Sega was the master of exaggerated, nuanced physics engines, and Monkey Ball fits that mold to a T. There’s three stylistic inaccuracies that sew Monkey Ball’s unique physics together:

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.

It has become convention in the games criticism space that there is an inherent difference between a game “review” and a game “critique.” Although the exact differences depend on who you ask, a review analyzes a game in the context of a consumer guide (i.e. whether the reader should purchase or play the game), whereas a critique analyzes a game on its form, its aesthetic qualities, the context it exists in, or through some other appropriate lens. Greg Costikyan’s “Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren’t It” sums it up thusly:

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.