While the main Klonoa team finished up Lunatea’s Veil, Namco contracted out their frequent collaborators at Now Production to produce a sequel to Moonlight Museum for the brand-new Game Boy Advance. The result, Empire of Dreams, benefits from only minutely iterating on its predecessor, despite the addition of action-oriented auto-scrollers and bosses to break up the puzzle gameplay. The enemy roster, Moo blocks, and copious amounts of air vents all return, and the level structure retains the now-contextless moon fragments and doors that powered the winding inner loops of Moonlight Museum.¹ Thankfully, Empire of Dreams compensates for this by speeding up the entire learning curve, cognizant that most will have not played its obscure prior entry but not beholden to that game’s agonizingly slow opening. Boomies, the cornerstone of these games’ timer- and storage-driven puzzles, appear by the third world, and the early stages lean more into interlocking room designs instead of barren left-to-right affairs. If that’s still not quick enough, each world’s boss unlocks when after a certain number of stages have been beaten, so occasional stages can be skipped for those not interested in full completion.

It’s hard to imagine that Puzzle Bobble arose from nowhere in particular, but none of the post-Tetris random-piece puzzle games that came prior resemble it: it’s match-three, but the board is designed by-hand and drops from the ceiling, crumbling only as the player shoots bubbles into it. One might surmise that, in an alternate universe, a continuous lineage from Breakout and Arkanoid to Puzzle Bobble exists, with some intermediary game that blends the real-time paddle of the former with the match-three of the latter, yet none exists. The key genetic trait retained here are the ricochets, a dollop of the basic kinetics from the block-breakers injected into the more modern puzzle concepts. Puzzle Bobble combines this with a hexagonal grid to create craggy playfields where one can sneak bubbles into crevices.

Shenmue understands the inherent arrogance of its protagonist Ryo Suzuki’s quest — in brief moments, tucked away behind a web of other cascading events, it shows the perspective of those left behind by his decisions, who seek to pull him back from the brink of revenge. These perspectives only appear in glimpses due to the weight that Suzuki exerts as the playable character, however. Shenmue’s exploration of minutiae trawls these people’s schedules yet closes them off from Suzuki; the attention to detail only glances beyond human bodies moving with purpose on a map, to canned conversations and little of the world interaction that Suzuki feasts upon. Thus, the ultimate perspective is warped around Suzuki’s quest playing out in your hands, justifying his arrogance. Blue Giant sows the same field — a man on the cusp of adulthood throwing himself towards passion in a foreign city — but it has a far keener eye for the engine that powers such arrogance, that both fuels it and harvests it, those who gain confidence from it and those who spurn it. It grips the arrogance much tighter and assumes it is elemental, feeling it wriggle and documenting every facet of it.

It’s difficult to judge solely from the cover what kind of game this is, but the first real mission spells it out: drive an RC car up a series of oddly modeled ramps to get onto a countertop, and push an egg into a pot of boiling water using the collision physics. From there the game skews towards more traditional objectives — combat and racing — but the mission design still includes unique geometry as a key consideration. Many missions provide rickety, railless scaffolding for the player’s vehicles to climb even without extraneous obstacles to push them off or impede their progress. Given that every mission is played against a par time, simply lighting a fire under the player is enough to force tight execution on these perilous ascents.

Recently I discussed some of the arcade clubs I have participated in over the last couple of years. Part of the reason I’ve really enjoyed these is that I’ve gotten insight into some games where I haven’t pushed into a 1CC or 1-ALL, but I’ve still put effort into scoring and early-game routing. Today I’ve got three different ’80s arcade staples that fall into this boat: hugely important in their own ways, but not ones I’ve decided to really hone in on for a clear and a full review.

Splitting the majority of the puzzle gameplay off to Moonlight Museum puts Lunatea’s Veil in a position to carry forward the original game’s action elements, but Lunatea’s Veil seems uninterested in reprising the quirks from the original. Where Door to Phantomile emphasized levels that curved in on themselves, obstacles that crossed between playable planes, and enemy variety, Lunatea’s Veil hews much closer to prototypical 2D platformer elements — featureless running and jumping within the plane. Basic checks on one’s ability to wield Klonoa’s enemy-based double-jump are absent when not contextualized by one of the few new gimmicks, such as with giant worms that appear out of walls to eat Klonoa unless fed prior with an enemy, which appear long past their expiration date late into the game. When these won’t suffice, a trite 3D snowboarding section fills the void. Oddly enough, this ends up highlighting the puzzles that dot each level; the proper platforming is only grist between them.

Players familiar with the effortless gear drifting of OutRun 2 may balk at the idea that it inherits much from the team’s prior Daytona and Scud Race titles, but common DNA threads through each one. Despite first appearances, OutRun 2 relies on the same exaggerated vehicle model: a strict power band, stiff handling at high speeds that frequently understeers, and drifts that linearly drain speed until exited. In the latter case, Daytona used engine braking to initiate drifts via holding a lower gear for a period of time before stabilizing the speed (which correlated with turn angle) by shifting back up. In OutRun 2, virtually every turn is solved with a plink across the shifter buttons, with little time spent in the lower gear. Instead, fine angle control is mediated through countersteer mechanics, letting the vehicle nudge laterally and alter the vehicle rotation angle on the fly. The choice makes OutRun 2 vastly more approachable at a glance, but a major change to the SP version brings back another Daytona mechanic for incredible flavor: slipstreaming.

I’ve attended MAGFest six times now, and one of my favorite events each year are the tournaments. Regular head-to-head genres tends to monopolize the proceedings — fighting games, action puzzle games, TCGs, etc. — but they also put an emphasis on featuring less common tournament fare, including score-based games! In some cases this may be implemented through simultaneous play (a Typing of the Dead tournament I was in once was structured this way), but for others, the format allows everyone to watch each competitor play through a game superplay-style and mark their scores on a local leaderboard. I loved this concept so much that I started participating in online variants of the same concept with friends over the last two years, and it’s been a rousing success.¹ My friends and I have played many more games off the beaten path, gained competency in the “prestige” titles, and explored some score systems that people rarely talk about. Below I’m going to offer a few reasons why an arcade club can be a benefit to your friend group and give some tips on setting it up and maintaining it.

A side jaunt on the WonderSwan gave the Klonoa developers a chance to dig into the puzzle aspects of the original release, and no enemy suited their needs more than the Boomie. These bomb mice wrap up each of the primary Klonoa mechanics into a neat package: they can be carried, they squish under ceilings, they enable Klonoa’s throw-based double-jump, and they trigger interactables, all while exploding on a timer. By not disappearing upon being thrown, they additionally add a storage element that other enemies lack. Moonlight Museum squeezes puzzles out of each of these facets in a way the original Klonoa never bothered. Doors that open for limited periods once a switch is flipped perfectly intersect their timers with the Boomies, especially when one or multiple remote switch triggers is involved. A special category of block exists only to increase the possibility space of this intersection by spreading a Boomie’s blast in a specific direction, sending it through ceilings where switches sit out of reach. Whether they involve as many moving parts as these or rely solely on Klonoa hoofing it to a gap with a hot potato in his hands, the puzzles here lean on the Boomies as their workhorse.

The first nuance of Tetris that a new player will comprehend is the role of each piece. The unique sides of each tetromino synergizes with particular holes in the stack and affects the future stack’s shape: some flatten, others create peaks, some bridge gaps, others divide. Few Tetris variants stretch what this entails quite as far as Tetris – The Absolute: The Grandmaster 2 (lovingly referred to just as The Absolute Plus, or TAP). A Swiss Army knife piece like the T, at the drop speeds TAP eventually induces, suddenly becomes a death trap if there’s a gap in the stack right below the drop point; likewise, I-pieces and their inflexible rotation quickly ends runs without stacking with it in mind. Tradeoffs form in this environment. Covering holes, while virtually never an issue in the later Tetris Guideline games thanks to held pieces and gentler speeds, has strategic merit here when compared to overextending vertical towers or removing flat landing spots from the stack. A willingness to stomach risk and non-optimal outcomes gives TAP a distinct character.