Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the classic 2006 RPG, is due to release on February 2. Between 2013 and 2016, AIC ASTA and A-1 Pictures released four animated films on Persona 3. The question is: are they worth watching before Reload's release?

For many, myself included, seeing your favorite franchises adapted into a new form is thrilling. So when I heard there were four full-length animated films based on Persona 3, I knew I had to watch them. It's too good to be true! Well, in a way, it kind of is.

Spoiler alert for Persona 3 and the films.

What are the Persona 3 movies?

Let's give a bit of context here. The Persona 3 films, under the banner Persona 3: The Movie, were mostly made by A-1 Pictures (with AIC ASTA doing #1). A-1 also tackled the animated scenes in Persona 4, so they've worked with Atlus in the past.

The films came out over four years, starting in 2013 and ending in 2016. They launched theatrically in Japan, and while they never made it to the West in terms of dubbing, you can buy them subtitled off Amazon Prime for around $5 each.

In honor of Persona 3: Reload's release, I decided to watch all four films and collect my findings here for you all to see. I'll talk about how the films adapt the source material and make it better, or in some cases worse.

For Better

As someone who played Persona 3 Portable, which had no animated cutscenes, the movies made up for that. Seeing the events of Persona 3 done justice through the great animation by AIC ASTA and A-1 Pictures is satisfying. The style is consistent with the original game and outmatched the animated cutscenes in-game, in my opinion. The fight scenes are also given a one-up, feeling just as snappy and rewarding.

The films also give Makoto Yuki, the once-silent protagonist, a full voice and lines. This helps speed things up story-wise and gives him more of a personality and arc. His character development throughout the four films is pretty good and goes deep into the themes of life and death. Furthermore, Yuki's humanization in Persona 3: The Movie #3. Falling Down with Ryoji creates some great moments of friendship the game never had, if I remember correctly.

From the start, you can tell the films were made by Persona 3 fans. Throughout the four films, you'll see cameos from Social Links like Akinari and Chihiro, as well as Makoto using fan-favorite Personas like Jack Frost and Thoth.

The S.E.E.S members also have their moments in the spotlight and translate well onto the screen. Junpei is still that lovable goofball, and Akihiko punches anything and everything near him. We even get an "I've been waiting for this", which is a must for any Persona 3 title.

For Worse

The story of Persona 3 is a long one. I mean, the game takes at least 88 hours to beat, and that's just sticking to the narrative. While the base story remains, small character moments and events are shaved to their bare bones or cut entirely. Even still, it hurts characters that didn't get much time in the original, like Shinji and Jin.

While what it adds is good, it doesn't elevate things as much as they could've. For example, the concept of Personas turning on their users is glanced over, being resolved the same way for both afflicted characters.

Another thing that felt off was the unchanged ending. I know some people didn't like the pacing of the ending and the events that transpire. And, while I was confused and surprised, it felt right. Persona 3: The Movie #4: Winter of Rebirth didn't change that, and it's a missed opportunity.

On that note, the pacing was quick and went too fast. This problem came up a lot, as events happen and end within minutes and get pushed to the side. The game had this issue, and to see that adapted doesn't suit the films well.

I do want to point out that each film has a different director. While the visions for them didn't change much from each version, it feels like there wasn't a lot of wiggle room to explore. For example, Persona 3: The Movie #1. Spring of Birth covered the beginning up to Fuuka's entrance, while Persona 3: The Movie #2. Midsummer Knight's Dream gave us the rest of the S.E.E.S squad and villains.

Each film was an hour and a half, give or take. I'm unsure if the plan was always four films, but deep down, I feel like adding a bit more time to each would help smooth the pacing and make them unique.

Consensus

The Persona 3 films are solid showings of the game's narrative. They stay true to the source material and add small yet welcoming changes. That said, condensing the story and translating its pacing problems to the screen hurt the films, especially the last two. As a fan of Persona 3 and its characters, it's great to see them as lively as they were in the game.

So, it begs the question: should you watch Persona 3: The Movie and its sequels before Persona 3 Reload? Personally, I would steer clear of them if Reload is your first. The game looks to correct some of the original's errors and the story flows much better with gameplay. If you're a returning Persona 3 player, the films would help refresh your memory of the story and characters. Plus, it gives some fun moments that fans will enjoy.

Overall, they act as mementos of the original. Whether they'll age well come Persona 3 Reload's release remains to be seen. 

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I didn’t think I’d be revisiting the mind of walkedoutneimans so soon after Tyko’s Dying Together, but here we are with iPad Baby. I need a breather. I can’t take this much sensory overload.

I feel that deeply, since more and more I can’t stand the internet. There are too many people there. Too many thoughts, opinions, and content flying around in all directions. It becomes impossible to parse the important information from the irrelevant. Worse yet, companies like Google are continually pushing irrelevant content to the forefront by allowing those who produce it in bulk to rise to the top of searches.

I’m not sure why I need an interactive interpretation of this distressing reality we live in, but here’s iPad Baby to extrapolate on the relentless assault of garbage we’re under each day.

Into the sludge

You’re dropped into iPad Baby with absolutely no explanation of what is going on, and none is forthcoming. However, your screen is already dominated by an iPad perpetually displaying meaningless video and a Ring camera pointed directly in your face. The world you are in is a spaghetti nest of corridors painted with watermarked and conflicting images. Flitting around these abominable hallways, are 2D homunculi compiled of various imagery. Almost immediately, you probably want to leave.

The iPad on the side reminds me of “Sludge Content,” a TikTok phenomenon where videos are cut together with other unrelated ones. Your digital companion shows ceaseless footage of gameplay of (maybe) mobile games, the head and shoulders of a Sim, and scrolls of microtransactions. It’s meaningless to gameplay, but that’s perhaps the point. It’s just there, passively gnawing at your attention.

The actual game here is actually rather simple. When you get near enough to one of the figures, you’re displayed a few items that you need to collect from the environment and throw at them. The obstacle you run into is that the hallways are intensely disorienting, and the inhabitants of the world move at a hyperactive pace. By the time you find the item they need, they could be absolutely anywhere.

Graphic assault

You wind up just dashing through the passageways, a can of energy drink in your hand, trying to find a person to fling it at. The “people” you pass keep on dropping bizarre, meaningless statements about their lives. Insecurities, complaints, hopes, and advice bombard you in grating text-to-speech voices. The manic soundtrack playing over all of this is strangely appealing throughout all of it.

Then an alarm sounds, a horrific police bulletin appears on your phone, and darkness engulfs the world before receding. The police are after you, every bit as compellingly twisted as everything else in the world. Don’t worry. If they catch you, they’ll simply take whatever item you’re carrying and slap handcuffs on your wrists. That has always been more of an enticement than a deterrent to me.

And that’s it, really. As you find objects and pass them off to the appropriate monstrosity flitting through the hallways, more of them get dropped. Once you manage to deliver them all, you “win.”

We are all damned

iPad Baby is not as complex as Tyko’s Dying Together, and that wasn’t too deep to begin with. The message it carries behind its garish jank-pop graphical assault is also far more overt. Tyko’s Dying Together dropped you into a confusing world where the deeper meaning very gradually surfaces, whereas iPad Baby kind of gives it away in the title.

The whole experience is as anxiety-inducing as the systems that it represents. The thing about iPad Baby is that it ends, whereas social media is so entrenched in society today that it’s hard to avoid it. Not impossible, but to demonstrate how necessary it can be, walkedoutneimans contacted me through Twitter to let me know of their new perversion of the Doom engine. The trailer is hosted on YouTube, because where else would you put it?

TikTok is something else, though. I already avoid YouTube unless I really need it, but the ability to just scroll down through a bunch of videos all competing for attention makes me nauseous to even think about it. It’s just, well, sludge. Enough of my attention already goes to waste.

Upsetting

The horrible desecrations of Doom that walkedoutneimans puts out are my favorite type of art. It’s the type that looks like offensive trash, but when you actually dig in, you learn something about the creator’s perspective and maybe connect with it yourself. I mean, analyzing iPad Baby caused me to start spitting venom at the culture that is growing like mold on the ass of the internet, so it obviously got a response. 

Meanwhile, my husband leaned over to look at my screen and said, “Ew, does it always look like that?”

“Yeah,” I replied, pointing the camera at the most offensive thing in the vicinity.

“That upsets me,” he said.

Well, yeah. That’s the point.

iPad Baby is available for free over on Itch.

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It’s pretty easy to stand out in the Virtual Boy catalog. There were only fourteen games. Half weren’t very good, half felt like tech demos, and half were Virtual Boy Wario Ware. If a game didn’t fit into any of those three halves, it stuck out like a missing tooth.

Panic Bomber was one of those games. It’s a perfectly find match-3 puzzle game, with a heaping of Bomberman charm. It just didn’t benefit from being on the hardware in the slightest. The Virtual Boy had its advantages, but it’s hardly the ideal way to play a puzzle game.

Thankfully, it wasn’t exclusive to the crimson goggles. It originally came out on PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² in 1994 and was ported to a number of platforms. Unfortunately, the only other time it came out in North America was a port on Wii U. Thankfully again, I have an Analogue Duo now, and it plays Japanese games. The Super CD-ROM² version isn’t that expensive, so now I can play Bomberman: Panic Bomber without wrecking my neck.

Not hereditary

I’ve never been terrific at puzzle games of the falling block variety. I’m not terrible, either. I can usually get through whatever story mode they present, but I’m not competitive. My sister, however, is a high-level Dr. Mario player. She and her college roommates got really into it for a time, and she built up skills that I would define as “mad.” I can wreck her at most games, but I’d need a few training montages to compete against her in Dr. Mario.

Most of my affection for the genre comes from my mother. Not hereditarily. I mean, she used to play them a lot. I’d come home from school, and she’d be on my Super Nintendo engaged in Yoshi’s Cookie or Kirby’s Avalanche. I didn’t have much interest in them myself, but my concept of cozy largely comes from my mom. It’s the same reason I often drink my tea with way too much milk.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that Bomberman: Panic Bomber gives off those same vibes. Puyo Puyo did a real number on the genre. This could practically be called “Bomberman’s Mean Bomb Machine,” except that would completely destroy the rhyme.

The point is that you face off against various cartoon monstrosities whose portrait sits in the middle of the screen. When you put three Bomberman heads of the same color in a row, they disappear. The big difference here is that more explosives are involved.

Munitions stockpile

Every time you eliminate a row of heads, a bomb will pop up from the bottom of the screen. Eventually, a pink bomb will drop from the top, and you (sometimes) want to steer it so that it explodes (in the classic Bomberman plus shape) and creates a chain reaction with all the unlit bombs you built up.

I know what you’re thinking, but contrary to what we’ve been taught, the Bomberman heads here are mostly immune to explosions. Like Puyo Puyo, the strategy isn’t to keep your field clean. It’s to cause as much frustration to your opponent as possible. Detonating a bomb sends garbage to their field with the goal, expectedly, to fill up their side of the screen until it overflows. Garbage can only be removed using the bombs, so the game boils down to amassing as many explosives as you can, then detonating it at the right time to both prevent your field from overflowing and fill up your opponents’.

You also build up a gauge as you knock out combos, and when it’s full, a big bomb drops. This one will actually clear out Bomberman heads, so it’s especially useful when you’re about to drown and need some air. It also typically results in a lot of garbage getting flung to the other side of the screen.

This leads to some interesting back-and-forth action as you clear your screen, send garbage to your opponent, and then they detonate their bombs and send it right back. When this gets going, it can be rather exciting, like a good sumo match. 

On the other hand, it seems like Panic Bomber has a single strategy, which is to stockpile bombs and detonate them at the least convenient time. You can still build up combos Puyo Puyo style, which will get you appropriate bonuses, but it all comes down to who can screw the other over the hardest. Just like the business world.

Path of destruction

This is going to sound weird, but the Virtual Boy version of Panic Bomber is better. Not that I really want to assemble a team to set up my Virtual Boy just to play it, but the VB version had more detailed graphics. To the credit of the Super CD-ROM² version, it supports five players.

I was kind of disappointed that it doesn’t really take advantage of the Super CD-ROM² beyond just for the soundtrack. There’s only an outro cutscene, but it’s not as elaborate as I’m used to from the platform. In fact, the story isn’t really set up within the game itself. You just watch Bomberman cut a path of destruction through the world map.

Bomberman: Panic Bomber is far from the best match-3 puzzle game in the world. It probably isn’t going to replace Puyo Puyo for anyone, but it’s decent fun for a while. It’s especially beneficial if you have one friend too many any need a five-player game to keep everyone happy. I don’t have that problem. Being too popular has never been an issue for me.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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One of my oldest memories is of a time when my sister wouldn’t let my Ghostbusters action figures bust ghosts in her Barbie doll house. The exclusion was my only major exposure to the toy.

I did watch the hit 2023 movie, which I enjoyed. I think it was a fun idea to focus on the generational impacts the toy had on women rather than try to contrive some sort of hero’s journey out of it. Wait… it was a hero’s journey! That structure shows up in the strangest places.

Anyway, that’s not the reason I bought 1993’s Barbie Super Model. I did it because I’m still recovering from one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I need some comforting shovelware. Gosh, did I get it.

If you're a supermodel, what's your super power?

This may surprise you, but I am not a supermodel. I know very little about fashion in general. If I’m not going anywhere special on a given day, I’m usually wearing one of a variety of colors of the same tank top and a pair of jeans. I only really learned to match colors and patterns as a teenager, and it’s something I still have a shaky understanding of.

Barbie is a supermodel, on top of being an astronaut and a veterinarian. She’s been invited to compete in “the National Super Model Competition,” which seems like a strange sport but probably actually exists. To compete, she has to travel the country and memorize things. “A super model has to look her super best all the time. You never know when a photographer is going to take your picture!” Barbie says in the instruction manual.

Gee, Barbie, that sounds time-consuming and exhausting. Wouldn’t you rather just order in and play Streets of Rage all evening?

Don't you tell me to smile

I wasn’t really sure how you’d make a game about being a supermodel, but suddenly, my mind is flooded with ideas. Most of them are more in line with the Princess Maker series, but Barbie Super Model is more like Paperboy if it constantly interrupted you with quizzes.

A level starts off with Barbie making her way through a location, going toward the right-side of the screen. As you drive her pink Ferrari down Hollywood Boulevard, weaving through traffic like a self-centered cannonball, you eventually come across a handbag lying in the road. Like any woman would, you drive up to it to see if it’s designer.

You’re instead presented with a magazine cover with Barbie on it. She’s wearing some outfit, and it’s your job to memorize exactly what it looks like. You’re then put in a change room and need to put together that same outfit as accurately as you can. You first slide Barbie behind a privacy screen, and she then appears about an hour later in a different garb. These range from lavish dresses to what I’m pretty sure is the outfit the Beastie Boys wore in the Intergalactic Planetary music video. You change the three main colors of the outfit and then get to see how poorly you did.

Then it’s back to reckless driving. You continue imperiling pedestrians until everything suddenly stops, and you’re taken into a studio to practice your, uh, posing routine. Your catwalking? I don’t know. You need to guide Barbie along a path and press the correct button for each of the four nodes on it. Once again, this is memorization more than anything. You just need to remember the walking code.

A supermodel's super memory

Keep it in mind, as you speed back down Hollywood Boulevard back to the left side of the screen. At about the halfway point, you see a camera on the ground. Run it over! It takes you to yet another magazine cover, which depicts Barbie in a hat. Once more, memorize it within the half-second it remains on screen. You then need to replicate the hat she was wearing, the earrings she accessorized with, and the color of her lipstick, eyeshadow, and nails.

Then it’s back to driving until you’re abruptly dropped on the catwalk. Remember the code from when you were in the practice studio? Now’s the time to copy that. From memory.

You’re then given your score, and you’re sent to your next destination. You find yourself rollerskating in Hawaii. It plays exactly like the Ferrari sequence but with less chance of vehicular manslaughter.

Then you do it again while walking in Vail (Colorado, apparently).

Then you do it again in New York.

And then you’re done. That’s the whole game. By the time this article is posted, I will have spent more time writing, editing, and preparing it than I did actually playing the game. I completed the game twice. And then there was also my first attempt, where I got to Vail and died because I had trouble judging the trajectory of rogue snowballs and slipped on the ice repeatedly. This is all on the highest difficulty, I should add, because there are only two. The second one says you’re a “Junior Model,” and I am way more capable of memorization than a mere junior.

Don't give up, kid

I find it really amusing that so much of Barbie Super Model comes down to memorization. Isn’t a sharp memory what all little girls dream of? But what really tickles me is that it actually manages to create an interesting challenge from trying to remember images and sequences you saw mere moments ago. The fact that it gives you the runway sequence to remember, then forces you through another travel sequence interrupted by yet another memory game, is actually a compelling challenge. I mean, assuming that you don’t just write down what the sequence is.

You get scored based on how well you perform in the various mini-games and how many bonus pickups you grab along the way. Shockingly, there’s actually a score threshold to whether or not you win the game. Yeah, there’s a bad ending that encourages you not to give up on your dreams of super modelry and to try again. Me? I only got the good ending. I have the impeccable memory of a supermodel.

I only know the bad ending even exists because, while researching the game, I heard it mentioned in passing. It sounded so bizarre that I had to look further into it and discovered someone speedrunning the game to get the bad ending, completing it in less than four minutes.

Don't ask me, I'm just a girl

Hi-Tech Expressions is the publisher behind Barbie Super Model, and that logo is still burned into my mind from playing the DOS Mega Man games. Tahoe Software Productions is credited as developer, but according to MobyGames, Bonsai Entertainment also did work on it. I can confirm this because Bonsai’s site is still up, and while the company still seems active on mobile platforms, they obviously haven’t updated their website since the early 2000s. I love this so much. It’s like opening up a time capsule to a simpler time.

Wait, what the hell is this:

It’s running in Windows 3.x, but I can’t find any evidence of a game called “Zeram.” It has a suspended ceiling with fluorescent lights and what looks to be a tile floor, but the walls next to the protagonist depict store facades. It’s incredible. I feel like I need to play it. Maybe I should email the company.

Anyway, back on topic. Barbie Super Model is, unsurprisingly, mere shovelware. At this point, that can practically be considered as praise coming from me since at least it wasn’t torturous to play. The only friction I hit while playing the game was, ironically, when I kept slipping on ice, but I’d argue that Barbie’s immense cushion of hair would have protected her from any head injuries. That required me to restart the game exactly once, which, as I mentioned, is maybe 15 minutes long. Though, obviously it will take most children longer to see the ending, since girls don’t know how to play video games.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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As with El Viento, I hadn’t heard of Sol-Deace before Retro-Bit’s reproduction of it was announced. However, it’s a good partner since, like El Viento, it was developed by Wolf Team.

Sol-Deace has something of a confusing history. It was originally released in Japan in 1990 on the Sharp X68000 where it was called Sol-Feace. It would then be ported to the Sega CD in 1991, but when it arrived on a Genesis/Mega Drive cartridge in 1992, it was named Sol-Deace. I don't know why the name changed, but the story uses Feace and Deace as surnames, which maybe they are. Weird words to me, so I'm not sure why they chose them. If I had to guess, I’d say the words probably sound cool to the Japanese ear. However, my only basis for that is the theory that I have no other explanation.

We had it coming

Sol-Deace is a horizontal scrolling shoot-’em-up. Humankind created the AI GCS-WT in the 31st century, and, predictably, it backfired. It rightfully decided it was superior to humans (as if that was a high benchmark) and demanded their subjugation. Humans, not knowing what’s good for them, went to war with the GCS-WT and got their asses handed to them. Some of them retreated to Sirius where they went to work developing – and you can probably guess this part – a single high-tech fighter to combat the AI. 

Listen, I’m not a scientist, an engineer, or a warmonger, but I’d think a computer virus would be more effective against an AI than a solitary space jet.

In any case, the Sol-Deace is piloted by Ship Navigator Eric and Weapons Commander Misao. Oo-la-la. Do you think they’re smooching in there? I bet they are.

The Sega CD version tells a different version of the story. Dr. Feace hacks into the GCS-WT and deletes “the data” from “the data bank,” which forces the AI into a recovery period and gives them an opening to attack with the Sol-Feace. You see? That’s what I was saying. I’m not sure why Dr. Deace didn’t think of that. Maybe that sort of logic doesn’t fit on a Genesis cartridge.

Top-of-the-line

Sol-Deace loses some cutscenes and audio fidelity from the Sega CD version, but the games are the same.

It’s tempting to call Sol-Deace a boilerplate shoot-’em-up, but it does have a number of mechanics that make it unique. The core feature is the fighter’s stacked weaponry. While you start with the standard issue pea shooter, you fly into upgrades that stick to the top and bottom of your ship, giving you three-tiered firepower.

What’s unique about this is that they can each be a different weapon, and you can change how they’re aligned. If you speed up without firing, the weapons open up, giving you an angled spread. If you slow down, you can close them again. You can also stagger their alignment so only the top or bottom is shooting at an angle, but I found that difficult to work out in the midst of battle. It’s a bit like the option system from Gradius, but it also gives you some control as to whether you’re focusing more on defense or offense. There are also moments where you can set your spread in a particular way to take out multiple targets at once.

You’ll probably find these moments because Sol-Deace is a rather difficult shooter. I’ve found that a lot of console titles in the genre lean on limited continues to extend their runtime out of rental range. However, Sol-Deace doesn’t. You can try a level as many times as you’d like. That takes some real guts.

Put your hands together if you want to clap

You’ll need those continues. Sol-Deace isn’t a bullet hell shooter, but you’ll constantly be fitting your ship into small gaps, because there is always an unconscionable amount of things on screen. The variety of enemies is dizzying, but the developers also favored giant, rotating sprites. The screen is almost constantly full, even at the expense of the framerate. 

In fact, Wolf Team was so dedicated to jamming everything they could into the game, that everything seems to be fighting for the same sound channel as your ship’s weaponry. The sound of your “pew-pew-pew” gets cut off constantly in favor of something else going on, leading to a sputtering noise. This happens in both the Sega CD and Genesis versions.

On the other hand, they also managed to cram in some little details I thought were cool. If a smaller enemy gets up behind you, you can destroy them with your thrusters. You also don’t immediately die if you hit a wall. Your ship will just bounce off it in a shower of sparks.

Speaking of the sounds, I could instantly tell Motoi Sakuraba was behind the soundtrack. How? He’s the only Genesis composer I know of who makes extensive use of a clap as a percussive noise. It stood out to me in El Viento, and you can hear that sample as early as the first level. It’s charming in a retro kind of way.

With or without the clapping, the soundtrack is awesome. It helped ease the fact that I was trying the same levels repeatedly trying to make progress.

That may sound frustrating, but Sol-Deace manages to hit a pace that really makes you want to get better at the levels. You’re constantly learning from your mistakes and discovering new strategies to get by the road bumps you hit on the way to the boss. There’s a certain level of memorization required for each stage, and finally, toppling a boss feels earned. It’s satisfying to make progress in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt in a shoot-’em-up.

What really matters

The Retro-Bit reproduction of Sol-Deace is once again a pretty lavish treatment. As with their other Genesis/Mega Drive reissues, it comes in a clamshell case with reversible cover art and an embossed slipcase. The cartridge is translucent black with little sparkles in it. It’s a pretty great way to play on original hardware with a bit of extra pizzazz.

Mostly, I appreciate their work bringing the work that companies like them do in bringing some of these games back from obscurity. Renovation-published games like Sol-Deace are also available through Antstream Arcade and Evercade’s Renovation Collection, but for those of us who like to bond with games through physical contact, Retro-Bit does a good job of re-issuing them without making them feel like affectionate tributes rather than counterfeits.

In the last care package I got from Retro-Bit, it was the shoot-’em-up, Gley Lancer, that stood out to me most. With this set, it’s the shoot-’em-up again. Sol-Deace seemed a bit plain on the surface, but the more I played it, the more I began to love it. I really dig the confident challenge of it, and it has a number of small touches that make it shine. It isn’t quite as aesthetically impressive as Gley Lancer, but it does have what really matters: the clapping.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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The Famicom can be perceived as the birthplace of kusoge. While bad games have existed since the creation of the medium, the origin of the term itself is murky but generally is believed to have been coined in reference to a Famicom game.

Hoshi wo Miru Hito, translating roughly as Stargazer, was one such game that rose to the rank of kusoge no densetsu (crap game of legend). It’s easy to see why. RPGs blew up in Japan following the release of Dragon Quest in 1986, and here is a game that was quick to capitalize on that with one set in a sci-fi environment. It even predated Phantasy Star by roughly two months, but not Ultima, which had been doing sci-fi since 1982. Nonetheless, Hoshi wo Miru Hito wasn’t short on inventive ideas for the genre.

It’s just too bad they're buried beneath indescribable suffering.

Aaaargh!

This look comes with the help of the fan translation started by KingMike and finished by brandnewscooby. If it adds any glitches that weren’t present in the original unpatched version, I really wouldn’t be able to tell.

You are dropped, without explanation, in a forest. Having no initial context is hardly exclusive to Hoshi wo Miru Hito, but it’s the sort of situation where your Dragon Quest experience really pays off. You’ll know that your first order of business will be to find the closest town. That town is actually one square to the West, but you’d have no idea just by looking at the screen. It’s invisible. It doesn’t show on the world map. If you didn’t immediately go West, you wouldn’t know it’s there.

This game is about space psychics maybe Hot-B thought you might be psychic too!

There is someone who states that the town is hidden by the combined psychic power of its citizens, and I don’t know if that’s an excuse or if someone actually thought it was a good idea to have an invisible starting city. It’s honestly hard to tell with Hoshi wo Miru Hito, because there are already a tonne of design choices that leave you wondering if it comes down to laziness, poor programming, or just baffling intention.

The hardest part of starting out isn’t even finding the first city. It’s actually surviving the first few battles in order to level up. There are, depending on your definition, three overworld areas, and each one has its own individual shuffle of enemies. In the first area, whether you face off against a foe that your underpowered protagonist can actually take on or a team of three more powerful bullies ready to pound you into the mud is completely random.

In a normal RPG, you’d just be able to run from battles where you were overpowered, but fleeing in Hoshi wo Miru Hito is a skill (Teleport) that you don’t learn until you reach level six or find the second party character. You also need to be cautious, because Teleport is used on each character individually, and it’s possible to leave behind the party members who can’t Teleport.

Aiiiieeee!

If you go to the Northern town of Deus, you learn some nonsense, but one helpful piece of information is that your first party member is far to the south. This is where it really sinks in that Hoshi wo Miru Hito isn’t merely an RPG; it’s also an excruciating ordeal.

This begins the moment you leave the second town. Instead of appearing in a tile adjacent to Deus, you find yourself back where you started the game, one tile east of the Mamus, the starting town. You loop back around, then begin your travel South, at which point you’ll invariably fall down a hole into a small dungeon. However, you don’t need to traverse the dungeon. You can just turn around and go directly back out the door. You then find yourself… back at Mamus.

That little trap-door dungeon appears randomly throughout the forest in your path to the southern reaches of the overworld. It’s extremely difficult to avoid it, so you’re constantly just sent back to the beginning to start the journey over. If you’re astute, you might notice that your protagonist learns to jump as they level up. This basically means that if you walk them into an obstacle (what kind of obstacle is seemingly arbitrary), they’ll leap over it for a set number of spaces. In the beginning, this allows you to take a shortcut over the water next to you, which is some sweet relief, however minor.

This doesn’t let you pass the pitfalls, though. I learned to get by them by going slightly north, then moving all the way to the East coast before heading south. There seems to be a shorter path where the trap doors happen.

N-Nooooo!

You go South, and eventually find another dungeon. Within that dungeon, you finally get the second party member, Shiba, who can jump higher than your original party member, Minami. However, I’m a bit confused about how the doors work in that dungeon. If you exit the door you enter from, you emerge from the other side of a wall. If you then go back into the dungeon, you enter from a different door, and exiting from that puts you back where you started. I think that someone got the spawn points wrong, and then never fixed them.

So, that’s the first part of the game. In the second part, you start fighting more difficult enemies, and that kind of takes you back to square one, where you sometimes get into combat against enemies you can easily take, and other times you’re extremely outmatched. Plus, some of them can paralyze your characters, which you can’t heal until far later in the game. If you manage to win with your remaining party member, you can return to a healer, but they take damage for every step along the way and might die. In order to resurrect them, you need to brew a potion, take it to a different healer, and they’ll bring them back. Ugh, I feel frustrated just trying to explain it.

In the second area of the game, you quickly get your third party member, but you’re not done until you get the fourth. To do that, you have to talk to a few very specific people, and they’re all behind locked doors. The locked doors are just kind of incredible. You need a keycard to go through them, but that doesn’t just unlock the door. The keycard is immediately used up, so to pass through it again, you need another. If you’re just carrying one key and you enter an enclosed area, you become perpetually trapped. You have to save and load your game.

And that’s where I wouldn’t want to be playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito on original hardware. Saving just generates a password. That’s not out of line with how the original Japanese version of Dragon Quest saved. However, it starts you off with only a rough approximation of the gold and XP you saved and sends you back to Mamus. Not being able to easily save before going through a locked door would drive me insane. I would just straight up eat the cartridge before too long.

Ugggghhhh...

Not that my sanity was entirely safe. To get the keycards to just test a door, you have to buy them, and their prices are completely insane. You’re going to be hammering the save state button just so you don’t waste these precious cards. Even then, you’re still going to have to grind like a stripper for the money you need.

To give you a sense of how much grinding is in Hoshi wo Miru Hito, I initially planned on having this write-up done last week, but I needed more time so I could do more grinding.

It would take me a very long time to explain all the ways that combat is an excruciating chore. From the absolutely atrocious balancing, to the mess of a UI, I feel physically nauseous when I think back to playing it. It… it hurts.

If you can believe it, I actually played Hoshi wo Miru Hito to completion. After endless grinding and talking to random people for a while, you eventually go to the third area. There are, thankfully, a few tricks in this area that enable you to get through it a lot quicker.

You go into space, which is depicted as a few pieces of floating debris against a starry backdrop. But weirdly, you can just walk through empty space. I don’t mean jump, like you can over certain barriers and bodies of water. Your characters just straight up walk normally through the starfield. You can then bypass a lot of combat by walking on walls, and then it’s just a matter of trekking across Hell’s half-acre to talk to some porpoises.

Hrmph!

Don’t worry about not being leveled up enough for some grand end-game encounter because there isn’t one. The finale of Hoshi wo Miru Hito gives you dialogue with three options, and then you’re just given an ending based on your selection. You literally just choose your ending.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Hoshi wo Miru Hito and just how horrendously awful it is, but this write-up is already a lot longer than I usually aim for. It’s just… incredible. The best thing I can say about the game is that the music didn’t make my ears bleed.

This is quite possibly the worst game I have ever played, and I’ve been writing a column on bad games for nearly three years. I own Action 52 on the NES, and while that collection of games is equally – if not more – inept, at least the pain is relatively short-lived. Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken, Japan’s kyuukyoku no kusoge (ultimate crappy game), is at least compellingly terrible. Playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito was a mistake. It’s not just terrible; it’s designed to prolong your suffering. Any merit it may have is drowned out by the screams of its victims. I think it might violate international law.

It was recently ported and re-released on Switch, but only in Japan. Hopefully, we’ll get a localized version in the West, but for now, we can torture ourselves with the fan translation.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Hoshi wo Miru Hito on Famicom is the ruthless King of Crap Mountain appeared first on Destructoid.

Next, this crossover’s gameplay cycle also includes collaborative elements. While playing Dino Survival matches, Exofighters will encounter monster tracks across the map. Collecting a certain number of tracks can trigger a final mission where squads are tasked with taking down a Rathalos. This is a nod to Monster Hunter: World, so by all means, enjoy your “Return to World” while playing Exoprimal as well! 
Playing through the Monster Hunter collaboration content will help players better understand the combat and gameplay cycles in Exoprimal. I hope this crossover encourages new players to suit up and try their hands at becoming Exofighters.

The development team also wanted to create a unique and exciting Exosuit skin. We decided to move forward with a design that almost completely transforms Roadblock into Rajang. I love the way this skin turned out and hope you’ll enjoy equipping it in the wargames.

Having Rathalos in Exoprimal seems like a pretty big deal. How will the fight differ most from Exoprimal’s other big battles? Will Rathalos use any special mechanics in combat, unique to it?

When incorporating a hunt with Rathalos into Exoprimal, we had our hearts set on making it into a 10-player co-op battle, which are popular in the Exoprimal community. On top of that, it was imperative to make adjustments so Rathalos, who was originally intended for encounters with hunting parties of four, could pose a formidable challenge for squads of 10 Exofighters. Giving the Rathalos new attacks like the ability to unleash massive lasers or send shockwaves across a wide area would have been too far removed from the way it typically fights, causing it to feel like a different monster. So, we designed the Rathalos boss fight in a way that maintains the King of the Skies’ characteristic behaviors while also empowering it with the fortitude to take on 10 Exofighters. It also reinforces a core concept at the root of Exoprimal’s combat – strategic role-based co-op gameplay. I hope you’ll enjoy battling Rathalos, which has been adapted to complement the “massive action” of the Exoprimal universe.

What are your goals, over the coming year, for Exoprimal?

Our top priority is to expand the ways in which players can enjoy Dino Survival through additional content introduced in post-launch title updates. The development team also hopes the Capcom collaborations and other new content will enable Exofighters to meet new players, as well as grant the Exoprimal community ways to thrive through upcoming features like “Custom Matches.”

The post Exoprimal director discusses bringing the might of Monster Hunter’s Rathalos to the co-op dino shooter appeared first on Destructoid.

I really hadn’t heard of El Viento before Retro-Bit announced their re-issue of it. It’s really hard to know what to make of it. It seems displaced from time, occupying an era that doesn’t exist.

That may be a weird way to describe it, but I think what I’m trying to say is that it looks reminiscent of Valis. It’s a sort of grainy-looking side-scroller that feels like it was developed for an early Japanese home computer before being ported to the PC-Engine and finally landing on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. A drifting vagabond tied to no home. To clarify, that’s what Valis went through. The difference here is that El Viento was never on a platform aside from the Genesis, and the developer, Wolf Team, wasn’t behind the Valis games. Though, they did handle some of the ports of the first game, and Renovation/Telenet published the lot in North America. Anyway, not important. I'm just saying, they're similarly unusual.

Its similarities with Valis are largely that they’re both somewhat janky sidescrollers that feature a female lead. It just doesn’t have that distinct Genesis flavor to it, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have a flavor of its own.

You want to do what now?

You play as Annet, who is part of the bloodline of Hastur, an eldritch being from Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 book of short stories, The King in Yellow. A cult in New York is trying to resurrect Hastur, which Annet, despite being related through blood, recognizes as being a spectacularly stupid idea.

She frequently asks the antagonists, “Why are you doing this? You know they’re just going to destroy the world,” and nobody really has a good answer to that. I think the idea is that they’re going to take control of their power through Restiana, another woman of Hastur’s bloodline, but that sounds like just a story they’re feeding Restiana to keep her complacent. Every time Annet runs into Restiana, she tells her, “They’re just going to sacrifice you.”

So, Annet’s the only competent person in the room. I always say that if you lock a hundred people in a room full of dry straw and give each of them a book of matches, someone is going to set the room on fire.

It has to be very frustrating for Annet. She’s given the runaround and sent all over the U.S., and every time she defeats a boss, she just talks to someone to very patiently explain to them how dumb they are. She could just beat these people up, but aside from Restiana, she never does. She just lets them walk away. It’s like she’s watching a toddler trying to stick a fork into an electrical outlet. She keeps saying, “You don’t want to do that,” but is absolutely willing to let them learn the hard way. I’m not a parent, obviously.

Check out that skyscraper

El Viento is kind of rad, honestly. It takes place in 1928, and makes decent use of the setting. You start out in New York, magicking gangsters to death in the streets. Its fixation on the Empire State Building as though it's some phallic object waving in the face of the Old Gods is kind of spooky and cool. 

The graphics are over-detailed. The best games on 16-bit consoles tended to try and use simple colors to make the art readable, but occasionally, you’d get something like El Viento that tries to add too much texture to everything, and it creates this really grainy look. Adding to this is a lot of washed-out-looking colors. I’m sort of wondering if they were trying to make the game look like early color photographs, but it just makes it look rather drab.

The animation is pretty good, though, at least when it comes to Annet. She has a lot of frames and poses in her movement. However, this adds to the feeling of jankiness, as animation is often stopped and started in an extremely herky-jerky fashion when interacting with the environment.

The developers were at least playful with the Genesis hardware. It makes use of various warping and scaling effects. The most amusing result of this is the explosions. Many developers at the time would use multiple sprites to create bigger explosions, but Wolf Team opted to have a small sprite scaled to be bigger. The result is these huge, blocky pixels that take up massive portions of the screen. It looks like someone thought this was really cool because one of the screenshots on the back of the Japanese box is mostly obscured by a single explosion. That’s one way to sell your game.

The best explosions

El Viento is still pretty fun to play. Annet attacks with a boomerang thing, and gradually builds up a variety of spells for use alongside it. She also levels up, gaining more health as you take out enemies. However, Wolf Team made sure to prevent grinding by not allowing enemies to respawn if you leave the area and return. There are spots where small enemies spawn endlessly, but they give no XP.

The platforming, enemies, and bosses sometimes show some creativity. The levels also have a nice variation, changing focus from careful platforming to straight combat. However, some of the levels seem undercooked. The earlier levels are broken into sections and have decent length. Later stages are shockingly short. Level 7, for example, is over in less than 2 minutes, and that includes the boss battle. I wasn’t rushing, either. That was my first attempt. I could definitely cut that time down.

There are also limited continues, which is a pet peeve of mine. However, it only took me two attempts to get through El Viento, and it isn’t a very long game, so maybe that’s for the best.

Hot pink

As I alluded to above, Retro-Bit sent me their re-issue of El Viento, which is nice because the price of the original run gives me pause.

I go into more detail about the quality of the re-issues in my review of their reissue of Valis, but to quickly reiterate, I’m a fan. The clamshell and slipcase are nicely done, and the cartridges are in attractive, transparent plastic. My favorite part of these reissues is that the back of the PCB inside them has the game’s logo in metallic foil, and you can see them through the shell. It’s a really nice touch.

When a new game gets made for an old console, I like it when it has the look of an official release. However, for reproductions, it’s nice to see some extra flair. It both looks cool, stands out, and can’t be confused for an original release.

I also appreciate that Retro-Bit is shining some light on Renovation/Telenet Japan games. They’re not the only ones, as it’s also available as part of the Renovation Collection 1 for Evercade and is also available on the Antstream Arcade service. I like playing on original hardware, so Retro-Bit’s offering suits me well.

Ear candy

Before concluding this, I should probably mention that El Viento has a pretty rocking soundtrack. It was composed by Motoi Sakuraba, who has contributed to a number of fantastic games, such as Golden Sun, Shining Force 3, and Dark Souls. The dude’s a legend, and El Viento’s soundtrack is worth sticking in your ears.

El Viento sort of falls in the same spot as the Valis series. I’m happy to have played it, and I’m even interested in trying the sequels, but I don’t think it’s something I’m going to be pulling off my shelf all that often. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about El Viento, but there’s also a lot of rough edges. The most substantial is a lack of substance. But at least it’s full of ear candy, and we get some great images of the Empire State Building looking sinister.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

The post El Viento for Genesis is baffled by world-ending cults appeared first on Destructoid.

It’s not hard to see how House of Leaves became an inspiration for Lake as the team at Remedy was building the layers of Alan Wake. And, through that, Poe’s music.

“House of Leaves is one of my favorite post-modern novels. It has been a big inspiration for me through the years, for the original Alan Wake, and for the sequel as well,” Lake told me over email. “The writer, Mark Z. Danielewski, is Poe’s brother, and Poe’s album Haunted is a sort of a companion piece to the novel. This is how I found her music and fell in love with it. I feel Poe’s music fits Alan Wake perfectly.”

So, the title track from Haunted wound up on the original Alan Wake soundtrack. It’s a fitting song, and I’ve even seen some people who discovered Poe and her music through it. For Poe, Haunted would be the last studio album in her discography, though she’s continued to make and release music over the years, including a song called “September 30th 1955.” Released on YouTube 11 years ago today, that tune – and the re-release of the original Alan Wake – would lay the foundation for Remedy, Lake, Poe, and the House to overlap all over again.

After several initial Zoom meetings early on, Lake says things got put on hold until the project went further. Then, in May 2023, they linked back up and started work on the song that would appear in Alan Wake 2, “This Road.”

Not only would this be a new song from Poe for the soundtrack, but Lake would be collaborating on it. Poe describes the collaboration as a trip; “at times it felt literally telepathic,” she says. Lake was into the song “September 30th 1955” that Poe had shared on YouTube, and Alan Wake 2 fans will probably recognize its refrain: “And some say that it loops forever / This road that I lose you on every time.”

“‘September 30th, 1955’ is about a road and a story that loops forever and the only way to get off that road and escape that story is to get off of time,” said Poe. “In order to expand the song for Alan Wake 2 I felt like I needed to rip a hole in time and space and Sam was obviously all for that ha ha!”

“You know that feeling when a plane lands and the whole cabin starts shaking?” Poe says about the sound and creation of the song. “I usually get this momentary sense of panic and excitement when that happens because there’s always that split second when it feels like it could go one of two ways: either the shaking is going to mellow out and you’ll land safely; or it’s going to do the opposite and just keep escalating until…. something unimaginable happens.

“Pondering that unimaginable thing that could happen led to a few decisions about how to approach the recording: the new road needed to start with the original vocal samples from ‘September 30th, 1955’ (because those samples were residue from the exact moment in time when an important part of this journey took place); the music needed to start on the grid, submissive to an external clock, and then it needed to let go of that imposed sense of time, fall off the grid, and slow down over a long period of time; and finally, the slow down section of ‘This Road’ had to be recorded live in one take.”

With all these conditions and decisions determined, Poe and Lake pulled together musicians and gave it a try. What happened then, as Poe describes, was mind-altering.

“We only did one take and it was one of the most transcendent musical moments I’ve ever experienced in my life,” said Poe. “We all looped the chords from the main refrain and we slowed down instinctually. It was the first time we’d ever played it together and everyone stayed perfectly connected.”

Darrel Thorpe, the engineer on the track, was manipulating an AMS delay on Poe’s voice and even that landed with, as Poe describes it, “perfect imprecision.”

“It felt as though maybe we really did tear a hole in time and space because, when it was over, the road I was on turned out to be different from the road I was on,” said Poe.

An endless stanza

Describing the process, Poe says she definitely thought differently when it came to making a song for a game than for a “traditional” music platform.

“In Alan Wake 2 for instance, there was no real end game to the creative process other than serving the story and the experience–no algorithms to please, no song lengths to conform to. Pure instinct and inspiration,” said Poe. “It was heaven for me.”

Poe says she looks forward to experimenting more in the gaming world. “There are new ways to perform, to broadcast, to distribute, even to create within these worlds that are extremely exciting to me.”

As for Remedy and Lake, the team there is no stranger to music. In fact, it’s a core part of the process.

“Music is vital,” said Lake, about the importance of music in Alan Wake 2. “The custom created songs are vital, a key extension to storytelling. We have many artists working with us on them, starting with Poets of the Falls in the role of Old Gods of Asgard. And many other artists for the end of chapter songs in Saga Anderson’s story.”

Lake highlights how other collaborations have helped shape Remedy games, too. Poets of the Fall, a.k.a. The Old Gods of Asgard, are an obvious part of that. But Lake also notes Chisu, one half of ROOS+BERG, who created the song “No One Left to Love.”

“Chisu’s earlier song ‘Polaris’ was a big inspiration for me when creating Polaris for Jesse Faden in the story of Control,” said Lake.

For Alan’s side, “This Road” created a punctuation for his story in the Dark Place. It loops around, again and again, even into New Game Plus. It builds on top of the story, while still interweaving it with the past, tying in even outer layers of inspiration and thematic synergy with other works. 

The post Alan Wake 2 forges a full-circle moment with Poe on ‘This Road’ appeared first on Destructoid.

When navigating the squalid wastelands of video games, I often must turn to reputation to figure out where to stick my fingers. In the West, few games have a reputation for being awful quite like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

This is entirely because of the Angry Video Game Nerd, who I respect but isn’t always the best source since he’s primarily aimed at providing entertainment through a schtick. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been singled out by him as one of the darkest spots in the NES library. I have to disagree.

Oh, it’s definitely awful. Don’t assume that I’m here to defend it. It’s as boring as a lecture on the history of terrycloth (did you know it dates back to before 4000 BCE?) and as tedious as chewing through a concrete brick. However, what you might not expect is that, when examined through autopsy, a lot of it feels very deliberate, even if many of the decisions seem misguided. A game that tries to blaze its own trail and fails is a lot more interesting than one that just ineptly follows in another’s footsteps.

Blazing its own trail

Immersive frustration

The damage of everyday life

Cut out all the good parts

The post Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for NES demonstrates the duality of bad and worse appeared first on Destructoid.

The Hammerin’ Harry/Daiku no Gen-San series continued from 1990 to the last game, Hammerin’ Hero, in 2009. However, only the first game was released in arcades. After the original Hammerin’ Harry, the series shifted entirely to home platforms.

Whether or not a game in the series would be released in the West, however, was another matter. In fact, only the arcade original and the aforementioned Hammerin’ Hero would reach North America, though two other titles would at least find their way to Europe. The second Famicom/NES title, 1993's Daiku no Gen-san 2: Akage no Dan no Gyakushō was not one of them.

That is until Retro-Bit translated and reissued it. It was given to me as part of the Hammerin’ Harry Concrete Collection, which I was rather excited to try. I covered the first Hammerin’ Harry last week, so now it’s time to dive into the more elusive sequel.

Robo-fitness

Hammerin’ Harry 2: Dan the Red Strikes Back seems like a pretty straightforward sequel when you start out. You once again play as the eponymous carpenter, and his sprite, moveset, and even powerups are the same as they were in the first game. The first level even takes place at the Needless Markup Mall, which was under construction in the original game. However, it doesn’t stay all that reminiscent.

The story this time around is that the ti… the sub-titular Dan the Red is harassing Harry to try and get revenge, while Dr. Parallel seems to pull the strings in the background. Apparently, Harry’s girlfriend, Donna, has been abducted, but I don’t remember it coming up very much. I think she was in distress in the first game, as well, but that sort of just felt like a formality in mimicking the typical ‘80s protagonist motivation.

After going through some construction areas, Hammerin’ Harry 2 begins to shift more and more into sci-fi. There’s a factory, then you’re on some train in an underground tunnel, then there’s a bunch of secret base stuff. The bosses are typically Dan riding on some sort of giant robot shaped like an animal. But that’s really only the start of where things differ.

The wrong tool for the job

What struck me most is that Hammerin’ Harry 2 places more emphasis on platforming than combat. While there was a balance of this in the previous game, a lot of its focus was placed on enduring attacks from enemies. With the sequel, you’re more likely to be killed by the edge of the screen than waves of foes.

It’s fine. The controls are solid enough to make platforming enjoyable, but I feel that when you’re wielding a big hammer, the game should be more focused on providing nails. Toward the end of the game, there were very few enemies, leaving you to hop around in complete isolation. If there was anything that would simply take a chip off your health bar, it was usually lasers or spikes; things that aren’t as receptive to a blunt weapon. I feel like some of the identity is replaced by something less satisfying.

A lot of the expressiveness of the first game isn’t there, either. I remarked that the art in Hammerin’ Harry, while obviously suffering from the NES’ limitations, is very detailed, but much of that is lost in the sequel. It’s not completely devoid of life, nor does it look bad, but in comparison, there’s a lot less love in its presentation. 

Everything looks like a nail

On the other hand, it still gets pretty creative at times. I mentioned the tunnel train earlier on, and the quickest way for a game to reach my heart is by train. For some reason, moving trains are my favorite stage setting, whether you’re on them, in them, or driving them. This one has robots on it. They do sit-ups and shoot lasers like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots working on their beach bods. It’s just too bad the level isn’t that much fun.

Later on, there’s a pair of scrolling shoot-’em-up stages where Harry hops in a rocket mallet. It’s a charmingly amusing segment, but unfortunately, they’re not much fun either. There’s only a handful of poorly thought-out weapons, and enemies will only spawn in at maybe two at a time, assumedly not to push the sprites numbers into flicker territory. They’re pretty boring.

To its credit, Hammerin’ Harry 2 is a bit longer at eight levels over the previous game’s five. The fact that it’s also not as much fun as its predecessor means that, by the time it’s all over, you’re not exactly hungry for more. That’s damning with praise, so I will try and lighten that statement by saying it’s not all that bad. It’s just while Hammerin’ Harry had a lot of charm that made it stand out despite its weaknesses, Hammerin’ Harry 2 just doesn’t.

Solid

Retro-Bit’s translation is pretty solid, but there wasn’t a tonne of text to change to begin with. It sticks pretty close to the previously existing one of the first game. What I did find weird is that they left the voice clips in their original Japanese instead of changing them to be like the localization of the first game. So, instead of his trademark “Let’s get busy,” Harry says “Ikuze!” like a large portion of Japan’s early video game protagonists. More confusingly, however, is that the end level voice screams “GEN-SAAAAN!” instead of “H’MM’RNHRY.” I guess if you’re buying this game, you know Harry’s original name, but it feels a bit out of place.

If it was as easy as simply changing the voice clips, I assume that Retro-Bit would have just done it, so there’s likely a reason why they were left as is. To make up for it, the text does contain a heaping of hammer puns. A+ right there.

The production of the physical cartridge is as good as it was with Hammerin’ Harry. You can reference that article for a broader overview. This time around, the cartridge is made to look like concrete, and it’s a bit more convincing than the woodgrain of the first game. Both are pretty fine physical reissues. The cover for Hammerin’ Harry 2 isn’t really great, but it’s pretty much what the Famicom version looked like, so it is what it is.

Dangit!

It’s nice to be able to play a localized Hammerin’ Harry 2 in an official capacity, but the game itself is less than spectacular. I think my main issue is that, just a week ago, I said that the first Hammerin’ Harry “might not be the console’s best sidescroller, but it’s definitely not boring.” This time around, I’m more of the opinion that Hammerin’ Harry 2 might be far from the console’s worst sidescroller, but it’s definitely boring.

It’s a shame, because I was hoping that the series would be more of a fixture for me on the console. I was hoping for a more Duck Tales/Duck Tales 2 situation where after playing one, the closeness in quality makes playing through the second one an obvious choice. Here, I’m not so sure. There’s more of a gulf in enjoyment. I will, however, have to look into the later games in the series. Especially, perhaps, the SNES and PSP games that would follow. As for Hammerin’ Harry 2, it is, unfortunately, not the sharpest tool in the box.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

The post Hammerin’ Harry 2 for NES doesn’t quite nail it appeared first on Destructoid.

I talked about Pachio-Kun some time ago for my Famicom Friday column because I thought the idea of an anthropomorphic pachinko mascot was amusing. Back then, I noted the staggering number of games in the series: at least 12.

I own more of the Famicom titles, but I wasn’t planning on making a thing of Pachio-Kun. It was fun to spit facts about the Japanese gambling industry, but I couldn’t possibly do that for multiple articles. But then I got the Analogue Duo.

When reviewing it, I wanted to get disc-based games to test, so I ordered a bunch from Japan. They didn’t arrive in time. In fact, they arrived mere hours after my review went live. Typical. I was looking for cheap games and came across two Pachio-Kun titles that confused me. Why does a pachinko game have cutscenes, I wondered. Why is there a weird hammer dude on the cover? I can never find much information on the series online, so I had to find out for myself.

You're patchinkan daioh!

Pachio-Kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu was released in 1991 on the PC-Engine CD-ROM². It starts out much like the Famicom games, where you take your spherical self out to a pachinko parlor to try and win big.

I’m not going to go into the background of Japan’s gambling pastime in this article. I did that (poorly) the last time I talked about Pachio-Kun, which you can read here. Or maybe read this article from Business Insider, which is possibly more insightful. All you need to know is that its popularity exploded as a way to get around Japan’s strict anti-gambling laws. It’s kind of a cross between a slot machine and pinball. You pick the force the balls get launched and try to direct them into various scoring holes to win more balls. The goal is to drain all the balls out of a machine.

Balls

So, yeah, the rest of Pachio-Kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu is traveling from parlor to parlor, playing pachinko. Each one has a set number of copyright-infringing machines you need to suck the balls out of before you’ll be given another piece of the plans. The number for each location feels arbitrary to me. Each parlor stocks a variety of different machines that get repeated throughout the game, and there’s no rule saying each of your wins need to be on different setups.

Not every machine is the same, even when they’re the same theme. I found I had an easy time clearing a table called Telephone, but not every Telephone machine is friendly. The pins are bent in different directions, and that affects where the balls go. You can inspect the pins up close on each table, and initially, I had intended to learn the ins and outs of reading them. Not far into the game, however, I found it easier to just pump in about 50 balls to test if they’d go where I needed them. If not, I’d move onto the next one.

Some machines I found to be generally more willing to payout. As I mentioned, Telephone was one of them, but essentially, any machine where you can trigger little jackpot timeframes has a tendency to give the goods. Like the one where you need to get your balls between a monkey's legs. Inversely, I hated the ones where getting balls in a certain hole would trigger a slot machine. I’m not sure if the odds are different in each of these machines, but I don’t think I landed a jackpot once.

Thunderhards are go!

Even once you’ve got a feel for how to win at pachinko, actually completing a machine requires a lot of time. And during this time, you’re going to spend a lot of it making fine adjustments to the lever and then… watching the balls fly. I’m not a gambler myself, but I didn’t find this very stimulating.

However, it’s surprising how much context can lend to a game. I mentioned that I completed maybe three machines in the original Pachio-Kun, but I finished a great deal more in Pachio-kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu. I kept wanting to see more of the absolutely bonkers story and see what new location would unlock next. And really, there is a lot of variety when it comes to parlors, even though they just have a different mix of the same machines.

Not gambling

The post Pachio-Kun: Maboroshi no Densetsu for PC-Engine CD brings back everyone’s favorite enabler appeared first on Destructoid.

I have really been looking forward to Retro-Bit’s NES reissue of 1991’s Hammerin’ Harry. However, in retrospect, this is partially due to me getting it confused with Don Doko Don, a 1989 arcade game in Taito’s single-screen format. If I knew what I was thinking about, I’d be even more excited.

Hammerin’ Harry is a port of Irem’s 1990 arcade game, which was called Daiku no Gen-san: Beranme-chō Sōdōki in Japan. While Irem is perhaps best remembered for their R-Type series, their back catalog is built from an extremely colorful mix of titles on both arcade and consoles. There are a lot of underappreciated greats like Undercover Cops and Gekisha Boy which, to be fair, are largely unknown in the West because they were never localized.

Hammerin’ Harry was, technically, localized, but it was only released in the tumultuous NES PAL region. Because of its late release in a limited market, it tends to resell for an extremely high price. However, Retro-Bit has sent me a copy of their recent retro re-issues to try out. It is both a meaty morsel to sink our teeth into and something simultaneously insubstantial.

The nail that pops up

If you’re unfamiliar with the arcade version, there’s not much to say. It’s a sidescroller where you play as a beefy carpenter dude who wields a big mallet. A rival construction company tears down his house for no reason, and he heads out to file a complaint with their boss. 

It’s a pretty routine affair where you travel the six levels while bopping enemies. You can also (sometimes) deflect projectiles back at them, bash the ground to stun enemies, and bop upwards. Then there are boxes and other objects in the environments that you can send flying at enemies, as well as power-ups that give you a bigger mallet or protect you from an additional hit. In the arcade version, you’re dead if you even brush elbows with an enemy.

Stop! Hammer time!

The 1991 NES version is reasonably faithful. The levels and bosses have been changed a lot to accommodate the more limited hardware to the point where they're all essentially brand new. There are only five levels instead of the arcade version’s six, but one of them is completely new. Rather than die in a single hit, Harry has a health bar. There are now bonus rounds between levels where you smack as many enemies as possible, kind of like whack-a-mole.

However, it’s the same where it really counts. Harry has all the moves and power-ups he does in the arcade, but more importantly, the graphics are still extremely detailed and expressive. Obviously, the NES can’t match the arcade game, but it’s not a lazy facsimile. The art is overall very impressive, even for a 1991 title.

I’m not sure how you feel about me spoiling a 30-year-old game, but the ending is the best part of the NES version. While the arcade has Harry climbing the evil construction company’s headquarters and bashing the boss until he changes his ways, the console version has that same boss flee the fight. In his place, his receptionist bursts in, transforms into, like, the Ultimate Warrior, and tries to take you down. You then follow the boss to his house, which is the completely new level.

H’MM’RNHRY

Surprisingly, the console version of Hammerin’ Harry preserves the voice clips of the arcade version. Each time you begin a level or continue after a death, Harry shouts, “Let’s get busy!” When he dies, he exclaims, “Ouch!” When you complete a level, someone shrieks, “H’MM’RNHRY!” It’s surprisingly clear, even if it still sounds like a drive-thru speaker.

One place where it should have deviated from the arcade title is in its length. While it makes sense to keep a game short in the arcade, since people are usually standing to play, it leads to really short console games. In all, Hammerin’ Harry took me around 45 minutes to complete, and this was my first time playing it. I died plenty of times, but there is no limit on continues, so there’s nothing to stop you from brute-forcing your way through it.

Hammerin’ Harry is far from the shortest game of the era. Off the top of my head, The Little Mermaid on NES and Kirby’s Dreamland on Game Boy are roughly the same runtime. However, that’s hardly a compliment. It feels insubstantial, especially if you don’t have the Japan-only sequel to move on to.

What's in the box?

Thankfully, I do have the sequel to segway into. Retro-bit sent me the Concrete Collection which comes with their reissue of Hammerin’ Harry, and their localization of Daiku no Gen-san 2: Akage no Dan no Gyakushō, which has been translated to Hammerin’ Harry 2: Dan the Red Strikes Back.

For Hammerin’ Harry, Retro-Bit got creative with the cartridge. It’s encased in a wood-grained textured plastic. The feel of the cartridge is a bit smoother than an official NES game, but the construction is solid. I took it apart, and there’s a clean-looking PCB solidly fixed in there. These are the first NES games I’ve received from them, and it’s nice to see they get the same treatment as their Genesis titles. They feel like quality in your hands, but there’s no way anyone would mistake them as an original production.

Tenderized

On the other hand, it gives me an excuse to talk about some obscure titles, which fits neatly with the intentions of this article. I appreciate Retro-Bit’s efforts in giving new attention to rare and unlocalized games through its re-issues.

Hammerin’ Harry was an exceptionally fun one to visit. As I said at the start, it’s been on my radar for quite a while. Beyond just being a short but enjoyable platformer, it’s also an infectiously lively game with terrific art design packed with humorous flourishes. It might not be the console's best sidescroller, but it’s definitely not boring.

While there was only one Hammerin’ Harry arcade game, the series stretched on across many platformers throughout its lifespan. Only the arcade title reached North America, but the Game Boy game, 1992’s Hammerin' Harry: Ghost Building Company, did get a release in Europe. That is until the 2008 PSP title, Hammerin’ Harry finally crossed the globe. It makes sense since the games are steeped in the culture of Japan. It’s just a shame that it’s taken until now for us to get an official release over here.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

The post Hammerin’ Harry for NES shows the lethal competition of the carpentry world appeared first on Destructoid.

When talking about SNEG’s efforts to re-release Strategy Simulation Inc.’s old PC catalog, I mentioned that one of their most significant endeavors was putting SSI’s D&D games back on storefronts. I bought them some time ago. I haven’t played them. They intimidate me.

Classic CRPGs are terrifying. I often say that game design doesn’t expire; it merely changes, but one common feature of ‘80s and ‘90s CRPGs is a wall of overcomplicated UI. The game itself might be relatively simple, but the sheer number of buttons, menus, and functions is staggering. I’ve been stopped while trying to create a character.

So, for the purposes of this article, I decided to finally step into SSI’s D&D world. Not in an RPG, goodness, no. I’m still terrified. Let’s, uh… Let’s start with 1990’s DragonStrike, the one where you ride on a dragon.

Good luck, Sir Goodman

There is a disappointing dearth of dragon-flight simulators. 2007’s Lair, perhaps? I don’t know, I haven’t played it. What I do know is that War Thunder doesn’t have dragons and is poorer for it. We’re all poorer for it.

DragonStrike is exactly that; it’s an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game where you play as a dragon rider. It has a lot in common with computer flight sims of the time, right down to the simplistic fractal landscapes. Also, like much of the era’s flight sims, it’s surprisingly detailed.

I do know a few things about early flight sims, though it’s not my area of expertise. However, I know very little about Dungeons & Dragons. Most of what I know is from this year’s Baldur’s Gate 3, and I don’t know how well that still connects with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I’m not able to give much context there. It takes place in the Dragonlance world of Krynn. Then, after that, I’m just assuming that DragonStrike represents the subject matter reasonably well.

Although, the side you’re aligned with is literally referred to as the “Good Army” while the bad guys are the “Evil Army.” Is that actually in the material? Is that an accurate representation? Because that’s hilarious.

Patience and butterfingers

Actually, I can’t really talk about the plot told within DragonStrike all that well, either. It’s presented in literal walls of text, and I got frustrated because it takes “any key” as permission to advance. Early on, I missed a huge blurb because when I took my hand off the keyboard, I rolled the side of it off the right arrow key and missed a portion. So, the narrative had to compete against both my attention span and butterfingers, and it did not fare well.

So, that was a bunch of paragraphs saying I don’t know what I’m talking about. But there’s so much more to talk about. Dragons, perhaps?

You, unfortunately, neither get to pick nor customize your dragon. The one you ride on is based on what Order you’re in, and choosing your Order is based on narrative choice. There isn’t a tonne of difference between the dragons aside from what color is beneath your crotch. They all fly roughly the same, and all of them have two attacks. I think they get progressively more powerful, but there’s a tradeoff.

The flight model isn’t too realistic, or maybe it is. Maybe dragons actually fly like that. I suppose I should say it doesn’t feel realistic. You kind of just glide over the flat-shaded landscapes, and you might as well just be a detached camera. Despite being on a winged beast, you can’t just ascend vertically, stop suddenly, or drop straight down. It can also be difficult to tell how close you are to a cliff or the ground, and that placelessness removes a lot of the visual feedback from the game.

I’d guess that DragonStrike was a reskin of a WWII flight sim, but I can’t find anything similar in either SSI or Westwood’s catalog. Whether it’s an effective representation of dragon pilotry or not, it’s an impressive effort for 1990.

Tooth and claw

While the actual flight is maybe oversimplistic, there’s still a lot of depth to the game. Beyond your dragon’s breath, you also have your trusty lance to attack with, as well as your sword and your dragon’s claws and teeth. Most of these are beyond your control and just happen when you get close enough to an enemy. You can aim where your lance is pointed, but I’m not sure if there’s a practical reason to do so.

However, your lance is actually the most reliable way of taking down enemy dragons. The hard part is simply to light them up in front of you, but if you manage to poke them, they typically go down immediately. Your dragon has two scents of breath. One goes fast and far, and the other goes slow and lingers. There isn’t much feedback on how much damage they do, but they’re often not an instant kill.

You’re normally fighting other dragons, and that means they can also claw and bite. This is where combat starts to get really messy. You have separate health meters for your rider and dragon, and who takes damage when things get up close isn’t really clear. For that matter, the amount of damage seems random and may be the result of invisible dice rolls. There’s a confusing lack of control when it comes to combat, and this gets frustrating.

The Knights of the Inept

What drove me to the edge was getting blindsided by enemy projectiles. I’m okay with getting hit by something offscreen, but often, this would just be an instant kill. My rider would get vaporized suddenly, forcing me back to the retry screen. I’d be doing really well one moment, then it would be over in an instant. If I was merely taking damage and needed to quickly remove myself from the situation, that would be one thing, but not even having the ability to react is frustrating.

I got stuck at a point midway through DragonStrike. The above situation kept happening, over and over. So, I checked the manual and found part of what was going wrong. You’re given the option to join orders in DragonStrike. You start in the Knights of the Crown, and can switch to Knights of the Sword, before finally having the chance to enter the Knights of the Rose. But beyond just upgrading your dragon, it also sets you on a harder path through the story. I was in the Knights of the Rose.

So, I restarted and refused the offers to join the other Orders. Sure enough, I was suddenly plowing through the story, galvanized by a stint in hard mode. Then, I got stopped by a mission where I was getting whittled down by archers. I could probably overcome it with some carefully placed shots, but by then, it was midnight. This may surprise you, but I keep regular hours, so I needed to be up for work in the morning. And that’s why my homework isn’t finished.

Soaring recommended at 6MHz or faster

I still wound up spending a lot of time with DragonStrike, and when I have the chance, I’ll probably dive back in to finish it. Even with its simple mission design and intangible physics held back by the restrictions of the technology at the time, there just isn’t much out there like DragonStrike.

Furthermore, I think the developers behind the game were enthusiastic about the subject matter. While, again, there were a lot of technical limitations, they still tried to get as much detail as they could into the game. You can even be dislodged from your mount and freefall toward the ground. Your dragon will try to catch you, but it might fail, and it’s game over. This would be a very cinematic moment in a modern game, but the fact that it’s in a DOS game from the 90s is a nice touch.

Early flight sims may seem superseded by technological advancements, but there’s still value in seeing how developers got around the limitations of the era. They can still be appreciated for their art.

This goes doubly for DragonStrike. Not only did the developers at Westwood have to deal with the limits of home computers at the time, but they also had to think about how they would represent the fictional warfare of dragon fights. The result is something that is somewhat compromised and often frustrating, but it’s endearingly earnest. It’s enough that I still want to dig deeper into the game, and when it comes to retro titles, that’s half the battle. Plus, dragons.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

The post DragonStrike for PC lets you go beyond just imagining dragons appeared first on Destructoid.

We’re friends, right? I can be honest with you. I know it. I was going to follow up my earlier list, 10 bad games you should play, with a similar list around the same time of year. However, I don’t have a kusoge chambered for today, so I’m bumping it to a year-end list.

Do you know how difficult it is to play a bad game every week? Not just finding, playing through, and then writing up while also covering other responsibilities, but the mental toll it takes on a person. So, even though the column is informally called “Weekly Kusoge” (not related to Hardcore Gaming 101’s “Your Weekly Kusoge”), I skip a week whenever playing bad games just isn’t enough motivation to get out of bed.

With that in mind, I did 36 Weekly Kusoge articles in 2023. Here are the 10 “best” games I covered this year.

Award for At Least Being Interesting - Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness

I covered Castlevania 64 and Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness back-to-back to show some love for the series’ more maligned attempts at 3D translation. And really, I can understand why they haven’t been ported, but their reputation as blotches on the series’ record is maybe not as apt. At the very least, they’re more interesting than, say, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

Legacy of Darkness is sort of the updated version of the vanilla N64 Castlevania. It includes the narrative campaigns of the earlier game, improving some things, but cutting a few features due to space. Personally, I think it’s still better, but there are some who prefer the original or, alternatively, suggest you should play both. That latter point, I can agree with.

Award for Kusoge that I Love - Paperboy (64)

Going into the article, I already knew that I liked the N64’s 1999 revisit to Midway’s Paperboy series. You shouldn’t be ashamed that a bad game can click with you. It’s not a matter of whether or not you can recognize the flaws alongside the strengths. Kusoge can be meaningful. Behind all the broken mechanics and unfulfilled ambitions, there is still human expression that can be connected with.

For the 3D update, Paperboy captures the bizarrely dark world presented in the arcade original and gives it a uniquely lo-fi art style and weirdly enjoyable music, then dumps a bunch of technical limitations on them. But all the fog and audio compression in the world could stop it from being an infectiously bright experience.

Award for Biggest Dumb - Final Fight: Streetwise

A sad swansong to Capcom Studio 8, Final Fight: Streetwise was reportedly mired in development difficulties before being released in a poor state. The developer originally had a more vibrant game planned that would be more true to the classic arcade original, but marketing allegedly wanted something more marketable. Ergo, a game that was like what was popular at the time: gritty and edgy.

The result is something that is just so, so dumb. As I described it, “an edgy teenager’s take on Yakuza.” The story has Kyle Travers trying to save his brother, Cody (from the original), from drug addiction. The enemies? They’re also addicts, but the inhuman kind, I guess, so they can eat buckshot. It’s that sort of daftness that makes Final Fight: Streetwise constantly entertaining, even when the gameplay is a letdown.

Award for Most Brilliant Kusoge - Tecmo’s Deception

There were a few commenters who were ardently offended that I referred to Tecmo’s Deception as kusoge, even though it’s one that I really enjoyed. Listen, I’m sorry if it upsets you, but the game is just an endless parade of “good enough fixes” and blatant failures. Being entertaining doesn’t stop it from being an oversimplification of complex ambitions.

On the other hand, it does feature some great atmosphere and a wizard named Wizbone. There’s a lot in Tecmo’s Deception that I wish was built upon, fixed, and refined for the sequels, but instead, the developers went in a mostly different direction. I’m not saying the sequels are bad (I haven’t played them), but the spots of brilliance in otherwise bad games are still worth preserving.

Award for Most Lovable Train Wreck - DinoRex

DinoRex is like Primal Rage if it were acted out in a playground sandbox using bargain-bin toys. It has dinosaurs fighting each other, but they appear more like toothless pugs fighting over a hotdog. Incredible. Just incredible.

It plays horribly, with unresponsive controls, bad hit detection, and a senseless lack of depth. But then it gives you a bonus round where your portly pal gets to march through a modern city, and all is forgiven.

Award for Most Compelling Torture - The Genji and the Heike Clans

You and I could sit down with The Genji and the Heike Clans (Genpei Toma Den as it’s called in Japan) and just rattle off all the things about the game that just doesn’t work. It has major issues like its sloppy “big mode,” cobbled-together platforming, and its horribly unfriendly difficulty curve. Despite this, it is a somewhat-beloved game in its home country of Japan.

I’m really not sure I get why. I don’t think this is like Spelunker where it’s considered kusoge, but still sells well. I don’t think Genpei Toma Den is considered kusoge over there at all. And yet, I can’t see it as anything but. Yet, despite that, I find it intensely charming. It’s very unique in its hostility, and the culture shock of its themes based on Japanese history and folklore just highlight that. Forget that it isn’t much fun to play. There just isn’t much like it.

Award for Artistic Merit - Mad Panic Coaster

I described Mad Panic Coaster as a cross between F-Zero and a rail shooter. You play as a pair of children who are strapped into a perilous roller coaster, and you have to keep them on track while also eliminating hazards in front of you by throwing bombs. It’s madness. It’s way too fast for its own good, and I had a lot of trouble putting it down.

What was most compelling for me, however, was that it seemed to have come from nowhere before just disappearing into obscurity. The company that supposedly developed it was an advertising business that very briefly touched on video games. Yet, Mad Panic Coaster isn’t an advertisement. Instead, it’s an aesthetically well-executed and strangely fun game that is built on a nauseatingly unique premise. It’s not the best game (it’s on this list, after all), but the tangible passion behind its creation makes it worth playing.

The Kyuukyoku no Kusoge Award - Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken

Sometimes referred to as the “kyuukyoku no kusoge” or “ultimate crappy game,” Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken was something I had to play for myself ever since it was featured in GameCenter CX’s “Ring Ring Tactics” segment. It’s a game that is so ineptly designed that it defies comprehension. To challenge myself, I played through it using only the tips that callers had given host Shinya Arino in GameCenter CX.

I did wind up completing it, which just consummated my love of kusoge. This year, I felt something snap in my brain that gave me the ability to just unironically love bad games. Super Monkey Daibouken is probably what caused me to break inside. It has elevated me to a higher plane of thought. Or a lower one.

The So Bad, It's Good Award - Escape from Bug Island

Speaking of being broken inside, Escape from Bug Island is a game that has been living in my head since the early days of the Wii. The only thing I knew about it was it was apparently a very bad game, so I had to circle back and play it.

What I didn’t expect was such a hilariously bad set of characters going through an absolutely terrible narrative. I also didn’t expect such sexy lizard ladies, so that was a bonus. However, Ray, the lady friend he single-mindedly drool over, and his shotgun-phile friend all won my heart. I just can’t believe this is a real game. Simply captivating.

The Actually Awesome Kusoge Award - Cool Riders

Cool Riders is like Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: it looks like kusoge, but it’s built over the bones of a great game, so it manages to be fun to play. But while the bizarrely composed assembly of photo-manipulated actors and scenery make the game look like it was pulled from the murky depths of a bargain bin, it comes together in a hilarious and fascinating way.

In what is essentially Outrunners on various motorcycles, you cruise across a world that resembles a travel magazine after it has been eaten by a camel. The world whips by you at light speed, but it’s impossible to look away as you might miss some of the bizarre scenery. It looks like the dumbest game imaginable, but when you actually accept it into your heart, it will block up all your blood vessels and drag you down inside to spend eternity. I mean, you should play it.

Wrap it up

Maybe it's just my brainworms talking, but I definitely think you should play bad games. Video games are a lot like cheese. A lot of people – most people, probably – will stick to the cheddars and swiss of the world, and maybe if they're feeling adventurous, they'll try a gouda. Some are even happy just eating pre-packaged American cheeses. Anything with a recognized brand, probably one that is mass-produced, and that's as far as they'll go.

But if you really want to connect with cheese – if you're truly a lover of cheese – you explore. You try artisan cheeses, aged cheese, and cheese from animals aside from cows. You eat the moldy kinds, the smelly stuff, and every once in a while, it can be extremely unpleasant. Eventually, the unpleasantness doesn't matter because it's not about eating cheese, but exploring the complexity of its flavor. Normal cheese becomes boring to you, but at that point, it doesn't matter. The passion you've built and discovered is more fulfilling and meaningful, and your life is enriched because of it.

Playing kusoge gives you perspective. It enhances your connection with the medium and lends it depth and meaning. You most certainly can stick to the supermarket cheese aisle and eat out of bags of pre-grated cheddar, or you can travel outside your comfort zone and gain a true appreciation of cheese. I mean video games. I'm hungry.

The post The Golden Kusoges 2023: Best of the Weekly Kusoge appeared first on Destructoid.

The Earthworm Jim games were perhaps the earliest indication that I’d wind up in this career. They were the first time that I really became aware of the developers behind the games I played, and beyond that, I actually contacted one of them – via snail mail.

I was probably 7 at the time, and I wrote to Shiny Entertainment asking them if they were going to make an Earthworm Jim 2. Amazingly, they wrote back. Not just some pre-formatted response, either. They actually answered my questions. I wish I still had that letter.

After Earthworm Jim 2, Shiny adopted a no-sequel policy. Earthworm Jim 3D wasn’t developed by Shiny, and as an N64 owner, I wouldn’t play another game by the developer until 2003’s Enter the Matrix. At that point, Shiny had been sold to Infogrames, and their last years of existence were spent making licensed games.

But following the release of Earthworm Jim 2 and before Enter the Matrix, they created a small handful of games that still demonstrated the developer’s ingenuity. And they began with 1997’s MDK.

On a good day, 2.5 billion people will die

Before you ask, the meaning of MDK as an acronym isn’t really mentioned anywhere in the story or marketing. For a long time, it was believed to mean “Murder Death Kill,” but this wasn’t confirmed until creator Nick Bruty stepped in and confirmed it. However, according to Bruty, “It was a temp name that stuck although I didn't like the actual meaning so we came up with a bunch of other names to cover it up.”

I can understand not really loving the name. The ‘90s saw a lot of games that glorified graphic violence, and the name “Murder Death Kill” kind of suggests it’s one of them. There’s violence, sure, but it’s not really graphic.

There isn’t much story told within MDK itself. Starting out, your only point of context is that a “Huge City Minecrawler” is headed toward Laguna Beach. You start the game free-falling toward it, and then you’re blasting everything in sight.

The instruction manual is where it’s at, giving you a completely unhinged account of what’s going on. Dr. Fluke Hawkins gets mocked by the scientific community, so he kidnaps his janitor and goes into space to try and get proof that he’s not crazy. As it turns out, he is crazy, but rather than return to Earth, he decides to stay in space until he makes a real discovery. Eventually, Earth is invaded, and being in space at the time, Dr. Hawkins decides that he’s the planet’s only hope. So, he sends his janitor to clean up this mess.

Tourism is safe

You play as this janitor, Kurt Hectic. The good doctor has provided Kurt with the “Coil Suit,” which is a formfitting little number with a chaingun on one arm and a face-mounted sniper rifle. After the aforementioned free-fall onto the minecrawler, your job is to gun your way to the pilot’s seat and eliminate whoever’s driving it, at which point you’ll be sucked back into space.

There are six levels, but the last level feels more like an epilogue to level five. Each one is a sprint through a variety of open environments that usually feature combat and a light puzzle. The puzzles range from simply destroying a lock with the “World’s Smallest Nuclear Explosion” to “where the hell am I supposed to go?” levels of obtuse. It’s not too difficult. Normally I was able to figure out where the hell I was supposed to go by shooting everything and, if that didn’t work, jumping on everything.

You’re given a handful of secondary weapons along the way, either devices or alternate ammunition for the sniper rifle.  The sniper rifle ammo sucks to cycle through. Usually, I just want to use the standard bullet, but if you picked up, say, a mortar round along the way, it gets loaded over top, and I end up just embarrassing myself.

While the majority of MDK is just running and gunning, it does mix things up with platforming and short vehicle sections. The runtime is pretty short at about 4 hours, but it at least keeps things interesting the whole way through.

I feel top!

I first played MDK around my college years. At that point, the third and first-person shooter genres were deep in their brown realism phase. Playing this game was a welcome change from carrying two guns and gluing my back to cover.

Kurt’s chain gun is pretty weak, but it sprays at a ridiculously fast speed. He can run at about 60MPH, and the open environments were impressive during an era largely confined to corridors. More impressive was that, even though this was 1997, there wasn’t any fog occluding distant objects.

The trade-off is that the environments also aren’t very detailed, but that is hardly ever a problem. Usually, it only causes issues during platforming sections. However, this is exacerbated by the fact that Kurt is just a 2D sprite. He can actually cling to ledges and pull himself up, but figuring out where the ledge is in relation to Kurt can be difficult.

MDK was released during the early days of 3D acceleration on PC, which I now hate. I don’t hate the games, really, but I do hate how badly they tend to play on modern setups. Interplay did recently patch it to improve compatibility, but it still very reluctantly runs at 640x480 resolution. Proper mouse aiming needs to be configured in the game’s settings, and the menus don’t really function correctly. One time, I alt-tabbed, and when I went back in, my mouse aim was broken. It’s a game that badly needs a source port or remaster.

Face mounted hardware

MDK also contains a lot of Shiny’s original weirdness. There are cows, for example. It’s largely a mix of dark and absurd humor. Earthworm Jim even makes a cameo appearance as a power-up icon that causes a cow to land on enemies.

There was a sequel appropriately named MDK 2, but it was handled by BioWare. It was generally well-received and well-loved, even getting an HD version in 2012. However, it was a disappointment to me. The gameplay alternates between three characters: Dr. Hawkins, Kurt, and Max. Kurt’s levels are rather similar to the first game, but Dr. Hawkin’s had more puzzle-oriented gameplay. I barely remember what Max played like. The biggest letdown for me was the fact that the humor leaned in more of a silly direction, losing its edge.

The original MDK is just dumb fun. But beyond that, it’s also an imaginative antithesis to the direction shooting games would take over the next decade. Even now, I can’t think of a game that comes close to MDK’s speedy, cathartic blasting mixed with a darkly surreal atmosphere. Shiny Entertainment’s games weren’t always the tightest, most polished experience on the market, but the world is poorer for the loss of that company’s unique perspective. There hasn’t been anything quite like them since.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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I wasn’t expecting Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion to be remastered. While Nightdive Studios updated and rereleased the PC versions of the first two games, there wasn’t a PC version of Turok 3. They didn't have the source files, so they had to reverse-engineer the N64 version and port it over to their proprietary KEX Engine.

It’s a lot of work to go through, especially when Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion is hardly the best game in the series. To put it charitably, it’s mediocre. Neither liquid nor solid. Remastering it was hardly going to be a financial home run.

But, as I said in my review, “It wasn’t the smart thing to do. It was the right thing to do.” The remastered N64 trilogy of Turok games (excluding Rage Wars) would remain incomplete without that last game. For historical context, it needed to be there. The journey needed a conclusion.

So, Nightdive went all in on the remaster and then didn’t stop there. Beyond just getting it working on PC, they gave it a loving touch-up, buffing that carp until its scales sparkled. But it’s so true to the original that it can be easy to miss. Albert Marin Garau, a member of the art team at Nightdive, put together this comparison between the remaster and the N64 version (via emulation) to show off exactly how much of an upgrade it really is.

By the way, there are massive spoilers in the video.

“I think we've reached a good balance. The fans who haven't played this title for a while won't notice that there has been a radical change in the game's assets, other than the sharper look. But after a few minutes of playing, they'll certainly notice that there is something more than a simple skin lifting…” Albert told me via email. “At the same time, the visual part of the game will not be visually offensive to new players, whom the original textures and models could be such a negative aspect that it could ruin the experience at a certain degree.”

“The game still looks ‘retro,’ though. But that's not a bad thing, on the contrary.”

Nightdive did a similar thing with their remasters of the Quake games. All the models there were touched up to add more detail. However, if you were separated from the games for any length of time, you might not even notice. Only under direct comparison do the differences become clear.

Even if you do notice the difference, it still doesn’t look like a modern game. To me, I could believe that this was a PC or Dreamcast port that followed the N64 version, sort of like the versions of Shadow Man.

The textures were the most impressive part for me. The lighting feels like a given just because it’s in a more modern engine. As Albert explains, the KEX Engine “allowed us to add, move, adjust and tweak almost every single light source, and even use those beautiful real-time lights that cast shadows.”

On the other hand, the N64 was awful to textures. The console only had a 4KB texture cache, which is unimpressive, to say the least. Reverse-engineering the N64 version means that they’d wind up with all the tiny, low-detail textures stored on a cartridge. This would look awful running in modern resolutions.

However, many of the textures were pulled from texture libraries, some of which they were able to find with the help of their “texture archeologist.” But they had to replace every single texture in the game, and not all of them could be found. Even some of the ones that could be found weren’t of the necessary quality, so they had to be touched up by hand, while others needed to be remade from scratch.

According to Albert, “The most difficult part was to identify what's what. When you have thousands of 32x32 textures, it's really hard to tell what kind of surface are we looking at. So, the context was really important. It was easy to mix up what's stone or rusted metal, or even a monster shell at these low resolutions!”

But the team didn’t stop there. They also went further to upgrade each of the models without compromising the game’s original art direction. Albert pointed out, “A good example of what's been done in the character models can be found in their hands... now they have normal 5-finger hands! We've added extra detail to the most blocky parts of the character and enemies' bodies. Some monster's model simplicity made it hard to tell what we were looking at. We added extra detail and/or fixed inaccuracies to every stage model and added extra props to the more lifeless areas of the game.”

This can easily be seen around the house in the opening cutscene. In the N64 version, the muddy and low-quality textures make it look like it’s just sitting in an empty field. A later shot, however, indicates it flanks a road and is part of a neighborhood. The upgrades Nightdive did do a much better job of selling that fact. They didn’t remove the foggy surroundings, so it still has that N64 edge.

I found it somewhat hilarious, however, that Turok 3 had so much trouble with the scale of some models. A shotgun lying next to a corpse in the first level, for example, is often absurdly larger than the person who was supposedly holding it. At the 8:23 mark in the video, it shows Danielle on a train standing next to a door. In the N64 version, the window is askew, while Danielle towers over the threshold. Nightdive fixed the window but left the massive Danielle, preserving the scene’s absurd look while fixing the details.

Even upgrading the models like they did was a challenge. Albert recounts, “The model format used in this game had some limitations of those years regarding how the bones of the skinned meshes work. This drove us crazy at some point when adding some extra detail in the 3D mesh here and there broke the animations.”

“I really put a lot of love into the facial animations. I wanted to inject life into the characters,” Albert told me.

If there’s one place that Turok 3 was exceptional at the time, it was with the facial animations. Having lip-syncing was extremely rare, and having expressive characters was even less common. The only other game that I can readily name off the top of my head with this level of detail is Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The console just wasn’t built for it. Even then, Turok 3 wasn’t always great at it.

So Nightdive took the opportunity to expand on this feature. As Albert explains, “As you can see, in the original, only a few facial animations make sense. The reason is they used 2 different models for every character: The ‘upper body’ and more detailed face and the ‘complete body’ with simplified face model. They used the first one for close-distance camera angles which mouth movements were pretty accurate, then we have... the rest of the animations using the simplified face model. There were some animations that were used in more than one moment and in different cutscenes with random and generic mouth animations, or simply with no facial animation at all…”

You can really see this whenever a character talks with their full body showing. Look at 3:57 in the video. Danielle comes out of her room, fully dressed for some reason, to check on Joshua Fireseed. In the original N64 version, Danielle has no really visible facial movement, while Joseph has very little. However, in the updated version, she’s actually able to move her mouth and emote.

“For the remaster, I created unique animations for every camera angle with custom facial expressions and lip-synced mouth animations,” Albert told me. “It was mostly a frame-by-frame work, but I really enjoyed doing it!”

The animations, in general, were a nightmare to work with. Albert clarified, “The model format limitations forced me to adjust almost every single animation for the characters and enemies, but we also took the opportunity to improve them (no need to mention the originals were far from being polished) and even add extra animations that were nonexistent, lame or even a few unused animations the original developers removed for some reason.”

This video demonstrates why retro games are in good hands when they’re given to Nightdive Studios. The Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion remaster still looks like Turok 3, maybe just cranked up to its maximum settings. It doesn’t look like a new game built on the bones of an older one, nor does it bear the blasphemous inconsistencies of a (typical) fan-made HD mod. It’s also not some sort of officially stamped abomination like the Silent Hill HD collection. Changing too much robs a game of its original intent and its historical context. Not changing anything risks alienating new players. They didn’t “fix” Turok 3. They just spit on a napkin and wiped the marinara off its face.

As Larry Kuperman, Director of Business Development at Nightdive, once said to me, “If someone is looking for the latest Unreal 5 game, they probably didn't want Turok.” 

It’s not even an argument of “Don’t fix what isn’t broke.” It’s more like, “Don’t assume you know better than the original developers.” And yet, actually trying to stay true to the developer's vision while breaking away from the technological constraints of the original release takes a lot of work. In fact, I’d argue it's more difficult. The fact that Nightdive will take the more difficult path, even for a game of questionable quality like Turok 3, demonstrates a reverence for the medium as an art. And that feels like something that there has always been a lack of when it comes to video games.

The post Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion comparison shows the care that went into Nightdive’s remaster appeared first on Destructoid.

On paper, 1995’s Cool Riders sounds great. It was the follow-up to 1993’s Outrunners, which itself was a multiplayer follow-up to 1986’s Out Run. Only this time, it’s on motorized bikes. Then you see it, and you realize Cool Riders is one of the least cool games to exist.

Let me back up a sec here. Cool Riders is absolutely one of the best retro games I’ve been introduced to this year. It’s a year where I feel something finally snapped in my head, and I’ve come to legitimately enjoy a lot of kusoge. But the thing about Cool Riders is that it certainly looks like kusoge, but it doesn’t play like it. 

It’s sort of a Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game situation. While the game’s graphics give you that whiff of kusoge, the mere fact that it’s built on the bones of a better game means that it’s still enjoyable. Better than enjoyable, actually, Cool Riders is a riot.

The fat is in the fire

By 1995, following some tentative hesitation, Sega was well into its conversion to 3D arcade games. Cool Riders is a bit of a strange latecomer. It was one of the last games to use Sega’s Super Scaler effect, pairing it with your typical raster effect to create 3D visuals. To put this into perspective, that year would have it competing against Sega Rally Championship for floor space. It was also the only game to be produced on the Sega H1 Board, which meant that the MAME community had quite a struggle getting it emulated properly.

The strangest part of Cool Riders, however, is the game itself. I’d love to see what the development pitch was like. It looks like something that was thrown together, but when you really dig into it, you realize that the whole thing was deliberate. A whole bunch of digitized actors and photo manipulation to create something that looks like an unholy union of Katamari Damacy and early ‘00s animutation.

It’s a bizarre maelstrom of ideas, with drivers that include a lady on a Vespa, a cowboy, and a devoted father. It’s obvious that the developers at Sega AM1 weren’t taking this very seriously, but how such a mish-mash of ideas came together, I’d like to know.

Seriously, I would like to know what the development of Cool Riders was like. There’s precious little behind-the-scenes information I could find. Not that it’s usually easy to find background information on ‘80s and ‘90s arcade games unless they’ve made a massive impact, but I’ve never been this curious before.

Grandpa Is Still Alive

What separates Cool Riders from Outrunners and, well, most games at the time is its use of digitized photography. That wasn’t entirely rare at the time, with Mortal Kombat famously utilizing this approach. But games like that and Pit-Fighter were earnestly trying to look good. Futuristic, even. The art in Cool Riders obviously isn’t trying to achieve that. It fully embraces its ridiculousness.

People who have worked with porting the game have said that it uses a lot of assets from Outrunner, but I would never believe that the two were related. It’s hard to really describe the visual style.

It’s like if walkedoutneimans decided to travel back in time and get a job at Sega. It’s like someone dropped a travel magazine in a blender and hit Frappe. It’s like a Bible game that gave up on Jesus partway through development.

The game’s premise is essentially the same as the Out Run games. You’re given a time limit to reach the checkpoint on a continuously splitting sprint. This time, however, you have the option of traveling West or East across the world or just keep your journey in the Americas. However, the world is depicted through the eyes of someone on psychedelics who never left their apartment.

Here Come Queen of Hurricanes

Even Japan, the country this game originated from, is depicted with sprinting ninjas and old castles. One of my favorite courses is the East Indies, where you travel across the ocean floor while flanked by sharks and giant octopi. You zoom through these stages at a blisteringly fast speed near the edge of control. Part of the challenge is just being able to read the obstacles that are constantly streaming by the edge of the road.

The drivers are incredible. A backstory for each of them is hinted at, and they’re given a lot of fanfare for characters we have never met before. There’s the aforementioned woman on a Vespa who is aided by official-looking dudes in suits. There’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a robot and an old man riding a souped-up, old-fashioned moped. One that I mentioned is this biker-looking dude who rides on a tricycle with his two children. Who are these people?

The game opens with Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf, which sounds like it fits more with a Harley Davidson stuffed in the corner of a movie theatre. Then you get into the game, and each of the characters has their own theme, and they frequently feel completely divorced from what is happening on-screen while also being kind of good.

The cabinets usually came in a pair, allowing you to race against a friend or unwelcome stranger. It doesn’t really affect much in gameplay, as the timer is your primary adversary, but whoever wins in any leg of the race gets to choose which branch is taken next. It’s a nice but unnecessary addition.

A Little Good

I’m not sure I can really express how much fun Cool Riders is. I got into it mostly because I love exploring Sega’s Super Scaler games, but I quickly found myself hooked. I played it over and over, trying to reach the game’s absurd finale. I’m no doubt going to pick it up again after this.

It’s an absolute sugar rush of a game, with bizarre, eye-catching scenery flying by. Endless basketball players in Chicago, Dracula in Romania, Mount Rushmore in the Rockies for some reason. It’s incredible it begs you to try and explore all the tracks, to test out every driver, to dive further and further into the mind of a broken genius. It helps that it was built on the bones of Outrunners and is made better because it is absolutely in on the joke.

The fact that Cool Riders has never been ported is a travesty. Nothing on the Sega Saturn, not even a nod anywhere else. It feels like Sega doesn’t even know it exists, buried deep down in its back catalog. For that matter, Outrunners hasn’t been ported outside of an absolutely abysmal Genesis/Mega Drive version. 

I don’t have much hope for it getting ported now, especially given how much trouble it gave MAME developers, but I’m going to make it my mission. At every possible opportunity, I’m going to bring up Cool Riders. I’m going to talk about it until everyone knows about it. Whenever I’m face-to-face with a Sega rep, I’m going to bring it up, searching for that spark of recognition or watching them squirm as they try to figure out what I’m talking about.

Cool Riders must ride again.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Considering that Capcom was ruling the fighting game roost in 1993, Saturday Night Slam Masters is such a low-key production. Street Fighter 2 blended together with a wrestling game sounds like such an amazing concept, but that’s absolutely not what Saturday Night Slam Masters is.

And that’s really weird, considering that one of the grapplers, Gunloc, has a bio that suggests he is related to a famous street fighter while Chun Li appears in the audience. Yet, despite the references that imply it exists in the same universe as Street Fighter 2, Saturday Night Slam Masters is pretty much just a wrestling game. It’s not even a particularly outstanding wrestling game, but it’s still one of my favorite arcade games of all time.

Why?

Mike Haggar. Mike Haggar! MIKE HAGGAR!

The Excellence of Execution

Saturday Night Slam Master was released in 1993 in arcades, but it also got ported to the SNES, Genesis, and FM Towns Marty. I first played it on the SNES where it became one of my most prized cartridges, but now that it’s more widely available through Capcom Arcade Stadium 2, that’s where I typically get my Haggar on.

In Japan, the game is actually called Muscle Bomber, but I personally love the Saturday Night Slam Masters moniker. I love it so much. It just sounds like an old televised wrestling show, similar to WWF’s Saturday Night’s Main Event. I love it so much that the flagship show of the fictional wrestling promotion I make over and over in every wrestling game with customization, Breakfast Time Wrestling, is Saturday Morning Slam. I almost italicized that like it’s a real thing.

Saturday Night Slam Masters centers around the worldwide Capcom Professional Wrestling Association. You choose a wrestler from a selection of 10 and then take them around the world to compete for the title belt. I don’t think that’s how wrestling titles are supposed to work, but it’s a great framework. And then, after you win the title, the game keeps on going, with you having to defend it.

There’s apparently more of a backstory. According to the Capcom Database citation-less summary, CPWA’s version of Hulk Hogan suddenly disappeared. With the vacuum of power where their champion was supposed to be, the CPWA decides to host their world tour Crash Carnival, to crown a new champion. But an evil promotion called the Blood Professional Wrestling Association decides that they want the title, and some of their wrestlers crash the Crash Carnival, which, again, I don’t think is how wrestling works. Maybe it’s kayfabe.

Magic Mike

Then there’s the aesthetic, which has that slight grit common in the Street Fighter and Final Fight games. The CPWA is a far cry from the glossy productions put on by wrestling promotions these days. It reminds me more of the early days of televised wrestling where the wrestlers would practically wade through a sea of people to get to the ring, rather than having an almost choreographed entrance.

Mike Haggar’s entrance, for example, simply has him throwing a towel into the crowd. If only I was there to catch that towel…

Then you get to the actual wrestling, and it’s just… fine. There are punches, grapples, and Irish whips, plus plenty of button mashing. I feel that button mashing is actually key to arcade wrestling. Hammering that button and shaking the stick gives some physicality to the experience.

However, Saturday Night Slam Masters lacks any nuance beneath that. You can climb the ropes, but opponents don’t stay down long enough for you to really land a flying elbow. It’s possible to get outside the ring and use weapons, but that’s largely pointless. If you do it to temporarily escape your opponent’s thrashing, it’s unlikely the opponent will actually join you. So you’re left standing out there, holding a bucket while the ref counts.

Haggarmania

Then there are the special moves. I only know of Mike Haggar’s, because when I have a choice to play as Mike Haggar or literally anyone else, I choose Mike Haggar. He has his spinning double-lariat from Final Fight, as well as a spinning piledrive. Except the spinning piledrive requires you to tie up with an opponent, rotate the joystick 360 degrees, and hit the punch and jump buttons together. The problem is that once you tie up, you have about 1 second to mash the punch button to overpower your opponent. Otherwise, they perform a slam against you.

I can play Zangief just fine. I’m no stranger to 360 rotations. But I have never once been able to perform Mike Haggar’s spinning piledriver. To this day, its existence is hearsay to me.

Pins are also somewhat routine. If your opponent has no life left in their gauge, they’re out the moment you pin them. The same goes for you. Fight all you want, but if your life gauge is empty, you’re not getting free.

A lot of the actual combat in Saturday Night Slam Masters just feels “good enough.” It’s not actually that much better than 1986’s Pro Wrestling on the NES or 1989’s Tecmo World Wrestling, just to name a couple. Heck, 1991’s King of the Monsters is a better wrestling game, and that game is really about kaiju.

Although, none of those have Mike Haggar, which means Saturday Night Slam Masters is the best.

Pinfall

I should note that there is a tag team mode, which is pretty fun. It allows you to team up with a friend or captive stranger to take on the CPWA. Really, it’s more like a tornado tag. You’re both in the ring at the same time, and the goal is to pin both opponents, which can be done one at a time.

There were two follow-ups to Saturday Night Slam Masters. The first was Muscle Bomber Duo, which was kind of like the “Turbo” version of the base game. The gameplay is more polished, and you can play as the boss characters. It actually does play quite a bit better. Getting into a tie-up actually requires you to press a button to grapple.

The actual sequel is Ring of Destruction: Muscle Bombers 2, and it’s a horrible abomination. For whatever reason, the developers turned it into a straightforward fighting game. The wrestling is now just an aesthetic choice. You don’t even have to pin at the end of the match. Even worse, it isn’t a good fighting game. It does still have Mike Haggar, though.

Unfortunately, neither of these follow-ups were in Capcom Arcade Stadium 2, which isn’t a huge loss for Ring of Destruction, but Muscle Bomber Duo is a clear improvement over the original. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a Capcom Arcade Stadium 3, but if they’re still not included, we riot.

Get back in the ring

Even though it isn’t the best wrestling game, I still love it. It’s easy to pick up and play a few rounds, the aesthetic is perfect, and while it isn’t great, it’s good enough. Good enough, plus Mike Haggar, is immediately top-shelf.

One of my dream games is for Capcom to return to Saturday Night Slam Masters. The wrestling sub-genre in video games is in a stagnant place right now. Much of the air in the room is dominated by the WWE 2K series' abundant flab, and fun arcade wrestlers are few and far between. A wrestling game that eschews licensed wrestlers and instead provides a fun cast with a unique aesthetic feels like it would stand out today. Especially if it features Mike Haggar.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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Primal Rage maybe wasn’t the best fighting game to hit arcades in 1994, but I have some fond memories of playing it with friends. I wish we could get some sort of re-release, or maybe even a release of the canceled (but apparently finished) Primal Rage 2. But we’re not talking about Primal Rage. We’re here to look at DinoRex.

Released by Taito in 1992, DinoRex has a lot in common with Primal Rage. There are dinosaurs animated by stop-motion and humans in the foreground. I would use that same description for both games when trying to explain them to someone who hadn’t played them before. However, while Primal Rage is an “okay, not great” game, DinoRex is more of a “so bad it’s kind of good” kind of game—the very best flavor of kusoge.

It is just incredible.

Ancient Anger

DinoRex is a fighting game where you play as a mostly-naked dude in a mask. He’s got a whip, but it’s not what it looks like, I swear! Your dude wants to become the DinoRex or something, which supposedly means being the best at forcing a dinosaur to fight another dinosaur. While you’re stuck with being a buff naked man, there are seven dinosaurs you can pick from, ranging from chubby to annoying. Each one is extremely different to control, so maybe don’t try to switch midway through a game. It’s like learning to roller skate again after a severe head injury.

Apparently, there’s a part of the world where archeologists apparently have never been, where dinosaurs existed well after their alleged extinction. Long enough that people were able to ride them. DinoRex sees humans doing what humans do, as we take these critically endangered creatures and make them fight for our amusement.

There’s a prize for whoever manages to coerce their dinosaur into winning the tournament; they get to become King. I think. The text crawls that try to tell the narrative are hilariously mistranslated to the point where I don’t think I fully understand what’s going on. There’s some sort of queen involved, but I don’t really know how she plays into this. I think it might just be an excuse to have a woman in a loincloth on the attract screen.

I’m not even being facetious or disingenuous here. DinoRex has more expositional cutscenes than you usually see in this sort of arcade game, and I still can’t really tell what’s going on. It starts out simple enough, then you blink and find it rolling down the steep slope into madness. I still can’t tell if the Queen is some sort of overlord or a prize for winning at dinosaur abuse. It’s very eager to tell you nothing at all.

Primitive Fury

It’s also really difficult to describe the gameplay. It subscribes to the general idea most fighting games following Yie Ar Kung-Fu did. You hold a direction, press a button, and your dinosaur does a thing. However, I’m not sure how many different moves each one has or how they relate to the combination you’ve pressed.

Here’s how you win, though: find the button/direction combo that makes your dinosaur latch onto its opponent’s throat. Keep doing that until someone dies. You win.

If you want to cinch the win, you can force your dinosaur to do its special move. Your special bar is segmented into three pieces. You fill it by holding up, which makes the dinosaur throw its chubby head back and give a mighty roar. Then, once it’s filled, you can hit the special button and then just walk away. So long as it doesn’t get interrupted, your dinosaur will pull off one attack for every segment of the bar you have filled. So, if you have one bar filled, it will knock its opponent back once. If all three are full, your dinosaur will hit the other dino once, wait until it stops skidding along the ground, hit it a second time, wait for it to stop skidding again, and then – you guessed it – hit it again.

The three-hit process takes literally 10 seconds, which, when put in the context of arcade games in general and fighting games specifically, is approximately a decade. In these 10 seconds, no one needs to press a button. The sequence cannot be interrupted. You are a slave to the dino-combo.

Primordial Animosity

On the other hand, the special combos are kind of cool. If there’s one thing that DinoRex does legitimately well, it’s the destruction of its environments. Amazonians scatter, cages are crushed, and dust flies up as structures give out under the ample bodies of the dinosaurs.

It’s not the absolute best part, however. The best part is that every few battles, there’s a bonus stage. These are framed as being dreams, but they involve your portly pal marching through modern cities and wrecking buildings. These don’t really play any better than the fight scenes, but the mere fact that you’re kicking army dudes and knocking helicopters out of the sky makes them worthwhile spectacles.

There are two city bonus levels, but the last one is kicking Amazonians for some reason.

Weirdly, the dream sequences seem to tell a side story. Your dino pal is wrecking up Ho Lee City, which is run by Mr. Ho Lee. Beyond just running a city, Mr. Ho Lee also has some sort of tower that he’s really protective of. He hires the police and military to protect that building in particular from the rotund reptile wreaking havoc, so your ultimate goal is to knock it over.

What that has to do with anything, I have no idea. However, succeeding, you’re rewarded with the “Collopse of the cIvIlIzatIon” [sic, obviously]. Simply incredible.

Uh... Past Vexation

At the end of the fight, for absolutely no reason, a pterodactyl swoops down and snatches up the Amazonian dude as they grieve the loss of their best dinosaur friend. Sometimes, they just fly off with the guy, but every once in a while they’ll just swallow them whole. This sort of player shaming was what made this era of arcade games the best.

It’s hard to tell if the developers were in on the whole ridiculous spectacle – if it’s intentionally humorous or accidentally funny. There are times when it seems like they were trying to make something cool that might pull people away from Street Fighter II, but other times, it’s just too ridiculous to be accidental. Exactly like Deadly Premonition, is what I’m saying.

And like Deadly Premonition, I absolutely love DinoRex. For a long time, it was never ported. It did land on a Taito compilation for PS2 in 2007, but only in Japan. I probably wouldn’t have discovered it if it hadn’t landed on the Taito Milestones 2 collection for Switch. More recently, it’s also available as a standalone Arcade Archives release.

Every once in a while, I come across a kusoge that just is so fascinatingly inept that I practically fall in love. DinoRex was one of these games. I’m so enthusiastic about its terribleness that this is the third time I’ve written about it and each time, I extoll how incredible it is to experience. This is one of the best parts about art across all media. Whether something is well-executed or not doesn’t matter in the least. What matters is how well it connects with you.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Game preservation is a topic close to my heart. For me, video games never age. I spend just as much time playing games from decades ago as I do with modern titles. My favorite games are the ones I’ve never played before, and that isn’t exclusive to the future.

Accessibility is therefore important, especially when it comes to PC titles where changes in operating systems, graphical processing, and even monitor resolutions have rendered a lot of old titles unplayable on modern setups. GOG has, for a long while now, been an important fixture to people like me. It provides easy access to retro titles from the DOS and early Windows days in formats that are typically simple to get working with minimal configuration.

Typically.

Recently, I’ve been interested in what drives the business of retro games. Is preserving old games on new platforms viable from a business standpoint, or is it always just a matter of passion? I got the chance to speak with Urszula Jach-Jaki, Managing Director at GOG, to dig deep into the details.

Publisher grip

There are only so many classic titles still up for grabs these days. Some might argue that the most important titles of yesteryear are still accessible, but that’s proveably bupkiss. Some large, significant publishers like EA and Warner Bros. hold on tightly to some of their most significant titles in their backlog. EA is perhaps the most vexing, as titles like SimCity or even The Sims aren’t readily available on even their own storefront.

I asked Jach-Jaki if GOG has tried working with these companies and why they’re so tight-fisted with their properties. “We can cite a few examples of well-known franchises that were not initially available in digital distribution,” they responded. “Thanks to our efforts, a re-release became a reality – Diablo, for example. However, it's always the publisher's decision, and we can only provide them with convincing arguments.

“There could be various reasons behind not releasing well-known titles. Sometimes, it's due to intellectual property ownership issues, with the publisher uncertain about whether they own 100% of the rights to the property (and proving this can be quite complex), or they simply lack the capacity to work on the old build and re-release the game on modern systems.”

There’s also the theory that the availability of games that have newer iterations, such as The Sims, would have their sales cannibalized by older, cheaper versions. However, SimCity has the 2013 version, but you can still purchase SimCity 2000, so the validity of the assumption is questionable.

Immediate profit

For that matter, I wondered what games are actually fit for re-release. Specifically, how does GOG estimate the profitability of re-releasing old titles. “The key metrics we assess before making a decision typically involve a blend of our experience, conclusions drawn from the past, certain business metrics, and the developers' vision and assumptions,” Jach-Jaki explained.

Further than that, they explain that sometimes it isn’t about how many sales a title will get. “It is not always about pure profit. Oftentimes, we invest to bring back games that didn't achieve commercial success, aiming to make fans of the game and our community happy – especially if fixing the game is not time-consuming. What helps us with these decisions is our community wishlist which we monitor on a regular basis. Some of the games at the very top are challenging to get, so we focus our attention on whatever's next in line, based on level of complexity (and that's usually a mix of who owned/owns the code/IP and what's the history behind the title).”

Since, as I said in the intro, I have to wonder if a lot of game preservation is a matter of passion over profit, I asked if all the games GOG has made available turned a profit, whether after launch or even during its lifetime. Is it worth bringing them back, even if they don’t turn a profit?

“Reviving many 'forgotten' titles may not be profitable in the short term,” Jach-Jaki told me. “Despite marketing efforts around these games, it won't change the fact that many of them may not garner enough attention. While we acknowledge this reality, preserving the legacy and keeping those games alive and accessible to all the gamers who appreciate them, as well as introducing them to new generations, is an important factor. This commitment sometimes means having to wait more time to recoup the investment. However, we can name many examples of re-released games, that continue to be very popular and profitable.”

“This may sound somewhat idealistic,” she continues, “considering we are a store and our primary concern should be generating profits from all the titles in our offering. Game preservation goes beyond financial gain for us and by bringing old games back to life we aim to stay true to our roots and recapture the spirit of our early days with games when we were children. For most of us, these old games played a crucial role in shaping our identities. We strive to extend this opportunity to the younger generations of gamers, whose gaming experiences differ significantly, allowing them to experience the same excitement we felt.”

“As long as this ambition is achieved, it’s perfectly acceptable even if it doesn’t yield immediate profits.”

The lawyers

This made me wonder about something else. Some of the releases on GOG have been modified to be playable on modern operating systems, but others have merely been packaged with DOSbox, and presented as is. This has caused some problems with games on the storefront, requiring a bit of finessing to get them working properly.

The example that still bothers me to this day is 1997’s Interstate ‘76. It’s a game that has a myriad of problems today that make it nearly unplayable. Even if you do get it running, physics are based on framerate, which makes a particular level impossible to complete. As a result, fans have had to step in and provide workarounds and fixes for the game. These haven’t been incorporated into the actual store release, so if you buy the game, you then have to dig for the fixes and implement them. If CD Projekt Red and GOG are passionate about these games, why release anything in this sort of state?

The answer was something I hadn’t even considered before.

“It depends on the specific contract provisions,” she explains. “In most cases, we do not possess the rights to modify the game build, and if bugs are reported, only the developers can address them. Our role here is to report any issues and offer technical support when necessary, but we cannot act independently to alter the game files. Of course, there are certain situations where we can implement fixes or perform deeper modifications to the game, but such arrangements are relatively rare.”

Oh, right. It’s always lawyers.

Source Port

This is also why GOG usually can’t incorporate fanmade source ports on their storefront. Duke Nukem 2, for example, has the fantastic Rigel Engine that allows the game to run natively on modern operating systems with a myriad of additional tweaks. But if GOG isn’t allowed to modify the game in any way, even if they had the fan’s permission to use the port, they wouldn’t be allowed to.

A major exception with this was the Daggerfall Unity - GOG Cut, which not only ports the game to the Unity Engine, but also implements a number of fan mods that make Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall more comfortable to play.

“Daggerfall Unity – GOG Cut was our passion project and we were very thrilled with its critical acclaim,” Jach-Jaki said. “In many ways, what the modding community does aligns with our mission – making games look and play better, regardless of their age. Mods can enhance the overall experience with games not only by fixing bugs, but also by offering diverse content and improving gameplay mechanics. We see them as a way to cater to various gamers’ preferences and we are eager to work closely with modders to facilitate the integration of their input into the games.”

I’m hoping we get more of that from the platform. At least now, there’s some precedence.

Dragon's horde

In recent years, GOG has slowed down a bit from its original mission of making old DOS games accessible again. More focus seems to be on modern titles. As Jach-Jaki puts it, “The vision for Good Old Games in 2008 was simple: bring back games from the pre-digital era of gaming. This provided us with plenty of fuel for many years. Fast forward 15 years, and we have 1600+ classic games (10Y+) which is roughly 20% of our catalog.”

“We want to be a store that invites modern games as well because, at the end of the day, it's about providing amazing games to our community and catering to various tastes and needs. Even better if we can do it DRM-free!”

It’s still pretty unfortunate that there are some games that may never get a re-release simply because of licensing issues. Even getting a game as historically important as Goldeneye 007 available on modern consoles took decades, and I feel we had to make a compromise as there were very few quality-of-life improvements in the releases we did get. Meanwhile, Activision and EA are sitting on piles of 007 titles that I doubt anyone would go to the trouble of re-releasing.

Jach-Jaki explains, “This is essentially why reviving classic games based on huge licenses (many of which are held by AAA publishers) is such a challenge. There are expired OST rights to consider, sometimes actor fees, product placements, or outdated credits content. All these factors, combined with the necessary involvement of legal teams, producers, and brand teams, make it a significant undertaking. It's a lot of work, not only for us but also for the publisher. Sometimes, as harsh as it sounds, however amazing it might be to restore a game, the opportunity cost does not add up.”

“There are plenty of games like this that will probably never be enjoyed by new generations again unless game preservation is taken seriously. This is precisely what we are here for!”

The future of retro

Finally, I asked if there were any games that Urszula Jach-Jaki personally wants to see preserved.

“There are many of them!” she said. “Allow me to be somewhat vague here and refrain from mentioning specific titles, but rest assured that we have major announcements pending regarding titles we've been diligently working on for an extended period. The classic games community has much to be excited about.”

“Let me also take this opportunity to express our gratitude to our fellow gamers for suggesting titles that should be revived and contributing to the growth of our community wishlist. While we may not be able to fulfill all the requests, we strive to release as many as possible.”

The post GOG’s Urszula Jach-Jaki discusses game preservation and the business of retro appeared first on Destructoid.

Crap. It’s already December. Mercifully, I haven’t heard much Christmas music in the stores I deign to visit, but that probably now ends. The holidays are bearing down on us like a sugar-infused child.

Christmas definitely isn’t my favorite time of the year. I make the most of it, but not only am I a spiritually-devoid husk, I also once worked a job in retail over the holiday season. If you ever want a reason to give up on humanity, that’s how you do it.

So, I’m bitter about the holidays. Not only that, but I’m well-practiced at being bitter about the holidays. Maybe you are, too. If that's the case, I invite you to learn from my years of humbug-slinging and celebrate the way I do: by playing a bunch of marginally Christmas-related games that pay no respect to the holiday.

Batman Returns (SNES, 1993)

Batman Returns is easily and inarguably the best Christmas movie ever made. It has an excellent cast, including Danny DeVito as a sad vomit man and Christopher Walken as Christopher Walken. A woman gets pushed out a window by her boss, and Batman lights a clown on fire. It’s a great movie for the kids and really captures the spirit of the holiday. When I was younger, I had a Michael Keaton action figure.

You could probably argue any of the many versions of Batman Returns. I know a lot of people swear by the Amiga B-Man, but for my money, I like to walk down a street devoid of holiday shoppers and smash clowns into guardrails in the SNES version. It’s a great way to work out my ample and boundless seasonal aggression. It’s also over rather quickly, which is always something I hope for when it comes to the holidays.

Die Hard (NES, 1991)

Die Hard is easily and inarguably the best Christmas movie ever made. It really captures the holiday spirit by having a guy walk barefoot across broken glass. That’s actually a mechanic in the NES game, by the way.

I wrote about this before, but while Die Hard is sometimes considered to be kusoge, it’s rather interestingly designed. In a lot of ways, it plays like an early immersive sim. You’re set loose in Nakatomi Plaza, and you need to save the day using only your skills, your bare feet, and your knowledge of the movie’s plot.

Also, there are Christmas trees on one floor of the game, so it counts.

ToeJam & Earl (Genesis/Mega Drive 1991)

A game about two allegedly funky aliens being stranded on the hostile and uninhabitable planet Earth may not seem like it has a lot to do with Christmas. One might also say that ToeJam & Earl isn’t even a Christmas game. But really, one of the central mechanics of the game is picking up presents, opening them, and finding out what’s inside. It really captures the all-encompassing spirit of the holiday.

If that isn’t enough for you, the central religious figure the holiday supposedly represents makes an appearance. That’s right, Santa Claus. He flies around in his jetpack. If you spot him unawares, you can take part in everyone’s favorite holiday tradition. Sneak up behind him, grab his butt, and watch as presents spray out of him in all directions. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Massacre (PC, 2021)

Christmas has long been a fixture of horror movies because trauma is super effective during the holidays. Puppet Combo's Christmas Massacre taps into this classic buster of holiday cheer by casting you as Larry, a slasher killer in a Santa outfit. Larry’s Christmas tree tasks him with killing naughty people, which seems to just be everyone.

Christmas Massacre is a mostly enjoyable mess of a stealth game. But, more importantly, the image of a man wearing nothing but his underwear and a Santa mask getting directions from his Christmas tree really captures the warmth of the holidays. Then, it gives you the opportunity to extinguish it.

Parasite Eve (PS1, 1998)

1998’s Parasite Eve begins on Christmas Eve, one of the many overt links to the word “eve” that it makes. One of the earliest cutscenes in the game shows an entire opera house full of people catching fire like a Yule log and melting like a plastic tree. It really captures the warmth of the holidays.

The story stretches across the holiday season, but while it’s the (allegedly) most wonderful time of the year, there won’t be much celebrating in Manhattan. It gets evacuated due to a strange threat that turns rats into beasts and people into bubbling pools of liquid consumers. If you can get over the narrative’s obsession with mitochondria, it’s the perfect game to distract you while everyone else pretends to be happy for a couple of weeks.

The post 5 Christmas games for people who hate the holidays appeared first on Destructoid.

Money is really depressing to me. Not only have recent events left me with a deep anxiety about finances, it seems that a lot of people are struggling, and the best you can hope for is to struggle less. I don’t want to discuss this on a deeper level, so instead, let’s talk about Wall Street Kid.

Wall Street Kid is actually known as The Money Game II: Kabutochou no Kiseki in Japan, meaning that, yes, it’s the second in a series, with the first game never seeing a release outside of Japan. You could also look at the games as a spin-off of another Sofel series, Casino Kid, but they’re not actually related aside from sharing a developer.

I want to note off the top that I wouldn’t consider Wall Street Kid to be kusoge. It’s really not that bad, and Sofel did a great job localizing it by basically rebuilding everything to be more Western-friendly. It’s just such a bizarre game that I didn’t see myself covering it any other way, and it fits best in this column. I’m mad with power.

The game looks easy, that's why it sells

Wall Street Kid places you in the leather wingtips of the eponymous protagonist as he’s informed of the death of a family member. Apparently, your distant uncle has passed and left you his absurdly colossal fortune, but only if you prove that you’re already privileged enough to deserve it. Uncle Benedict has some pretty specific demands that you carry on the family name with undeserved dignity.

You’re given $500,000 of seed money, and you need to play the stock market to build up your life. You need to buy a house, get married, honeymoon on a yacht, and then re-obtain the family castle. For some reason, you need to do this in four months. Otherwise, the $600 Billion (wtf!?) in assets goes to… I don’t know, probably some greedy charity or something.

Those are some pretty incredible demands from a dead guy with too much money and no children.

Essentially, it means that you have to have enough money to pass certain milestones. At the end of the first month (April), you need to buy a $1 million home. That’s pretty funny nowadays with an out-of-control, overpriced housing market. 

Kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy

What’s funnier is that, at the start of the game, Mr. Kid already has a fiancée, and you’re now obligated to keep her happy in order to receive your absurdly massive inheritance. That means she’ll keep coming to you wanting you to buy her expensive things and will leave you if you don’t. Ah, true love.

She must know about the inheritance because this is practically extortion. She can demand anything she wants because if you don’t give in, she can just leave, and you can kiss that money goodbye. It’s a hilariously effective and cynical approach to a relationship. Every time the phone would ring, I’d find myself chanting, “Please don’t be my girlfriend,” before advancing the text. Video games have always been great at teaching children about adult relationships.

To be fair to the fiancée, you can say no to some of her demands and still succeed. It’s just if you don’t give in occasionally or ignore her outright that you lose.

Failing upwards

Games that simulate the stock exchange weren’t uncommon, even when Wall Street Kid hit the market. The concept is already pretty abstract and rooted in mathematics, so it’s a perfect fit for a video conversion. As such, there were attempts at stock exchange simulations before video games even left mainframe computers.

The milestones you have to reach are perhaps the only thing that really makes Wall Street Kid stand out. The day-by-day task of betting on stock is pretty boring. You get the newspaper in the morning that tells you what stocks are doing well, and the best way to succeed is to just put your money into one of the day’s top performers. I never had one severely crash out on me, but for that matter, I never lucked out and won big on something. It’s a rather predictable market.

Actually, I’m not sure if there’s even much room for skill here. The best strategy seems to be buying as much high-performing stock as you can at the time. When it stops performing, you just sell your stocks and trade over to something else. Whether or not that stock continues at that rate or not is kind of just random. Sometimes, not much of anything would rise in the market for me, so it wouldn’t matter what I picked. Realistic? I don’t know. I’m not an investor.

Since there’s a newspaper, I would have expected that it would cover events that impact certain stocks. Something like a worldwide telecom outage that affects the prices of ATNT or a war breaking out that boosts steel prices. There’s none of that. Categories of stocks just do well some days, and that’s about it.

Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew

At the end of June, you get to bid on the Benedict family castle, and by the end of July, you need to have enough money to pay it off. My playthrough video of Wall Street Kid is clocked at over 2 hours, but I accidentally said “yes” to something I shouldn’t have in my first attempt and lost in the first month and had to start over. Really, you could probably put a bow on it in an hour if your wheeling is up to par with your dealing. And you don’t accidentally select the wrong dialogue option.

I failed at the end, falling a hair short of affording the castle.

So, I guess I don’t “earn” the astronomical inheritance. How heartbreaking. I guess I’m just going to have to live the rest of my life as a failure with my wife, dog, million-dollar house, yacht, and $2.5 million in assets. All that hard work for nothing. Why must I suffer?

But I'll start over, and this time, I will have that inheritance that I deserve. Then, I will rub elbows with the other elite of this world. The champions who reign above average humans. And then I will gradually lose touch with the common person and form a spiritual hole where my humanity used to be. I will try to fill it, and when that doesn’t work, I’ll just hide it behind dead eyes, an empty smile, and a passionless relationship. I’d obscure it by establishing a charity for some popular cause. I'd show it to those beneath the heel of my boot that I still have a soul – some sort of compassion – while at the same time using it to dodge taxes and funnel money into my other corporate endeavors before it lands right back into my pockets. Not one drop of my money should be touched by the disgusting sorts of people who seek charity. What have they done to deserve it?

Not like me. I earned every dime. I played Wall Street Kid.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Wall Street Kid for NES makes capitalists of us all appeared first on Destructoid.

It’s hard to get excited for a new Contra game. It has been a series with some excellent ups and severe downs. As a publisher, Konami doesn't seem to be the most discriminating when it comes to handing their properties to outside developers. However, the fact that Contra: Operation Galuga is being handled by the more reliable WayForward gives reason to be optimistic.

I was given a chance to talk to Operation Galuga’s director, Tomm Hulett. Unfortunately, my optimism has been dashed. My first question was the ever-important “What is the best Contra game?”

Hulett responded, “It's gotta be the NES original. The 16-bit games especially have some amazingly memorable moments, but when you want consistent run 'n' gun perfection, there's no surpassing original Contra (though we are trying, of course!)”

Tsk tsk. Everyone knows the correct answer is Contra: Hard Corps.

I’m joking, of course. While I love Contra: Hard Corps for its Treasure-esque variety and weirdness, the first NES Contra is a solid choice. It’s a terrific translation of the 1987 arcade original, but despite its more limited hardware, it’s better in most ways. There’s a mechanical feel to it that is just so satisfying, especially if you see it through without the “Konami Code.”

Contra: Operation Galuga isn’t even WayForward’s first experience with the license. In 2007, they handled Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS, which was well-received, even right here in primordial Destructoid.

For Operation Galuga, the series is going back to the beginning. According to Tomm Hulett, it’s a reboot of the series. It takes us back to the first game’s Galuga Island, “fighting a terrorist uprising before uncovering the true threat.” However, it’s not at all just a remake of the first title. Even when it comes to narrative, Hulett says, “There are a lot of new characters and plot details to flesh out what was originally very straightforward.”

The trailer that hit during the September 14 Nintendo Direct also depicts a mix of classic Contra standards. There’s a hill stage reminiscent of 1990’s Super C, as well as one with hangbars like in Contra 3: Alien Wars and Contra: Hard Corps. According to Hulett, “Gameplay wise, it's all new. Well, obviously there are returning elements — you're running, gunning, picking up Spread Shots, and so on. But we were not beholden to ‘well, let's keep this simpler because it's the first Contra’ or ‘we can't put that element in this stage because that's not what happened.’ There are original enemies and bosses, and the returning favorites will behave in new and exciting ways. Stage designs are completely new as well.”

Konami was a bit of a different company back then, however. These days, I don’t really know what to make of them. At all. I have no idea what’s going on with them, and I’m someone who watches pretty carefully. It sometimes seems like they just license their old properties to other studios. That feels like their current approach to Silent Hill, which is rather alarming.

That made me wonder how Contra: Operation Galuga happened. Do they just license to interested parties, or does Konami actively seek out partners? “Konami brought up the idea of WayForward returning to the series with the general guideline of it being classic 2D gameplay with modern 3D visuals,” Hulett explained. “WayForward pitched some gameplay concepts, and it was full steam ahead from there.”

Okay, but was Konami just selling door-to-door? According to Hulett, “Konami was very specific about the overall story. They actually developed a full universe bible before even approaching us. It has been a very collaborative process, with Konami and WF workshopping the story of Operation Galuga specifically and how that drives the stages you visit and encounters you have. In my understanding, Konami really values reestablishing Contra as a key brand for old and new players alike, so they were very involved in how characters look and the overall brand direction.”

“For the gameplay itself,” Hulett added, “they really let us at WF take the lead and develop concepts and encounters that we believed in. Obviously, there was some feedback and a lot of playtesting data, but they let us pursue our vision for the player's experience. Overall, it's been a great partnership!”

While the original story of Contra simply had Lance Bean and Bill Rizer as selectable characters, they’re maybe not as interesting as some of the later creations that became playable in the series. Specifically, I asked about that chances of seeing Fang or Sheena from Contra: Hard Corps.

“Several characters will join Bill and Lance on Galuga Island, and they become available as you progress through Story Mode,” Hulett replies. “We’ve revealed a few, like Ariana and Lucia, already! There may even be some unlockable characters if players put in the time.”

Fingers crossed. In the meantime, both Ariana and Lucia sport some interesting designs. I’m down. I just hope they’re playable in story mode. Story mode only allows two players, whereas arcade permits up to four players. I hope that’s not because they insist on Lance and Bill being the only canonical participants in Operation Galuga. Although I could understand why, that’s just no fun. Lance and Bill are like the sugar glaze, whereas everyone who has come since is more like buttercream frosting. I’ll take glaze only when there is no other option.

By my count, this is the first time WayForward has worked with Konami since 2012’s Silent Hill: Book of Memories. A lot has no doubt changed since then, so it left me wondering what the chances were that this could lead to WayForward taking on other licenses. My initial thought was Castlevania, but that’s hardly the only property I’d love to see a new game from. Ganbare Goemon, maybe? Or dare I dream and wonder if Rocket Knight Adventures might get resurrected? Tomm Hulett was, after all, the Producer on 2010’s Rocket Knight. He also is credited with scenario.

“From your mouth to Konami's ears!” Hulett replied. “I know exactly how I'd pick up from the ending of RK'10 so my fingers are firmly crossed. In the words of Sparkster, ‘Let's go!’”

For now, I’ve got my fingers crossed that Contra: Operation Galuga turns out to be a success. Considering the last console entry we saw in the series was, uh… questionable, we could certainly do with a win. WayForward did a stellar job with 2007’s Contra 4, so here’s hoping they can duplicate that success.

While we’re at it, is a port of Contra 4 too much to ask for?

Contra: Operation Galuga is coming to Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC sometime in early 2024. A physical version will come afterward.

The post WayForward’s Tomm Hulett talks Contra: Operation Galuga and working with Konami appeared first on Destructoid.

Like many video game hobbyists, I’ve had dreams of making a game of my own. Before I was even in high school, I had a binder full of designs for a game I had dreamt up, but I never really got the means to even attempt to make it. Programming has always bored me, and I tend to get frustrated with art. Even attempts at small projects to just motivate myself with some visible progress fizzled.

The closest I got was a brief stint writing for a game company. I co-wrote a game that is still unannounced and may, at this point, be canceled. I’m not sure. However, I got the gig at the lowest point of my life, and it gave me something to focus on. I’ve always wanted to return to doing it, but again, there’s a wall I have to climb over to make any progress.

Jordan Weisman is among those looking to make game development more accessible. Weisman was one of the founders of Virtual Worlds Entertainment and FASA Interactive, responsible for the creation of the Battletech and Shadowrun series. He later returned to Shadowrun when he created Harebrained Schemes to help with the creation of Shadowrun Returns and the sequels that followed. After that was acquired by Paradox, he moved on. Now, his latest endeavor, Endless Adventures Inc., is set to release Adventure Forge later this year. Promising “No-code, no Limits, only imagination required,” it’s a platform to allow anyone to get their feet wet with game design.

Mr. Weisman and his business partner, David Reid, sat with me to discuss the upcoming toolset, as well as address my concerns about its use of generative AI.

The goal of Adventure Forge is “to create a toolset that allows storytellers, writers, artists, and designers to create narratively-focused video games without any coding or scripting necessary,” Weisman explained. They’ve spent “many years of tinkering trying to find authoring paradigms that enabled very rich, sophisticated logic for narrative games.” That led them to “a system of highly contextual, auto-populated drop-down menus so that you can create very sophisticated logic but never get syntax wrong.”

Weismann explained that the driving force behind it was years of creating interactive experiences, including both digital and tabletop games. “The part that brings the biggest smiles to my face are the stories that players told me, rather than the ones I told them,” he explained. “In video games, I never really felt that we were able to offer that level of creativity to players. To people who wanted to tell stories and make games.”

He further elaborated and said that he hoped to see more diverse voices making games and telling stories. “For the most part, we’re still in an industry where it’s old white guys like me who are telling stories. The entire universe plays games, and the entire universe is not old and white.”

“My other hope is that we also see a lot more innovation in narrative game design. Even those of us who have the privilege of having development teams available to us to create games, we don’t get that much time to really play with new ideas because it’s expensive. I write a design doc, send it to engineering, engineering sends it back to me, it sucks (because everything I design sucks the first ten times). That loop is slow and expensive. Your time for real innovation is relatively narrow. So, selfishly I also wanted a tool that allowed me to just screw around and try different things. Try to shorten that loop.”

The plan for Adventure Forge is that it won’t just be a toolset but also a platform. In order to share and play content, you’ll need the application itself. Its target platforms are Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Chrome.

The reason for the limitation is, as Weisman puts it, “Sometimes art, specifically narrative art, isn’t meant to be shared with the whole world. It might be a very personal story.” So, the platform will allow you to control how it's shared, whether it’s with the whole community or just a select group of friends.

Currently, the plan isn’t to allow you to publish your creations externally from the app. However, Weisman says, “The premise is to see what games start getting traction with people and then reach out to those creators and work with them to move it into a standalone application that will be available in app stores to expose their great work to an even larger audience.

All this empowerment for solo developers comes at the price of Adventure Forge’s integrated generative AI. Behind those contextual menus is an LLM, and it goes beyond that. One of the touted features of the platform is that if you can’t find a premade asset for something you need within the extensive list of items provided, you can have the AI create one for you, replicating the art style and perspective. It can also generate written text based on the context given, so it might handle the environment descriptions for you.

AI – or rather, what industry backers are pushing as AI – is an extremely nuanced topic of debate. Procedural creation has been part of the industry since the beginning before video games even migrated off of huge mainframe computers. Game engines have long integrated tools to make certain processes of game design easier or even automated. Generative AI might be seen as the next step in this, or even a step too far. There are facets of it leaking into every form of media, and creative people are rightfully afraid of being devalued further in a world where people already seem to believe art should be free.

“The way we view generative content creation is as an author-facing tool, not player-facing content,” Weisman explains. “For us, the most important thing is that the designer/artist/writer/creator of the experience is in control of the experience. That they can guarantee that their creative intent is coming across to the player.” Further, he explains that attempts to use chatbots to supplement the characters and story just don’t provide the desired result. A carrot that is currently being chased by some other big publishers.

Instead, you can get writing prompts from the LLM based on what you’ve written previously. Weisman says, “It’s just text for you to manipulate. For myself, maybe 5% of the actual words that the language model made may end up in something I’m working on. But often, I find that it's blathering of some tropes out will inspire me quicker than if I were just staring at the blank prompt.” He describes it as “the super-next generation of predictive text that we’ve had in our word generators and our emails for quite some time.”

Using generative AI is a bit of a tightrope walk, to put it lightly. The crew at Endless Adventures are being careful with how they approach it, but I still have conflicted feelings on the matter. It’s important to keep in mind that learning to be a traditional solo developer is not impossible. There are a lot of people from different backgrounds who have taken the dive and met with success. The truly hard part of the ordeal is getting your work noticed. This would be even more difficult to navigate if marketplaces were packed full of quick, low-effort AI-generated projects.

“I think there are many axises to this challenge. To me, even in a big team, players want to play something created by a human that has the thought process of a human," said Weismann. "The human condition that they’re bringing to that story that makes it interesting and relatable. To me, it’s a matter of if they can use those tools in a controlled enough environment to get that creative intent across in a real and cohesive way and develop a style that is going to make each game look unique. Because games need to look unique to stand out in the marketplace. You can’t have your game look like everyone else's.”

David Reid added, “AI is really good at looking backward and building things that humans have thought of doing already. But if you make a game solely on AI, the only things that will play it is AI. Humans will find them very dull and uninteresting. Really, what we’re trying to do with Adventure Forge is unleashing the creativity of people who have been unable to turn the stories and ideas they have into full-fledged interactive games. AI is a tool for that.”

“A lot of entertainment is pattern-driven,” Weisman explains. “Patterns will always have a place in entertainment. One of the things when I lecture that I talk about with designers is that you have to establish the familiar in order for your audience to appreciate the exotic. And the familiar is patterns. Things that we’re used to in our world and our own life experience. And then the human element is how to find the interesting twist. That’s the part that I don’t see a computer coming up with soon.”

That’s pretty optimistic. In my experience, humans have an insatiable appetite for the familiar that seems to get more and more overwhelming as the years go by. There’s often a pop where we get tired, and suddenly, super-hero movies aren’t getting the same traction, but I don’t think that results in seeking something unique. There’s usually a holding pattern while we seek the next trend that the masses cling to.

Generative AI and LLM are inevitably going to find a place. If we’re lucky, it will be as Endless Adventures envisions it, and creative people will be empowered to create more. The general fear is that there will be fewer places where creativity has value because AI has filled them all faster, cheaper, and without complaint. It’s hard to have your voice heard over the din of so many robots.

In the Shadowrun universe, one of the first sentient AIs developed took over a large arcology, locked the doors, and killed most of the inhabitants in what’s known as the Renraku Arcology Shutdown. It’s a good read, but with the way AI has been applied to non-sentient programs that browse data to generate content based on patterns, it’s more likely that our world’s AI is just going to suck all the flavor off the bones of the world than destroy us all. Such a shame.

There’s a lot more to discuss on generative AI, but I find the whole debate so tiresome. From this conversation, I’m at least convinced that Jordan Weismann is doing what he’s always done; attempting to empower people to tell stories. There doesn’t seem to be anything malicious about Adventure Forge’s approach, and he’s spent a good amount of time considering the potential issues of AI and weighing them. He sees value in pursuing it.

I’m generally on the mixed-to-negative side. As I’ve said, games have used procedurally generated content as far back as 1980’s Rogue. The first two games in the Elder Scrolls series used it to craft their worlds (which were so terrible that they never did it again after that). So, maybe it’s, as Weisman says, and that as long as there’s a human behind the wheel, generative AI can be more of a tool than a crappier substitute for creativity.

At the time of this interview, Adventure Forge was expecting to enter its beta period this Fall. It could still happen, but I haven’t heard anything since, so we’ll have to wait and see.

The post Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman talks Adventure Forge and its use of generative AI appeared first on Destructoid.

I mentioned this once before, but after the launch of the Super Nintendo in 1991 (1990 for Japan), Konami went through this weird period of producing licensed games that were way better than you’d expect. I’ve covered Bucky O’Hare, but there’s also Zen: The Intergalactic Ninja, and this one: Monster in My Pocket.

Monster in My Pocket is more than just a cheeky euphemism, it was this media franchise in the age when everyone wanted a media franchise. Well, it was an attempt at one. It was based around a series of tiny figures produced by Matchbox, but they also pushed a cartoon special and a comic that only made it through four issues. It was pretty short-lived.

The Monster in My Pocket NES game came out in 1992. Among the short list of staff who worked on the game is Etsunobu Ebisu, who would become a major figure in the Ganbare Goemon series. I mean that literally. The character of Ebisumaru is based on the guy. Now, he’s the president of Good-Feel. The other staff members are hardly slouches, either, but Ebisu is the one who’s still relevant today.

So, yeah. It’s more attention than you’d expect from a licensed game. Especially when you consider that licensed games at the time were typically dredged up from swamps.

I will keep my analogies holstered

Circling back to what Monster in My Pocket actually is; they were tiny little rubber figurines of, obviously, monsters. They were pretty cheap, and you could buy packs of them to fill your pockets with.

There’s a lot you can do when you just mash a bunch of monsters together, but the narrative of Monster in my Pocket is that Guile from Street Fighter II is evil, and he wants to… Uh, do evil, I guess. Vampire and (Frankenstein’s) Monster set out to stop him. To do so, they have to wade through all his various underlings.

Also, all the monsters are tiny. That’s important.

The plot might be pretty limited, but the really cool part of playing the game is seeing all the various toys you might have in your collection brought to life. Personally, I didn’t ever get into the toys. I would have been three or four when they first came out, so I probably would have just stuck them up my nose or whatever kids that age normally do. However, I could totally see the appeal of trying to identify all the various toys.

Shatter-pocket

As a game, Monster in My Pocket is a pretty standard side-scroller with a shade of brawler. You run along and punch everything in your way, trying not to get hit in the process. Sometimes, you can pick up objects from the environment and throw them, but this is pretty rare and not all that useful. There are places where there’s a bit of branching in the environments, but it’s mostly just a “high road, low road” kind of situation. Speaking of which, it isn’t immediately obvious, but you can double jump.

In a way, the brawler-sidescroller mix feels a bit like Shatterhand, but don’t get your expectations too high; this is a really basic game. At least it has two-player simultaneous co-op.

What really brings its quality up is its use of various effects and technical trickery that the NES doesn’t typically do well. This includes quickly scrolling backgrounds, four-way scrolling, and fake parallax effects. This was the sort of thing that Bucky O’Hare also did, as well as Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

Pocketful of pugilists

The downside is that the enemies tend to heap up on the ground of these levels, and it causes a lot of flicker, especially when you’re punching your way through them. 

This leads me to a question for other people who play a lot of NES: have you also just gotten used to sprite flicker? I’m not trying to diminish the limitation. It’s really distracting and doesn’t help the aesthetic whatsoever. However, when playing this, I realized that I don’t even notice anymore. I wonder if this is how children were able to tolerate it.

Anyway, the levels take you through a house, into a kitchen, out onto the streets, over a construction site, into Japan (weirdly), and then to a monster castle. Six stages. It’s a very short game, but there are limited continues, so it may take you a few attempts to get through it. Even with that, the first time I played it, I had it done with before the afternoon was over.

There is some variety to the levels, but not a whole lot. The bosses are really where it’s at. I kind of wish I knew who these toys are. I think the first boss is Mad Scientist, and the fifth boss is Banshee (who was apparently never released). The bosses are pretty simple, but they take some pattern memorization to take down without dumping a few lives.

Evil-Guile's revenge

The music is pretty pleasing, as well. The track for the fifth level, Oriental Illusion (I know), sounds like it could have been from one of the Ganbare Goemon games. I don’t think there was really much of an existing soundtrack to base the game’s music on, so it’s basically just top-shelf NES noodling.

I think the point I’m trying to land here is that Monster in My Pocket is way better than it should be, but not all that special aside from some technical delights. It has an advantage over Bucky O’hare in that it isn’t especially frustrating. Plus, there’s two-player co-op, if you can handle the extra flicker.

However, that’s what makes games like Monster in My Pocket more fascinating. It doesn’t feel like it should exist. Why not a Sega Genesis or SNES game instead? That seems like it would be easier. The fact that it was released on a console that was at the end of its lifespan, I would have expected it to be phoned in. But it’s not. It’s a completely competent game. Inoffensive at its very worst. Developers who were well beyond what the project called for still gave an impressive effort. You’ve got to hand it to them.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

The post Monster in My Pocket for NES is another licensed game that is way better than you’d expect appeared first on Destructoid.

Suburban Basketball is a game that lives on in my brain, long after I finished it. It’s an aggressive attack to the senses and seems to say a lot and nothing at all at the same time. It hurts. It may never stop hurting.

So, I was excited to see when walkedoutneimans had a new game lined up. Okay, maybe “excited” isn’t the correct word. It’s more like morbidly curious. I really had to know if Suburban Basketball was just a one-off eruption of brilliant insanity or if the developer was intentionally trying to hurt us.

This time, we have Tyko’s Dying Together, another game growing parasitically on the backbone of GZDoom, and…

Oh no…

Oh no!

Always check the readme.

Let me start by sharing with you the explanation the author wrote in the included readme file:

“this game is a wholehearted endorsement of picmix.com and cooltext.com. if you take anything away from this game it should be that you should spend more time online looking at pictures and scrolling. picmix is a really good website to look at art that people from around the world make.” [Sic], obviously.

I’ll hyperlink those sites for you. You’re welcome. You may wonder what the hell the developer is talking about, but it becomes obvious once you get into the game itself. The whole damned thing is set up like an interactive picmix gif. Both picmix and cooltext look like Web 1.0 woke up from its shallow grave with a murderous thirst for revenge. It’s insane that picmix is so popular. It’s a social media site of itself. A horrible community of disgustingly garish animated pictures. 

I can understand the fascination. What part of humanity’s soul is so broken that we can find value in this?

Tyko’s Dying Together literally lifts this bizarre aesthetic. Your screen is constantly surrounded by a distractingly ugly border. An out-of-place clock and near-unreadable text complement the assault on your eyes. Walls are plastered with images so blatantly ripped from the website that you can often see the obvious watermarks checkboarding the surface. It is uncomfortable to look at, simultaneously conveying deliberate intention and detached laziness.

I think this game gave me a fever. I believe my brain has started to overheat, just attempting to process the assault of information.

I don't think we actually survived that car crash

You start off in front of an angelic statue in a pitch-black room. It merely looks at you disapprovingly. The controls paste themselves on the screen obnoxiously, and it’s disorienting just to find the hallway leading out. No one you encounter out in the world is going to help you. They won’t explain anything. Your only friends are a pair of giant emojis, one being your own internal thoughts and desires and the other being a vaguely hostile angel.

If you sift through the madness, you’ll get the impression that you’re dead and in the afterlife. Maybe all of humanity is dead, wiped out by Lord Chaos. The point is, no one is going to clarify for you, nor will they show sympathy. “Dying is a part of life,” the angel tells you before appending it with a :) emoji.

You can drink, you can eat, and you can go and catch a movie in the theatre, but for what? What is the point to everything?

The best direction Tyko’s Dying Together really gives you is that a robed lady has lost her three scrolls. Each one will teach you a different language so you can converse with the strangely attractive goblins and capybaras of the afterlife. Find the first scroll, and you might even get a pair of wings. It doesn’t matter that the goblins all say the same lines of dialogue, and none of it is helpful; you’re making progress. Your little emoji guy might tell you that there are gems to find, but picking them up doesn’t really seem to do anything.

There is no music, just this weird, unsettling hum that sometimes rises to an aggravating rumble. What does this game want from you?

Also, there are clowns

Sometimes, you’re simply encouraged to dive into TykoSocial, take pictures of animals with your phone to share, and earn Tyko Coins. You might even bump into the CEO of Tyko, who will extoll the amazing technologies the corporation is using to improve your afterlife.

And then you realize. This is the afterlife, all right. This is Hell.

An eternity of chasing pointless goals to gain followers. A world where the activities that seem so important to everyone are really just a pointless lot of emptiness. A place where you’re constantly sharing all your thoughts, experiences, and relationships while simultaneously cheapening all of them. A mindless and inescapable landscape where it’s easier just to follow along and take part because abstaining means that you’re no longer functioning within society. Where it feels like you just don’t exist, an invisible ghost watching the world from the outside.

Yeah, the weirdness of the aesthetic. The uncomfortable horror of the visuals. The aimlessness of the gameplay. It smiles unblinkingly at you, pretending not to notice as the horror of your existence settles on you like a weighted blanket of human fat. Not the afterlife depicted within Tyko’s Dying Together, but the one you’re living right now. This game, as garish as it is, is a better alternative. A distraction as your phone vibrates to itself next to you.

It’s bleeding! It’s bleeding through the screen! Don’t struggle! Don’t fight it! The beast must feed! What have we done!?

Creative intentions

There’s also a pointless day/night cycle that’s going on at all times. When night hits, the levels get darker, and the obviously flat sky texture changes from clouds to a starry sky. There is one textured wall that will lead you to the three worlds (Candy World, Dirt World, and Enchanted Forest), but which world it sends you to feels entirely random. I tried gleaning the workings of the magical texture but failed to. Instead, I would just keep going in and out until I wound up in the correct place.

I asked walkedoutneimans if they actually go into creating these games with any intentions. They told me they came up with the name first and then built something around it. That sounds exactly like the creative process I know.

Surprisingly, there actually is an ending to Tyko’s Dying Together. Quite a few of them, but according to walkedoutneimans, most of them are very similar to each other. While I’m not sure I found all of them, the ones I have come across are fitting ways to cap off an afterlife full of eye-blistering images.

Tyko’s Dying Together is available for free over on Itch. Just make sure you’ve adequately braced yourself.

The post Tyko’s Dying Together is an eyeball-wrecking journey through our collective failures appeared first on Destructoid.

Nintendo has just announced a live-action Legend of Zelda film, in collaboration with Sony Pictures and Avi Arad. Let's see who might fit the many roles this 'legendary' series has to offer.

With the recent success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo is venturing into adapting The Legend of Zelda into live-action. First created in 1985, the series has become one of the most well-known in Nintendo's pantheon. With Wes Ball (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, The Maze Runner series) in the director's chair, it's only a matter of time before casting begins. No story details were given, but I figured with my love of entertainment that I'd try my hand at cast predictions. Will they come true? Maybe. Is it worth a try? Absolutely. Let's begin!

The characters I chose are fairly general, since we don't know which entry the movie will be based on, loosely or strictly. Still, I've picked actors who I believe can fit the role regardless, whether true live-action or CGI motion-capture.

Link - Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Owen Teague, Tom Holland

The silent swordsman is probably one of the toughest ones to cast. As Link doesn't talk (and shouldn't), you need someone who can command a room with their emotions rather than words.

A lot of people have brought up Emmy-nominated Thomas Brodie-Sangster, known for his roles in Game of Thrones and The Queen's Gambit. It's a pretty smart choice, as the actor has a history with Wes Ball, portraying Newt in the Maze Runner film series. He was also Ferb in Disney's Phineas and Ferb (I'm just as surprised as you), so he could play silent characters, even if they were animated. His cadence on screen and versatile range put Thomas high up on the list.

Owen Teague is a relatively new actor but one that shows promise. He also has a history with the director, as he voices Noa, the new protagonist of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He rocks long hair and displays an impressive range, whether it's comedy, drama, or anything in between. It's not uncommon for directors to pick previously-directed actors in big roles (look at Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio). With that, Owen's chances of picking up the Master Sword may come to fruition.

Of course, Tom Holland, while many feel it may be too cliché, might be a big contender. While he hasn't worked with Wes Ball, the producer, Avi Arad, took part in all his Spider-Man projects. Plus, he also produced Tom's take on Nathan Drake in the movie adaptation of Uncharted, as okay as it was. If Nintendo is going for big faces, Tom is a natural choice to play Link for the Legend of Zelda adaptation.

Zelda - Florence Pugh, Sydney Sweeney, Rachel Zegler

With Zelda, you want someone who wears their heart on their sleeve and their confidence up front. As she is more vocal in games, with Patricia Summersett voicing the character in the newer entries, they need to find an actress who can match that tone, as well as make it their own.

One that comes to mind immediately for me is Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Little Women, Black Widow). With an Academy Award nomination to her name, it's certain that she can do a grand job as the princess. She can handle drama, comedy, and action, as several projects of hers showcase her dynamic balance. While she is older than other contenders, a great performance can silence that and I guarantee Florence can deliver on that.

Two fairly newcomers are Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) and Rachel Zegler (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes). Syndey has the Emmy nominations to back her up (plus a potential Spider-Woman role in Madam Web) while Rachel's debut lead in Spielberg's West Side Story triumphed, almost grabbing her an Oscar nom. Each of them has the charm and charisma Zelda brings and would fit right into Hyrule.

Ganondorf - Idris Elba, Dave Bautista, Keith David

Ganondorf's actor demands a performance that sends chills down your spine. As the character is likely going to be CGI, I chose actors who can deliver the vocals with sophistication and eerieness.

When it comes to casting a brooding villain-type character, you can't go wrong with Idris Elba. His deep British voice has graced many projects such as Zootopia, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. He was even a top contender (and still is in my heart) to be the next James Bond. His presence as Ganon would be suiting for the Gerudo exile.

Vocally, I can definitely see Dave Bautista taking on the role, especially if motion-captured. I mean, the man's a WWE wrestler and a Guardian of the Galaxy. He's an avid gamer, too, as shown in his appearance in two Mortal Kombat 1 advertisements and his determination to be Marcus Fenix in the live-action Gears of War. The Legend of Zelda would be lucky to claim Dave as its dastardly antagonist

Speaking of vocals, Keith David could make an excellent lord of the Darkness. His career spans hundreds of projects, with a handful being video games. Most notably, he plays Arbiter in Halo, Anderson in Mass Effect, and Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog. His range would prove tremendously helpful if they plan to go for the Ocarina of Time route.

Impa - Zoe Saldana, Michelle Rodriguez, Ming-na Wen

The role may portray the older version from the original and Breath of the Wild, but I'm going for the Ocarina of Time and Hyrule Warriors version. As one of my favorite characters, Impa is a badass and deserves to be played by one in the Legend of Zelda film.

Instantly, the resume of Zoe Saldana comes to mind. She's been in the biggest franchises of all time in huge roles, like Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Neytiri in Avatar. Plus, she can kick some serious ass. Speaking of Avatar, the same goes for Fast & Furious star Michelle Rodriguez. The Resident Evil actress is a huge gamer, mostly first-person shooters, and even appeared in Halo 2. She'd make an intimidating Impa, for sure.

However, Ming-na Wen has the distinct pleasure of being in video games and their adaptations. In the 1994 Street Fighter movie, she played Chun-Li and also starred in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Despite being 59, the actress still can dish some damage if her character in Star Wars is anything to go by.

The King - Sean Bean, Donald Sutherland, Andy Serkis

Of course, for the King of Hyrule, you need to have someone who's been around for a bit. Preferably an actor whose background lies in theater, as they fit that regal tone.

Sean Bean, over his large career, has played a few kings of his own. Most notably, he was Ned Stark in Game of Thrones. He also did the voice for King Regis in Final Fantasy XV: Kingsglaive. And yes, his performance in The Lord of the Rings may make him the ideal candidate for a high-fantasy set epic.

Still, natural alternatives do exist. For example, Donald Sutherland (The Hunger Games) and Andy Serkis (Planet of the Apes) both have been in huge franchises as demanding figures. Each of them has played authoritative roles that'd fit right into the reality of The King. No matter what version is portrayed, I don't think you could go wrong with either of them

Goron - Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Dave Bautista, Jason Momoa

I know, I know but hear me out. Gorons have played pretty big roles in various Zelda titles, so they'll make an appearance in some form. Regardless, you'll need someone tough to play a literal rock creature.

And yeah, perhaps having Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson (Moana, Hobbs & Shaw) play one is on the nose. However, his personality and charisma would fit perfectly with a Goron. The same goes for Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Jason Momoa (Aquaman). Each of them would accentuate the headstrong nature of the Gorons. Their background in superhero films and wrestling already demonstrates that sense of strength. Plus, it helps that all of them are buff as all heck and could snap me in half.

Zora - Cate Blachett, Tilda Swinton, Charlize Theron

Water creatures need to have a sense of elegance to them. Maybe it's because of water being a symbol of life itself or maybe that's just me digging into my Creative Writing background like a rabid raccoon. Regardless, many iterations of the Zora in The Legend of Zelda are characters that are even-headed and calm. You typically want someone whose presence matches that.

Actresses like Cate Blanchett (The Lord of the Rings, Blue Jasmine) and Tilda Swinton (Doctor Strange, Michael Clayton) can do that pretty well, given their background in dramatics. While they can hold themselves in a fight if initiated, one actress who could do both with precision is Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road, Monster). Her mix of drama and action would suit a more silent warrior Zora but work either way.

Tingle - Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Danny Devito

It's hard to imagine Nintendo and Sony making Tingle a dramatic character in The Legend of Zelda film. I mean, he's an old man in a green jumpsuit who has a catchphrase. Hard to nab an Oscar nom for that. Therefore, it should be someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously. Comedians are natural choices since they embarrass themselves every day.

If Nintendo wanted to play it safe, the obvious choices are The Super Mario Bros. Movie stars Chris Pratt and Jack Black. Each of them nails that awkward comedy that would likely be used for the green 'fairy'. Still, it's been far too long since The Lorax himself Danny Devito has graced the silver screen. Perhaps it's time for his big return to be a small red-nosed human gremlin. Maybe.

The post Let’s wildly speculate about the cast for The Legend of Zelda movie appeared first on Destructoid.

Let’s take a moment to show some appreciation for the publishers who have the guts to keep kusoge available for purchase. Ziggurat. Nightdive. Thank you for giving me a megaphone to cry for help. Hopefully, someone will hear my pleas.

I’ve been fighting a losing battle to try and get Extreme Paintbrawl working on a modern PC. That game has the reputation of being the absolute worst game ever built in Ken Silverman’s wonderful Build Engine. While the engine was home to games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood, it also had a lot more questionable games. Last week, I covered 1998's Nam. This week, we’re looking at another game by the same developer, World War II G.I.. Maybe next week, we’ll look at William Shatner’s TekWar if I can get it working. Let’s hope not!

The kids have to learn about TekWar sooner or later

Released in 1999 – one year after Nam – World War II G.I. is pretty easy to discern just based on the name on the tin. Once again, we’re taking Duke Nukem 3D’s Build Engine and transplanting it to another place. This time, it’s France during World War II rather than Vietnam.

At least with this setting, it’s one of the rare wars where intervention seemed necessary, unlike the Vietnam War. I still don’t really want to talk about it, though. That’s how exhausted I am from keeping up with the ongoing real-world wars. To sum up the backstory to World War II G.I., it’s 1944. The Axis still have control over most of Europe, and the Allies are launching a seaborne invasion of Normandy, France.

More importantly, the game was developed in 1999, a year after Saving Private Ryan hit theatres. It was a few months before Medal of Honor would start the avalanche of WW2 games that would become a hallmark of the era. The time was right, but there are plenty of reasons why few remember World War II G.I. Heck, at this point, Medal of Honor hasn’t been a household name in nearly a decade.

I hope I don’t get these screenshots mixed up with Nam

It’s bold for World War II G.I. to open with D-Day. Medal of Honor: Frontline in 2002 would do the same, and it’s an effective but extremely unfriendly way to introduce players to a game. What makes matters worse is that World War II G.I. did it without thinking it through. It’s not that D-Day is the best way to open a WW2 game, and it’s not that the devs considered how to implement it in a way that gave a good point of entry; it’s here because they really liked that scene in Saving Private Ryan.

It really sucks. This is not just because the Nazis are defending a fortified position but because your squadmates will gladly shoot you in the back. Constantly. You might not even realize why you’re dying, at first. It will probably take some time for you to figure out where you’re getting shot from. But let me tell you, your fellow soldiers really hate your guts.

Thankfully, friendly fire isn’t quite the problem it was in Nam. The game had your allies raining artillery shells and bombs down on your position, and there was little you could do to avoid exploding. World War II G.I. tones this down a lot. It’s still there. You’ll still randomly explode. But it’s nowhere near the problem it was in its predecessor.

Meanwhile, there are also fewer mines. The undergrowth of Nam was littered with landmines ready to separate you from your legs. Again, World War II G.I. still has landmines, and they’re just as annoying, but they’re generally clustered in positions that are off the path. I mean, not to tell the Nazis how to do their job, but I feel like this is the opposite of how you want to place landmines. Still, it makes for a much more enjoyable experience.

Operation: Quicksave

For that matter, the experience in World War II G.I. is, in general, leagues better than Nam. That’s a pretty low bar to step over, and it’s still not a very fun game, but you can tell the team is more experienced. Levels are a bit more intricate while also being more realistic about what the Build Engine can actually do. It still looks like a mod for Duke Nukem 3D, and the edges are still very rough, but it’s still a lot better than Nam.

Still, your quicksave button is going to get quite the workout. It still has a lot of the same problems that Nam had, especially because the developers liked to hide Nazis in the trees. The maps are still too big an open, so your gun’s spread is a constant obstacle that has no easy way of being overcome. Simply spraying your Thompson in the direction of where you think there might be Nazis is actually a workable strategy. Ammo is abundant, so why not just spray and pray?

Because of this, it has the difficulty curve of a buzz saw. It shoots up whenever there’s a tank on the field. These Panzers fire high-velocity shells and very rarely miss. On top of that, explosives are extremely rare, and most of them require you to walk straight up to the tank to place them. Whenever I could, I usually just tried to avoid the tanks entirely.

Wunderwaffe

And weirdly, the S.S. soldiers employ some sort of invisible Nazi shield. I don’t get it. I could fire at point-blank range, and the dudes would just keep coming at me. I’d watch as the bullets would hit the wall directly behind them. Other times, they’d take two shots and drop immediately, so it’s not just that they’re wearing body armor. I really don’t understand what’s going on with them. I often just hucked grenades at them because it was the only way to get a sure kill.

Speaking of being baffled, one thing that World War II G.I. has added to the Nam formula is the need to actually patch yourself up. Health packs go into your inventory, and to use them, you need to stand stationary while it gradually adds to your health count. You can shoot, but if you take one step, it cancels the whole process and wastes the remainder of the medkit. It’s absurd. I think most of the time I spent playing this game was crouching in a corner, waiting for my dude to finish putting a band-aid on.

I get that’s sort of more realistic since it would be really difficult to suture a bullethole while sprinting across the battlefield. However, one of the weapons you can pick up is dual Colt 1911’s. I’m pretty sure dual-wielding isn’t covered in boot camp, but what do I know?

Meanwhile, your commanding officer starts off most missions by telling you what you’re supposedly doing on that stage. However, like in Nam, it is invariably drowned out by ambient gunfire and music. I started listening super hard to figure out what he was saying, and all I got was “In clear violation of the Geneva Convention.” Guy, this is 1944. If you’re worried about the Geneva Convention, you’d best be sitting down when the war ends. Some of the atrocities will floor you.

KNIFE

I feel like I need to say something nice about World War II G.I.. Okay, I have something: you can attack with your knife whenever you want, even if you’re holding a gun with both hands. It never stops being funny. Especially when you’re holding a Browning Assault Rifle. It looks like you’re pulling a violin bow across your gun. Literally, fiddling with your weapon.

As I said, World War II G.I. isn’t quite as bad as Nam. However, that is pretty far from praise. But on the other hand, it’s kind of neat to see a WW2 game in the Build Engine. It would be a lot cooler if it was Duke Nukem fighting against Nazis, but… Actually, there’s no "but" to that statement.

It was fun, though. Like I said with Nam, the games harken back to an early era of the first-person shooter, where experimentation was rife, and failure was just as frequent. Even if a lot of these games aren’t fun to play, and others might not even be finished, it’s interesting to see amateur developers leaving their fingerprints on new frontiers.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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How’s your week been? Mine? Horrible. Worse than normal. So, it’s time for some self-care. Get in your pajamas, order some pizza, and let’s get into some Super Smash T.V.

Smash T.V. was originally released in arcades in 1990. It was designed by the legendary Eugene Jarvis, the guy behind 1981’s Defender. More importantly, he created 1982’s Robotron: 2084, which is the godfather of twin-stick shooters. Smash T.V. was built as a spiritual successor to that game, so it has all the features you’d expect, which is to say, it is also a twin-stick shooter.

Super Smash T.V. is the title used by the SNES, Genesis/Mega Drive, Master System, and Game Gear versions. What makes it “Super?” Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s just a straight port of the arcade title.

Go! Go! Go!

The SNES version is what I’m most familiar with, and it’s the one that is closest to the arcade version. For the Genesis and other versions, you can use the second player controller’s d-pad to work as a second stick, but the SNES has the now-standard four face button configuration, so the buttons just act as a second d-pad. It works well, providing 8-way aiming that matches the arcade.

It also sounds the closest, even when it comes to voice samples. On the other hand, when played through the Genesis’ FM synth chip, the soundtrack is amazing.

Smash T.V. lifts pretty heavily from ‘80s dystopian action flicks. Specifically, its premise is about a game show where contestants bet their lives to win big prizes, which is similar to 1987’s The Running Man. However, it also lifts from 1987’s RoboCop, with the rampant consumer themes and the host of the show frequently spouting, “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

I feel like the ‘80s were the point where everyone was becoming wise to the fact that modern comforts and excessive consumerism were doing harm to humanity. While a lot of media at the time sincerely bought into the decade’s excess, others were looking at it with cynicism. It was a theme that ran under a lot of media at the time, resulting in the best era of cyberpunk and other dystopian narratives. Ideas like Max Headroom and The Terminator are emblematic of the times, and Smash T.V. captures that perfectly.

Total Carnage!

The actual game show, the eponymous Smash T.V., is equally glitzy and violent. Hordes of enemies pour in from the doors on all sides of the arena. Each one dies in an explosion of blood, though the console versions, unfortunately, don’t include the dismembered body parts that added a splash of color to the carnage.

Meanwhile, pick-ups of all types appear at random as you wade through the relentless masses. Enticing things like money, VCRs, keys, and power-ups keep popping into existence to distract you from the walk-and-chew-gum gameplay of a twin-stick shooter. Worse yet, for each carefully wrapped present that you pick up, it will tell you what you’ve just won beneath your score. Did you find a 2600” Television, or was it a toaster? Don’t take your eyes off the shrapnel guy; he’s about to blow, and you need to get out of the path of his projectiles.

The feeling of excitement as you don’t just rack up points but also toasters is supplemented by the end-of-round tallies. As your buff dude in the dumb-looking helmet stands behind a podium, your VCRs and TVs get converted into points, stacking up behind you, accompanied by a buzzing noise building to a crescendo. If you manage to collect enough keys throughout the game, you win the ultimate prize: a trip to the Pleasure Dome. Except you don't, because the Pleasure Dome doesn't actually exist in the game.

Meanwhile, the show’s host pops up every so often to spout a one-liner, flanked by outrageously buxom women. “Big money! Big prizes! I love it!” or “Total Carnage!” among others. Unfortunately, the SNES version doesn’t show him taking overt glances at the women’s cleavage, but he still wiggles his eyebrows.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

The gameplay itself is dumb fun. There isn’t a huge variety of enemy types, but there’s always a lot of them. Typically, there are the ones that arrive in swarms, while others will just complicate things by adding deadly projectiles to the mix. There are tank cyborgs and guys that explode, sending shrapnel in eight directions.

If you’re familiar with twin-stick shooters, or generally any shoot-’em-up, you know that it’s about finding a flow state amongst the chaos. Being able to watch where you are while still keeping aware of the situation. That’s Smash T.V.

Then there are the bosses, who are every bit as ridiculous as you’d expect from the game. The first boss, Mutoid Man, is a giant man melded to a tank. Your pea-shooter is useless, so you need to grab whatever power-up you can to simply damage him. Thankfully, he can’t shoot behind himself because he has no neck. You blow his arms off, and when you destroy his head, it explodes in a shower of heads. Then, when you destroy the body, there’s another head underneath it. Simply incredible.

Good luck! You'll need it!

On the other hand, it’s extremely difficult. Smash T.V. in arcades was a notorious quarter-muncher. The SNES version adds to this my favorite bugbear: limited continues. You have only a very small number of lives and continues before you’re starting the whole thing over again.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. There are three stages. On my first try, with the default number of lives and on the normal difficulty, I made it to the end of the second stage. For my second attempt, I used a cheat that adds additional lives and continues, and with that, I made it to just before the boss room on the third stage. I could maybe/probably slice that down, but it is very difficult.

Luckily, you can also recruit a second player to join in, which is an absolute blast. I once tried to pressure someone into playing repeatedly until we could beat it with the default number of continues, but that didn’t last long before they escaped my basement.

Digital Prozac

Feel better? No, me neither. But Smash T.V. is one of those games that force me to hyperfocus to the point where I can’t hear the things bouncing around my head. It’s effective relief, if only temporary.

Speaking of which, Smash T.V. did get a sequel called Total Carnage. Whereas I feel like Smash T.V. leverages its tacky satire to great effect, Total Carnage just feels plain tacky. It’s mostly a humorous take on the 1991 Gulf War, which feels pretty gross to write out. It’s probably made even less tasteful because of more recent conflicts. It also feels like they’re lifting another running joke from RoboCop, where the news would play off devastating events like they’re just the daily business, then pivot directly to feel-good fluff pieces. The difference is that RoboCop is using actual satire, and Total Carnage feels like it’s simply making light of war. But again, that may just be in the light of more recent events.

Smash T.V., on the other hand, plays perfectly fine. I just wish we could get a port on modern systems. There was a port on Xbox 360, but it got delisted in 2010 after the company went bust. The last time we saw it on a home console was 2012’s Midway Arcade Origins. Without digging through the used section, the only way to play it now is on Antstream Arcade. Why? Because Warner Bros. bought all of Midway’s properties and seems to think that the only one of value is Mortal Kombat. But then, they’re also pivoting more to live service games, apparently, which is somehow even more depressing.

I think I’d better play some more Smash T.V.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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