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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.