Happy new year! My “resolution” this year: after playing a lot of ’90s stuff in the last year, I want to cover as much seventh generation stuff as I can. I own an absurd number of Wii and PS3 games, so the fact that I haven’t worked through most of my actual collection is a bummer. Time to change that! Regardless, here’s the other 18 games that I wanted to briefly cover from last year.

Ridge Racer V

I haven’t talked about Type-4 extensively because it’s overexposed, but beyond my anti-Namco bits it’s a really enjoyable arcade racer in its own right, and RRV covers most of the same ground. I expected a sleek racer to usher in the new millennium but instead got grainy digital nu-metal racing, a not-unpleasant surprise. When I read reviews astonished at the difficulty step-up over Type-4, I wonder how many people left the pressure sensitivity on in the control settings, dooming them to never reach top speed unless they jam their thumb deep into the cross button. I had this exact issue for a race or two until I recognized the issue and switched it off, and then it turned into, reductively speaking, its predecessor with a different coat of paint. I’m not sure the track design concept – a full “city” to race around in, broken up into segments based on the competition – quite highlights the unique aspects of each either; the canvas is a bit drab. But these things will melt away as I play into the endgame in the future.

Kirby’s Dream Course

Through a series of accidents, my brother’s Super Famicom ended up in my hands indefinitely,¹ with this game in his pile of cheap import pick-ups. It had a lovely 100% complete save file on it from someone who I’ll never know, whose custom nameplate I did not take a photo of, and whose memory got wiped by some freak accident. Ships sailing through the night. Golf games were oddly conservative in this era, with premises at least somewhat wed to the prestige and legacy of the real-life game, whereas Dream Course completely flips that on its head, leveraging the concepts of ball interaction (power, spin, etc.) to a multi-objective experience. Roaming each board to eliminate each enemy gives the developers a lot of room to test the player across a whole course rather than making large driving stretches indistinguishable or easily skipped. Need to dig into the back half here to see how they continue to play with this concept. Admittedly, a lot of my hours in this are multiplayer, since it’s surprisingly directly competitive and mean-spirited with both Kirbys placed on the board simultaneously.

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood

Earlier this year I ran through Super Castlevania IV for the first time in over a decade and came back extremely negative; Rondo was, by comparison, the perfect palette cleanser. Just compare the Axe Knights alone and the gulf comes into view: Rondo’s knights throw high axes that aren’t duckable and punish approaches with a high arc lob, all tied together with an increased throw rate. Rondo’s enemies are dynamic and push hard on Richter’s backflip and switchable air direction, which makes up quite a bit for the proto-Symphony bare, flat hallways that also rear their head here (along with gorgeous, top-of-the-line pixel art). Still, it’s never as pervasive as its sequel. Another game I lost my save to and thus haven’t finished yet.

Hagane: The Final Conflict

Spiritually akin to Rondo, but it adapts the console Shinobi ranged attack diversity and movement options to the Super Nintendo. All the pieces are there to be an extremely promising, sometimes-great game but never an exceptional one; Hagane is stuffed to the gills with precise movement techniques, situational combos, and an unhealthy glut of projectiles, and the enemy and setpiece designs are thoughtful and varied for the era in which they appear, but actually applying the former to the latter strains one more than just playing as a slow run-and-gun in the Shinobi vein. If you commit the i-frame timings of the little roll and dash moves to memory, one could turn Hagane into a Combo MAD smorgasbord, but it’s more likely that you’ll dink-and-dunk through the obstacles in a style more akin to the action staples from a few years prior.

OutRunners

Gritting my teeth here admitting that AM1 actually cooked here, with, of course, the caveat that AM2 did all of the legwork for them prior. Outside of novelty titles like Dark Edge, OutRunners is the super-scaler technology swan song, releasing after Virtua Racing had already ushered in full-speed 3D racing into arcades. Where the original OutRun favors scenic country drives, OutRunners saturates the screen with thick urban landscapes or historical landmarks just as often. Dropping into a Mediterranean vista and riding on a simulated slope down to the oceanfront, white-washed houses staggered on either side of the road, illustrates just how far the System-32 could go even as its primary visual trick became obsolete in the face of the Model 1 and 2 boards. Gameplay-wise it’s still the ultra-grippy OutRun formula, with plenty of random vehicles (and animals!) littering the highway in between; it’s mainly just keeping your horizontal position safely towards the inside of the road whenever possible. A real gem in between the original and the mid-’00s sequel.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

I played this for five hours in a single sitting and got completely sucked in, much to my shock. The silver sapling movable respawn system makes death a complete non-issue, complimenting the flexible engine and focus on lethal experimentation. I knew the overall scope was that of a dungeon crawler (assuredly drawing from the Dungeon Master formula) but the complexity and open-ended design of the space surprised me, throwing diverging paths that don’t meet for quite some time at you from the jump. The lack of gaminess to the floor system, with the primary collectable objectives being tied to player-discerned quest-lines rather than floor bosses or some more contrived system, pulled me in to the life of the space. On my second session, with the initial magic now gone, I more clearly saw the ugly wandering and the inviability of early-game ranged gameplay; many games have conjured legible depth perception and visual contact on-hit in 3D with 2D sprites overlaid on top, so the charge-based hits in this removing the instant feedback of a more traditional system was too much of a step back for me.

Sutte Hakkun

I didn’t want to spend my time in the ’90s loading up on my Nintendo oddities, but this one drew me all the way in. The basic premise – store paint in your body, color blocks with it, and see how each color affects block movement – would be weak without relatively granular platforming, allowing organic solution testing with moving platforms that you rigged up yourself. I also love the scoring system in this one, where you start out with 1000 points and each action deducts a certain number of points; it again splits the difference perfectly between a rigid puzzle system and a granular platforming one. I’m curious to see how this evolves as they continue to add other characters into the mix, each changing the way the player interacts with the blocks.

HyperZone

It’s definitely a sister game to F-Zero,² both as Mode 7 showpieces and in their focus on damage as environmental reaction, whether it be crashing into laser barriers or crossing over into no-fly zones. Unlike F-Zero, the game is a rail shooter, which has the sneaky effect of enhancing the tech demo aspect. With two separate segments of Mode 7 on the top and bottom,³ the live affine scaling is more clearly seen as the vertical movement of the player changes the perspective of each. It also, on the segment furthest from the player, has a much “further” draw distance (read: more extreme skew), giving it a better vanishing point effect than its predecessor. Past that there’s very little to this game: all of the enemies are some variation on small circles bouncing about (even more creative ones, like segmented plants growing from the ground that are, in effect, green circles piling on), and since they aren’t also scaled, the depth perception when contacting them is poor.

Tomb Raider

For all the acclaim the controls get here, the actual game builds around them in an rigid, puzzle-based way, where platforming has you finding the right combination of movement techniques and applying them without much pressure. I do admire how many darts they throw in terms of level design: large vertical labyrinths, little rooms surrounding an area with a giant dinosaur (which you can unfortunately just kill from afar), multi-floor block puzzles all feature relatively early on. A game I can already see myself respecting more than enjoying.

Magical Crystals

A surprisingly agile platformer/shmup hybrid! It doesn’t necessarily have standout mechanics as a baseline, and the level designs are more functional than evocative, but the function is complicating the obstacle space, and they succeed unconditionally. Without succumbing to full-on labyrinth-style design, walls are placed that ricochet bullets, projectiles hatch into enemies, platforms drop or move, and many enemies have non-linear movement that will make the tight corridors all the more uncomfortable. All great in theory, and I think if I invested time into really learning it it could jump up for me, but without hooks in the mechanics and level design it never quite yanked me in.

Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War

I hopped on this immediately after Shining Force with the hope that my previous Fire Emblem experience would push me through. What I didn’t understand going in is that the draw of the game is its excess, depicting the entirety of the continent tile-for-tile on the maps, all stitched together between each chapter. This gives the light feeling of a proper military campaign instead of a smaller tactical focus, but at the same time the wide-open areas, slow movement, and giant balls of enemies turn into more of a protracted bulldozer contest between your busted lord and hordes of random enemies on flat ground. Maybe something that improves later on, but it successfully killed my desire to stick with strategy RPGs for the time being.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

I lost my save for this right before Misery Mire,⁴ but this replay pushed me from “this game is overrated” to “this game is a little overrated but more interesting than I previously thought.” There’s not a world where I’ll venerate the combat here – the item pool lets you start disabling enemies almost immediately, arrows and other projectiles flow like water, puzzle enemies like the one that mimics your steps are more obnoxious than thoughtful, bosses are heavily weakness-driven – but the free-wheeling dungeon layouts speak to me differently now after having played Awakening, Ocarina, and Majora’s, each of which relied on an organized template. While Swamp Palace plays on its descendants’ premise (work your way to the hookshot and then work your way back to the boss), the rest of the Dark World dungeons veer off. Dark Palace and Ice Palace both have flexible routes, with the latter starting off with a linear gauntlet before letting you stumble into multiple key paths across many floors. Thieves’ Hideout has its large central interior open up to a literal dungeon underneath and a strange little light puzzle above, all structured around escorting a prisoner to a room that reveals her true self. Skull Woods, on the other hand, has almost no discernible main path, being accessible from multiple entrances and having possibly the most inexplicable item trigger in the game (the Fire Rod on the statue). Getting this utter variety and freedom from later conventions has its own charm, even if it doesn’t beat the later entries.

Astal

One of the last of its kind in the 2D action pantheon: a setpiece-driven linear experience based around the character’s unique abilities. As a technical showpiece it’s brilliant, zooming out to punctuate the size of the boulders you toss, and scrolling lovely parallax backgrounds in a soft fantasy world. What Astal can actually do is more confusing: he throws enemies over punching them (which gives a strange Saturn kinship between this and Silhouette Mirage), sends his bird to perform contextual tasks, blows air, stomps, and jumps… and how these get applied in the actual levels can sometimes be a bit of a mystery. The levels themselves often focus on regular platforming challenges to the detriment of the rest of your toolkit. Which is fine, and I will definitely return, but I don’t know if it’s actually an incredible game to run through on a single continue or just a beautiful save-state game.

Outtrigger

Sega Quake III for better or worse, from an AM2 rump team working hand-in-hand with CRI.⁵ I got to play this online for a bit with friends through DCNet and was surprised to find a more traditional deathmatch experience waiting inside, with larger multi-layer levels and secret weapons. What I was more used to from the mission mode and some brief attempts prior was all-rocket splatterfests in the tightest spaces imaginable; one is literally a donut-shaped room where you can run a full lap in ~10 seconds. It’s stiff and lacks the Quake engine fluidity, but a solid attempt nonetheless.

Reel Fishing

The first Myst-like about fishing? Reel Fishing’s early PlayStation release put it squarely in the CD-ROM multimedia era, mixing FMVs and pre-rendered sprites to create an idyllic fishing experience. On my CRT it absolutely enthralled me. Absent from most 3D fishing games here is the sense of space, which can ultimately heighten the artifice in the dead-looking environs. Reel Fishing, by comparison, is like reaching into a living portrait: you’re casting the rod into what could be a looping rendition of a real place, touched up and optimized for the tight resolution, with the silhouettes of fish whispering up from the water. While the actual fishing is based on only two maneuvers (yank the line to turn the fish around, and reel it in when the fish slows down), it differentiates each locale based on bait type. When catching carp in the fourth area pond, for example, you use a dough ball that disintegrates into soggy crumbs as the fish nibbles on it, and nailing the point at which to ensnare it requires a new, more patient timing than your previous flies or live worms. At a later point it falls back into an endless grind for larger sized fish, but it’s picturesque.

Mega Man X

I’ve bounced off this so many times now to the point that the classic series might just speak to me more. The SNES’s omnidirectional scrolling gives the designers too much room to stretch out level ideas, and thus they move away from the room-by-room obstacle framing of the NES titles. I’m also resistant to the insistence on combing through the stages (and occasionally needing an outside tool) for health upgrades. There’s still a fun Mega Man game here, and one I will hopefully sink my teeth into more as I continue, but the fact that I continue to drop it is worrying. I might come in to this subseries just for X4’s Zero campaign and then dip.

NFL 2K2

This and ESPN NFL 2K5 were both in my rotation this year after a childhood of exclusively Madden. It’s hard to understand just how hard the quarterback’s job is until you’re throwing picks and getting sacked in a video game where it’s all laid out to work in your favor; this is a big reason why NFL Blitz nails the fantasy with generous abstraction. The one weird element of the seasons represented in these entries is how simultaneously foreign and familiar the scheme is: a lot of the teams are running a West Coast offense that works play action over the middle of the field. Lots of I-formation and other of-their-time relics date the game, but you can still see the bones of a modern Shanahan offense that makes it a bit more comfortable. Otherwise, all of the option play shenanigans from the modern game are completely absent, and the rushing concepts leave a lot to be desired outside of your basic inside/outside zone and strong/weak-side differentiators. Maximum Passing is an absolutely next-level mechanic though; it’s far beyond my comprehension, but the possibility of throwing a proper back-shoulder throw in a one-on-one and feeling the placement yourself is astounding.

Two Point Hospital

Having not played a tycoon-style game in many years, I found myself losing dozens of late-night hours to this, much to my horror. My impression is that this isn’t necessarily a challenging enthusiast-oriented game, although it splits the difference more than Two Point’s modern titles, which lean more into design over administration. A lot of the opening years read the same, with boilerplate between the different scenarios in the form of general practitioners’ offices, reception, standard diagnosis rooms, wards, and patient amenities. This can give it a brainless feel, up until you start brushing up against each level’s unique gimmick and accidentally dig yourself in a hole from spending too quickly or running the cleanliness of the establishment into the ground. Balancing between taking up space for rare ailments versus not overloading on tech for the most common diseases of each given area takes skill, especially when the practical aspects of proximity and patient travel times come into play. I’m curious to return to try out the remixed levels, which send patients out in waves. In the one I tried, instead of sustained agony, you get a nice blend of both optimizing the off-hours when patients are gone with the terrifying patient load that cyclically enters.

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