Super Castlevania IV

June 18, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory

June 4, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru

May 30, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

Lumines

May 22, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Bad Dream

May 13, 2025 - 10 mins read

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.

Banishing Racer

May 10, 2025 - 3 mins read

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.

Metroid II: Return of Samus

April 15, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Daytona USA

April 11, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

Strider (2014)

April 3, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

bit Generations: Coloris

March 16, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.