I used to do lists of each of the games I had left unfinished over the year with little blurbs to accompany each, although after a stressful holiday season last year I put the practice on hold. This year, however, I have 36 bullet reviews to give you to bring in the new year! I will be releasing a Part 2 later this week. Thanks for reading birthbydrip this year!
Dino Crisis
The raptors seem targeted to fix the core issues with the Resident Evil zombies: they don’t die easily, they track between rooms, and in most cases you’ll only tranquilize them momentarily to accomplish quick tasks. Fighting them is more so a dynamic routing problem than a shotgun head-gibs one. Remembering laser wall activation status and abusing the ventilation shafts would make the central area as wonderful as the mansion or the police station if it has the same character as those places. Instead the game throws you into diversions as bad as any RE action setpiece. By then the only selling point is “Shu Takumi designed the puzzles;” luckily that’s just fine with me (though not enough to finish apparently).
Slay the Spire
Potentially a forever game if I was willing to give myself up to it; I got Ironclad/Silent clears with a handful of ascensions for each, but that’s nowhere near the skill ceiling for this game, and I don’t feel comfortable giving it the full critical eye at the moment. In a simplistic way: just enough core variables (health, defense, attack, energy) to warp to incredibly scaled ends in transparently brutal fights. I was running a lot of defensive synergies for Ironclad, but I don’t really have good archetypes to build off of in my head outside of that, which was restricting me a fair deal. I do love how, especially by Act 3, the fights begin really emphasizing certain elements of your character output (damage per turn, consistency, building up or spreading out resources) to assess how well-rounded your build is.
Endless Ocean
My joke has been that Tetris - The Absolute: The Grand Master 2 is Arika’s “life isn’t worth living” game, and this is their “life is worth living” counterpart. An unadorned anti-conflict game. I love how the tourists who hire you to guide them underwater frequently break the silence to tell you how happy they are spending time with you. It’s the kind of presentation the “fuck subtlety” crowd should be aiming for; it’s not just turning towards the camera and telling you what it thinks, but communicating to you directly how beautiful the world is and how wonderful it is that you’re a part of it.
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
I might go back and play Moonlight Museum before returning to this one (I did maybe three worlds), but it’s all-in on the puzzle box aspects of the original game. Very few enemies will even bother bugging you; they’re almost all tools for puzzle solution. Levels are blandly dressed but just as intricate as anything from the two mainline games, with new ideas to boot. Let’s give the Now Production jobbers some love, for once.
Digidrive
One of the most original endless/randomized action-puzzle games I’ve ever played. I want to drive my score up some more before I write, but it’s abstract traffic management with cascading score objects, where one bit of misdirection can throw away a giant payday on accident. Unusually for an action-puzzle title, randomized pieces (of three different colors) arrive from four separate points and proceed towards the other end, grouping up when paired with like pieces and leaving towards the junction when displaced by a differently colored piece. Hitting five like pieces in a single lane turns it into a sink point to build score in a bundle when like pieces are deposited inside. Deposit a non-like piece and, if other sink points exist, the score bundle will deposit equivalent score into each other sink point, potentially doubling your gross score. Without another sink point, the score empties into a curling rock (?) to knock it away from an engine shaft (?). It has to be seen to be understood, in some way, a problem I eternally face when talking about these abstract action-puzzle games. Check it out before I do a full write-up on it!
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
I, at best, enjoy the Igavanias as enjoyable slop; Circle of the Moon barely scrapes that low bar. Ugly NESvania cosplay scarcely concealing the grubby stats and random ability drops. I had a particularly bad set of the latter and had basically no creative builds to run with by the time I reached the double skeleton dragon boss at the halfway point, so I decided not to slog through any longer.
Monster Hunter Wilds
I knew what I was getting into, and by god I did my best to enjoy it. Getting to play one of these as a linear, heavily constrained AAA narrative game (ignoring the fact that I was skipping every cutscene by the halfway point) was honestly refreshing; didn’t grind a bit, no replaying monsters, and only auto-running between the waypoints. On a sheer novelty level, it’s such a big step up from the 5th gen titles, with highly diverse and unusual monster designs pairing with AI routines that return to a less dynamic mid-gen (3rd/4th) template. Surprisingly reactive to position, and engaging if you’re practicing a vow of ignorance to all of the new mechanics as I did (I played switch axe for once, and they’ve honestly removed so much of the God Eater stench from its original implementation, ignoring the parries and focus mode and etc.). Of course, this is also predicted on me not touching high rank even for a second. Now that the game is relatively finished, it’s about time for me to go back and feel out the rest of the content; hard for me to commit, however, when I have so much left to play in the old titles.
Donald Duck: Goin’ Quackers
Obvious Crash clone (I played the Dreamcast version, although I think the sixth gen version is also Crash-esque), but there really was nothing interesting to extract from the experience in the time I played. Virtually nothing you can do outside of basic verbs other than getting the power-up that makes you mad and lets you go a little faster. Trying out the time trials here was such a bore, so I quit.
Initial D: The Arcade
At some level this has Sega racing oldheads working on it, although by this point working on a Sega racing series for 20 years might just mean you’ve been working on Initial D for that long. Although unnumbered, I don’t get the sense that this is significantly different from Initial D 8 or Initial D Zero, with a similar subdued racing system punctuated by fluid, dynamic drifting on nondescript mountain sides. This is the game that has made me say “arcade with sim characteristics” for over a year now. Compared to the older Sega racers, where the drifts were either exaggerated separate states (the AM2 family) or consequences of extremely slippery traction (the AM3 family), Initial D has the complexity of the former with the naturalism of the latter. Starting out, your drifts aren’t bombastic; they’re more like slow skids that line you up in the proper direction, closer to what they are in reality. Once you get comfortable with the series’ double-pump brake feeling (the first gives you the initial turn, and the second really loses the back wheels to get that nice horizontal translation), it becomes more of a dynamo. This entry has a rather nice balance between both traditional racing tracks and the full-on touge winding roads, where you’re rarely shifting above 3rd and are drifting in 1st and 2nd. It’s really a shame they haven’t ported this to home consoles, since it has a full story mode already, and the gear upgrade model is absolutely pernicious money grubbing.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2
Having the entire game take place in a constant highway loop is genius as a low-budget racing experience, and the sleek presentation and dark skies punctuated by reflective surfaces fits in perfectly on the Dreamcast. However, the CarPG aspect does me in a bit; there’s not really random encounters so to speak, but the constant one-on-one races are interchangeable and rarely offer a challenge to someone keeping up with upgrades, at least in the first half of the game. The repetition has its own charm, but perhaps not enough to keep me in for an older entry when I can jump into one of the linear upgrades that came later. However, I actually learned quite a bit about comparing horsepower and torque and tuning the gear ratios in my cars to compensate, and it helped me not only improve my shifting in other racing games but also improve when driving stick in real life, which I learned how to do this year. Thank you, Genki!
Alien vs. Predator
I haven’t done the full sampling of Capcom beat-em-ups, but this is solidly my favorite of their late-era titles. Playing through as Warrior and Hunter has the same sloppy feel as other titles of their era, as they can fly across the screen in an instant with hitboxes out at will, and Kurosawa offers a more technical, juggle-based play style, but Schaefer really clicked with me. His lumbering frame and limited mobility give the xenomorph hordes much more bite; even though they’re rather tame for the genre, often ignoring you and taking a long time to transition between actions, Schaefer still has to work overtime to out-range them. On one hand, he’s got the gun, which breaks some of the core spacing conceit, but on the other hand, some of his options that make the other characters complete back-breakers are more subdued. His DP has obnoxiously long hang-time, giving him the i-frames he needs at the start while leaving him vulnerable on the back-end, and his dash attacks have rather limited range. Also, I love his little fade-away short hop kick move. Need to invest more time into this; I was only getting through part of the fourth stage on one credit.
Panzer Bandit
This is the actual juggle-slop nonsense foretold by Alien vs. Predator and those other beat-em-ups in the same vein. It’s in the Mad Stalker fighting game-lite paradigm, but it has much more diversity between the characters. Unfortunately, this doesn’t transfer to the enemies, 90% of whom are easily loopable mooks when you can get them in the corner (and yes, this game does have walls on its arenas). I played as Ein for most of our run (I played this co-op with my friend Heather!), and the delayed effects of his different bomb options tied together with a few multi-hit combos meant everything felt like a touch-of-death, and there weren’t enough enemies to step in the way of that.
Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon
Blatant Final Fight worship from ex-Toaplan devs; Boghog called this something to the effect of a “skeleton beat-em-up” and I 100% agree. There’s next-to-no level gimmicks in lieu of well-defined enemy roles with a wide variety of movement options and projectiles, absolutely none of which are afforded to you. Instead, you have an easy infinite jab combo and an extremely meaty grab, and you’re expected to apply those as efficiently as possible even when the playfield gets compressed down to half-size or when a boss is pestering you. I’ve put more time into this than I would’ve otherwise because I have a cabinet for it near me, but I still haven’t taken the full beat-em-up plunge and likely won’t make more serious attempts on this until that point.
Wizardry Gaiden I: Suffering of the Queen
I talked about what I liked about the map system here a little while ago in a Q+A post, but the rest of this was a nice little overview of what I should be expecting in the retro blobbers as someone who only has experience with Etrian Odyssey. It’s minimal and swingy, especially once the insta-death moves start showing up, but there’s definitely an appeal to mapping the strange spaces that are put in front of you. The floors have a lot of character to each one but also have roughly one bit a piece, whether it’s the Monty Hall problem hallways of 2F or the magically dark coves of 5F, which makes the game lose its flavor the more you progress. The resource rationing is more a loop-driver and less a decision-making consideration: go upstairs when you start running low, go downstairs once you refill. Definitely will be back for the Bradley Wizardry games at some point, but I’ll work through the more modern stuff first.
Damascus Gear: Operation Tokyo
The Vita gets an obscure mecha combat duology and it ends up being completely worthless, unfortunately. I might return to this if I get a wild hair but the combat is top-down shooting with cooldown abilities, and you mostly kill everything with a giant laser beam that obliterates every popcorn enemy in a thick line on screen at once. I got to a point where they throw a claustrophobic boss battle against three beefy robots with their own giant lasers, which I assume is meant to be solved by buying tons of healing items to spam during the fight. Yikes.
Deep Rock Galactic
I can see how this one eventually dulls over time, but it’s rare to play a PvE game with such a rich variety of objectives and modalities. By the latter I really mean where each mission exists on the spectrum between “we’re all free-exploring doing our own thing towards a common objective” and “we’re all in a tight space killing swarms of bugs.” That kind of dynamic makes it really easy to invest a lot of time into in a co-op session, especially for myself, as someone who gets tired quickly of too much synchronized play. Of course, the fundamental building blocks don’t really capture the mind, even on the bigger swings like the rideable rails for gas refinement, but this was easily the most fun I had playing games with friends this year.
Lattice 200ec7
A rail shooter on a literal rail, one you can rotate around and proceed backwards on. It’s gorgeous and abstract, even if the actual shooting is more of a means towards the end of showing you these inconceivable galactic structures. I think about this game a lot, having only play a couple levels on a few separate occasions, and I find myself unable to summon anything about the gameplay or remember much of it at all.
Project Justice
We did a tournament for this a few months back and I placed 3rd, powered by a long bread-and-butter with Kyosuke. This game has a weirdly stubby neutral that I’m not sure is intentional as opposed to a side-effect of shifting to the 3D models. I haven’t seen much out of this game that isn’t rushdown pressure towards a touch that leads to a ~10-hit combo. It’s on a very Marvel vs. Capcom-esque ’90s magic series, by which I mean that the pathways are more restricted than just pressing every button in order with character-specific wrinkles that must be memorized. Also very strange to me that the ground finisher/launcher is often a DP, though that’s a somewhat common rule that makes jumping between characters a bit easier once you know it. I never felt like I got a good handle on the neutral regardless, instead mostly just winning off of higher value conversions than my opponents (and, of course, losing to people with even better conversions and more confident neutral games).
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