Shining Force

August 12, 2025 - 4 mins read

There’s two possible games here: one where you spam main character Max’s Egress spell to restart fights while retaining all the EXP you’ve gained, and one where you tough it out and push through even as the enemies far outpace you. The difference is difficult to reconcile because going the latter route directly interferes with one of the game’s strengths: its robust cast mixing together fantasy, sci-fi, and horror influences.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

August 7, 2025 - 23 mins read

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.

Múseca

July 29, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Super Magnetic Neo

July 24, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

Super Mario 3D Land

July 20, 2025 - 7 mins read

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.

Loom

July 15, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

Full Stack of Flapjacks: Roguelikes

July 5, 2025 - 6 mins read

Series: Flapjacks

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.

Zombie Revenge

June 30, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

Ufouria: The Saga

June 26, 2025 - 4 mins read

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).

Cosmic Smash

June 22, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.