy fire graze your ship (think Psyvariar Delta), you gain access to the titular Graze Counter. This short blast works in tandem with the less frequently earned Break mode to plow your way through dense curtains of bright pink fire. I do wish your hitbox was more obviously marked, but it's a generous, newcomer-friendly entry in a daunting genre.
14. Picross S Genesis & Master System Edition (2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Another solid Picross S title from Jupiter, with dozens of hours of puzzles. That said, it does feel like a missed opportunity to have all these classic Sega franchises to draw on, but not use any of their iconic tunes. If the fear is for the music to spoil puzzle outcome, then at least play a sound effect from the corresponding game when the puzzle is solved. They're also still recycling the puzzle solutions across regular and Mega Picross modes, and keep insisting on including no more than 30 Color Picross puzzles - despite this clearly being the best new mode since Picross S3.
15. Citizen Sleeper - Episode: Purge (2023, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The 3rd and final (free!) expansion to last year's GOTY sat atop my list of anticipated releases this year, so it's a bit deflating to realise it didn't fully connect with me. Structurally it's very solid: the Flux event's mysterious veil is lifted, and revealed to be a banal form of DRM software, operated by hypercapitalist space landlords trying to reposess "their" property.
Thus, the inhabitants of the Eye, who long denied access to the refugee flotilla, are now forced to rely on the kindness of people they othered. The metaphor is made literal: capitalism will push anyone into the periphery, regardless of social status. Refugees and citizens are social constructs; arbitrary lines of division which the ultra-rich will gladly uphold to keep the masses at each others' throats. But the moment these social groups stand in the way of extractable resources, the real division becomes clear: there are haves, and have-nots. It all mirrors neatly at a character level, too: while inhabitants become refugees, the Sleeper and Peake can in turn transition from refugees into citizens.
The Switch port seems to really strain under this last expansion, running considerably more sluggish than before, and it even hard-crashed on me once. While presumably unintended, this does amusingly mirror the Eye straining under the Flux events.
On paper this is a slam-dunk finale, and I have a hard time articulating why it disappointed me slightly. It's still good, but Citizen Sleeper has much higher highs in both the main game and the 2nd expansion. Normally this game is great at instilling urgency, but an odd lack of pushback makes its finale a total breeze. Even a late-stage antagonist can be pushed aside with near-zero consequences. Perhaps I came in with unrealistic expectations, but Citizen Sleeper set those expectations itself. This script has routinely pulled off poignancy, heartbreak, despair, tension, and glimpses of pure tranquility. I was hoping for one last such moment.
16. Rolling Gunner + Over Power (2019/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Extremely elegantly designed horizontal bullet hell shooter, directed by ex-CAVE programmer Daisuke Koizumi. Rolling Gunner has a simple, intuitively grasped concept: your ship fires forward, while a secondary cannon fires in opposite direction of your movement. You can also freeze its position for more targeted fire. The Over Power DLC lets you control the auxiliary cannon with the right joystick, moving the game into twin-stick shooter territory. In some ways this feels like the true vision of the project, especially since it makes the game easier. The art style and story are quite generic, but it does impress in presentation thanks to very short end-of-stage cinematics upping the production values.
17. DeltaZeal a.k.a. ΔZeal (2002/2023, Switch) ★★★★★
Vertical shooter initially released to Japanese arcades as G-Stream G2020, on supposedly crummy arcade hardware, and allegedly without properly paying its 3 developers. Later the lead developer got to re-release it as ΔZeal, retroactively making this the start of the Zeal franchise, which also includes XII Stag/XII Zeal, TriZeal, and ExZeal. On the surface this looks like a more intricately designed, slightly futuristic military take on Raiden Fighters, but there's enough happening under the hood to set it apart.
Its weapon system is simple, but neat: you have 10 weapon slots to fill with 3 varieties of pick-ups. Want more lasers? Grab the blue icons. Prefer missiles? Go for green, etc. This lets you either mix and match a balanced set, or go for a full set of a single colour. Doing the latter nets you extra powerful vulcans/lasers/missiles, but also means you'll have to be careful not to grab a different icon and lose a fully matching set. The devious scoring, which revolves around medal-chaining, invites you to take more risks to keep a chain going. It's further complicated by secret extra routes and branching paths, which add sections to levels if you're doing well, but simultaneously introduce more possibilities to meet an early demise.
ΔZeal feels slightly out of time, like it grazed the impact of the then-emerging bullet hell sub-genre, rather than fully absorbed it. Instead, it hews closer to Psikyo's output, or perhaps even RayForce: games which upped the speed of enemies and bullets, but still aimed them all at the player, rather than the aimless, fanning shots found in bullet hell. As a result, death comes at you quick, from places it wouldn't in other games - its contemporary developers at Cave would never allow units spawning under your sprite to point-blank kill you, but ΔZeal requires you either learn their spawn positions, or eat some cheap deaths.
There are further frictions I normally wouldn't excuse in other games: Bullet visibility isn't always great when both sides are exchanging pink fire. The game doesn't explain what triggers extra sections, or how routes branch. It won't let you practice a level before beating it in a run. In general there's a lot of ways the game punishes you, but outside of scoring it has relatively few rewards. Elsewhere these minor annoyances would add up, but here I felt oddly charmed by them. ΔZeal has a lot of secrets, and no intentions of spilling them. Instead, it's up to the player: do you want to take on more risk, or purposefully play worse to shorten levels and increase odds of survival?
I recognise my score is probably a tad higher than the ~4 stars I'd imagine this getting in consumer information style reviews. I'm absolutely choosing to either overlook or outright embrace some annoyances. ΔZeal puts me in that Guitar Hero-esque flow state, but adds much higher risk-reward wagers, and a punishing sense of danger to the affair. Its minor flaws are reduced to more variables to consider when reading the proverbial Matrix underpinning the programming, while the catchy music and hypnotically fast gameplay remain. The added developer commentary is the icing on the cake in this re-release, its text-to-speech delivery feeling rudimentary, while its contents feel more candid - which I suppose mirrors the whole game, really.
18. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (2023, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Remake which combines Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (2003/2004) and Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life (2005) into a single package. The town map, sound design, and general structure of the game remain largely unchanged, but there are improvements to inventory, menus, and general interface. Most dramatic is the stylistic overhaul: the new cartoony art style, with cutely redesigned characters, and pink fluffy sheep, is a distinct departure from the originals' GameCube grime.
This remake largely succeeds in reducing points of friction of the originals, but goes a bit too far in my opinion. Animals will no longer get sick and die, greatly reducing consequences if you treat them poorly. Similarly, cows and goats will give milk perenially, rather than only for a short period after giving birth. Viewed purely as a game, this is an improvement: it lets you maintain a more varied stable rather than one filled with cows, since you had to keep breeding them to keep milk production going (as in real life). But as a farming sim it does mean some realism is sacrificed. Likewise, the original games purposefully taunted you with the prospect of a cheap goat, only to make them economically useless after a year, which felt like a lesson in greed. Your short-sighted desire to exploit the goat's milk in year 2 saddled you with an animal who would only cost you fodder and the lost opportunity cost of a valuable barn spot for another 7 years.
Field farming is somewhat streamlined too, so you're left with more time to kill in the town, which inadvertently highlights how limited the social aspects truly are. Some NPCs have routines they repeat their whole lives, others will happily recycle a single phrase to say across multiple years. In year 1 you have 8 theoretical bachelor(ette)s to pursue, each with multiple cut-scenes, and a decent amount of dialogue. But by year 2 you'll have reduced 7 of them back to generic NPCs with 5 lines a year. As a result, the town grows uninteresting far too quickly, which makes running an efficient farm almost a punishment. Yes, the pace of the story has been substantially improved by reducing every chapter to a single year, but nonetheless I felt boredom already set in by hour 20 (of 50+). The game runs out of goals to pursue at the halfway point, and that's already well past the point where its loop grew stale.
A Wonderful Life remains a cozy farm/life sim, and this is a generous remake in a market where a shoddy port would've sold too. It brings upsides, like combining 2 games into one, features a new localisation, adds same-sex relationships and a non-binary option, looks great, and runs at 60fps to boot. That said, it sands off a few too many edges, which ends up highlighting how it doesn't address the core issue of the originals: a severely front-loaded story with way too long of a boring, repetitive tail.
19. Batsugun Saturn Tribute Boosted (1993/2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Re-release of Toaplan's last shooter from 1993, containing 2 versions (and 4 soundtracks) of Batsugun. This is often considered an early progenitor of the bullet hell style shooter, along with Toaplan's other 1993 release V-V (a.k.a. Grind Stormer). Batsugun still bears the hallmarks of classic shoot-'em-ups (collectible power-ups, losing some power when hit), but enemy shot patterns are dense, and your hitbox size is reduced. The game's Special Version features more iterations, reducing the hitbox even further, and brightening the entire colour palette to make incoming fire more distinct. The latter is a double-edged change, both improving legibility, but simultaneously diminishing the grimy neon look. There's a garish quality to the original's art, and it's not hard to see how Junya Inoue iterated upon Batsugun to later design the cleaner characters for ESP.Ra.De., which fully commited to an urban setting. Even the hornet iconography is already present, which would later show up in DonPachi.
Historical significance aside, Batsugun does hold up on its own, but there's a real sense the developers were reinventing the genre mid-way through. Stages 1-3 are relative pushovers, in which you feel overpowered, before stage 4 pulls out all the stops and coats the screen in bullets. Shots of all colours rain down at you fast and in clusters, requiring quick reflexes, big sweeping evasive movements, and memorisation of enemy placement. This sharply contrasts with later genre innovations, which reduce bullet speed dramatically, pick from more limited shot colour palettes, and focus on micro-dodges over constant player movements.
Batsugun's back half is a demanding game, with few moments to zone out to. I also think the game lacks a bit of context for the action, since the mix of human and mechanical foes don't make for the clearest story. There's connective tissue between the level themes, but Batsugun feels most iconic when gliding through its early aquatic levels, so it's a small bummer when those get traded for more generic cityscapes.
20. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (2010/2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Remaster of the 2010 release on DS. Smoothly animated adventure game, where a ghost tries to solve his own murder. This is from the Ace Attorney creator, and has a similarly colourful cast of cartoony characters zipping through a fast-paced, punchy script. It's amusing to watch the game invent new in-universe explanations everytime it wants to break/amend a previously established "rule". Some of the music gets repetitive, and towards the end the plot does jump a few sharks - but overall this is a fun romp.
21. Operation Logic Bomb (1993, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Went spelunking in the NSO apps and fired this up, thinking it would be a puzzle game based on the title. Instead, it's a slightly drab, overhead sci-fi action game, reminiscent of twin-stick shooters. Maybe it's due to low expectations, but I came away positively surprised! Granted, the action is not very strategic - everything boils down to picking foes off from angles their shots can't reach. And yes, the more novel weapons (like a decoy clone of yourself) don't show up until past the halfway point.
But it's interesting how the game attempts to do wordless storytelling by showing scans of areas and CCTV footage. It's no Metroid Prime by any means, but they've arrived upon a similar solution here. The colourful finale also weirdly impresses after 2 hours of grimy Alien vs. Predator environments, and I like how enemies stay dead even when backtracking. I don't want to oversell this game - it's needlessly difficult, barely establishes a plot, and I got lost a few times. But if you're not opposed to using save-states, and enjoy the weekend-rental vibes of the NSO catalogue, you could do worse than this.
22. Joy Mech Fight (1993, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★★☆
Another one from the pits of the NSO mines which I assumed would be garbage at first blush. Instead this turns out to be Nintendo published and uh, feels like a contender for a top-tier Famicom game? It's a fighting game starring abstract robots with Rayman-esque detached limbs, and there's a shocking amount of playable characters with individual move sets. Even better, the actual fighting feels snappy, slowdown is minimal, and everyone feels incredibly easy to learn in a Smash Bros. kind of way. Admittedly, the surprise factor helps a lot, but this seems super impressive for its hardware.
23. BurgerTime Deluxe (1991, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★☆☆
Have heard this series get mentioned once or twice in retro gaming videos, but this was entirely unfamiliar to me. Turns out it's a nifty puzzle game. You're a tiny chef in a big kitchen, climbing ladders (like in Donkey Kong) to reach hamburger ingredients, and drop them onto stacks. Meanwhile, various angry ingredients follow you around like ghosts from Pac-Man, who you'll want to squash between falling hamburger layers. The chef's movement speed is very slow, and the music gets repetitive fast, but the tiny cut-scenes between levels inject just enough personality to keep you going.
24. Gargoyle's Quest (1990/1991, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★☆☆
Ghosts 'n' Goblins spin-off in which you play as Firebrand, the Red Arremer who ended many early runs in Ghosts 'n' Goblins. I've never invested the time to get even remotely competent at that series, since the frantic enemy spawn rate feels exhausting. Gargoyle's Quest is a slow-paced affair, by contrast. Its platforming sections still require reflexes and precision, but it feels like you set the pace of the game, rather than being forced to contend with its whims.
When you're not platforming, the game changes to an overhead RPG perspective of sorts. You go from town to town, collect items, gain abilities, get into random (sidescrolling) battles, talk to locals (with truly incredibly slow text speed), and try to decode what its absurdly vague localisation is trying to tell you. In a roundabout way the cryptic translations and unique creature designs lend the game an air of mystery, which meshes well with the organ-esque soundtrack attempting to escape the Game Boy's sound chip. Gargoyle's Quest often feels uneven, barely giving you time to appreciate new abilities before bestowing the next one upon you already, but it punches well above its weight most of the time.
25. Demon's Crest (1994/1995, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Third game in the Gargoyle's Quest sub-series. Another ambitious title, another uneven result. This one does away with the overhead RPG perspective, focusing on sidescrolling everywhere except for the Mode 7 style world map. Presumably those were impressive at the time, but I'd rather pick stages from a menu; the world map gestures at more secrets than it really holds, and winds up as a minor nuisance. The actual stages are varied enough, and manage to establish atmosphere thanks to an organ-heavy soundtrack and once again terrific monster designs. You're encouraged to go back to stages with future power-ups, but this isn't a full Metroidvania.
Once again there's a cryptic vibe to the game, since you'll need to replay stages to find different exits. Maybe I'm just too impatient, but some exits did not seem obvious (why do you need to jump into a tornado in a stage where wind is an obstacle?). Likewise, there are certain spells I couldn't figure out (a quick search suggests some of them flat-out don't work due to a bug), the game does a poor job communicating how you need to collect everything to fight the true last boss, and there are some very late difficulty spikes. Still an impressive release, but I lost patience with it towards the end.
26. Eigengrau (2023, Switch) ★★★★★
Surprise GOTY contender for me! It's like someone looked at WarioWare's new-idea-every-30-seconds pace and asked "but what if this was a bullet hell?" The result is a 2 hour ballet of bullets, pulling all sorts of gimmicks and references, daring the player to keep up. Tetris shaped incoming fire? Check. Pac-Man style maze section? We got it. Triggerheart Exelica inspired wrecking ball? Sure! The bounce attack from Crimzon Clover? Of course! There's even Snake and Dance Dance Revolution style sections. With all these homages the game risks losing its own sense of identity, but the colour vs. grey theming provides just enough of a frame for the game to maintain a cohesive vision, and it has an oddly calming, string-heavy soundtrack. Besides, it has plenty novel tricks of its own amidst the references: most memorable is the boss who reverses all its outgoing fire, requiring you to dodge backwards through the hail of bullets you just passed.
There are elements to critique: the bosses always replicate hazards from the preceding levels, which feels like it follows the axiom of bosses needing to be skill-checks for players a little too rigidly. Likewise, on subsequent runs the surprising elements obviously hit diminishing returns, although it does offer a mirror mode and various hidden sub-objectives to keep things fresh. I don't fully know who to recommend this to, since its closest reference points are perhaps MileStone Inc.'s Radirgy, or Shmups Skill Test from Triangle Service, but I feel like Eigengrau's appeal could be a lot wider - if you like twin-stick shooters and surprises, check this out. Even has a free demo on PC/Mac!
27. Devil World (1984/1987, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Probably mostly known in trivia contexts as that Miyamoto & Tezuka take on maze games which never got released in America due to Christian imagery. As usual the kerfuffle is entirely unwarranted: a lil' dinosaur shoots demons with crosses and Bibles, while a blue Devil dances atop the screen to move the borders of the play area. The Pac-Man influence is impossible to miss, but the moving play area adds some dynamism not found in static single screen maze games, and Devil World varies in objectives per phase of each round. It also varies in how you can't collect pellets without carrying a cross, the Power Pellet equivalent here, but there's so many of them it's rarely a problem. The legacy of this game is stuck somewhere between a fun fact and its assist trophy presence is Smash Bros., but its reputation as a clone game feels unfairly dismissive.
28. Dr. Mario (1990, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★★★
Falling block puzzle game where Dr. Mario tries to line up pills to destroy viruses. Has a lot in common with Tetris, but rather than starting with a clean slate it's as if you're inheriting a messy stack and need to gradually unwind it. I got to the end of the Low Speed mode, but the SP version on NSO lets you see the Hi Speed mode's last level and true ending, which is worth seeing too. Definitely a contender for my favourite NES game.
29. Dr. Mario 64 (2001, Switch - N64 NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Very late N64 release. The core gameplay is still good, but there are minor bugs like being able to stack half a pill higher in the top-left corner than you ought to be able to, and the timer can freeze after 99 minutes of playtime. The visual presentation got an overhaul, but the soft, fuzzy visuals aren't really an improvement over the clarity the NES offered. More annoyingly, the music is a lot worse, and several irritating sound effects were added too.
Chief addition here was the 4-player multiplayer, but instead I want to complain about the story mode - essentially a series of versus matches strung together by a weak comedy plot. It features some hideous character designs with awful names like Mad Scienstein and a clown called Rudy. Apparently they hail from Wario Land 3, but they give off real Original Character, Do Not Steal vibes. The entire mode winds up feeling like a detriment rather than a boon.
30. Magical Drop II (1996, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Surprisingly addictive 1-v-1 puzzle game with the fast pace (and extensive cast) of a fighting game. You rearrange coloured orbs to create chains of 3 or more identical ones, which sends garbage to your opponent's field. Setting off chain reactions is the real play of course, and they feel easier to manufacture than in PuyoPuyo. Mind, I'm not great at Magical Drop by any means, but despite its evidently high skill ceiling, it's also very easy to learn (this version in particular is newcomer friendly as it uses 1 fewer orb column than the arcade & Neo Geo versions).
MagiDrop 2 has a surprisingly large cast of characters (all themed around the Major Arcana in a Tarot deck), but they have very little to say to each other. The game does have individual ending cut-scenes, but whether you'll find them all rewarding partially depends on your tolerance for vaguely implied nudity and repeated feet jokes. It looks like Magical Drop III andVI are the real fan-favourites, but I don't see a reason to avoid this one if you're curious.
31. Pokémon Puzzle League (2000, Switch - N64 NSO) ★★★☆☆
Quite blatant Pokémon themed reskin of Panel de Pon which was never released in Japan. Interestingly this draws much more upon the anime than the Pokémon games tend to: it features original animation and voicing, and even the music tries to sound like the 2.B.A. Master soundtrack. Gameplay is solid too, with several neat modes, and a weird 3D cylinder shaped play field to experiment with too. I didn't manage to clear it higher than normal mode, but it has a secret ending for the harder modes too.
32. Kirby's Dream Land (1992, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★☆☆
This is the first Kirby game ever, back when he was still white rather than pink, and could not absorb foes yet. A lot of future series staples were already present though, including bosses like Whispy Woods, Kracko the thundercloud, and of course King DeDeDe. The game is a short, breezy, 5-level affair, clocking in well under an hour tops (and that's including a boss rush to stall for time). Its runtime works in its favour though: the game can continually impress with new big sprites and level backgrounds, which might grow stale if they were drawn out over entire worlds.
33. Kirby's Dream Land 2 (1995, Switch - GB NSO) ★★☆☆☆
By this time Kirby was already a full-fledged franchise, with pinball and mini-golf spin-offs already out before this sequel landed. His characteristics were rapidly solidifying too, with copy abilities originating from Kirby's Adventure on NES, and animal companions getting introduced here. Their addition is a mixed bag however: they speed up your movement, but if you show up with the wrong one you'll wind up platforming with a fish on land, or swimming with the owl. Occasionally the game does this on purpose, and in those cases it works to add some light extra challenge, but just as often you're ditching your buddy to stop them dragging you down.
Unfortunately Dream Land 2 grows stale quite fast. The last set of mirrored stages are neat, but half the worlds feel extraneous, and it doesn't help how they get progressively longer. I'm not into its SNES sequel either, so maybe these non-Sakurai directed platformers just aren't quite for me.
34. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000, Switch - N64 NSO) ★☆☆☆☆
Bit of a hot take perhaps, since the game isn't awful, but I liked almost nothing about playing it besides the environments and cute picnic moments. It's a slow, dull platformer with forgettable music relative to the franchise's pedigree. It's got several good tunes, but also a lot of meandering synthscapes and tracks full of irritating chimes and bells. There are some selling points to Kirby 64, but few of them come without reservations. For e.g.: the "2.5D" backgrounds hold up well thanks to their angular designs, but the camera sometimes chooses angles which result in situations where you can't see ahead, or enemy traps get purposefully obscured to engineer cheap gotcha-moments.
Likewise, the game's main innovation of combining 2 copy abilities to form new ones unfortunately results in a shallow novelty. Sure, it's funny to turn Kirby into a fridge or snowman, but with so many possible combinations picking up new powers after finding one you like becomes a risk, rather than a reward. The only reason to interact with the system outside of curiosity and short-term amusement is to collect 100% of the items (which feels damning for the game's main raison d'être), and doing so presupposes an interest in prolonging your stay in the already quite boring levels.
Some stages have strong theming (the factory), but outside of a single chase and some vehicles sections you're going through level 1 exactly the same way as the last one. Iteration within the game feels very minimal, resulting in a samey experience spread very thinly across its runtime.
35. Kirby & The Amazing Mirror (2004, Switch - GBA NSO) ★★★☆☆
Coming straight ouf of Kirby 64 the movement in Amazing Mirror feels like a breath of fresh air. If it wasn't for Kirby's slow turning, I'd invoke comparisons to Shovel Knight degrees of speed. Amazing Mirror features an interconnected world, and at times approaches Metroid-like world design. Unlike in that series however, it's mostly a detriment here. Without persistent upgrades outside of heart containers, you frequently run across obstacles you can't clear without a certain power-up you last saw 8 screens ago. Add the amount of one-way doors into the equation, and suddenly that short trek back involves looping around the entire area. It also doesn't help how the game's map system is impressively uninformative, so it's difficult to remember which power-up you need to bring to which precise map square.
Admittedly it does seem impressive how the game can track 4 players across the game world, and the idea of 2 players simultaneously fighting different bosses across the map to speed up completion is cool. As a solo player however, you need to mop up the entire world yourself, and will get irritated at the constantly respawning enemies and frequent backtracking. Luckily the strong finale means the game ends on a high note.
36. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble (2000/2001, Switch - GBC NSO) ★★★☆☆
Puzzle game centered around rolling Kirby through stages using motion controls. Pretty novel for its time and hardware, but it's not a game I've heard about often. Inititally I found the controls quite annoying, especially since jumping is mapped to a shaking motion (a mistake you'd see Wii games like DeBlob make too). But from level 4 onwards you're combining mild puzzle elements with the longer hallways and can really gain some speed. The game gets surprisingly gnarly towards the end, but the final boss fight ends on a cute note to make it worth it.
37. F-Zero 99 (2023, Switch) ★★★★★
The mad lads finally made the F-Zero online death race people have been fantasising about for years! I will admit to being slightly disappointed at seeing this go for the SNES aesthetic upon reveal, but I couldn't have been more wrong. This is a very natural evolution for the franchise, with the aggressive risk-reward managing of mid-pack battles found in F-Zero GX now done with 98 other human opponents. The progression systems are super addictive, always giving you things to strive for, even if you're never winning races.
38. F-Zero (1990/1991, Switch) ★★★★☆
Got curious to try the original after F-Zero 99, and found it holds up really well. It is lacking the attacking moves of later entries, and also doesn't combine health and boost into a single bar like its sequels, so there's more emphasis on risk mitigation rather than taking risks. But a lot of the series' trademarks are already here: a remarkable sense of speed, excellent soundtrack, and the enduring futuristic vision. It's missing some obvious features like a trophy ceremony after every Grand Prix, and multiplayer. But while Nintendo would introduce those in Super Mario Kart, that game feels like it runs choppier, with less precise controls, and with tighter, more angular tracks than F-Zero's wider, more legible circuits.
39. Super Mario Kart (1992, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
The first Mario Kart has a dinky feel to it, with very obvious limitations imposed by its hardware. Many of the hallmarks were already present: most of the cast would return in every instalment, items like banana peels and shells are introduced here, and even some track themes would become mainstays (ghost houses, Bowser's castle, Rainbow Road). However, the lack of verticality requires some suspension of disbelief on the player's part to work. Why can't you go over certain lines? Well they represent walls, obviously, and no your short hop doesn't clear them.
I do like how coins and item boxes (both also flat here) disappear in future laps, requiring you to take slightly different racing lines. Speaking of racing lines, the CPU opponents drive near flawlessly here, and sometimes it feels like your rivals are flat-out cheating since they seemingly always have an invincibility star in their back pocket. Decent game overall, even it has been made thoroughly obsolete.
40. Mario Kart 64 (1996/1997, Switch - N64 NSO) ★★★★★ Replay
Still one of the best entries in the series. Probably the most iconic character roster, and the item balance is better here too by cutting the fairly inconsequential coins and feathers, while introducing the rare blue shell. Music is much better too, and it features several enduring course designs (D.K. Parkway), as well as the best-in-series Battle stage (Block Fort). Not every course is a winner in single player, but even the annoying ones become hilarious in multiplayer. My only complaints are how the CPUs blatantly cheat on 150cc, and I guess the drifting isn't as refined yet as Double Dash!! would eventually make it.
41. Mario Kart: Super Circuit a.k.a. Mario Kart Advance (2001, Switch - GBA NSO) ★★★☆☆
Somewhat perfunctory third instalment in the series. It's not outright bad, mashing the flat surface tracks of Super Mario Kart with Mario Kart 64's character models, items, and voices. However, it adds very little to the series, other than bringing it to handhelds. Perhaps that was enough at the time, but through a modern lens the lack of verticality is very noticeable once again. The track selection is lacking too, with many themes getting repeated (did we really need 4 Bowser Castle variants?), although it does include all the SNES tracks if you take the time to unlock them. There's a few winners here, like Sunset Wilds with its changing sky, and Rainbow Road with its ample opportunities for risky jumps. But overall this feels like a step back for the series until Double Dash!! would introduce new innovations.
42. Suika Game a.k.a. Watermelon Game (2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Highly addictive puzzle game where you try to match fruits. The slightly unreliable gravity results in that intoxicating mix of unpredictable rewards for repetitive actions. It's got only one, super annoying song, and I wonder if something like an (optional) basketball shot clock might be worth adding since you can theoretically take forever to drop your next fruit.
43. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ (2003, Switch - GBA NSO) ★★★★☆
The first WarioWare title is a startlingly complete vision of what the franchise would become. The pace is fast, jokes come quick, and the trollish sense of humour is a natural fit for the character. The art style in this entry is all over the place, ranging from beautiful pixel art to MS Paint crudeness. Only minor bummer is how it reuses some microgames without many changes to them, but at the breakneck pace that's a short-lived complaint.
44. Fighter's History (1994, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
I've never played Street Fighter II and even I can tell this is blatantly following SF2's footsteps. Looking into it, Data East even got (unsuccessfully) sued over this game by Capcom. That's probably the most interesting fact about Fighter's History, but I will say the game feels perfectly competent on its own, despite an utter lack of identity. It has 9 playable characters plus 2 bosses, all with unique move sets, and decently detailed arenas for everyone. All the fighters are entirely forgettable, except for final boss Karnov, who I believe is from a different game series. It feels like there's some political commentary happening, with the Soviet-coded Karnov disguised with keffiyeh & agal in a Middle-Eastern oil field, but I'm not informed enough on these topics to fully grasp its significance.
The fighting itself works well: it's a fast game with simple inputs, and impacts feel crunchy. Perhaps there could've been a bit more time between moves to punish button mashing, but that'd come at the expense of the current responsive controls. I don't know how much depth there really is for true fighting game fans, but as a scrub I had an okay time mashing buttons for 4 hours.
45. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts (1991, Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★★☆
Gave this franchise another shot after liking its spin-off series Gargoyle's Quest. Had bounced off of Ghosts 'n Goblins previously, but this third game drew me in with its opening cinematic, and fantasic visuals. The series already has a unique style, and for an early SNES game this looks particularly impressive. Mind, it's still a very difficult precision platformer loaded with traps, and an inflexible double jump which doesn't let you change directions once in the air. But the surprisingly generous continue system and the NSO addition of save states greatly help at tipping the scales against a game which is clearly giddy about trolling you with blind jumps, surprise spawning enemies, or outright flooding the screen. There's a sense of humour to poor Arthur's terrible fate, between running around in his underwear after losing his armour, and getting sent back all the way for a 2nd loop right before facing the (rather disappointing) final boss.
46. Dig Dug II a.k.a. Dig Dug II: Trouble in Paradise (1985, Switch - NES NSO) ★★★☆☆
Sequel to a Namco arcade classic I haven't played. Unlike the side-view underground digging of the original, which looks similar to Mr. Driller or SteamWorld Dig to me, this is an overhead action-puzzle game set above ground instead. You need to clear levels of enemies, by either inflating them 'til they pop, or by sinking parts of the island they're on. Quite addictive, but the game never introduces new foes, so its difficulty can only increase by upping enemy numbers, and more restrictive level designs. Later levels get fiendishly difficult, but on NSO you can trial & error your way through using savestates. Impressive amount of levels (72!) for a game this old, and there's a funny, morbid touch where sometimes the last surviving enemy will choose to drown themselves instead of facing you.
47. M.U.S.H.A. a.k.a. Musha Aleste: Fullmetal Fighter Ellinor (1990/1991, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★★★★
This got a stupid backcronym for the American release, and does a good job at masking behind an Edo/Tokugawa era aesthetic, but it's unmistakenly an Aleste game with the serial numbers filed off. MUSHA feels on the easier side for the franchise, especially if you get good at cycling through phases for your Options. The metal soundtrack isn't my jam, but it's a good fit on Genesis, and meshes well with the bombast the storytelling attempts. Great game, feels like a top-tier release on the system.
48. GyroBlade (2020/2023, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Helicopter-themed vertical shooter trying emulate an 80s arcade aesthetic. Having never played Tiger Heli or Twin Cobra, I imagine those were fairly similar, although mercifully GyroBlade at least has autofire, and an ending. It's a pretty competent, albeit repetitive game, with good music, and a bit more challenge than I expected. Unfortunately, not all said challenge derives from the stage and encounter designs. Rather, it uses tanky enemies and the Gradius punishment of losing power-ups upon death. The latter I understand in a retro throwback, but it feels severe since it takes almost two full stages to get fully powered up again. While I think GyroBlade achieves the goals it sets for itself, it lacks some identity to set itself apart.
49. GyroGunner (2023, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The sequel to GyroBlade maintains the helicopter theme, but this time it's an omni-directional shooter. You're given more tools to work with, both offensively (lock-on missiles) and defensively (flares), and this time the game places limits on both (jammers can disrupt your lock-on system, flares are finite). This results in more layered gameplay, where you need to weigh which targets to pursue first (do you take out the jammer first, or sources of incoming fire?), and being too cautious risks your fuel running out. The addition of a world map, and a more climactic final level also help in giving the game a more perceptable arc, which GyroBlade lacked. Granted, GyroGunner is still a retro throwback from a single developer working on a tiny budget, but it's cool to see their progress.
50. Zero Gunner 2- (2001/2018, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Another helicopter shooting game, this one being a rebuilt port of a Sega Naomi/DreamCast game. Production values seem quite high, and the polygonal models mostly clean up nicely (except for the grainy texture on your helicopters, amusingly). It's a short, fast-paced 7-stager with less jokes than Psikyo's Gunbird series, and offers nicely scaled difficulty levels. The central idea revolves around letting players angle their chopper 360 degrees, but since this predates the twin-stick era the turning is a little convoluted. Not a bad game, but not especially memorable either.
51. Steredenn: Binary Stars (2018, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Very mixed on this run-based, procedurally generated horizontal shooter. It frontloads a lot of immediate annoyances which you'll just need to accept if you want to get anywhere. These include basic things like many weapons not autofiring, or how switching weapons interrupts your fire, both of which require separate, semi-randomly dropped upgrades to solve. Initially the enemy designs blend together too; you'll just need to learn to recognise them. Most annoying is how you can't practice boss fights in the practice mode until after you've beaten those bosses. So if you're stuck on the level 6 boss your only way to practice is to repeatedly replay a 20 minute run before getting another go at him
In those moments the procedurally generated structure really works against the player - as every run the stages are different, so focusing squarely on learning a boss cannot be separated from adjusting to a set of newly rearranged levels and upgrades (unless you replay a fixed Seed, but that often requires entering a 6+ digit number and the game doesn't use the on-device software keyboard). I understand doing repeated runs is the point, but this game is brutally difficult at first, to the point where I think it goes overboard. Especially since you can do multiple loops of all stages, I don't see why the first one had to be this difficult already.
Last complaint: I know music is highly subjective, and I've certainly seen people online praise Steredenn's soundtrack. But personally the butt-rock got on my nerves very fast, and since turning it down still left the crunchy sound effects, this quickly became Mute & Podcast Game to me.
For a while this game was headed straight to the two-star pile, but i will say its "one more go" draw hooked me. And 45 hours later a lot of my initial reservations had been solved by time. I had all the bosses down pat, knew how to reliably trigger secret bosses, and was shooting for a third complete loop. It's not a game I would recommend to many people: it's way too hard, visually on the uninteresting side, and has music I dislike. The procedurally generated levels will be an immediate turn off to shooting game fans who want to study levels by heart, but the game also doesn't draw enough on the persistent upgrades found in rogue-lites to appeal to that crowd. If you're somewhere in between both groups, this offers a functionally endless experience which stays interesting long beyond your first cleared loop. But I don't know how much the Venn diagram truly overlaps.
52. Yoshi's Story (1998, Switch - N64 NSO) ★☆☆☆☆
Cute, but very dull platformer, with grating music, and level design that seems to go nowhere since stages end whenever you've collected enough fruit. The visuals are nice, and I didn't realise how much the Smash Bros. series lifted from this release, but this feels like an enormous drop in quality after Yoshi's Island. When you make a platforming game and the best level is the water level where you do no jumping at all, something went wrong. The way you can choose levels might make for a good speedrunning game perhaps, or as a first game for very young children?
Finished: 52
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