If I ever make an exception for sports games on this feature, it's usually because they've got something else going on. Like an abstraction in its premise, or a heavier emphasis on story, or some kind of ridiculous fantastical gimmick to hang some non-standard sports game mechanics upon. In that sense, Golf Club Nostalgia (formerly Golf Club Wasteland) from Demagog Studio—where you're playing a round of 18 (well, 35) holes across the dilapidated remains of a post-apocalyptic Earth—reminded me of Sidebar Games's Golf Story in that, while golf is in the title and you certainly do play a lot of it, the package as a whole is not really just about the sport variously known as the King's Game and Ball Chess. Unfortunately with both games, that lack of focus also means that—were you to treat it as a serious golf game—it'll fall short of expectations with its attention spread elsewhere.

As stated, Golf Club Nostalgia is a 2D golfing game where each course is set in a different ruined location on Earth that your spacesuited golfer will jetpack his way through to take the next shot. Much of the time you'll need to carefully aim the direction and apply the right amount of power to get the ball to some precarious spot or another, often nestled between obstacles and water hazards that will destroy the ball and require another swing from your current position. The controls are simple enough: hold back in a direction to aim the shot and the amount of distance you hold back determines the power you put into the swing, and then confirm with the action button once everything looks good. Some courses have little surprises that might occasionally help you: sending a ball down a pipe might drop it much closer to the hole (or, occasionally, further away) while hitting a switch could open an obstructing door or a fragile window might prove to be a shortcut with a strong enough drive. The animals roaming around the otherwise empty planet might help or hinder your score as well, carrying the ball to more advantageous spot or just eating it.

However, Golf Club Nostalgia has much more going on in the background. The protagonist goes unnamed for much of the game but you learn more about him gradually from diary entries after every hole (retrieving the full entries of which might require going under a shot or two under par as an incentive to improve) and in the process learn how humanity reached the unfortunate position it did where it had to abandon Earth after it became inhabitable and instead fled to Mars, in relatively small groups of only the richest and most connected that could acquire tickets. This is conveyed not just through these journals but by the protagonist's favorite radio station, Radio Nostalgia from Mars, which he's been able to pump through his EVA suit's headset as he silently takes to his golfing. The radio goes through two shows on a loop, approximately 20-30 minutes long each, and comprises of music, guests reminiscing about their former lives on Earth (hence the Nostalgia name), and a smooth-voiced continuity announcer that frequently drops PSAs about the highly restrictive laws the populace must abide by to survive their current, probably untenable status as citizens of the barren red planet. We also learn that our protagonist is as enervated by life on Mars as anyone; he's a figure of some importance, yet he ekes out a sorrowful lifestyle burdened by the survivor's guilt he feels towards the many he was forced to leave behind including his own family. While it initially appears that he's a member of the idle rich who travelled back to Earth at great expense for this extravagant frippery of an interplanetary golfing trip, the truth is revealed to be something a bit more personal and bleak.

Speaking of which, though the premise would suggest some black humor, there's something about the sensibility of the game's eastern European developers (Demagog Studio hails from Serbia) that really hammers home the loneliness, the desperation, and the psychological harm that comes with abandoning one's homeworld for a duration-unknown stay of execution floating in space, knowing that your rich buddies with whom you share this fate are in some way responsible for the capitalism-driven ecological catastrophe that finally rendered Earth inhospitable and the many billions of human lives that were sacrificed on the altar of infinite corporate growth. Most of the wistful testimonials on Radio Nostalgia from Mars come from what sound like the most privileged, oblivious, upper-class citizens who mourn the demise of their lavish lifestyles more than they do the many hundreds of people they must've known by name that were unable to join them on the evacuation rockets, though a few have more human stories about being lucky enough to sneak aboard or how they were a child when they were saved and can only recall bits and pieces of their time on terra firma; it later becomes evident that, while he presumably enjoys listening to the music, the protagonist thinks very little of his fellow survivors—however, it takes the player perhaps a little longer (and a bit more of the backstory of this very exclusive rescue mission for the necessary context) to realize the vapid selfishness of (most of) these speakers. The music's kinda interesting too: being all about waxing lyrical about the good old days, Radio Nostalgia is set up like an oldies channel with its softly-spoken host and gentle platitudes, but the music is as artsy and contemporary as it gets with its combination of EDM and philosophical novelty songs—an attempt to create the type of future music those born after the Zoomer generation would hypothetically grow up with and nostalgically seek out in their advanced years.

I'll be frank, while I appreciate a lot of the game's worldbuilding and its mature (if hopelessly depressing) epistolary storytelling actually playing the game as a serious golf sim is an exercise in endless frustration. It's very difficult to accurately understand how far a ball will go when driving because the game deprives you of the usual dotted lines that simpler golf games might give you to judge a ball's trajectory, and as the protagonist is a dying middle-aged man (and perhaps too used to Mars's lower gravity) he's barely capable of hitting the ball more than 50 yards, which is often woefully short of the distances you'll need to hit when safe landing spots become few and far between. The behavior of the ball is hard to predict too: sometimes you'll have the ball run across a metal grate with holes (such as those on walkways) and hit maximum friction quickly, while other times it'll continue bouncing and rolling way further than you'd expect. The unexpected stage hazards can be fun surprises but will often, of course, mess up your attempts. Worst of all is that there's a very long delay when pausing the game, which you'll want to do frequently in order to start over if you're trying for par and have hit an out-of-bounds state one too many times; that there isn't a button that can instantly restart the current hole (with perhaps a "yes/no" prompt in case it was clicked by accident) seems like a major lapse in player UI considerations. That some holes have a 15-to-20-stroke par makes them way too long: you could spend fifteen minutes getting gradually closer to the hole only to have to start over once in putting distance after finally running out of strokes. The game offers a "story mode" where there's no obligation to reach par and you can continue to bash your head against a certain shot ad nauseam if preferred; I'd probably opt for that approach if I had to play the game all over again (and if you're really concerned enough about achievements to play the more punishing Challenge Mode where you can only pass a stage by getting par or under, the last achievement requires playing the full game again under par with no restarts so good luck with that). I might just have a low tolerance for golf games in general but I didn't care for playing Golf Club Nostalgia at all; however, there's enough going on in the periphery that I can't foster too much animosity against it either. Philosophical, maudlin, and deeply deeply irritating. Hey, I think I have my new Tinder tagline.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Hey all, trying out a not-particularly-novel new feature where I wrap up a month of gaming, blogging, and other miscellaneous activities of a mostly lawful nature. This'll give me all the excuse I need to deep dive on some of the non-Indie stuff I've played this month as well as sprinkle in a few other surprises.

Game of the Month: The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero

Oh look it's Falcom Boy over here ready to gush some more about his favorite (increasingly less) obscure Japanese RPG developer. I am about to get unpleasantly effusive, so be forewarned. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero constitutes the first half of what we Trails types call the "Crossbell Arc": moving the action from the southern kingdom of Liberl that was the setting of the whole Trails in the Sky trilogy to the Switzerland-esque city state of Crossbell, sat between the antagonistic Erebonian Empire (the setting for the Trails of Cold Steel series) and the Calvard Republic (the setting for the most recent Trails through Daybreak series). Crossbell is a demilitarized state with only a self-defense force for protection: it largely depends on Erebonia and Calvard remaining peaceful to continue surviving in its current form. It is, however, one of the richest nations in the world due to its status as a trade hub and various major corporations making it their headquarters and so its citizens enjoy a relatively high quality of life with many modern advancements found only sparingly in other countries, like the internet-equivalent Orbal Network and orbal-powered automobiles. The game follows a newly-minted division in Crossbell's mostly ineffectual police force: the Special Support Section, a squad of younger agents who are able to serve the community through odd jobs and other miscellaneous assignments in much the same way as the Bracer Guilds from previous games. The squad comprises four members: Lloyd, the only qualified detective in the group who joined the force to investigate his fellow cop brother's mysterious death; Elie, a VIP's granddaughter tired of how little Crossbell is able to deal with its rampant political corruption; Tio, a middle-schooler magical prodigy with exceptional senses and a whole heap of trauma to process; and the incredibly-named Randy Orlando, a redheaded laid-back party dude and womanizer looking to escape his dark past (and, like all redheads in Falcom games, is an exceptional warrior).

The thing I kept in the back of my mind throughout my playthrough of Trails from Zero was just how damn smartly designed it is, from its foundations on up. Any random encounter can be instantly dispatched with a stealth approach: attacking an enemy to stun them briefly, attacking them from behind them to knock them senseless, and then walk into them to trigger a fight where you get two full rounds of attacks (the first of which is all criticals, and might even contain an "all-out attack" team assault) which is usually enough to crush any normal encounter milling around. Far from being cheap, it helps minimize and mitigate the amount of grinding and pointless filler battles while still demanding a bit of finesse from the player and, obviously, is not a strategy you can rely on against pre-set encounters like bosses and the perilous monster trap chests (though, mercifully, monster chests have their own distinct appearance to give you a moment to prepare). All the carried over Trails in the Sky mechanics like the Orbment grids and learning when to use S-Breaks and S-Crafts felt like they were rolled out on fast-forward: you're starting from square one again, since it's a new group of characters in a new series, but by the end you're as buff as around the mid-point of Trails in the Sky Second Chapter (everyone has their second S-Craft by then). Speaking of fast-forward, I realize it's a common sight in most older RPGs getting remasters but being able to ramp up the overall game speed in a turn-based RPG is still darn appreciated. But, as I've already intimated, there's very little dead air in a game this sharply compact.

The old Trails charm is still here and accounted for as well. Not just in the characterization of its major characters, but in how it populates its towns and central city with named NPCs that have all these little incidental stories of their own happening in the background and frequently have new responses for you after major events or could have a word to say to any guest characters that might be tagging along. One such minor sideline involves meeting a crew of delinquents and quashing a beef with a rival gang before it erupts into street violence. You're then tasked with visiting the local hospital which is some ways out of the city of Crossbell. At some point after these two introductions, you learn (again, just by talking to a random NPC at the right time) that one of the hospital's doctors has a son that's part of that delinquent gang. Talking to the doc reveals how stressed he is about his wayward kid, while the kid in question is stifled by his respectable father's authority and has chosen to rebel. Much later in the game while at the hospital, you see the delinquent delivering his father's lunchbox, embarrassingly insisting to the receptionist that it was purely a favor he was doing for his mom: just another little detail that builds up this dysfunctional but perhaps not doomed relationship that you might not even notice existed if you hadn't been paying attention to the seeds being planted. That I know I'll be seeing almost all of these characters again and learning what's been going on in their lives since I last saw them once I eventually play Trails to Azure is just one of many reasons I keep coming back to this franchise.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Trails series is still the peak of the turn-based RPG genre as it stands today, albeit with close competition from a rapidly-improving Tales (which isn't turn-based, but hey), the Xenoblades with their huge scopes and tons of QoL features (which I guess is not really turn-based either), and some of the more promising recent Indie throwbacks like Chained Echoes. The worldbuilding and characterization of Trails is so much denser than you'd expect from first impressions and the combat system can be real demanding when it gets to the important fights: some of the battles in Sky SC were downright diabolical without first gleaning the right strategies, and though Trails from Zero was more gentle overall there were definitely some hairy moments. It's going to take some time to get caught up to where The Legend of Heroes sits presently, but I'm more motivated than ever to keep chasing after it.

Also the soundtrack is amazing. This is just the basic-ass battle music and it's so good. The arranged tracks are even better.

Darling Indies and Other Gaming Tomfoolery

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The Cursed Randomizer Run

That's right, I've been chipping away at that horrible Ocarina of Time randomizer run I began around the start of the year. The one I blogged about here.

As a reminder, here's what was randomized:

1. All inventory items
2. All heart pieces and containers
3. All keys and dungeon items
4. All vendors and their stocks, including the Deku Scrubs
5. All golden skulltulas and their tokens
6. All crates
7. All pots
8. All beehives
9. All cow milk
10. All entrances and exits
11. All boss fights
12. All silver rupees needed for certain puzzle rooms
13. All Ocarina songs and their notes
14. All warp song destinations (except Shadow Temple, since it can't be reached any other way)
15. Dungeons are randomly either their normal or Master Quest variant

I won't go into the full horrors of the playthrough warts and all, but I'll highlight a few of the more messed up moments this randomizer put me through:

• The whole time I was Child Link I did not have the Kokiri sword. I eventually found it deep inside the Fire Temple while an adult, which was also the most awkward dungeon to access (it involved going through Gerudo's Fortress to reach Sacred Forest Meadow and the Forest Temple entrance).
• Since I didn't have the Kokiri sword in most of the run, I couldn't get past Mido in Kokiri Forest for the first dungeon for the longest time. I only finally managed to sneak past him using a warp song: the Prelude of Light warped me directly to the Deku Tree.
• Speaking of Gerudo's Fortress, I cleared out all those sword-wielding prison wardens as a kid with nothing but a slingshot. Took like 20 hits each. Of course, I didn't get all the jail keys until the end of the game so it was kinda pointless (my reward for freeing them all, normally the Gerudo Pass, was instead one rupee. Wooooorth it?).
• I showed it in a screenshot in the original blog, but I spent some time in the Master Quest Water Temple as Child Link. Couldn't do a thing in there without the iron boots or hookshot though.
• It took a while to get the bow or boomerang, so to clear out the beehives for their items I had to throw explosives at them. There are probably grainy educational films out there expressly advising against that.
• I once defeated a Stalfos with nothing but deku nuts and bombchus. Again, a sword would've been nice.
• I reached the end of Dodongo's Cavern early in my run as Adult Link with six hearts, but the warp took me to the Twinrova fight instead. Fighting her on just six hearts was... rough. (At least I had the Mirror Shield though; would've been even tougher without it.)
• So I randomized the Ocarina notes, which meant having to find all four C-buttons and the A-button in random places before I could play all the songs. The last of those was C-left, which I found in the Spirit Temple at least halfway through the run. It was a big moment, since I couldn't use Epona's Song, Saria's Song, or Zelda's Lullaby without it.
• The Queen Gohma fight showed up right at the end of the run (she replaced Phantom Ganon). By then I had the Biggoron sword, almost full hearts with the defense boost, and every item. She didn't know what hit her.
• The absolute last item I found were the Ice Arrows, in a pot right before the Spirit Temple boss door. They are, as far as I know, the only item that isn't related to progress at all. You never need to freeze a thing, even in the Master Quest dungeons.

Speaking of the N64 I had the fortune and misfortune, respectively, of playing an hour-plus of Doom 64 and Heiwa Pachinko World 64 as part of my ongoing 64 in 64 feature, enjoying its final season this year. My therapist gave me a special cushion to punch whenever I think about the latter so let's not dwell on that but the former was one of those rare occasions on 64 in 64 where the hour flew by way too quickly. If you've read this far you deserve a small hint on next month's duo: they're both Midway games. Really doesn't narrow it down much though, huh? Here's another: neither of them are sports games, mercifully.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Tower of Time (Event Horizon, 2018)

I've played a great deal of CRPGs, many of which hail from the Infinity Engine period (and those of a more modern vintage that have taken after them such as your Pillars of Eternity and whatnot) and yet in all my travels I've only found two that picked up the "real-time with pausing" dynamic from the IE-style combat system and took it a whole different direction. The first was Aarklash: Legacy, a thematically-odd Cyanide RPG from about ten years back, and the other was this game, Tower of Time (IGotW #351). If I had to narrow down exactly what was revolutionary about their approach it's that the player's situational awareness is frequently pressed to react quickly to any and all manner of perils and opportunities, frequently micromanaging the placement of their units. In that sense, it can feel more like a real-time strategy or war game; sort of like a 4X type but focused on a much smaller hyper-specialized group, all the while pulling off more complex evasive maneuvers and making full use of AoEs and other crowd control tactics. The strength of the combat would be enough to carry the game on its own, but I also appreciated how tabletop-like the exploration was too: so much dungeon dressing had flavor text and each floor presented its own challenges and puzzles to overcome, while the tower as a whole had a certain logic to its construction rather than feeling like an arbitrarily thrown-together monster-nest-slash-treasure-vault. Speaking of Arbitrary, I still owe that guy one for recommending (and gifting) this game to me: I wish him luck with the terrible CRPGs he has planned as subjects for his streaming and blogging this year.

Our runners-up this month were Itorah (#352), The Spirit and the Mouse (#353), and Ary and the Secret of Seasons (#354). Itorah had some overt flaws and was far too linear to really qualify as an explormer but at least graphically it was a serious contender; a similar statement could be made for Ary and the Secret of Seasons too, which swung for the fences with its take on a Skyward Sword-era Zelda with a fraction of the budget but even with some impressive Chinese-influenced visuals (the Winter Temple was especially gorgeous) its world overall felt empty and barely held together, like a half-finished house; finally, the Spirit and the Mouse was a much more confident 3D platformer with a fetching Gallic aesthetic with some neat puzzles and clever vertical level design, if a bit on the (understandably) short side. Still, given that their larger scopes didn't do Itorah or Ary any favors, I suppose brevity can be a virtue.

Bonus Indie: Fossil Echo (Awaceb, 2016)

I have a whole stack of Indies about which I don't think I could easily turn out a ~1,000 word review via the usual weekly series but am still interested enough to delve into, so I'm going to try to toss one or two in at the end of the month and review them here. In January's case, it's an early game from the same studio that would later produce Tchia (a Zeldersatz I've been keeping my eye on): Awaceb, hailing from the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, an island some ways out from the eastern coast of Australia. The game in question is Fossil Echo: a narrative-heavy stealth platformer about a kid infiltrating a really tall tower full of hooded cultists. The reasons why are told in a series of flashbacks shown in reverse chronological order: a Memento-esque contrivance which makes the plot a lot harder to follow when you also consider there's some five-to-ten minutes of gameplay separating each of these scenes.

Speaking of gameplay, the game tends to alternate between three types of 2D platformer: one where you're stealthing around a room full of enemies that you can knock out if you leap on top of them but will otherwise die instantly if one spots you; timed auto-scroller sequences where you have to quickly ascend a platforming gauntlet; and challenge rooms with a whole lot of moving platforms, platforms that alternate between active and inactive, and wooden platforms that break a moment after you touch them. Overall the game can be quite challenging, but it's also pretty short so it balances out: even struggling with a few of the challenge rooms as I did, I managed to complete the game in about two hours. It's also pretty annoying, in part because the game put a lot into its presentation—meaning that the character would often take a moment to animate himself standing back up from an unsure landing or mantling an edge of a platform, which is often a moment you don't have when platforms are regularly vanishing on you.

I'll admit, playing Fossil Echo didn't get me any more hyped for Tchia, though I can recognize the level of craft involved in its presentation at least. It's never worthwhile to judge a studio by their first game either, of course, so I'll probably still be checking out Tchia before too long. No Zeldersatz can elude me for long. (Rating: 3 out of 5.)

The Weeb Weeview

I had fun discussing some anime shows I'd seen in last year's round-up, so I'm going to make more of an effort to talk about all the cartoons I've been enjoying like a proper adult might. Probably mostly new stuff, but I might slip in some older series if it's a quiet season. Winter '24 has certainly not been quiet though. My curated picks this time include three of the bigger, already well-promoted anime airing this period; for February, I'll get into some of the more obscure/divisive stuff I've been checking out.

Delicious in Dungeon

Delicious in Dungeon, or Dungeon Meshi, sees a veteran adventuring party get wiped out by a ferocious red dragon and their leader, Falin, eaten by same. The leader's brother Laios wants nothing more than to venture back down after Falin warps everyone to the entrance with her last breath, but is faced with the two issues of having half the group quit along with a dangerously low amount of supplies. Fortunately, he's heard that there's ways to eat dungeon monsters for sustenance if all else fails; recruiting a fellow monster meat gourmet, a dwarven fellow named Senshi, the remaining party of the warrior Laios, the pessimistic mage elf Marcille, and the talented halfling thief Chilchuck retrace their steps in pursuit of the dragon before it finishes digesting Falin and makes her revival impossible.

I've seen a few fantasy foodie shows before—most recently, the first seasons of Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill and Sweet Reincarnation last year—but Delicious in Dungeon has the tone of one of those crossed with a comedic D&D podcast by way of a Critical Role or The Adventure Zone. Lot of conventions of fantasy RPGs being turned on their head for the sake of a goof, or a segue into a "how would you even eat something like this?" culinary challenge. It also feels like a show with a lot of weight and stakes to it, silliness aside, as the protagonist endeavors to save what's left of his sister's corpse so she can be resurrected: it's a grim reminder at the back of one's mind that life in this dungeon is far too brutal and short and all this eating of monsters is in itself a necessary act of survival.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Still watching this excellent fantasy anime from last year. The most recent arc has the elf mage Frieren and her human protégé Fern join a practical examination to become first-class mages, a legal necessity if they're going to continue travelling further north into inhospitable lands. I guess every anime show has to have either a tournament or an exam arc (or both in the case of My Hero Academia). I'm still digging the pace of the show and the small moments of levity sprinkled throughout even if, like Delicious in Dungeon, the world is depicted as a pretty harsh place. Folks have even been dying in this sanctioned mage exam and threatening to kill each other in order to fulfill the winning condition—capturing a particularly hard-to-catch bird. It's also an excuse to introduce some of Frieren and Fern's magical contemporaries and see how they stack up to our protagonists: given Frieren's over a thousand years old, it would take a lot to get the drop on her these days (as a certain demonic antagonist discovered to her regret earlier this same season).

Anyway, it's still good stuff, even if I'm a little mystified by how many memes have sprung up because of this show. Its subtle, deadpan sense of humor definitely wouldn't suggest that sort of response.

Solo Leveling

Solo Leveling is a show that's... very uncomplicated with its mission statement and vibe. That is, it's pure power fantasy superhero action. Sung Jingwoo is one of several "hunters": regular human beings that awoke to heightened superpowers the same day that the modern world was besieged by interdimensional "gates" to dungeon-like pockets full of monsters and treasure. However, he is also the weakest of these hunters, and due to the nature of these powers no hunter can ever become stronger than when they first awoke (with very rare occurrences of those awakening twice) leaving him to pick up scraps left behind by more talented hunters to pay for his family's bills. After a mysterious and traumatic near-death incident though, he becomes a "player": one that has a video game interface allowing them to take on quests and grow stronger by earning experience. As the only hunter able to advance this way, Jingwoo starts to climb the ranking tables and... well, things get progressively more bananas from there.

Studio A-1 Pictures knew as well as anyone that an adaptation of this manhwa (Korean manga) would live or die on the quality of its action scenes. Having read the manhwa, I did appreciate much of its worldbuilding (less so the character work which is kinda minimal except for the "boring cool guy" evolution of its initially timid hero) but it's really the dynamic, ridiculous battles that elevated the material above standard genre fare. The show's now four episodes in and I think I can safely say it's delivering on that promise: the fight between Jingwoo and an enormous snake dungeon boss last ep was goshdarned electric, both in its pacing and emotional payoff. I'm bouncing on my seat in anticipation for the bigger showdowns to come, though if it's only a 12 episode season (sounds like it might be a two-cours 24 ep one, which is promising) it probably won't get too crazy just yet. Just know going in that it's a show that won't offer a whole lot you haven't already seen before, especially if superhero/fantasy shounen manga/anime is your thing, and maybe check out some of these fight scenes if they ever get clipped anywhere in case you need a push one way or the other. I'll also say the first three episodes have a whole lot of table-setting to get through as well, so bear with it.

That's probably enough anime talk for this month. Probably. Let's wrap it up here and see what this uncommonly-long February has to offer us all. Until next month, thanks for stopping by and I'll continue to fine-tune this thing before it becomes too much of a gargantuan wall o' words. Still, no promises, given how verbose everything I write ends up being. I just love the sounds this keyboard makes, what can I say?

If there's one thing I can admire in games, especially Indie games with all their limitations, it's ambition. The ambition to shoot for the moon and create something well above your weight class, if only because you have this firm idea for a project in your head and all the gumption and confidence (misplaced as it may be) to get it done by hook or by crook. That moxie is what I see reflected back at me whenever I boot up this week's game, Ary and the Secret of Seasons by eXiin and Fishing Cactus, both of which hail from the infrequently-represented (on here anyway) country of Belgium. Yeah, the waffle place. Ary sees the titular heroine take up her missing brother's sword and pitch in to help her elemental guardian father (still mourning said brother) by substituting for him in the big elemental guardian pow-wow at the Dome of Seasons. Issue is, all the seasons are out of whack across this vaguely Sinocentric world due to some ominous red crystals dropping from the sky and monsters prowl the streets between cities: Ary's got her work cut out for her if she's to become a guardian apprentice (despite being the wrong gender) and track down her AWOL sibling.

Secret of Seasons could've taken the same route as many Zeldersatzes before and stuck to something 2D, or maybe 3D with a fixed perspective, but instead it's a moderately-sized 3D action-adventure that hearkens to more recent Zelda titles like Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess and their level of scope: those games with sizeable overworlds that maybe don't have a whole lot to do in them besides find the entrances to the dungeons where the real action is. Ary's a proficient sword fighter but her chief weapon are the "season" balls that she can activate at any time: doing so creates a sphere of influence for that specific season, helpfully color-coded (pink for spring, green for summer, red for autumn, blue for winter), and by using each season's distinct properties you can make progress through a dungeon's environmental puzzles or when collecting treasures off the beaten path. Ary also picks up typical ability upgrade items like a pair of boots that allow her to double-jump (found mercifully early; they add a lot to simply getting around) and a slingshot to hit distant targets. So far, so traditional Zelda; issue being that all of these snazzy 3D environments and puzzles may have been a little more than the devs could handle. The game got lambasted at launch for its many game-breaking bugs, and some four years later it's still kind of a mess.

I could be here all week delineating all the strange problems this game has... and since I love to complain let's go ahead and get started: Ary receives a distinctive scar on her left cheek early on in the game, but it vanishes in half the cutscenes. The font's real basic-looking and doesn't fit the aesthetic. It's surprisingly easy to jump up to areas that shouldn't be reachable, though there's enough invisible walls to prevent you going OOB too often (though I'm sure speedrunners already know them all). Sometimes there's maps for internal locations like dungeons and sometime there aren't: the four big dungeons that make up the second half of the game don't have maps, but the basement of your parents' house and the tutorial mini-dungeon with the double-jump shoes both do. The larger boar-like enemies drop money that you can never collect because of some sort of solid posthumous hitbox you can't move through. It goes on like this but I'm not a QA report so take my word for it. As far as the more serious stuff is concerned I've also had it glitch a boss battle that made it unwinnable until I reloaded, and it's hard frozen on me once. There was also a time when I panicked because all the passive upgrades I bought disappeared after being captured along with my weapons and my double-jumping boots (which was fair enough; prison wardens tend to take that kind of thing away): those upgrades all come back later, some several tense minutes after the escape itself, but I've no clue how or why learned skills would also vanish with your items. But yeah, from reports it's still in a much better state than it once was.

It's not that the game is sloppy. I mean, it is, but not in the sense that the devs were resting on their laurels or taking things too easy. It feels more like the 2016 Summer Olympics at Rio: they overpromised and underdelivered because it turned out to be way more work than they bargained for with too little time to make it happen (though as far as I know, no-one on the dev team caught the Zika virus at least). Even now, a few years out, the game continues to feel as unfinished as a wall without its final coat of paint; large chunks of the environment are missing everywhere you look. There's some other odd choices too: for instance, you get the summoning balls for the first two seasons (winter and summer) individually with a bit of a tutorial lead-in on how to use them effectively—winter creates blocks of ice that sometimes obstruct the way but can also be useful platforms, while summer removes same. But then you're given both spring and autumn simultaneously after a major moment in the story with no hints as to how to use them (spring removes pools of water, which feels like it should've been summer's job, while autumn makes it rain). You also learn how to destroy the corrupted red crystals found across the overworld halfway through the game's plot, each of which earns you a new HP upgrade: this means you spend the first half of the game with a paltry five hearts and then suddenly balloon to over a dozen shortly after that revelation, making the game's combat significantly easier there on out.

It is a shame, because fundamentally the game isn't bad at all. Its story and presentation recall one of those recent Disney CG movies where you think it's going a "traditional" narrative route until it swerves on you—there's some gender equality stuff where the female Ary is less than pleased that all the important hero positions are male-only, and you're told that you'll have to defeat all the season temple golems for their cores only to meet the first one and discover he's completely chill and willing to help—and the facial animations for major characters and the goofy hyena enemies are expressive and often amusing. Some of the level design is solid too with some imaginative puzzles revolving around your season-changing abilities (if you recall the time bubbles for that one Skyward Sword area, they're a lot like that) and a few traversal upgrades like the aforementioned double-jump and a magnetic ring that lets you pull around metallic objects. The dungeons can be a bit empty and tough to navigate at times (a map would've helped) but they're otherwise the highlight. Combat's so-so and is rendered more or less moot once you have the timing for parries down (and it's not particularly strict, either) but the few boss fights I've had were engaging enough. I certainly wanted to like Ary and the Secret of Seasons more than I did partly because I have a thing for Zeldersatzes and partly because I can see the big dream it was reaching for but couldn't quite grasp, but there are times when progress can be real hard-going and not for the reasons the devs may have intended and it just makes me feel like I should've gone with the thematically-similar Kena: Bridge of Spirits instead. Maybe I'll cover that game in a future one of these and people can yell at me how it's too high-budget to count as an "Indie". That'll be fun.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Oh, Fates, why do you hurt your greatest son like this? Sorry to start a new year of 64 in 64 on such a melodramatic note, but if you scroll down a little I'm sure you'll understand. I almost considered adding a content warning for any second-hand empathetic suffering that might ensue. That's right, we're continuing to talent scout old Nintendo 64 tapes ostensibly for the sake of the figurative Noah's Ark that is the Nintendo Switch and its online subscriber library of retro highlights. Are this month's new duo worthy of historical preservation? I feel like I may have already provided a hint.

Anyway, and I swear this is (mostly) unrelated to the random pick this month, but I'm planning for this year's season of 64 in 64 to also be the last. Reason being in part because we're hitting the dregs after covering most of the system's highlights—though I hope to cajole a few more bangers out of the modest N64 library before we're fully through—but also because, for as much as I'll always champion this unfairly-maligned console, I do want to cover other games on other systems in other contexts. Ruts are comfortable, sure, but there's a wide world of gaming both retro and current out there to get all indignant about on the internet. The plan is to continue until November of this year: at this rate of two additions to the ranking table per episode November should see us hit our 100th inclusion and that's as good a milestone on which to wrap things up as any. It'll also be the 48th episode: a lore-important number for 64 in 64 that always heralds the pivotal third acts of these little one-hour dramas. Still, never say never for a comeback, especially if I'm ever reaching for a one-off blog on some quiet month in the future...

Speaking of quiet, nothing kills a party vibe as quickly as recounting the rules:

• Two games. 64 minutes each. A good one picked by me and a bad one picked by the randomizer tool. It's not actually a rule that it has to pick bad ones for me to play, and yet. And yet.
• I've broken up the playthrough report into four manageable 16 minute chunks, each with live commentary. This is bookended by a pre-amble and a post-amble about how much the game may or may not suck. I've also determined its odds of appearing on Nintendo Switch Online through a scholastic process I call "making shit up", as well as mentioned any RetroAchievements support it may enjoy.
• Our ironclad rule is to not touch a game that is presently available on Switch Online already or fated to be added in the near future. Presently, everything previously announced is now on the service. We might hear about more newcomers at the next Direct, but part of me thinks Nintendo's going to focus on GBA or maybe even move onto GameCube. I better start sketching an outline for the GC version of this feature before Minotti beats me to it.

Be sure to consult the table below for prior episodes in case this one didn't produce enough schadenfreude to sustain you:

Doom 64 (Pre-Select)

• Midway / Midway (NA/EU) & GameBank (JP)
• 1997-03-31 (NA), 1997-08-01 (JP), 1997-12-02 (EU)
• 24th N64 Game Released

History: Doom 64 is a console spin-off of id Software's genre-codifying demonic FPS franchise that was created exclusively for the Nintendo 64 as its own bespoke thing somewhat early in the system's lifespan (pre-GoldenEye, even). In addition to whole new levels and a story that takes place after Final Doom, the game's undergone a visual makeover with all the enemies and weapons given new pre-rendered CG sprite appearances. It also includes a few (then-)modern luxuries, like the dynamic lighting the franchise would polish further with its next big entry Doom 3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only significant negative review this game received at the time of its release was from one Mr. Jeff Gerstmann; the man has some very specific preferences, that's for sure.

This would be our tenth featured Midway published game on here, though only the third of those they developed themselves (after Mace: The Dark Age and San Francisco Rush 2049). It's also the first Midway game that was a pre-select rather than a random pick and there may even be more to come soon (what can I say? This is the third season of 64 in 64 and desperation has oh so assuredly set in). We're specifically talking Midway Studios San Diego here: the erstwhile Leland Corporation, a subsidiary of Battletoads-publishers Tradewest (who were also purchased by Midway's owners Williams along with Leland in 1994). They had been previously responsible for Doom and Final Doom for PlayStation and would later develop the N64 Quake port on the strength of their efforts here, which might be worth remembering if I ever find myself in the mood for another blurry boomer shooter that was far from being at its best.

I'll admit to feeling a little weird about featuring this game on here. Of the many id Software/Build engine style FPSes to find their way to the Nintendo's beautiful becurvéd boy Doom 64 was the best of the bunch because it bothered to create an original experience that even established Doom veterans could enjoy as a fresh new foray into the heavy metal world of huge demons and their huge guts, as opposed to the watered-down ports you saw with the others. However, the issue with Doom 64 specifically is that the matter of its potential presence on NSO has already been rendered completely moot: it was recently revamped by Nightdive Studios and that version eventually found its way onto Switch, making the game one of the few N64 ports you can purchase directly for the system instead of just "rent" from Nintendo for a while. Even so, I felt like playing some Doom 64 and, given what the randomizer disgorged onto my shoes this week, I'm grateful to have something not-terrible to cover this month.

16 Minutes In

Owing to its status as the fourth iterative Doom game rather than one created to be an onboarding point for console newcomers, even the first level—Staging Area—of Doom 64 is on the rough side. For instance, it traps you in a room with multiple demons (the big pink ones) at least twice, the second occasion right after you get the chainsaw so you can understand its utility against melee types like that one. I'm playing on the second-highest difficulty (standard practice for any Doom playthrough) so I wasn't expecting a cakewalk but at the same time I sort of assumed it would be a bit softer on a market as yet untested with the FPS genre. (I say that, but there was a SNES Doom and that wasn't easy either, more so because you couldn't tell what anything was with that resolution.) As a Doom veteran, though, I'm all for anything and everything they want to throw at me even this early on.

Graphically, the game leans closer to the Doom successor Quake with its amount of browns and darker browns replacing the eye-catching RGB of the originals, as well as an overall murkier level of luminosity. I'm not sure I'm wholly sold on the new pre-rendered looks for the enemies, especially up close, but I'm already into the double-pronged chainsaw glow-up. Hopefully I find some of the more welcome additions from Doom II show up soon, in particular the super-shotty. Even with the higher number of foes on the penultimate difficulty, I've not run into any ammo shortages yet: I'm sure that'll change once I start having to rely on rockets and energy weapons more often. One last note: the game throws lots of pink demons at you from the outset, but the imp is treated like a next level opponent as there's only one in the first stage and it shows up to jumpscare you in the final room with the level exit. Did imps always supersede demons in the pecking order? At least these ones look suitably scary: they're still as pointy as ever but also take on a taller, darker, and more alien-like (in the greys sense, rather than the xenomorph sense) appearance. They kinda remind me of Blackheart from the MvC games.

32 Minutes In

I'm coming around on the game's controls, as odd as they are (on their default setting anyway). As you might expect, the Z-trigger shoots while holding the bumpers lets you strafe; however, the A and B buttons—usually pretty central to any N64 game's controls—are only used to alternate weapons. Instead, the next-most pressed button in any Doom game, which is the one that opens doors and activates switches, is relegated to C-Right. C-Up switches to map mode, which is convenient for finding secrets and buttons/doors you may have overlooked, but I've yet to find a use for the other two C-buttons. If I can strafe and shoot I'm pretty much set; Doom's the type of FPS where aiming isn't really a factor beyond having to center enemies horizontally, making it better suited to this controller layout than most of its ilk.

I'm making... decent enough progress, some ways into the third level now (it's slower-going, but I tend to sweep areas for secrets just in case). It's introduced those tougher transparent blue imps (phantoms?) and plenty of cacodemons but also the super shotgun and rocket launcher, so it's about a wash. I also found an item that retroactively explained the darker environments: light-amplification goggles, which really help the levels become a lot more visible. That it's only a temporary buff is just painful; can't the game look like this all the time? Maybe they weren't as confident in the enemy's new appearances as I thought, so they—like so many nightclubs—chose to make ample use of the obfuscating power of low-light conditions. I'll admit to dying once so far; it does the usual thing of resetting your inventory, which sucks since I managed to find a whole cache of rockets in the second level, but if you enter a stage with barely any health left it's probably not going to go well. Fortunately, every Doom level is built in such a way that you can conquer it with a clean slate—it'll provide everything you'll need, one way or another—so I can roll with the setbacks for now. Maybe I'll be more careful with the boss encounters though; it's a bad time going up against a Baron with just a peashooter.

48 Minutes In

Halfway through level 4 now (I'm sure not speedrunning anything on this difficulty) and even though I'm having to squint at all the enemies in the dark—including those near-invisible demons, which are always fun—it's remarkable how much better this game feels to play than any other N64 FPS I've covered on 64 in 64 so far, including Perfect Dark. I guess it's largely because Doom is both timeless and very accessible even with the limited means of the N64 controller (playing most FPSes beyond a certain vintage without two sticks or a mouse/keyboard is simply unpleasant to me now) that it's been able to endure.

Speaking of enduring, I'm now adept enough at the ol' shoulder button shuffle to not have to worry too much about imps and cacos, while making good use of the chaingun to hold melee types like demons and lost souls at bay. It's only a matter of time before the game throws harder stuff my direction but I'm confident enough in my chances. The second-highest difficulty is no slouch though; a single caco shot is enough to drop my HP 25% without armor, so taking four at once would be enough to kill me at full health. Maybe "with an abundance of caution" isn't the right way to play Doom, but I want to repeat as little as possible while I'm limited by a timer.

64 Minutes In

Man, forget what I said about them building up to a Baron boss level: the last room of level 4 had three of them clumped together. I suppose they could be the weaker variant (Hell Knights?) but they were sturdy enough for me to resort to the rocket launcher for the first time. Always a little too skittish about the splash damage to rely on rockets too often; of course, in just a few scant years after Doom you were seeing FPSes where people intentionally fired them at their own feet. It's like we all got far too inured to the dangers of wielding heavy ordnance. At any rate, I was halfway through the curiously-designed fifth level—which has eight destinations branching away from you in a star formation as you start—before the final timer sounded. Overall, just the one death so that's something to be proud about, though I didn't find too many secrets either.

Doom's always a great time regardless of the quality of that particular installment/port (it's sort of like pizza in that respect) but I will say that Doom 64 is a smartly-made thing that understands the strengths of the N64 with considerations to its controller and hardware and not one that pulls any punches, berserker-empowered or otherwise, when it comes to giving its audience a challenge. It might've felt a little old-fashioned by 1997—a year that sat equidistant from Quake and Unreal—but I think it dutifully set the stage for GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark to follow, if perhaps to a much lesser extent the other id/Build ports. It's one of those rare games I cover here where I wanted to keep playing after the hour was over, though if I do I might restart to make a more earnest attempt at that RA set (or just pick up that Nightdive remaster; it usually goes for peanuts).

How Well Has It Aged?: Probably Better Than Anyone Old Enough to Remember What "SPISPOPD" Means. I'd say it's held up remarkably, with perhaps the exception of the pre-rendered sprites that I still hadn't warmed up to (though I am at least thankful that someone also pre-rendered the dead imp sprite's prominent butthole, as is Doom tradition). I still wouldn't play Doom on anything but keyboard and mouse if I had my druthers but as far as older console FPSes go it certainly wasn't a sluggish struggle the same way something like Armorines was.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: IDKFA (I Don't Know; Fuck All?) Chance. So yeah, refer back to what I said at the top. Nightdive and Bethesda put out their remake on everything, including the Switch, so there'd be little point for them to negotiate with Nintendo to add it to the NSO library in its visually weaker, blurrier state. At least, I can't see it being a priority for Nintendo themselves when there's still a few first-party games out there.

Retro Achievements Earned: 5 out of 88. Pretty standard assortment here, including one achievement each for beating a stage, beating it on the hardest difficulty, and finding all its secrets (if any).

Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Random)

• Shouei / Amtechs
• 1997-11-28 (JP)
• =53rd N64 Game Released

History: Heiwa Pachinko World 64 is a pachinko game that, like many developed in this and the previous generation, was not so much meant to be played for fun (because, hey, it's pachinko) but were accurate-ish simulations of actual pachinko machines to help train players for the real thing. Heiwa Corporation is a major presence in the world of the aforementioned ball-interfering pastime and the tables featured in this game are based on their products. If you think it's kinda sketchy that there are video games that simply exist to help you get better at real-life gambling, welcome to the C-tier Japanese game industry circa the mid-'90s: this shit was everywhere.

Developer Shouei's dubious claim to fame is being the team responsible for a great many terrible Fist of the North Star brawler/fighter adaptations for Famicom/Super Famicom, only the second of which ever saw a localization. They'd already been working with Heiwa on the Heiwa Pachinko franchise since the SFC era—this is technically the fourth one, but I guess they skipped ahead a bit with the numeral. Amtechs (or Amtex, as it says in-game) is a bit more of a mystery, since Heiwa Pachinko World is their only credit. From what little I've been able to gather, they're a subsidiary of Heiwa that usually focuses on products of a more serious industrial hardware nature. No clue why they were dragooned into publishing this game on behalf of their owners, but those are the breaks. At any rate, this was the only N64 game either the developer or the publisher were ever attached to.

Sigh. I have a "please, no, god, no" folder of N64 games I strongly don't want to see show up on here, to the extent that I sacrifice a goat to Ba'al every other month to ward them away like they were evil spirits, but I neglected the vast number of Japanese N64 exclusives that would fall under the same category had I done my due diligence in including them. That naturally extends to pachinko in all its fell forms, along with inscrutable shogi and hanafuda sims (I at least know how to play mahjong, so that's off the hook). For the record, the N64 only has two pachinko games—such is my luck that one showed up anyway—with the other being Seta Corp's Pachinko 365 Nichi ("365 Days of Pachinko", so it's cool that someone out there found the nightmare journal I misplaced).

16 Minutes In

I'm not sure I adequately conveyed how little I want to play a pachinko game for an hour, but I've made my bed and now I have to piss all over it apparently. If you don't know the particulars of playing pachinko or what winning at pachinko entails then... great, we have things in common. Absolutely no clue what I'm doing. The Japanese in the menus is at least surface-level enough that I can navigate them just fine but beyond that all I've been able to do so far is put money into a machine for 125 pachinko balls a pop and then watch helplessly as they all tumble past the pegs and into the abyss below. You can rotate a dial that increases or decreases the strength of the launch—otherwise known as the only control you have over pachinko and even then it's mostly an illusion—but despite aiming for the various little "pockets" on the table there's not been much in the way of big jackpots or really a significant payout of any kind.

What's remarkable is that this game bothered to create an "external" aspect outside the tables, where you're able to walk around a facsimile of a dingy pachinko parlor (absent the overwhelming noise, graciously; instead you just get some jaunty marching music) with four-directional movement like I'm playing some g-d Wizardry. Unfortunately, there's very little you can do in this mode: you can't talk to anyone and you certainly can't, say, turn a corner to find a goblin guarding a chest that has a 5,000 yen bill inside and enough energy drinks to keep you awake as you spend another long day frittering away what little funds your family has while your children go hungry and neglected. That I've been playing this game 16 minutes and am already inventing vivid bleak domestic drama scenarios in my head probably tells you plenty. About this game and me both.

32 Minutes In

I've found three different machine models so far, despite the fact that in the dungeon-crawler mode every machine looks identical. I'd go into what separates them all but really the only thing that's not identical is the little slot machine in the middle. That's right, this isn't actually a pachinko game: it's pachi-slots, a subtle but significant difference as it involves even more random chance. By dropping balls in the right aperture, you can get one free spin on the pachi-slot in the center, which could win you anywhere between 0 and 0 pachinko balls (from what I've been observing, anyway). Other areas of the table might grant up to five or six new balls, but since the balls drop at around the pace of three per second that's not whole lot of extra pachinko. Evidently there's a way to build up to payouts in the thousands—otherwise, what's the point?—but such a path presently eludes me.

I can actually feel my soul dying as I play this. It's quite the sensation; one almost impossible to describe except I could sense my eyes glazing over and my consciousness enter a disassociated state of being. It might also be because I'm not drinking enough water or I'm squinting too hard at these pins though. Either way, I'm not exactly warming to Heiwa Pachinko World 64 over here. Maybe I'll jog a few more laps around the pachinko parlor again, annoying all the literally faceless people concentrating on their bouncing balls.

48 Minutes In

Checking on some mental gauges real quick and it appears I'm running out of steam, patience, fucks to give, and material to talk about, so to address the last of those let's discuss the aesthetics of these three machines. Since I can't read their titles (if they're even displayed anywhere) and we're all about the balls here I've tentatively dubbed them Ligma, Sawcon, and Goblin: Ligma is a pretty straightforward pachi-slots machine with an enlarged central display, so it's clearly not messing around with too many peripheral bells and whistles like its more flippant contemporaries—it knows you're here to gamble, and all that ball and peg jazz only serves to distract from what's truly important in life; the Sawcon machine has a pachi-slot display where ladies cycle between multiple costume changes, up to at least a dozen variants, giving it a coquettish and playful air as it continues to rip you off; finally, the Goblin machine has this cute Pac-Land/Dizzy aesthetic where there's a bunch of anthro pachinko balls in the background going about their lives and the pachi-slots display has LEDs that more closely resemble the old-school pixel art of classic Pac-Man.

The third's my favorite—I was batting around the idea of calling it Pac-Chinko for a while, until I realized that literally translates to "Pac-Man's dick"—though I've been experimenting around to see if there's a machine that's maybe a little worse for wear that I could feasibly cheat at. Not that I'm in any hurry to earn extra pachinko balls but perhaps something, anything, will happen if I collect enough. That could just be my N64 3D platformer mindset inventing things out of whole cloth as it feverishly tries to find some purpose in the 48 minutes we've spent here so far; I'm nigh certain this game has no point to it whatsoever, though.

My mission for the final segment is to see if I can earn enough balls to cash them in for a prize at the counter like they were skeeball tickets. I just hope one of these Japanese detergents they're selling is Mr. Sparkle, though on the whole I'd prefer something a little more exciting like a box of mochi or a fidget spinner or even a BB gun. Or better yet a real gun with a single bullet.

64 Minutes In

I found a fourth machine! This is the most thrilling thing that's ever happened to me. This one, which I guess I'll call Bophides, has a mahjong theme as if to taunt me about the marginally-less annoying experience I could be having elsewhere in the wider world of Japanese-exclusive N64 games. The tiles show up and if three match, then... well, that's kind of minor as far as mahjong goes but here it might mean grabbing more balls than I know what to do with.

While continuing to stare joylessly at all the flashing lights and spinning dials I was able to mentally escape, the ending of Brazil-style, with a thought exercise where I'd imagine all the better uses for the many pachinko balls I was throwing away. Here's a short list:

• Sticking them up my nose one after the other until it got to the point where it would sound like maracas every time I nodded my head.
• Place them on every centimeter of floor in my house so I could simply roll to my desired destination (though I would need to workshop the stairs).
• Use them to trip up the Wet/Sticky Bandits, should I ever fall afoul of the pair.
• As Fairy Slingshot ammunition to make progress easier in my other headache-inducing N64 playthrough this month.
• World's Tiniest Ball Pit™.
• Pretend I was a giant who found some Fushigi balls in the bag of the human I just ate.
• Make a miniature Newton's cradle for busy office cats on the go.
• Throw them at cars from the overpass.
• Throw them at trains from the overpass.
• Just throw them at people passing by my window; it's too cold out to be walking to overpasses.

And that kept on going for a while until something completely unexpected happened: I actually won a jackpot. At that point, the display changed to a game of strip mahjong with three anime ladies and I managed to keep my streak (so to speak) going until all three were topless. The wildest shit I've ever seen in an officially licensed Nintendo game. I actually thought I might've imagined it while in some sort of horny fugue state until I noticed that my pachinko ball counter had gone up by 2,000: it's truly incredible what the mystical power of anime nudity can accomplish. (I should point out here that they were all covering The Goods with their hands but it's still nutty Shouei managed to get that much past Nintendo's draconian censorship. I guess the odds of winning on that table really were that low if Nintendo's QA department missed it. In fact, going by the rest of the playthrough, they seem to have missed a lot.)

Only question is, will tiny pixel hentai be enough to save this game from the absolute nadir of the ranking table? Ooh, ooh, let's find out, shall we?

How Well Has It Aged?: About As Well As That Sony Discman D-145 in the Pachinko Prize Store. If the randomizer bot ever tries to make me play the other N64 pachinko game I fully intend to quit this feature then and there, several months earlier than the planned end date. This was not a good game and this was not a fun time. Maybe it offers some practical use for degenerate pachinko addicts but I'm not sure that's a strong enough reason for a thing to exist. This is why, even though the parlors are everywhere in Japan, that they've only ever put pachinko in a Yakuza game once: they're just that monotonous and arbitrary. Also it looked like hot trash.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: A Snowball's Chance in Hell (Not a Pachinko Ball's Chance in Hell Though, Since They All Go There). To be clear, Nintendo would have to give money to an avaricious, unscrupulous, gambling-enabling pachinko manufacturer to make this game's inclusion on NSO happen. If they were ever prepared to sink that low, they might as well pay Konami instead for all that good, good Ganbare Goemon.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. Weird that it's not supported.

Current Ranking

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
2. Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
3. Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
4. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
5. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
6. Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
7. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
8. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
9. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
10. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
11. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
12. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
13. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
14. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
15. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
16. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
17. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
18. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
19. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
20. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
21. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
22. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
23. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
24. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
25. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
26. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
27. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
28. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
29. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
30. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
31. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
32. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
33. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
34. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
35. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
36. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
37. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
38. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
39. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
40. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
41. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
42. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
43. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
44. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
45. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
46. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
47. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
48. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
49. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
50. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
51. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
52. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
53. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
54. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
55. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
56. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
57. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
58. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
59. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
60. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
61. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
62. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
63. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
64. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
65. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
66. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
67. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
68. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
69. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
70. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
71. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
72. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
73. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
74. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
75. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
76. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
77. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
78. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
79. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
80. Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)

Bless the baby angel that is in charge of producing 3D platformers. Well, it's more the work of small teams of passionate developers around the world, but regardless of the providence that has allowed it I've had another opportunity to partake in running around 3D environments picking up random junk for hours and boy is that just peachy. This particular opportunity was The Spirit and the Mouse by Canadian team Alblune; befitting that country's European roots, the game feels beholden to both the UK and France in its aesthetic choices. (Well, maybe more so France, but the language was in English at least so we limeys will take partial credit.)

In the Spirit and the Mouse you play as an electric mouse whose task it is to help humans become the very best, like no-one ever was happier by listening to their troubles and resolving them, provided it's a request that a mouse carrying some serious voltage is capable of fulfilling. A guy who is missing his favorite TV show after the signal goes down, for example, just needs for you to shock the antenna above the building to bring it back online. Added to this is an extra layer of complication where the electricity spirits that power these generators also need your assistance, and these tasks tend to be little mini-games and fetch quests that might involve gathering information from around the level to answer trivia questions or playing hide and seek. The "small guys in a big world" aspect combined with the emphasis on these little spirits and their unseen lives reminded me quite a bit of the Wii game Elebits, which works for me as it was one of my favorite obscurities for that system. Exploring the everyday from a different perspective, especially when that perspective is very low to the ground, definitely has an appealing quality.

As the Spirit and the Mouse is one of those rare platformers with no jumping, similar to Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker, much of the time you're having to fall from higher up to reach other areas. While it's a known scientific fact that rats can't jump or leave the ground unassisted in any way, it's equally known that they're excellent climbers. As well, given the titular Mouse of this game was filled with the awesome power of raw lightning during the prologue, she can also ride through power cables like the electricity gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which is something of a nexus of mine when it comes to apposite pop culture-based analogies. Through these two traversal skills the game makes ample use of verticality in its level design, having you explore the sleepy Parisian-esque town of Sainte-et-Claire on both street level and rooftop level. The rooftops are often where the power boxes that house the aforementioned electricity spirits (called Kibblins) are found, so the first task after listening to a human's problems—or overhearing them, I should say—is usually to make your way up to the nearby Kibblin-Box. It's also a case of the game's relatively small size working for it: the levels, compromising four areas of the town corresponding to the cardinal directions, are never so large that you're likely to get lost while exploring or spend too long sweeping up collectibles while still substantial enough for some clever circuitous design.

The game has three main sets of collectibles, usually seen at the top left of the screen: the happiness of the humans, which is the main story-critical type; energy, which can be gained by shocking metallic objects and earned in bunches after assisting the Kibblins; and lightbulbs, which are spread across town and can be exchanged for maps and a few power-ups from an NPC back in the starting area. The last of these lightbulb power-ups is actually a radar that pings whenever a lightbulb is close by for the sake of those hunting for the full set, which is the type of convenient QoL feature that I always appreciate in collectathons like this—that you still have to find more than half of these collectibles on your own before you can unlock it for purchase is a fine compromise. They don't really serve any further purpose beyond being something there to chase after, but it does have that beneficial side-effect of letting you appreciate the intricacy of the level design when poking around every nook and cranny. Most of the gameplay loop is contained within those Kibblin missions which, while simple enough, are at least varied in their approach: many are puzzle-based, while others might involve a traversal challenge or exercising the player's reflexes. (Thankfully, the game has its own journal tool to track any passwords or information you might glean, but that's really closer to something that should come as standard.)

As with most Indie 3D platformers there's not a whole lot of content to the game (it's about six hours long) but what's there is charming, stress-minimal, and eclectic (and electric) enough in its objectives to leave a positive impression. Visually and audio-wise it's pretty solid too, with some amusing characterization for the mischievous and work-shy Kibblins and a jaunty French accordion jazz number playing in the background that—along with its rodent hero—makes the game feel very Ratatouille in stretches (or, closer to my own interests, like the BGM of Dark Cloud 2's main hub city). Just a cute game about doing regular mouse stuff like turning into electricity and conversing with ghosts, all the while taking in the attractive view from your high-up perch on the rooftops—in fact, it's sort of like that part with the bat gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch after it got covered in cement and froze in place on an eave like a gargoyle.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I'll admit to being all poised to put the Mega Archive on hiatus again—these updates take a lot out of me, especially when it's almost wall-to-wall trash like this episode—but I can't just abandon it in the fourth quarter of 1993 so close to the finish line like this. It will take most of this year to ensure the Mega Archive has covered everything 1993-related but I'm determined to do so regardless. After that, it'll either be another long vacation before covering the system's busiest year of 1994 or a much more truncated format (though I keep threatening the latter and never going through with it). Even so, this is one of the most personally-rewarding features I do (besides, well, covering modern games I actually want to play) so I doubt I'll be able to stay away from futzing around on our increasingly-imperilled wiki for too long.

With that, let's move on to what the Sega CD's new library looked like in September '93. I'll level with you: with the exception of one of the most beloved Sega CD games of all time showing up in this entry, this particular batch might be one of the weakest I've ever seen. Great way to ease us into a new year of MD/SCD recaps, I suppose. Hell, that Part VIII both starts and ends with a barely-interactive FMV disaster is a real ominous portent of the darker times to come. After this, we'll have two regular Mega Archive updates that'll cover October and a bit of November before we return to CD land for a whole bunch of juicy movie tie-in games. Mmm-mmm, can't wait.

For all the Mega Archive recaps and links, be sure to check out The Official Mega Archive Mega Spreadsheet.

Part VIII: CD68-CD76 (September '93 - October '93)

CD68: Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: September 1993
• Franchise: Make My Video
• Genre: FMV Nonsense
• Theme: The CD-ROM Format Has Been Around for Five Years and We Still Don't Know What We're Doing
• Premise: C+C Music Factory already knows that their music videos need to replace any zaftig female vocalists with svelte lip-syncing models, but beyond that they're utterly lost. Make their video, won't you?
• Availability: Not with all the licenses involved. The Power Factory was decommissioned long ago.
• Preservation: We thought the Make My Video series was done and dusted, but we have one more—that, tellingly, dropped the "Make My Video" brand—for C+C Music Factory, the early house music act. As in, the "everybody dance now" guys. That song, which is actually called I'm Gonna Make You Sweat (too late; I've already seen what I'm covering this month), is featured in this game along with two others: Things That Make You Go Hmmm... and Here We Go Let's Rock & Roll. As before, you just mess around with a bunch of B-roll and ancient public domain footage to string together a passable MV, which is then reviewed through some arcane manner of arbitration. Is it even a game? Sega and Sony would like you to think so.
• Wiki Notes: Some extra text and corrections as well as screenshots and a header image. For the header, I went with the evocative shot of a hammer coming down on a CD: very much the kind of energy I'm looking to bring to this episode.

CD69: The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin

• Developer: Sega of America
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: Spider-Man
• Genre: Platbrawler
• Theme: "My Kusoge Sense is Tingling"
• Premise: Kingpin, who made his fortune through an empire of various business enterprises (legal and otherwise) across New York City, now plans to blow it all up with a nuke and blame Spider-Man for it. It's the evil magnate's best get-rich-quick scheme yet.
• Availability: It's also on the Mega Drive. We covered it in Part XI.
• Preservation: I'm still not 100% sure whether or not I ought to be re-litigating every Mega Drive game that shows up on Sega CD with a fancy new makeover and soundtrack, but it's not a process that was exceptionally common: often, these ports were considered not so much for the sake of "let's put this on everything to make more money" but "how do we make a meaningful change to this game to justify selling it on both this platform and its peripheral?". Mostly those meaningful changes are limited to adding CD audio and possibly some animated clips (this port has both), but it also reworked the levels and added several new ones for a more "Definitive Edition" feel. A snippet from an interview with Dave Foley (presumably not that Dave Foley) featured on SegaRetro suggested that the development team took the opportunity to re-add a bunch of content they left out of the original MD version due to space issues; a limitation that no longer applied to the CD format. It corroborates a metaphor I often return to which posits that game development jumping from cart to CD is like moving to a much bigger place but still having the same amount of furniture and decor: you end up filling that space with all kinds of pointless junk just so it doesn't look quite so cavernous and empty.
• Wiki Notes: Double-dip. All the page needed was the EU MCD release and its box art. However, I just had to put in more screenshots from the opening animation. That beautiful Parker mullet.

CD70: AH-3 Thunderstrike / Thunderhawk

• Developer: Core Design
• Publisher: Victor Entertainment (JP) / JVC Musical Industries (NA) / Core Design (EU)
• JP Release: 1993-09-17 (as Thunderhawk)
• NA Release: November 1993 (as AH-3 Thunderstrike)
• EU Release: October 1993 (as Thunderhawk)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Flight Sim
• Theme: Does Thunder Strike? I Thought That Was Lightning. Did AC/DC Lie to Me?
• Premise: Fly an attack chopper through multiple missions as you squint to see where all the tiny bad guy sprites are hiding before they fire their surface-to-air missiles. Like Where's Waldo? only with war crimes. (Well, more war crimes depending on the Where's Waldo? book in question.)
• Availability: There's a '96 PC port but I don't think any of the big digital stores preserved it.
• Preservation: Thunderhawk sits in this nice pleasant valley between flight sims that go overboard with the fancy polygonal graphics that slows everything down to a crawl and something like an After Burner where's a purely adrenaline-pumping action game. You still have mission targets to pursue and gauges to side-eye and some tactical awareness to call upon, but it's mostly just blowing shit up really fast before it can blow you up. Maybe like a first-person Desert Strike would be the best way to put it. The game's based on an older Amiga/ST game (the developers Core Design are British, so that tracks) but I wasn't entirely sure if it's a full sequel or a glorified remake. It also got a new title for North America, which suggests there was already a Thunderhawk out there sitting on the name. Roosting, maybe is the more accurate term.
• Wiki Notes: It already had a page separate from its Amiga/ST antecedent so I just shrugged and left it like that. The jump to CD-ROM definitely gave the developers more to work with and it looks completely different, so I doubt I'll get the equivalent of a wiki editor court martial over it. The page needed pretty much everything besides screenshots.

CD71: Warau Salesman

• Developer: Compile
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-09-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Warau Salesman
• Genre: Adventure
• Theme: Ironic Comeuppances
• Premise: The Laughing Salesman can grant your heart's desire, but only if you don't mess up and break his rules. Yet everybody does. How vexing. For them.
• Availability: Licensed game. Though apparently the show did come back recently as a Netflix thing.
• Preservation: Here we have another impenetrable adventure game based on an anime license. The license this time is the darkly comic adventures of the titular salesman and his Wishmaster-esque approach to devastating the well-beings of those who become raging assholes once they get a taste of the good life. First created in the '60s by Motoo Abiko, the character saw a rise in popularity in the late '80s and early '90s due to an anime adaptation from which this game's animation and voice clips are sourced. While most Japanese adventure games tend to be dense, text-heavy menu-based affairs, this game uses a simplified UI that was becoming popular in the west around this time too: the cursor changes shape to represent any possible actions that can be performed, like eyes for examining something or a mouth for talking to an NPC. I'm sure you could brute force the game easily enough even if you couldn't understand the language, but that feels like missing the point. Either way, it's another example of the MCD becoming a home for anime licenses due to the increased multimedia potential of the CD-ROM format. I was a little surprised Compile was behind the game; they probably found a quiet moment between Puyos to take advantage of a license they'd been sitting on.
• Wiki Notes: A skeleton, so it needed everything. My thanks to wiki user Aruru-san for getting the ball rolling though.

CD72: Winning Post

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1993-09-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Winning Post
• Genre: Simulation
• Theme: Horsies
• Premise: RAISE some thoroughbred horses to peak fitness. RACE those horses to win big payouts in the G1 circuit. RAZE the horses that disappoint you. (RAY'S the guy you want to talk to about horse murder.)
• Availability: As well as a bunch of contemporary ports, you could also just buy the newest one—Winning Post 10 released last year on nearly everything. You will need to know Japanese though.
• Preservation: Not content with just Cao Caos, Koei looked across the barnyard and centered their gaze on the noble, hard-working steed. Winning Post is a very long-running (because horses; see, they tend to run long distan-) franchise that involves selectively breeding and racing horses to make a small fortune, which then goes back into building a bigger stable with better horses. Drawing on my traumatic memories working on SuFami pages, horseracing games were (are?) shockingly popular in Japan, possibly in part because of their strictly-controlled gambling laws, and there's an even split between those where you're raising the horses and those where just inputting their performance data into an algorithm for betting "advice" (meanwhile, there's barely any where you're actively involved in the racing yourself). This game, which is the first Winning Post as opposed to the one released on Saturn in North America (actually the second, or maybe the 1.5th), debuted on Japanese home computers the PC-98 and the Sharp X68k—the usual domain of Koei—before hitting Super Famicom and Mega-CD within one week of each other. It also appeared on the 3DO, if I ever feel like taking on that mostly-cursed wiki project. The next three Winning Post games all hit Sega platforms, but not the Sega CD or Mega Drive; we're one and done here.
• Wiki Notes: SFC double-dip so just some screenshots.

CD73: Sonic CD / Sonic the Hedgehog CD

• Developer: Sonic Team
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-09-23 (as Sonic the Hedgehog CD)
• NA Release: 1993-11-23 (as Sonic CD)
• EU Release: October 1993 (as Sonic CD)
• Franchise: Sonic the Hedgehog
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Sonic Booom, Sonic Booom, Sonic Booooom
• Premise: Tired of getting chumped as the pushover penultimate boss of Sonic 2, Sonic's metallic doppelganger (doppelclanger?) decides to get serious for this CD-ROM debut for the franchise. (Yes, yes, I know that was Mecha Sonic in Sonic 2 not Metal Sonic. Dang Sonic pedants.)
• Availability: You can't get it separately on Steam like most of the early Sonics, but it is available in compilations like Sonic Origins. It's also on the Sega Genesis Mini 2.
• Preservation: The inevitable Sega CD Sonic game might well be the peripheral's most beloved overall, especially given a lack of stiff competition outside of niche RPGs like Lunar and the even more niche preferences of ironic FMV appreciators, but fans of the Sonic franchise do seem attached to the narrative innovations presented by its time-travel story, a cooler new antagonist in Metal Sonic, and the divisive debut of gaming's most persistent stan Amy Rose. There's a whole bunch of names attached to the development of Sonic CD: in addition to Sonic Team, there's several other Sega internal divisions as well as third-party programming assistance from H.I.C. (that's Human Interface Communications, because I guess calling a company just "Talking" was insufficient) and a credit to Toei Animation for the game's pretty decent animated cutscenes. I guess because Tails isn't in it (outside of cameos), the creators decided this was set between Sonic 1 and 2 thereby giving the franchise its first prequel. Did we need to further complicate the already richly dense chronology of Sonic the Hedgehog? Apparently.
• Wiki Notes: You kidding? This page has had more work done than Mickey Rourke. I've been on the internet long enough to know never to underestimate the dedication of Sonic fans.

CD74: Aoki Ookami to Shiroki Meshika: Genchou Hishi

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1993-09-24
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Genghis Khan
• Genre: Strategy Sim
• Theme: Genghis Demonstrating His Khan-Do Attitude
• Premise: The Khan still fully intends to conquer the known world no matter which system he gets shunted off to next.
• Availability: It's on Steam, albeit in Japanese only. For anglophones, you'd be best off buying either of the localized Genesis or SNES versions.
• Preservation: The Winning Post MCD port I could understand since it hadn't debuted on Mega Drive yet, but there wasn't much reason to bring Genghis Khan II over as well seeing as it had already appeared on MD just a few months prior. Koei strategy fans don't really come to these games for the type of flashy presentations a CD port can offer, after all; it only serves to distract from all those delicious numbers and menus. Anyway, I think Koei themselves were conscious of this pointless doubling up because they didn't even bother to localize this even though they'd gone through the trouble to do so before with the aforementioned Mega Drive port. Any further details about the game itself can be gleaned from when I last covered it back in MA Part XXXI.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots. The JP MCD release erroneously used the English title, which is a mistake I make too often myself.

CD75: Joe Montana's NFL Football

• Developer: Malibu Interactive
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Joe Montana Football
• Genre: Football
• Theme: Football
• Premise: Football
• Availability: Licenses and endorsements might make a modern rerelease difficult, on top of pointless. I think Sega's done faking any interest in football.
• Preservation: Less an iterative sequel in Sega's homegrown Joe Montana Football series, more a spin-off that could ably utilize the CD-ROM format for some FMV shenanigans. The prior 49ers QB shows up in scratchy video form to dispense advice much like the various licensed game sportspeoples before him, and the game uses the CD capacity to its fullest with a 38 team roster (including ten historical teams) and some sprite-scaling visual trickery. Park Place Productions and BlueSky Software were Sega's usual go-tos for their Joe Montana games—both companies were frequently employed by EA Sports also—but the former were developing a different NFL Sega CD game (see below) while the latter were already hard at work on the next MD game, NFL Football '94 Starring Joe Montana, which released the following month. Instead, we have the return of Malibu Interactive whom we last saw with the enhanced Sega CD port of Batman Returns [MACD Part VI]. Given the positive reception, Sega probably figured Malibu could be trusted with throwing FMV pigskins around. After all, seeing how it was vitally important for Sega to put out three friggin' NFL games in one friggin' season, it must have been a case of any port-developer in a storm.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots and text. At least someone was kind enough to list all the featured historical teams. Great example of having some obscure bit of trivia burning a hole in your pocket that you need to put on the wiki somewhere.

CD76: NFL's Greatest: San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993

• Developer: Park Place Productions
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Football
• Theme: Football
• Premise: Football
• Availability: Maybe a little too outdated now. Besides, 2008 would've been the ideal time for a reboot.
• Preservation: If Joe Montana's NFL Football was an earnest effort at making a CD-enhanced football game, NFL's Greatest is definitely a "let's fuck around and find out" experiment that's more in line with how we perceive the Sega CD today. It's all grody FMV clips bolted together by a mostly hands-off management gameplay loop where the player can call plays, substitutions, and the coin toss and that's about it. After making a decision, another FMV clip shows up to tell you how well your decision has fared. There's only two teams in the game—the eponymous ones, if that wasn't clear—but the clips come from 15 years of televized bouts between the two in order to cover a wide variety of possible plays. The amount of bouncing back and forth through time kind of makes NFL's Greatest like the world's first fourth-dimensional football game; very innovative stuff. Maybe it was pretty smart in retrospect that Sega had a real SCD football game release the same month just in case this dumb idea blew up in their faces (which, from what I can tell from scathing contemporary reviews, it sort of did).
• Wiki Notes: Skeleton, so it needed everything except release info. The original deck message was so enthusiastic (in a passive-aggressive way) I was loath to remove it, so I've kept it as is. What is this hidden video of which it speaks? Is it like a THPS "secret tape" bloopers reel of players getting debilitating concussions?

Now that I've made good on a longstanding obligation to a fellow GB blogger with last week's Tower of Time, it's business as usual for the Indie Game of the Week. That is, I'm reviewing another explormer. Quelle surprise. Well, I say "explormer": it has maps and traversal abilities, but it's light on collectibles and very linear so I'm not sure it necessarily counts. Either way, I just picked up a double-jump so I figure it's close enough to pass the smell test. Itorah is the explormer in question, the debut game from German studio Grimbart Tales, and has a sort of Mesoamerican theme (making that two Latin American explormer playthroughs in close proximity, after Guacamelee! 2 back in November) as the world's remaining human being finds a magical talking axe and joins up with a scientifically-curious furry (in the sense that she's driven by scientific curiosity, not that furries themselves are a scientific curiosity, though they kinda are) to explore ruins and learn more about the "plague" that exterminated the rest of our bush league species.

First impressions of Itorah are positive largely due to its gorgeous art and animation work. In that respect it's similar to Lab Zero's Indivisible, with its central character sporting an impressive number of animations for running, jumping, using healing magic, idling, and reacting to things during cutscenes. She doesn't talk, letting her sapient axe Koda do most of the communicating (in more ways than one), but the expressive character animations do a fine task of substituting for any verbal indication of her current temperament or status. Most of the exposition is delivered by your new fuzzy friend Ahui and her brother, who leads her village, as they discuss the next destination for the heroes as they stay one step ahead of the creepy plague monsters. This naturally has you returning to said village frequently, pretty much the only recurring destination given the lack of backtracking, which is where you can also spend some finite resources to either upgrade your healing (which, like Souls, is limited but replenished for free after stopping at a checkpoint campfire; something that's becoming the norm in explormers rather than the exception) or increase your health and stamina gauges, the latter used up whenever you hold down the run button and quickly regenerates once the button is released.

The issues arrive when you're left to your own devices to make your way to the next destination flag. The first is that the game is hopelessly linear: there's very few alternative paths and little to earn for finding them besides cash and items for upgrades, and most of the time you're just following the icon on the map rather than exploring off in random directions and procrastinating. That's often the case for other explormers too, but this game seems far less interested in an open world and more towards a railroaded experience. Not a bad thing at all, as most regular platformers are certainly of that mindset, but a little deceptive given all the other explormer accoutrements that the game presents like the map and traversal upgrades. The second issue is the jumping controls; there's a certain level of commitment to jumps that makes it hard to adjust with air control. It's not quite as bad as, say, Ghouls N' Ghosts where you're pretty much consigned to whatever horrible death lies in the direction you just unwisely double-hopped towards but it can feel oddly restrictive at times, especially if you do a smaller hop and barely cover any distance.

The third issue is the combat, which... well, when the platforming and the combat both feel a bit off, it's not generally a good sign given how little else tends to make up the DNA of an explormer. In this case, the combat has animations as flashy as anything else but includes some odd hitbox collision. It's also kinda dull, as you fight the same enemies over and over (I'm particularly tired of swatting little flying bug guys everywhere I go) with the same three-hit combo and an upwards stab to the point where I now mostly avoid fighting enemies if I can help it. They provide so little currency compared to the chests that they're scarcely worth the trouble. Add to that a very generous amount of health that, with the healing opportunities added on top, makes the platforming something you can sleepwalk. The moderately tough boss fights still require a bit more cautious attention, and there's been at least a couple of challenging "chases" where I've had to quickly platform my way through a gauntlet while something big and nasty is close on my tail, but other than that it's been kind of a breeze.

I don't dislike Itorah. It's very attractive and the stretches of low-effort gameplay can be mildly relaxing, which I guess is a nice way to critique that. I don't get the usual thrill from traversal upgrades I usually do from this genre: they only appear the moment they're needed, and any prior cases where you walked past a barred passage that could've used a specific upgrade are invariably routes to future destinations rather than prizes to backtrack for. Still, though, it's nice to have upgrades like a double-jump and a wall jump just for the promise of more elaborate platforming sequences in the future. Even if the combat's dull I can just skip past it if I like, saving my energy for the boss encounters, and the jumping around is adequate enough despite my poor attempts to describe why "the feel" is just a tad amiss (something that's as hard to expatiate as it is to program in the first place, I know from experience). I've mentally catalogued the game in the same filing cabinet drawer as Owlboy: another game with impressive graphical chops and some mildly intriguing worldbuilding, but let down by its only so-so gameplay loop. I'll come back with some post-game analysis later if anything changes.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Nothing much changed. It did get a little more challenging though. I even died once, against the final boss.

Welcome to OoT OoT—which is to say, Over the Top Ocarina of Time, in case you thought I suddenly turned into Pingu—which involves another look at the severely cursed randomizer tools for that one N64 Zelda game lots of people like, rather than the one lots of people are weirded out by. I actually took on a rather tough configuration a few years back in this LP blog, where I opted for both Keysanity (randomizes all keys for all dungeons) and Tokensanity (adds the gold skulltula tokens to the item pool and makes it so skulltulas can drop vital items), and afterwards swore I'd never make one of my all-timers this painful to play ever again.

Well. Ocarina of Time makes fools of us all, as the saying goes.

Pottering around the OoTRandomizer website for all the new options that have been added since I last checked it out in 2020, I was surprised by just how much more malevolent the developers have become; presumably, the streamer/speedrunner types who can play through these randomized Zeldas in their sleep were asking for ever more devious variables with which to challenge themselves. I thought I'd give it another shot and highlight some more of the things you can randomize—the seed I've since generated is truly one of the most dire imaginable. There won't be a whole lot of new ground to cover since the last time I LPed one of these, and people are (or should be) familiar enough with the vanilla experience already, so I'm just going to cover the new toggles and do a play-by-play of maybe the first few hours or so. (I very much doubt I'll have the cajones to actually complete this run. Well, unless someone offers me money. Or double dog dares me, such is the fragility of my masculinity.)

Prepare to be amazed and/or horrified at how much more ridiculously punitive a randomized OoT can be.

(N.B.: I'll be breaking up the usual wall of screenshots with a "what have you transformed here observation" side-bar, or "WHY THO" for short. In these, I'll be explaining in detail some ominous new change I've made via the randomizer, rather than delineate them all beforehand. It'll be more fun this way? Question mark?)

Give a Hoot, Read This OoT OoT

WHY THO #1: Starting location. This is some dude's house, but it's where I'll always start as young Link if I ever reset the game. Naturally, this can mess with the pathing something fierce; it also means that, even if I begin the game with a certain other vanilla setting still enabled—that is, the one where Mido refuses to let you see the Great Deku Tree and continue the game without the starting sword and shield—those items could still be anywhere because I'm no longer confined to Kokiri Forest.

WHY THO #2: I also fucked with the color palettes, but only sparingly. I'm not wearing a Zora tunic; that navy blue is what the game registers as green now, at least as far as my sartorial choices are concerned. That also goes for the hearts, which have taken on an incidentally cool metallic sheen.

WHY THO #3: Yep, in addition to the starting location being randomized, so has every internal and external exit in the game. And I do mean all of them. However, there are certain limitations in play here: dungeon entrances can only ever go to other dungeons, for example, and likewise doors to houses and holes in the ground will always go to other internal locations. Not only can this get hideously confusing for your sense of direction after a while, but there are many places where you'll be stuck because the exit you just appeared at is one way (like, say, the gate leading to Death Mountain if you haven't given the guard Zelda's invitation). If that happens, you gotta reset with the save warp. This is a pretty well known randomizer function, but one I was reluctant to use before: fortunately, the internet has some decent OoT Entrance Trackers.

WHY THO #4: Now we start getting into truly psychotic territory. This toggle randomizes all the Silver Rupees you need to collect to finish certain puzzle rooms. You might recall one from the Shadow Temple where there's a big spinning reaper scythe in the middle of the area. All five of the Silver Rupees in each of these rooms have been replaced with other items, and said rupees are part of the universal item pool. I'll need to figure out where they all are before I can move beyond the room in question. Incidentally, there's fourteen of these rooms in the game, meaning there's 70 of these Silver Rupees out there in the item pool. I've found quite a few so far.

WHY THO #5: See those golden pots? I randomized every pot's contents too. There's an optional setting where, if you've broken one of these pots that might potentially have a vital item, it'll go back to its usual brown color the next time it spawns. Of course, you can eschew this visual QoL feature and just run wild and free like the founding fathers intended.

WHY THO #6: I randomized the crates too. Only some of them, mind: the ones that would normally drop items. They can have the same optional visual glow-up the unchecked pots do.

WHY THO #7: You better believe Keysanity is still active. No half-assing on this occasion.

WHY THO #8: The song locations are part of the universal item pool too, rather than just randomizing the locations where'd you normally get a different song (like learning Saria's Song from Impa instead). They each have these neat transparent clef items attached to them. Of course, I won't be able to play anything yet for a couple reasons I'll get into.

WHY THO #9: All shop contents are randomized, though I've set all the prices to 10 rupees. I know, I went bush league with some of these options. Still, though, what an amazing deal this is.

WHY THO #10: So, the game has these things called "freestanding items", which are usually just hearts and rupees sitting out in the open rather than being in chests or in pots or some such. I randomized all of them too. That includes freestanding items hidden in patches of tall grass, like above. How do I know if I've already checked them? That's what Google Spreadsheets are for, my friend. (Well, it's either that or for administrative office work and data management, but one's clearly more important than the others.)

WHY THO #11: I know you didn't think for a second that I turned Tokensanity off, but here we are to confirm things are still busted regardless. 100 of these little skeletal beauties gumming up the works.

WHY THO #12: Those annoying business scrubs? Better believe I randomized all their shop contents too. Best part is that they never tell you what they're selling. Caveat emptor, everyone.

WHY THO #13: You can't really see in the above screenshot, but those two beehives are wiggling slightly. That's because I randomized their contents as well, which probably means there's more than a few chests with a whole bunch of confused and angry bees inside. The hives stop wiggling if you've checked them already: another very necessary QoL toggle.

WHY THO #14: You know how many loose cows are in Hyrule? Lots. And you know what happens if you play Epona's Song around them? They get all happy and give you some free Lon Lon Milk, provided you have an empty bottle for it. Not anymore though. I randomized what they give you once they hear their favorite song. That also means I have to track where they all are for the sake of a future point in the run when I can play them the song in question, including the bovines stuck in a random hole in the ground like this one.

WHY THO #15: This is what I call the piéce-de-résistance. You can actually take the individual button presses for the ocarina songs and add them to the item pool too. This is the C-Up button, if it wasn't clear. It's all moot right now anyway, since I don't have an ocarina, but my musical options would be pretty limited without all five note buttons even if I did have one.

Anyway, that's just a taste of how badly you can screw up one of these Zelda randomizer runs. I didn't find the option for randomizing the tufts of grass you can mow down but I know that's out there too. If you really wanted to get nasty, you can randomize the notes in every song producing absolute cacophonies or randomize how much damage each enemy can do to you (and presumably you to them). You can even combine the two N64 Zeldas into one game and randomize all their items and entrances together to produce an enormous mess not even the four giants could sort out. If I remembered a damn thing about Majora's Mask I almost would've been tempted enough to try it.

Playing this nightmare was certainly fun for a few hours but I've made almost zero progress besides finding a handful of items like bombs and the hookshot. The only dungeon entrances I can access right now take me to the Water Temple and the Master Quest version of Jabu-Jabu's Belly, the latter of which needs the slingshot to get out of the first room. I haven't even found a sword yet. I'm going to leave this run abandoned like it was some 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle strewn across a portable poker table that I vastly overestimated my patience for solving. Good thing we're still in early January, where it's entirely permissible to give up on any and all lofty goals you may have set yourself.

In conclusion: I'm sorry, Zelda. I'm sorry I messed up your game real bad. (Not that sorry though.)

...Just incidentally speaking, though, have we nailed down what @danryckert 's postponed Blight Club game punishment will be once his broken fingy is all healed? No particular reason for asking.

(P.S. I realize OtT is the abbreviation for over the top, not OoT, but I just wanted to keep saying OoT OoT. Artistic license.)

One week into January is a good time for contrition I've found, since most of us have already broken any and all New Year's Resolutions we'd optimistically set ourselves. In my case, having long since abandoned any pretensions towards self-improvement, this sheepishness is instead aimed squarely at a fellow Bomblogger: one Mr. @arbitrarywater. See, the stand-up duder in question gifted me this entry's Indie Game of the Week as a fellow CRPG nut curious to read my reactions; however, I've actually forgotten how long ago it was since this game showed up in my Steam library on that generously fateful (fatefully generous?) day. In my defense, it wasn't until I bought a stronger PC that I could finally run it without issues. That is, the PC I bought last December. Uhhhhh well, I'm playing it now, and as we say here in the titular chronological fortress "better late than never", a statement heard only slightly less frequently than "stop sitting on your ass and protect my mages already, you stupid tank".

Tower of Time is a tactical real-time RPG with... well, not so much turn-based but "slowed down enough to let you collect your thoughts"-based (though fully halting the action is available as an alternative). You control a party of four champions loyal to you, the big important unnamed protagonist who ominously introduces himself as "The Destroyer" during the in media res introduction, as you send them down through an inverted tower reaching deep into the earth to their probable grisly deaths. Due to some poorly-maintained arcane energies and a whole lot of incidental bad shit going down besides, the tower is full of monsters and traps but also purports to hold the salvation for the surface world through ancient technology and thinking lost to the current surface world, presently undergoing a very slow apocalypse for reasons lost to history. Point being, this tower seems pretty important and everyone's pushing past its many obstacles to find a path to a brighter future at its base (or its top, depending on your perspective).

Units in battle automatically attack anything in range, with an optional toggle to have them march towards the nearest enemy to fight or stand their ground (the latter preferable for squishy ranged types) but the player is in charge of everything else, including skill usage and positioning. Enemies spawn in from multiple directions, requiring your best crowd control and situational awareness as you chip away at the encroaching hordes while keeping your team alive and (ideally) buffed to the nines. Roles naturally fall under the usual archetypes—tanks at the front line to soak up damage, support for heals and buffs, DPS to take down foes tout de suite before they overwhelm you—and the game provides a set of pre-determined characters (with newcomers doled out at about a rate of one per floor) with similarly pre-determined skillsets that you have some minor customization over, in particular regards to the skills you choose to upgrade and the alternative upgrade paths you might follow. An example might be an AoE attack where you can either upgrade its splash range or its damage, your preference being contingent on how you're using it (either demolishing larger groups of weaker mobs or taking down bosses/spawners and their adds quickly, respectively).

The situational awareness factor takes a much more critical role in this game than other RPGs of its type, as you're frequently required to move units out of the way of incoming enemy AoEs or having to quickly account for a bunch of mooks that spawned in behind your archer and mage while your tanks were out in front. Hitting the space bar to slow down the action gives you time to react to these new developments, as well as toss off multiple skills on the trot. These skills are limited by both cooldowns and a finite mana gauge, though the regeneration for the latter can be improved with the right enhancements on your gear (and probably should for mages). You're also only able to equip four skills per character, out of the eight they eventually acquire through levelling up, further adding to the player-directed specialization aspect. To account for the somewhat small number of character customization options, the game has multiple battle scenario "types" that it'll throw at you including demolishing monster spawners, either destroying or avoiding enemy orb turrets, protecting your own orbs (something I already do habitually thanks to some painful lessons learned during dodgeball in gym class), or rescue a fellow comrade from a sturdy cage before the enemies arrive to ensure I have my full fighting force ready to go. Many battles will also add bonus conditions, making things easier or harder for you or the enemies by way of slowdown, lower elemental resistances, or extra health regen. Where it might falter in giving you a wide spread of tactical options (there's little reason to change things up unless you recently acquired new skills or an enemy proves highly resistant to your favorite element) it makes up for it with these varied battle scenarios.

Notably, the game eschews an XP system: your characters are already as skilled as the world's strongest according to the in-game explanation, so the only way to improve is to study whatever ancient fighting techniques and magicks you can gather from this tower and pay for training. This means that both equipment and money are tantamount to succeeding in battle, at least in preparatory terms. As such, I've been exploring floors until I see a battle on the horizon—no battles are random, and enemies will simply stand in the road until you're ready to face them with the exception of a few sudden ambushes—and then walk the opposite direction for a while. After all available looting opportunities are exhausted, I can peruse my inventory to make sure I have the best gear equipped and maybe hit the trainers back in town to be fully primed for whatever the next fracas has waiting for me. Best of all, the game is very forthcoming with information about the current floor: the number of battles, treasure chests, secret areas, side-quests, and other notables are all made apparent to you as soon as you enter, ensuring that you don't miss anything before you find the exit and are prepared to move on. There's also intra-dungeon fast travel for quickly getting back to splits in the path you left behind, and moving back and forth from the hub town is mostly instantaneous: the game has been very accommodating so far, saving all its challenging moments for the battles themselves.

There's plenty I really like about this game, and only a mild layer of jank that's worthy of kvetching about. The combat recalls a little game from Cyanide I played a while back called Aarklash: Legacy (hard to miss it, since it always sits at the top of my alphabetical Steam library) that had a similar "what if Infinity Engine games did way more with the repositioning aspect of its real-time combat?" epiphany, and none of the battles so far have been either too difficult or too easy (that's on Normal difficulty, mind). The dungeon exploration half hasn't been slept on due to the combat focus either: each floor has its own distinct personality, its own role back when the tower was newly built that in some way has influenced the state it's in now (very Ultima Underworld), and its own bonus areas and unique challenges to find and overcome. There's a ton of flavor text—and some inescapable typos, given this is an ESL game—so it regularly feels like a tabletop RPG experience, even without the guy spilling soda on my character sheets ("Hey, you said you liked 'flavor text'!" Yeah, thanks Gerry). It even does the Divinity: Original Sin thing of having your teammates bicker over certain dilemmas until you step in with some problematic mind manipulation to settle their disputes (you can leave it to chance too, if tinkering with your friends' brains is somehow not to your liking). I keep entering each new floor excited to discover what's next, and how my battle strategy might change with each new level up or character introduced to the mix. If you're a fan of color-coded loot (and by golly I am) this game has a bunch of it, even if you run into the usual procgen issues of, for example, finding way too much mage equipment that boosts your melee strength—thankfully, you have the means to make your own gear if the stuff you find isn't to your liking. Not for the first time, I find myself thanking ArbitraryWater for his recommendations and contributions to a backlog that's proving to be every bit as bottomless as this tower. Still, I have a whole new year to spend delving ever deeper into it so I can't say I'm not content right now.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-playthrough update: The rest of the game was more or less the same, though it did feel like it was running out of steam towards the end (or maybe that was just me). After undead, orcs, and elemental constructs it kinda got stuck on golems for a while. There was an interesting twist (and one germane to the name) where you met the extradimensional orcs again near the end but they were way more advanced; turns out their world portal was several hundred years ahead of the previous, and they'd been chased through on this occasion by a bunch of genocidal human purists (who, charmingly, had leaders named for American colonists like Hernan Cortes). The ending was... well, it was something. What's odd is just prior they set up a sequel hook involving a minor antagonist, but I'm not sure how they're going to resolve it given everyone in your party died. Definitely a memorable game with more than a little bit of jank, but some novel ideas and an appealing enough tactical real-time combat system. (Once I discovered the auto-cast function and given everyone mana-regen-boosting gear, the battles got considerably easier.)

I sadly didn't get around to enough 2023 games for a comprehensive (and objectively 100% correct) ranking of the year's greatest so instead I've prepared a selection of miscellaneous "Best Of" categories and other rundowns for you to peruse at your leisure over the holiday break.

This certainly wasn't motivated by any sort of ugly jealousy spawned by everyone else's writing getting more attention. Wait, did I say the quiet part loud again?

Games of a Year

Welcome to Games of a Year, a list that highlights games of a year—which is to say any year, not necessarily this year—that I enjoyed the most in 2023. Pulled from my "List of Games Beaten", I've selected both a favorite and a runner-up for each month. I do plan on playing more 2023 games eventually but I'm in no rush, hi-fi or otherwise. Let them drop in price and get all their patches (looking at you, Starfield) and free DLC first; I've plenty to be getting on with in the meantime.

January: Vampire Survivors (2022)

While huddled around a fragile candlestick one dark and dreary night Dracula's minions wondered aloud why they didn't all attack the interloping Belmonts at the same time, and so Vampire Survivors was born. A twin-stick (twin-stake?) shooter that only uses the one in truth, Vampire Survivors not only created a compelling run-based gameplay loop right out of the gate but continued to embellish it with regular mostly-free content updates just in the off-chance we were about to get burned out on getting merked by chromatic psychopomps after our permitted half-hour of mass slaughter. It's a game with far more nuance and depth than it first lets on but never stops being crowd-pleasing (and crowd-avoiding) fun.

Runner-up: Psychonauts 2 (2021). Helps to be in the right headspace for a game like this.

February: Chained Echoes (2022)

Sea of Stars looks to be the big mainstream-breaching throwback RPG of 2023, but Chained Echoes helped set the stage with its equally adept balancing act of taking what we loved about those older games and marrying it to the modern conveniences and deeper waters we've come to expect from our contemporary RPGs. The worldbuilding has more than a few surprises, the cast all have their distinct personalities and combat roles alike, the mech suits let you pretend you're playing Xenosaga if you're the kind of sicko who's into that, and the Reward Board gives you plenty of extracurricular activities to tackle if you ever need a break from the main progression. Just a really solid and quite substantial game for its weight class.

Runner-up: Eastward (2021). Great work slipping an English language Mother 3 past Nintendo without them noticing.

March: F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch (2021)

There's nothing particularly inventive or revolutionary about F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch but I found myself frequently floored by the amount of earnest, gritty yarn-spinning and presentational chops that went into the game, creating a well-realized steampunk universe of talking animals with thousand-yard stares and difficult personal histories. It's also a highly competent explormer that reminded me frequently of Shadow Complex between its gun-toting foes, mature narrative, and "2.5D" format, and was one of the strongest of its genre that I played this year (and I played many, as I'm known to do). Plus, electric whips. Why can't more games let me have an electric whip? C'mon. I'm responsible enough.

Runner-up: Sunset Overdrive (2014). They really didn't need to make any more open-world city games after this.

April: Lost Judgment (2021)

My annual RGG Studio RPG playthrough saw me once again occupy Takayuki Yagami's stylish loafers as the former yakuza orphan turned public defender turned streetwise private eye took on a case that tapped into the long-term, widespread psychological harm caused by both bullying and suicide: two horrifying scenarios that are sadly all too quotidian. Mostly, though, it's an excuse to ride a skateboard, build robots, hang out at flirty dive bars, scare the crap out of people with the new Snake martial arts style, take someone else's pet dog out to hunt for treasure, and just generally go around giving highschoolers a hard time because you're an adult and they can't do shit to you. Sure, there's a main plot, but that's sort of missing the point of these games.

Runner-up: Metroid Dread (2021). As suspenseful as Breaking Bad, and has almost as many E.M.M.I.s.

May: Severed Steel (2021)

As Mirror's Edge taught us, there's no FPS that can't be improved with parkour and this game takes that axiom to its absolute zenith with its high-paced gunplay and vertiginous platforming as you shred your way through dozens of foes with the most stylish leaps, wall-runs, slides, and flips, all of which are encouraged through concrete gameplay advantages in addition to the mostly incidental "cool factor". I'm also a mark for any game that lets you defeat enemies by kicking open a door real hard. As a zealous votary at the Church of Vanquish—a Vanquishitor, if you like—Severed Steel is the sort of disciple I wish would've appeared more frequently in its wake.

Runner-up: Rising Dusk (2018). Methadone for collectathon addicts.

June: Mortal Shell (2020)

This year produced some apparently stellar Soulslikes, with Lies of P and Remnant II leading the pack, but stuck playing catch-up as I am my pick for best merciless action-RPG was Mortal Shell, which like many Indie games does its best to drill down to the fundamentals of what FromSoft's series is all about in lieu of something much closer to their vast content and scope, often beyond an Indie studio's budget. Mortal Shell in particular eschewed much of the character-building the Souls games are known for in order to give players a group of titular shells, class archetypes in so many words, that offered a small amount of skill customization. Everything else, from the memorable bosses to the ever-present foreboding sense of danger, was remarkably well replicated with a fraction of the cost.

Runner-up: Unsighted (2021). No Zelda game has ever had the balls to make you Sophie's Choice the residents of Kakariko Village.

July: Tales of Arise (2021)

I was happily surprised by how much attention Tales of Arise got from this site and elsewhere, which sees the Tales franchise find a new peak—at least mechanically—as it tweaks its ever-versatile LMB System to include more in the way of evasive maneuvers to add a bit more dynamism to the combat and expand the utility of glass cannon melee types like Law. Much of the game operates like Tales has always done: there's some business with two worlds competing with each other, characters tend to be serious during cutscenes but less so during optional "skits" that offer both comedic asides and incidental lore and personal backstories, and there's a fair few character development features including Graces F's title-based progression (that is, accessing new passive skills to learn by hitting milestones and other achievements) and the usual system of arranging your combat arte bindings to find serviceable combos. This was my twelfth Tales game and for as similar as they all can be I'm still motivated to check out the rest someday.

Runner-up: Sable (2021). Like the prologue of A New Hope just with fewer crispy skeletons.

August: The Great Ace Attorney (2021)

I'm not sure if there's a term for it—jingomasochism, maybe?—but I can't get enough of games made by foreigners that constantly dump on the British. The period pieces that are The Great Ace Attorney games see Phoenix Wright's Meiji era ancestor Ryunosuke travel to London to learn how to become an effective defense attorney, inspired by his (way more confident) friend Kazuma, and while there must countenance the true horror of a jury system staffed by the dimmest and most mercurial denizens our fair capital has to offer. The highlight of these games though, at least comedically speaking, are when you're forced to correct Herlock Sholmes's mad guessworks of deductions; the game keeps it close to the chest whether Sholmes is an actual dummy or just does all this to mess with the strait-laced protagonist. Either way, it's a fun dynamic in a game that clearly didn't lose any of the franchise's surreal silliness after travelling back in time a hundred years. (The sequel's just as good if a bit more climactic; I completed it soon after since they came as a pair in their localized forms.)

Runner-up: Kaze and the Wild Masks (2021). Donkey Kong platformers really put me through the wringer this year, even when they weren't actually Donkey Kong.

September: Splasher (2017)

We're now six years removed (soon to be seven) from the annum in question but that I'm still finding Top Twenty GOTY candidates for 2017, the Busiest (Increasingly Less) Recent Year for Games, really emphasizes just how special it was. Splasher's an absolutely wonderful platformer in the Super Meat Boy mold where the controls are every bit as fluid as the viscous ammo that spurts from its titular goop-shooter (I could've made this sentence less gross, but opted not to). However, while it is certainly exacting, it never goes full masocore like its inspiration and I found its difficulty curve palatable from beginning to end. That the same devs then went on to create Tinykin, another recent platforming favorite, was no surprise in retrospect. I'm just glad if flabbergasted that I can upturn and shake the cookie jar that was 2017 and still have the occasional delicious crumb like this pop out.

Runner-up: The Room 4: Old Sins (2021). It's said the oldest sin of all is betrayal. I fed up with this world.

October: Dark Souls (with randomizer hacks) (2011)

I would argue that you've never truly played Dark Souls unless you've had the good fortune of having half the end-game bosses swapped out for Kalameet and Artorias while having to feverishly check every nook and cranny in every optional (and DLC) area for the critically important Lordvessel and Lord Souls before you're allowed to finish the game. Such was playing Dark Souls with two randomizer hacks activated—one for enemies, one for items—and certainly among the most memorable experiences I've ever had with that franchise. I also had the opportunity to discover just how broken mage builds are in those games, giving me plenty of food for thought for when the next Elden Ring arrives.

Runner-up: Hell Pie (2022). Get your fill of demonic baked goods or, if you will, a Hornish Pasty.

November: Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021)

The best CRPGs are where you start off losing every other fight with big centipedes and end it stomping demigods by performing eight critical hits a round. The power fantasy experience is very real in Wrath of the Righteous thanks in large part to its OP Mythic Class progression, as well as an expansive amount of content as you take on a country occupied by endless demon forces with either your military (protip: hire lots of archers) or a small adventuring crew. In the midst of all the min-maxing and munchkin malarkey I discovered a decent core of a "chosen one" trope-subverting narrative (in some way reminiscent of KOTOR II's, even), some relatable stalwart companions each with their own messes to clean up, and such a thorough exploration of the Pathfinder world and ruleset that I couldn't have found a better introduction to Not-Dungeons-and-Dragons if I tried. Now, ask me anything about my rapier dual-wielding finesse-build Slayer!Deliverer MC with all her Angelic buffs and Ranger feats.

Runner-up: Umineko When They Cry: Question Arcs (2016). What's going on? Who cares! Internet debate me, Ushiromiya Battleeeeeer!

December: Pikmin 4 (2023)

I don't even have to write anything more about Pikmin 4: my half-sane musings managed to make it into an official Giant Bomb front page article (with contributions from many other fellow mods). I like Pikmin. I love Oatchi. I don't like tower defense or stressful time trials, but those weren't enough to spoil the fun. I'm just so pleased Nintendo went back to Pikmin 2 for inspiration, vindicating my long-held belief that it's the best one by a mile. They even brought my spooky buddy the Waterwraith back. Just wonderful. My tentative 2023 Game of the Year if anyone asks, though we'll see if it stays as such this time again next year.

Runner-up: The Forgotten City (2021). Like Groundhog Day, only more Pax Romana than Paxatawney.

Animento

Just a ranking of the 15(ish) best(ish) anime I watched this year. I sure did watch a lot. The medium collectively occupied the "something to stick on while I eat" role for most of the meals I had this year. (I won't be ranking those meals too, incidentally, since most of them were sandwiches and pasta dishes. Just a whole lot of carbs; probably won't regret that in fifteen years...)

The Eminence in Shadow (Seasons 1 and 2)

You've possibly seen or heard of enough isekai shows where the protagonist becomes some untouchable godlike entity through his OP cheat skills, but what if that protagonist was also an oblivious dipshit who badly wanted to be Shadow the Hedgehog? You'd get one of the funniest (yet somehow still badass as hell) isekai parodies around. I... Am... suggesting you give this show a shot, at least up to episode 5. (Best character: Delta.)

Isekai Ojisan (Season 1)

And here we have another isekai parody, only this time with a middle-aged guy who loves the Sega Saturn showing his nephew and his nephew's girlfriend-in-all-but-name his adventures in another world through a magical memory viewscreen. Dude's so much a boomer that he predates tsundere culture so he has no idea that all the annoying women who keep insulting him are actually being affectionate (he keeps finding ways to ditch them instead) and he approaches every problem in the least smooth way imaginable. It's a lot more amusing than I make it sound. (I also appreciated the synergy between it and my Sega-themed Mega Archive blog feature too.) (Best character: Mabel.)

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (Season 1)

Still ongoing, but this fantasy anime explores the sort of emotional detachment an elf would necessarily have towards her shorter-lived human and dwarf party companions. Seeking answers on what her old party actually meant to her, and she to them, she embarks on another long quest with the protégés of her elderly and/or deceased friends. I really love the pace and quiet emotional intelligence of this series; it has the unhurried vibe of a Ghibli movie, and is as beautiful to boot. (Best character: Frieren.)

Spy x Family (Season 2)

James Bond, Killing Eve, and Stephen King's Carrie create a fake family for the sake of being inconspicuous and it's still the most wholesome thing ever, somehow. I adore the show's style too, adapting a metropolitan 1950s flair with the occasional anachronism along with some of the best intro animations since Cowboy Bebop. The second season is as delightful as the first, with the highlight being a protracted arc on a cruise ship that shows off just how stupidly strong and resourceful Yor Forger can be when she's cornered. (Best character: The dog. BORF!)

Bocchi the Rock! (Season 1)

Introverted guitar prodigy gets talked into joining an all-girl rock band, social challenges ensue. I respect this show for being a very accurate portrayal of someone so socially awkward that it's almost worth putting them into a zoo and studying them for science. Bocchi the Rock! depicts these overthinking freak-outs with some really imaginative animation work, so even while it's just a show about a fledgling highschool band it still manages to be visually distinct and wild. Naturally, it's also strong on its audio component too. (Best character: PA-san. Hope we get more of this mysterious unnamed goth cutie next season.)

Helck (Season 1)

A hulking yet cheerful He-Man-looking dude shows up at the demon capital and participates in a contest to be their new leader. His reason? "I wanna kill all the humans." This show is a rollercoaster of tonal shifts but I got swept up with both its emotional, dramatic moments as well as those times when it remembered it was a comedy. I could really use a second season to see how it all ends. Also, all the demon characters are precious and I want to hang out with them. (Best character: Hyura.)

Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story (Season 2)

The gayest ladies in professional sports are back for a second (and probably final) season of this raucous golfing dramedy where everyone has special golf attacks that can knock down trees and split the atom and shit. This season's biggest dramatic hurdle is the possibility that the heroines are actually half-sisters and can't be in lesbians with each other any more. It's all ludicrous superpowered soap opera nonsense, but the kind that makes certain sports anime sing. And I don't even like golf. (Best character: Vipere, the villainess that uses sexy snake pheromones or something to throw opponents off their game. She now has a yacht and a himbo and has mellowed out considerably.)

Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games Is Tough for Mobs (Season 1)

In most isekai where the guy reincarnates in his favorite video game, he's stoked. In this, the hero was hoodwinked into 100%-ing a kusoge otome dating game (the ones where all the love interests are dudes) for his crappy sister and despised the whole experience. He then dies of exhaustion, wakes up in that same game as a background NPC, panics for a while, and then decides to use every glitch and cheap DLC gamebreaker to mess up that world's careful balance while humiliating the love interests that gave him so much trouble. The sheer vindictive glee behind his actions is what makes this show shine. Some of the most fun I've had with an isekai, excepting similar parodies above. (Best character: Luxion. The AI of the overpowered, anachronistic DLC spaceship (think Invincible from FF9) that the protagonist hijacks through forbidden knowledge. The only way the two are able to bond is because the ship hates all the other characters too.)

Yuri is My Job! (Season 1)

I figured this would be another wholesome yuri rom-com: a haughty, insincere popular girl-type learns some harsh life lessons after being blackmailed into working for a "concept cafe" where the staff are constantly embroiled in fictional G-rated lesbian highschool drama where they have to stay in character throughout (maintaining what I call "gayfabe"). Instead, the place is a pit of vipers and absolutely no-one is sympathetic or likeable except the cook. It's cask strength trainwreck TV suited for anyone who recreationally haunts the "Am I The Asshole?" subreddit. (Best character: The cook.)

Am I Actually the Strongest? (Season 1)

My favorite isekai are where the main characters are overpowered but spectacularly lazy and therefore do the bare minimum of good deeds to ensure they still technically qualify as heroic protagonists. Haruto quickly uses his ridiculous amount of mana to recruit a bunch of demonic underlings, create a clone golem to do all the shit he doesn't want to do (except the clone is as indolent as he is), and eventually has his ancient barrier magic create a passable internet connection to our world so his kid sister can watch anime on Netflix. This show has some slightly off-putting "doting imouto" business going on (she is adorable, yet still) but is otherwise a low-key joy of a hangout anime. (Best character: Flay.)

Skip and Loafer (Season 1)

Just a cute highschool romance thing. The girl is a motivated overachiever from the boonies who's a little overwhelmed after moving to Tokyo; the guy is a nice, chill slacker with a bit of a dark past. Can these two crazy mismatched kids find love with- Yes. The answer's yes. But it's sweetly wholesome for what it is and it does a great job making all its characters feel like real people. (Other equally cute HS rom-coms that almost made this slot: The Dangers in My Heart, Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible, and Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie.) (Best character: Nao-chan. Finally, a sympathetic and fully-realized trans character in an anime that isn't Tokyo Godfathers.)

Too Cute Crisis (Season 1)

Alien lands on Earth to judge whether or not it should be blown up. Finds a cat. Has an existential crisis because of how cute it is; the rest of the galaxy has nothing remotely as kawaii. She then learns that the whole planet is full of equally adorable critters and the whole show is just a lot more of that, really. The end credits include real photos of pets sent in by viewers. I'm just impressed with the sheer dedication to its core tenet of "animals = cute". (Best character: Maybe the cool old guy who really loves his hamster?)

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon (Season 1)

The most resourceful dude on the planet wakes up in a fantasy world as a sapient vending machine with a handful of canned electronic phrases and a whole vending skilltree. That is, a skilltree dedicated to more efficiently dispensing soft drinks and udon and even print pornography at one point. It feels like the end result of an elaborate dare between mangaka; how do you turn a premise like "guy becomes a vending machine in a fantasy world with medieval-level tech" into an entertaining and occasionally insightful isekai? It just about kinda manages it. (Best character: Boxxo.)

Tearmoon Empire (Season 1)

A proud member of the "lucky idiot" anime sitcom archetype, Tearmoon Empire can be reductively summed up as "What if Marie Antoinette still had a continue left over?". The spoiled and self-obsessed princess of an empire on the brink of implosion due to the vast disparity between its richest and poorest citizens has her eventually captured, imprisoned, and executed when the inevitable revolution comes to pass. However, she wakes up back as a pre-teen and realizes she must mend her ways (and empire), Ebenezer-style, to escape the guillotine. Of course, she's still guileless and selfish and kinda dumb but things just miraculously turn out well for her regardless. It's mostly just a sweet confectionary nothing of a show, but sometimes you have to let yourself eat cake. (Best character: Mia Luna Tearmoon, of course. Desu wa!)

Rising of the Shield Hero (Seasons 1 and 2) / Arifureta (Seasons 1 and 2)

I'm putting both of these here since they share the premise of "guy gets isekai'd with a bunch of others, gets betrayed, gets reaaaaaal pissy about it for the rest of the show, still accrues a harem of ladies anyway because moody, emotionally-withdrawn guys are hot I guess". Nonsense power/revenge fantasies for loner otaku. Still kinda fun though in a grunchy sort of way. (Best character: The chocobo and the M dragon, respectively.)

Bonus: All the old junk I watched for Game OVA this summer

Shout-outs to the Dirty Pair movie. Best anime Bond intro in the biz. Also to the 1988 Appleseed OVA and its fucked up keyboards.

(Incidentally, for this next season Solo Leveling, Delicious in Dungeon, and My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered are the shows I have my eye on (along with the second halves of Frieren and Shangri-La Frontier).)

(Incidentally x2, since I'm already in for a penny in for a pound vis-á-vis showing my entire weeb ass this year, 2023's best VTuber was HololiveEN's Ouro Kronii.)

Games I'm Looking Forward to in 2024 (Besides All the 2023 Games I Didn't Play Yet)

Here's ten games that will (probably) come out next year that might tear me away from my already dismally-neglected backlog.

• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Ichibanimal Crossing? Sign me up. Well, actually, the fully turn-based entries in this series will still take a backseat to the traditional gameplay spin-offs I've yet to play (so, Ishin! and The Man Who Erased His Name). I can't imagine it'll be anything short of amazing though.
• Ys X: Nordics. I don't think the localization has a confirmed release date yet but it hit Japan in September and how long does it take to translate a Ys game? As long as NISA doesn't go around calling dungeons "Big Holes" again we should be good. Either way, it's going to be my GOTY and my Best Music winner next year, so look forward to that.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak. Speaking of Falcom, we'll be getting the first Kuro no Kiseki in English sometime in the middle of 2024. It's the... eleventh Trails game? And I'm about to start on the fourth. I guess I'll see it later, then.
• The Plucky Squire. That one charming game where you leave the book you're in and go exploring around the desk it's sitting on. I assume it's out soon if they're promoting it this hard. Pikmin 4 and Tinykin has me jonesing for more "hanging out in some dude's enormous house pretending I'm a Borrower" games.
• Ufouria: The Saga 2. I just learned about this around a week ago. Sunsoft's making a sequel to their NES Hebereke explormer—one of the earliest of its kind, first released in 1991—and dropping it on everything. It has the potential to be absolute trash, but I want to believe in Bop Louie and his pals.
• Dragon's Dogma II. I mean, I guess I can check it out even if the appeal of the first was always lost on me, Berserk references be damned. It better have a new track from B'z. Keep that Dangan alive and flying into free.
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. I liked but did not love the first Hellblade yet there's something very immersive and intense about what they're doing with these games that demands closer attention. I just hope it has a bit more substance to the parts where you're not just freaking out at whispery voices. If I just wanted to scream at stupid rune puzzles for hours I have God of War right here.
• Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. *Just a whole lot of banging on tables yelling for more Suikoden while Konami sits in a mud bath with cucumber slices over its eyes and pretends not to hear me.*
• Pepper Grinder. I don't know much about this game, but Vinny keeps telling me to pick it up.
• Beyond Good & Evil 2. Yeah, right.

The Stuff I Wrote

First, we have the usual 50 annual Indie Game of the Week entries. Most of the highlights can already be found above in the "Games of a Year" section. I'm not going to spam this spot with fifty links but by all means check out the 301st IGotW—Psychonauts 2—and keep hitting that "next" button at the bottom. Hopefully you find a few underappreciated gems you were interested in reading more about, and better still if you were inspired to go check them out yourself. Bon voyage!

We also continued both the Mega Archive and 64 in 64 this year, which each saw twelve updates. The former explores every Mega Drive game in chronological release order as I ensure our wiki is up to date on all its old Sega tapes, leaving us at the start of the autumn of 1993 when it resumes; the latter does something similar with the Nintendo 64 through a procession of mentally-draining hour-long playthroughs, half of which were selected randomly and do not see the system anywhere near its best. Either way, I love my retro gaming and I'll take any excuse to write about it in more depth than is maybe warranted; I'll be sure to come up with some more ideas for 2024.

Some of the shorter features for 2023 include: Go! Go! GOTY! 2022, where I started the year playing and talking about many games I missed the previous year; May Magnanimity, where I spent May going through my Itch.io backlog after one enormous charity bundle too many; The Dark Souls Randomizer, which has a self-explanatory title but is otherwise a real fascinating way to play through a modern icon; Game OVA, which has me comparing and contrasting classic (and less classic) anime with their quickie video game adaptations; The Kobayashi Mario and MisSimian: Chimpossible, two quixotic playthroughs where the goal was to get the full Retro Achievements sets for their respective N64 games or die trying (i.e. give up); and the second edition of VN-ese Waltz, which had me round up a bunch of neat (and kinda dark) visual novels on Steam that I wanted to check out.

I'm proud of all of them. Sorta.

And I'm proud of you for reading. Kudos. Thanks to the GB forum/blogging community for all your support this year and I hope you have a rad 2024. I'll have lots of entertaining nonsense for you to read even if nothing else clicks for you in the coming months.

Oh, and here's Alpha, as promised. Next best girl after Delta.