Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

March 11, 2026 - 6 mins read

Goemon is clinging onto that 1997 release date for dear life: it gets plenty of points just for implementing a serviceable 3D Zelda template before Ocarina of Time dropped. Even extending the timeline out to the end of the fifth generation, it’s rare to see games on these consoles attempt a relatively explorable world. Of course, what qualifies as a “vast” depiction of feudal Japan here (lovingly depicted by the map screen) ends up being extremely large, box-y rooms peppered with weak enemies and occasional flora.

Fire 'n Ice

March 1, 2026 - 5 mins read

Although it’s technically a prequel to Solomon’s Key, Fire ’n Ice dispenses with that title’s action-oriented approach in favor of a tile-based Sokoban platformer, much like Catrap. Fire ’n Ice is slightly less raw than the latter, however. While the goal is identical – to eliminate all enemies on-screen – said enemies are fire spirits and must be snuffed out by contacting an ice block. Luckily, protagonist Dana can summon or dispel ice from above any tile directly diagonal to him (either down-right or down-left).

Ninja Gaiden

February 12, 2026 - 4 mins read

Usually I would avoid talking about something as dry and static as enemy spawn positions, but for Ninja Gaiden, their naive implementation colors the entire play experience. Instead of enemies appearing once their spawn point is visible on screen, blatant spawn triggers dot the terrain, yanking the enemy into the play-space once you collide with the trigger. Unusually, the relative clarity of the spawns and the manner in which they’re deployed manifests taut positioning dynamics.

Shatterhand

February 7, 2026 - 4 mins read

While the core conceit is a guy who punches stuff with robot arms instead of shooting, there’s a surprising amount of Mega Man DNA present here, even beyond the selectable stage system. The enemy designs draw from a similar pool of stationary gunners (including in the iconic upwards three-way orientation), flying popcorn enemy spawners, and larger robots with slow or repetitive movement. While Shatterhand effortlessly shifts between horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, it still uses the breaks between them to shuffle its deck, plucking new obstacles out to throw at the player.

Resident Evil - Code: Veronica

January 30, 2026 - 8 mins read

Although it was mostly outsourced and didn’t get mainline status, Code Veronica vastly outstrips its predecessors in sheer scope. The first and second games set their primary areas up in an iconic orientation: two multi-floor building halves connected by pathways through a center hall. These were dense, with subsequent areas shrinking the scope considerably; Resident Evil 3: Nemesis leaned into the structure of these later areas and transformed their smaller scope into the streets of Raccoon City, with more wiggle room in the connective tissue between rooms.

bit Generations: Dialhex

January 25, 2026 - 4 mins read

Much like in Techno BB, there’s a certain amount of complexity extracted just from moving many tiles at once. In Dialhex, these tiles are triangles embedded in a giant hexagon, and the player spins these tiles six at a time within a hexagon-shaped cursor.1 With a gravity system and less-than-intuitive position resolution thanks to the slant of the pieces, any match (made by creating a hexagon with tiles of a single color) shakes up the stack, especially as the field fills up.

Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational

January 15, 2026 - 4 mins read

As you drive for the first time, you’ll notice that the 1-wood has its impact zone tightened up such that any non-perfect hit will sharply slice or hook.1 Beginner characters used to trade out power and control for easier impact zones, whereas here the expert characters linearly improve on the starting roster without a relative debuff to impact. A small change here instantly changes the candor of every non-par-three hole that comes after it, cutting off the wiggle room that gives this series its slow, novice-friendly beginnings.

Devil Dice

December 21, 2025 - 5 mins read

Devil Dice leverages the simplicity of die orientation to complicate what would otherwise be rote tile-matching mechanics. Six-sided dice lay across a grid, with the cutesy “Aqui” demon running around on top of them.1 Moving off the side of an unobstructed die will rotate it into the adjacent space, exposing a number on top. When a set of contiguous dice share the same exposed number, with as many or more dice as the number on the face, they all sink into the ground, yielding points equivalent to the number multiplied by the count of dice in the set.

Lumines Arise

December 17, 2025 - 6 mins read

The burst mechanic (surely drawing from Tetris Effect’s zone mechanic) violates the purity of the elegantly terse Lumines concept on a first impression, as it tacks on an extra meter and lets you blow up the stack on-demand. In a series that already has a friendly and frequent screen-clear block type, slapping this on top is a bit overkill, and survival play, which had a low ceiling from the series beginning, gets utterly trivialized in the process.

Tall: Infinity

December 10, 2025 - 5 mins read

Grid-based puzzle games usually project the playfield as a flat surface; Tall: Infinity bucks this by wrapping it around a vertical cylinder, tying the edges of the playfield together and incorporating gravity. While the player’s avatar can freely walk up walls and fall from great heights, when rolling a block they can only surmount edges that are one row higher, and they need a column’s worth of head start to gain the “momentum” to roll up.