Reserved!
01. Altered Beast (1988, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★☆☆☆☆
Exhibit A in the case why beat 'em ups really need more planes of movement than platformers or fighting games; when surrounded, you can't dodge easily without sidestepping. I have to imagine the large sprites, animal transformations, and voice samples were impressive at the time. But all that remains now is a stiff, clunky action game, with a cookie-cutter save-the-princess plot, and a beefcake protagonist. Even the central gimmick of transforming into a monster/animal is dubiously executed: the transformation orbs can catch you out at the wrong time, forcing you to take a hit. Since the level ends soon after you transform, you also don't get to stomp around as a big tiger as long as you want.
02. Golden Axe (1989, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★☆☆☆
The drab colour palette and tell-don't-show approach to storytelling robs this fantasy beat 'em up of a lot of potential charm. Ostensibly you're adventuring over turtles with villages on their shells and using eagles as bridges, but 90% of the environments are brown paths with little life to them. Fights feel okay, but a lot of enemies get palette swapped, and the mounts require more precision than you'd like.
03. Golden Axe II (1992, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Very similar to the first game. You've got a few more moves at your disposal in the sequel, but once again the high amount of re-used palette swapped enemies means repetition sets in quickly. The storytelling sequences are a bit more convincing, and it's an overall more colourful game, ending on a cool final boss room. But aside for the significantly improved soundtrack, this feels like the series immediately entered a holding pattern.
04. Alien Storm (1991, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★★☆☆
Alien invasion beat 'em up, supposedly from the Golden Axe team, although this feels markedly better. Levels are more varied since the belt scrolling sections are interspersed with short first person shooting galleries or speedy running segments. The game has a sense of humour to it, with aliens hiding in trash cans or mailboxes, and levels opening on dramatic 50s style sci-fi openings. It's all very stupid, but the game leans into it which makes it considerably more tolerable.
05. Ristar (1995, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★★☆☆
Colourful mascot platformer with detailed level designs and several decent bosses. Visual flourishes make it feel alive, such as the varied idle animations, and how Ristar enters the snow world on skiis. The level transitions feel very similar to the Sonic games on Genesis, but I'm seeing conflicting answers about how much development overlap there truly was.
06. Disc Room (2020, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Solid action game about dodging buzzsaws in small rooms. The light puzzle elements, great soundtrack, and snappy pace keep it from growing stale, but the story is entirely forgettable. Almost half my deaths were against the final boss, but the instant retry kept it free of frustration.
07. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024, Switch) ★★★★☆
Feels fitting to complete this shortly after Akira Toriyama's passing, given how some of the flashy boss battles feel modelled after Dragon Ball Z fights. The Lost Crown is a strong revival of the Prince of Persia series, returning to its sidescroller roots, but this time emerging as a Metroid-style exploration platformer. For a subgenre usually dominated by independent studios, the extra budget of a large publisher is on full display here. Mount Qaf is huge, constantly rolling out new biomes, many of them with arresting visual designs, and region-specific obstacles and enemies. Traversing the world is a joy thanks to nimble protagonist Sargon, who controls as fluidly as a Smash Bros. character, and the game constantly pushes you to chain all of his movement options together into white-knuckle acrobatic sequences.
The size of the world unfortunately does allow for some light but typical Ubisoft bloat to creep in. A lot of the storytelling is done through collecting lore documents, which feel inessential, and the stop-to-read nature of them feels antithetical to the otherwise fast pace of traversal. I wish this game had the confidence to apply Metroid's central lesson of letting its (incredible!) architecture do environmental storytelling, and keeping lore dumps short and mysterious. Furthermore, since the developers have so many nooks and crannies to fill, you invariably wind up with 3 separate currencies to pay for various upgrades, meaning the reward for some of the game's gnarliest optional platforming sections will absolutely be just another Xerxes coin you're already drowning in. Sometimes the designers actively troll you, too: whoever designed a minutes-long room full of sawblades requiring complete memorisation, only to reward you with... lilac pants... was definitely cackling to themselves.
There's more critiques you could leverage against the game, like how the story doesn't really establish Sargon's personal motivations, how it appears to miss a boss fight somewhere along the way, and how it undercuts its strong finale somewhat with two weaker final cut-scenes. But a lot of the lesser aspects feel like the result of a team taking big swings, and they're quite minor in the grand scheme.
Given its title and premise, this series inherently invites discussion about whether it falls for typical Orientalist traps of exoticism. I'm not remotely qualified to speak on those topics, but the game features characters named after goddesses like Anahita, and draws upon mythology to enrich its world by including creatures like a Manticore, the Simurgh mythical bird, and the snake-like Azhdaha. Playing this with the full Farsi dub, and backed by the incredible soundtrack from Iranian producer Mentrix, I've definitely become acutely aware of my very limited understanding of the region's history. It feels like a lot of care went into this project, and I hope this team get to make a sequel.
08. SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (2019, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
It's admirable how the SteamWorld series remains committed to switching up its genres with most releases. This one is a turn based RPG with card battles. It's simple to grasp, with 3 active characters in your party cycling through decks of 8 cards each, but there's plenty of cards and interactions between them to allow for some depth. That said, I don't think the game is very successful at convincing you to try out new strategies once you've landed upon a reliable one. Outside of combat I find very little to recommend here. The storybook framing device and heaps of middling comedy dialogue make it difficult to get invested in anything, and few conversations are worth listening to, unless you're interested in mild observational humour. The downright tedious pacing during any non-combat segments, even with the game permanently set to fast-forward, further emphasises how much time is spent outside of card battles. Frankly, most of it feels disposable, dragging down an otherwise solid card battler with great visuals.
09. SteamWorld Dig 2 (2017, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The first direct sequel in the SteamWorld series, and a mixed improvement over its predecessor. It looks gorgeous, with much improved mobility options, and it retains most of the gameplay loop of the original where you mine for ores, return to the surface, sell your findings, and purchase upgrades. This time the world is hand designed rather than procedurally generated, which makes for a more streamlined experience, but also means you're funnelled down specific routes. I never dug myself an impossible hole, or felt any ownership of the tunnel networks I was digging, as they all have guaranteed guardrails placed by the level designers. I kind of missed the constant pressure of the original game to maintain a functional hub-and-spoke system to ensure I could return to the surface. A bit too much friction was reduced there, in my opinion.
10. ITTA (2020, Switch) ★★★★☆
Seen this get recommended by folks like Malverde and Rhaknar over the years in these threads, so finally jumped on a sale. It's a melancholy affair, mixing light exploration with twin-stick bullet hell boss battles. The game manages to evoke a lot of sympathy for its characters, and humanises the bosses in a manner reminiscent of Pandora's Tower. Definitely feels like a lot of personal experience went into the resigned, hopeless mood underpinning the setting. I have some basic complaints (wish the map marked areas you'd already been to as done, some boss music gets repetitive, it crashed on me once after beating a difficult boss, etc.) but those feel minor compared to what's accomplished here.
11. Swordship (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Ultra stylish futuristic speedboat game where you steal containers on a canal, while zigzagging through enemy fire, all set to bumping EDM tunes. You have few offensive moves at your disposal, so your best defence is trying to make enemies hit each other. Pulling such a move off at the last second results in a satisfying Burnout style slow-mo crash. The run-based nature of the game means no attempt is identical, and replaying is incentivised by dangling some carrots to unlock in front of you. Likewise the procedurally generated levels result in further variation, although I wish it would re-use the same seed upon death, since you can never retry the scenario that killed you. Very cool game though, can't believe I missed out on this 2 years ago.
12. Hexapoda (2023, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Insect-themed vertical shooter with a solid EDM soundtrack, and striking black and white artwork complimented by unique bullet patterns of contrasting pink & teal shots. There's a real sense this could've been a winner, but unfortunately it falls short in several areas beyond presentation. My primary complaint is how this tries to marry the bullet hell staple of instant respawns with traditional space shooter upgrade pick-ups. In my opinion this combination rarely works: your firepower being variable against overwhelming odds is tough to balance for when you don't know the precise moment a player will die/respawn at (hence why classic shooters used checkpoints to control for unbeatable situations). Hexapoda further compounds this issue by not letting you pick lost upgrades back up until your i-frames end. This can (and will) result in rapid consecutive loss of lives when you invariably get caught early in a big wave of shots.
The game inherits another classic issue of pick-ups too, where too many dropped weapon capsules effectively force you to evade upgrades to keep your current load-out. Meanwhile speed increases are nowhere to be found, even though they'd be welcome. I have some further nitpicks, particularly about the story: there's both too much of it, but also not enough to prevent multiple anticlimactic ending, and the slightly cringeworthy dialogue translation does the game no favours. I feel bad for coming down quite negatively on this one, since it's by a tiny team, and they shipped a totally playable, at times even cool game. It just happens to run against a lot of my personal tastes.
13. Xelan Force (2024, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Space shooter somewhat in the vein of Zanac or early Aleste titles, but with none of the slowdown. It's a mostly solid, albeit unoriginal genre exercise. They don't really solve the classic issue of having to avoid unwanted power-ups, and having to choose your turrets' behaviour at the start of a run feels less flexible than you'd want. I also ran into the issue where dying once can quickly lead to a cascading life count since it de-powers you. This feels like it should be a solved problem by now; just let the player scramble to re-acquire their dropped pick-ups before their i-frames run out. Xelan Force seems comfortable reaching for facsimile status, which it does convincingly, and with a decent finale up its sleeve it ends on a high note.
14. Rainbow Cotton (2024, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
By commissioning a remake of this previously Japan-exclusive Dreamcast railshooter from 2000, publishers Success Corporation & ININ Games have now brought the entire Cotton series (minus Pachinko Cotton) to modern systems. This is the 2nd railshooter in the series, a sequel to Panorama Cotton on Genesis. Since I played all of them in 2022, I couldn't let Rainbow Cotton's mixed reputation get in the way of my completionism.
Let's start out with the positives: this game is a looker, with varied colourful environments, and cute enemies which give Kirby Air Ride vibes. The music borders on the twee, but has some okay tunes, and everything runs at a consistent framerate no matter how hectic things get. It's got some memorable set-pieces (the Stage 1 train and Stage 3 boss stand out in in particular), and this remake fixes several QOL issues too. Unlike in the original, the remake indicates where branching paths occur, gives bosses visible health bars, appears to have fixed the auto-centering controls, and added a visual indicator for your lock-on shots. An added benefit of the move to widescreen is how Cotton's character model doesn't get in the way of your vision as much as it seemed to have done on Dreamcast, too.
Unfortunately the remake can't fix everything. This game has a lot of cut-scenes, which are cleaned up a bit here and subtitled (apparently done with an existing fan-translation team, neat!). However, the cut-scenes themselves remain shoddily voiced 90s anime nonsense, have 1 joke they keep repeating (Cotton wants to eat Willow candy), and seem pre-occupied with framing the faeries' cleavages as much as possible. Another aspect the game inherits from its original version are the slow, way-too-long stages which stretch 8-10 minutes each, and make you start over upon death.
This gets particularly annoying given the frankly absurd difficulty spike in the last stage. For an otherwise mostly breezy series it suddenly starts raining bullets towards the end, and since you have no i-frames, dodge, or speed-up, it's very easy to tank 3 consecutive hits in a single second. Due to stingy placement of item containers you can also totally blow up all your faeries against one of the 4 late-game bosses, and as a result need to white-knuckle the already drawn-out final battle with effectively a pea-shooter.
An odd change the remake makes to said final battle is to give the boss an invincibility shield at 75%/50%/25% health to make sure the player doesn't kill her before seeing all the phases. From a design standpoint I can see not wanting players to win before the planned dramatic finale, but as a player it feels like you're being forced to endure even more patterns without being able to return fire.
The remake also kind of drops the ball in surfacing information. There's no button lay-out, manual, instruction, or tutorial of any kind. And while the game seems like a simple 2-button affair, it doesn't communicate at all why your Magic (think equivalent of a Bomb) sometimes changes effects. Turns out if you're firing and locked onto an enemy, you trigger a different Magic variant which blows up a faerie. Another thing you'll need to discover is how the auto-fire is actually slower than mashing your thumb to smithereens. Feels like using two buttons (one for auto-fire, one for the homing attack) would've been preferable here. Likewise I would've preferred two buttons for the alternate Magic bomb uses, to have more control over losing faeries or not, and a simpler button to input more credits would be preferable over the elaborate cheat code you need to input currently.
In conclusion: Rainbow Cotton is a lacking, overly long, and frankly exhausting railshooter which tries to skate by on its strong presentation. The team at KRITZELKRATZ 3000 have attempted an admirable salvage job, but their remake is simply too small in scope to make the drastic changes this game truly needs. Between this game, the also poor Panorama Cotton, and the limp 3D bonus stages in Cotton Fantasy I feel like this series should dip out of railshooters entirely. It's a tough sub-genre to make, its perspective doesn't leverage Cotton's central appear (her amusing facial expressions), and Success Corp. are never going to have the budget to hire a studio which can compete with the likes of Panzer Dragoon Orta, Sin & Punishment 2, Rez, or Kid Icarus: Uprising, so even their best effort will come up lacking.
15. Dr. Mario (1990, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★★☆
The Game Boy version of Dr. Mario is very similar to the NES release, and just as fiendishly addictive. They've cleverly accounted for the lack of colour by giving the viruses patterns instead. The end screen is different too, which is a nice touch.
16. Alleyway (1989, Switch - GB NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Rather basic variant on Breakout/Arkanoid. It has about 3 ideas and cycles through them 8 times, which gets old fast. The horizontally scrolling stages are novel, but kind of give me a headache. It doesn't solve the usual Breakout issue where you spend 3 minutes trying to hit the last remaining block, but also never makes time an issue - even in levels where it slowly lowers blocks, they'll cap out at a pre-planned height, never threatening to overwhelm the player.
17. XIIZeal a.k.a. XII Stag (2002/2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Re-release of Triangle Service's 2nd major vertical shooter, following G-Stream 2020 (now known as ΔZeal ), which is a game I unexpectedly fell in love with last year. XIIZeal is an objectively more polished game, but doesn't quite match the same heights for me. This one is laser-focused on score chaining: shooting foes down nets you points once, but using your sideswipe lets you multiply those points per sideswiped enemy. Of course this means you'll need to play riskier to get close to enemies. Keeping a chain of 12x multipliers going rewards you with a satisfying robotic voice yelling "TWELVETWELVETWELVE", and you can soar to even further heights by using the bomb's forcefield to cancel big shot barrages up to 1000 points per shot. The risk there is once again proximity - do you dare to hover right next to a boss' cannon, catching all its bullets in a bomb-cancel, and simultaneously sideswiping its various elements?
It results in a mostly focused, streamlined game, although its final stage visuals feel at odds with the general theming. XIIZeal wears its secrets prominently on its sleeve, listed right there as achievements. It's more accessible for sure, but ΔZeal 's determination to leave players in the dark feels a little more interesting to me. Perhaps the true value of this re-release lies in its developer commentary, which reflects on the changing conditions for solo developers in the past 2 decades. Here's hoping Toshiaki Fujino has one more future game in him, or at least gets to re-release TriZeal Remix.
18. Super R-Type (Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
In appropriate Bydo fashion this feels like a mutated version of R-Type II. About half its levels are still partially recognisable, particularly the underwater stage, battleship fight, and the difficult factory chase. The other half is new material, albeit with some palette swapped enemies.
This feels like a rather inessential release, with less iconic music (most bosses use the same tune), and less of the H.R. Giger horror imagery which informs the series' identity. One notable aspect however is how it's considerably easier than most of the series, thanks to copious slowdown working in your favour. Just don't start it on Hard mode, since the game challenges you to complete 2 loops, and the 2nd one ups the difficulty level by 1.
19. Zero Wing (1991, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Quite forgettable horizontal space shooter, mostly known for the opening cut-scene which was added to this Genesis version and features the notorious "all your base are belong to us" translation. Besides this crumb of personality the game lacks a real identity. Bosses aren't memorable, and neither are the stages. Towards the end it starts cribbing from Alien and R-Type, which doesn't mesh with the earlier stages, leading to an incoherent campaign.
Completed: 23/52
In progress: 2
01. Altered Beast (1988, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★☆☆☆☆
Exhibit A in the case why beat 'em ups really need more planes of movement than platformers or fighting games; when surrounded, you can't dodge easily without sidestepping. I have to imagine the large sprites, animal transformations, and voice samples were impressive at the time. But all that remains now is a stiff, clunky action game, with a cookie-cutter save-the-princess plot, and a beefcake protagonist. Even the central gimmick of transforming into a monster/animal is dubiously executed: the transformation orbs can catch you out at the wrong time, forcing you to take a hit. Since the level ends soon after you transform, you also don't get to stomp around as a big tiger as long as you want.
02. Golden Axe (1989, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★☆☆☆
The drab colour palette and tell-don't-show approach to storytelling robs this fantasy beat 'em up of a lot of potential charm. Ostensibly you're adventuring over turtles with villages on their shells and using eagles as bridges, but 90% of the environments are brown paths with little life to them. Fights feel okay, but a lot of enemies get palette swapped, and the mounts require more precision than you'd like.
03. Golden Axe II (1992, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Very similar to the first game. You've got a few more moves at your disposal in the sequel, but once again the high amount of re-used palette swapped enemies means repetition sets in quickly. The storytelling sequences are a bit more convincing, and it's an overall more colourful game, ending on a cool final boss room. But aside for the significantly improved soundtrack, this feels like the series immediately entered a holding pattern.
04. Alien Storm (1991, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★★☆☆
Alien invasion beat 'em up, supposedly from the Golden Axe team, although this feels markedly better. Levels are more varied since the belt scrolling sections are interspersed with short first person shooting galleries or speedy running segments. The game has a sense of humour to it, with aliens hiding in trash cans or mailboxes, and levels opening on dramatic 50s style sci-fi openings. It's all very stupid, but the game leans into it which makes it considerably more tolerable.
05. Ristar (1995, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★★☆☆
Colourful mascot platformer with detailed level designs and several decent bosses. Visual flourishes make it feel alive, such as the varied idle animations, and how Ristar enters the snow world on skiis. The level transitions feel very similar to the Sonic games on Genesis, but I'm seeing conflicting answers about how much development overlap there truly was.
06. Disc Room (2020, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Solid action game about dodging buzzsaws in small rooms. The light puzzle elements, great soundtrack, and snappy pace keep it from growing stale, but the story is entirely forgettable. Almost half my deaths were against the final boss, but the instant retry kept it free of frustration.
07. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024, Switch) ★★★★☆
Feels fitting to complete this shortly after Akira Toriyama's passing, given how some of the flashy boss battles feel modelled after Dragon Ball Z fights. The Lost Crown is a strong revival of the Prince of Persia series, returning to its sidescroller roots, but this time emerging as a Metroid-style exploration platformer. For a subgenre usually dominated by independent studios, the extra budget of a large publisher is on full display here. Mount Qaf is huge, constantly rolling out new biomes, many of them with arresting visual designs, and region-specific obstacles and enemies. Traversing the world is a joy thanks to nimble protagonist Sargon, who controls as fluidly as a Smash Bros. character, and the game constantly pushes you to chain all of his movement options together into white-knuckle acrobatic sequences.
The size of the world unfortunately does allow for some light but typical Ubisoft bloat to creep in. A lot of the storytelling is done through collecting lore documents, which feel inessential, and the stop-to-read nature of them feels antithetical to the otherwise fast pace of traversal. I wish this game had the confidence to apply Metroid's central lesson of letting its (incredible!) architecture do environmental storytelling, and keeping lore dumps short and mysterious. Furthermore, since the developers have so many nooks and crannies to fill, you invariably wind up with 3 separate currencies to pay for various upgrades, meaning the reward for some of the game's gnarliest optional platforming sections will absolutely be just another Xerxes coin you're already drowning in. Sometimes the designers actively troll you, too: whoever designed a minutes-long room full of sawblades requiring complete memorisation, only to reward you with... lilac pants... was definitely cackling to themselves.
There's more critiques you could leverage against the game, like how the story doesn't really establish Sargon's personal motivations, how it appears to miss a boss fight somewhere along the way, and how it undercuts its strong finale somewhat with two weaker final cut-scenes. But a lot of the lesser aspects feel like the result of a team taking big swings, and they're quite minor in the grand scheme.
Given its title and premise, this series inherently invites discussion about whether it falls for typical Orientalist traps of exoticism. I'm not remotely qualified to speak on those topics, but the game features characters named after goddesses like Anahita, and draws upon mythology to enrich its world by including creatures like a Manticore, the Simurgh mythical bird, and the snake-like Azhdaha. Playing this with the full Farsi dub, and backed by the incredible soundtrack from Iranian producer Mentrix, I've definitely become acutely aware of my very limited understanding of the region's history. It feels like a lot of care went into this project, and I hope this team get to make a sequel.
08. SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (2019, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
It's admirable how the SteamWorld series remains committed to switching up its genres with most releases. This one is a turn based RPG with card battles. It's simple to grasp, with 3 active characters in your party cycling through decks of 8 cards each, but there's plenty of cards and interactions between them to allow for some depth. That said, I don't think the game is very successful at convincing you to try out new strategies once you've landed upon a reliable one. Outside of combat I find very little to recommend here. The storybook framing device and heaps of middling comedy dialogue make it difficult to get invested in anything, and few conversations are worth listening to, unless you're interested in mild observational humour. The downright tedious pacing during any non-combat segments, even with the game permanently set to fast-forward, further emphasises how much time is spent outside of card battles. Frankly, most of it feels disposable, dragging down an otherwise solid card battler with great visuals.
09. SteamWorld Dig 2 (2017, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The first direct sequel in the SteamWorld series, and a mixed improvement over its predecessor. It looks gorgeous, with much improved mobility options, and it retains most of the gameplay loop of the original where you mine for ores, return to the surface, sell your findings, and purchase upgrades. This time the world is hand designed rather than procedurally generated, which makes for a more streamlined experience, but also means you're funnelled down specific routes. I never dug myself an impossible hole, or felt any ownership of the tunnel networks I was digging, as they all have guaranteed guardrails placed by the level designers. I kind of missed the constant pressure of the original game to maintain a functional hub-and-spoke system to ensure I could return to the surface. A bit too much friction was reduced there, in my opinion.
10. ITTA (2020, Switch) ★★★★☆
Seen this get recommended by folks like Malverde and Rhaknar over the years in these threads, so finally jumped on a sale. It's a melancholy affair, mixing light exploration with twin-stick bullet hell boss battles. The game manages to evoke a lot of sympathy for its characters, and humanises the bosses in a manner reminiscent of Pandora's Tower. Definitely feels like a lot of personal experience went into the resigned, hopeless mood underpinning the setting. I have some basic complaints (wish the map marked areas you'd already been to as done, some boss music gets repetitive, it crashed on me once after beating a difficult boss, etc.) but those feel minor compared to what's accomplished here.
11. Swordship (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Ultra stylish futuristic speedboat game where you steal containers on a canal, while zigzagging through enemy fire, all set to bumping EDM tunes. You have few offensive moves at your disposal, so your best defence is trying to make enemies hit each other. Pulling such a move off at the last second results in a satisfying Burnout style slow-mo crash. The run-based nature of the game means no attempt is identical, and replaying is incentivised by dangling some carrots to unlock in front of you. Likewise the procedurally generated levels result in further variation, although I wish it would re-use the same seed upon death, since you can never retry the scenario that killed you. Very cool game though, can't believe I missed out on this 2 years ago.
12. Hexapoda (2023, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Insect-themed vertical shooter with a solid EDM soundtrack, and striking black and white artwork complimented by unique bullet patterns of contrasting pink & teal shots. There's a real sense this could've been a winner, but unfortunately it falls short in several areas beyond presentation. My primary complaint is how this tries to marry the bullet hell staple of instant respawns with traditional space shooter upgrade pick-ups. In my opinion this combination rarely works: your firepower being variable against overwhelming odds is tough to balance for when you don't know the precise moment a player will die/respawn at (hence why classic shooters used checkpoints to control for unbeatable situations). Hexapoda further compounds this issue by not letting you pick lost upgrades back up until your i-frames end. This can (and will) result in rapid consecutive loss of lives when you invariably get caught early in a big wave of shots.
The game inherits another classic issue of pick-ups too, where too many dropped weapon capsules effectively force you to evade upgrades to keep your current load-out. Meanwhile speed increases are nowhere to be found, even though they'd be welcome. I have some further nitpicks, particularly about the story: there's both too much of it, but also not enough to prevent multiple anticlimactic ending, and the slightly cringeworthy dialogue translation does the game no favours. I feel bad for coming down quite negatively on this one, since it's by a tiny team, and they shipped a totally playable, at times even cool game. It just happens to run against a lot of my personal tastes.
13. Xelan Force (2024, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Space shooter somewhat in the vein of Zanac or early Aleste titles, but with none of the slowdown. It's a mostly solid, albeit unoriginal genre exercise. They don't really solve the classic issue of having to avoid unwanted power-ups, and having to choose your turrets' behaviour at the start of a run feels less flexible than you'd want. I also ran into the issue where dying once can quickly lead to a cascading life count since it de-powers you. This feels like it should be a solved problem by now; just let the player scramble to re-acquire their dropped pick-ups before their i-frames run out. Xelan Force seems comfortable reaching for facsimile status, which it does convincingly, and with a decent finale up its sleeve it ends on a high note.
14. Rainbow Cotton (2024, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
By commissioning a remake of this previously Japan-exclusive Dreamcast railshooter from 2000, publishers Success Corporation & ININ Games have now brought the entire Cotton series (minus Pachinko Cotton) to modern systems. This is the 2nd railshooter in the series, a sequel to Panorama Cotton on Genesis. Since I played all of them in 2022, I couldn't let Rainbow Cotton's mixed reputation get in the way of my completionism.
Let's start out with the positives: this game is a looker, with varied colourful environments, and cute enemies which give Kirby Air Ride vibes. The music borders on the twee, but has some okay tunes, and everything runs at a consistent framerate no matter how hectic things get. It's got some memorable set-pieces (the Stage 1 train and Stage 3 boss stand out in in particular), and this remake fixes several QOL issues too. Unlike in the original, the remake indicates where branching paths occur, gives bosses visible health bars, appears to have fixed the auto-centering controls, and added a visual indicator for your lock-on shots. An added benefit of the move to widescreen is how Cotton's character model doesn't get in the way of your vision as much as it seemed to have done on Dreamcast, too.
Unfortunately the remake can't fix everything. This game has a lot of cut-scenes, which are cleaned up a bit here and subtitled (apparently done with an existing fan-translation team, neat!). However, the cut-scenes themselves remain shoddily voiced 90s anime nonsense, have 1 joke they keep repeating (Cotton wants to eat Willow candy), and seem pre-occupied with framing the faeries' cleavages as much as possible. Another aspect the game inherits from its original version are the slow, way-too-long stages which stretch 8-10 minutes each, and make you start over upon death.
This gets particularly annoying given the frankly absurd difficulty spike in the last stage. For an otherwise mostly breezy series it suddenly starts raining bullets towards the end, and since you have no i-frames, dodge, or speed-up, it's very easy to tank 3 consecutive hits in a single second. Due to stingy placement of item containers you can also totally blow up all your faeries against one of the 4 late-game bosses, and as a result need to white-knuckle the already drawn-out final battle with effectively a pea-shooter.
An odd change the remake makes to said final battle is to give the boss an invincibility shield at 75%/50%/25% health to make sure the player doesn't kill her before seeing all the phases. From a design standpoint I can see not wanting players to win before the planned dramatic finale, but as a player it feels like you're being forced to endure even more patterns without being able to return fire.
The remake also kind of drops the ball in surfacing information. There's no button lay-out, manual, instruction, or tutorial of any kind. And while the game seems like a simple 2-button affair, it doesn't communicate at all why your Magic (think equivalent of a Bomb) sometimes changes effects. Turns out if you're firing and locked onto an enemy, you trigger a different Magic variant which blows up a faerie. Another thing you'll need to discover is how the auto-fire is actually slower than mashing your thumb to smithereens. Feels like using two buttons (one for auto-fire, one for the homing attack) would've been preferable here. Likewise I would've preferred two buttons for the alternate Magic bomb uses, to have more control over losing faeries or not, and a simpler button to input more credits would be preferable over the elaborate cheat code you need to input currently.
In conclusion: Rainbow Cotton is a lacking, overly long, and frankly exhausting railshooter which tries to skate by on its strong presentation. The team at KRITZELKRATZ 3000 have attempted an admirable salvage job, but their remake is simply too small in scope to make the drastic changes this game truly needs. Between this game, the also poor Panorama Cotton, and the limp 3D bonus stages in Cotton Fantasy I feel like this series should dip out of railshooters entirely. It's a tough sub-genre to make, its perspective doesn't leverage Cotton's central appear (her amusing facial expressions), and Success Corp. are never going to have the budget to hire a studio which can compete with the likes of Panzer Dragoon Orta, Sin & Punishment 2, Rez, or Kid Icarus: Uprising, so even their best effort will come up lacking.
15. Dr. Mario (1990, Switch - GB NSO) ★★★★☆
The Game Boy version of Dr. Mario is very similar to the NES release, and just as fiendishly addictive. They've cleverly accounted for the lack of colour by giving the viruses patterns instead. The end screen is different too, which is a nice touch.
16. Alleyway (1989, Switch - GB NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Rather basic variant on Breakout/Arkanoid. It has about 3 ideas and cycles through them 8 times, which gets old fast. The horizontally scrolling stages are novel, but kind of give me a headache. It doesn't solve the usual Breakout issue where you spend 3 minutes trying to hit the last remaining block, but also never makes time an issue - even in levels where it slowly lowers blocks, they'll cap out at a pre-planned height, never threatening to overwhelm the player.
17. XIIZeal a.k.a. XII Stag (2002/2023, Switch) ★★★★☆
Re-release of Triangle Service's 2nd major vertical shooter, following G-Stream 2020 (now known as ΔZeal ), which is a game I unexpectedly fell in love with last year. XIIZeal is an objectively more polished game, but doesn't quite match the same heights for me. This one is laser-focused on score chaining: shooting foes down nets you points once, but using your sideswipe lets you multiply those points per sideswiped enemy. Of course this means you'll need to play riskier to get close to enemies. Keeping a chain of 12x multipliers going rewards you with a satisfying robotic voice yelling "TWELVETWELVETWELVE", and you can soar to even further heights by using the bomb's forcefield to cancel big shot barrages up to 1000 points per shot. The risk there is once again proximity - do you dare to hover right next to a boss' cannon, catching all its bullets in a bomb-cancel, and simultaneously sideswiping its various elements?
It results in a mostly focused, streamlined game, although its final stage visuals feel at odds with the general theming. XIIZeal wears its secrets prominently on its sleeve, listed right there as achievements. It's more accessible for sure, but ΔZeal 's determination to leave players in the dark feels a little more interesting to me. Perhaps the true value of this re-release lies in its developer commentary, which reflects on the changing conditions for solo developers in the past 2 decades. Here's hoping Toshiaki Fujino has one more future game in him, or at least gets to re-release TriZeal Remix.
18. Super R-Type (Switch - SNES NSO) ★★★☆☆
In appropriate Bydo fashion this feels like a mutated version of R-Type II. About half its levels are still partially recognisable, particularly the underwater stage, battleship fight, and the difficult factory chase. The other half is new material, albeit with some palette swapped enemies.
This feels like a rather inessential release, with less iconic music (most bosses use the same tune), and less of the H.R. Giger horror imagery which informs the series' identity. One notable aspect however is how it's considerably easier than most of the series, thanks to copious slowdown working in your favour. Just don't start it on Hard mode, since the game challenges you to complete 2 loops, and the 2nd one ups the difficulty level by 1.
19. Zero Wing (1991, Switch - Genesis NSO) ★★☆☆☆
Quite forgettable horizontal space shooter, mostly known for the opening cut-scene which was added to this Genesis version and features the notorious "all your base are belong to us" translation. Besides this crumb of personality the game lacks a real identity. Bosses aren't memorable, and neither are the stages. Towards the end it starts cribbing from Alien and R-Type, which doesn't mesh with the earlier stages, leading to an incoherent campaign.
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