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.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile

March 11, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

First Impressions: PS2 Games

March 4, 2025 - 5 mins read

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

February 24, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

Strider

February 7, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

February 4, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

January 22, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Don't Flip The Doom Card

January 13, 2025 - 3 mins read

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.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

January 8, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.