birthbydrip

Want to Learn Arcade Games? Start a Club!

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:03:00 -0400

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.

Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:44:00 -0400

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.

Tetris – The Absolute: The Grandmaster 2

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:34:00 -0400

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.

Q+A: What Does "Arcade-y" Mean?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:26:00 -0400

Drax asks:

what do you think makes something “arcadey” since that’s a label i see getting thrown around a lot

Kururin Squash

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:41:00 -0400

Where Kururin Paradise poured the scrappy look of the original Kuru Kuru Kururin into a sleeker, cheerier skin, Kururin Squash completely revamps the look and feel with lush 3D backgrounds and and a focus on gentler curves. The flat-shaded cartoon interludes of Paradise give way to a puppet show aesthetic, down to curtains that open on the title card and characters printed on cardboard with articulated, flapping arms. Their non-stop gesticulating combined with the movement of the backgrounds, replete with signs of organic life and community, infuses the atmosphere with an invitation for the player to live in its world. Kururin had never been a brooding or violent series, but the grinning brutality of the obstacle gauntlets finally melts away in Squash.

The Munchables

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:42:00 -0400

A Katamari-like from the actual Katamari developers, those Now Production contractors who toiled to get Keita Takahashi’s vision off the ground.¹ Munchables twists the “roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff” loop from Katamari into a game all about eating, where the mute, spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations, progressively inflating after each set of meals. The character’s size is unambiguously labeled with a level number, with enemies larger than yourself having a similar label to illustrate who exactly you can eat at any given point. These larger enemies can be bumped with a dash attack that splits them into smaller enemies, although if the difference between you and the enemy is vast enough, each of their component sub-enemies may still be larger than you. Recursively repeating the split mechanic unveils levels built around flooding the field with bite-sized enemies and eating as many as possible before they reassemble into their larger forms.

Kururin Paradise

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:01:00 -0400

The Helirin’s rotation in the Kururin games has a particular dynamic: certain rotation angles will always reoccur provided the player has space to sit and wait. Safe zones often bookend major obstacle sections, so a start-and-stop tendency arises, where arriving in a safe zone with the wrong angle to start the next section incurs a short break to let it spin into place. The first Kururin game suffered from this in its larger stages specifically thanks to cyclical obstacles, each requiring a synchronization between the Helirin and the obstacle. Depending on the difference in frequency between the two cycles, waiting for both to line up could potentially take multiple rotations without prior planning. While the series’s staple springs, which change the Helirin’s direction of rotation, could help by altering the phase over multiple bounces, most applications of these boiled down to bouncing between parallel springs, offering only minor improvements over unassisted waiting. Kururin Paradise smartly fixes this by giving the player control over their rotation speed. Even with only a single speed increase to work with, the player has significantly more leverage on how to synchronize with obstacles or avoid waiting. In turn, the designers decrease the amount of safe zones in each level, resulting in more compact and intense design overall.

Ace Combat

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:01:00 -0400

Retrospectively speaking, Ace Combat’s¹ rough-hewn edges might appeal to those turned off by how quickly the series streamlined starting with its immediate sequel. Starting Ace Combat’s hard mode plops the player into an unmaneuverable tin can that explodes upon contact with a single missile, and the plane selection only incrementally improves its quality from there. Broadly speaking, the most useful planes are split between durable hunks of junk and fragile ships that pivot on a dime, leaving the player to decide between the least bad choice for a given objective. Both of these give the simplistic dogfights and bombing runs a distinct flavor. The former makes downhill approaches a necessity to build up enough speed when avoiding surface-to-air missiles surrounding a drop zone, while the latter turns stray gunfire into a legitimate danger. The decisions here (along with a bevy of stealth planes and other more unorthodox choices) make experimentation with each mission much more useful compared to later titles, which drown the player in extremely useful all-rounders.

Kuru Kuru Kururin

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:13:00 -0400

The fundamental genius of the Kururin trilogy derives from its unique, bare-bones approach to modulating outcomes over time. Consider racing games: part of their appeal is how the timing of an action alters the outcome of each action that comes after it. Taking a turn changes not only the car’s current speed and direction but the speed at which it arrives at the next turn as well. This propagates to the requisite braking power needed for the turn, the best line to take through the curve, and the torque and power the engine is putting out; each variation adds nuance to later actions. Even when the system is abstractly solvable, the variables are so granular and dynamics so nonlinear that reproducing the solution is never trivial. The Kururin series does this without the same density or non-linearity by instead constantly turning Kururin’s long, stick-like ship while punishing contact with any obstacles. The player tracks little other the rotation of the ship and the location of moving obstacles, yet small variations in timing change the phase of the ship’s rotation for future movement, restricting viable movement through future corridors. While this lacks the analog granularity of car control, Kururin’s ticky-tacky movement and three discrete speed settings make up for it by clamping the player’s precision, asking them to alternate between the separate speed modes rather than key in a specific analog value. This reconstitutes the subtle variations of each run that racing games exhibit, elevating Kururin to their level in the confines of a handheld d-pad.

Skydiving Extreme

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:18:00 -0400

Although the package is unassuming and generic, Skydiving Extreme is actually a hidden fourth Bust-a-Groove entry, using a similar QTE combat concept without the rhythm component.¹ The latter absence fundamentally alters the flow of each match: without synchronized measures tying the players together, the race is on to mash the button commands as quickly as possible. Dance battles from Bust-a-Groove transform here into skydiving choreography, with each team of four leaping from a plane and forming what are effectively body sculptures of progressive complexity. Presumably these formations also increase drag, as incorrectly executing them will put the divers in free fall, with the team that reaches the break altitude first losing. Over the course of a clear, the player earns the right to take on more and more complex maneuvers, performing in thunderstorms and other dangerous locations.

Tall Twins Tower

Wed, 27 May 2026 17:54:00 -0400

Tall: Infinity’s ascetic insistence on clipped chains and limited board manipulation cultivated a severity that perhaps muted its appeal, so Techno Soleil went back to the drawing board and overhauled its core components¹ into something radically different. Instead of awkward stick figures slowly constructing the Tower of Babel, looming over the player on the title screen, Tall Twins Tower pivots to adorable animal-suited characters swimming in the ocean or stacking under a singing moon. The shift is more than mere aesthetic: the two primary protagonists each have an absolutely disgusting level of board control that completely nullifies the austerity of Tall: Infinity’s mechanics. Cat Debinyachi can slide an entire row below them clockwise or counter-clockwise around the cylinder playfield, while rabbit Rabbikyu can lift and shift individual blocks without rotating them in the process.² Without needing to roll blocks onto row ledges to change their orientation, any block slightly off from making a match can now be seamlessly “fixed” to make it work, vastly decreasing the difficulty of finding and preserving chains.

Deus Ex

Fri, 22 May 2026 19:03:00 -0400

In Deus Ex, hour after hour of slices of the world perfectly align into a living playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. Rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet Deus Ex routinely weaves both together. For every underground lair with traps laid out in sequence, an open oasis follows – see the suffocating catacombs that give way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of Paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer’s loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. Military bases and science labs exhibit believable layouts, and locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. The authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location’s fidelity in the process.

Boom Blox

Fri, 15 May 2026 18:20:00 -0400

First perceptions may peg this game as a Jenga variant with some explosive addendums, but Boom Blox is more of a generic rigid-body physics sandbox with support for a diverse range of play-styles. This isn’t robust on accident, as the campaign explicitly pushes the engine’s capabilities to mold it around its scraps of narrative. Each level takes place in a flat, open zone with various stacked block structures, but the specifics beyond that can vary wildly, including the camera, which may be static, movable in an arc centered on the arena, or 360° rotatable from the playfield’s center. Players may lob baseballs, shoot guns, or manipulate the blocks depending on the course’s objectives. The Jenga comparisons apply to some levels, but in others destruction is an explicit condition, either in totality or in a controlled fashion. No matter what you choose, it’s rare that the game won’t throw you a curveball in one form or another.

Picross 3D

Tue, 12 May 2026 12:57:00 -0400

The kineticism of chiseling a sculpture out of stone infuses itself in any purely mechanical discussion; there’s no analysis of Picross 3D that can ignore it. In the original Picross games on Game Boy, the conceit was similar: the player chiseled images into a stone tablet. There, beyond the lack of a touch screen,¹ the flat surface made the action less like a sweeping change and more like a small marking, like scraping one’s name into a wall. Here, the action transforms nondescript stone into a living, breathing object, releasing it from its marble cage and revealing its true form. Of course, the actual similarities to sculpture fall apart here: art doesn’t merely hide inside stone waiting to be systematically unveiled. But the tapping still translates to carving with force, presenting physicality many other DS games only wish they could have.

bit Generations: Dotstream

Sat, 02 May 2026 15:23:00 -0400

Racing games often get boiled down to how turns are taken and how other cars behave, ignoring jargon-heavy descriptions of handling dynamics and transmission characteristics. Dotstream actualizes this: your “car” is merely a Tron-esque line that paints the lane behind it the same color. When you proceed straight on the horizontal track, you approach max speed, and when you arc into a different lane, you lose speed. Each line takes up the totality of its lane, so switching into an occupied lane skips your car to the next available, and course leaders can bump those trailing by hijacking their lane. Although you come out the gate exceedingly slow compared to your opponents, a slipstream mechanic evens things out. Shadowing a line by following in an adjacent lane juices a meter parallel to your speed; when this meter exceeds the other, it pulls top speed up to match. This interplay – clawing for lane space while hewing close to the front of the pack – defines Dotstream and its course design.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:41:00 -0400

Atlus adapts the grisly world of surgery as a timer juggling exercise, with the player managing a main time limit, the drain on their patient’s vitals, and the interval until a new hazard spawns. Kyriaki, one of the game’s fabricated “GUILT” viruses, best exemplifies this. It appears by creating an incision in the patient’s tissue, which bleeds and thus increases the patient’s vital drain, and it travels under the tissue surface making more incisions until extracted. Locating one permanently requires detecting it with an ultrasound and then cutting it out of the tissue with the scalpel, after which it will make yet another incision, leaving two net additional cuts to deal with. To kill it, you target it with a laser for a period, with the caveat that leaving the laser in one place for too long will burn through the tissue and cause a hemorrhage. When multiple of these appear at once, you’re put in the uncomfortable circumstance of switching your attention between actively adversarial viruses and the injuries both you and they incur. This aligns with the game’s spatial aspect: your tools utilize stylus strokes, so the player can optionally bide their time fixing injuries while waiting for multiple Kyriaki to line up for extraction in a single strike. Attempting this without consideration of the patient’s vitals often results in a quick death, however, especially in scenarios where killing one on its own leads to two more spawning and overwhelming the organ with incisions. While this sounds like a traditional combat game, the implementation is a stranger blend: small skill-based actions, almost reminiscent of the exaggerated tasks of the Cooking Mama games, required dynamically based on the behavior of the virus.

Professor Layton and the Last Specter

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:54:00 -0400

The Layton series put itself in an unenviable position with a follow-up to the grandiose Unwound Future, which pushed the world-rending consequences of the series to their breaking point. Last Specter attempts to roll back to a more sustainable franchise template, both by starting a prequel trilogy and by restraining the scope to a small town with minimal personal entanglements for Layton, but in the process the writers lose the self-aware artifice that punctuated the previous entries. The original trilogy each features Layton traversing and overcoming a state of unreality;¹ Last Specter expects both Layton and the player to take the game at face value. Misthallery has its charm, with canals threaded throughout, powered by a reservoir looming over the town, but what you see is what you get. The lack of mass conspiratorial orchestration leaves the new trilogy’s villain looking rather impotent compared to their predecessors, who possessed transformative power over the events Layton witnessed. When Last Specter’s narrative reveals the supposed titular specter – a giant figure that has destroyed swathes of the town – as a hitherto unseen squishy Loch Ness monster only to immediately hedge on its culpability, it inadvertently demonstrates just how lousy this game’s hand of cards is. Instead of bluffing until a flush is laid out at the end, they frantically stack bets on weaker reveals steadily throughout. Perhaps it improves the pace, but the final impact suffers.

bit Generations: Digidrive

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:44:00 -0400

The usual action-puzzle title, hopelessly indebted to Tetris, builds upon a grid-based playfield with game elements falling from the ceiling; Digidrive ignores this, with elements appearing at four points and drifting smoothly down two perpendicular lanes. ¹ These elements, of three colors, are abstract vehicles crossing through an intersection, where the player redirects them using the d-pad. These cars stop once they reach a spawn point and stack with like colors; if a different color approaches, the cars previously stationed there will reverse course and return to the intersection. Stacking five cars at a spawn transforms it into a fuel cell for that color, although it disappears if not supplied regularly with more cars of the correct type, the timer for which inversely scales with the amount of fuel.

Ballistic

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Tucked away on the official AARP website – the acronym formerly stood for “American Association of Retired Persons” – is an oasis of small arcade-style games; browser experiences perfect for an aging audience uninterested in metaprogression or buildcraft. Of these, Ballistic encapsulates the style: it reframes Breakout as turn-based actions, where the player shoots a stream of balls that ricochet off of walls and destructible blocks, waiting for each ball to land back at the bottom before firing the next volley. Instead of separate levels with fixed arrangements, all the blocks in the playfield shift down one row in an implicit grid after each turn, with the game ending when a block reaches the line the player shoots from. At the same time, a new row of blocks appears one row below the top, with at least one gap left for the player to sneak their shots in. Over time, this breaks the playfield up into two sections: dense blocks at the top, and stragglers creeping towards the bottom on every turn. A smart shot attempts to clean up both areas by trapping balls in a cave on the always empty top row behind multiple rows of blocks. Doing this while having the balls trickle down to the bottom section as they exit the cave keeps the playfield clean. Additional wrinkles prevent this loop from staling: ball pick-ups add to the number you shoot on every turn, and the “health” of the blocks (how many hits they can take before breaking) scale alongside your reserve, occasionally throwing in double-health blocks to ensure that some blocks actually survive down to the second layer. The simplicity of these aspects, the intuitive physics system, and a prominent scoring system (the game’s only goal, with a leaderboard prominently displayed) demonstrate why even nondescript browser games can still showcase the elegance of the medium.

Quadrilateral Cowboy

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Command-line interfaces are less a mystic channel of communication with an operating system and more a compromise. Writing graphical interfaces is difficult and time-consuming, and for the average developer, it’s much easier to implement text-based commands than get mired in the widgets, frames, and event-driven programming that comes with GUI creation. However, a CLI is also enticing for how easy it is to enable cooperation between different applications using a common set of commands: piping, redirection, and a slew of helper programs all support a robust level of control for the user.

PaRappa the Rapper 2

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Having soldified their position at the top of the “experimental” commerical gaming heap in Japan, NanaOn-Sha were able to let their hair down with PaRappa 2, moving past the idyllic picture-book narrative of the original game in the process. What this presents as is split between two equally disconcerting plot threads: the first a militaristic invasion of PaRappa Town by noodle enthusiasts, prompting late-game armed resistance by the protagonists, and the second a quest by PaRappa to be come a more “mature” lover. Look no further than Master Onion in a sleazy red tracksuit instructing PaRappa through the TV on his brand of romantic gestures (still mostly related to karate) as PaRappa tries them out on his enthusiastic best friend PJ.¹ Interspersed are scenes of PaRappa and his girlfriend Sunny’s respective fathers scrambling around on the ground, having accidentally shrunk from one of PaRappa’s dad’s inventions. The developers assuredly understand how ridiculous the scenarios are now, even compared to the off-kilter Um Jammer Lammy, and they sprinkle in non-sequiturs and little gags to add extra flair, from Master Onion going on a tangent about his legal problems to primary antagonist Colonel Noodles dropping nasty innuendo.² Even when they’re not necessarily going for a laugh, the stages still draw the player’s attention with dynamic visuals, such as with a galactic PaRappa looming over the earth during the even verses in the song Big.

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Goemon is clinging onto that 1997 release date for dear life: it gets plenty of points just for implementing a serviceable 3D Zelda template before Ocarina of Time dropped. Even extending the timeline out to the end of the fifth generation, it’s rare to see games on these consoles attempt a relatively explorable world. Of course, what qualifies as a “vast” depiction of feudal Japan here (lovingly depicted by the map screen) ends up being extremely large, box-y rooms peppered with weak enemies and occasional flora. Konami’s design here fluctuates between purely functional point-A-to-point-B shuffling and attempts to capture the essence of grand vistas, if not its contents. Where the barren mountainsides and fields lack character, the towns make up for it, featuring denser landmarks and humorous NPCs. This works in Goemon’s favor as well, as the relaxed pace and silliness, punctuated by compressed canned laughter, keep the landscapes from having to summon wonder when they’re unable to do so; it’s merely a bonus when they add substance to the gaps in the humor. Some of these arise from unlikely places: at the end of the Festival Temple Castle, a pole of massive koinobori – fish-shaped windsocks – sits in front of a waterfall, dwarfing Goemon and his friends by multiple orders of magnitude. The experience of climbing up the koinobori, rotating stiffly around the pole, looms large with its vertical scale, making one feel minuscule in the face of it.

Fire 'n Ice

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Although it’s technically a prequel to Solomon’s Key, Fire ’n Ice dispenses with that title’s action-oriented approach in favor of a tile-based Sokoban platformer, much like Catrap. Fire ’n Ice is slightly less raw than the latter, however. While the goal is identical – to eliminate all enemies on-screen – said enemies are fire spirits and must be snuffed out by contacting an ice block. Luckily, protagonist Dana can summon or dispel ice from above any tile directly diagonal to him (either down-right or down-left). Creating ice next to a wall fuses it to the surface horizontally, but one can extend it by another tile and then erase the initial tile, leaving a free-standing ice block for the player to manipulate as they please. However, the player can’t move these blocks tile-by-tile; they slide across the floor until they hit a wall, fall off a ledge, or contact fire and melt. As the game progresses, the player must learn to craft elaborate structures that will allow an individual ice block to eliminate a spirit in an awkward location, often while preserving access to another spirits in the stage.

Q+A: Remembering Yakuza 3

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Raph asks:

can you talk about a game you love but would never want to be good at, something where wading through low level gameplay is satisfying enough (yakuza 3, i’m asking for yakuza 3)

This is a bit of a weird question because Yakuza isn’t necessarily the first example I would pull for this, both because I don’t really love the series anymore and because very few people are likely playing these at a “high level.” I gave up on being good at Yakuza out of practicality: I tried, but they take so insanely long to “master” (or rather, complete) that I fell off the chase. The closest I got was Kiwami, where I actually did all of the side-quests and Tiger Drop parry-spammed my way into beating Amon. But with the recent release of Kiwami 3 and the widespread public outcry over how it butchers the original, I’ve been reflective on Yakuza 3’s vision for the series that never quite came to fruition.

Ninja Gaiden

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Usually I would avoid talking about something as dry and static as enemy spawn positions, but for Ninja Gaiden, their naive implementation colors the entire play experience. Instead of enemies appearing once their spawn point is visible on screen, blatant spawn triggers dot the terrain, yanking the enemy into the play-space once you collide with the trigger. Unusually, the relative clarity of the spawns and the manner in which they’re deployed manifests taut positioning dynamics. The most vexing for a new player is that spawning the enemy and then backing up to secure one’s footing often fails, as killing the enemy and then stepping back into its trigger instantly revives it. When the player initiates the spawn, they must be prepared to push forward as they kill it. Pushing forward quickly enough can reward the player for this by despawning the enemy against the back wall, assuming they get beyond the enemy without killing it in the first place. However, enemy triggers rarely stack, with sequential triggers staggering their entrances. This inversely favors slow progression, dealing with each enemy one-by-one while standing ground to avoid respawns. At its best, the game creates scenarios that encourage the former, while at its worst, it lapses into slow-chug memorizer runs in the latter paradigm.

Shatterhand

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

While the core conceit is a guy who punches stuff with robot arms instead of shooting, there’s a surprising amount of Mega Man DNA present here, even beyond the selectable stage system. The enemy designs draw from a similar pool of stationary gunners (including in the iconic upwards three-way orientation), flying popcorn enemy spawners, and larger robots with slow or repetitive movement. While Shatterhand effortlessly shifts between horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, it still uses the breaks between them to shuffle its deck, plucking new obstacles out to throw at the player. The frequent switches in focus and close-quarters combat help highlight more aggressive strategies instead of letting players hang back or charge their weapons.

Resident Evil - Code: Veronica

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Although it was mostly outsourced and didn’t get mainline status, Code Veronica vastly outstrips its predecessors in sheer scope. The first and second games set their primary areas up in an iconic orientation: two multi-floor building halves connected by pathways through a center hall. These were dense, with subsequent areas shrinking the scope considerably; Resident Evil 3: Nemesis leaned into the structure of these later areas and transformed their smaller scope into the streets of Raccoon City, with more wiggle room in the connective tissue between rooms. However, in all of these three games, there were distinct chokepoints between sections, with a major puzzle blocking progress to the next section. Code Veronica’s first disc sets up a full map of five of these smaller areas together and, as much as it can, removes chokepoints entirely. After escaping the initial prison area (half of which can only be completed later), Claire gets instant access to both the palace and the military training facility. An item obtained immediately in the palace gives access to the airport, and the residence entrance follows not far behind that. Keys for puzzles span the entire map, making revisiting older areas to discover new rooms or complete half-finished puzzles more common than the original trilogy. Code Veronica heavily relies on its adventure game trappings, emphasizing constant exploration and parallel puzzle chains over resource preservation elements or combat.

bit Generations: Dialhex

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Much like in Techno BB, there’s a certain amount of complexity extracted just from moving many tiles at once. In Dialhex, these tiles are triangles embedded in a giant hexagon, and the player spins these tiles six at a time within a hexagon-shaped cursor.¹ With a gravity system and less-than-intuitive position resolution thanks to the slant of the pieces, any match (made by creating a hexagon with tiles of a single color) shakes up the stack, especially as the field fills up. By hovering the cursor in empty space, gravity ceases, and the player can suspend tiles in air to drop them into the most optimal spot. Between each of these dynamics, there’s quite the foundation here for quick thinking. Matching a full hexagon without accidentally scattering it requires pairing tiles together, as each cursor position is attached to adjacent ones by a two-tile third of the hexagon. Juggling a piece across the stack can’t be done through linear button presses either, as cursor positions are staggered against both the horizontal and vertical axes. There’s quite a lot to consider in the skill floor thanks to an original, dense base idea.

Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

As you drive for the first time, you’ll notice that the 1-wood has its impact zone tightened up such that any non-perfect hit will sharply slice or hook.¹ Beginner characters used to trade out power and control for easier impact zones, whereas here the expert characters linearly improve on the starting roster without a relative debuff to impact. A small change here instantly changes the candor of every non-par-three hole that comes after it, cutting off the wiggle room that gives this series its slow, novice-friendly beginnings. World Invitational goes out of its way to raise the skill floor rather than kowtow to newcomers; it’s a lean campaign attached to a ruthless online multiplayer scene rather than a starter entry as the previous PSP titles were. Wind is only communicated through a direction and a visual of your character dropping grass cuttings until you reach the green, where the actual speed finally appears only once it’s irrelevant to the simplified physics simulation. Progression demands first place finishes rather than aggregating placement scores across multiple tournaments as in the PS2 titles. The pocket-dimension courses feature hot air balloons blocking your path, quicksand sinkholes, and holes nestled into the sides of cliffs that no mower could ever reach. As the effective finale of the series before the infrequent reboots afterwards, it goes all-in on the core of the experience without wasting time on pleasantries.

Hall of Shame 2025, Part 2

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

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.

Hall of Shame 2025, Part 1

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

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!

Devil Dice

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Devil Dice leverages the simplicity of die orientation to complicate what would otherwise be rote tile-matching mechanics. Six-sided dice lay across a grid, with the cutesy “Aqui” demon running around on top of them.¹ Moving off the side of an unobstructed die will rotate it into the adjacent space, exposing a number on top. When a set of contiguous dice share the same exposed number, with as many or more dice as the number on the face, they all sink into the ground, yielding points equivalent to the number multiplied by the count of dice in the set. If, while these dice are sinking, the player moves another die with the same number next to the sinking set, a chain counter increments and re-adds the points from the set, now multiplied by the counter. New dice rise from the floor in accordance with the number of dice cleared; if the player falls to the floor due to standing on a sinking die, they can use a freshly spawning die to reach the top layer once again.

Lumines Arise

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

The burst mechanic (surely drawing from Tetris Effect’s zone mechanic) violates the purity of the elegantly terse Lumines concept on a first impression, as it tacks on an extra meter and lets you blow up the stack on-demand. In a series that already has a friendly and frequent screen-clear block type, slapping this on top is a bit overkill, and survival play, which had a low ceiling from the series beginning, gets utterly trivialized in the process.¹ But Lumines is richest in score play, and the burst mechanic throws a major wrench in the game’s brutal measure-to-measure combo system. The burst “minigame” identifies a current square formation and lets you build it up over multiple timeline sweeps, creating a monolith that tosses blocks of the opposing color off-screen. Optimally setting up “seed” squares before initiating the burst requires foresight and tempo, especially when lining it up with a x12 or x16 combo from consecutive multi-square timeline sweeps, although the burst can also salvage a combo that’s about to expire in pinch. Doing the latter is risky, however, as using burst when the meter is between 50% and 99% doesn’t scale the effect (gives you three measures to build compared to a 100% burst’s six) and thus wastes any additional meter you built up over the halfway mark. Tying all of this together, activating burst also freezes the level progression, making any of the squares you clear during the burst period freebies and incentivizing the player to pop burst as often as possible. This makes it your biggest cash cow for score purposes, with the half-meter version gaining more relevance if the player has the skill to juice the monolith with very little time. Doing this circles back to seeding the burst correctly and so on, making the mechanic a potential friend and your biggest stressor at the same time.

Tall: Infinity

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Grid-based puzzle games usually project the playfield as a flat surface; Tall: Infinity bucks this by wrapping it around a vertical cylinder, tying the edges of the playfield together and incorporating gravity. While the player’s avatar can freely walk up walls and fall from great heights, when rolling a block they can only surmount edges that are one row higher, and they need a column’s worth of head start to gain the “momentum” to roll up. The game’s matching focus has players pressing together sides of blocks with identical colors,¹ but the orientation of the block consistently rotates 90 degrees when pushed to an adjacent column, and flipping the block in-place isn’t possible. However, rolling the block onto a higher row actually rotates the block 180 degrees, thus making elevation changes the primary method of reorienting blocks. Since matching blocks spawns additional blocks in the matched column, it’s easy to accidentally build giant peaks without the gradual changes that enable reorientation; managing stack height to maintain reorientation opportunities naturally pushes the player away from constant matching in favor of doing light playfield management throughout a session as well.²

Techno BB

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Techno BB is just waiting for its time to shine as a profile picture machine; the adorable half-panda half-bumblebee main character looks like a archetypal blind box figurine, with its little ears poking out over its aviator goggles. An obscure Konami title from the twilight years of the PlayStation,¹ it’s an elevated match-four puzzle title with an extremely light malware aesthetic, letting your bear buzz about the grid to eliminate tiles before they turn into skull-marked viruses. Where the backgrounds would maybe reflect this in another game, here they instead favor eclectic psychedelic and toybox patterns, all matched up to a menagerie of electronic tunes. Mix this with a lengthy, educational puzzle mode and a rare PocketStation minigame, and it’s a cute budget package for someone looking to round out an emulator library with a pick-up-and-play title.

NFL Blitz 2000

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Pass interference is usually the bane of a cornerback, but in NFL Blitz’s take on American football, where penalties don’t exist, lets defenders manhandle or completely tackle open receivers to their heart’s content. Despite the limited defensive playbook,¹ legal pass interference makes controlling a defender interesting: who and where do you cover? Obliterating a particular receiver out the gate eliminates one of three downfield options for your opponent in exchange for dedicating you to the tackle and locking you out of a character switch. Conversely, watching the quarterback’s eyes and determining where they’re planning on throwing to opens up tackles after the ball has been thrown, or even better, interceptions. Strategy here evolves based on the habits of the opposing QB,² including favorite plays and receiver formation, but fundamentally it’s a careful combination of suppressing the most dangerous routes on the field while chasing down passes; the speed and narrow field let you play defense like you’re covering one big zone. Or, if you want to shake things up, just rush the passer! Force them to throw quick and keep them in hell.

Full Stack of Flapjacks: Rhythm Games

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

One of the “issues” with many of the arcade rhythm games I play is that they have such a breadth of content and high difficulty curve that I rarely reach the point where I’m comfortable talking about them in the context of a full review. However, since I published my guide to rhythm game critique last week, I wanted to also provide some quick thoughts on some rhythm games I’m not quite ready to dedicate an entire review to.

Q+A: Rhythm Game Critique

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Luna asks:

I want to see the rhythm game breakdown/a rhythm bonanza discussion personally :3

Raph additionally asks:

Or an explanation on when aesthetic obfuscation in rhythm games is and isn’t acceptable

Rhythm game critique threw me in the loop for a while because it’s working on a different axis from a lot of other “good” games in our sphere, and what’s happening inside of the game is generally not that interesting; it’s, from a strict ruleset perspective, almost always just timing checks. While for most video games we can perform quality critique fully within the “bounds” of the game, looking only at the variables during program execution and how they change over time, for many rhythm games our critique only blooms when we look at our physical interaction with the controller. Timing checks become complex in the context of human movement, where moving a finger may become taxing depending on the position of your other fingers, or where hitting multiple buttons simultaneously may require more than just your two hands. I’m going to quickly go over the main games that might strike your fancy, and then I’ll break down how I analyze quality when I’m playing rhythm games.

Clock Tower

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0400

It lacks the usual framing that comes with a point-and-click adventure, ignoring a general guiding question in favor of understated wandering and seemingly tangential puzzle design. Few rooms in the Barrows Mansion direct the player towards any method of escape, but perhaps they don’t need to; main character Jennifer Simpson can hightail it out of the mansion in minutes by starting up the car in the garage, which has its keys conveniently left nearby. If you choose not to, she’s left to meander, leafing through old books and dusting off unused furniture. The mansion’s two wings, west and east, sit parallel to one another in a neat arrangement of hallways, with the camera facing the inside and its pool courtyard. The entrance to this, an inexpliably collapsed corridor between wings with a unsteady brick wall on one side, seems to face the outside of the mansion based on the position of the camera; between this incongruity, the nondescript hallways, and the rotation of rooms between playthroughs, the mansion leaves a woozy impression, never quite locking into place even over the course of a single campaign.

Everybody's Golf

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

The first hurdle is the ersatz-Mii, flea-market puppet custom characters that infest the world, getting stuck on each other on the course and running up to you eerily in the hub. The second, and much more more major one, is the decadent progression system. After stepping foot into the Clap Handz land-out-of-time and accessing the tournament counter, it becomes apparent that you only have access to the front nine of the starting course, reconfigured with different hole sizes, tee positions, and weather patterns over and over again until you grind out the requisite experience points to unlock more locales. Your next rank only gives you the back nine, leaving you to churn through the course several more times and fight three separate bosses to finally scrape your way into the next tier. From here on you unlock three more 18-hole courses in the campaign at a regular clip, but the drudgery of the early game lingers. Even with the hard settings turned on, which doubles the experience in exchange for a modicum of challenge, unlocking a single boss takes around 27 holes, which you have to do three times per rank, and there are six ranks to hit the credits…

Q+A: Minigames in Platformers

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

BlazingWaters asks:

have any thoughts about platformers - typically 3D - incorporating “minigames” (i.e. anything not directly related to vertical/horizontal plane tissues) into their elements? some are just minigame distractions but others keep it cohesive somehow

This is a pretty standard complaint to throw at 3D platformers from their “golden age”; it felt like the third game of a lot of classic 3D mascot platformer trilogies transitioned into more minigame-driven content, usually to their detriment. The particular examples that come to mind for me are Crash Bandicoot: Warped and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, although the latter example weaves it in a bit better thanks to the lightly Ocean’s-inspired ensemble heist approach, which explains why there’s a whole suite of new, limited-toolkit characters you play as.

Catrap

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

A prototypical puzzle game, as in a game that makes it abundantly clear how the barest mechanics should interact in order to produce interesting levels. Owing to its origins as a BASIC type-in game,¹ the mechanics are extremely simple: moving into a block will shift it forward one tile, moving into sand will make it disappear permanently, preventing you from walking on it later, and moving into an enemy will remove it, with the win condition being removing every enemy. Every object shares key attributes: everything in the game can be walked on by the player character and almost everything has gravity apply to it (excluding sand, ladders, and some enemies). There is no concept of death, no dynamic objects, and no theme-driven levels that add or subtract mechanics. The only twist here – which is seemingly unique to this Game Boy release – is that specific levels have you control two characters at once, with the select button switching between them. The clarity and versatility of this mechanic primarily derives from it following the aforementioned rules: you can walk on the idle character, and gravity applies to them at all times, just as if they were another block in the world.

Zone of the Enders

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner has become one of the ball-knower’s character-action favorites, but it’s worth giving some love to its predecessor for laying the groundwork. Its release being less than six months before Devil May Cry gave it some room to stretch its legs outside of DMC’s reliance on combo depth and i-frames, while it also has a stronger hand-to-hand combat basis than its few notable mecha predecessors, such as Omega Boost or Love & Destroy. Zone of the Enders’s take on the latter is contextual but extremely polished, using a range-from-target distinction to change the capabilities of your mech, Jehuty.

Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This has a distinct Quintet-esque flair to it: a solemn world-restoration myth communicated through gameplay that shallowly evokes its contemporaries, although here it’s 2.5D platforming instead of hack-and-slash. Protagonist Porch Arsia’s soul is mistakenly reaped by bumbling spirit guide and dessert auteur Straynap, and the duo must retrieve the “petals” of her soul from around the purgatorial plane of Napple Town. An assemblage of both humans and surreal creatures¹ live in Napple Town day-to-day, and some of them have inadvertently imbued themselves with Porch’s petals. Merely visiting them throughout Napple Town yields little, however, as each denizen of the town simultaneously exists in another form located within one of four seasonal wildernesses outside the city gates. To restore herself, Porch must meet both the town and seasonal variations of each community member and reconcile their respective problems.

Grand Theft Auto III

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

A systems-driven game with one amazing core system and a whole bunch of shitty ones in its orbit. DMA Design salvages a lot of elements in here by threading everything through the game’s driving mechanics, which perfectly straddle the line between fiddly accuracy and easy-going simplicity. The taxis clogging the streets give you that front wheel drive that’ll keep you from ending up nose-first in the bay, but if you comb through old parking lots and alleys you’ll find much sportier cars to outspeed police cruisers and pull ahead in races. In the early game, where your guns do jack squat, running someone over repeatedly becomes the standard mode of operation for each mission, turning your car into your most powerful weapon. Once it takes a certain amount of abuse, it’ll ignite, ending its life as a giant explosive that will nuke everything in the vicinity and let you get away scot-free – assuming you’re not stuck in motion or getting dragged out of the car, in which case you’ll go up in smoke as well. Every mission element that touches the driving in some way, shape, or form automatically benefits from its depth of handling and potential for carnage.

American Football and Timer Management

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Happy NFL kickoff! When I was a kid I was obsessed with football, trying every Madden we had¹ and playing flag football every autumn. Last year I got back into it for real after only following from the sidelines for most of my teens and 20’s, and I fell in love with the sport again. Perhaps it’s because it’s the only good real-time-with-pause game, the RPG to beat out all other RPG’s. And it helps that it’s easy for me to do work or play other games during all the stoppages as well!

Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

The childhood nostalgia angle hits well as a thumbnail teaser or a loopable GIF of warm glow dusk, but Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is less concerned with portraying the ideal child’s summer and more with letting the disarming naivete of your avatar Boku open up the reality around him. “Stark” may not be the right word here, because for all of the pain and intrigue that worms its way into his surroundings, just as many of his days are filled with genuine joy or tame ennui. But for all the words that filter into question marks in his brain, culminating in exaggerated nods or head scratches, they additionally transmit directly to the player, almost as if Boku functions less as a living being and more as a probe to move around the world and open people’s hearts. When he actually intervenes in the plot, it’s a rarity, and almost always initiated by him alone without the explicit intention of the player.

Shining Force

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. Laser-equipped ancient automaton Adam, alien hatchling Domingo, and final dragon survivor Bleu all show up in your party effectively useless unless you’re willing to devote time to grinding them up, which blunts the enthusiasm of bringing them in. On the other side, the game is better balanced than you’d initially think for those looking to run through with a core group of characters with quicker scaling, especially since the back quarter throws two secret units at you that will instantly swing your team back into contention with the roughest forces you’ll encounter. It helps that characters can be bought back from the dead in a game where cash flows freely from every enemy killed; on some level I would prefer if the economy was less overwhelmingly stacked in the player’s favor or if the post-battle pillage threw less amazing freebie weapons their way, but it definitely helps smooth out the curve when the difficulty dials up in the last 10 battles or so.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. At the same time, this pernicious crunch led to peaks and valleys in quality, a devastating proposition when building on the bones of Ocarina of Time, which leaned heavily on holistic grandeur and originality to avoid putting the shallow gameplay front and center. The opening hours do this no justice either: the intro and disconcerting warp into the clock tower to meet the Happy Mask Salesman sell the game’s dedication to incoherent spaces and chaotic personalities early, and your jaunt around the town on the first cycle gives a glimpse into the engine behind the emotional core, but it’s seized away just as quickly when it shoos you out to tackle Woodfall, the most forgettable stretch of the entire game. The intricacies of the lives of those in Clock Town and the malignant effects that the Skull Kid has wrought on each will have to wait.

Múseca

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. It’s a shame that the botched concept mulched one of Bemani’s best concepts: think Beatmania if every button was a turntable.¹ Each button is spaced such that your pinky-to-thumb handspan will only reach two at any given time, with three on top and two on the bottom. This should theoretically make only the top middle button a shared point between the two hands, but the higher difficulty charts quickly strain that.

Super Magnetic Neo

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. Not necessarily a compelling hook on its own, and indeed, the game on first pass lacks the elements that might put a game over the top. Dig in past the sparse toolkit and punitive level design, however, and you’ll find a game that never seems to repeat an idea twice while layering opportunities for advanced momentum transfer throughout.

Super Mario 3D Land

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. Each gauntlet combines a dynamic platform type with an enemy type by plopping a few clusters down in a wide arrangement to give players flexible routes without allowing them to trivialize the whole thing (as soon as the difficulty curve deems that acceptable, anyway). That’s meaty enough to form a whole game around, and 3D Land pushes that to its absolute limit; even with the project’s smaller scope, they shoved nearly 100 full levels into it!

Loom

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. Indeed, the manual here says “There is more than one way to solve many of the puzzles.” but then immediately hedges: “In fact some of the activities… [are] simply experiences for you to enjoy.” And yes, many, many of the things you can do in this game are one-off hardcoded interactions to reward you for sketching out a puzzle solution that might have made sense in a game that had the resources to make it feasible. The only puzzle with multiple solutions (blunting or twisting the sword in the forge) is a binary-choice fail-safe in case you missed the sharpening draft from earlier, less of an expression of the malleability of the object and more of a shrug to let the player carry on.

Q+A: Interactive Fiction

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Raph asks:

when are you hopping on if

Shin Megami Tensei If…? Probably never. Next!

Now interactive fiction… this is a genre I’ve been keen on getting into a few times but have never quite gone all in on. On and off for the last few years I had been working on an adventure game with a minimal, script-driven engine, and at some point last year I had a phase where I was interested in trying to write it in Inform instead. One of my research tasks is writing monitoring software derived from formal logic statements, and these tend to be written in a declarative language, which is the camp Inform falls into. Most languages are imperative, as in they provide a series of instructions; declarative languages describe simply what entities are by contrast, assuming that if a top-level entity is defined that is compiled from lower-level entities, their attributes and such will transfer directly into the full object.¹ In Inform’s case, I figured the base engine (which handles verb parsing based on what your character is able to perform in the context they’re in) would give me a strong enough basis to do what I wanted with my concepts, though I ended up moving away from it a bit because I wanted stronger authorial control over the pace (surely doable with Inform, but maybe not the right tool for it).

Full Stack of Flapjacks: Roguelikes

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. I still have a lot of time left to invest in these games to hit a proper clear though, so I didn’t want to dedicate full reviews to any of them.

Zombie Revenge

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. Also unlike Devil May Cry, there’s an actual ammo system at play here with no manual reloading, so timing combos to fall earlier in your clip is essential. Tack on a substantial movelist with options for interrupt points, differently sized hitboxes, juggle/knockdown setups, and redirectable followups, and you’ve got a rather expressive combat engine for a game of its era.

Ufouria: The Saga

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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 structure 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). Starting character Bop-Louie has little other than a jump, a divekick of sorts, and a charge attack, and your first two recovered friends don’t add much (other than Shades’ floaty jump), but once Bop-Louie gets a wall-suction maneuver, the game completely opens up. Climbing random walls or descending into pits not only reveals the usual one-off items and upgrades but often full new areas as well, including the final area of the game, which could theoretically be stumbled into on accident long beforehand. By the time you get Gil, the free-swimming final character, you should already have an item that gives you the location of almost every important item on the map, and it’s your job to roam around cleaning up unfinished business until you have three specific items that will take you into the final boss’s chambers. The small world already doesn’t take much effort to move around in, but shortcuts will become apparent as you play with each character’s movement abilities, and adding Gil to the party lets you access underground aqueducts that let you jump all over the map.

Cosmic Smash

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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. The equally minimal HUD contains only a timer in skewed perspective beside the player character. Each hallway area features a series of blocks at the opposite end from the player that they must hit with a ball and racket.¹ Upon destroying all colored blocks in an area, the player gains some bonus time and heads off to the next section, perhaps laid out in wireframe green, or seemingly floating in a white void.

Super Castlevania IV

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I’m reluctant to do the full-throated condemnation of the expanded toolkit here because, outside of a comparison against the NES Castlevanias, it’s still restrained. Simon doesn’t move particularly fast, his jump height is fixed, and he still can’t jump off of stairs. The Ghost ’n Goblins games had presented more significant challenge with looser handling and free, rapid-fire projectiles, but they also leaned into dynamic enemies and random placements. Super Castlevania IV doesn’t just tack the other way on this, it falls short of even the game it’s ostensibly reimagining. Skeletons usually stay glued to the ground and move slower, and Medusa heads seem to not track the player at spawn time, to the extent that they often appear in places where they would never get close to grazing Simon. Enemies that do get spammed in every level, such as axe knights, skele-dragons, and skull cannons, all lack tools to chase down the player or prevent them from hitting from below, while the agile hunchbacks and dogs from the original game appear rarely or not at all. Arguably this game would have been improved if it was a 1:1 recreation of Castlevania with the new additions, using the original game’s enemy balance and AI rather than this neutered update.

Q+A: Time Limits in Games

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

LordDarius asks:

Thoughts on the value/function of time limits and why they seem to have gone out of fashion in mainstream gaming?

The simple answer is that time limits were popularized through arcade games, which needed them for practical reasons.¹ The arcade as a game distribution concept has diminished significantly in prevalence from its heyday, so the need for the technique has disappeared.

Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

An oddball Fromsoft-esque title with a similar sort of interplay between loadout, upgrade currency, and death mechanics. You play as a robot that can be equipped with weapons/armor on your head, arms, chest, and legs. Pressing the corresponding face button uses the equipment mapped to that body part, although the leg equipment is exclusively passive (the cross button is mapped to your chest). Using equipment raises the heat gauge for that body part, and when the gauge is full, the equipment is disabled until the gauge has fully drained. There is also a total usage limit for each weapon, which more or less acts as ammo. Double-tapping in any direction causes a roll or dash with full i-frames, each of which raises the legs’ heat gauge. The game is arranged into a series of floors in a tower, with the full eradication of enemies on each floor leading to a boss fight with a portal to the next floor. There’s a single place to save, restore one’s health/ammo, upgrade player stats, equip weapons, and change areas at the center of each floor. Upgrades to health, defense, maximum heat gauge, and weapon slots are conducted via “elixir skin” you receive from killing enemies or “restoring” (selling) equipment. Killing enemies occasionally drops weapons as well, with certain weapon “combos” activating “overkill” after death that supposedly raises the drop rate. Upon death, the player is sent to the first floor of the tower with all active equipment permanently lost, although all previously opened portals remain.

Critique Tips: Demystifying Friction

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

A recent Maximilian Dood video on the topic of “friction” in games came across my feed the other day and really concisely laid out (on accident) the mess of concepts that friction has come to embody. To explain the issue of “absence of friction” in Monster Hunter Wilds, he pulls up a separate clip of fellow YouTuber Shroud talking about the lack of friction in extraction shooters post-Escape from Tarkov. Here’s one example he gives:

Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Although often inaccurately compared to Link’s Awakening,¹ Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (officially translatd as The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls), resembles something more like Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, where cartoony dust-cloud autobattles replace the hack-and-slash and the adventure elements lampoon the genre. It’s less built around “setup-punchline” humor or anything truly absurd, and instead it leans into a light-hearted atmosphere where no one seems to take anything of consequence particularly seriously. You and your rival’s army of soldiers turn into frogs, guards for the evil empire chit-chat about anything mundane that comes to mind, and an entire town of miners loafs about drunk for lack of work. In the funniest segment, the Prince of Sablé, your avatar, sails to the headquarters of “Nantendo” to visit their R&D department. To gain access, you have to curry favor with the lead scientist by ordering the same sushi meal as him in the cafeteria; if you do so and then say that it’s tasty when he asks, he’ll berate you for your undistinguished palate. If you think this seems a little weak for a “best joke,” I’ll level with you and admit that I didn’t find the game game so much “funny” as “mildly amusing,” which begins ringing some alarm bells with how slight the rest of the game is.

Q+A: Taking Physical Notes

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This is me playing the Golgo 13 arcade game from Raizing. Thanks to Heather for the picture!

DoodleDud asks:

Would you be interested in writing about players taking notes in games?

I’ll link DoodleDud’s other thread on this as well for context. It gets into this excellent, raw point about physical notes – that they can be completely wrong – when compared in-game systems, that will point players towards the right outcome or filter out extraneous info. In modern implementations this seems absolutely right; admittedly I haven’t played many games that would probably fall into this category, but it did instantly bring to mind this review from chump about Return of the Obra Dinn. I’ll let their words speak for me here:

Lumines

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Mizuguchi’s work incorporates musical elements without tethering it to rhythmic execution challenges. The player becomes an equal contributor to the creative tapestry of the soundscape rather than reciting canned phrases or demanding precision. As you move, rotate, place, and destroy blocks throughout Lumines, your actions directly accent the soundtrack and create new polyrhythmic layers over top of it, leading to a temporally fluid pacing that ebbs and flows with the eye-catching, psychedelic backdrops. The effect is subtle; auspiciously off-beat inputs will not result in any added sounds, and with enough play this absence becomes noticeable. You unconsciously begin to follow the tempo and create your own grooves through your play, and in this way the game manages to gently synchronize your input timing with a moving cursor that removes your grouped blocks. This cursor slides along in perfect sync with the backing track. Your button presses, twitches, and excited exhalations form their own accompaniment to the game, and Lumines codifies these subliminal impulses to alter the player’s behavior without letting them know explicitly.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Bad Dream

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Also known as Scary Dreams¹, Buster’s Bad Dream has slipped under the radar thanks to its incredibly delayed release stateside, its outdated cartoon license, and its overall limited presentation. If anything, the game has had more discussion as a prototype of sorts for Astro Boy: Omega Factor, both of which were programmed by Yaiman (Mitsuru Yaida, best known for leading Gunstar Heroes and the Bangai-O games). However, where Omega Factor and many of Treasure’s other titles focus heavily on setpieces, Buster’s Bad Dream’s restraint helps it stand out for those more interested in pure combat. The single-plane beat ’em up engine compares less to Treasure’s 16-bit days and more to Fill-in-Cafe games like Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit, with deep toolkits that draw from contemporary fighting games more than belt scroller classics.

Banishing Racer

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

One distinguishing factor of vehicle games that tends to get lost in genres tied to humanoid avatars is that turning around can be rather difficult. When you’re driving a car, you have the option of either doing a 180° turn, subject to all of the dynamics that a tight turn involves at speed, or stopping to shift into reverse. Banishing Racer applies a rudimentary version of this on the 2D plane, where the main car refuses to ignore inertia and going backwards requires overcoming the forward force. It’s not realistic by any means – the other main movement mechanic is a forward dash that can also be done after jumping – but it helps differentiate the game from peers that had moved away from this handling model by the early ’90s.

Crazy Taxi Crash Course: How to Clear $20,000

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

My recent onslaught of Crazy Taxi posting has caused a lot of my friends to revisit the game and attempt to play for score. Unfortunately, the game can be rather sparse with detail on how its own systems work, and the customer routing element of the game is completely opaque. As I’ve researched this game’s mechanics, both on my own and from watching high-level play, I’ve also noticed that many of the FAQs and guides from around the time of the game’s release have misconceptions or insufficient detail, making them occasionally a hindrance to succeeding rather than a boon. Although I’d like to put together a more complete customer guide in the future, I’ve compiled together enough information here to get you from starter level to the Crazy License rank on the Arcade map without having to memorize sheets of customer information.

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

In the era of Metroidvanias before Super Metroid, a dense world would still take the form of traditional single-directional platformer levels, just interconnected with ability-driven progression. Metroid II looks much the same as you descend down into SR388, wading through pitch-black caverns on your mission to eradicate every remaining Metroid on the planet. At most you’ll walk over a bridge or slide through a gap in the floor, but nothing lets you know the game’s true scope until you obtain the Spider Ball. With Samus now able to roll up walls, the player can start crawling up the outside of the ruins where they obtained the upgrade, revealing a far more vast, coherent structure than the truncated view from the entrance allowed. Probing in the ceiling and the high walls reveals new entrances, with new rooms segregated from the main halls and tunnels through rooms you’ve been through before. The NES forerunners of the Metroidvania pushed up against that system’s rigid scrolling system and tight screen buffer, whereas R&D1 squeezes a much more formidable world out of the Game Boy’s more sophisticated renderer.

Daytona USA

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Sega’s mission statement for the ’90s in a three-track package. Where Ridge Racer points to energetic hard dance and concrete urban environments¹, Sega zagged and descended into full kitsch. Daytona splatters mismatched grotesque fonts all over the interface, drills three-reel slots into a rock overpass on the one course even vaguely related to the NASCAR tracks that inspired the game, and lets cars go lazily flying after head-on collisions only to bounce gently back onto all four wheels. Mitsuyoshi’s soundtrack anchors itself against auxiliary percussion-heavy rhythms relying on dense syncopation reminiscent of batucada, flavoring them with squelchy bass and urgent ninths on retro keys. To build out the sound, Mitsuyoshi liberally samples himself, with the limited clip length giving his voice a robotic tremolo on sustains. And above it all: the blue sky, the brilliant lighting, all against cleanly textured cars deforming like cardboard models. It’s the same look and feel that Sega would carry all the way through the Dreamcast era; no matter how tacky or garish, it’s the essence of their gonzo arcade philosophy.

The Post-CAG Manifesto

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

The era of character action games (CAGs) is over. If Devil May Cry 5 was their final hurrah, Nier: Automata had set the framework for the post-CAG¹ era two years prior. The language of CAGs – launchers, stingers, devil trigger, combos and links – has transformed from a mantra to summon action fundamentals – positioning, tempo, resource management, and crowd control – to the mere suggestion of such. Their aesthetic trappings present the fantasy of excellence without a struggle for competency put forward by their mechanics. Juggles come for free, elaborate animations hide downtime, and enemies sit idle without challenging the player. The scene has finally morphed into shrouded action RPGs.

Strider (2014)

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

A Metroidvania based on an arcade game should instantly ring structural bells, but Strider thankfully opts for an on-rails approach. Strider Hiryu leaps into the Meio Tower to expel its emperor with almost as little fuss as its forebear, and the narrative rarely amounts to more than occasional shady figures giving Hiryu tidbits on how to crush the empire from within. In-game markers drag the player around from area to area with frequent shortcuts cutting down extraneous travel time, and when the player actually has to backtrack, the game spins up new enemy encounters to keep the pace moving. This approach may have been just as much out of necessity as preference, as the game lacks non-combat-related abilities or puzzle potential, and what little exists for hidden items rarely scale past opening an out-of-the-way door with a late-game key.

Overlooked Issues in Game Preservation

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Ziad uploaded a loose video talking about the idea of games preservation, specifically in how people conflate “accessibility” (being able to purchase a game on a modern storefront) with “preservation” (the game existing perpetually in some form or fashion). It covered thoughts I’ve had on this issue for a long time, specifically that being in an almost purely digital medium, we’re at a distinct advantage when it comes to transferring copies of any work. Film and audio preservationists are fighting against analog mediums that degrade upon transfer and with age. Meanwhile, since games can be transferred with no downside¹, creating redundancy by spreading copies of the game as widely as possible provides the best chance of preservation. I’m not holding my breath about letting publishers solve preservation anytime soon, as it’s rare that we get rereleases on modern platforms that match the originals, much less ones that actually improve upon them.²

bit Generations: Coloris

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

While Coloris sits on a match-three foundation, it distinguishes itself from similar titles through a Mizuguchi-esque approach to player-guided sound evolution. With the help of jittery art-pop musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius), the team at Skip layers inputs and playfield updates with scratchy samples, sidechained against an LFO or glazed with brittle reverb. Each square on the playfield decays into garbage when left untouched, and as they get closer to their transformation they pulse quicker and quicker. Lines scroll, dots shimmer, each block’s skin turns itself inside out, bugs crawl across, and leaves fall, each shimmering at an increasing clip until burning out with the gasp of a synth pad sting. At the game’s end, each sound effect comes together into an arrangement of blocks snapping on and off in rhythm as Oyamada presents his overarching composition. Even as the game seems to sputter on its own premise, dialing back the visual flair on the last few stages, the way it coalesces in this finale makes it clear that the campaign serves as a vehicle for sonic ideas. The player has space to contextualize the stems in their own way, pushing through until their final form is revealed.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

While the overall 2D platformer scene died down in the advent of polygonal rendering in the late ’90s, Klonoa quietly inherited the mantle of Yoshi’s Island and brought its slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs into the fifth generation. Much like how Yoshi can ingest enemies to create throwable eggs, Klonoa can capture and inflate enemies, although he can only hold one at a time. This restriction directly feeds into Klonoa’s puzzle design: every obstacle in the environment requires Klonoa to immediately interface with surrounding enemies to get past, unlike Yoshi’s Island, where a persistent “inventory” of eggs trailing Yoshi and a plethora of egg generators let players decouple storage from puzzle solving.

Full Stack of Flapjacks: PS2 Games

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I tend to play a lot of games at once, and recently I’ve been sampling the start of many different games just to keep myself fresh and avoid getting bored with any particular game I’m playing. It also helps that I recently got ethernet streaming set up for my PS2 and have a much wider set of games available for myself. Although I have a list of titles that I’m closer to finishing and will be focusing on those for the time being, here’s some early impressions of a few under-the-radar titles that I know I’ll be returning to in the future.

Odama

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

A group of simulation game experts naively wandering into the arcade domain results in the rich fabric of mechanics combining the best of each genre coming out patchy. The box pitch (yell commands to your troops while you play pinball on the controller) presents the two concepts as separate, but in reality the troop manipulation rarely progresses past keeping up a tempo of pressing your troops forward and rallying them around occasional interactables. Instead, the uneasy alliance between the mighty Odama and your comparatively diminutive troops takes the forefront.

Critique Tips: Examples Using the SSS Model

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In my previous article, I presented my model that I use as a jumping off point for my game analysis. As shown in the figure below, I try to identify the “system,” the “scenario(s),” and the “structure” of each game I play. While I provided some light examples in that article, I wanted to dedicate a full article just to providing examples; I could and probably will write articles diving into more abstract details on each, but examples will get most of those points across better.

Critique Tips: Using the SSS Model

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

One of the first things you’ll likely disentangle as you begin thinking about games in more depth is the difference between “mechanics” and “level design.” For many games, regardless of the particular level or area you’re in, you’re always capable of performing actions from your base toolkit or interacting with enemies in a particular way, but the design of the area will dictate which actions or interactions are useful. However, thinking about this too heavily from the perspective of a given game or genre can cause tangents into the nitty-gritty implementation elements. As I like to start from a abstract reference point, I devised this simple “SSS” model (“system, scenario, and structure”) to frame my analysis.

Strider

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Although the painful gotcha moments and frequent shifts between setpieces may hide it on a blind playthrough, Strider’s main appeal is its movement and handling, which bridge the gap between commitment and fluidity. Main character Hiryu’s moving jump arc is a graceful parabola befitting the fixed movement of something like Castlevania, yet it interfaces with the rest of Hiryu’s kit elegantly thanks to its lack of endlag and gentle buffering. Hiryu can leap backwards to cancel his ground slide, instantly flip off of poles and ledges that he grabs, and rotate mid-jump to slash foes behind him with minimal effort. Learning the ins and outs of how all of these moves interact with each other takes effort thanks to both natural and unnatural restrictions set in place: the inability to jump out of a crouch given that the input makes Hiryu slide makes sense, while some curved ceilings being traversable forward while not backwards is less intuitive. However, learning these interactions gives the players the tools to improvise in navigating level layouts compared to the stricter routing of its ilk, all without the dynamic enemy spawns of contemporaries like Ghouls ’n Ghosts.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

The initial bombast of Unwound Future immediately sets it apart from its two predecessors: a public showing of a time machine goes awry and explodes, taking the prime minister with it as Professor Layton and his soon-to-be emigrating companion Luke observe in horror. A letter from Luke dated 10 years in the future soon arrives at Layton’s office, leading him to a second, functional time machine contained in an antique clock store. Once he and Luke arrive in the future, they find that the future Professor Layton has started an organized crime ring out of London’s Chinatown and taken over the city, with his goons skulking about doling out puzzles to unsuspecting citizens. There’s a puzzle around here where you build a gun that shoots poker chips in the middle of a casino shootout. The escalation continues: Layton’s nemesis (and in a Venture Bros.-esque twist, college classmate) Don Paolo returns, a giant mobile fortress begins destroying London, Layton searches for his up-to-now unseen former lover, and so on.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Diabolical Box instantly has a better sense of scale than the first, with its initial mystery having more personal stakes for Layton and its starting train ride setpiece giving way to multiple locales compared to Curious Village’s single tight area. You’re given much more room to stretch your legs, and the second half of the game alone feels like it’s the same size as the entirety of St. Mystere. The multiple mysteries in this one also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than meandering through as in Curious Village. At the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover’s bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. An examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it’s conveyed entirely through history lessons and Layton’s personal observations, and the writers’ preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes.

Don't Flip The Doom Card

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Link to the game on Newgrounds.

Games of Concentration are exactly what the name implies: brute-force memorization of a playfield of face-down cards with no optimizing heuristic. Don’t Flip The Doom Card uses this as its basis, but manages to weave in actual antagonists: “doom cards” (printed with a skull and an ominous black flame behind them) that will move across the board on each flip by exchanging itself with another card. While flipping one at any point instantly reshuffles the field and docks you a heart, you can see a skid mark between their previous and current position, and your initial flip of each turn also shows the contents of the spaces around you. With that boon in play, the actual base memorization is simple; the real challenge is finding ways to trap the doom cards by surrounding them with matched, face-up pairs.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

The Professor Layton series takes the scaffolding from Japanese adventure games – screen-by-screen navigation while conversing with static characters placed within each area – to contextualize a deep collection of puzzles. Professor Layton and the Curious Village, the first entry, lays groundwork for the following entries without coming off as too raw. The opening sets the tone: Layton and his precocious sidekick Luke must locate St. Mystere, a town holding an heirloom known as the “Golden Apple” that will grant its finder the whole of the late Baron Reinhold’s estate. As they discuss directions, the player must solve a simple map “maze” contextualized by a restriction (the path chosen must only lead to a single town). As they approach the town’s entrance in the thin and stalky Laytonmobile (tall enough for Layton to wear his top hat inside), a person from across the moat surrounding the town explains that he can’t lower the drawbridge without knowing which slot his crank works in. The player must use some basic spatial reasoning to figure out which one of three holes the crank can fit in, knowing that the protrusions on the crank will be visually flipped when inserted into the slot. This is the ostensible formula: progress the narrative until the protagonists run into a conundrum and then solve a puzzle based on the circumstance.

Polarium Advance

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This strange late-era Game Boy Advance release was developed simultaneously with a DS release the year prior. Each game features tiles on a playfield that must be color-matched per row by drawing a line that flips all tiles beneath it. Although the two games seem structurally different, this Advance release is effectively an elaboration of the DS game’s static puzzle mode, with the arcade-style falling block variant discarded. Perhaps this was an acknowledgement of the shift in tactility between the consoles, as the smooth winning strokes made with a stylus on DS were translated to non-continuous d-pad inputs on GBA. A time attack mode attempts to add a speed element back into the game, but it boils down merely to solving a set of puzzles back-to-back as quickly as possible.

Cursed Mountain

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0500

It’s Eurojank Resident Evil 4 for sure, but given the near immediate shift away from that particular third-person shooter paradigm in the post-Gears era, it’s sweet to see a lesser-known game attempt the style. Not that it holds a candle to its predecessor; you can’t move while shooting, but you also don’t have ammo to worry about for your paltry assortment of mystic weapons, and the vast majority of encounters throw one or two enemies at you with no confounding factors beyond that. Still, the game has merit on its environmental design alone, trapping the player in vicious sheets of ice and gusts of oxygen-starved wind in a rare mountaineering horror concept. The start is slow while protagonist Eric Simmons explores evacuated Tibetan monasteries at lower altitudes, but by the second half the barren slopes of Chomo Lonzo envelop the player in blinding whiteness and sullen caverns. The mountain’s name translates to “bird goddess,” and as it lashes out as you it deploys decaying avian forms that judder and blink as they pursue you. Few horror games visually capture suffocation like this.

Super Mario 64 Has Aged

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The first volley is always “It’s aged poorly!” You can envision the scene: probably five or six “|” separators in the bio, perhaps with a “19 | minors DNI,” pfp drawn from the seasonal anime in vogue, 10,000 favs, and a replies section littered with “never understood the hype for this one” and “the later ones are so much better.” I get it; it’s annoying. If you are someone who gives old games their due (and perhaps even prefers them to newer games), then seeing someone write off an old classic because of an unwillingness to engage with a game that lacks the conventions of modernity can feel like a rejection of the retro era as a whole. It’s disheartening to see small roadblocks keep a younger generation from experiencing what were once life-changing works.

State Space Analysis from the Player Perspective: Complexity and Exploration

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Note: This is the first in a four part series that builds off a previous piece I wrote regarding state space representations of video games. I would recommend you read that piece first.

In my previous piece, I laid out a framework for modeling games as “state spaces,” or minimal representations of the game’s variables at a particular time during play. In the context of this post, I focused on developing a state space for any given game in the abstract, effectively creating a perfect representation of the game’s mechanical interactions. However, doing this in practice is effectively impossible; even highly truncated state spaces for a given game are vast and difficult to document accurately. This follow-up series will discuss how players perceive the state space of a given game and how that influences the way we characterize said games.

Using State Space Representations of Game Design to Evaluate Mechanical Design

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Celia Wagar has written frequently about a “state” representation of games in posts such as this general description of game state and this more in-depth discussion of gameplay depth. In the latter, she explicitly floats the idea of reducing the state space of a game in order to analyze its depth. Let’s expand upon this: how can we use a state space representation of a game as an evaluation tool for its mechanics?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Me

Hi, I go by pang. I’ve been writing video game critique since about 2020; first just for myself, then on Backloggd, and then on Cohost. I jump between review styles pretty frequently, but most of my work focuses on mechanical analysis. You’ll often find me playing or writing about the following:

Late ’90s / Early ’00s titles
Action / Puzzle hybrids
Survival Horror games
Arcade Rhythm games
Obscure Japanese games

Day-to-day I work as a computer science professor at an east coast liberal arts college. In my research I study dependable systems (primarily civil air safety), and when in my teaching I cover software engineering and system architecture. These topics come up in my writing occasionally; I try to take a systematic approach to game critique (a fancy way of saying that I look at how different components function together to create particular gameplay experiences).