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.

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.