It’s tempting to split the game down the middle here somewhere to try to rectify its conflicts: overworld versus dungeons, story versus gameplay, even Koizumi’s Clock Town versus Aonuma’s outer villages.¹ Pithy comments like “an official edgy ROM hack” don’t do justice to the staggering depth of the developer’s notebooks, tossing out off-kilter concepts on the fly and slamming them into the game with just months until the game went gold. At the same time, this pernicious crunch led to peaks and valleys in quality, a devastating proposition when building on the bones of Ocarina of Time, which leaned heavily on holistic grandeur and originality to avoid putting the shallow gameplay front and center. The opening hours do this no justice either: the intro and disconcerting warp into the clock tower to meet the Happy Mask Salesman sell the game’s dedication to incoherent spaces and chaotic personalities early, and your jaunt around the town on the first cycle gives a glimpse into the engine behind the emotional core, but it’s seized away just as quickly when it shoos you out to tackle Woodfall, the most forgettable stretch of the entire game. The intricacies of the lives of those in Clock Town and the malignant effects that the Skull Kid has wrought on each will have to wait.

Múseca’s initial launch, with its shop-based progression system that required grinding the game’s story mode, inevitably doomed the game to obscurity. Beyond hastily released updates that unlocked all of the charts and removed the influence from the unlockable “grafica” characters on score, support for the game tapered off only a couple of years after release, leaving fans to add standard features like leaderboard widgets, hard mode, and end-of-play continue settings. It’s a shame that the botched concept mulched one of Bemani’s best concepts: think Beatmania if every button was a turntable.¹ Each button is spaced such that your pinky-to-thumb handspan will only reach two at any given time, with three on top and two on the bottom. This should theoretically make only the top middle button a shared point between the two hands, but the higher difficulty charts quickly strain that.

It’s a Crash-like with a twist: you can emanate a magnetic field for either polarity, north or south. Magnetized items (with color-coded polarity for your convenience) will respond appropriately, where if you use the opposite polarity, you’ll be pulled towards the object, and if you use the same polarity, you’ll be pushed away. In practice the implementation is rather ticky-tacky, with the actual interactable set being primarily jump pads and swings/ziplines. Not necessarily a compelling hook on its own, and indeed, the game on first pass lacks the elements that might put a game over the top. Dig in past the sparse toolkit and punitive level design, however, and you’ll find a game that never seems to repeat an idea twice while layering opportunities for advanced momentum transfer throughout.

Although my initial impression felt like the callback-heavy aesthetic and the linear level design were undercooked, Super Mario 3D Land now reads to me as compact and focused. 3D Mario traditionally struggles with providing proper applications for the nuances of its movement mechanics from second-to-second, which 3D Land solves simply by keeping its platforms tight and giving them dynamic properties. Early levels have more continuous topographies with explorable elements similar to the Galaxy games, but by the halfway point the paradigm shifts to providing momentary safe zones in between obstacle gauntlets. Each gauntlet combines a dynamic platform type with an enemy type by plopping a few clusters down in a wide arrangement to give players flexible routes without allowing them to trivialize the whole thing (as soon as the difficulty curve deems that acceptable, anyway). That’s meaty enough to form a whole game around, and 3D Land pushes that to its absolute limit; even with the project’s smaller scope, they shoved nearly 100 full levels into it!

You can imagine the theoretical version of this game per the emergent, systemic gameplay I discussed in my recent interactive fiction article. Without the need to create unique assets for everything, it would be easier to apply many more of the draft (in this game, a spell using notes plucked on strings wound to a distaff) effects to each object, and universal actions could have been integrated in to allow more freeform puzzle solutions. Indeed, the manual here says “There is more than one way to solve many of the puzzles.” but then immediately hedges: “In fact some of the activities… [are] simply experiences for you to enjoy.” And yes, many, many of the things you can do in this game are one-off hardcoded interactions to reward you for sketching out a puzzle solution that might have made sense in a game that had the resources to make it feasible. The only puzzle with multiple solutions (blunting or twisting the sword in the forge) is a binary-choice fail-safe in case you missed the sharpening draft from earlier, less of an expression of the malleability of the object and more of a shrug to let the player carry on.

I hopped on the roguelike bandwagon recently because of some friends, specifically variations on the classic tile-based format (although I also put a fair amount of time into Slay the Spire alongside these). Pretty quickly I got sucked in by the short run length and critical thinking required to succeed, and having extremely quick combat that prioritizes positioning and item usage helped mitigate the tedium that other turn-based combat systems fall into. I still have a lot of time left to invest in these games to hit a proper clear though, so I didn’t want to dedicate full reviews to any of them.

Despite releasing a couple years prior, Zombie Revenge pioneered Devil May Cry’s signature bullet juggling, all the way down to the enemy splaying out in the air as they bounce. In Zombie Revenge’s case, the rigid combo system with minimal interruptible frames makes the gun mandatory for linking strings, especially since it’s the most reliable OTG in your arsenal, and almost every full string forces a knockdown. It’s not merely a tool for styling on enemies either; it takes good timing to shoot a downed enemy in the window where they’ll pop back up for a juggle, as the game removes the property after a period of time or a failed attempt, and spacing the followup can be vexing depending on where they landed. Also unlike Devil May Cry, there’s an actual ammo system at play here with no manual reloading, so timing combos to fall earlier in your clip is essential. Tack on a substantial movelist with options for interrupt points, differently sized hitboxes, juggle/knockdown setups, and redirectable followups, and you’ve got a rather expressive combat engine for a game of its era.

Originally the start of the eclectic Hebereke series,¹ Ufouria had an unassuming localization for the European market that left it with few western fans until emulator-fueled retrospectives came along. After I dug past the first hour, I was shocked to find a sophisticated metroidvania structured hiding behind the ho-hum platformer up front. Ufouria gates its mechanics around different characters that must be “recruited” by knocking some sense to them in a quick boss battle (you and your friends have crash landed in a strange world, and said friends all have amnesia). Starting character Bop-Louie has little other than a jump, a divekick of sorts, and a charge attack, and your first two recovered friends don’t add much (other than Shades’ floaty jump), but once Bop-Louie gets a wall-suction maneuver, the game completely opens up. Climbing random walls or descending into pits not only reveals the usual one-off items and upgrades but often full new areas as well, including the final area of the game, which could theoretically be stumbled into on accident long beforehand. By the time you get Gil, the free-swimming final character, you should already have an item that gives you the location of almost every important item on the map, and it’s your job to roam around cleaning up unfinished business until you have three specific items that will take you into the final boss’s chambers. The small world already doesn’t take much effort to move around in, but shortcuts will become apparent as you play with each character’s movement abilities, and adding Gil to the party lets you access underground aqueducts that let you jump all over the map.

A group of veterans with credits on both Namco’s Ridge Racer and Sega AM3’s Sega Rally, the short-lived studio Sega Rosso plopped this into arcades at the turn of the millennium just after their back-to-back titles NASCAR Racing and Star Wars Racer Arcade. This side project, Cosmic Smash, is coolly minimalist in its series of abstract corridors and translucent blocks, all of which melt to black at the end of each level within the veneer of an interstellar subway tunnel. The equally minimal HUD contains only a timer in skewed perspective beside the player character. Each hallway area features a series of blocks at the opposite end from the player that they must hit with a ball and racket.¹ Upon destroying all colored blocks in an area, the player gains some bonus time and heads off to the next section, perhaps laid out in wireframe green, or seemingly floating in a white void.

I’m reluctant to do the full-throated condemnation of the expanded toolkit here because, outside of a comparison against the NES Castlevanias, it’s still restrained. Simon doesn’t move particularly fast, his jump height is fixed, and he still can’t jump off of stairs. The Ghost ’n Goblins games had presented more significant challenge with looser handling and free, rapid-fire projectiles, but they also leaned into dynamic enemies and random placements. Super Castlevania IV doesn’t just tack the other way on this, it falls short of even the game it’s ostensibly reimagining. Skeletons usually stay glued to the ground and move slower, and Medusa heads seem to not track the player at spawn time, to the extent that they often appear in places where they would never get close to grazing Simon. Enemies that do get spammed in every level, such as axe knights, skele-dragons, and skull cannons, all lack tools to chase down the player or prevent them from hitting from below, while the agile hunchbacks and dogs from the original game appear rarely or not at all. Arguably this game would have been improved if it was a 1:1 recreation of Castlevania with the new additions, using the original game’s enemy balance and AI rather than this neutered update.