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Indie Game of the Week 348: Q.U.B.E. 2

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Hey guys, remember Q.U.B.E.? It's back. Well, OK, so this sequel is already five years old at this point so it's not a recent resurgence, but if there's something I'll always have a soft spot for in this feature—besides the usual RPGs, 3D collectathons, and explormers—it's the humble Portal-alikes, a.k.a. (by no-one) the Dopportalganger. The first Q.U.B.E. was assuredly that, launching in 2011 (as a Desura exclusive!) soon after the eagerly anticipated love letter to lemons and potato PCs that was Portal 2, taking the general structure of a first-person puzzle game that frequently employs physics and momentum in its occasionally vertiginous instances, couching it in a minimalist aesthetic of dilapidated white-tiled rooms that made it easier to identify which parts of the immediate area were relevant to the puzzle at hand (usually the brightly-colored parts), and a little bit of a mystery story that would pipe up to let itself be known between stretches of mentally-taxing, cube-wrangling melon-scramblers.

Q.U.B.E. 2 continues in much the same way as the first, giving you an enigmatic cold open as British researcher Amelia Cross wakes up in an unfamiliar location wearing a pair of high-tech gloves that are beyond anything she recognizes. A friendly radio voiceover, related to the first game, informs her that she's in a location of extraterrestrial origin and her best means of passing through the area is to use said gloves: they're able to activate certain white tiles (they're bordered by danger lines to stand out more, which was conveniently kind of the aliens (though there's a pretty cool in-universe reason for this (they're trying to communicate))) to create blue panels, with other colors to be unlocked later. A blue panel creates a pushing effect that can propel Amelia or any other object a fair distance. Red creates an extended platform that can be climbed on or used to push something else; Green produces a small cube that cannot be picked up but can be stood upon for extra height or used to hold down pressure plates; and so on. The gloves will also activate environmental mechanisms, such as those that might move a panel or produce a magnetic effect. Through this simple assortment of mechanics the player is tasked with moving through a series of rooms in a mostly linear order (there are occasional splits where multiple puzzles are available at once, but the puzzle difficulty is built on a curve so don't expect too much in the way of an open world).

A typical puzzle with an atypical amount of bloom. The white panel with the border up right is currently green, but I could also make it blue or red if I thought it would help (it wouldn't). Meanwhile, these two buttons on the far wall are a magnetizer (hence the magnet symbol: again, very courteous of the aliens to use iconography we're familiar with) and a button that moves the panel left and right. The fact I probably didn't need to explain any of this is a testament to how thorough the visual designers were in leaving nothing too ambiguous.
A typical puzzle with an atypical amount of bloom. The white panel with the border up right is currently green, but I could also make it blue or red if I thought it would help (it wouldn't). Meanwhile, these two buttons on the far wall are a magnetizer (hence the magnet symbol: again, very courteous of the aliens to use iconography we're familiar with) and a button that moves the panel left and right. The fact I probably didn't need to explain any of this is a testament to how thorough the visual designers were in leaving nothing too ambiguous.

Q.U.B.E. 2 may start simple but it gradually starts to get trickier as its instances demand a greater degree of lateral thinking. However, there's a double-edged sword effect to the more loosey-goosey approach that a physics engine like Q.U.B.E. 2's tends to introduce; there's been a few cases where I've felt like I somehow broke the puzzle and found a much more elusive and unintended means to complete it, maybe by jumping around a platform or utilizing split-second timing on a flying cube to get higher up than I should be. This raises a few questions: Do I feel less satisfied completing a puzzle in this unorthodox way? Shouldn't any success count, and should the developers be condemned or commended for this freedom? Who is to say the strange way I beat that room wasn't the intended route all along, and I'm just overthinking how unintuitive my solution may have felt? It's possibly true of the puzzle genre as a whole that you end up ruminating too much on everything, since you already made the effort of whirring up gears in your brain that maybe don't get too much of a daily workout and now they're free to wreak havoc on your ratiocination. Either way, though I run into this issue often with physics-based games where it seems like I'm finding exploits in the system more than adhering to it, it's not really affecting my enjoyment of the game one way or the other; it just leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth that something that relies on so much precision could have gaps wide enough to stroll through. Unless, of course, the game is just trying to convince me that I got one over on it...

Anyway, I always dig games like Q.U.B.E. 2 and not just because Portal was such a formative title for both me and the Indie (or at least my definition of Indie, meaning "sufficiently small-scaled and/or low-budget game") market as a whole. There's something to that feeling of walking into a large open room, checking out from every angle all the now-familiar gizmos lining the floors and walls, taking a deep breath, rolling up your sleeves, and getting to work on figuring out how this particular puzzle ticks. Q.U.B.E. 2 might not be doing anything especially novel with its conundrums or its story but it's very competent at creating this very specific type of game with its specific type of environmental stumpers. A stronger narrative hook like Magrunner's or The Talos Principle's might've hit the spot, but the eerie mysteries behind this abandoned facility are starting to ratchet up now at the point I've reached and I don't doubt it has many more mechanisms to introduce. Time to pour another coffee, not forgetting to add a thematically germane sugarQUBE, and get down to business.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, turns out I was fairly close to the end when I stopped to write the review. The story was mostly incidental throughout (the usual voiceover talking heads interrupting some prime "sit there and stew over the puzzles" time) but I did enjoy how it concluded at least. What I've really grown attached to are the game's narrative-free DLC challenges: two sets of puzzle rooms connected by a central hub, all of which (including the hub) have some well-hidden collectibles to find that expands the scope of the puzzles just that little bit further. Some of those collectibles, color-coded by their difficulty to reach, really gave me a mental workout. Definitely keeping the score at a 4: it's the type of game that knows what it is and endeavors to deliver on that promise to the best of its ability, even if it doesn't feel all that revolutionary and its physics occasionally annoy the poop out of me.

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VN-ese Waltz Book 2: VN-ese Whirls

Felicitations, all lovers of books (as long as they have pictures), to another mini-series of VN-ese Waltz: a feature I did a couple years back wherein I checked out a bunch of notable visual novels. Since we're right near the end of Novelmber and we've all got GOTY to be concerning ourselves with before too long, the timing seemed prudent to wax lexical about a whole new host of barely interactive beauties. (Boy, that's a weird three-word phrase without context.) Needless to say, I've been slowly piling up more of these since I ended the previous season back in December 2021 and have aggregated a smattering of mini-reviews here as an anthology of sorts.

Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

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The first book off the figurative shelf would be Paranormasight, which coincidentally is about as contemporary as this feature (or any of my features) intends to get given it was released a mere seven months ago. Paranormasight was published by Square Enix (hence why I can't "Indie Game of the Week" this one, even for as much as I tend to stretch the definition of Indie on the reg) and developed by a frequent collaborator of theirs named Xeen, presumably unrelated to Might and Magic IV and V (or maybe not; those games were popular enough in Japan), who had previously worked with SE on the Trials of Mana remake and Final Fantasy XV and several others. Paranormasight is a horror-themed game (only a month late there) that concerns a series of folk legends known as the Seven Mysteries of Honjo: one night, all seven (actually nine, but a character explains that "seven mysteries" rolls off the tongue better) of the vengeful spirits that inspired these mysteries choose "curse bearers" that are able to kill others with curses related to how the spirits died. Some real gnarly ones too, like getting disemboweled in the dark. The goal is collect enough "soul dregs" from these spectral executions to enact the Rite of Resurrection, a ritual capable of bringing anyone back from the world of the dead. Naturally, these curse bearers are all those with a strong desire to revive someone, and some are even capable of going to any length to do so. The game follows the aimless young man Shogo Okiie at first, then eventually opens up to three concurrent stories regarding the grieving mother Harue Shigima, the hardboiled cop Tetsuo Tsutsumi, and the feisty schoolgirl Yakko Sakazaki (whom I'm guessing is also looking to escape the Warner Bros. water tower).

Paranormasight is a true visual novel experience, at least how I define it: one that takes into account the player's omniscient ability to switch between timelines and nodes at will and work from information gathered in other (usually fatal) routes to intuit a better outcome. All four (later five) protagonists have stories that weave in and out of the others', each pursuing their own goals with a gaggle of secondary characters in tow, and the game plays around with a deepening mystery that takes multiple perspectives to piece together in its entirety. It's not dissimilar to Raging Loop, which I played as part of the last season of this VN-focused feature, as both games are apt examples of how the supernatural horror genre is a perfect thematic match for a timeline-hopping whodunnit thriller with all sorts of rule-breaking involved (including, often, the laws of causality).

Though it's rarely important to the story, the game is deeply rooted in a time and place: specifically, the Tokyo-adjacent city of Sumida in the 1980s. Usually when horror media does this period piece business it's to write around the snag of everyone spoiling the villains' plans by using their smartphones to call for help (and that is a factor here too) but I think here it's more in service of giving the game a distinctive aesthetic. When I say aesthetic, I don't just mean the period-specific fashion of the characters but a sort of grainy CRT filter over everything. (And I guess when I say distinctive, I'm willfully ignoring all the other horror-related stuff set in the 1980s that has come out in the past decade, which perhaps outnumbers the amount set in modern times.)

Anyway, this game's fun because it keenly understands (and thus knows how to subvert) the conventions of the visual novel format and has a few curveballs here and there about how the player might proceed. For example, a hostile curse bearer whose curses are audio-based might not sound like something your protagonist could easily evade, unless you start tinkering with the audio settings in the options menu first. You also have to pay attention to what you're told, as there's some tougher reading comprehension puzzles towards the end. Fortunately, the game has a database of its characters and terminology to remind you of any proper nouns being tossed around: the file system in particular works like the glossaries of the Science Adventure series, practically doubling as a collectible hunt of its own. Games like this and Raging Loop and 428: Shibuya Scramble, which all take advantage of the typical visual novel system of navigating a branching timeline for the full story to create some intriguing meta puzzles, are definitely my favorite variety of VN and I hope to encounter more of them in the future. (Recommendations welcome!)

'In this economy...?!?!'
'In this economy...?!?!'
Timeline flowcharts for every VN please. Then again, there's little reason to revisit most of these nodes unless you've forgotten the whole plot.
Timeline flowcharts for every VN please. Then again, there's little reason to revisit most of these nodes unless you've forgotten the whole plot.
For the life of me, I could never figure out why characters would make this kissy face when they're supposed to be pursing their lips in thought. It's like the whole game is filled with Instagram selfie fanatics despite being set in the '80s.
For the life of me, I could never figure out why characters would make this kissy face when they're supposed to be pursing their lips in thought. It's like the whole game is filled with Instagram selfie fanatics despite being set in the '80s.

Quarantine Circular

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I guess I'll include this but I don't have much more to say that I didn't already cover in this Indie Game of the Week entry. Complete coincidence that I left a VN in the IGotW rotation; I actually plan those things out a month in advance. It's a very Star Trek-like approach to a sci-fi story, couching the otherworldly premise of negotiating with an advanced and potentially dangerous alien being for a solution to a deadly epidemic with a certain amount of empathetic groundedness and measured caution. The essence of humanity (for better and worse) is definitely at the core of the piece.

Corpse Factory

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I'll admit it, the first time I saw the title of this game I thought it was a Corpse Party spin-off of some kind. The second time I just imagined Paul Ryckert yelling "Corpse Factory!" at bemused passing drivers. I think the internet has broken me. Corpse Factory is neither of those, you might be surprised to learn, but is instead a suspenseful psychological horror crime thriller set in Tokyo about a website that will kill the person whose details are entered: a photo and a phone number. Said victim soon receives a photo of their own death, time-stamped for the near future, and then either suicides out of despair or is disposed of by an unknown entity. After a prologue chapter that demonstrates this process in action, the game then switches to the main protagonist: Noriko Kurosawa. Noriko is deeply disturbed. On anxiety meds, suffering an eating disorder, pining for an unrequited love since highschool, and surrounded at her job with people she doesn't like, she's slowly unravelling from mental illness, malnutrition, and loneliness. Yet, for as sympathetic a character as the game sets her up to be, she eventually proves to be anything but. A deranged, sadistic anti-hero with delusions of grandeur, but a compelling character to follow all the same. It's like the game molds its initially likeable protagonists' suffering through a whole host of bad decisions, as if to challenge our continued tacit support for them almost due entirely to them being a viewpoint character we are asked to empathize with. Maybe it's just more fun to root for the bad guys sometimes, especially if we understand the course that brought them down the villain path.

Man, is this game bleak though. Just damaged people damaging others in a vicious cycle. The supernatural angle dissipates almost immediately (or does it?) once you realize what's going on, and then it simply becomes a character study on a person disintegrating in real-time, switching perspectives as the ball their psychosis got rolling continues tumbling out of their or anyone else's control. It's also a riveting read as a result, an ongoing trainwreck you can't look away from, with about as high a bodycount. Some aspects of it reminded me of Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue: specifically, when your viewpoint character becomes increasingly unreliable and paranoid as their mind disintegrates from stress, how much can you believe in what you're experiencing from their perspective? What's real, what isn't, and to what degree are external forces having an influence? Just know beforehand that this game wallows in its misery porn and has set aside a primo spot on the couch for you to join it, and you'll probably find yourself having a ball. A macabre ball, like those rolling skeleton ball traps from Dark Souls III. I will say, though, there's probably more than a few plot holes you have to mentally patch over to appreciate it fully—there are elements of Death Note's cat-and-mouse battle between the supernatural killer and the cops, though with far less effort put into establishing how the former is able to stay one step ahead of the latter.

As a visual novel, it's about as traditional as they come. Notice I said that Paranormasight felt like a "true" visual novel to me, because as someone with a game design background I'm more interested in how the medium can create unique gameplay scenarios that are almost puzzle-like in their temporal and deterministic nature. The majority of visual novels aren't that though: they're passive affairs that, at best, offer a few branching decisions that might alter the story in small or significant ways. That's the traditional visual novel experience that Corpse Factory offers, giving you something like a 1,000:1 ratio of lines that you simply read versus those that you decide upon. That's no denigration, however: even if I'm just clicking through dialogue boxes with backgrounds and character portraits moving in and out of frame, it proved deeply compelling on the strength of its potboiler prose alone. I was genuinely terrified for almost every character involved, even if most had invited this misfortune upon themselves, and I practically read half the story through my hands. Fortunately, the game is also voiced by professional VAs throughout, making it as effective an audio book as it is a visual novel. The VAs do great work: Noriko's "Queen of the Dead" superciliousness, office nemesis Tomoe's heightened valley girl approximation of a tactless gyaru, PTSD-suffering best friend Aoi's mousy timidity, morgue technician Kojiro's tired disaffectedness—every voice leans into their character's anime archetype but in a manner where they're able to plumb the deeper emotional waters lying just beneath. Might help the script that there were no localization woes: despite being set in Japan with Japanese characters, the game itself was developed in Australia. Kinda adjacent, I guess.

Many of the visual novels I've read of late have gone this sort of edgy, morbid, grim approach: The House in Fata Morgana, Chaos;Child, Steins;Gate, a few of the smaller VNs I played during this feature from May, and from what little I've seen of a certain upcoming game about crying seagulls (not the pigeon dating simulator, though) this theme's going to continue for a while longer yet. I wonder what it is about the visual novel medium that makes these particular kinds of stories pop that little bit more. Maybe the emotional voice reads and the extra layer of sympathy you build up with characters you're able to see on-screen and emoting? The occasional branching paths in the narrative affording you hope that, in some alternative timeline, these characters don't fall quite so hard or far? (Even though it's likely they just end up suffering in some other manner instead?) Either way, these factors certainly lend themselves to the impact of the drama being woven. Starting to wonder if playing a bunch of these harrowing VNs in a row like this is necessarily good for my own beleagured psyche, especially as winter approaches and with it come colder and darker days. Good thing I've got Pikmin 4 on standby as a cuteness tonic. A "break window in case of bad vibes," sort of deal.

Like any good anime, the game has its own opening musical number. It's not bad.
Like any good anime, the game has its own opening musical number. It's not bad.
Noriko just having a little bit of a nervous breakdown. Not the only time either. Fun times had by all.
Noriko just having a little bit of a nervous breakdown. Not the only time either. Fun times had by all.
I know I'm not playing the pigeon dating game this year, but all the same...
I know I'm not playing the pigeon dating game this year, but all the same...

Anyway, back to the murder and sadness grind:

Umineko When They Cry: Question Arcs

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  • 07th Expansion / MangaGamer
  • Chapter 1 Completed 15/11
  • Chapter 2 Completed 16/11
  • Chapter 3 Completed 20/11
  • Chapter 4 Completed 24/11

So this is a game I've been hearing about forever, along with its disconnected predecessor Higarashi When They Cry, as a murder mystery VN notoriously full of insane twists and wild tangents. Created by 07th Expansion, the English localization collects all eight episodes into two compilations: this would be "Question Arcs," which comprises the first four. Even if it's just half the total story, we're talking a run time well over 40 hours (dependent on your reading speed, I suppose), so I'll probably leave off the other half (named "Answer Arcs," naturally) for a later date so as not to monopolize the rest of this month. Maybe not that much later though, since I imagine I'll forget half the revelations and foreshadowing before too long.

The game concerns the affluent Ushiromiya family who annually gather together on Rokkenjima—an island off the coast of Tokyo owned by their patriarch, Kinzo—in order to catch up with each other and discuss matters important to the clan. At this point it currently consists of Kinzo; his four middle-aged children Krauss, Eva, Rudolf, and Rosa; Krauss's wife Natsuhi and his highschooler daughter Jessica; Eva's husband Hideyoshi and her twentysomething son George; Rudolf's second wife Kyrie and his highschooler son (from his previous wife) Battler; and Rosa's elementary school-aged (and super creepy) daughter Maria. There's also five servants—Genji the butler, Gohda the chef, Kumawara the elderly part-timer, Shannon the maid, and Kanon the apprentice butler—and Kinzo's Wilford Brimley-esque visiting physician Nanjo, looking after Kinzo as the end of his days approaches. Each chapter explores what happens on the island over two nights after it becomes cut off from the world due to a typhoon: the set-up is that the island is actually owned by an all-powerful witch, Beatrice, who murders all eighteen human occupants in a ritualistic manner with hole-gouging stakes (i.e. a full eighteen hole course) over the two nights in order to resurrect herself, affording the humans one chance to survive by having them locate the huge pile of gold Beatrice once lent to Kinzo to help him establish the family's current prestigious wealth. If someone can solve Kinzo's riddle that cryptically reveals the gold's location, they will strike it rich, become the new family head, and everyone will survive; otherwise, Beatrice will collect the "interest" from her investment, which includes everything Kinzo has including the lives of him and his family.

The crux of Umineko When They Cry, and the way it connects each reiteration of this "game", is by having the Battler character vehemently deny Beatrice's existence as a witch capable of magically massacring the Ushiromiya clan. In every murder case, which are invariably impossible closed room murders beloved of whodunnit novels, he pokes enough holes in the premise that the victims were supernaturally executed by presenting arguments that a normal human may have theoretically done it. He's not required to explain who of the eighteen humans was actually the culprit or their motives, just that that an explanation could exist outside of a mystical "a wizard did it" cop-out answer. After the first chapter of the game, these interludes where Beatrice and Battler have a fight of deductions over the murders as they occur will regularly interrupt the increasingly familiar series of events. Notable also is that each "game" is different: Beatrice modifies the methods and the order that the deaths occur as a means of tripping Battler up and forcing him to accept that she killed them with witchcraft. That Battler himself is frequently a victim is inconsequential to their little game.

I brought up Kemco's Raging Loop earlier, and I feel it's prudent to do so again as it's the only previous VN example I've encountered that employs this sort of parlor mystery that—due to some very bizarre meta rules—could be reset with a different configuration of homicides, heightening the suspense and unpredictability by adding alternative variations as well as letting us players/readers spend more time with characters that were eliminated too early in the first "loop". It's now pretty obvious in retrospect that Kemco owes much to 07th Expansion and this series (and possibly to Higarashi too; I'll obviously need to go back and check that out too once I'm done with Answer Arcs). The mental chess game between an obstinate and bright protagonist and a seemingly omnipotent antagonist has an appealing quality to it as a framing device—even if this game spends a good long while setting that dynamic up—but it's the added wrinkles in each chapter that muddy the waters that little bit further, answering one question while presenting two more and new characters besides (impressive for a closed circle murder mystery), that makes this game compelling enough to push through its more languid stretches. I would say it's similar to a TV show that only starts to get good after the first half-dozen episodes, or only on the second season—a Star Trek TNG or a Parks and Recreation—where the viewer's faithful investment is eventually paid off.

Naturally, I can't speak to the full narrative arc of this game yet, since I've only experienced the first half. I've included some (spoiler-blocked) observations below, each written just after the chapter they pertain to, but I daren't guess what might happen next. I imagine all will be revealed eventually, though it feels like the mysteries will continue to snowball for the time being.

The new artwork included with the localized remasters, featuring George, Maria, and Jessica.
The new artwork included with the localized remasters, featuring George, Maria, and Jessica.
And this is the original artwork. I won't argue the new stuff is more professional-looking but there's a charm to this too. I should know, I used to fill these forums with MS Paint masterpieces.
And this is the original artwork. I won't argue the new stuff is more professional-looking but there's a charm to this too. I should know, I used to fill these forums with MS Paint masterpieces.
Pointing and Yelling: The Ushiromiya Battler Story.
Pointing and Yelling: The Ushiromiya Battler Story.

Chapter 1 Notes

The first chapter just sets everything up. The dysfunctional family of rich assholes, that a whole bunch of them get butchered in the two days they're trapped on this island, the ritual aspects involved including magic circles and demonic stake murder weapons, and that these murders were all performed in an inscrutable manner that Battler is as yet unable to ascertain. It took an awful long time for anyone to recognize that the murders happen exactly as described by the witch's epitaph, though. The coda it ends on sets up the framing device for later chapters to follow: a version of Battler is trapped outside of space and time with Beatrice and observes each new session of the game with her (along with her servants) while the two argue whether or not the improbable killings could happen without magic. Prior to all the witches and magic murders though there's like five hours of anime Succession to sit through first.

Chapter 2 Notes

This one does a little more to establish the romantic relationships between the younger cast members. We understand the depth of George and Shannon's relationship a bit more, both of whom draw an unexpected amount of strength from this relationship after being insecure doormats for so long, and further explore the hinted-at attraction between the feisty Jessica and taciturn Kanon. We're also introduced to more of Beatrice's "furniture": seven sisters who are the sassy highschooler gijinka of the unholy stakes used to murder the last seven sacrifices, naturally themed after the deadly sins. That they're all visually identical besides their hairstyles is kinda cute. We also get confirmation about what happens to those that survive long enough to reach the Golden Land: they still get ate by demons. It's a full party wipe no matter how you look at it.

Chapter 3 Notes

Well, this was certainly an eventful chapter. Here we have more emphasis put on Beatrice and her past, with hints to how she became such a heartless villain as presented by an alternative reality scenario where Eva solves the epitaph's riddle and inherits Beatrice's powers in addition to the Ushiromiya gold and if anything becomes an even worse monster. Beatrice is shown to be a spoiled princess type who was allowed to inherit her powers from a benevolent witch (Vergilia, who now joins the interdimensional peanut gallery as an ally of Battler) and only uses her powers to amuse herself; this childishness, plus the fact she can resurrect those she slays endlessly so as to avoid any permanent repercussions, suggests her irredeemable characterization is a little more circumstantial. It's super weird to see such a cute tsundere version of the character after spending many hours with the absolutely psychotic harridan version. Or, well, so we're supposed to believe. We also have the introduction of several more supernatural cast members: In addition to Vergilia there's also Ronove, a demon lord bound in servitude to Beatrice, who perfectly fits that superior butler character who can't help but sarcastically jab at their master under a veneer of politeness. (Very Wodehousian.) There's a couple of bunnygirls who are shown to be even better at killing people than the seven sisters thanks to what I think are probably not nanomachines but I'm going to say are nanomachines. Finally there's Ange Ushiromiya—the daughter of Rudolf and Kyrie, and half-sister to Battler—who literally appears out of nowhere in the final moments of the chapter and was obliquely mentioned only twice before in this same chapter. Feels kinda like an ass-pull, but we're to believe she's going to serve as Battler's confidante in his further rounds with Beatrice (given neither Ronove or Vergilia can be trusted at this point).

Chapter 4 Notes

So Beatrice still sucks as a person but the game's still maintaining this new characterization streak where she's not so much a bitter old hag but a child enjoying herself with her cruel imagination games, and still occasionally capable of remorse when she knows she's gone too far. It's kinda weird for a being supposedly a millennium old but I guess I'll roll with it for now; the game did after all blow its one opportunity for a redemption arc by presenting her actions last game as an elaborate prank on the overly-trusting Battler. Speaking of whom, and given the people he's the product of, Battler strikes me as a little too naive sometimes. Less so is his sister Ange, who now throws herself into the fourth game as a magnificent spanner in the works as a time-travelling Future Beatrice: she's been hardened by a very difficult life thanks to the only surviving Ushiromiya from the last game, Eva, who in turn despises her for undisclosed reasons and has, as her legal guardian, directed her upbringing to be as miserable as possible. To say she's a little frosty as a result is an understatement. Quite a bit of this fourth chapter follows her perspective from twelve years after the third game, giving her a vantage outside of the two days to launch her own attacks, while connecting her budding witchcraft with her similarly gifted cousin Maria (who also goes through the wringer this episode, to put it mildly). It's another excuse to introduce even more characters (on top of that whole troop of war criminal Pekoras) making me wonder how much the 1998 events are going to be a factor moving forward.

Pour one out for Sakutaro.

Character Study

Eh, I'll do one of these too. Curious to see how much my opinions will shift on the main 18(+) whenever I get to the second half of the game.

  • Battler: I misread his character completely at first, since his snappy outfit made him resemble one of those rich jerks so typical of '80s teen comedies. Nah, he's just Adol the Red if someone slapped a suit on him and made him twice as emotional and half as smart. Likes to yell and point a lot; in fact, I dare say those are his main strengths. He's a great foil to Beatrice and that's all that matters.
  • George and Shannon: Is it weird that I find these two incredibly uninteresting? That's even after the former became Bruce Lee and the latter was popping out barrier spells like no-one's business. Their whole schtick is meant to be one of those enduring true loves that enriches and emboldens them both but it's real awkward to see play out sometimes, tragically or otherwise. The game milks plenty of pathos out of it whenever one or the other bites the dust, so I hope the last four chapters can move on from it.
  • Jessica and Kanon: Ditto these two as well, though at least Jessica is enough of a firecracker to keep the plot moving along and Kanon's not half bad in a magic laser sword fight. I'm still like 60% sure Kanon's actually a girl, but maybe the idea is he (?) has that hot androgynous boyband look that is Jessica's type. Or maybe it's because I ended up playing way too many GL-themed VNs this year that it's starting to mess with my perception...
  • Maria: She went from this deliberately eerie precocious kid horror movie archetype to a real tragic and lonely figure as more of her backstory is revealed; her occasional sinister personality being the result of some significant parental abuse and neglect. The times when she's not a Beatrice fangirl reveling in the death and horror of the rituals she can be a cute kid, but it gets harder to see the latter whenever the former comes out to play. Somehow "Uu-"s more than Ceres Fauna.
  • Krauss and Netsuhi: Meh. (I belive that's Kinzo's official stance on the pair too.)
  • Eva and Hideyoshi: Eva makes me wonder if Cersei Lannister would've turned out better if her husband was a black-haired portly dude of good humor instead of just her equally crappy brother. Wait, I guess I just described Robert Baratheon, huh. So, no, I guess there's no big difference here. Seeing Eva go full heel (instead of like 80% heel) as a preteen witch was kinda intriguing though; it's almost like this game has a problem with them or something.
  • Rudolf and Kyrie: I like Kyrie but there's something real sinister going on beneath that surface. Like full on yandere sinister. Maybe I'm imagining it, or reading too much into that one particular scene where she outwits one of the stakes or that glimpse into her delightful family. Rudolf's just some yakuza-looking dope. Kiryu would've thrown him into Sotenbori canal by now if this was a different game series.
  • Rosa: In some takes Rosa's irredeemable for her treatment of Maria. In others, it's the sad case of a child abuse victim begetting another. She has fire when she needs it, like the badass ending of the second chapter, but so much of her character is paying forward the trauma she received onto her kid and it's real hard to watch whenever she gets physical with her or flies off to Sapporo with her boyfriend for three days and Kevin McCallisters the little weirdo. Very hard character to like, but certainly one to be pitied.
  • Kinzo: Heihachi Mishima if he was a lovesick warlock. Real larger-than-life character even in a game full of witches and demons. A tyrannical, terrifying asshole but almost to a comic degree, he usually doesn't spend a lot of time on-screen but always monopolizes a scene when he does either tossing out withering putdowns at his useless kids or going on crazy rants about his beloved Beatrice or his own "mathemagic". I'm glad I downloaded the voices patch because his VA is always having a blast.
  • Genji, Gohda, Kumasawa: The idea that these are all mortal vessels for Beatrice's demon chums is kind of a weird pull. I guess I don't know that about Gohda yet: for all I know he's the only cast member with no connection to anything Ushiromiya or Beatrice-related and was just hired for his killer crème brûlée.
  • Beatrice: Oh, you don't like it when I pull the fingers off your family members one by one, Ushiromiya Battleeeeeer?! Just the absolute worst. Which is why she's so fun? Until she suddenly isn't by getting all moody. My one distinct hope is that she doesn't get redeemed in any way, shape, or form by some sudden ass-pull tragic backstory. Screw that. A villain this spitefully evil shouldn't need nuance. Just dump some cold water on her next time she decides to bail on a game and let her melt. But until then, I'll enjoy seeing her scheme some more with those insane faces she keeps pulling.
  • The Incongruous Squeaky Door Sound Effect Used Whenever Someone Dies: My actual favorite character. Hope to see (hear?) way more of this guy in Answer Arcs.

The final chapter of Question Arcs concludes with Beatrice ending her little chess game by pulling the decisive power move that is negating her opponent's entire existence—one seen only once before in professional chess with the climactic match of Bobby Fischer vs. _____________ in the 1974 World Chess Championship semi-finals—ending these Arcs on what are indeed some big questions I'm sure the next four chapters will have to spend some time answering.

Why do I get the sinking feeling that the response to this from people who have played the whole thing is "you haven't seen anything yet"...?

Night Cascades

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Night Cascades is a mystery crime thriller VN released just last year from Hanako Games, best known (at least by me) for the "all roads lead to death" decisions simulator Long Live the Queen. Set in the southern United States in the 1980s, at the height of the Satanic Panic, it follows two protagonists: Diane, a substitute teacher by day and a fantasy novellist by... I guess other days; and Jackie, a detective who turned a rebellious childhood full of misdemeanors into a career working on the other side of the law. The two are invited to work together on a series of arson cases involving occult symbology—Diane has an academic background in folklore and mythology, and is brought in as a consultant—with the pair investigating crime scenes and interrogating possible suspects. The one small snag is that they already have history together: they dated in college until Jackie suddenly broke things off.

So, yes, I'm back on my girls' love VN bullshit. This was a recurring theme back in May too, and my only defense is that I keep picking these things up incidentally through bundles. The ones in May were from those huge Itch.io charity bundles, while this was something I picked up in a Fanatical VN bundle with a few others I was hoping to exhibit in this feature. This excuse already has "the lady doth protest too much, methinks" energy all over it but I swear it's a coincidence. Anyway, the romance aspect is not just a small part of this VN: this central relationship, or rather the frosty shambling corpse of same, is a major element of friction between the two women that is slowly unraveled and restructured as the game continues, making it a bit more significant to the narrative than just a subplot. If anything, the amount of misdirection and hurt feelings involved in their backstory makes it as much of a twisty plot than the crime case itself. Speaking of which, the main case proceeds with very little input from the player; however, while this isn't an adventure game in the classic sense, the game does still have you investigate scenes for clues and at one point has you try to guess who you believe the culprit(s) might be from some multiple choice prompts (the only ones of its type in the whole game; no story branching going on here that I can tell). The hinted-at supernatural aspects meanwhile are... light. The various magical symbols are not treated in-game with a whole lot of seriousness, but the possibility of there being something arcane afoot is not entirely absent either.

It's a light read at around four or five hours, set across four days during which the viewpoint role switches from Diane to Jackie to Diane to Jackie, providing the player both their individual insights on the case based on their respective backgrounds as well as their own takes on how their old relationship went sour and why. Diane's chapters have a mini-game where you investigate all the hotspots of a crime scene for hints, while Jackie's is this tad more abstract hot-and-cold "find the hidden Illuminati symbol" task where you just click around the screen and follow concentric circles to where they're the most concentrated. I hesitate to call these things mini-games even, but they serve as a means of breaking up the usual walls of text of dialogue and inner thoughts of the current viewpoint character. I'll say also that the visuals and music are generally excellent: though the interface can be a bit rudimentary (the game was made in Ren'py, a popular budget text adventure game creator) the rest of the presentation had a very professional sheen to it. The event CGs—static images used for special scenes—were particularly slick. Definitely a whole lot lighter than Long Live the Queen, both mechanically and tonally, but a pleasant enough yarn for those with a crime procedural (or GL) predilection and certainly much easier to digest than anything above.

Hunting for clues. Now, where could these clues be...? If only there was something that could highlight where these- all right, enough snark, the game has other priorities than to put readers through the detective wringer.
Hunting for clues. Now, where could these clues be...? If only there was something that could highlight where these- all right, enough snark, the game has other priorities than to put readers through the detective wringer.
People keep confusing Jackie for a fed throughout the game. Can't imagine why.
People keep confusing Jackie for a fed throughout the game. Can't imagine why.
Like, I'm into the game's slightly more down-to-earth pace, but entering a burnt out property for evidence is the closest thing this game has to a dramatic, dangerous moment. Just don't go in hoping for shootouts with agents of the Illuminati.
Like, I'm into the game's slightly more down-to-earth pace, but entering a burnt out property for evidence is the closest thing this game has to a dramatic, dangerous moment. Just don't go in hoping for shootouts with agents of the Illuminati.

Perfect Gold

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Perfect Gold is a fantasy romance VN set in the magical city of Castlecoast, a place where alchemists occupy the upper class due to their ability to create vast amounts of gold and other magic-users, such as elemental mages and healers, are relegated to lower tiers of society. At the prestigious LaFey Academy, two students and former friends conspire to ditch detention to hit the annual Sunflower Festival: one is the class representative and a prim alchemy prodigy from a famous family who secretly longs for a different life, while the other is a rebellious elemental mage with a talent for fire magic who feels lost in Castlecoast after moving north from a friendlier provincial village and hopes to reconnect with a distant, celebrity sister. Though the two were close to becoming more than friends just a year prior during the previous Sunflower Festival something caused a rift between the two and now they're little more than bickering enemies and rivals, though with the events that follow and some deeper introspections they might yet rekindle what was once lost. Also they're both girls. Whoops. (At this point I realize I'm just taking the piss.)

Structurally, though certainly not thematically, the game isn't too dissimilar from Night Cascades. The game has an achronological approach to storytelling where it explores two points in time for the primary characters' relationship, working up to how a hopeful pairing suddenly went awry in the past and how that same fractured reacquaintance in the present is getting glued back together after the duo have had time to clear the air and ruminate on what went wrong. It also uses Night Cascades's approach in alternating protagonists every chapter to give us a glimpse into each of their interiorities and feelings for the other person, letting us know in no uncertain terms who messed up where and why and how this unexpected reunion is affecting the pair. However, Perfect Gold is much less focused on plotting and dramatic twists: it's simply a character study, or perhaps a relationship study, between two dumb kids who needed to sort out their drama and insecurities a bit before they could commit to what they actually wanted.

Perfect Gold is even briefer than Night Cascades at a svelte 90 minutes. It does, however, have a bit more of an interactive aspect to its branching storyline structure albeit still only a wisp of one: at several dozen points in the story you have the option of two dialogue responses, one of which is considered more empathetic or romantic than the other. By choosing enough of these positive responses the player is entreated to a slightly extended epilogue ending, though there are often distinct CGs and other developments to be seen even in the "lesser" choices. There's not really enough deviation to necessitate two full playthroughs—I had the "skip all read text" toggle on in the second run, and it whizzed past at least 95% of the game—but I guess it works as a minor test of the player's emotional intelligence. I went full aromantic the first time just to amuse myself but the ending was still the same, just without the bonus coda. This game comes to us courtesy of Yangyang Mobile, a Filipino developer whom I last encountered in the previous VN-ese Waltz: they also developed the 2017 horror VN The Letter (which I reviewed here and here). As with that game, you get some pretty decent character and background art as well as full voice-acting: the VAs are not bad at all, giving Audrey (the rich alchemist girl) a well-to-do British accent and Marion (the rough-and-tumble elementalist) an American one to create a more overt distinction in their backdrops. Perfect Gold might be an even slighter piece of fluff than anything else I've played this month but it's still real cute. If you're into GL stuff, that is. Which I'm... uh...

Look, they're just good friends, OK?
Look, they're just good friends, OK?
Audrey secretly wants to heal people for a living, doctors somehow being a less respectable profession in this world, and this adorable flashback shows us why.
Audrey secretly wants to heal people for a living, doctors somehow being a less respectable profession in this world, and this adorable flashback shows us why.
Typical story of girl gets girl, girl loses girl, girl fights girl in a magic duel with mirror clones and fireballs.
Typical story of girl gets girl, girl loses girl, girl fights girl in a magic duel with mirror clones and fireballs.

Hey! Would you look at that! I'm out of VNs for this month. That's going to do this for this season of VN-ese Waltz, but I'll start stockpiling VNs for the next one in a year or two. If I play the next Umineko before then, I'll be sure to write a bonus thing for it since I know some weirdos will be waiting for me to correct all my misconceptions when it turns out to all be aliens or something. Either way, thanks for reading. Just, in general. It's what makes this whole talky-picturey visual novel cottage industry tick.

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Indie Game of the Week 347: River City Girls

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Mercantile-minded folks are out celebrating Black Friday, but here I am celebrating Black Eye Friday instead. That's right, this week we'll be covering a brawler, a genre I don't dip into much (and for good reason, outlined further below): WayForward's River City Girls, published/licensed by Arc System Works. Anime fighter peddlers ASW acquired the Kunio-kun license from Technos Japan (or, well, an intermediary) in 2015, and this game's full of characters from both that franchise and Double Dragon—the two apparently sharing a universe much like Final Fight and Street Fighter. It sees Kunio and his brawling buddy Riki apparently kidnapped at the start of the game, prompting their respective girlfriends Misako and Kyoko to ditch detention and go rescue them.

The most famous non-sports Kunio-kun game, at least overseas, is River City Ransom: hence this game is both named after and structurally based upon that game's blueprint. A before-its-time brawler that implemented an open-world exploration aspect, vendors that sold restorative items and new techniques, and a conducive-to-grinding feature where enemies would regularly hassle you wherever you went but commonly weren't strictly necessary to fight in order to keep moving forward. River City Girls implements all of that as well, dividing its time between fetch missions that will have you scouring its more open-world areas for a series of items or clues, and more dungeon-like self-contained locations that have linear paths to their bosses. Defeating enemies earns you both money and XP: the former can be spent at vendors and the latter contributes to levelling up, which provides incremental bonuses to your stats (max health, fighting power, defense, etc.) and unlocks new moves for purchase. You have two slots for accessories, most of which provide very small buffs of around 1-5%, so your money is often better put towards food items from restaurants and cafes: not only is this the most quick and direct form of healing, but each new food item type also gives you a permanent stat buff. If you get KOed, and you probably will a lot, you'll lose about a quarter of the cash on you; subsequently, it behooves you to go spend your cash after the big payouts received from completing side-quests and defeating bosses (that is, if you can survive long enough to backtrack with what little health you might have remaining).

Most weapons tend to be benches, garbage cans, crates, or wrenches, but you'll occasionally find stronger ones like yo-yos or this lightsaber. My favorite weapon would be the stunned bodies of enemies, once you have the right upgrade: hitting enemies with their friends does damage to them both.
Most weapons tend to be benches, garbage cans, crates, or wrenches, but you'll occasionally find stronger ones like yo-yos or this lightsaber. My favorite weapon would be the stunned bodies of enemies, once you have the right upgrade: hitting enemies with their friends does damage to them both.

I'll get the positives out of the way. River City Girls has a visual style that honors the cartoonish world of the Kunio-kun franchise but specifically takes after the more realistically-proportioned characters from the game that introduced Misako and Kyoko to the world, at least as playable characters: Shin Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun: Kunio-tachi no Banka, which has since been rereleased as River City Girls Zero due to this game (I actually reviewed it semi-recently here). WayForward is never a slouch when it comes to 16-bit graphics and that's as true here as it is in their Shantae franchise or the unexpectedly gorgeous explormer The Mummy Demastered—the many faces of River City from the Akihabara-like neon Uptown to the dingy, dilapidated Downtown to the gentrified Ocean Heights are given a detailed and distinctive rendering and the various enemy combatants, though their types are small in number, are given variations that often do a little more than just change the palettes. The biggest stand-out in the presentation, as is often the case with WayForward, is the soundtrack: largely composed by Megan McDuffee with contributions from Chipzel, Nate Sharp, and Dale North, with McDuffee lending vocals to several tracks as in-universe rock star "Noize", the music builds on that dreamy stylish '80s Streets of Fire vibe established by what might be the game's stylistic predecessor Double Dragon Neon (with the Lee brothers also making cameo appearances as vendors in RCG too, incongruously voiced by the Game Grumps, as well as their one-time nemesis Skullmageddon) and is definitely a fine soundtrack to bust heads to.

WayForward, being the bunch of retro game nerds they are, also ensured a lot of accuracy to extant RCR lore with this game. Hasebe and Mami, the girlfriends of Kunio and Riki in most of the other Kunio-kun games, are reimagined here as teasing mean girl adversaries of Misako and Ryoko, frequently showing up to snipe at the protagonists for their poor fashion taste and general ignorance of modern teen trends while purporting to be the actual girlfriends of the kidnapped duo. Canonically, they're probably correct, but I like that the game plays with the idea that these two have somehow seduced the heroes purely as a means of spiting their hated rivals. Other Kunio-kun villains show up as bosses and vendors, as well as familiar guest characters like Abobo and new characters like the daughter of recurring Yakuza boss Sabu, Sabuko (literally "child of Sabu"). It's a fun way to connect the continuity of the Technos Japan brawler universe and WayForward (along with maybe Digital Eclipse or Tribute Games, the developers behind the recent TMNT: Shredder's Revenge) is one of the few Indie devs I could name that can do it justice.

A typical vendor, where you can buy and store classic video game carts in your inventory for later or just eat them right there. I was also able to buy books from ProZD that make weapons unbreakable, but they didn't work for some reason.
A typical vendor, where you can buy and store classic video game carts in your inventory for later or just eat them right there. I was also able to buy books from ProZD that make weapons unbreakable, but they didn't work for some reason.

My issues with RCG are mostly tied in to how many throwback (and throw forward, depending on which direction you push) brawlers are very adamantly trying to pretend they came directly out of the arcades in the 1990s, and it occasionally feels like they haven't accounted for several decades of advancements beyond those that would make a significant alteration to the gameplay model like going 3D. Yakuza/Like a Dragon is what I would consider the modern incarnation of River City Ransom as well as the brawler genre as a whole, layered as it is with so much more incidental content and a combat system that makes better use of evasion, parries, counters, and crowd control techniques. Some of that is evident in this game too, but it also feels many of the same problems that plagued those older games from unseen enemy attacks from off-screen to overlapping a sprite so your attacks whiff (but theirs somehow don't) has been lovingly replicated here for little reason other than, I guess, authenticity. The way most enemy animations take priority over yours, or the extremely generous interpretation of where the hitboxes of their attacks start and end, means you'll regularly be taking hits to the face despite best attempts to avoid such a scenario. You're also as beholden to being juggled with air-attacks and losing huge chunks of your health bar as your opponents are, though in the latter case there's few situations where you could attack quickly enough to keep foes airborne unless you have a very coordinated companion to help.

There are also issues endemic to this game specifically too, of course. One such example is the boss difficulty, which hits an enormous unexplained spike right in the middle of the game against a spider-like fashion diva who spends the majority of the fight floating out of reach and shooting Touhou garbage at you for minutes at a time until she finally deigns to let herself become vulnerable. A boss like this wouldn't be such a pain if the opportunities to do damage led to some serious harm: instead, she has twice the endurance of the previous bosses and so it usually takes about three cycles before she moves onto the next stage of the fight. I died several times just from losing the very long battles of attrition each fight turned into; I'm half convinced I missed something major, like some heretofore unknown double-jump technique that would've given me the height I needed. Conversely, the bosses that followed were all one-and-dones, including the last boss (for as cheap as she was). I guess when you think you have a good idea for a boss fight you just roll with it, but not even the secret bosses gave me as much trouble as that floating fashionista (and they had a stun-lock multi-hit attack that chopped my health bar in half).

I appreciated they brought back the theme park from Kunio-tachi no Banka, but there's no big fight on a Ferris wheel? Disappointing. (I guess Gang Beasts already cornered the market on that.)
I appreciated they brought back the theme park from Kunio-tachi no Banka, but there's no big fight on a Ferris wheel? Disappointing. (I guess Gang Beasts already cornered the market on that.)

As a result, for as much as I loved inhabiting the world of River City Girls, actually playing the game was often a painful chore and I can only blame it so far for sticking to its guns as a deliberate throwback. It could be that I just don't care for the genre itself, or at least this antiquated version of it, as RCG is considered by most to be one of the better Indie games of its type; however, as a diehard Like a Dragon fan, I have seen and experienced a future model for the brawler genre that has so thoroughly curb-stomped the older street belt-battlers that it's kinda hard to go back. It's true that many genres of the '90s were unfairly cast aside as others rose up to draw attention away, but with brawlers it was entirely a case of beepers dying to cellphones as the latter could do everything the former could and more besides. But hey, maybe that's just my own lack of nostalgia for these things. I certainly played many of them as a kid but didn't really gel with them; not like, say, 16-bit style turn-based RPGs or the four-directional first-person dungeon-crawlers, either of which I'll champion at a moment's notice. Suffice it to say, I probably won't be featuring many more games like this on here unless I see some marked improvement to the hoary archetype they're built upon. The game did let me throw enemies into a pit though, so it's not all bad.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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64 in 64: Episode 36

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Welcome to another episode of 64 in 64, a self-destructive spiral masquerading as a Nintendo 64 retrospective feature. My ongoing dalliances with Nintendo's third home console have also spawned another ill-advised feature, last week's Mis-Simian: Chimpossible, even in the midst of one of the busiest years for new releases that I really ought to be paying more attention to instead. But if no-one else is going to play N64 games this year, least of all Nintendo if the slower drip of Switch Online library updates is anything to go by, I guess it falls to me. How noble.

I like to do the occasional themed list here, but this time Wikipedia already has me beat with this citation-heavy List of Cancelled N64 Games. Now, I've already included in my master list all those N64 games that were close enough to completion to have playable alphas or prototypes—the N64 version of 40 Winks, from Episode 31, was one such case—but there's evidently plenty more that never even made it that far. Poring over the list, there's some expected sights: We have games that were in development for N64 but eventually carried over to its successor the GameCube, like Eternal Darkness and Luigi's Mansion; those that pivoted so hard that they dropped the 3D entirely and went to a portable console instead, like Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade and Mother 3; we also have a bunch of PC and PS1 ports that the developers eventually gave up on, seeing as the N64 was probably more trouble than it was worth. It's the ones Wikipedia doesn't have pages for yet that are the most intriguing though. A Konami game called Battle Dancer? A new Vic Tokai Golgo 13 adaptation? A second South Park FPS? A Resident Evil clone called W.E.T. Corpse? Wall Street 64??? PC Genjin 64?! Man, the absolute trash I could've had to deal with for this feature. I guess I can consider myself lucky to some degree but there's still many of those prototypes lurking on my list, aching for the day where I lambast them on the internet in front of thousands tens of loyal readers. Some day, maybe, if the random chooser wills it.

Speaking of willing things into being, here are some rules that were handed down to me on a pair of stone tablets. It wasn't some holy miracle on top of a mountain business; I just found them in the trash. Found their way to me regardless though.

  • Every episode of 64 in 64 covers two N64 games, each played for 64 minutes each exactly. Well, except I swear the browser keeps falling asleep before the alarm app goes off, so it's however long it takes me to notice it's been suspiciously quiet for too long.
  • The first choice was pre-selected by me. Miraculously, even this many episodes later I still have N64 games I want to check out, though by now it's mostly out of pure morbid curiosity. The second choice comes from a robot. The robot doesn't care if I'm happy or sad, since emotions are beyond its comprehension. Or so it claims, anyway.
  • Each game has a rundown of its history, quarterly updates journalizing my time with it, how well it has endured after two decades and change of technological growth, and my own astute (that is to say, a complete ass toot) take on how likely it is to see renewed interest by joining the Switch Online library.
  • Finally, we don't truck with any games already on the Switch Online service. Nintendo has already rewarded them enough; they need no additional recognition or approbations from me and this feature, if approbations is the word I want to use (and it isn't for many of them). Incidentally, there's only two remaining announced games they haven't added yet: 1080 Snowboarding and Harvest Moon 64. Real curious if they have plans for more.

One last piece of housekeeping here, and that's the Indomitable Table of Previous Episodes. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Or, I dunno, enjoy reading them instead. I cannot control how people respond to things. Yet.

Episode 1Episode 2Episode 3Episode 4Episode 5
Episode 6Episode 7Episode 8Episode 9Episode 10
Episode 11Episode 12Episode 13Episode 14Episode 15
Episode 16Episode 17Episode 18Episode 19Episode 20
Episode 21Episode 22Episode 23Episode 24Episode 25
Episode 26Episode 27Episode 28Episode 29Episode 30
Episode 31Episode 32Episode 33Episode 34Episode 35
Episode 36Episode 37---

Charlie Blast's Territory (Pre-Select)

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History: Charlie Blast's Territory is a foresight-dependent puzzle game in which you detonate a series of bombs across a set of destructible islands in such a way where you don't accidentally blow yourself up or leave any bombs intact. It's sort of like Bomberman from the perspective of the bomb defusal expert who has to clear up all those remote mines before someone gets hurt. (We don't really think about the repercussions of Bomberman's actions, but that's on us as a society.) It also has the curious distinction of being a reskin of a reskin: Kemco took the 1988 computer game Bombuzal, which they published in Japan on behalf of original creators Image Works, replaced its blue blob-like hero with their Kid Klown mascot character and released the game as The Bombing Islands on PlayStation. American developers Realtime Associates then took that game and inserted the titular demolitionist everyman Charlie Blast in the starring role instead, releasing it on N64 in North America and Europe.

We've met both these companies before. Realtime Associates, of El Segundo, California, were behind previous regrettable 64 in 64 random picks Gex 64: Enter the Gecko and Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey. I guess they're coming up in the world if they managed to get a pre-selected slot out of me too. Kemco last popped up when we looked at Shadowgate 64 (they also handled the original game's NES port back in the day) and may do so again, since they have eight other N64 credits. They're best known these days for having like a thousand identical mobile RPGs, though they're well-regarded in the visual novel fandom as well.

So, there's a recurring theme I've been exhibiting here with some of my pre-select picks which is "N64 games that are in some way linked to the British gaming industry". The Japanese Kemco and the American Realtime Associates aren't exactly the types to go out for a cheeky Nando's, but the game's original source—Bombuzal—was developed here in the UK by Anthony Crowther (a.k.a. Ratt), a major figure in the C64 gaming world who went on to work on many games old and semi-new including the neat Atari ST sci-fi dungeon-crawler Captive and (much later) Burnout Paradise. Kemco's port of Bombuzal was also one of the earliest third-party games for the SNES, so even if I don't particularly care for the game itself too much I wanted to check out how far it had come after several international rounds of the Telephone Game. Will I get stuck about six levels in, like usual? Probably! Let's find out:

16 Minutes In

You might not have thought games would still use level passwords in 1999, but here comes Charlie Blast's Territory to prove us all fools.
You might not have thought games would still use level passwords in 1999, but here comes Charlie Blast's Territory to prove us all fools.

OK, so, first impressions. They count for a lot, after all. My first impression of Charlie Blast's Territory is that it looks extraordinarily cheap. I realize Kemco tends to develop on a budget if all those RPG Maker games of theirs are anything to go by, but I have to imagine that Realtime Associates applied their own parsimony (as ably demonstrated by our Elmo's Number Journey playthrough) on top of whatever was already there because there's a distinct lack of... well, I won't say "effort" since that's neither fair on the developers whom probably had to stick to a miniscule budget and/or probably decided to prioritize the puzzle quality over the presentation, but let's say a distinct lack of polish. I'm pretty sure this game uses a comic sans font with no drop shadows or anything and the visuals and animations are on the below-average side too, but I'm willing to blame some of that on what is perhaps iffy emulation. Wouldn't be a 64 in 64 if I didn't throw RetroArch under a bus.

As to the gameplay, well, as you can see I've already passed through most of the first dozen levels in a flash. It's way more Sokoban-y than I remember; maybe Kemco made the executive decision to lean closer to Thinking Rabbit's classic box-pushers because those have always proven more popular to Japanese puzzle game fans. For the record, I recall Bombuzal's levels do indeed involve pushing bombs into place but there was much more consideration towards an "if I set off this cluster first, I can't reach the second cluster, so I need to do this in the right order" type of planning. Conversely, every level in CBT (and yes, I'm sticking with that initialism; I imagine it'll become more apposite as we continue) just has the one bomb you can detonate and the puzzles involve pushing all the other bombs in close proximity before setting it off. I won't argue this way is any better or worse, but I have this horrible sinking feeling that the game's easier levels are behind it now. At least it looks like it might switch things up occasionally: the first ten levels had a desert theme, but the next set look to have an alpine/snowy theme instead, so maybe we'll see some new mechanics as well.

32 Minutes In

A puzzle game, much like the dating world, is the last place where you want to see two timers.
A puzzle game, much like the dating world, is the last place where you want to see two timers.

I can't dislike this game too much, I suppose. There are times where the rules seem like they can be bent, which is usually a bad sign with a precision-based puzzle game format like this, but for the most part there's a decent variety of objectives that start at "push bombs around" then diverge in intriguing ways. This level I'm currently on with its timed explosive is kinda nerve-wracking, but it just means factoring in the occasional return to the timer to reset it in my order of steps to take. The Alpine level set (I'm on level 16, I think, so I've got a few left) have introduced a number of new obstacles in addition to the bomb timers: there's also how every blue bomb has a blast radius indicated by the number on top. A blast radius of one means it can't create combos, since the blast doesn't go beyond where the bomb originally stood, so instead of a daisy chain you have to place the initial bomb (or another blue bomb with a larger radius) somewhere where it can reach all the others. Just to reiterate also that this game operates on Sokoban rules: that means no pulling objects, only pushing them, and any mistakes will necessitate a quick reset of the level. There might be an "undo last move" function (there usually is in Sokoban games made after a certain period, which I would hope includes 1999) but I've yet to find it.

When I say that certain rules can be bent, one of those involve these annoying spikes that pop out of the ground in certain spots. Sometimes the spike extrudes and retracts so quickly that you can't even get past it, though you can use bombs and other pushable objects to at least block it and jump over (where applicable). However, you can also just jump directly on it and sometimes this gives you a brief window to push the object on the other side out of the way or, if there's nothing there, walk over the gap. It makes me wonder if I'm supposed to be able to do that or if I've found some kind of sequence break. It's made the few levels in which those spikes have been a factor much more pleasant, so I won't complain. I suppose I'll consider stuff like this a problem if it makes the game harder than it should rather than easier. Speaking of the jump though, I've been able to vault over any bombs and objects throughout the initial Desert set of levels, but not so in the Alpine ones. I'm not sure what's changed, exactly, but it's probably something I should figure out: I don't want to get stuck later without realizing I could've just leapt over the stuff in my path.

48 Minutes In

This level made my head hurt, but it also made my hand hurt. That's after I punched a wall because I accidentally shoved a TNT crate into a corner instead of jumping over it for the twentieth time. Games really do make you violent.
This level made my head hurt, but it also made my hand hurt. That's after I punched a wall because I accidentally shoved a TNT crate into a corner instead of jumping over it for the twentieth time. Games really do make you violent.

As is often the case, the harder a game becomes the more its controls and gameplay mechanics wither under harsh scrutiny. You can't run a marathon without the right shoes or build a palace with shoddy tools, so as the demands on the player increase so too does their own demand for the accurate and precise means to accomplish what is asked of them. This is just a roundabout way of saying that CBT (the initialism now more apt than ever) is starting to test my patience with its shortcomings. The first sticking point came about from a level that has you push a timed explosive all the way from the far end of the level—just getting to it before it detonates is tricky enough, given the spike traps in the way—and it turns out the level timer, distinct from the bomb's timer (since that can be reset), is just as urgent. I'm generally not a fan of timers in puzzle games: when it's a bomb timer you need to constantly reset, that's one thing that I can roll with since it factors into the level's challenge in a meaningful and logical way, but having all these arbitrary level timers on top of that is an unnecessary strain on the player that's undoubtedly going to lead to more forced errors as they're required to think and act faster than they'd prefer. Sokoban is already one of the harshest puzzle game formats around, one that demands you take consideration of the level in full and plan your subsequent actions with an exorbitant amount of care, and so pressing the player forward for no particularly obvious reason seems vindictively cruel.

The second sticking point is how the player controls Charlie's movement. Using the Control Stick or the D-Pad (the C-Buttons are relegated to controlling the camera, as they should be) you can make Charlie move in that direction, pushing anything that happens to be front of him as long as it has somewhere to go (no pushing bombs off the level, for instance, nor can you push two bombs sitting in a row). However, those same movement controls also determine where Charlie is looking: by tapping a direction instead of pushing it, Charlie will simply turn to look that way. This is useful if, instead of pushing something in that direction, you're hoping to jump over it to the gap behind it. To do that, you'd only need to tap the direction to look the right way then hit the jump button to leap over the obstacle. You might have already realized at this point how disadvantageous it is to have the "look" and "move/push" functions be separated by only a tiny amount of button pressure instead of, say, exclusively having the D-Pad make Charlie turn and the Control Stick make him move, respectively. That would've taken extra work to program though, I imagine, and everything about this game screams that it had to be finished within a weekend. Suffice it to say, I've reset my current level quite a few times because the game hasn't always been able to distinguish "tap" and "push" to a 100% accurate degree. I will say it's making me very glad that I've only got sixteen minutes left here.

64 Minutes In

It took almost the whole duration of this segment, but I finally managed to solve the above. To think, later levels are going to be even more intensive. Not for the first time when writing this feature, I'm glad the N64 wasn't called the N128.
It took almost the whole duration of this segment, but I finally managed to solve the above. To think, later levels are going to be even more intensive. Not for the first time when writing this feature, I'm glad the N64 wasn't called the N128.

Well, it took almost this whole segment but I figured out level 18 and managed to pull off a chain reaction without accidentally pushing the wrong box, a scenario made doubly likely by the potent combination of oversensitive buttons and my own stupidity. The next level, which involved forming a straight line of TNT boxes (which, I learned, have an automatic blast radius of 2 and can also be jumped over; the first world had more of these than the impassable blue bombs), was easier to figure out but almost harder to execute upon because it involved blocking another timed explosive at one point in the process, preventing me from hitting its reset and so essentially giving me only fifteen seconds to complete the remaining six or seven steps to get all the boxes lined up right. Sadly, stopping at level 20 meant that I couldn't complete the full set of ten for Alpine and didn't get to see which inconsequential level dressing change followed after. That's just something I'm going to have to live with, if I can.

I won't say something as trite as "this playthrough went out on a bang" but- no, wait, I absolutely would say something like that. So this playthrough went out on a bang, demonstrating both the strengths and the foibles of a puzzle game that was already eleven years old when this came out, with not a whole lot changed. The 3D aspect is completely wasted on a game with standard cardinal-directional movement—then again, the original was isometric and that didn't help much either—and I can't help but feel like most of the puzzle games for the system had the same issue: it's only occasional bouts of innovation like Tetrisphere and Wetrix that really made full use of the N64's third-dimensional capabilities. Still, though, this is perhaps an ideal puzzle game to play for just an hour: any longer and I really would've been struggling, quickly jutting up against the limits of my perseverance and perspicacity alike.

How Well Has It Aged?: Like a Damp Squib. Let's be clear here, the Sokoban format was already ancient when Bombuzal came out in 1988, the latter saved only by its novel prioritizing between disconnected groups of explosives that this game wasn't even advanced enough to include. However, one could argue that most puzzle games tend to be evergreen due to their straightforward rules and not really needing any significant amount of visual pizzazz to get the job done. It's why low-spec portable platforms have been a suitable home for the puzzle genre since Tetris on Game Boy. With that being said, you could probably find a dozen games just like this on any given app store so it doesn't really need a revival.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Maybe as a Blast Resort. Kemco's still around and will happily rerelease their old games if that recent giant RPG bundle is any indication, but I dunno if they're in a place right now to talk to Nintendo about reviving their N64 library. Even if they were, they'd probably prioritize Shadowgate 64 over something relatively low-budget like this that could easily be reworked as a 2D game for mobile if it hasn't already (and it has: The Bombing Islands was ported to cell phones in 2003). Worth noting you can also play the SNES Bombuzal on Switch too.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. (Instead, I had to check GameFAQs to find out how many levels this game has. It's 60. Almost a third of the content in an hour ain't bad.)

Last Legion UX (Random)

No Caption Provided

History: Last Legion UX is a one-on-one 3D arena fighter featuring mechs with player-determined loadouts. The weaponry and gear equipped to a mech will have a noticeable affect on its mobility, reducing its speed and jump height as the weight increases. The game features a single-player story campaign as well as multiplayer options for shorter exhibition battles against either another human player or the CPU. Plans to localize the game overseas eventually fell through after developer Yuke's failed to find an international publisher, but fortunately a fan translation from Zoinkity exists (they also did the fan translations for earlier 64 in 64 entries Eikou no Saint Andrews and Mario no Photopi).

If anyone knows Yuke's for anything it's for their endless procession of wrasslin' sims. That's more or less true for the N64 as well: Of their four developed N64 games, two were based on the Shin Nippon (New Japan) Pro Wrestling circuit. Their fourth is actually a game based on the same Japanese TV game show that spawned the PS1 curio Irritating Stick, so I'm curious enough to check that out too someday. Hudson needs no introduction: we were just talking about Bomberman a little while ago, after all. They put out just shy of twenty games for N64, the most notable of which are the four Bomberman games and the three Mario Parties, with all of the latter now out on Switch Online and thus out of my grasp. Real torn up about that.

Having a mech arena fighter dropped on me this close to GOTY discussions and the inevitable presence of Armored Core VI makes for an intriguing parallel, though I don't imagine it plays too similarly. It'll probably be closer to the Custom Robo duo or perhaps Sega's Virtual-On: a whole lot of tinkering around with equipment loadouts and hoping for the best. Mech games tend to have intimidating learning curves, squarely aimed as they are at true gearhead perverts, but if I can wrangle a few victories before this hour's over I can be satisfied with that much.

16 Minutes In

Didn't get many of these. Of course, I instinctively took a screenshot when I did, such is the insecurity that defines my being.
Didn't get many of these. Of course, I instinctively took a screenshot when I did, such is the insecurity that defines my being.

There's a lot to disseminate right off the bat, as might be expected. I went with the story mode, which limits your number of playable characters to just six. I chose Bebaion as my mech, since he seems like the beginner-friendly default as well as a mid- to long-range combatant (going for a melee main seems a bit tough if I'm not versed with the movement controls yet). Each mech has a main weapon (some of which are shared), a special weapon (all unique), a shield (some robots have multiple options, some don't), and their own configuration of stats for jump height, movement speed, defense, and whatnot. There's a limited amount of customization too: if you know who you're fighting, you might switch to a different main weapon or shield depending on the strategy you intend to follow. A is jump, B is shoot, Z to guard, and the C-Up and C-Left both activate the special. Useful buttons I discovered a little later include holding R to strafe and tapping C-Down to lock-on to nearby foes: both pretty important in a rapid third-person arena fighter like this where you can lose sight of your opponent easily.

The story mode has a soft onboarding process, but my last opponent—the third in the sequence—did give me some trouble due to its high evasion. Early on I used a crutch which is this big charged-up laser beam attack that does absurd damage, but enemies are getting pretty good at dodging it at a distance unless they're in the process of attacking themselves (and that means getting your defensive tech ready). I've already taken down two slower mechs called Globus and V-Bee, and the third one I just fought was a second Bebaion: I learned quite a bit about the ideal tactics to use as this guy the hard way, so that'll help in future battles. Honestly? This game's not too bad so far and it's a bit more accommodating than I anticipated, probably because it's a N64 game so it was never going to go full MechWarrior on me. The Virtual-On comparison seems the most apt: these battles are kinda frantic and quick, and it serves you best to keep moving because it's not like the opponent will slow down either.

32 Minutes In

Always, always, check the options menu before starting a game.
Always, always, check the options menu before starting a game.

Well, some unfortunate business occurred this time. Unfortunate and predictable. The next opponent was another like myself: Galevin, a dexterous robot that often relied on grenades when in mid-range but generally kept its distance. The arena for this fight was vaguely maze-like so there were plenty of places to hide, though that also made things easier for me since I could charge my main weapon whenever I wasn't being targeted and then peek out and take a shot when the dude finally appeared. The next opponent, which fights you in a crater with lava geysers, is the awesomely-named Lieabouts. However, far from snoozing on the job, Lieabouts would often try to close the distance to use its claw attacks but would otherwise run circles around you to stay clear of your ranged weapons. It was a bad match for me, and I quickly lost all my continues. A lesson learned, though one I should've gleaned a long time ago: always jump into the Options menu first to check out if you can give yourself more leeway (the infinite continues option is appreciated; just wish it was on by default).

Rather than just repeat the last half-hour though, I'll switch over to the single-player versus mode for a spell and check out a few of the other mechs. Might see if I can handle a melee mech like Lieabouts and go for a strategy with more evasion and close-quarters combat. So far this is looking to be one of those games where an hour is about the right length to spend on it: I'm sure I could push myself to get better at it with enough time but I can't say my motivation to do so is particularly high. For what it is, though, it's not terrible.

48 Minutes In

Not always the easiest thing to aim, but always satisfying when it hits.
Not always the easiest thing to aim, but always satisfying when it hits.

As promised, I spent some time trying out a few of the other mechs in the versus mode. Sadly, I couldn't use the two I'd already fought in the story mode—Globus and V-Bee—but of the six default choices I took a look at Lieabouts (my favorite, honestly), which wasn't quite as melee-dependent as I thought as its true specialty is homing missiles. Would explain how it kept destroying me so quickly. I also checked out Jankees, which started with a sword but could switch to guns if preferred; NL-FT-PP, which employed turrets to keep enemies off its back and had sleeker versions of the standard weapons; and Weisstiger, which could employ a stealth camouflage that made it slightly tougher to spot and removed it from the radar mini-map. I think I'm missing something too: there's some kind of ultimate attack that needs to be charged over time (there's a gauge at the top of the screen for it) and enemies do a tremendous amount of damage whenever they fire one off. I've run out of buttons that might activate it so I'm guessing it must be a combination, like Z and B. I'll let you know if I get it working.

Seeing as this versus mode is kinda dull with only six choices, I've gone back to the story mode. I don't imagine I'll get too much further, even skipping all the dialogue, but I would like to see if I can do better with NL-FT-PP between its faster speed and improved weaponry, albeit with no grenades to fall back on. The turrets should keep them from charging at me constantly at the very least.

64 Minutes In

Not that inconceivable, you kept walking in front of my lasers. A worthy adversary, just like Light Raid Officer and Light Raid Officer. Not Light Raid Officer though, he was a putz.
Not that inconceivable, you kept walking in front of my lasers. A worthy adversary, just like Light Raid Officer and Light Raid Officer. Not Light Raid Officer though, he was a putz.

I was right about how to activate the super, and man are those things effective. Just have to be careful not to waste them: you only get the opportunity to use it once or twice a fight with how slowly they charge. NL-FT-PP's super is, like many of them, a big homing attack that knocks off around 40% of the opponent's health bar, so as long as they're in visual range and aren't in a post-damage invulnerability state (made that mistake once) it'll probably hit. Of course, the same goes for their own supers, and if you see them charging it up it's time to go hide behind something.

I did way better in the story mode this time, pushing past Lieabouts and also defeating the above, a mirror match with another NL-FT-PP. Weisstiger would've been my next opponent had the timer not sounded for the end. I neglected to mention much about the story because it's kinda nonsense: you're some dude named Reddi who works for the world government, Union IV, and is tasked with taking down a terrorist group calling themselves Light Raid who have successfully infiltrated a top-secret research base and sent themselves back in time to an era thought to be the dawn of civilization. You've chased them there and are eliminating their unnamed lieutenants one after the other. The big revelation with NL-FT-PP's pilot is that she's the only woman; since we don't have a name or a portrait though, there's no real big difference between her and the others besides being somewhat flirty with the hero after she's defeated. It'd be nice if Yuke's gave these characters anything to go on, but I guess everyone knows that in mecha anime it's the mecha themselves that are the real stars.

How Well Has It Aged?: Mechs-ellently. Even though it has UX right in the title I can't say the user experience was all that great, but I was definitely coming around on it the more I played and learned of its mechanics. That it was kinda stiff to move around, target, and shoot simultaneously is more on the era it came from than any fault of this game: 3D arena shooters were not exactly plentiful in 1999 and it was doing the best it could to accommodate the N64's weird controller layout. I think focusing on the Control Stick, two face buttons, Z, and R trigger made the most intuitive sense for how you're meant to hold that thing. Between Daemon X Machina and AC6 it feels like this genre's finally returning to the fore, so I could see an argument for reviving this whole mecha arena fighter subgenre too. It's nice that N64 fans could have their own Virtual-On, if nothing else.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: It's Last in a Legion of Other Choices. Actually, the Hudson credit probably gives this a better shot than most. They already managed to get all three Mario Party games on the service (though I'm sure being Mario-licensed helped with that) and I can't imagine the N64 Bomberman games are too far behind. Of course, the big shuffling cardboard box in the room is the fact that Konami probably owns this property now and who could possibly know what their plans are at any given juncture. I doubt anyone could turn this into a successful pachinko cabinet.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. (Buncha Lieabouts over there at Retro Achievement Central.)

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. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
  7. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
  8. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
  9. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
  10. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
  11. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
  12. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
  13. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
  14. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
  15. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
  16. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
  17. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
  18. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
  19. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
  20. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
  21. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
  22. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
  23. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
  24. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
  25. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
  26. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
  27. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
  28. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
  29. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
  30. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
  31. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
  32. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
  33. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
  34. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
  35. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
  36. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
  37. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
  38. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
  39. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
  40. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
  41. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
  42. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
  43. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
  44. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
  45. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
  46. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
  47. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
  48. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
  49. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
  50. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
  51. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
  52. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
  53. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
  54. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
  55. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
  56. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
  57. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
  58. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
  59. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
  60. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
  61. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
  62. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
  63. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
  64. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
  65. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
  66. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
  67. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
  68. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
  69. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
  70. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
  71. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
  72. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
  73. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
  74. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
  75. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
  76. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
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Indie Game of the Week 346: Looking for Aliens

No Caption Provided

Sometimes you want to stick a game on that offers layers upon layers of deep mechanics to dig into or some equally deep storytelling that'll keep you immersed for an unhealthy length of time. On other occasions, you probably just want some basic-ass Where's Waldo? game with a sci-fi/UFO theme because you're busy enough already. Looking for Aliens belongs to that most underappreciated of genres: the hidden object puzzle game or, as I call them, "squint 'em ups". The goal of each level is simple enough: scour a large diorama for the objects or people listed across the bottom of the screen, in addition to a card collectible and a set of identical targets, and then repeat the loop with the equally detailed images to follow. A premise so simple I've now painted myself into a corner trying to expatiate on it for another four paragraphs.

Looking for Aliens takes a leaf from Hidden Folks in particular—and a few other I've seen pop up on Steam over the years, so I'm going to recuse myself of mentioning a likely precursor and getting it wrong—by having its large, detail-oriented tableaux be to some extent both interactive and animated: two advantages not afforded to the Where's Waldo? book franchise. You can click dumpsters, doors, windows, crates, and other portals to have them reveal their contents, which may or may not include something you're searching for. There's also buttons and levers that might cause some other part of the level to change, which in turn could also be either a means to summon one of your targets or itself be a target. The game is built in a way where many levels will have a specific goal in mind to further the story it's telling (though said story is fairly loose and prone to tangents), and one of those could be to press a series of buttons semi-hidden across the level to, say, launch a space rocket or cook a giant egg. Other times you're just looking for the specific NPCs related to the story, or simply enough of the targets for the game to accept you've done sufficiently well and can proceed: hunting absolutely everything is never a requirement, though there are achievements and game progress attached to doing so.

The Area 51 level, which the game gets out of the way with early to its credit. Respect, if that's the right word, for recognizably recreating a Naruto run with sprites this small.
The Area 51 level, which the game gets out of the way with early to its credit. Respect, if that's the right word, for recognizably recreating a Naruto run with sprites this small.

Speaking of story, Looking for Aliens has a shaggy dog of a narrative where aliens are shown to be real and hiding among us. They tend to be tourists, scientists, and pranksters for the most part: they hide in plain sight at UFO conventions, for example, or are using hologram technology to conceal all their moon habitats to the humans that just built a base nearby. The framing device follows three celebrity aliens in particular: a stern rock-like anchorman called Blorp, the energetic amorphous blob reporter Bubble Gu, and the reckless survival reality TV show host Grey Brills. They chronicle their time on Earth, with Brills in particular attempting to survive the most dangerous scenarios Earth has to offer (the morning commute and the Black Friday sales). We learn two things from these various reports and the levels that follow: the aliens are very dumb, but the humans are even dumber so the aliens have remained undiscovered despite a significant lack of discretion. Throughout the game's twenty-five scenarios, which generally stick to either the "aliens hiding on Earth" Men in Black theme (speaking of which, the music is very reminiscent of Danny Elfman's MiB tracks) or provide a glimpse of a densely populated outer space, a series of events occur that might have Earth threatened by a kaiju one moment or a tenacious tinfoil-hat wearer causing the aliens some trouble by endlessly cloning himself the next. It lacks the thematic variety of many of its peers, but conversely offers something of a narrative thread to tie itself together as compensation. The humor's hit and miss, of course, but this structure offers the game some freedom in its approach to its puzzles.

For an example of what I mean, the game will occasionally have these huge vistas to pore over, with number of targets well up into the several dozen. However, it won't keep throwing these massive images at you: it'll decide the next moment in the story requires a much more compact puzzle to solve, giving the player a bit of a breather before the next enormous canvas to intently examine. It recognizes that this genre isn't necessarily one that benefits from a traditional difficulty curve—as a casual game, "difficulty" isn't really a factor regardless—so instead chooses to present its content as a series of peaks and valleys, giving you time to recover before the next big wave and using its narrative thread as a laudable explanation for this approach. It's probably my favorite aspect about it, though it might be worth keeping in mind that only half its puzzles will take any amount of time to complete: the smaller ones might well take less than five minutes, so factor that into the completion time. With twenty-five puzzles total though, you can't argue you don't get your money's worth.

You know how games with giant spiders have content warnings for arachnophobes? Maybe this game should carry one for agoraphobes. That's... a lot of people.
You know how games with giant spiders have content warnings for arachnophobes? Maybe this game should carry one for agoraphobes. That's... a lot of people.

In some ways, Looking for Aliens is an improvement over its predecessors in the "Where's Waldo? but shit moves" sub-genre of the hidden object world, but in other ways it feels a little lacking. It's pretty glitchy, for example, though I'll admit that I've yet to run into any game-breaking issues; it's more like sprites going behind background items instead of in front of them or found items suddenly reappearing and disappearing again, just minor graphical imperfections of the type that give the game a slightly sloppy feel. There's also the focus on the whole aliens/sci-fi business that makes many of the levels feel same-y after a while, frequently reusing most of the same assets and characters. On the whole, though, there's plenty of imagination to be found in how the game sets up its individual levels, sometimes giving you a different approach to "just look around for stuff" where you might have to follow a series of clues or complete multiple stages of a single puzzle to proceed. And, that said, it's not like the game isn't lacking for garbage to find and does the Where's Waldo? thing of setting up little jokes for you to discover everywhere you look. I appreciated the game's silliness and charm, in combination with its unhurried pace as a casual game meant to be somewhat relaxing. Well, until you've spent thirty minutes looking for one particularly elusive little alien blob and are starting to get just a tad antsy about it, at least.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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Mis-Simian: Chimpossible (Part 1)

No Caption Provided

...And if you think that title is bad, wait until you see what game I'm playing.

Much like General Custer at the Battle of the Tiny-Huge Island, I have allowed myself to grow overconfident after demolishing Super Mario 64 by mastering its Retro Achievement set and have now set my sights on something even less attainable (and, dare I say, less palatable as well). That's right, I'm playing Donkey Kong 64 with the aim to complete its Retro Achievement set too. I had all the Zeldas and Peaches and Samuses to choose from and yet I've opted for the banana factory; Freud would have a field day. Donkey Kong 64 probably needs no further introduction given the site's history with it: you can witness Giant Bomb East coming undone in real-time by following the entertaining disaster that was Burgle My Bananas over here. Much like in any DKC minecart level, things went off the rails pretty quickly. (And if you want to read my in-depth impressions on the game check out the episode of 64 in 64 that it featured in.)

Stating for the record here so I can use it as an excuse later, but I am far less committed to earning this full RA achievement set than I was for Super Mario 64. If Super Mario 64 is having a sneaky cigarette behind the highschool gym with the delinquent girl you had a thing for, Donkey Kong 64 is being forced to smoke the entire carton after your dad found out. It's just all too much, and this is me—The Collectathot of Collectathons—saying that. It doesn't help that many of these achievements are for no-damage boss fights, an achievement category I vehemently hate for how little it respects the player's time (more so than even collectibles, before someone turns that around on me).

However, to help things chug along at a brisk pace I am affording myself one small indulgence and that's the Tag Anywhere hack made by Isotarge. By hitting the L-button or the D-pad you can instantly switch between Kongs where you stand, rather than having to hunt down a swap barrel. It doesn't make the game any easier but it does make it significantly more pleasant. It's also a boon I was happy to see didn't void any RetroAchievements: they're picky about using specific ROM dumps over there, so I suspect someone who contributes to the achievement sets deliberately included this hack.

N.B.: I'm bringing back the Exasperometer from The Kobayashi Mario. However, since it's still attuned to Super Mario 64's achievement set, the maximum cap has been raised from 10 to who-even-knows. Which is to say, a figure higher than 10 is more exasperating than anything the Mario 64 achievement set threw at me.

OK, let's get it on like some kind of primate video game character. Countdown until the moment when I decide I would much rather be playing an Ape Escape game instead. In fact, let's just preemptively say it's already passed.

DK Rap

Maybe the secret hardest achievement is this one, which you earn from having to listen to the DK Rap in full. And by "having to listen to" I of course mean "getting to listen to".

Exasperometer: Immeasurable.

Petite Ecolier

La Portrait de la Petite Cossette

Folsom Prison Blues

Rusty Cage

Freeing the four other Kongs (Diddy, Tiny, Lanky, and Chunky respectively). Usually the first priority on a completionist run to minimize the amount of running around in the early worlds. It involves unlocking the third world though, so it does need some legwork to get there. Don't look at me, I didn't choose those names.

Exasperometer: 1.

Welcome to the Jungle

Beat the first boss. I only realized after this that there were no-damage clear achievements too. I won't bother including the default boss achievements separately from here on out.

Exasperometer: 1.

I can never think of the DK Rap without also thinking of Joel Haver's 'Lanky Kong listens to the DK Rap for the first time' animation. Go Google it, I can't put links in captions.
I can never think of the DK Rap without also thinking of Joel Haver's 'Lanky Kong listens to the DK Rap for the first time' animation. Go Google it, I can't put links in captions.

D-D-D-Dragonfly (Default: Temblores de Tenochtitlan)

Second boss. The strategy is identical to the first: avoid its fireballs, wait for the obvious opening, and then throw an explosive barrel at it. I recall most bosses in this game getting much harder than this so I predict these no-damage boss fights will be the things I get hung up on the most.

Exasperometer: 2.

It's On Like Donkey Kong

Kong the Destroyer

There's a Donkey Kong arcade machine you can play in the third world, Frantic Factory. First time you beat it—which is to say, all five of its levels on a single life—you earn a Golden Banana (GB) for Donkey. The second time nets you the N64 Coin and the first of these two achievements. The second achievement requires hitting a 30,000 highscore: the points (and difficulty) increase with each run though, so I earned enough just by reaching the end a third time. I'm no Steve Wiebe but I can handle three loops of some Barrel Ape.

Exasperometer: 3.

Ruff in the Jungle Bizness

100% the first world, Jungle Japes. Most annoying GB here is beating Diddy's minecart race. I managed it the first time, just, but I recall it giving the Burgle My Bananas crew some trouble. Each Kong also has a timed challenge to reach an unlocked door, and some of those were tight races too. Otherwise, an easy world suitable for onboarding unsuspecting players who may have thought this was Banjo-Kazooie with apes and not a malevolent OCD Enabler.

Exasperometer: 1.

I loved K. Rool's subtle torture of forcing Donkey Kong himself to play this. Fortunately, past DK is actually Cranky and current DK's relationship with him is strained enough that he was probably cool with it.
I loved K. Rool's subtle torture of forcing Donkey Kong himself to play this. Fortunately, past DK is actually Cranky and current DK's relationship with him is strained enough that he was probably cool with it.

Jump Up, Super Star!

Like Mario 64 there are some "expert play" technique achievements to earn. Sadly, unlike Mario 64, most of these are missable in nature. This is the first of nine missable achievements, each requiring you don't activate a certain flag ahead of time. (I've been informed that boss fights are repeatable, though I've yet to figure out how.) The goal here is to get a rainbow coin on top of the Angry Aztec (World 2) building without spawning a Diddy Jetpack barrel: the issue, to simplify things here, is that the roof is inaccessible due to its height. Since there's a boulder Chunky can lift in the vicinity, I just dropped that near the building and that gave me enough height as Diddy to reach the top with a crouching high jump. I'm not sure if that's something that's only possible with the Tag Anywhere hack or not, though. (There's also a glitchy high jump Diddy can use, but I can rarely get it to work.)

Exasperometer: 2.

The Floor is Lava

Another tech achievement, but thankfully one that doesn't have a missable cutoff point. It involves reaching the top of Cranky's lab from the starting treehouse without ever touching the ground (hence the name). Only way you're going to get this is by unlocking Tiny's hair twirl glide and float from tree to tree, unless there's another speedrun strategy out there I'm missing. Kind of a fun idea though.

Exasperometer: 2.

The Flower Songs of Nezahualcoyotl

100% the second world, Angry Aztec. This is where you free both Tiny and Lanky, so there's plenty of scrouging around for the coins they need to buy all the upgrades so far (that includes a musical instrument from Candy as well as Cranky's potions and Funky's firearms). Worst GB was the infamous "Tiny races a weird bug" mini-game that requires finishing a slide race while also collecting enough coins (and collisions with the bug causes you to lose several). I think the Burgle My Bananas crew spent a whole episode on that one.

Exasperometer: 2.

I think this mini-game alone shaved years off Mahardy's and Abby's lifespans. Vinny's seen worse.
I think this mini-game alone shaved years off Mahardy's and Abby's lifespans. Vinny's seen worse.

Expand Kong

Just use Lanky's balloon power-up once. You ever earn an achievement that you just know someone put in there as a joke? The very notion that there are developers and RA contributors out there not treating achievements as sacrosanct, tsk.

Exasperometer: 1.

Jewel in the Crown

Earn four crowns from those battle royale mini-games. Nothing much to note here; there's going to be a much harder achievement related to these things coming much later.

Exasperometer: 1.

Der Flohwalzer

This is a Frantic Factory GB for Lanky. Dunno why it gets its own achievement, but it is one of those annoying Simon Says memory challenges so maybe that's plenty tough for some folks.

Exasperometer: 1.

When the edibles finally hit after eating like twenty of them.
When the edibles finally hit after eating like twenty of them.

Jumpin' Jack Flash (Default: Life in the Factory)

Frantic Factory's boss fight. This is the one where you're jumping around a grid as Tiny to avoid a jack-in-the-box. It's the first real challenging fight in the game, partly because you need to hit the boss five times to win instead of three and he'll do things like fire hard-to-dodge lasers or turn invisible. The no-damage clear took a while because of how stretched out that fight was and how long you have to wait for the boss to be vulnerable. Not a highlight, I'll say that much.

Exasperometer: 5.

In the Toymaker's Workshop

100% on Frantic Factory (World Three). The GB you earn from the classic DK arcade game might be the hardest, though there's another obnoxious race with Tiny as well as the aforementioned memory challenge with Lanky. It's also not the easiest place to navigate in general with its multi-floor firefighter poles, though Tag Anywhere really helps a lot.

Exasperometer: 2.

Life on the Nickel

Rocket Man

This is for earning the Rareware coin (first) and then subsequently the highscore of 15,000 (second) from playing Jetpac at Cranky's Lab. Hasn't really held up as the screen's too small and hanging around its edges is suicide due to how often enemies will just spawn right on top of you. You can play normally, collecting score items to get to that target faster, or just hang around in the relatively safe middle area eliminating enemies as they appear. The latter's a slower but less dangerous way of reaching 15k (which, by the by, is three times what you need to make the coin appear).

Exasperometer: 4.

Just Never Stop Shooting. Even at the rocket fuel.
Just Never Stop Shooting. Even at the rocket fuel.

Hey Armadillo

The no-damage clear on the first boss. Turns out saving banana fairies unlocks special content, one of which is the boss retry feature. I'll be more vigilant in future about these no-damage clears.

Exasperometer: 2.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

Included in the special features are mini-games related to the game's two animal companions, Rambi the Rhino and Enguarde the Swordfish. This achievement is for scoring 200 points in the Enguarde mini-game: twice the score needed to top the highscore table. The idea here is that you earn points from endlessly swimming through rings; with all this training I now feel ready to take on the Superman 64 achievement set.

(The equivalent Rambi achievement is... going to take some time. Verrrrry RNG heavy.)

Exasperometer: 4.

Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas

Simple milestone achievement for earning 100 GBs, the main collectible. For most 3D platformers, that would be near the full total. For DK64, it's not even halfway.

Exasperometer: 1.

I might've been a little frustrated at this mini-game (especially after that 195 high score) but there's really no way to tell that from this image.
I might've been a little frustrated at this mini-game (especially after that 195 high score) but there's really no way to tell that from this image.

Sunleth Waterscape

100% the fourth world, Gloomy Galleon. Requisite water level, but besides dealing with the swimming controls there aren't too many difficult GB challenges here. There is one race against a seal that kinda sucks, but it's not that much tougher than the other races. A few of the mini-games, which have like five or six varieties that increase in difficulty as the game goes on, are starting to get tricky.

Exasperometer: 1.

Too Many Fish in the Sea (Default: Sea Within a Sea)

The no-damage clear and regular clear for the fourth boss, Puftoss. This was the point in the run where I really started to have second thoughts about taking on this achievement set. This boss was an absolute ordeal: in addition to Lanky's boat controls, which like the hovercrafts in Diddy Kong Racing aren't particularly great for reducing one's momentum to adjust for hazards in your path, the boss also has too many RNG attacks and you need to complete five full waves as you pass through rings to summon the lightning rods to damage it. So many projectiles flying around, so little chance of avoiding them. Not something I ever want to put myself through again.

Exasperometer: 9.

I Believe I Can Fly

Another missable tech achievement. It involves getting to a specific area of the overworld hub to snap one of the banana fairies before you're supposed to. The normal route involves teleporting with Tiny with one of her upgrades to get to the top of K. Rool's fortress, but you can also use a Diddy barrel to jetpack over there way earlier. Issue is, the game forces you out of the jetpack mode if you get too close to the fortress (because it's sequence breaking) but if you approach it at the right angle and speed you can still just make it to that upper area. Incidentally, when you have the Tiny upgrade you're supposed to use, the achievement can no longer be earned; hence, missable. Total glitch exploitation achievement, which traditionally aren't part of these core sets but in this case someone made an exception. To be fair, once you know exactly where to aim (after checking some videos) it's not too tough to replicate.

Exasperometer: 3.

The lowest point in the run so far. But we can go lower, I'm sure.
The lowest point in the run so far. But we can go lower, I'm sure.

No Quarter

This is a fun one. Like any retro platformer DK64 had built up a sizeable speedrunning community over the years. One of those runners—in fact, the same one that built the Tag Anywhere hack—had a gander at the game data to look for new glitches to exploit and inadvertently discovered a well-hidden dirt mound in the fifth world, Fungi Forest. Each dirt mound provides a rainbow coin which adds to the game completion % (if not in-game, then at least as far as speedruns are concerned), only this one was concealed in the tall grass and went unnoticed for almost 20 years. Suffice it to say, a lot of full completion runs suddenly became null and void to the consternation (and probably some amusement) of the whole DK64 speedrun community. Personally, I think if speedrunning DK64 is your idea of a pastime you're probably used to heartache. Anyway, this achievement is for picking up that coin (and yes, I looked up where it was).

Exasperometer: 1.

Where the Lights Are

Another missable. This involves a GB in the dark attic of a barn in Fungi Forest. The ideal way to get this is to use Diddy's guitar to summon Squawks holding a light so you can actually see where you're going. This achievement doesn't want you to do that: you have to feel your way in the pitch-black across the rafters to get the GB. You can either memorize the route, which takes forever, or sparingly use the peanut popgun which causes the room to light up in a brief flash each time. Perilous, but not too difficult (then again, if I was low on ammo it'd be another story).

Exasperometer: 2.

Jane, Stop this Crazy Thing!

Yet another missable. DK64 has a recurring mini-game where you ride a minecart around a multi-track circuit while avoiding two other carts with bombs in them for a length of time. It's a spin on the old Namco game Rally-X, but as long as you're able to predict where the bomb carts are going it's not tough. That is, if you aren't holding down the accelerator the entire time, which is what you need to do for this achievement. This really sucked, but the bomb cart AI is consistent enough that you can figure out a pattern to survive and it's not so strict that you have to follow an exact route for the whole timer duration. (Incidentally, there's three of these mini-games overall but the achievement only counts for the second or third, the latter found in Creepy Castle (World 7). The first, in Jungle Japes, only has the one bomb cart and is therefore considered too easy for an achievement.)

Exasperometer: 5.

I'm guessing they added this achievement challenge so the whole spread isn't just completion and boss fights, but that's a wild shot in the dark.
I'm guessing they added this achievement challenge so the whole spread isn't just completion and boss fights, but that's a wild shot in the dark.

Dragonfly's Outro (Default: The Three Mushrooms)

The fifth boss, which is a rematch with Dogadon (the second boss). The fight is similar to the first battle with Dogadon, though a bit longer and more involved. It has two major snags: the first comes right before you score the third hit, after he sends an all-encompassing wave of fire at you. I found the best way to dodge it was to jump off the platform and double-jump to get back on, though the timing's tight. The second comes with the final stage of the fight where you have to stun him with the explosives, use the power-up barrel to become Hunky Chunky, and lay the smackdown before the power-up wears off and you repeat the cycle. Avoiding damage here is relatively easy, but you're on a timer due to your platform's slow descent into lava so you're forced to move quickly which of course opens you up to unfortunate mistakes in the eleventh hour. Overall, though, way easier than the previous two bosses.

Exasperometer: 3.

So now that's over with, where does this leave us for Part Two? Well, we've still got World Six (Crystal Cave) and World Seven (Creepy Castle) left, which are both full levels with plenty of banana crap to find and more bosses to deal with. World Eight is a shorter area that leads to the finale, but there's a few collectibles there too. There's also the remaining collectibles in the hub area of DK Isles and a couple more missable tech achievements to earn. Finally, there's the multi-stage final boss fight against K. Rool and, yes, I will apparently have to no-damage the whole thing as well. That might be where I draw the line. Best to sign off on these things with some element of suspense, wouldn't you say?

  • Current Golden Banana Count: 138 (69%)
  • Current In-Game Progress Tracker: 68%.
  • Current Achievement Count: 34 of 59 (57.6%)
  • Hardest Achievement So Far: "Too Many Fish in the Sea" (no-damage victory on Boss #4).

(No, seriously, why am I doing this? And why is there a Part 2?)

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Indie Game of the Week 345: Quarantine Circular

No Caption Provided

I did not anticipate that I would enjoy Mike Bithell's 2017 adventure game short Subsurface Circular as much as I did (IGotW #97), about a group of robots riding the subway and having discussions about the events and politics happening topside. That early apprehension had nothing to do with my opinions on Bithell's previous works, which have always been excellently written with a professional sheen that often eludes Indies (even when it was just talking boxes), but more to do with my social anxiety and how much of that is predicated by my limited emotional intelligence and ability to read people (or sapient robots, as the case may be). Subsurface Circular was a visual novel in the sense that interactivity mostly just boiled down to simple dialogue choices that would branch the story path, but for as often as I felt the tension in those scenes everything was conveyed in such a layered yet coherent way that I instead found myself enjoying the act of navigating its webs of deceit and power plays.

Quarantine Circular, the 2018 spiritual follow-up, changes the premise and setting but retains what I would consider the core of having an intense series of dialogues with a potentially hostile being looking to convince you to trust it for unknown reasons. The pitch is that mankind is on a slow descent to oblivion due to an unstoppable virus—the game had the misfortune of preceding the COVID epidemic by a year and change, though it's possible the game's inspiration came from early grumblings about the damage this unknown disease may yet wreak or an antecedent such as SARS—and, in the midst of it all, an alien being wearing power armor suddenly arrives in a Croatian city and is quickly captured by what global authorities remain in control of mankind's crumbling infrastructure. This being, symbolically named Gabriel due to its descent from the sky in lieu of any direct translation of its name, insists that it has arrived to help humanity survive what may become an extinction-level event using its advanced anti-viral technologies and methodologies; however, humanity remains skeptical and already on-edge due to the unfolding tragedy, with rumors floating around that the disease might be extraterrestrial in origin. Thrown into this mess is an engineer named Marc Perez, whose job it is to modify existing translation tools to help understand Gabriel's words and inadvertently finds himself being the first person to communicate with a sapient non-human being.

You're occasionally provided with a motivation for the current playable character (seen near the top right here) to help steer the conversation how your character wishes. It's also helpful for understanding them better, without necessarily revealing everything.
You're occasionally provided with a motivation for the current playable character (seen near the top right here) to help steer the conversation how your character wishes. It's also helpful for understanding them better, without necessarily revealing everything.

What follows are a set of tense discussions with this visitor, who is not best pleased about their predicament but due to their enlightened nature is attempting to be patient and understanding. It doesn't help that Gabriel is an intimidating ten-foot-tall alien in glowing armor that vaguely resembles a lobster, like Garrus Vakarian if he'd been hitting the juice once too often. One of the first things Gabriel asks is to release an electric shock collar that was used to quarantine them in place; that's not the kind of choice one can easily make on the spot, especially if you're a low-level government employee working way beyond your pay grade and doubly so if it means this visitor, about whom you know nothing, might then decide you could use far fewer limbs. Further discussions with Gabriel, alternating viewpoints between multiple protagonists (including Gabriel as well), continues to provide hard choices for the player regarding how much humanity can afford to pass up any opportunity given the dwindling chances to beat this plague, no matter how dubious the source, and regardless of what the repercussions might be.

The game does its job well, which is to say the job of making me second-guess every dialogue tree response and branching path and be in a constant state of low-level anxiety about how badly I might be screwing up the future of the planet. Something mildly reassuring is that the players involved, from the admiral in charge to the brightest scientists to the hardheaded idealist Gabriel themself, are kind of playing this thing by ear as they go along as well, no side fully able to trust the other's intentions. It effectively turns the narrative into one of those small, intimate character plays of unreliable narrators so beloved of Samuel Beckett and the like, despite the hard science-fiction angle of negotiating with an alien for help in eliminating an apocalyptic supervirus. It does, after all, boil down to using one's communication skills to adroitly navigate complex interpersonal discourse where all participants are, by necessity, having to hide information or are trying to be sufficiently convincing in order to gain trust; a skillset I'm about as effective at as speaking Spanish (and check the previous IGotW episode to see how that went). Even so, like with the last Circular, the story feels railroaded just enough that the choices aren't quite as load-bearing as you might dread, though many will still affect future dialogue, and the story is well-written enough that even bad choices lead to interesting outcomes. Even the game's closest equivalent to an antagonist (besides the virus), an overly enthusiastic security officer named Teng Lei, is motivated by her desire to keep humanity safe from an unknown and potentially dangerous extraterrestrial threat making wild promises for no apparent gain. Easy to get a little skeptical at such an offer, especially if it comes to light that said alien is working against the wishes of the formal governance ruling the galaxy.

There are a few puzzles, including decrypting a coded password, but these character notes tend to have the answers you need. I felt my eyes starting to cross reading that hint about the cipher though.
There are a few puzzles, including decrypting a coded password, but these character notes tend to have the answers you need. I felt my eyes starting to cross reading that hint about the cipher though.

The game is around short story length, so about three hours tops, though there's some amount of going back and futzing with previous decisions to see different outcomes; you only have to go about twenty minutes back via the chapter select menu to change the most impactful decision if you wanted to see all the endings, which isn't so bad in lieu of a more convenient timeline/flowchart feature. There feels like a small nod to the world of Subsurface Circular too, though I may have been reading too much into it; the two games are otherwise unrelated, besides a similar format. I plan to play a lot of VNs this month, being Novelmber and all, so this served as a palatable aperitif for what I hope to be a relatively chill month for gaming. Bithell's since moved onto licensed fare—he put out both a Tron game and a John Wick game after this, as well as that Solitaire Conspiracy thing—but I hope he decides to dabble in this genre again with another "Circular" someday, since his worldbuilding and ear for dialogue are often the highlights of his work. Which, man, kinda sounds like a backhanded compliment now I've read it back; see what I mean about my less-than-stellar communication skills? Hopefully this review came off as legible at least.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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Mega Archive CD: Part VII: From Ecco the Dolphin to Jangou World Cup

Welcome back once again to another Mega Archive CD, the glossy, reflective younger brother of the Mega Archive archival/research wiki project. Most Sega fans are celebrating this month by playing the new Like a Dragon spin-off, The Man Who Erased His Name, but I'm too cool for all that. I'm instead poring over the data for early CD-ROM experiments released thirty years ago, many of which have been forgotten and many of those for good reason.

We have one last check-in for the Sega CD/Mega-CD platform before the year is done, bringing us up to the end of summer 1993 if not quite into September where the Mega Archive currently sits (both the next Mega Archive and Mega Archive CD will focus on that particular month). While the regular Mega Drive/Genesis release schedule has been all but supplanted by western developers by 1993—the 16-bit system continuing to be the market leader in both North America and Europe—the Sega CD still enjoys a considerable degree of first- and third-party support in its homeland: almost every game in Part VII comes from Japan, and most from Sega directly. In another parallel with the early Mega Drive library, many of the best games this entry are shoot 'em ups: a genre that once dominated the system and the arcades alike before the advent of fighter games (and the advent of rhythm games after that). Otherwise, it's just your regular mix of enhanced Mega Drive ports, computer game conversions, FMV indulgences, and anime tie-ins.

Before we begin, however, be sure to check out this spreadsheet of all things Mega Archive for previous entries and upcoming games.

Part VII: CD58-CD67 (July '93 - August '93)

CD58: Ecco the Dolphin

No Caption Provided
  • Developer: Novotrade
  • Publisher: Sega
  • JP Release: N/A
  • NA Release: July 1993
  • EU Release: August 1993
  • Franchise: Ecco the Dolphin
  • Genre: Aquatic Tomfoolery
  • Theme: Ecco Location? Right Here on Sega CD
  • Premise: Basically The Abyss if dolphins sorted everything out before the humans got involved.
  • Availability: The original MD Ecco can be bought on Steam as well as its two MD sequels. There was also a 1995 PC version that was specifically based on this enhanced port. Last, the Sega Genesis Mini 2 has the CD version of Ecco the Dolphin (the first had the MD version).
  • Preservation: We have a few Mega Drive ports this entry, including everyone's favorite mercilessly obtuse bottlenose dolphin simulator (covered in Mega Archive: Part XXV). As with many of these Mega Drive to Sega CD ports the only thing that's really changed is the music and sound effects, the game naturally opting for some chilled out trance BGM business befitting a game full of dolphins and crystals and cooperating with each other for a brighter tomorrow. You know, hippy shit. (Composed by Spencer Nilsen, incidentally, who also worked on a great many other Sega CD games as something like the in-house composer for Sega of America at the time.) It's no Aquatic Ambience but it's not bad. In addition to the audio, the Sega CD version does have a few extra levels but they don't show up until way later.
  • Wiki Notes: Needed some SCD-specific releases and screenshots. (I say it needs screenshots, but it's visually identical to the MD version.)

CD59: Dynamic Country Club

No Caption Provided
  • Developer: Sega
  • Publisher: Sega
  • JP Release: 1993-07-16
  • NA Release: N/A
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: N/A
  • Genre: Golf
  • Theme: Golf
  • Premise: Golf
  • Availability: Neither the Sega CD or arcade version of this game was released outside of Japan.
  • Preservation: Sweet, a boring golf game. There aren't too many golf sims for Sega CD, just this and a 1994 port of Links: The Challenge of Golf (a western computer golf franchise) and both were exclusive to their respective regions so golf fans were really spoilt for choice. Didn't help that they were both ports too; Sega originally put this out in arcades back in 1991. Sega's clearly going after T&E Soft's territory here, which at the time were releasing many entries in their "New 3D Golf Simulation" series which used a similar form of fake 3D to give the courses a more realistic feel: after all, it's easier to know where to hit towards if you can sorta make out a few pixels that may or may not be a flag in the far distance. Easier to just use the mini top-down map, really, but the verisimilitude is nice to have I suppose. Super big on the customization settings too, to the extent that you can even choose your own caddy each with their own voiceover clips (this selection being entirely female for some reason; was that all that women were allowed to do in golf at the time? Grim stuff).
  • Wiki Notes: Brand new page. I didn't realize we had any gaps for the Sega CD, since its library isn't exactly enormous, but I could see why this dry, JP-only golfing sim may have fallen through the cracks.

CD60: Arcus I-II-III

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  • Developer: Wolf Team
  • Publisher: Wolf Team / Telenet Japan
  • JP Release: 1993-07-23
  • NA Release: N/A
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: Arcus
  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Theme: A Triple Threat of Dungeon Crawlers
  • Premise: Were you one of the eight people who bought Arcus Odyssey and loved it? Well, do we have the back-catalog-scraping compilation for you.
  • Availability: These games aren't available anywhere any more, unless Wolf Team squeezed them into a Tales game without anyone noticing.
  • Preservation: Possibly buoyed by any success Arcus Odyssey [Mega Archive Part IX] may have enjoyed, Wolf Team took it upon themselves to completely overhaul the first three games in their Arcus series and release them as a compilation for Mega CD. It's sort of like when a Japanese company remakes Might and Magic or Wizardry for a console, except I imagine it's an easier process when they're all your own games. Since it's a Mega CD game, it also has a bunch of anime cutscenes and CD music shoehorned in, but I imagine long-time fans of this series were very happy with the improvements and additions as well as those curious few who liked Odyssey and wanted more adventures with those characters (they all appear in the first Arcus too). Should be noted that while Odyssey was this odd isometric Gauntlet action-RPG, these three Arcuses (Arcii?) are all traditional first-person dungeon crawlers. (The second originally wasn't, but I guess they forced it to obey conformity with this remake.) Westerners never saw this game of course, because why would we? Working Designs were the only US publishers crazy enough to localize a Japanese RPG with voiceovers at the time, and they had their hands full elsewhere.
  • Wiki Notes: Just some text and a header image. My fellow Falcom nut @bowl-of-lentils had passed through here, saving me some work.

CD61: 3x3 Eyes: Seima Densetsu

No Caption Provided
  • Developer: Sega
  • Publisher: Sega
  • JP Release: 1993-07-23
  • NA Release: N/A
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: 3x3 Eyes
  • Genre: RPG
  • Theme: Supernatural Anime Business
  • Premise: What's a three-eyed gal to do when the nice guy you just met is suddenly murdered by a bird demon? Eat his soul and make him your immortal servant, of course.
  • Availability: Licensed game, so nope.
  • Preservation: We've got a couple of anime licensed games this week, making full use of the Mega-CD's capacity for FMV to create a multimedia showcase. As a game, though, 3x3 Eyes is a little too ordinary considering multiple Sega divisions (and two outside contractors) are behind it: feels more like the game's there to prop up the anime scenes rather than the preferred inverse. Truth be told, I didn't see enough of it to get to any battles (there's a lot of running around Tokyo talking to people first, and I'm not fluent enough to handle that) but from witnessing it in action elsewhere it doesn't strike me as particularly inspired. 3x3 Eyes was a long-running (we're talking 25 years here, though it was still only a spry six years old when this game came out) manga from Yuzo Takada, who was also the character artist for the Famicom Enix RPG Just Breed (yikes). The plot involves Pai, one of the titular three-eyed demon elf girls looking to transform herself into a human like the rest of her kind, and the streetwise charmer Yakumo who inadvertently becomes her undead protector. 3x3 Eyes will probably be the subject of a Game OVA episode eventually, except it has a great number of video game adaptations and they're all impenetrable (to the non-fluent) RPGs and adventure games. Regardless, much like Ranma ½, despite being prolific elsewhere it was a one-and-done as far as Sega consoles were concerned.
  • Wiki Notes: Text and deck. Also a header image. The screenshots and release were already there though; we must have some 3x3 Eyes fans in the house.

CD62: Android Assault: The Revenge of Bari-Arm / Bari-Arm

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  • Developer: Human
  • Publisher: Human (JP) / Big Fun Games (NA)
  • JP Release: 1993-07-30 (as Bari-Arm)
  • NA Release: October 1994 (as Android Assault: The Revenge of Bari-Arm)
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: N/A
  • Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal)
  • Theme: The Fusion of Ships and Mechas (a.k.a. Techs-Mechs)
  • Premise: Mankind is colonizing the stars and any attempts to suppress us will be met with deadly force. Hey, hi, we're the good guys.
  • Availability: Nope. I believe Spike Chunsoft owns the IP now, but they don't really focus on retro stuff.
  • Preservation: It always warms my heart to see a shoot 'em up on here, since they were ubiquitous for the early Mega Drive and slowly died out as other genres became more popular. Android Assault/Bari-Arm is a fairly standard horizontal shoot 'em up that uses the mecha transformation gimmick we've seen in a few MD games before, like Arrow Flash and Heavy Unit, and an upgrade system that favors sticking with one color-coded type and constantly upgrading it (while avoiding the other types lest they downgrade you back to the first tier). It certainly looks and sounds good; the former being a relatively late 16-bit game and the latter due to the Sega CD's audio capabilities. Human dabbled in many genres, but are best known for adventure games like Clock Tower along with the Fire-Pro Wrestling franchise (which saw a sneaky Mega Drive iteration in Thunder-Pro Wrestling Retsuden), and less so for shoot 'em ups like this. We won't see any more of their games on either Mega Archive or Mega Archive CD, but they were very busy on the Sega Saturn if I ever decide to encroach on @borgmaster's territory.
  • Wiki Notes: Text and deck. Gave it a suitably cool header image also.

CD63: Cyborg 009

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  • Developer: Telenet Japan
  • Publisher: Riot
  • JP Release: 1993-07-30
  • NA Release: N/A
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: Cyborg 009
  • Genre: Side-scrolling shooter
  • Theme: '60s Superhero Cyborgs With Cool Hair
  • Premise: Nine regular people are kidnapped and turned into cyborgs to wage war on humanity, but are instead rescued by a sympathetic scientist and turn the tables on their abductors.
  • Availability: Licensed game.
  • Preservation: From androids to cyborgs, we have our second anime license for this Mega Archive CD and the source is a real vintage of the medium. Cyborg 009 was a manga created by Osamu Tezuka, one of several hundred projects of his, that debuted in 1964 and continued well into the 1980s, with a few movie adaptations here and there (in fact, I think it's getting rebooted again soon). The titular 009 is the ninth and last of this group of abductees, but debatably the most powerful having been granted super strength, super speed, and near invincibility by his cybernetics. The game takes some ideas from the manga, mixing a few plotlines together, and throws some goofy-looking bosses at you between side-scrolling shooter levels that are vaguely Contra-esque, though much easier given 009's nigh-invulnerability (which in video game terms just means a pretty beefy HP bar). I suppose I'll make this a tentative Game OVA candidate too; neither of its game adaptations (there's one for SFC too) were all that great, but they weren't hard to follow either.
  • Wiki Notes: Just text and a header image. Pattern emerging this month.

CD64: Silpheed

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  • Developer: Game Arts
  • Publisher: Game Arts (JP) / Sega (NA/EU)
  • JP Release: 1993-07-30
  • NA Release: October 1993
  • EU Release: September 1993
  • Franchise: Silpheed
  • Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Z-Axis)
  • Theme: FMV-empowered Space Explosions
  • Premise: When life blows up your home planet, make lemonade
  • Availability: The Sega CD Silpheed is available on the second Sega Genesis Mini. Not sure where you'd get the PC version though.
  • Preservation: Here's a big one among Sega CD fans. Silpheed was a home computer shoot 'em up that was built to take advantage of the tech on Japanese PCs at the time, making use of early polygonal graphics to give it some extra oomph. Original developers Game Arts, already well-established on the Sega CD thanks to Lunar and others, figured Silpheed was due for a renaissance and pulled off the same trick by having it demonstrate what the platform could do. The SCD Silpheed similarly uses polygons for its ships, but goes one step further by having FMV featuring pre-rendered polygonal graphics play in the background as you focus on the approaching waves of enemies. It can make the framerate stutter a bit, but the resulting effect as you weave around bullets while witnessing enormous space battles happening just adjacent must have been very impressive for 1993. It's a pretty normal shoot 'em up for the era without the spectacle, but I won't argue it doesn't add to its memorability.
  • Wiki Notes: Just some releases. Fellow mod @fisk0 is a big fan of this game, so I think he did much of the work here already. The page already had a header image, but it was low-res and came out blurry. Some inside baseball: When I come across headers like this, I try to recreate the image as best as I can in a higher def to honor the original uploader's wishes. Since it was a split-second scene of a capital ship in the background exploding into polygons, I was pretty fortunate to have hit the screenshot button at that moment.

CD65: Egawa Suguru no Super League CD

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  • Developer: Sega
  • Publisher: Sega
  • JP Release: 1993-08-06
  • NA Release: N/A
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: Super League
  • Genre: Baseball
  • Theme: Baseball
  • Premise: Baseball
  • Availability: Nope. Of all the 16-bit baseball games for Sega to bring back, it probably won't be the one that would require royalties.
  • Preservation: I think it shows a tremendous amount of restraint on the leagues (super or otherwise) of Japanese developers that deal in endless baseball games that we're only now getting the Sega CD's second one after almost two years. More so, that Sega put both of them out themselves: the previous was in fact this game's direct predecessor, Pro Yakyuu Super League CD [Mega Archive CD II]. In 1993 there continued to be an untapped market for those looking to bring the World's Most Boring Sport to a cutting-edge optical media frontier of fancy audio and grainy FMV, but we get a bit of both of those here as the game boots up so you can't argue it isn't fulfilling some of that potential. Egawa Suguru was a fairly heel-like pitcher that eventually left the sport close to his peak and became an analyst, which is the role he occupies here as a Madden-type commentating on games and offering some tips about your opponent's strengths and weaknesses. There wasn't another Super League after this so I'm guessing the celebrity endorsement didn't help much.
  • Wiki Notes: Brand new page. Getting a wiki workout this entry. A wikork- wikou- Nope, bailing.

CD66: Keio Flying Squadron

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  • Developer: Victor Entertainment
  • Publisher: Victor Entertainment (JP) / JVC Musical Industries (NA/EU)
  • JP Release: 1993-08-06
  • NA Release: February 1995
  • EU Release: October 1994
  • Franchise: Keio Flying Squadron
  • Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal)
  • Theme: Underaged Bunny Girls Riding Dragons into Battle
  • Premise: A genius-level tanuki has stolen the key to an ark full of advanced alien technology, and only the part-alien caretaker and her pet dragon are capable of recovering it, even if it means defeating anthros, dragons, Shinto gods, and the US and Russian militaries. This is all set in the 19th century, incidentally.
  • Availability: Sadly not available.
  • Preservation: Keio Flying Squadron is the Sega CD's answer to Cho Aniki, Parodius, and all the other comedic shoot 'em ups that were showing up the overly serious R-Types and Gradii that were dominating the space. Of course, cute anime girls with tiny hitboxes would eventually become the norm rather than the exception for this genre once the Touhou era arrived, but here it was enough of a novelty to draw in a crowd amused by its unpredictable and irreverent antics. Being a Sega CD game it also benefitted from (what else?) some animated cutscenes, but these were done professionally by major anime creators Studio Pierrot: a company that at the time was popular due to exorcist action show YuYu Hakusho but would eventually grow to monolithic heights with Naruto and Bleach a decade later. Keio Flying Squadron saw a couple sequels despite its low initial sales, evidently picking up a cult fandom at some point. I'm guessing it was mostly Sega CD fans looking for something, anything, to play that wasn't FMV garbage. But that's just a guess.
  • Wiki Notes: Absolutely no work needed.

CD67: Jangou World Cup

No Caption Provided
  • Developer: Victor Entertainment
  • Publisher: Victor Entertainment
  • JP Release: 1993-08-27
  • NA Release: N/A
  • EU Release: N/A
  • Franchise: Jangou
  • Genre: Mahjong
  • Theme: Board Games
  • Premise: Droppin' tiles and makin' piles. Of money.
  • Availability: I sincerely doubt it.
  • Preservation: Finally, the Jango Fett Star Wars soccer game we've all been waiting for. Easier to take all those headers when you're wearing a beskar steel helmet. Nope, just kidding, Jangou refers to an expert-level mahjong player so the title would suggest some kind of battle royale between the world's (though let's be real, it's probably just Japan and maybe China) best mahjonggers. The Riichi-Elite(e)s. The Illumahjongi. In other words... it's another mahjong game! Hooray! Though like baseball games they're surprisingly thin on the ground here on the Sega CD, as opposed to the SFC where they were already up to a dozen of both by late 1993. (By the by, the only other mahjong game for Sega CD so far is the manga-based Gambler Jiko Chuushinha 2: Gekitou! Tokyo Mahjong Land Hen [Mega Archive CD Part IV].) I suspect the offices of Victor Entertainment were getting a little too rowdy and zany during Keio Flying Squadron's production cycle so they probably made this exceptionally dry board game sim at the same time to even out the mood. Beyond some traditional eastern music, there's not much "CD"-ish about this game—apparently part of a long-running computer mahjong series by Victor—though there's a certain chunkiness to the sound of the tiles being placed that makes it more exciting than it probably should be. This game may not be about Star Wars bounty hunters after all, but make no mistake: you still spend the whole time searching for Han. That's a mahjong joke. I'm trying, here.
  • Wiki Notes: Screenshots and text.
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Indie Game of the Week 344: Guacamelee! 2

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¡Hola amigos y amigas! Mi nombre es Mento. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? But that's enough of my powerful command over the Spanish language for now, as this week we're featuring a Mexican-themed game to celebrate the Day of the Dead in a fashionably late manner. It's Guacamelee! 2, the second in the luchador explormer series from Drinkbox Studios, a developer from the Mexico-adjacent country of Canada. (Yes, my geography is just as estimable as my foreign language skills.) I'll admit that I wasn't fully impressed by the first Guacamelee! due to some uneven boss difficulty and late-game mob fights that dragged on forever due to some colored shield nonsense, but since then Drinkbox has since become a studio to watch between excellent games like 2016's Severed and last year's Nobody Saves the World. As the 2018 release of Guacamelee! 2 fits snugly between the two, I had every expectation to see a greatly improved sequel.

What I found shocked and horrified me.

Well, OK, it did neither of those things; I'm past the halfway point though and there's a familiar sinking feeling as more abilities become unlocked. As in the first game, the color-coded power-ups (blue is an air-dash, red is an uppercut, green is a slam, and so on) are both relevant to the explormer traversal—the map helpfully once again remembering where each inaccessible area is and the color of the thing blocking it, which makes backtracking for 100% much less painful—and to the brawler combat, which does indeed reintroduce the shields that require those specific power-ups to break, if only temporarily. Tougher encounters involve more of these shielded foes mixed together, requiring you to essentially pull off the video game version of patting your head while rubbing your stomach as you try to decipher the chaotic melee in front of you before you can start busting heads. The combat, for what it's worth, remains compelling between its air juggles and dodge rolls and various combos: a minor antagonist from the first game with a flame for a head gets you up to speed on effective chains with each new power-up earned. It can just be a little much occasionally, and since a lot of moves have animation priority there's an inertia that makes it hard to quickly switch from offense to defense if an enemy is about to swing at you, or if you whiff because they popped up behind you. It's fine, and I always like a combat engine that lets me throw enemies into stage hazards to kill them, but it doesn't feel that much more improved over the original; maybe there's some late-game power-ups to make it more intriguing.

You'll quickly learn the ability to switch between the lands of the living and dead, and if anything the latter is the more lively one.
You'll quickly learn the ability to switch between the lands of the living and dead, and if anything the latter is the more lively one.

I can happily confirm that the game's sense of humor is still as delightfully stupid as ever, combining corny dad jokes with random internet memes in a way that is never as overly embarrassing as you might dread. There was a lot of this in Nobody Saves the World too, as well as the first Guacamelee! of course (Severed was a tad more sober), so I've become accustomed to it. Hell, reading enough of my own material is a sufficient vaccine of sorts for crappy humor tolerance (and this isn't the first time I or someone else has compared my jokes to smallpox). Getting back to the game, Guacamelee! 2 establishes that seven years have passed since the heroic luchador Juan defeated his undead nemesis Carlos Calaca at the end of the first game—they make you replay it in manner not unlike the prologue to Symphony of the Night, and boy howdy you better believe they reference the famous dialogue—and settled down with the sacrificial heroine, Lupita, eventually developing a dad bod from too many avocados while pining for his glory days as the masked savior of the world. However, his caprine mentor Uay Chivo suddenly requests his presence to defeat a sinister lucha rival, Salvador, over in the Darkest Timeline: failure to stop his plans may lead to the destruction of the entire Mexiverse itself. The mask is back on and Juan has his excuse to go back to beating up skeletons and combing maps for upgrades.

Guacamelee! 2 feels more it's polishing up its moves than trying to innovate on the original; it's been a while since I played the first, admittedly, but much of the game's quirks remain for better and worse. A few obvious changes include expanding on Juan's "pollo" form, which now has its own (almost admittedly better) combat moveset along with some unique battle upgrades like a slide and a diagonal charge attack, both of which get a heavy workout while platforming as well. That, of course, means a few extra shield colors to make combat that much more awkward to parse. It sometimes feels like I'm playing the Streets of Rage equivalent of Simon Says: orange, red, red, green, blue, brown, orange, red, purple and remembering all the moves that correspond to them is a typical fight where I'm at—and lord help the colorblind, who'll have an even more enervating time with this kaleidoscopic nightmare. At least the platforming remains stellar, though these optional gauntlets to earn some magical key parts for a big Chicken Illuminati secret level (don't ask) might prove to be my undoing if they're all as difficult as the one I just completed. Some real nasty trial-and-error business.

I could be mistaken, but I think these white shields might be new. You don't need any specific attack to break them, but instead need to apply pressure with enough consecutive blows. Easier said than done if there's a dozen other enemies trying to knock you out of your combo.
I could be mistaken, but I think these white shields might be new. You don't need any specific attack to break them, but instead need to apply pressure with enough consecutive blows. Easier said than done if there's a dozen other enemies trying to knock you out of your combo.

Regardless, whether the new changes are significant or minor, the first Guacamelee! didn't need a whole lot of improvement on its explormer fundamentals—the issues were always with its late-game difficulty spikes and hectic multicolored crowd control, and I can only speak to the latter right now as still being a factor. However, for as much as I braced myself for a similarly sour experience I have to admit to enjoying this game a lot so far. The two temples I've played through (I'm on my way to the third and final) had some inventive platforming puzzles and combat scenarios alike and there's a definite sense that the crew behind the game applied everything they'd learned making the first one to produce a much more confident sequel, even if it doesn't feel like they went out of the way to fix what was wrong with it. Given how vibrant the world is, it might be said that they just painted over all the cracks instead.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Oof, yeah, pretty much the same late-game issues as Guacamelee!, right down to a very unpleasant boss fight with a certain cat-person. Maybe the difficulty is a little more forgiving or I've just gotten better at dealing with this franchise's nonsense, but I wasn't hitting my head against the final challenges quite as much. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that, while it has its moments, it's probably a little more even-keeled with regards to difficulty spikes. The gauntlets where you're blasting bomb monsters before they explode and insta-kill you really did suck a cajone though. I'll keep it at 4 out of 5 because I really did enjoy my time with it more consistently than the first. (Oh boy, though, making a whole bonus area mocking those who insult-reviewed the first game for its obnoxious use of memes was a real low point. "Figuratively written by Reddit" is right.)

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64 in 64: Episode 35

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Welcome to a spooooky episode of 64 in 64, and what's scarier than racing and fishing games? Yeah, I flaked out on doing a horror-themed episode of one of these. Ideal time for Resident Evil 2 to make one of the slots, but I decided I didn't want to play that game. The random choice algorithm wasn't really in a seasonal mood either, it turns out. Still, you can get some cask-strength Halloween energy most places today so why not treat this as an oasis of relative serenity? I mean, there's still pain and suffering and insanity but I'm the one taking all that on so don't you worry none.

Right, an introduction that isn't just me taking a glance at the PC clock and realizing what day it is. Hello! This is 64 in 64, a (currently) monthly retrospective on N64 games with an eye on judging how well they've held up and how they might be received by a modern audience browsing their premium tier Nintendo Switch Online retro game libraries for something to fill the time. Perhaps that time is sixty-four minutes exactly? Well, that sounds like an unusually specific length for a lunch break and/or commute journey but who am I to call you a liar, you filthy liar? If any of the above applies to you and your suspiciously particular needs I hope this series helps you out. If a guy from Nintendo happens to read this: A) I bought all these games legally as far as you or anyone else knows; B) Say hi to my middle school friend's uncle for me; and C) I hope you feel sufficiently inspired by all the research on display to do some overdue moving and shaking over there.

However, whether we happen to be a Nintendo guy or not, we all have to follow the rules (well, technically, only I have to):

  1. Each episode of 64 in 64 covers two N64 games, though once upon a time I used to have enough energy to do three. Each is played for sixty-four minutes exactly. I've split each playthrough into four quarterly chunks for the sake of better journalizing my efforts. I'm like the Sammy Pepys of the N64 (no, he was not the inventor of Pepsi).
  2. The pile of N64 games I want to try out is ever dwindling to nothing like a bonfire on its final cinders, but fortunately I only get to pick one game to cover. The second is picked for me by a malevolent AI super-entity posing as a browser random chooser app to torment any humans foolish enough to incur its attention. It says hi.
  3. As well as the quarterly check-ins I've also written some insightful drivel about the game's legacy, its longevity, and its eligibility for the Switch Online N64 library. I've kept the sarcasm to a moderate level. Moderate for me, anyway.
  4. There is one special rule, one so iron-clad that I've only ever broken it twice and probably will again who am I kidding, and that's never to touch a game slated to be added to the Switch Online library or one that already resides in its vaunted halls. Any opinion proffered as to its suitability for inclusion is kinda moot if that decision has already been made. As of this month that also includes Mario Party 3, and I'd celebrate being free from the capricious whims of another devious CPU except I think the random chooser is looking this way. Psst, act inconspicuous.

It was only after inadvertently putting "Episode 35" in the title of this brand new series that I realized my error and had to quickly write and publish all thirty-four previous episodes overnight before anyone caught on to the gaffe. (That's also my excuse for their quality.)

Episode 1Episode 2Episode 3Episode 4Episode 5
Episode 6Episode 7Episode 8Episode 9Episode 10
Episode 11Episode 12Episode 13Episode 14Episode 15
Episode 16Episode 17Episode 18Episode 19Episode 20
Episode 21Episode 22Episode 23Episode 24Episode 25
Episode 26Episode 27Episode 28Episode 29Episode 30
Episode 31Episode 32Episode 33Episode 34Episode 35
Episode 36Episode 37---

Iggy's Reckin' Balls / Iggy-kun no Bura Bura Poyon (Pre-Select)

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History: Iggy's Reckin' Balls sees Californian studio Iguana Entertainment take a break from their usual annual sports games and dinosaur hunts to try their hand at a mascot platformer with a (not chameleon) twist: rather than jump around an open world collecting gewgaws the player is instead competing with other spherical cartoon characters in a series of races up towers that vaguely resemble those crazy marble courses you could buy with all the tubes and such. It also frequently uses a grappling hook: a mechanic the video game industry, outside of the occasional Bionic Commando, wouldn't really exploit in full until around 2015/2016, known as the Year of Grappling Hooks to gaming historians.

This is our second Iguana game, and a large part of why I chose it is due to giving them the benefit of the doubt after the first of theirs we played: Forsaken 64 (Episode 31). Of their other games, well, I'm almost certainly going to get around to a Turok one of these days but I'll probably avoid the South Park FPS for as long as possible. The rest are sports games I could do without, but I'm sure the random picker will select a few for me in due time. (It's also our fourth Acclaim game, for those counting. The others include South Park Rally, Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M., and Forsaken.)

This is a total curiosity pick. I've known about Iggy's Reckin' Balls since forever ago because how could you not with that name but I've never taken the opportunity to play it before. It never struck me as a particularly well-acclaimed (so to speak) or even well-liked game but certainly one that stood out in the N64's ocean of third-party mediocrity, and often that's what gets you immortalized more than uninspired competency. Some might question why I'm covering two games about balls in as many episodes (we covered Tetrisphere last time) and what that might say about any repressed psychosexual yearnings, and to that I say "ball jokes are funny, and I need every crutch I can get".

16 Minutes In

Reaching first place gives you the privilege of setting off the demolition charges to destroy the course you just played. It's almost therapeutic.
Reaching first place gives you the privilege of setting off the demolition charges to destroy the course you just played. It's almost therapeutic.

Well, here goes reckin'. Went with the first grand prix of the standard race mode to see what's what. Hopefully this game has an onboarding ramp because I've seen this in action and still didn't quite get it. So the idea is that you're rolling or hopping along a fixed-track 3D (think Klonoa) obstacle course and jumping across gaps and up platforms when needed, using the grappling hook to either latch on to the terrain above or to attack your competitors. Each course has its own rules, hazards, and number of laps: the general goal is to head ever upwards towards the checkered platform, but even if you can't see the full course there's always arrows telling you where to head next. (By the way, I opted for the Jack O'Lantern looking guy, Narlie, since I'm getting in the seasonal mood and all.)

So, two observations from this inaugural segment: The first is that the game is really tough. Like, the courses are straightforward enough once you get acclimated to using the hookshot and its length (apparently both its reach and the top speed are different for each character? Narlie's somewhere in the middle for both, I think, but the game doesn't give you hard stats like it would in Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong Racing) to reach higher platforms, but actually beating your opponents to the end requires a level of precision play I didn't expect from this colorful party game of a racer. Every CPU knows exactly what they're doing and where they're going and they're pretty aggressive to boot, so you really need to take a few attempts before you're in a position to beat them and even then there's still a luck/RNG factor regarding moving platform cycles and other timers. However, for certain courses the CPU might be dumb as hell; I've yet to figure out if there's any consistency, but they'll whiz right to the end taking the absolute most efficient path for one course and then in others they'll get lost for a whole minute. The second observation is that there doesn't seem to be a limit on retries, so you can just start over if it's looking like last place. If this is just an exclusive courtesy for the tutorial-tier grand prix or a game-wide thing is yet to be determined. (I say tutorial, but the game has none. Just throws you in with the proverbial lions from the get-go.)

32 Minutes In

On the plus side, the game has a lot of characters to choose from. On the negative side, they're all these hideous ball things. Oddly, the protagonist Iggy is perhaps one of the creepiest, more so than even the teeth guy.
On the plus side, the game has a lot of characters to choose from. On the negative side, they're all these hideous ball things. Oddly, the protagonist Iggy is perhaps one of the creepiest, more so than even the teeth guy.

Dear God, this game does not pull its punches. I completed the Easy Street GP in pole position, albeit with a lot of resets, but three races into the first "proper" GP, Downtown, I'm getting my ass handed to me. I've started utilizing the power-ups they give you a bit more, but certain ones like missiles seem useless given how chaotic the game is and how you have little idea where anyone else is besides a progress tracker on the left side that tells you how far in front (or behind, frequently in my case) from the rest you are. Even the speed boosts, which are normally so reliable in games like this, can be a crapshoot if (for example) you weren't aware that the next part of the course is mostly vertical where any increased horizontal movement is redundant. Hammering the grapple is often necessary for areas where the layers of platforms are close together, though if there's some distance you might need to jump and grapple instead. As always, opponents seem to know exactly where to go, so if all else fails I can try to follow them and remember the route for the next attempt.

Seconds before this block was about to end, as I was retrying the third race after almost getting lapped by the clown ball yet again, the game crashed. Can't say if it was the game itself punishing me for too many restarts or just an emulator snafu, but either way I'm half-tempted to skip ahead to avoid repeats and half-tempted to not do that because the game's only going to get tougher. There's ten of these GPs, incidentally, so I've no idea what the difficulty curve is going to look like around the eighth or ninth one. Maybe a spectral hand comes out of the screen to punch me in the face repeatedly. Again, it would at least be thematically apropos to the season.

48 Minutes In

Finally.
Finally.

Switching to Charlie, the aforementioned clown ball (and, according to internet research, the fastest racer; so I wasn't just imagining it) and I managed to reach the third course of Downtown and it crashed again. Happens when restarting the race as well as after successfully completing it in first place. I'll chalk it up to some odd emulation issue and move onto the other main game mode for our final block coming up.

Apparently I'm blind as there is in fact a pretty detailed "trainin'" tutorial available on the main start menu, rather than the game mode menu that immediately follows which is where you'd expect it to be. The tutorial covers the basics I'd already figured out—A to jump, B to grapple, Z to use your current power-up—but in addition there's techniques like hanging underneath a platform and using your wrecking (sorry, reckin') ball momentum to swing yourself up to new heights. There's also several ways you can grapple and throw your fellow racers, the more elaborate they are the longer they stay stunned afterwards; though it should be noted that stopping to attack is still going to delay you as well, so any other opponents might take the opportunity to get ahead. I couldn't even imagine the level of mastery you'd need to pull off these tricks without losing too much time, unless they adjust for player error by making the CPU bad at the more advanced tech too.

64 Minutes In

Absolute mayhem. Best tactic I found is to go somewhere remote and just keep firing projectiles into the central mass and hope you hit something.
Absolute mayhem. Best tactic I found is to go somewhere remote and just keep firing projectiles into the central mass and hope you hit something.

The other two modes include a time trial, which I'll leave well enough alone, and the Battle Mode which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Three balloons trail behind you to represent your lives, and upon dying you get to turn into a bomb and chase after the still-living like a revenant out for vengeance. Yes, it's exactly the same as Mario Kart 64, but try not to call too much attention to it for the devs' sake. Anyway, the battles are just as chaotic as the races but at least the balloons are easier to see at a distance if an enemy is closing in. There's some heat-seeking lasers that seem tough to avoid—like if you had a Mario Kart battle mode with the blue shells included—and there's one power-up that shrinks everyone else that I swear I never picked up once.

After sixty four minutes I can attest that my balls are thoroughly recked. At least I have a clearer idea of what this game is now and, honestly, it feels like the type of game that would be due for a comeback. The party game aspect combined with the tough grapple-based platforming all seem a little ahead of their time and better suited for today's Indie crowd, ideally with a lower price tag and a much higher level of quality. Actually playing it is rough in multiple respects: the sense of speed combined with the N64's draw distance does not make for a great experience if you happen to be a fan of being able to react to things ahead of you in time, and the opponent difficulty is absurdly strong for no particular reason I can see besides making the game's "time to beat" accelerate towards infinity. Though, if that is the case, it's an odd decision to let players restart races endlessly for a better result. It's a game where I'm not sure who it's for, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that it found an audience that adored its challenging and unusual take on a multiplayer competitive racer.

How Well Has It Aged?: A Light Reck-ommend. I don't think I need to play it again and the N64 wasn't hurting for novelty racers, though few were as strange as this one. Props to Iguana for taking such a big swing, so to speak, on a racing/platformer game featuring spherical wrecking ball characters that look like they rolled right off the Madballs assembly line. Plus, I steeled all the resolve I had and didn't make a single joke about deez nuts throughout this whole review. It was tough but I managed to pass my own test...icles. Aw, shit.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: I Reckin' Not. Iggy's Reckin' Balls, like many of Acclaim's properties, were bought by Canadian nostalgia-grocers Throwback Entertainment whom have been slowly rereleasing those games on Steam. They recently signed off on letting Nightdive handle that excellent PowerSlave remaster and they've put out N64 games like Extreme-G 2 in the past (though in that game's case there was a contemporary Windows version to make it easier for them). No clue if this so-so game featuring a mascot for a defunct company is going to be something they're interested in reviving.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. (I'm surprised it has no support; I figured this would be a cult favorite among achievement fanatics and fans of challenging games in general.)

Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Random)

No Caption Provided

History: The Nushi Tsuri series, known in the west as Legend of the River King (or sometimes Harvest Fishing, to tie it into Natsume's thematically and visually similar Harvest Moon games), is a fishing-RPG hybrid that prioritizes upgrading the tools of the angling trade and procuring the right bait to hook the biggest and rarest fish in any given region, earning XP and/or money and thus improving your odds of eventually reeling in the titular sovereign of the watery deep. As might be expected from this subtitle, which means "Riding on the Sea Salt Breeze", this N64-exclusive sequel includes ocean fishing as well, raising the stakes by having you reel up enormous groupers, swordfish, and sharks.

Victor Interactive was a briefly-lived merger of Victor Entertainment, a Japanese multimedia publisher that often worked with EA to publish its games in Japan, and Pack-In-Video, another publisher that occasionally developed licensed games: they were behind Rambo, Predator, and Knight Rider for NES, for example. Victor Interactive would soon after be bought and folded into Marvelous Entertainment, the current owners of the Story of Seasons property. We've met Victor once before on this feature with Harvest Moon 64 (Episode 15), so the relationship between the two properties is certainly more than just skin-deep, but this is going to be it for them unless we ever get around to the first Nushi Tsuri 64.

A little apprehensive about this one. There are no fan translations for Shiokaze ni Notte that I could find and we're talking an RPG about fishing here; there's going to be many terms I probably wouldn't recognize even if they were in English, so I expect to get very lost over the next hour. I did play a little of Harvest Fishing back in the day and bounced off it due to how boring it was, so that bodes well. Turns out fishing works better as a mini-game in RPGs rather than the whole game.

16 Minutes In

Just a bear, hanging out in the middle of the village. Everyone just seems cool with it.
Just a bear, hanging out in the middle of the village. Everyone just seems cool with it.

Much like a vase on a thin stand in a cartoon or Crime Boss: Rockay City, this playthrough was a disaster anyone could've predicted. I cannot read a damn thing. There were multiple eras of how much Japanese text a game can feasibly display with the resolution of the console and we're in that least accommodating era where displaying kanji is fine but furigana not so much, and I can only read hiragana and katakana (and even then only on a good day). From what I've been able to pick up, you play as any one of four members of a family of avid nature lovers (a blue older son, a red androgynous sibling, a purple dad, and an orange mom) and set out to fish and collect bugs and flowers from your home village at first, with perhaps an eye towards conquering the whole region. Conquering in the sense of cataloguing all its flora and fauna, anyway. All I've been doing since I left the homestead as the orange character (which turned out to be the mom; she wears her hair under a bandana so it's hard to tell) is finding bugs and picking flowers. Any attempts to actually fish have been met with failure: the fish move insanely quickly, to the extent that I'm fairly sure an emulator issue is responsible (nice, two for two this month).

Drama struck when I ran out of room to collect new bugs, either that or I'd already found all the unique species here and am unable to interact with any dupes. The town, which looks to be partially submerged, is full of random people enjoying their time and all manner of wild and domesticated beasts—I can't catalogue those, probably because they're too big to fit in any of my terrariums—as well as what look to be primo fishing spots, were fishing something I was capable of doing. Last, I should probably note this art style before moving on: they look like Playmobil figures and I'm not sure why the visual style is this drastically cartoonish given how natural-looking the plants and wildlife are (they're super detailed too; the game must know its fanbase of hobby-grade biologists). Time to poke away at this indecipherable game for another sixteen minutes, I guess.

32 Minutes In

I won! I think?
I won! I think?

This is kinda like the video game equivalent of being in the waiting room at a doctor's office. I can't do the thing I'm here to do, but maybe I can read a magazine or look at my phone or something. Which is to say, even in a fishing RPG where you can't fish there are ways to waste time that isn't usual amount of time wasted on fishing. I've placed my bugs in a terrarium so now I can pick up more, if I wanted to or could even figure out why I would want to, and I've stopped by all the local stores (I can't afford anything besides two vegetables) and play an Othello knock-off board game that someone shoehorned math into, just in case anyone wondered how you could possibly improve on Othello.

I'll be real with you folks, this one's looking like a wash. What's troubling is that I can see a fail state on the horizon: you have a limited amount of stamina that's constantly ticking down and an equally limited means of replenishing it with no money. I found the fish shop but, well, the only thing they want to buy is fish and I don't have any of those. If I could sell these bugs or flowers at the fish shop or the greengrocers I might be able to hang on for the full hour, but then I remembered how the concept of commerce works and I don't think those are going to be viable options. I suppose I could try eating the bugs instead? When did this suddenly turn into a grim poverty simulator like Papers, Please?

48 Minutes In

I came across this graphic in a book I found (read: stole) in some dude's house. I can't tell if the fish is chomping on some deer or if someone's workshopping a new mermaid variant.
I came across this graphic in a book I found (read: stole) in some dude's house. I can't tell if the fish is chomping on some deer or if someone's workshopping a new mermaid variant.

Determined to actually do some damn fishing in this damn fishing game, I underwent some trial and error to figure out how Nushi Tsuri's angling system worked rather than bailing on it with loser talk like "the emulator's at fault" or "I need to visit my parents in the hospital while I still can rather than spend a whole hour bashing my ahead against an ancient fishing game I can't even read", so while I sit here ignoring what sound like very urgent phone calls I've just been practicing on some small fry. Turns out years of finely-honed fishing mini-game instincts were all wrong: you don't fight the fish when they're trying to pull away on your bait, but rather just sit there passively while they tire themselves out and only reel once they stop resisting. It's a surprisingly hands-off method: only needing to reel whenever the fish takes a break makes the whole thing feel like a very rudimentary "red light, green light" mini-game. I guess I can chalk that up to the game's age to some extent, but I want to say even while I was toiling away in the figurative landfills that were the JP-exclusive SFC and PCE back-catalogs for the sake of wiki research I encountered far more sophisticated angling sims than this. Maybe I'm still pissy that I threw in the towel so quickly when it proved to be so simple, perhaps deceptively so given how deep in the reeds Nushi Tsuri is about having the right fishing accoutrements (there's so many types of rod, hook, bait, and lure on sale at the local fishing store; unless you know what fish you're specifically aiming for and what it needs, so much of it seems like blind luck).

Anyway, I did a fishing. I fushed, to use the correct past tense verb. Now to sell these healthy splashboys to the local sushi place (I can read "sushi" on signs just fine) and earn about enough money... to pay for all the bait I wasted. Truly a fishous cycle. (Oh, what, you're going to carp at me for that? Kiss my bass sole.)

64 Minutes In

I spent this whole block trying to hook my nemesis here after so many near misses, and it turned out to be a 21cm-long white-spotted char. Let's see Herman Melville write a book about this.
I spent this whole block trying to hook my nemesis here after so many near misses, and it turned out to be a 21cm-long white-spotted char. Let's see Herman Melville write a book about this.

Very little further progress was made but I will rescind a little bit what I said earlier about this being a rudimentary fishing game. The behavior of the fish can be very erratic, so you really have to pay attention to what it's doing and what seems like a safe time to start reeling. There's no gauges, no idea of how taut the line is or how exhausted the fish is becoming, and the only way to tell how far the fish is from where you're standing is the angle of the line (the steeper the closer, naturally). I haven't decided yet if that's because the game is going for a very natural feel in tandem with its environmentalist themes or if all the fancy gauges are upgrades you can buy with enough cash and progress made. I can't imagine the whole game is just this; a fishing game has to have hooks, after all.

So that's the end of my sorry attempts to make sense of this game. It's a prolific series in Japan, one that appeals to both fisherpeople and those with an affinity for games that let you gain experience and grow stronger at any given pursuit until you've become a master at it and can reap the rewards for your diligence. I appreciate that Animal Crossing bugs/fish collectathon aspect to it too, and I'm sure with a little digging (and a lot more Japanese fluency) I could glean many interesting facts about the natural ecosystem in Japan. Or wherever in the South Pacific this game is actually set; I heard you go to Hawaii at some point. Probably need to catch a lot more fish to pay for that plane ticket.

How Well Has It Aged?: Cod Only Knows. I would need to have a stronger sense of how to properly play the game and the kind of progression arc it has before I can speak with any authority about how well it's held up as an example of its genre. Saying that, I'd probably also need to play a bunch of modern fishing games for something to compare it to. Is it fair to say I liked Final Fantasy XV and Tales of Arise as fishing games more than this? I mean, I did more than just fishing in those games, but the fishing was excellent. At any rate, I don't think I'd want to continue with this game even if it was available in English, but I'll admit some broken part of me does want to fill out those fish and bug bestiaries...

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Troubtful. Marvelous is working with Nintendo to put Harvest Moon 64 on the Japanese Switch Online service at least (though someone somewhere is certainly dragging their heels about it) so there's a moderate chance they might follow that with the lesser regarded Nushi Tsuri games if this partnership turns out to be fruitful for them.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. (Really, what is Retro Achievements coming to when it doesn't even have a set of achievements for a Japan-only N64 fishing RPG sequel?)

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