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. The most vexing for a new player is that spawning the enemy and then backing up to secure one’s footing often fails, as killing the enemy and then stepping back into its trigger instantly revives it. When the player initiates the spawn, they must be prepared to push forward as they kill it. Pushing forward quickly enough can reward the player for this by despawning the enemy against the back wall, assuming they get beyond the enemy without killing it in the first place. However, enemy triggers rarely stack, with sequential triggers staggering their entrances. This inversely favors slow progression, dealing with each enemy one-by-one while standing ground to avoid respawns. At its best, the game creates scenarios that encourage the former, while at its worst, it lapses into slow-chug memorizer runs in the latter paradigm.

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. The frequent switches in focus and close-quarters combat help highlight more aggressive strategies instead of letting players hang back or charge their weapons.

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. However, in all of these three games, there were distinct chokepoints between sections, with a major puzzle blocking progress to the next section. Code Veronica’s first disc sets up a full map of five of these smaller areas together and, as much as it can, removes chokepoints entirely. After escaping the initial prison area (half of which can only be completed later), Claire gets instant access to both the palace and the military training facility. An item obtained immediately in the palace gives access to the airport, and the residence entrance follows not far behind that. Keys for puzzles span the entire map, making revisiting older areas to discover new rooms or complete half-finished puzzles more common than the original trilogy. Code Veronica heavily relies on its adventure game trappings, emphasizing constant exploration and parallel puzzle chains over resource preservation elements or combat.

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. By hovering the cursor in empty space, gravity ceases, and the player can suspend tiles in air to drop them into the most optimal spot. Between each of these dynamics, there’s quite the foundation here for quick thinking. Matching a full hexagon without accidentally scattering it requires pairing tiles together, as each cursor position is attached to adjacent ones by a two-tile third of the hexagon. Juggling a piece across the stack can’t be done through linear button presses either, as cursor positions are staggered against both the horizontal and vertical axes. There’s quite a lot to consider in the skill floor thanks to an original, dense base idea.

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. World Invitational goes out of its way to raise the skill floor rather than kowtow to newcomers; it’s a lean campaign attached to a ruthless online multiplayer scene rather than a starter entry as the previous PSP titles were. Wind is only communicated through a direction and a visual of your character dropping grass cuttings until you reach the green, where the actual speed finally appears only once it’s irrelevant to the simplified physics simulation. Progression demands first place finishes rather than aggregating placement scores across multiple tournaments as in the PS2 titles. The pocket-dimension courses feature hot air balloons blocking your path, quicksand sinkholes, and holes nestled into the sides of cliffs that no mower could ever reach. As the effective finale of the series before the infrequent reboots afterwards, it goes all-in on the core of the experience without wasting time on pleasantries.

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. If, while these dice are sinking, the player moves another die with the same number next to the sinking set, a chain counter increments and re-adds the points from the set, now multiplied by the counter. New dice rise from the floor in accordance with the number of dice cleared; if the player falls to the floor due to standing on a sinking die, they can use a freshly spawning die to reach the top layer once again.

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.¹ But Lumines is richest in score play, and the burst mechanic throws a major wrench in the game’s brutal measure-to-measure combo system. The burst “minigame” identifies a current square formation and lets you build it up over multiple timeline sweeps, creating a monolith that tosses blocks of the opposing color off-screen. Optimally setting up “seed” squares before initiating the burst requires foresight and tempo, especially when lining it up with a x12 or x16 combo from consecutive multi-square timeline sweeps, although the burst can also salvage a combo that’s about to expire in pinch. Doing the latter is risky, however, as using burst when the meter is between 50% and 99% doesn’t scale the effect (gives you three measures to build compared to a 100% burst’s six) and thus wastes any additional meter you built up over the halfway mark. Tying all of this together, activating burst also freezes the level progression, making any of the squares you clear during the burst period freebies and incentivizing the player to pop burst as often as possible. This makes it your biggest cash cow for score purposes, with the half-meter version gaining more relevance if the player has the skill to juice the monolith with very little time. Doing this circles back to seeding the burst correctly and so on, making the mechanic a potential friend and your biggest stressor at the same time.

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. The game’s matching focus has players pressing together sides of blocks with identical colors,¹ but the orientation of the block consistently rotates 90 degrees when pushed to an adjacent column, and flipping the block in-place isn’t possible. However, rolling the block onto a higher row actually rotates the block 180 degrees, thus making elevation changes the primary method of reorienting blocks. Since matching blocks spawns additional blocks in the matched column, it’s easy to accidentally build giant peaks without the gradual changes that enable reorientation; managing stack height to maintain reorientation opportunities naturally pushes the player away from constant matching in favor of doing light playfield management throughout a session as well.²

Techno BB is just waiting for its time to shine as a profile picture machine; the adorable half-panda half-bumblebee main character looks like a archetypal blind box figurine, with its little ears poking out over its aviator goggles. An obscure Konami title from the twilight years of the PlayStation,¹ it’s an elevated match-four puzzle title with an extremely light malware aesthetic, letting your bear buzz about the grid to eliminate tiles before they turn into skull-marked viruses. Where the backgrounds would maybe reflect this in another game, here they instead favor eclectic psychedelic and toybox patterns, all matched up to a menagerie of electronic tunes. Mix this with a lengthy, educational puzzle mode and a rare PocketStation minigame, and it’s a cute budget package for someone looking to round out an emulator library with a pick-up-and-play title.

Pass interference is usually the bane of a cornerback, but in NFL Blitz’s take on American football, where penalties don’t exist, lets defenders manhandle or completely tackle open receivers to their heart’s content. Despite the limited defensive playbook,¹ legal pass interference makes controlling a defender interesting: who and where do you cover? Obliterating a particular receiver out the gate eliminates one of three downfield options for your opponent in exchange for dedicating you to the tackle and locking you out of a character switch. Conversely, watching the quarterback’s eyes and determining where they’re planning on throwing to opens up tackles after the ball has been thrown, or even better, interceptions. Strategy here evolves based on the habits of the opposing QB,² including favorite plays and receiver formation, but fundamentally it’s a careful combination of suppressing the most dangerous routes on the field while chasing down passes; the speed and narrow field let you play defense like you’re covering one big zone. Or, if you want to shake things up, just rush the passer! Force them to throw quick and keep them in hell.