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.)

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

• Iguana Entertainment / Acclaim
• 1998-07-31 (NA), 1998-08-01 (EU), 1998-08-28 (JP)
• =119th N64 Game Released

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

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

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

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

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)

• Victor Interactive / Victor Interactive
• 2000-05-26 (JP)
• 326th N64 Game Released

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

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

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

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

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)

This Halloween month's seen killer sharks, demons, and ghosts on IGotW so what better way to end than with, uh, more demons? Demon Turf is a 3D platformer from Fabraz and Playtonic Friends with a sorta Doom-ish aesthetic by way of PaRappa the Rapper. It uses 2D sprites against 3D environments, possibly as a means to keep the game running as fluidly as possible as that would be paramount for the type of game it is: one of those "git gud" platformers with time trials and the like, albeit a rare 3D variant. Demon Turf sees the diminutive "Beebz" decide to topple the Demon King from his throne after a perceived slight by methodically defeating his four lieutenants and taking enough batteries to power up the gate leading into the Demon King's castle, wherein she plans to beat his ass. The game is split into four hub worlds (plus a more general town hub full of vendors, mini-games, and other bonuses) and each of those four has seven regular stages and one boss stage. Upon defeating the boss, the seven normal stages are remixed to be harder and have more collectibles on offer, essentially expanding the number to fifteen per world (and sixty overall). They're the mostly linear type of "obstacle course" platforming levels, popularized by the likes of Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario 3D World, and in addition to sweeping up a set of sweet-based collectibles there's also a time trial for every stage to overcome as well, though both of these additional objectives are optional.

So, starting with the good. The controls and platforming are generally excellent, though often they're not quite sharp enough for the demanding tasks of some of the tougher challenges I've encountered so far. It's sort of like a luxury car in a racing game: mostly does the job for any task you give it, though it leaves you wanting something with a little more horsepower for the truly demanding courses. The traversal upgrades you earn while playing are a bit more mixed though: the hookshot's fine, even if it has a slightly annoying quirk where you can't use it after a double-jump, but the fast wheel transformation is really awkward to control due to the inconsistent rules regarding its momentum. I'm a fan of the aesthetic and the general vibe of the underworld being this place of mostly passive assholes always on each other's case—kinda reminds me of Disgaea, even—but the 2D sprites can be a bit limiting in certain conditions (like, say, if someone's directly below you they tend to appear as a straight line; fortunately, all the collectibles have 3D models so they don't suffer from this "dimensional blindness"). Musically, it's very reminiscent of Splatoon: the tracks have this hip-hop bouncy irreverence to them with distorted vocals that aren't completely crystal, but you can just about make out what they're saying.

As is often the case, there's not so much any one significant failing but a legion of minor annoyances that eventually aggregate into a big snowball of displeasure. For one, I've never been a fan of taking time trials and making them part of the 100% progression in a collectathon platformer, albeit while still not part of the critical path to the end of the game. Time trials are divisive things that I personally find annoying to deal with in part because they're usually mutually exclusive to hunting collectibles—you can encourage players to explore or dash to the end but not both, also the fundamental flaw of the whole Sonic franchise—which means playing every course at least twice, but also because you can waste so much time getting through the longer levels only to discover close to the end that the time target has passed. The game also lets you set your own checkpoints similar to Fred Wood's Love series of lo-fi masocore platformers, but for as generous as this feature might seem it's also something that will slip your mind a lot while playing and so you'll often find yourself cursing your own carelessness after being sent back to the start of the level from a mistimed jump. Speaking of which, this game has a bad case of what I call "Media Moleculeitis": by which I don't mean that you got so pissy that no-one bought your game maker that so you go three years without announcing anything and are forced to decimate your staff, but rather the situation when you build all your platforms with rounded edges to make them more "whimsical" and the result is that players reach the platforms by a matter of pixels and watch helplessly as the character slides off these curved edges to their deaths rather than celebrating what should've been a comforting near-miss. I also don't particularly care for the combat: the usual way to complete any given beatdown is to push enemies off cliffs or into deadly zones (they tend to be spikes or flames with a red tint so you know they're fatal) by using either quick or charged punching attacks with increasing levels of knockback. What this essentially means is that success in combat often boils down to a physics engine playing nice, which they so rarely do, and praying to Baphomet or whomever will listen that enemies don't hit the corner of something and go flying off at an undesired tangent or get stuck against a wall (and yes, this unpredictable awkwardness synergizes quite nicely with the time trial feature on levels with a lot of combat encounters, thank you for your query). Finally, Demon Turf also has that double-edged sword of having a lot of "ideas": I'm sure you know the type of game experience I speak of, where the designers took every conceit for a level they had on the whiteboard in the meeting room and ended up with a significantly skewed hit-or-miss ratio. It feels like only the Mario team can change the script every level and still come out smelling like roses each time; everyone else runs into issues with certain one-and-done stage props or features that aren't prolific enough to warrant the attention when it's crunch time for the design and QA teams, unlike the more vital game-wide stuff to get right like the controls or any major glitches. Oh, and just one last extra thing: the boss fights are straight trash. I could elaborate, but I've gone overlong here so just trust me.

I could go on and on (I decided to mercifully end that last paragraph at a little over 500 words) but even if the game does all it can to frustrate me on the regular—and it certainly won't stop doing so as I enter its latter half and the increased challenge that'll present—it has a moxie, a creative streak, and a general competency to it that I can't completely dislike. When you're just running and jumping around the game doesn't feel half-bad at all. If you want an idea, start with something fundamentally sound like a 3D Mario and add both a double-jump and a spin move that operates like a flutter jump or glide in mid-air, and the order you do the double-jump and spin produces different effects: going spin then double-jump boosts you forward, making it ideal for long horizontal gaps, while ending with the spin makes it much easier to carefully land on smaller platforms. The camera's somehow not awful—at least, I've had no issues with it, which is very rare for this genre—and run attempts can be reset quickly when you need them to be. The main town hub also has a ton of side-stuff for you to get distracted by, from specially tough levels, arena challenges (skip those), photography missions that offer a bit of a scavenger hunt puzzle, something called Demon Soccer Golf (skip that too), and many cosmetics and minor upgrades to purchase with your hard-earned candy collectibles. A traversal upgrade grants you the means of playing certain levels with props that need those upgrades but they can also help with time trials in a more general sense too; I've decided to put off the tougher courses in case I get another traversal ability later that'll make it easier to beat the timer.

I may have kvetched for like five minutes straight up there, but I choose to see that as a sign that I've become invested in this scrappy little 3D platformer (though I say "little" only in relation to the budget on display; the game is extremely beefy when it comes to the sheer amount of content and I don't doubt for a moment the accuracy of the HowLongToBeat estimate of 35 hours for full completion, which is just a little over that for Donkey Kong 64) and I only yearn for it to be better because I plan to stick with it for the long run to see where it goes and what it does next. There's no doubt in my mind that the team behind this knew exactly what kind of game they wanted to make and deeply loved the genre conventions they were invoking, and boy is that enthusiasm infectious; there's just these moments when I think about dipping and waiting for the more proficient sequel so I won't get vexed by some absolute horsepoop quite so often.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Yeah, the game getting harder didn't really do its faults any favors. That's the kind of thing that tends to get magnified the more insistent the game demands on the player to do well. Also, if there are three rules for games that include time trials, they are A) don't make the levels too long because it's annoying to repeat too much content over and over, B) don't include a bunch of moving platforms and devices you have to wait on as the timer continues to tick along, and C) don't have too much of an RNG aspect to certain elements where a random arbitrary occurrence might kill an otherwise promising run. Demon Turf breaks all three towards the end. If it'd just decided to be more like a chill Banjo-Kazooie type similar to Hell Pie or most other Indie 3D platformers I imagine I'd be far more forgiving, but it's just such a frustrating mess at times despite its imagination and charming aesthetic.

I polished off this Souls run about a day after posting the last entry, so the choice was either dropping this month's 64 in 64 episode now and putting off this finale for two weeks or, well, not doing that. Like a few of the corpses in the Painted World of Ariamis, I figured it was best to not leave people hanging when I could be cutting them down and robbing their bodies instead. (Maybe I'll stay off the analogies for a while.)

So, yes, hail and well met everyone to the final part of this LP wherein I check out a couple of randomizers for the first Dark Souls. I won't say it's been a frequent joy playing through this game with all the modifications—to tacitly reference 64 in 64 again, I think the randomization algorithms of the world just have some sort of grudge against me—but I have enjoyed my time shaking my head in disbelief at the sheer horsepuckey on display. It reminded me why I like watching other people play these randomizer hacks, if not always playing them myself. Good thing Dark Souls remains a fantastic game, so it wasn't too hard to convince myself to keep pushing through it.

Part One can be found here and Part Two is... wait, I'm sure I had a link around here somewhere... oh, it's here. Back of the sofa, would you believe it?

As we begin this final block, I'm still feverishly hunting for the crucial Lordvessel in what few places I have left to fully explore. This comes after running from Anor Londo with my tail between my legs due to an unfortunate Gwyn-featuring tag team match of a boss I was in no mood to parse. I also have three of the four Lord Souls I need to power said absent Lordvessel, so completing that set is another goal of some immediacy.

As for my build, we're rocking a Velka's Rapier +5 and a whole bunch of sorceries using Logan's Catalyst for its S-tier Intelligence scaling: the sword is for mobs, since it cuts down anything in seconds and you can even use it while guarding, while the spells are reserved for bosses and the occasional tough spawn. I've grown particularly fond of Soul Spears by this point in the playthrough, though I can only equip so many. My Estus is at +2 and with no Rite of Kindling it means I have to be judicious with my healing.

Firelink Shrine

• Anastasia's back, and thus so is the bonfire. Big Hat Logan was disappointingly free of sorceries or catalysts to buy. Best thing on him was a single blue titanite chunk (and it was expensive). Just goes to show: never rescue anyone if you can help it.

Darkroot Forest (2nd Visit)

• Joined the Forest Covenant to access Shiva as a merchant later. This is like the third time I've switched covenants; I'm probably getting a reputation as a player.
• Since I wussed out on Gwyn, I dealt with that big Ornstein in the basin to regain some honor. Tough, but I was at the appropriate level to deal with him now. Plus, no life partner to make things awkward (well, if you don't include the various forest wildlife that showed up to watch).
• Sif had been replaced by that blob of many faces that, in the regular game, you meet only once in New Londo after draining it. I've actually fought a few of them now: there's one on the left balcony going into Anor Londo castle that keeps respawning, and since it's worth 5000 souls and is right next to the blacksmith he's a handy amorphous fellow to have around. At any rate, it went down in like three casts of Great Heavy Soul Arrow.
• No Lordvessel here, but Blob-Sif did drop another Firekeeper Soul. Up to +3.

New Londo (2nd Visit)

• Powering through everything down here now, though there's still some tough foes like the stone guardians from the DLC. Absolutely no Darkwraiths though. Congrats, you submerged this place for no reason.
• The Key to the Seal, needed to open up the dam to let the water out, was actually in New Londo about 50 yards away from its door. That's convenient.
• Ingwald had next to nothing to sell, but that's usually the case. I could've bought another pendant if I wanted one.
• Let the water out and marched into the Four Kings boss location. It's the only one that didn't have a fog gate that the Lordvessel dispells, and I remembered why: you have the option to give the Lordvessel to Kaathe instead of Frampt, and he only shows up after this fight.
• The Four Kings fight was... intriguing. Clearly the randomizer couldn't account for how that battle would work with random foes. Ended up facing two Iron Golems and another Gravelord, who I guess I'll call Ni-two. All three were bugged out and unresponsive, but I'll take the easy victory. I've no pride. My prize was a dozen crossbow bolts; honestly, more than I deserved.
• One thing I was worried about: getting out of here. You can warp from the Abyss bonfire without the Lordvessel though, so I decided to zip over to Blighttown via Quelaag's Sister's bonfire.

Blighttown (3rd Visit)

• Ceaseless Discharge and the first half of Lost Izalith is my goal here, since I'd rather do that than Tomb of the Giants or the Great Hollow. However, before I head there I've got a few errands to run.
• First, I defeated Hollow Laurentius. Sorry I said there was some cool shit down here, bro.
• Second, I went to see if Shiva was selling anything useful at his new location next to the big wheel elevator. (He wasn't.)
• Third, spend the souls I got from the Four Kings (or the Three Stooges in this case) fight on upgrading the Pyromancy Flame enough to make Quelana appear, and see if she has anything (she didn't—40k for a Lightning Resist ring? Excuse me?).
• OK, all done, time to hit the lava baths. It's like being in an onsen, only more like an "onfire".

Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith

• Ceaseless was replaced by another Sif, who I'll call Olly. Olly was completely inert when I walked past her, and I remembered that the battle only activates once I grab an item off the altar (that in this case was the weakest sorcery, Soul Arrow). I thought about attacking her then and there to see if I could, but I figured I'd let her cook.
• The first Sif (which substituted for the Gaping Dragon) didn't hop backwards off a ledge, sadly, but this one did. Right over the cliff into the lava. I did say I'd let her cook. Again, I've no pride remaining at this point, so please continue giving me all the rewards for doing nothing.
• The first random corpse I found after the lava drained possessed nothing less than the Lordvessel itself. Holy shit did a wave of relief wash over me. Getting dangerously close to running out of places to look.
• With the Lordvessel in hand, I threw my lot in with Kaathe (Frampt was pissed, but since all he did was eat all the dung pies I gave him and make Firelink unbearable with his chewing noises I'm not too broken up about it) and got to processing some Lord Souls.
• Presently, I've fully opened Tomb of the Giants, Lost Izalith, and Duke's Archive and am now on the hunt for the very last Lord Soul. Besides some stronger sorceries, the Rite of Kindling, that ring that boosts magic damage, and maybe a few more Firekeeper Souls, there's nothing else I really want or need. My spells are already doing close to nuke-level damage, but I guess a few more points in Int wouldn't hurt. Wouldn't hurt me, anyway.
• Wellll, since I'm already down here...
• Firesage is next, and its arena had... Sif again? This jerk of a randomizer wants me to put down Gaming's Most Loyal Dog for a third time? I cried the last time I fought Sif. Granted, they were tears of laughter as I watched her tumble into magma like a Hawaiian Air Bud sequel gone horribly awry, but emotions were had nonetheless.
• Anyway, the branches covering this arena worked for and against the big pupper: it often blocked her from reaching me, but ditto for the spells I was sending her way. Finally we reached an accord when I did a murderous amount of damage with some Dark Bead shots and then we were back to running across big branches and crumbling architecture.
• Because the Demon Ruins is a sucky dungeon, I found two bonfires in a row and barely any enemies before hitting the next boss fight: what is normally the Centipede Demon, and a melee made tougher by all the lava in the arena.
• Instead, it was the Sanctuary Guardian. That big lion thing from the DLC. Absolutely not convinced I could take it, but I got backed up by an unexpected enemy-turned-ally here: the lava. Ol' Kimba the White Lion (more like Alight Lion) couldn't handle the stuff, yet strutted around in it like the Bee Gees heading to the disco. A disco inferno, as it sadly turned out for our leonine chum.
• Beyond here there's no point in continuing without the lava ring. Outie.

Great Hollow (2nd Visit) and Ash Lake

• I found a spell to help out with this place: Fall Control. Casting it makes you more or less immune to fall damage for somewhere short of a minute, though it has its limits for how far you can plummet. Just a matter of sweeping up some annoying enemies as I headed down.
• Ash Lake was as eerie as I remember it. Didn't get any less eerie when I noticed what had replaced the first hydra down here: Kalameet, the Black Dragon of Calamity. Arguably the most dangerous foe in the entire game—he's the only DLC boss that's optional—just seeing him flying around on that beach gave me the jitters. The dude is absurdly resistant to physical and magical damage alike, so it took all my patience and cunning to... watch passively as he misjudged a charge attack and launched himself into the inky black ocean. I'll come right out and admit it: there may be aspects to this enemy randomizer that make the game a tad easier than it was meant to be.
• 60,000 souls for refusing to help a drowning animal later and I encounter the Ancient Dragon. I'm not joining its covenant yet, but I think the bonfire in front of it is another warp destination so it was worth coming all this way. I guess.

Undead Asylum (2nd Visit)

• Had a poke around my old digs even though I was lacking a key. Two specific goals in mind here.
• The first was fighting the Stray Demon. Or, in this case, a fourth Sif. I think the game's just messing with me now.
• The other was visiting Snuggly and trading everything he/she wanted. Naturally, the received barter items were randomized as well. I've included a list below.
• Nothing else to do here, but it was nice to put off Tomb of the Giants for a little while longer. I mean, uh, "to ensure I'm not missing any valuable items".

Side-Note: Snuggly's Trades

Snuggly accepts a lot of specific "warm" and/or "soft" items, most of which I'd found by this point:

• Pendant = Soul of Lord Gwyn (!!)
• Rubbish = Gold Coin
• Bloodred Moss Clump = Hard Leather Gauntlets
• Purple Moss Clump = Red Titanite Chunk
• Blooming Purple Moss Clump = Humanity x5
• Cracked Red Eye Orb = Thief Mask
• Humanity = Grant (a warhammer)
• Twin Humanities = Black Flame (pyro spell)
• Prism Stone = Gough's Great Arrow x3
• Dung Pie = Ring of Favor and Protection (a.k.a. the FAP Ring)
• Pyromancy Flame (Basic) = Xanthous Gloves
• Egg Vermifuge = Guardian Soul (!!)
• Sunlight Medal = Bloodred Moss Clump x4
• Skull Lantern = Red Titanite Chunk
• Xanthous Crown = Humanity x2
• Sack = Elizabeth Mushroom x3

I've yet to find a Sunlight Maggot which is one of the four remaining trades. The other three include the Ring of the Sun Princess, which Andre is selling for 100,000 souls; an ascended Pyromancy Flame, which will cost an arm and a leg to prepare as well; and the Soul of Manus which I'd already used up to make a cool catalyst. Sincerely hoping the last Lord Soul isn't the exchange item for any of those.

Tomb of the Giants

• TotG and Duke's are both sucky in different ways, but Tomb grants me two more vendors once it's done (Rhea and Patches). I had already traded my Skull Lantern to Snuggly but I still have a Light spell, though it meant sacrificing a slot.
• This place is one of the few that's been made much harder in this randomized playthrough. I was hoping there would be fewer of those skeleton dogs but there's more of them now than ever, and the rest of the enemies include silver knights, those giant clams from the Crystal Caves, Oolacile sorceresses blasting away at you from the dark, and the really tough DLC forest guardians again. Very unpleasant to get anywhere down here.
• Found both the missing Asylum key and the Lower Undead Burg Residence key I need to save Griggs. I think that's all the remaining keys in the core game? Unless you count the doll that gets you into the Painted World.
• Went through the usual rigamarole with Patches. Yes, yes, have a nice trip. Gotta do it to rescue the damsel in distress down here anyway. Patches won't actually return to Firelink until after I beat Nito, which, well...
• So therein lies the rub: Everything about the Nito fight sucks now. There's a tough gauntlet between the last bonfire and the boss door, which includes that room where skeletons spawn endlessly (only they're poison dogs and giant leeches now), and then you have that big damage drop into the boss arena and have to deal with its regenerating skeleton adds, which unlike the Catacombs regenerators didn't get swapped out. Still, Nito's kind of a slow boss that you can avoid for a while as you whittle down his support, and then gingerly take apart as you avoid his sweeping AoE attacks. But what if you were to replace the sluggish Nito with a faster and more aggressive boss? How about the fastest and most aggressive boss in the game?
• I am not equipped, literally or mentally, to fight Artorias the Abysswalker while stuck in a claustrophobic arena alongside six skeletons that won't ever die without special weaponry. This isn't a boss battle; it's an anxiety dream made manifest. You know why there aren't adds in the Artorias fight? Because the moment you turn your back on him to focus on something else is the moment you get Aerith'd. I fully intend to beat the Ornstein!Gwyn eventually, but up with this fight I will not put.
• My last recourse, then, is Duke's Archives: the only remaining location available to me, given Painted World is locked and Lost Izalith lies beyond a sea of lava. (Though... I might be able to get into the DLC now...)
• (I won't add another blurb for them, but neither Griggs nor Rhea had anything vital. Worth checking all the same. I'll buy all their overpriced crap to hollow them out later. Least I could do for them.)

Anor Londo (2nd Visit)

• Actually, before visiting Seath's crib I think it's time I dealt with Gwynstein. The Gravetorias fight is one I'm bailing on forever, but I think I can deal with one little old lightning king and his tall friend. As I figured, just keeping my distance and hitting him with Soul Spears and Crystal Soul Spears did the trick, though I lost half my Estus flasks and used up most the spells in the process (Gwyn likes to side-step a lot to dodge spells, turns out, so I had to improve my timing to hit him during the cooldowns after his attacks). I did not anticipate what happened next, as I didn't think it would still apply: the moment Gwyn passed from this world, his large sentinel friend acted out the cutscene where the partner absorbs the power of his fallen buddy. In this case, the sentinel transformed into... another Kalameet. My heart sank so far at this development that I think it's in one of my ankles now.
• Naturally, with few spells and potions left and a very tight space for Kalameet to do his thing, I did not survive that encounter. However, I figured something out: if killing Gwyn turned his nondescript friend into a draconic terror beyond imagining, what happens if I kill the friend first? It took a few tries—Gwyn, like Artorias, takes it personally if your attention is drawn away from him for even a split second—but after killing the sentinel first, Gwyn instead transformed into the Stray Demon from the Asylum revisit. Stray is pretty tough (and magic-resistant, annoyingly) but not to the same extent as Gwyn and certainly nowhere near Kalameet.
• I got nothing from that battle besides humanity and low-level gear and Gwynevere didn't even give me a reward since I'd passed the flag where I set the Lordvessel and started filling it (normally, she'd give me the Lordvessel so I could get started on that) so that's my second permanently missed item of the playthrough. Duke's is a big place and there's also the DLC (as well as Painted World and Lost Izalith should I find the right items to access them) so I'm hoping I haven't screwed myself out of the last Lord Soul, but if I get really stuck I'll consult the cheatsheet just to be sure. That's a last resort though.

Duke's Archives and Crystal Cave

• My one concern with Duke's was the prison sequence. In order to escape confinement, you need to pick up several keys in a series and then leave via the big doors at the top before the tough pisaca enemies, alerted to your jailbreak by a gramophone alarm in one of the game's more surreal moments, caught up to you. Since you can't warp out during this sequence you're pretty much screwed if the necessary keys aren't in your inventory: thankfully, the randomizer dev already figured this out and the keys are in their usual locations.
• The pisacas, by the way, are one of two enemy types I never saw even once while playing. That is, excepting special mini-bosses that can only show up in one scripted place like the undead dragon torso in Valley of the Drakes. I instead got a room full of silver and black knights, a clam guy, some Oolacile goons, and two of those mega-tough DLC chained dudes. A nightmare to clear out, but those Soul Spears really pack a punch and have the nice benefit of passing through enemies to hit those behind. This also meant rescuing Big Hat Logan and unlocking him as a vendor for the second and last time, though I couldn't get much from him. I'm wondering where all the crystal sorceries got to: they're the most powerful spells in the game and I've only found one so far.
• (BTW: the other enemy type I missed (though I use that term loosely) in this run is the mimic: all the mimic chests have been regular ones, based on a randomizer toggle that should've still offered the possibility that any given chest was one of the long-legged people-eaters we love to hate.)
• Just before Crystal Cave I killed a random Oolacile berserker and a lady wearing an Oolacile sorceress hat popped out. I almost hit her but then she started talking to me: it's Sieglinde, the daughter of Onion Knight. Finding her is important to progressing that chain, so I'm glad I didn't just cut her down.
• Crystal Cave was the same as ever. Most of the enemies were smart enough to navigate the invisible bridges just fine, though we got a couple of clumsy lads that fell off immediately. The various Moonlight Butterflies were replaced by other mid-game bosses, but they weren't worth any souls or items.
• Seath had the most drastic change. Instead of a huge white crystal dragon I got one of those skeletal beasts again: a single Homing Soulmass was enough to finish it after I'd destroyed the immortality crystal. Hey, after all this Kalameet BS recently, I'll take a freebie.
• Only key item I found in this whole region was the New Londo Ruins key, one already supplanted by the Master Key starting item. That means Izalith and Painted World are still off the table. DLC it is...

DLC: Artorias of the Abyss

• I wasn't sure about accessing this content in the randomizer because this is actually the first time I've played it. By now I've fought every one of its bosses besides Manus, and probably all its regular enemies too, so I guess there's no need to be precious about "spoiling" my first foray into Oolacile.
• I'd already found the broken pendant and managed to rescue Dusk at her usual spot, so the DLC is totally available. (Incidentally, "Dusk's Oral" is another viable anagram of Dark Souls I could've used for a title, except I'm pretty sure that one would get me cancelled.)
• I have three items I'm looking for in here, and any one will do: the Peculiar Doll for Painted World, the Orange Charred Ring for Izalith, or the Four Kings Bequeathed Lord Soul that'll let me finish the game.
• (If I could get the Rite of Kindling, more Firekeeper Souls, or some stronger sorceries I would be grateful also.)
• Through cultural osmosis (and watching Vinny play through it) I know there's also three vendors to check: the sinister dude with the hat, the friendly mushroom lady, and the giant archer guy with the carved talking stones.
• First, we have what I like to call the "are you tall enough for this ride?" boss: the Sanctuary Guardian. I swear this guy only exists to kick out anyone from the DLC who hasn't sufficiently mastered the game, since he's pretty tough (or was when I faced him in that lava field) but nothing compared to the other three DLC bosses. Lucky for me he was replaced by a gargoyle, which ties up the gargoyles and Sif for most appearances so far (4 each).
• Gargoyle dropped another Firekeeper Soul: the Darkmoon Knight's, to be exact, who is the Anor Londo Firekeeper.
• Elizabeth has a maiden skirt (I didn't ask), a white Titanite Slab (not doing faith builds, but I might grab it for the related smithing achievement), and Smough's Soul. Why wouldn't she? Either way, some nice stuff but nothing essential. Chester had far less.
• Ditto for the forest. Many items, not a whole lot I'll end up using. I did get three more crystal sorceries though, including the White Dragon Breath one that needs an astonishing 50 Int to cast (I'm at 45 Int at around SL80, where the vast amount of souls I need to level up is getting harder to accumulate outside of boss fights).
• The big find came when I went into the valley that leads to the Kalameet fight: the Orange Charred Ring was on a nearby body. I can now finish Lost Izalith at any time. (Item #1 Procured!)
• Artorias was... Artorias. Phew. This is the best boss battle in the game (at least without all the regenerating skeleton adds) so I'm relieved I can enjoy it in all its unsullied glory. Amusingly, while he didn't get randomized, the goon Artorias is murdering when you enter his arena the first time was another matter (I think it was a snakeperson).
• Dude's tough, but even though he's resistant to magic I suspect the mage build might actually be very broken. Just had to hit him with Soul Spears and Crystal Soul Spears in the gaps between his every attack. That said, I eventually ran out and had to resort to the weaker Homing Soulmass; these knights truly are built from sterner stuff.
• Didn't drop anything of note but I don't even care. A great time was had by all evading those big swings. Not sure I could've managed the fight quite as adroitly with a melee build.
• Gough's tower is locked and I don't have the key. That means no merchant and no (extra) Kalameet fight, at least for now. I'll add it to the list of items I still need before the game world is fully accessible.
• Speaking of which, heading deeper into the Oolacile Township I found a corpse that was kind enough to give me the Peculiar Doll. (Item #2 Procured!)
• Rest of the DLC went without incident. There's places in the chasm where there's a whole mess of those Humanity spirits floating around, and they all got replaced by some tough enemies. I swear I fought like five or six black knights in this one plateau-like area, with some infected pyro guys and channelers for ranged back-up.
• The last corpse item of the DLC, the very last one just outside of Manus's lair, had the Lord Soul on him. I'm now all set to beat this game. (Item #3 Procured!)
• Manus got replaced. By Kalameet. Getting real sick of this rad-looking dragon. However, this was the first opportunity I had to defeat him legitimately: I tricked him into killing himself the first time at Ash Lake, and found a way to avoid fighting him in the second with the modified Ornstein/Smough battle. On this third occasion, I just nuked his ass. Done playing around. Got 16 standard crossbow bolts out of it, so that's cool. Guess I'll see how many I can fit in my mouth at once, shall I?

Side Note: Clean-Up

I won't bore you too long with all the sordid details of the cleaning up I've been doing—I was curious if I could earn some of those "all sorceries/pyromancies/special weapons" achievements, but there's no telling where the remaining items are or if I've already missed them due to NPC snafus—so we'll move onto the final roundup and then the last boss.

Lost Izalith: This dungeon is just as unfinished as I remember it being, the "thrown together with an imminent deadline looming overhead" vibe made all the more pronounced with the mismatched gaggle of enemies occupying the place. Managed to finish my Lord's Blade ensemble with the cadaver items here, as well as advance Siegmeyer's NPC side-quest towards its tragic end (more so since I only got more arrows out of it). The dragon asses of the lava sea had been swapped out with other enemies that died instantly earlier in the run and never returned, once I was close enough geographically to spawn them in (the dragon asses are another enemy I never saw once this playthrough, maybe because their size makes them awkward to slot into anything else's place?). The Bed of Chaos was replaced with... Sif. Again. The fifth appearance of swordog and counting.

Painted World: Along the bridge area where the undead dragon normally shows up (I got one of the Sen's Fortress giants instead) I managed to find both the Rite of Kindling (about damn time) and the Crest Key needed to reach Gough in Oolacile. I got into a lot of trouble due to the Phalanx mini-boss fight here, which was replaced by a large clump of knights and Darkwraiths with a cunningly-hidden Vagrant in there that managed to broadside me to death with its homing missiles. Priscilla was replaced with, you guessed it, Frank Stallone Kalameet. After the fourth dispatching of Dark Souls's strongest monster, I decided to leave as I'd nothing left to prove.

Oolacile: Just a quick visit to see if Gough had anything on him (nope) and then fight the actual Kalameet boss fight. I was less than enthusiastic about fighting Kalameet for the fifth time, but fortunately he got replaced. By another Artorias. Which I nuked. These notoriously powerful DLC bosses are starting to lose their majesty for me a little, gotta admit.

Anor Londo: Since I killed one of the two pacifist bosses, I might as well get the other. For the Lord Gwyndolin fight, we got our long-delayed battle with the Centipede Demon. Much easier to fight it on dry land.

Kiln of the First Flame

Let's do this. All that's left is a melancholy showdown with a hollowed Lord Gwyn, long gone mad from the endless suffering required to keep alight the original flame to artificially extend the Age of Fire for centuries. It's a battle both climactic and anti-climactic, not so much taking on but putting down an ancient God well past his prime for the sake of an uncertain future without the guidance of a divine pantheon.

Except, of course, I didn't get Lord Gwyn.

I got Kalameet.

Fucking. Perfect.

No notes.

The end.

This October on IGotW we've had ghosts and demons, so how about a creature feature? Maneater is a shark RPG, or a shaRkPG, or a JRPG if the J stood for Jaws, that has you becoming the apex aquatic predator of the Louisianan tourist resort-slash-seedy bayou Port Clovis. A celebrity shark hunter named Scaly Pete fished out a ferocious bullshark and pulled her newborn out of her dying carcass, scarring it in the process so he'd always be able to recognize it, which is ample excuse for said baby shark to doot-doot-doot her way into a bloody tale of revenge and carnage. Essentially an aquatic open-world game of the GTA variety, the player spends their time completing repetitive missions involving eating fish and eating humans, collecting random crap strewn about the environment, and having the occasional stand-off with dubious shark hunters who pop out of the woodwork on skiffs and jetskis whenever you've created too much of a seaside panic.

Though the game isn't enormous in size it's quite ambitious given the simple, misanthropic pleasures of its "you're a shark that eats everybody" mission statement. For one, there's various upgrades you can receive and equip to parts of the shark's body that can help it gain more materials (needed for other upgrades), fight off predators like barracudas and alligators, survive on land longer if you need to take a (not) breather to knock on some doors and trick folks into thinking you're a candygram, or otherwise just look very cool and big and mean like a shark should. The combat too, especially with the keyboard and mouse controls I've been using (I read they make it easier to traverse the 3D space underwater), has been hand-crampingly elaborate with its utilization of the WASDQERF cluster. The usual suspects are used for movement while F centers the camera on attackers, Q and E lets you perform quick dodges to evade predator lunges or humans lining up shots on you, R to hit the sonar (I guess I got bit by a radioactive dolphin) for collectible sweeping and prey detection, Shift to accelerate to prime chomping speed, and Space to breach the water for airborne targets. (Not that I've managed to snatch a seagull in mid-air yet, but it feels like something this game should let me do.) Either way, having to keep all those controls in mind while playing can make for some chaotic encounters, especially when you're having to focus on predators while dodge-rolling their attacks as you move around: that's seven fingers right there, and sadly neither of my hands have been blessed with that many.

In addition to its flight-sim-complexity shark controls the other big unexpected strength of the game is its sense of humor. I was all ready to start flinching at every bad shark week joke but the comedy is overall at a pretty high quality, helped in no small part by the performance of former SNL straight man linchpin Chris Parnell, who takes this Attenborough-vian reality TV show narrator voiceover character and channels the soothingly authoritative if also occasionally batshit insane performance he polished on 30 Rock as Dr. Leo Spaceman. The game's humor isn't so much focused on surreal jokes however as it is on being a sardonically scathing jeremiad concerning mankind's treatment of the natural world and its denizen fauna: make no mistake, for as many people (and cute seals) as you chew down on the shark is never the bad guy here. She's just doing what she needs to do to survive, albeit with a little more enthusiasm than might be warranted. It's the humans polluting the seas and bayous with golf balls, luxury yacht wrecks, processed foods with far too many additives, enough nuclear waste to give my shark a healthy glow, and just any old trash that the locals didn't feel like disposing responsibly: if anything, I'm a hero for fighting that scourge. A hero that deliberately jumps onto land to eat people trying to enjoy their vacations even though it could asphyxiate me, such are my potent feelings of hunger and antipathy.

Progression tends to involve reaching a new region, completing some compulsory missions (which then unlock some thematically similar optional ones), hitting a certain completion percentage, perhaps raising infamy by eating enough bounty hunters to summon one of ten named mini-bosses, and then hitting a cutscene featuring your human nemesis Scaly Pete to move the overarching story along before resetting the loop in a new place. Navigation is often made challenging by how the map only reveals the top layer of the world: there's many places that have underwater cave and sewer pipe networks that you can easily get lost in, and even if you've pinged a chest (full of nutritional foodstuffs, because why else would a shark want to open a chest?) there's sometimes no intuitive means of reaching it unless you find the right set of directions to take through some underwater maze grottos. Speaking of which, the grottos are the "safe" zones (though turns out most places become pretty safe when you're the biggest predator there) and are the only places you're allowed to change your "equipment" loadout. They're also fast travel destinations, but given the size of most regions and the fact there's only one of these safe zone grottos per area you might still find yourself having to cover a lot of ground to reach an outstanding mission or collectible marker.

On the whole, there's much to like about Maneater. I'm playing it in spurts so I don't get RSI from going "claw mode" every time there's a tactical battle I can't just chomp my way through, but I think it's having a serendipitous effect on my enjoyment of the game. The repetitive nature of the mission structure means that it wouldn't be the sort of thing I'd want to play in long stretches regardless, and the simple joys of just swimming around exploring while eating anything edible and plenty more that ain't besides are all the more pronounced if it's been a few hours or days since your last aquatic foray. It's also visually a treat, even if it's one of the few underwater exploration games to not emphasize the beauty of this rarely seen part of our planet; rather, it tends to be filthy and full of debris and mean-looking fish, only some of which is humanity's fault. It's funny, it's brutal, it's challenging in mostly the right ways, and its only real failing is that they took five hours of content and made a 15-20 hour game out of it. I'm sure I'll chip away at what little content remains (I already maxed my level but there's still three more regions to visit, so maybe I'll try to rein in my OCD tendencies) over the next few days.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

Welcome back to another episode of my misadventures in a randomized Dark Souls. I've swapped around both the enemies (including bosses) and the items, leaving everything to chance by even throwing in items critical to completing the game, the Lordvessel and the Lord Souls, into the random item pool as well. No idea where they could be. Maybe I've already missed them? Wouldn't that be a fun thing to find out twenty hours into a playthrough? Oh, how we'd laugh.

I planned for this to be a two-parter but I got up to a lot of mischief owing to the unpredicable manner in which the randomizer apportioned its key items, so here's the dark middle chapter of a Dark Lord in-the-making. Witness, how the game gets surprisingly easy because of all the weird glitches this randomizer (specifically the enemy one) generates and yet I still run away from everything like a big old coward. Marvel, at how little I seem to remember about a game I've already beaten twice. Be aghast, at how shuffling around the items in an already obtuse game doesn't help navigating Lordran in the slightest.

We have Part One over here by the by. In case you didn't see it. Or just read them out of order; that feels more germane to the theme here. (And here's Part Three in case you wanted to skip the dark middle chapter, though just be forewarned that all three chapters are dark. It's Dark Souls.)

As a gentle reminder of what we were doing last time on "Why does Mento keep doing this to himself? Is there a psychiatrist alive able to figure it out?":

I remain in the process of hitting the two bells and opening Sen's Fortress, otherwise known as the first act of the game. However, their respective issues involve: a bad randomizer draw for the gargoyle boss fight that precedes the first bell; and being too underpowered to head through Blighttown to the second bell since I'd have to skip Lower Undead Burg and the Depths, which normally would provide the items and XP needed to brave the fetid swamps of everyone's favorite poison favela. Fa-venom-la. I'll be sure to workshop that as I contract all the known hepatisees and new ones beside from wading through what is raw sewage and probably worse. Can't wait.

Since my options are running out, my mage-to-be takes a brave few steps towards the New Londo Ruins: a haunted destination of waterlogged deathtraps I absolutely should not be going anywhere near yet.

New Londo Ruins (1st Visit)

• New Londo is terrifying. Dark and almost completely silent. Most enemies are inactive for some reason (something to do with the ghosts' behavior?), but what few are hostile are pretty tough ranging from snakepeople to those DLC shaman that throw dark fireballs at you to the Anor Londo silver knights. Lot of bonewheels too, oof. Those guys are great in a level full of narrow paths where you can barely see where to stand.
• Should note that I'm wearing the ring that makes your footsteps silent, so it's even quieter than usual.
• Rickert of Villheim had nothing. A standard catalyst that's way too expensive (half a million!) and some other trash.
• Only quest item I found was a key for the Duke's Archives. I'm sure I'll need it eventually so best to have it than not.
• Some enemies deeper within seem too high level for me and it's not like I can fight the boss(es) here yet so I guess I'm hitting Blighttown after all.

Blighttown (1st Visit)

• Picked up a Large Divine Ember near Smough in Valley of the Drakes. Not doing faith build, but kinda neat. I guess. Smough doesn't activate when you approach him from the other side, so...
• Interesting note: Smough didn't give any XP. I guess you only get that from the solo version of either of the pair once you've killed their friend and they've absorbed their power.
• Blighttown sucks as bad as I remember. The tree village parts are now filled with large enemies that get in the way of every bridge and ladder. We've still got some of those toxic poison blowdart guys in the mix too; not always easy to spot them in the dark.
• I'd forgotten that the entrance to Blighttown from Valley of Drakes is a one shot to the swamp at the bottom and the Quelaag (or whomever it is now) fight. Not looking forward to any of that without either more vitality or more poison-resistance items (or that rusted ring that lets you walk through the swamp at normal speed), so I bailed again.

Catacombs (1st Visit)

• Kinda desperate now, my next best bet besides moving deeper into New Londo or Blighttown was to check out the Catacombs via the Firelink shrine.
• A note here: Firelink has become less useful since I let Lautrec murder the Firekeeper. That dude just loves murdering ladies, what can you do? Point in doing that is that both Lautrec and the Firekeeper only drop their items during this "subplot" and either might have something vital on them. The Firekeeper didn't, but at least I got the item I needed to go after Lautrec once I reach Anor Londo.
• Incidentally, I've yet to find a single Firekeeper's Soul. They're out there somewhere. I've no way to turn them into Estus upgrades until after the Blighttown boss at the earliest anyway.
• Catacombs might actually be easier in this run because all the skeletons were replaced, which means none of the enemies are coming back to life.
• Only made it a little way into the Catacombs before finding the Basement Key for Lower Undead Burg. The randomizer managed to generate a nasty little bridge trap there by generating a fire-throwing lantern witch on a distant platform and blocking the way past with one of those big quadruped skeletons from Tomb of the Giants. Regardless, I'm haulin' ass back to the L.U.B.. Way safer than dealing with Pinwheel (or whomever) at this point in the game.

Side-Note #1

Gear change! The Drake Sword was fun but it's far too expensive to upgrade at 10,000 souls a pop right now. Instead, I've found an Int-scaling weapon in the Titanite Demon's round trident thing (it actually counts as a halberd). It's slow but the reach is incredible, and having inherent magic damage means it already outpaces the Drake Sword in damage after two upgrades (provided I don't meet something immune to magic). Only issue is the Twinkling Titanite I need to upgrade it: they're not particularly common items.

For the record, the weapons I'm looking for (after a little bit of research) are the Moonlight Greatsword, the Velka Rapier, and the Butterfly Horn spear. All are very powerful and have high Int-scaling. I think at least one of them is a boss soul weapon too which means I'll need to pass through Anor Londo first before I can craft it. Artorias's Greatsword (which I have the soul for) is another option.

Lower Undead Burg

• Goal here is to defeat the new Capra Demon boss fight, grab any items just in case, and find the proper entrance to Blighttown via the Depths/sewers. Not sure what will replace Gaping Dragon, but it'll probably be easier to look at.
• The main street area of Lower Undead Burg is kind of a chokepoint because originally the challenge came from clustering many weaker enemies together so they could flank you. With the randomizer, I had to tangle with one toxic blowdart Blighttown guy, a forest guardian knight, and at least one invisible bug on top of the usual venomous hounds and thieves. Not insurmountable, gladly: if I went with "swap any enemy" rather than just level-appropriate ones I bet I would've looked for a way around.
• Lucky find down here: the Covenant of Artorias. This ring is necessary for the boss fight in New Londo, if I felt up to it (how will that battle work with non-Abyss enemies, I wonder? Would they just sink through the floor like I would without the ring?). That's a Lord Soul boss though, so I don't even recall if the game will let me fight it yet.
• The female Undead Merchant had nothing noteworthy on her, at least in terms of unique items. She is, however, an endless source of cheap Titanite shards and poison curatives and very easy to reach from Firelink with the shortcut open, so that's a reassurance for when I hit Blighttown again or want to upgrade a standard weapon with an eye towards an Int-scaling route (still need the right ember for that).
• Capra was replaced by a regular Darkwraith, backed by a thief and a slime (sounds like an isekai). The close quarters still presented an issue. Just... not as much of an issue as it might have presented otherwise. I'm saying this dude was a chump.
• I don't have the Key to the Depths which means I've exhausted this route for now. Remaining options are to tackle the swamp area of Blighttown (might be easier with all that moss I bought), finish New Londo, or see how deep I can go into the Catacombs. None of these fill me with confidence.
• I believe I'll hit the Catacombs again since it has a bonfire near the entrance (the nearest bonfire to both Blighttown and New Londo is probably Andre's place in Undead Parish seeing as Firelink is out of commission, which in either case is still a heck of a walk).

Catacombs (2nd Visit)

• This place still sucks to navigate, but that suits its oppressive atmosphere. Some moderately tough enemies found here, including what I think are the silver knights of Anor Londo (they hit very hard, but don't seem as tough as the black knights). Seeing a lot of those RE4 butcher guys from the Depths too: he's (it's?) a one-and-done enemy in standard Dark Souls, but I've probably killed dozens of them by now.
• Found another ember: the Very Large one, I think the first of the major important ones for all builds. Later on I found a Chaos Flame ember too. The first magic one is the one I need now, though.
• Unable to form the Gravelord Nito covenant pact even after doing the whole "lying in an open coffin for funzies" bit, I guess because Nito's not actually here (he got randomized away). Either that or I missed a condition somewhere.
• The Titanite Demon that used to be near the coffin is instead some kind of chained up monster. Didn't recognize it so I assume it's a DLC mini-boss. It completely wrecked me, so I'm staying far away from it for now.
• Right near the bottom of the Catacombs I find my first catalyst. Finally. Swapped out my pyro spells for some sorceries. Think I'm ready for the "Queegoyle" fight now.
• Speaking of gargoyles, another one replaced Pinwheel. Probably an improvement in terms of difficulty.
• I'm not going anywhere near Tomb of the Giants until I have to. Finished up down here by visiting the skeletal blacksmith (bonesmith?) Vamos but he didn't have much in his inventory. Good source of cheap fire resin though; might come in handy at some point.
• So... I guess let's finish off the two bells and go visit Sen's and Anor Londo? Rather that than New Londo or Tomb of the Giants at my level. (For the record, I've still got the Depths and most of upper Blighttown left too, but I need some keys for those. Ditto the Crest of Artorias and the other half of Darkroot Forest.)
• Quick check-in: I'm equipped with a Titanite Catch Pole +2 and a Tin Banishment Catalyst, with Great Soul Arrow, Dark Orb, and Light as spells. Armor-wise nothing of note, besides the Crown of the Dark Sun supplying me with a magic boost. I'm still rocking the Crest Shield from before (100% Physical, 80% Magic resistance). For rings I have the White Seance Ring (more attunement slots) and Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring (stealthy footsteps).
• My current available locations include: New Londo (tough enemies); Blighttown (just the latter half, available via the Valley entrance); Tomb of the Giants (I have a light source, but the enemies will be too much); while The Depths, Darkroot Forest (second half), and Sen's Fortress are all locked up and inaccessible.

Undead Church

• Managed to beat Quelaag this time. Granted, I did take advantage of some nooks to avoid her sword attacks but I was also pushed back there by all the lava around the arena. I think if the battle kept going she would've covered the majority of the ground in orange goop. Enough to win a Splatfest, at least.
• She dropped the Moonlight Greatsword. This might be the best weapon for a pure mage build: it has S-tier scaling with Intelligence, fires off beams as an alternate attack, and is generally just a big cool sword for big cool guys like what I wanna be. I need 28 Int to use it (I'm around 20) and like the Drake Sword it's a dragon weapon that needs a lot of souls to upgrade. Fortunately, I already have a few of the Dragon Scale materials it needs.
• First bell rang! Finally, we're back on the critical story path. Take that, ADHD!
• The Pardoner dude in the belfry had nothing of note. He did have his own covenant item for sale though, so I guess those don't get randomized.

Blighttown (2nd Visit)

• Putting on my best anti-poison gear, I combed the swamp like I was searching for coins in the sewer. In addition to some useless crap I did find both the Key to the Depths and the Sewer Key, so I think I can fully explore that part of the game. From where I am now, I could probably do it backwards.
• The Quelaag fight was replaced by... one of those weird eyeball things from Izalith. The conical guys that ruin your gear if they barf on you. It died in four hits. I swear I shouldn't be getting this many regular enemy/boss swaps.
• Second bell rang! We're all set for Sen's.
• Demon Ruins is messed up: all the egg-infected undead have been replaced by some weirdos. I'm not attacking them because of the worms they spawn (those didn't get randomized).
• If I want to get further down here I need to fight Ceaseless Discharge (or whatever replaced it). As I said before, holding off on any Lord Soul routes until after Anor Londo. I think I'll need a lava-protection ring at some point too.
• One last thing to do down here before I start heading up the other Blighttown path: talk to Spider-Waifu. The Fair Lady cannot be heard since I don't have the Old Witch's Ring, but I fed her some humanity and got a nice pyromancy spell out of it. Always worth having the option to burn things to fall back on. I got egg-dude to upgrade my Pyromancy Flame too.
• Discovered that the way to the sewers from Blighttown is a one-way door going in the other direction. Disappointing but makes sense; it'd probably mess with some flags otherwise. Time to hoof it back down to the bottom of the swamp and head back up the way I came in.
• But first! I almost forgot about Ash Lake. I'm contemplating leaving this place until later when I come back for Izalith since the Great Hollow is so annoying to traverse, but there's a lot of items in here that I might need.
• Nope, too annoying. Gonna hold off until I find some way to mitigate fall damage.
• I can hit Sen's now but I might as well open the way through Depths and the Sewers since it's a lower-level area. At this point I'm working towards where I've already been (and conquered) but as I'm still only at 1 out of 5 of the key items necessary to complete the game every area counts.

Side-note #2

Speaking of stuff I want, here's a semi-comprehensive list in descending order:

1. The other three Lord Souls (the one I picked up back in Darkroot was Bed of Chaos's, as if that means anything in a randomizer). Also the Lordvessel, if only to cut down on all this travel.
2. Any Firekeeper Souls. I can't upgrade at Firelink right now but The Fair Lady can help instead. If I recall, there's another Firekeeper at Anor Londo too if I make it that far.
3. Speaking of more healing power, the Rite of Kindling would hit the spot also. That's what I'll need to max out at 20 Estus instead of 10.
4. The Butterfly Horn spear. I might be good with just the Velka Rapier and the Moonlight Greatsword though; I'm spoiled for choice already. I've also found an Enchanted Falchion which is another decent magic-scaling weapon, albeit one that has basically no range.
5. Soul of a Great Hero and any other boss souls. The former is the only "lesser" soul item that is still in the game—I've only found one so far, and since it's worth 20k it'd be nice to have another when I get into upgrading—and I've found a surprisingly limited number of the latter. I'm sure I have fewer boss souls than I've killed bosses. The boss souls I have (besides the BoC Lord Soul) include Sif, Artorias, and Gwyndolin.
6. Speaking of upgrading, I'd like that blacksmith kit that lets you upgrade your own gear at bonfires. It can't do anything that needs an ember, but I can get a head start on some items.

The Depths

• One of the most confusing regions to navigate for all its items, but otherwise manageable with the level and equipment I have, the Depths consists of a dungeon-like area (that also includes some kitchens) and beneath that a network of sewers with floors connected in a labyrinthine manner, usually via one-way pits.
• First thing is to free the Pyro trainer, Laurentius, who promptly vanishes to Firelink. I'll check in on him later. (For the record, the guy you want to free if you're a sorcerer/mage, Griggs, is in Lower Undead Burg behind a locked door. I'm hoping to find that key sooner rather than later.)
• Some unusual new enemies here: enormous monstrous cats. There's a few deeper in Darkroot that won't respawn, but of course these do. Fortunately, the sewers and its doors are too compact to let the bigger enemies through.
• Towards the end, where Domhnall usually spawns (he skipped the spawn because of the weird flags I've been hitting and is now in Firelink also), I finally found my second Lord Soul. It's Nito's. Two more left to find (and the Lordvessel).
• Gaping Dragon was replaced by Sif, making for a possibly tougher fight. The large arena at least helped: you want to create space to avoid Sif's whirlwind attack and then rush in to attack her legs. I thought I could make her jump off the cliff at the back (no way they programmed a sense of caution around pits into her behavior, since her arena has nothing of the sort) but nothin' doin'. Sif's one of the few bosses I feel it's only right to fight fair, anyway...
• There's no Blighttown door key in the boss arena, so I can't open up Blighttown this way (yet). It's fine: I was just at the other side of that door a little while ago, so I'm missing nothing.
• With that cleared up, it's finally time to hit Sen's Fortress. Lord help us. Actually, I'm looking forward to a bunch of nasty monsters walking into every axe trap.

Sen's Fortress

• Right off the bat I found the Annex Key. That opens a door in the Painted World if memory (and/or a quick Googling) serves. I'd previously found the only key I need for this place at the Great Hollow: the Cage Key that lets out Big Hat Logan (though I started with the Master Key and that works too).
• I've played through Sen's Fortress twice before now, so I remembered most (but not all) of the traps here. Even so, the randomizer did me no favors replacing certain enemies with bonewheels. Gee, thanks.
• Freed Big Hat Logan, so that's another vendor to check in on whenever I get back to Firelink, and in a cage just a little further along I managed to find my third Lord Soul: it's the "bequeathed" one given to Seath. Only one left is from The Four Kings. At this rate I might be ready for the final boss as soon as I'm done in Anor Londo.
• The Crestfallen Merchant, the one in the tower you have to jump to while walking along the battlements, is usually fairly nondescript as vendors go. Not so in this case. Dude had a lot of stuff on him, including the Soul of Manus (I'm sure I'll find a use for that), a Dragon Scale, some nice armor (including Havel's), and that ring that helps with thrust counters. He was also selling a shield for 1,000,000 souls. That's million souls! (I'm slightly terrified I'll find a merchant charging that much for something vital; if I was some rando who found the Lordvessel, I'd probably charge a million for it too.)
• There's a hostile NPC, Prince Ricard, up here who not only didn't get swapped but was also gracious enough to drop a Firekeeper's Soul. Once I get to Anor Londo I can get my Estus upgraded at last (I checked, it's not the one from the dead Firekeeper at Firelink: very important I return that one intact).
• The Iron Golem boss was instead... uh, The Gravelord himself. Wasn't quite geared up for that, but turns out the arena made him slightly glitchy and he couldn't summon adds or use that gnarly floor spike spell of his. He also couldn't reach me from where he started and I'm a mage with a lot of ranged spells, so...

Anor Londo (1st Visit)

• The enemy strength here is pretty high: there's a few of those big mushrooms and a quadruped skeleton beast from Tomb of the Giants right from the start, and of course we have some more bonewheels (one's actually on the high eaves that you have to carefully cross over to get to the second elevator).
• For whatever reason, the staircase leading to Anor Londo's castle is guarded by the Demon Firesage, the first boss of the Izalith area and a guy I only remember because Rorie insisted his name was pronounced like "Versace" (shout-outs to Rordawg, hope his new gig is treating him well).
• Versace's size meant I could pepper him with spells without him being able to reach me. I'm starting to worry the real reason I went with a ranged-focused character is coming to light.
• Big Fire Dude dropped the Moonlight Butterfly boss soul, so I can make the Butterfly Horn now. If I wanted.
• Can't access Painted World yet, but the broken chandelier corpse had the Homing Soulmass spell on him. That's a good one. You can prep it before enemies get into range.
• Bonewheel where the notorious rooftop knight archer once was. I hate this place.
• Another of those deadly chain dudes in the secret basement near the second bonfire. That's the third one I've met, but the only one I've managed to beat (with effort). However, the chests down here were a goldmine: we got the Crest of Artorias, so now I can go deeper into Darkroot; some Ancient Dragon convenant items I probably won't use; and the Darkmoon Seance Ring, which'll let me talk to Gwyndolin (hopefully he doesn't ask why I have his hat) (or his soul, for that matter).
• Since I have the ring, I went to see Gwyndolin. Found another Firekeeper Soul on a corpse near the bonfire down here, turns out it belongs to Quelaag's sister. Hope she doesn't mind me using it.
• Talking of meeting cool dudes, I went to see the Giant Blacksmith. Excellent luck here, as he's selling very cheap Twinkling Titanite. Managed to max out my Velka's Rapier (damn I love this sword; so fast) and some of my armor.
• Last cool dude to go say hi to was Lautrec. Got the Firekeeper Soul back: it'll be nice to have the Firelink bonfire back open for business, since New Londo doesn't have one.
• Bert and Ernie have been replaced by one of those big Anor Londo sentinels and... Lord Gwyn, King of Anor Londo, First of His Name, Slayer of the Ancient Dragons, Bringer of the Age of Fire, and royal pain in my ass. I could slowly regain the muscle memory needed to parry him into a long-due retirement but I'd rather build my stats and do this legit. Time to bounce for now—I'm banking on the Lordvessel not being in its usual location.

Mid-Game Check

The Lordvessel is still the missing linchpin so my number one priority is scouring everywhere I can now access to find it. Beyond that, I'll continue to fight bosses to earn the souls needed to level up for the magical oomph (technical term) needed for the harder outstanding boss fights. My Velka's Rapier +5 is definitely sufficient for poking mobs, but I could always use some beefier spells to whittle down larger enemies from a distance first.

Places I can go...

• Firelink. I can resurrect the Keeper and talk to Big Hat Logan, Laurentius, and Domhnall for their shop inventories.
• Darkroot Forest. I have the Crest for the door.
• New Londo Ruins. I think I need a key to reach the dam controls though.
• Tomb of the Giants. At least as far as the Lordvessel Fog Gate.
• Lost Izalith. At least as far as the Lordvessel Fog Gate and/or the big rivers of lava, if I don't find the right ring.
• Ash Lake. I feel more confident I can handle the Great Hollow now. The Lake itself is a tiny area, but I might have trouble with whatever replaced the hydras down there.

...And can't go

• Painted World of Ariamis. Missing a key item.
• Undead Asylum. Or at least the parts that are new. Again, need the right key.
• Duke's Archives. Entrance has a Lordvessel Fog Gate.
• Any of the Lord Soul fights in their respective regions.
• Kiln of the First Flame. Obviously.
• The DLC. I have no idea what the flags are for this now that everything's jumbled up. I think there's a crystal golem out there with a princess inside it? Or is that Onion Knight's daughter? I've yet to meet either.

Next Time: A coward retraces his steps, again, while consolidating enough magical power to go atomic.

I should eventually rename this feature "3D platformers, adventure games, RPGs, and explormers" (or some punchier equivalent) because that's pretty much all I'm interested in covering. I'll expand the menu occasionally if something highly acclaimed or otherwise noteworthy appears in my lesser-explored genres, but for the most part I have my creature comforts and I could probably be of more service catering to those with specific tastes that align with my own. Speaking of acquired tastes, this week we have Hell Pie from Sluggerfly: a scatological 3D platformer about collecting the ingredients to cook the worst pie to ever exist for a certain Dark Lord's birthday. The player is Nate: a low-level demon employee of Sin Inc. whose day job involves "bad taste" and the propagation thereof. Accidentally dragooned into Satan's birthday planning, he is assigned to the kitchens and given a list of items to pursue both in Hell and on the no-less-nightmarish surface world.

As with any 3D collectathon platformer there's some leeway in the pursuit of your goals: you will (probably) have to collect all the ingredients eventually, but you can open up new worlds to visit without necessarily having exhausted the previous ones. If an item proves too challenging to acquire, or you simply can't figure out how to reach it yet, it's best to head to the next world and maybe avail yourself of some handy new upgrades. Hell Pie actually has two upgrade trees: the first comes from sacrificing some ridiculously cute "unilambs" to acquire new devil horns, each providing a beneficial effect that might open some doors metaphorically or literally (in the case of the ram horns). The other involves your pet cupid, Nugget, who follows you around on a chain like a garrulous helium balloon. Nugget is primarily used for combat—Nate swings him around into enemies—but he also has enough strength to hold you in the air for a while, allowing you to swing to greater heights. In fact, with the addition of a vertical wall-run, a double-jump, an air dash, and an upgradeable number of Nugget swings you start to be able to cover some serious distance in the air, not only extending where you can go but how quickly you can get anywhere. The platforming doesn't always feel great—platforms can have curved edges so you just slide off if not perfectly on top of them, and the vertical wall-run can be pernickety about activating unless the wall is perfectly flat—and the "extreme close up"-happy camera is about as cursed as it tends to be in games of this genre, even in 2022, but you can't say it isn't fair with the number of options it gives you to stay airborne.

The game is impressively expansive. There's four open-world hubs, five if you count Nate's place of business, but each is massive with multiple "sub-levels" that are a bit more linear and gauntlet-like in their platforming and combat challenges. In addition to the ingredients there's also at least four other collectibles: new outfits for Nate and Nugget, an ubiquitous purple crystal currency that is also spent on costumes, "candymeat" tins that contribute to Nugget's skill tree, the aforementioned unilambs which contribute to Nate's, and some gold maneko nekos that unlock new parts of Sin Inc. to visit. The crystals regenerate endlessly, whether you leave a level and come back or happen to die and get sent back to a checkpoint (dying also costs you some crystals, but the amount becomes negligible quick), and since they're immaterial to making progress you can usually feel free to ignore them except maybe as a guide for where to head next. This currency can be acquired by destroying larger crystal structures too, which are worth something like 150 each: these are what are really worth pursuing, less so the individual rocks. On the one hand I do feel a pang of annoyance that after sweeping up collectibles they all suddenly come back if I fall in the lava or something equally fatal, but maybe it's for the best these purple doodads aren't part of the main collectible hunt: the game might start peaking into Donkey Kong 64 territory otherwise, and I don't think anyone wants that.

Can't say I'm gelling with the game's subversive sense of humor much. It's not full-on Postal or anything, but it does have a lot of poop jokes and the usual snide cynicism that concerns us sinful humans and the many self-destructive methods in which our behavior might drag our souls down to Gehenna. Nugget also never shuts up; I guess the idea is to make him an annoying mouthpiece companion in much the same way Navi was so we don't feel too broken up when he (presumably) needs to get sacrificed at the end of the game (Nate's a mute protagonist, so Nugget tends to provide most of the flavor text for any new area). Sub-levels have included a delightful trip down the sewers where a civil war has broken out between sapient feces and the bald, naked, fleshy humanoids that eat same; an automated slaughterhouse where the meat is "organically" farmed from sedated (and also naked) humans; a Scarface parody with a Tony Montana snailperson fighting off extremely high and extremely agitated geckos; and Hell's own supermarket, where every product gets moved to a different shelf every evening. It's crude, gross, sometimes scathing about humanity's ugly foibles, but generally benign in terms of how "offensive" it's trying to be, instead luxuriating in bad taste like a John Waters movie. It's not been a deterrent for me so far, but it's not a draw either.

Hell Pie is scratching a similar itch, if to an understandably lesser degree, that Super Mario Odyssey did. It's an exceptionally vast game with plenty of content to pursue and many treasures kept in real out-of-the-way places exclusive to those truly proficient in its traversal mechanics. I've been playing for some six or seven hours and am only in the second world, having spent far too long scouring the previous for remote collectibles (the golden cats are by far the hardest to find since they're pretty small and don't make noises unlike the unilambs; my hope is that a late-game power-up will give me some idea where to look for them). The challenge level is sometimes unfair due to the slightly wonky platforming but it checkpoints regularly and there's no real penalty for dying. A dyed-in-the-wool 3D platformer collectathon like this is still a fairly rare and precious thing, Indie sector or no, so for that and for having a bedrock of platforming competency in what is never the easiest genre to pull off with a small team I'm giving Hell Pie a tentative recommend and I fully intend to keep chipping away at it. Man, if I never have to fight another sapient poop wearing a Nazi hat I'll be as golden as these cats I keep (not) finding.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Happy to discover that the level design remained inventive throughout and the challenge level continued to rise at a manageable incline. There were still plenty of times where the gameplay feel wasn't quite there, especially when using Nugget to swing when you were near a platform since he'd often just smack into it and drop you down a pit for no reason, and some collision stuff regarding platforms and enemies alike felt decidedly dubious but I don't think it overall hampered such an expansive and creative 3D platformer, especially when there are so few of them on the ground (or in the air, as was often the case here). Soundtrack was quite something too, but not always a positive something: reminded me of that Hell Yeah! game (also based in Hell) for how much of its silly, subversive personality came via the music.

Lo there, scaleless dukes and furtive pygmies alike. If there's anything I like to write about way too often, besides just "everything", it's randomizer hacks. For as much as I tend to steer clear of roguelike games and those that prominently feature procedural generation due to how creatively stifling it can be to rely too much on algorithms, there's something about randomizer hacks in particular that I find so appealing. I think because they offer a chance to revisit games I've previously enjoyed in full once or twice before and getting to experience a whole new side to them; in some cases it's just the novelty of wandering around and seeing all the new enemy and item placements, but occasionally the way I approach the game has to necessarily change to account for some unexpected new hurdle or roadblock. I've tried out a few in the past based on older (usually between 16-bit and 64-bit) games like A Link to the Past and Super Mario 64, but the one I've really been wanting to try out was the original Dark Souls. Now that I finally have a half-decent system that can take the punishment of a modern(ish) game running multiple ridiculous mods at once, the timing seemed auspicious.

Dark Souls is, of course, the second Souls game and my personal favorite (Bloodborne aside, which can't be played on PC, still, for reasons as unfathomable as the Great Old Ones themselves). It left such an impression on me the first time I played that I'm near-certain I wouldn't get lost even if all the key items got jumbled up and dropped in unfamiliar new locations. Likewise, the skills I sharpened while dying to that game's bosses over and over has given me an (if not entirely warranted) self-confidence to weather the worst Lordran has to throw my way. There's limitations to the process of simply remixing all the items and enemies, and deep down I know it's going to be essentially the same experience, but poking around some randomizers seems like a perfect excuse to jump back into that world and possibly try a new character build in the process.

I've presented here a few scattered screengrabs of my time in the newly-revised Dark Souls, passing through the Undead Asylum on the way to Undead Burg and Undead Parish and eventually locations that don't have "undead" in their titles and yet are even less pleasant. First though, I'll get into what randomizers I've been using and the settings I've opted for.

The Randomizer(s)

So I've been using HotPocketRemix's Item Randomizer and rycheNhavalys's Enemy Randomizer with the following settings:

For Items, I've shuffled all the key items including the Lordvessel (which lets you warp, so I was tempted to leave it be; instead, I'm now hoping I get it early) and the four Lord Souls. I liked the idea of NPCs wearing random mismatched armor sets—why should they be any more fashionable than I?—and I've replaced all the "low-level" soul-gaining items (which so far has been all of them besides boss souls) because I was curious what the randomizer would produce instead. This, of course, does not mean I can avoid collecting all those white glowy items from the corpses lying around inopportune places because any one of them might be holding onto a vital key item. Ditto for previously inessential locations like Painted World or Ash Lake. It's going to be quite the journey to the four ends of this accursed land to recover everything I need, though there's always a chance that every essential item just miraculously drops into my lap while on the critical path.

With the Enemy Randomizer there's potential to really screw yourself over and I'll admit to being too much of a wuss to mix bosses in with regular enemy placements or opt for a fully unbiased enemy swap. I've instead opted for the "difficulty curve" with the "a bit loose" modifier, which will likely provide but not guarantee enemies that I can actually deal with in those early areas. Of course, a true Souls player knows to run past everything if they can help it and ignore the souls if they don't need them in that moment in time, but on the whole Undead Burg can be a pretty rough start with all those narrow paths and more so if there's something real nasty sitting on them. As we'll see, the promise of a tough but not insurmountable trial proved to be an attainable dream, if perhaps one that still highlights my cowardice. I misread the "not replacing NPCs" setting: I thought they meant hostile NPCs, such as Havel or the invaders, which I still wanted to meet. It does in fact mean all of them, including friendly ones who can still be talked to even though they're a basilisk or a skeleton or something now. I kinda wanted to keep them all human for the stupid armor thing though, I'll admit it.

The Enemy Randomizer also had a few more options (you can see the Other Options tabs in the screenshot) and those include not randomizing the mimics (I randomized them), some conditions relating to boss adds (the second gargoyle or the Pinwheel clones, for example, which have also been randomized), and a way to nerf the chances of Gwyn showing up as a normal enemy replacement since having to fight the final boss while jogging around Blighttown is probably too much to ask. I also left T-posing on for certain enemy spawns because who doesn't love T-posing? Pop those Christ Airs, my undead brahs.

Anyway, these are two pretty robust randomizers that I'm thankful still accounted for dirty casuls like myself wanting to check out some dumb randomizer fun out of pure curiosity rather than the hardest of the hardcore "run around naked and solo Malenia" types looking for new wrinkles and speedrun opportunities in a game they've already mastered and then some. To you two fine mod-development persons, I doff whatever ridiculous hat the randomizer will spawn me with.

The Playthrough

For this annotated screenshot LP I've decided to mostly stick to the ways the randomizer has caused me to deviate from my usual behavior, either in terms of figuring out where to go or how to overcome the obstacles in front of me. That is, as opposed to taking a screenshot everytime an item/enemy is different and going "wow, the item/enemy is different, how strange is that?" like I've only just now realized what a randomizer does (though I might be tempted to make a few of those regardless).

Due to the way the enemy randomizer is set, I don't have full freedom from the start to go anywhere I wish without suffering an ignominious fate: the new enemies are still approximately matched to the difficulty of the foes that used to occupy their spots so if I were to, for example, head into the graveyard from Firelink I can expect some heavy resistance that won't get any easier to cope with should I go as deep as the Tomb of the Giants. That said, if I can get some lucky item drops it might alleviate the difficulty added by the new monster locations. How much easier or harder the game may become is one of the more entertaining surprises that comes with a randomizer, after all.

Side-Note: "The Sacrifice" i.e. the protagonist. Since all the spells are jumbled up with the rest of the items and since I've never ran one before, I've decided to go for a mage-type build. Since that might take a while to craft—I'll need a decent Intelligence stat first, and that's going to come after I've boosted Endurance and Vitality to survival levels as well as my Strength (and Dex) for a decent weapon—I went with the Pyromancer starting class so I could get some practice fighting with witchcraft in the meanwhile. Pyro also starts at level 1 and has a decent array of all-rounder stats, so it's generally the best choice regardless of your intended build.

My starting gear included a Pyromancy Flame +2, the extremely bulky Golem Armor from the Iron Golem boss fight, the Helm of the Wise that Domhnall (the weird dude in the sewers) sells, and the blood-stained skirt from the Dead Firekeeper set. No gloves or other gear. For some reason, I start with the "Undead Rapport" pyromancy spell which I've never been able to get to work.

With that, let's review our options:

• The Bell (Hell?) Gargoyle fight is a nightmare at present. Skipping until I get better gear or some non-fire spells. Ideally I'd like to focus on ranged attacks so I won't have to swim in endless lava barf.
• Lower Undead Burg needs a key to open, as far as I recall. Haven't chanced upon it yet.
• The remainder of Darkroot Forest needs the Crest of Artorias to get past that door. Haven't chanced upon that either.
• The one area of Darkroot Basin I haven't explored yet has a roided-up electricity knight guarding it. No thanks.
• The Valley of Drakes has Smough patrolling around, but I think I can run past him if push comes to shove (and I'd love to shove him off the cliff). That means dealing with Blighttown right after, though. I'd laugh long into the night if all the monsters there were replaced with those with no poison resistance.
• There's the Firelink graveyard and what lies beneath, but those monsters might still be too hardcore. Maybe after I've hit the bells.
• Sen's Fortress is currently closed for business. Then again, all those snakepeople managed to get out somehow...
• That leaves New Londo, which I can access from Firelink. There's another vendor down there I should talk to as well (the imprisoned magic blacksmith guy). Kind of a mid-game area, but I have little recourse right now—since all the ghosts spawn over the lake, I wonder if their replacements will just sink like rocks? Might be amusing to find out.

At any rate, we're done here for today. I intend to keep popping back in and working my way through the transformed game whenever I have a gap in my backlog-clearage, using what options I have available to make life easier (I'm definitely going to have to keep visiting vendors: as well as the low-price treasures there's no way of knowing if they're carrying something important... which I guess also means I might have to kill them at some point too) and working towards a viable mage build, building stats like Intelligence and Attunement that I'd always previously ignored. If I could get fewer DLC spawns going forward as well, that'd be great. I'll pen another one of these updates once I'm done with the game or close to it, highlighting any unexpected hardships that may have arisen.

Final observation: This game still kicks ass even twelve years later, perhaps unsurprisingly. (And here's Part Two!) (And Part Three!)

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, I wrote a small piece on a game called Stick It to the Man!: an adventure game with some mild platforming that was notable for both its Klasky Csupo-like endearingly grotesque visuals and an equally endearing script by a veritable Tyrannosaur of the webcomic world, Ryan North. Conversely, it also suffered from some floaty jumping controls, an occasionally awkward aiming mechanic for its main traversal tool, and a certain reluctance to accommodate "traditional" adventure gamer types who were presumably just there to solve its various inventory puzzles and/or politely (and sometimes genuinely) laugh at its jokes without suffering a few action sequences.

I'm happy/sad/probably just ambivalent to announce that Zoink!'s stylistic follow-up, Flipping Death, is in the exact same Stygian rowboat in all respects. The only thing that's different is that we've switched from psychics and brain slugs to the Grim Reaper and the afterlife, as once depicted by Soul Reaver as this desaturated landscape full of eerie sights and ominous purple whirlwinds that is, geographically-speaking, a mirror opposite of the land of the living. The protagonist Penny is fired from yet another job, takes out her frustrations on a random mausoleum, and finds herself unceremoniously dying when the rotted floor collapses beneath her. Wandering around as a confused ghost, she encounters Death and is promptly mistaken for a temp and given all the powers of said psychopomp while Death takes a holiday to the moon ("The only place where no-one ever died... yet."). Making an honest effort to pitch in on Death's workload, which also includes putting restless spirits at peace by resolving whatever issues are causing them to linger, Penny soon finds out that her deceased body has been possessed in much the same way she's been going around possessing the living.

It all feels very Ghost Trick by way of Day of the Tentacle-era LucasFilm, and like both those properties is often a delight both in its exploration of its ridiculous characters—the possessor is also able to speak to possessed through their own minds, a process some of them don't care for but several more are curiously fine with —and clever puzzles that might require momentarily borrowing someone's talents for hitting things with axes, putting out fires, or blowing real hard, as you go about peacefully exorcising the ungrateful dead and moving closer to Penny's personal quest of recovering her body from this mysterious interloper. In addition to the three or four tasks any given chapter will have you complete, there's also several bonus challenges that unlock "ghost cards" with backstory (that is to say, more jokes) regarding the game's cast. They're often worth pursuing because the process of solving them is no less compelling than completing the main objectives, excepting maybe that one challenge where you had to possess a seagull and shit on everybody (which I suppose might be compelling in a different sense). I will say the puzzles do err towards the hopelessly obtuse, though characters drop hints with their dialogue to such a degree that it compensates for the difficulty a skosh. A typical puzzle might involve helping a burly tennis ghost move on by empowering his only living relative, a weakling named Bjorn: you do this by possessing Bjorn, putting encouraging thoughts in his head, sticking bowling balls into the nearby tennis ball launcher he's using for practice, having him break his arm trying to volley one, and then convincing the doctor to replace the broken arm with the partially rotted limb pulled from the ancestor ghost's grave which requires the (possessed) help of a nearby vulture. For as convoluted as all that sounds, the involved characters drop hints aplenty every step of the way: the vulture confesses to loving pulling up rotted meat, the doctor won't stop going on about his wish to become a bowler instead, et cetera.

However, I did mention some action sequences, so let's reluctantly circle back around to those. Each of the game's chapters is set in a semi-open level (usually the same town and forest area repeated, just with a few cosmetic and cast changes) that requires some amount of platforming to get around. The living (and those possessing them) can take these convenient elevators to higher areas, but in the realm of the dead Penny instead must get around with a combination of jumping across platforms and using her (actually Death's temporarily borrowed) scythe. The way the scythe works is that Penny can throw it in a parabolic arc and it'll stick to solid ground; Penny can then warp to its current location and jump up onto the platform it was stuck to. However, it's not necessarily the most convenient way to get around because the arc is a lot smaller than the indicator would have you believe and if you miss there's no "recall scythe" button: you instead warp to wherever it landed (provided it's still on the screen; it'll just warp back to you otherwise) which might then require you to walk all the way back to where you threw it from. There are some race-like sequences attached to those optional ghost cards which can be a little irksome with these controls, but at least the timer on them is pretty generous (ditto with some "ghost critter" collectibles—used to possess certain characters—that might have you running around grabbing them within a time limit).

Flipping Death is, then, about as imbalanced an experience as its predecessor and perhaps spoils what is otherwise a fine adventure game with some unnecessary action-y bits. Not every Indie game needs to be a puzzle-platformer, after all. However, I'd probably err towards calling it an overall positive experience due to a few factors: A) there's no stealth unlike the first game, at least from what I've seen so far (I'm about 60% the way through? I think?), just a bit of platforming; B) there's a fast-travel to any body you've previously possessed, which is beyond helpful for getting around quickly and is the sort of QoL feature that makes this game's action indulgences entirely tolerable; and C) I think it's just generally funnier and better written overall, perhaps building on the lessons learned from Stick It to the Man! (and potentially Fe; a game Zoink! worked on between SIttM and Flipping Death that tonally couldn't be more different). It's also a spooky game full of ghosts and the skeletons that love them, which made it a perfect choice for the first October IGotW of the year: expect some more spine-chilling (but not so much) Indie examinations in the weeks to come.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Hey SeGuys and SeGals to another edition of the Mega Archive: the only place on the internet that still remembers the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Actually, that's not even remotely true, but if I keep on this obsequious path maybe Sega will send over some review copies of the half-dozen Like a Dragon games they're developing to your hardworking boy. Fingers crossed, yes? Regardless, we have another ten games that released across August and September, bringing us ever closer to the busy autumn season of Sega's 1993 release history. Next month's Mega Archive will be another Sega CD check in, as we bring that console closer to the end of its summer as well, so look forward to hearing more about some Japanese-only adventure games and RPGs I can barely read.

Turns out Sonic has a lot to answer for. I'm not just talking about bottoming out the ring economy by gathering them all together and subsequently losing them whenever he stubs his toe, or the extremely sorry state of the prodigious (emphasis on the "prod") internet slash-fiction community of works, but specifically the near-immediate "follow the leader" aftermath of his Sonic the Hedgehog 2 peak. Turns out a lot of people wanted in on his irreverent finger-wagging mascot platformer appeal, or perhaps more accurately speaking the boatload of money it made, and this entry of the Mega Archive typifies that like few others: we have no less than seven platformers featuring iconoclastic and/or anthropomorphic protagonists running around annoying maze-like levels for their own ends. For the most part the Mega Drive has resisted trends and waves: they had a lot of shoot 'em ups to begin with and certainly a lot of sports games since (mostly the fault of one voltaic company in particular) but we'd usually get more of a mix of genres than this in any given batch of ten. I guess we better ride this out until Awesome Possum arrives and humbles the rest of the mascot platformer competition so badly that it dries up.

Speaking of humbling, please feel free to peruse the Master List (or Master Spreadsheet, I guess) of the Mega Archive to see how far we've come and how far we've yet to go. I'm just about done adding the last of the 1993 games; as you can tell, it'll probably take another year of the Mega Archive just to reach the end of December '93. Now that truly is humbling.

Part XXXVI: 461-470 (August '93 - September '93)

461: TechnoClash

• Developer: Zono / BlueSky Software
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: August 1993
• EU Release: August 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Action-Adventure
• Theme: Technology vs. Magic
• Premise: Fantasy clashes with the modern world in this thematic crossover that's a bit like Gauntlet but even tougher to survive. Wizard needs a takeout drone delivery badly.
• Availability: Nope. It's a neat concept that could use a second chance though.
• Preservation: Most of the bad games that filter through the Mega Archive tend to be wholly unoriginal (usually licensed), so cases like TechnoClash stand out even with its faults. You play a wizard who enters a crapshoot sci-fi version of our world in order to fight cyborgs before they can invade and disrupt your harmonious land with all their evil technologies like the printing press, heart medicine, or flushing toilets. Various places call this an RPG but it's really more like Gauntlet: a top-down action free-for-all with tons of enemies that run up to you in every direction, making it almost impossible to avoid getting hit. However, unlike Gauntlet, you don't starve to death if you take more than five minutes to rest so you can very gradually work your way through the hordes to your objectives. It also has a proto-Mark of Kri thing where you can scout the land with your bird pal. It's not entirely clear who the developers are: Zono is credited on the box for the NA version of the game while BlueSky has a management credit in the in-game staff roll. It's probably both? Let's say both. BlueSky we've met several times before (in fact, we ended the last Mega Archive on their Jurassic Park adaptation) but Zono's new. Another Californian studio, Zono supposedly worked on Sega's Joe Montana Football (the first one, which required many contractors to finish in time) but this is their only confirmed MD credit. They would become more famous for the ossified Saturn classic that is Mr. Bones.
• Wiki Notes: Just some bits and pieces like a new header image, a EU release, and some overview text.

462: Wayne's World

• Developer: Gray Matter
• Publisher: THQ
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: August 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Wayne's World
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: This Game Blows Goats, I Have Proof
• Premise: Garth is kidnapped by a purple blob so Wayne goes to rescue him. Look, you try to come up with a video game premise for this license in the five minutes THQ allows you.
• Availability: Mercifully out of print.
• Preservation: Most of the bad games that filter through the Mega Archive tend to be wholly unoriginal (usually licensed), so cases like Wayne's World don't stand out at all because it's exactly that. While the SNL Myers movie it's based on still holds up today as a surreal comedy classic, much less can be said about the video game tie-in. Rather than clashing with his unctuous PR "pralines and dick" agent Benjamin or jamming out with his cool bass guitarist girlfriend Cassandra, Wayne's left to fight weird monsters (and occasionally robot Elvises) in a game-within-a-game that has nothing to do with anything. It's truly terrible, and I almost wish they built a game around that one scene where they play hockey out in the middle of the street instead: at least the Mega Drive has a decent track history with that sport. Gray Matter are our developers here, a team we last saw in the previous Mega Archive with B.O.B., a game I'm sure they were a lot more invested in. Look forward to many more thrown-together licensed beauties from THQ in upcoming entries.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Just some screenshots and an edited release.

463: Rocket Knight Adventures

• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• JP Release: 1993-08-06
• NA Release: August 1993
• EU Release: September 1993
• Franchise: Rocket Knight Adventures
• Genre: Jet-Powered Platformer
• Theme: Armored rodents
• Premise: Sparkster is one of the titular Rocket Knights: an elite squad handpicked by the king of Zebulos to safeguard a starship once used to attack the planet. The traitorous former Rocket Knight Axel Gear and the rival porcine kingdom of Devotindos threaten the peace of Zebulos once again.
• Availability: It's Konami, so good luck to those hoping for a rerelease. The franchise did get rebooted by Climax Group in 2010, and that version is on Steam as well as some older consoles.
• Preservation: Finally, our first good game this entry is the classic Konami platformer Rocket Knight Adventures. Taking the idea of an alacritous rodent protagonist in a slightly different direction than Sonic, Rocket Knight Adventures has its chivalrous hero Sparkster get everywhere via a jetpack that allows him to bounce off surfaces diagonally, as well as hook onto parts of the level with his prehensile tail. It's a little tough to get used to the game's rapid traversal but the sense of speed once you're tuned into its wavelength makes for some great, fast-paced fun. Rocket Knight Adventures wouldn't remain a Sega exclusive mascot platformer franchise for long—it was followed by a SNES-only spin-off, as well as a direct Mega Drive sequel—but Sparkster is one of the few others on the system to give Sonic a good run for his rings.
• Wiki Notes: All good here, barely had to change a thing.

464: Socket / Time Dominator 1st

• Developer: Vic Tokai
• Publisher: Vic Tokai
• JP Release: 1994-03-25 (as Time Dominator 1st)
• NA Release: 1993-08-17 (as Socket)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Sonic Sold Pretty Well, Huh?
• Premise: Socket is a time-travelling duck robot (with an attitude!) that is hired to defeat the Time Dominator, a villain that dominates time.
• Availability: Nope. But now feels like a more permissive era for 16-bit Sonic clones if the likes of Freedom Planet et al are any indication, so maybe Socket was just ahead of its time? (Time travel jokes.)
• Preservation: Neither the best nor the worst of the mascot platformer rush this month but certainly the most shameless. The Vic Tokai development team tapped into the depths of their collective creativity, found bupkis, and decided to make Sonic the Hedgehog but with a duck that needed to constantly feed itself electricity to stay alive like a proto-Crank 2. Socket is like if a Tesla was anthropomorphized as a hopeless edgelord who thought he was funnier and cooler than he actually was. Wait, that's just Elon Musk. Anyway, suffice it to say, critics at the time didn't care too much for Socket's flagrant ripping off of the system's best and brightest star but impressions have softened a bit since then, as it's now retroactively evident that Vic Tokai had a better idea for a Sonic sequel than most of Sonic Team did. (This is the fourth of five Vic Tokai-developed games for the Mega Drive. The fifth and last is a doozy we'll be seeing come December '93.)
• Wiki Notes: Pretty barren page, looks like everyone's forgotten about ol' Socket. Usual mix of screenshots, releases, and text.

465: The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

• Developer: Imagineering
• Publisher: Absolute Entertainment
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Rocky and Bullwinkle
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Only the Hottest 1960s Properties for Today's Youths
• Premise: Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose are recruited to recover some stolen museum artifacts, leading them on a trip around the world. Guessing it was probably those damn Russians again. Maybe avoid getting in any planes or going near any windows, you two (though I guess as a flying squirrel Rocky will be fine in either case).
• Availability: Nah. I think Rocky and Bullwinkle have even less of a cultural cachet now. Fun fact though: The distance in time between the Rocky and Bullwinkle TV show ending in 1964 and this game coming out is shorter than the distance between this game's release and now. Ain't time messed up?
• Preservation: The handlers of boomer cartoon duo Rocky and Bullwinkle attempted to draw in a new generation of kid viewers with this 16-bit video game adaptation based on a slightly earlier 8-bit one, though sadly didn't follow through with the second half of the plan which was to make the game good enough that the kids would want to see more of the characters, or indeed be left with any sort of positive impression towards the franchise. A mistake that would eventually be repeated with that De Niro movie. It's one of those "variety" platformer-action games that's just a rough assemblage of ideas the designers had for the license, loosely tied together by some story about a museum heist. The "Friends" of the title in this case refer to unflappable Canadian mountie Dudley Do-Right and the time-travelling duo of Sherman and Mr. Peabody, all of whom appear in interstitial mini-games. We last met the gruesome twosome of Imagineering and Absolute with the regrettable Toys [MA XXXIII] so it would be extremely generous to say that they are at least improving a little. I can't tell you how many times I've been tripped up by there being an Imagineering and an Imagineer out there: the latter is a Japanese publisher that happily for the sake of clarity we won't be encountering on the Mega Archive (though they were behind a lot of Saturn games) but I still do a double take each time.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Nothing new to add.

466: Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck

• Developer: Core Design
• Publisher: Core Design (EU) / Virgin Interactive (NA/JP)
• JP Release: 1994-06-24
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: October 1993
• Franchise: Chuck Rock
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Exploitation of Child Labor
• Premise: Chuck Rock and his recently rescued wife Ophelia have been kidnapped by unscrupulous car manufacturer Brick Jagger (why is Mick Jagger's ancestor making stone cars?), leaving their baby son abandoned at home. Will Chuck Jr. choose the toy and die with his family, or choose the weapon and fight for vengeance?
• Availability: Nah. The Chuck Rock franchise only saw one more game after this, Core Design having then moved onto bigger and boobier things.
• Preservation: Mascotageddon continues with this prehistoric platformer sequel from UK developers Core Design. Like the first, it's a comically silly platformer with many exaggerated expressions as the new baby protagonist cuts a bloody swathe through some anachronistic dinosaur foes. I don't know what it is about prehistoric babies but it felt like they were all over the place in the early '90s, from Hudson's Bonk series to that Dinosaurs TV show with its Urkel-esque catchphrase-generating crotch goblin. Strike while the baby iron's hot, I guess they (never) say. It's more or less the same game but with a few control tweaks and some extra mini-game challenges. It's also visually a little sharper: buffing what was already a highlight in the first game. We're still very much in Amiga platformer territory so caveat emptor, but at least this is one of the better ones.
• Wiki Notes: Unlike the first Chuck Rock this sequel was never ported to the SNES, maybe because it already had Super Bonk and there was some kind of very stupid cavebaby arms race happening. That meant no double-dipping and so the page needed a bit of everything including two releases, a header, and some body text.

467: Dashin' Desperadoes

• Developer: Data East
• Publisher: Data East
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Racing / Platformer
• Theme: Vageuly Western
• Premise: The girl you like is willing to date you, but only if you can outrun this other dude. A racing game where "NTR" isn't short for "nitrous".
• Availability: Nope. Unlike a lot of Data East games, this one has yet to resurface.
• Preservation: I could've sworn this was an Amiga platformer just looking at the artwork, but it's our old pals Data East again. DE plays against type here to develop this competitive two-player racer exclusively for the Genesis (and only in America, no less): a departure from what had so far been a string of arcade game conversions. While the game can be played in single-player, it's built for two: evinced by the permanent split-screen which makes it tough to register anything above or below you, and given it's a platformer on top of being a racing game that lack of vertical perspective is troubling. It scores points for originality though: it's like if someone saw Sonic 2 and wondered why there wasn't a mode to let Sonic and Tails race each other to the end of the zone. Oh wait, Sonic 2 did have that mode. OK, so I guess it's not that original but then you never saw Tails wearing a Stetson, did you?
• Wiki Notes: A release, a header, and a bit of text.

468: A Dinosaur's Tale

• Developer: Funcom
• Publisher: Hi-Tech Expressions
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: !Dinosaurs, Mi Amigos¡
• Premise: A 1993 movie where dinosaurs are brought back in the modern day. But not that one.
• Availability: Licensed game for a movie no-one saw. They ain't coming back.
• Preservation: I have to admit to having zero nostalgia for We're Back!. It somehow completely skipped me by, unlike the first "Amblimation" (take it from me, Mr. Portmento himself; that's a bad one) feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. Based on a kids' book of the same name, the game and movie both are about a Professor Neweyes fighting his brother Screweyes over the ownership of a bunch of dinosaurs the former kidnapped and sapience'd up by having them eat brain cereal. I guess the idea of this franchise was to counterprogram the less kid-friendly Jurassic Park (which was also Spielberg and Amblin, so they're counterprogramming themselves?) but it backfired when all the kids still flocked to the live-action movie like so many Compsognathus. Also, We're Back! is not that much more kid-friendly: the bad guy gets graphically eaten by crows at the end (spoilers?). Anyway, the Genesis game—which doesn't even have the right title—is the usual licensed dreck, notable only for being a completely different flavor of licensed dreck than the SNES game. It actually plays a lot like Disney's Aladdin, which also had distinct SNES and Genesis adaptations. I guess that fits Amblin's own aspirations to try to out-Disney Disney. Didn't really pan out for them. Also, this is Funcom's first Genesis game; we'll be seeing this Nordic studio a few more times in Mega Archive entries to come, including (funnily enough) a Disney tie-in.
• Wiki Notes: The great dilemma with some licensed games like A Dinosaur's Tale is whether to stick all the versions on one page or separate them out. What was often the case back then was that the license holders recruited multiple development teams to work on separate games for different systems, creating enough distinction between them all that they probably shouldn't be lumped together (though in most cases they currently still are). This is especially true of Game Boy games, which necessarily have to downscale a bit. Since the Dinosaur Story/Tale SNES/MD games have different names and had separate pages already I've kept it that way but I've still no idea if that's the right course.

469: NHL '94

• Developer: High Score Productions
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: 1993-09-11
• Franchise: NHL Hockey
• Genre: Hockey
• Theme: Hockey
• Premise: Hockey
• Availability: NHL '24 is literally out this week, as of writing. It'll have different hockey guys but it'll probably be better. Actually, it probably won't, but it'll be commercially available at least.
• Preservation: I've made it abundantly clear by now that I am by no means a sports games guy but even I have to admit to having some good times with NHL 94 back in its time. We're right at the peak of EA Sports and its ability to mesh a simulation-heavy experience with many options to peruse with a very accessible core that anyone could jump into, regardless of their familiarity with the sport. NHL 94 sees EA once again procure the licenses to use both team and player names (the previous year's, NHLPA '93, was just the player's association license) and the franchise would continue to become a pillar of the Genesis fall schedule deep into the late '90s. I don't really see it myself, but NHL 94 is one of those games that is often the answer to "what is the best Genesis game?". The only real downside here is that the spoilsports at the NHL demanded Sega and EA take all the fighting out (it came back for NHL 96). The big question I always have about this sport is that we have dirt hockey, ice hockey, and air hockey so where the heck is fire hockey? I want to sling flaming pucks at peoples' faces, so make this happen already EA.
• Wiki Notes: A double-dip for a popular game means an already thorough wiki page. Just had to tinker with releases a little. For some reason there are sites that suggest March was the release month, even though every NHL game before and since came out around September when the real NHL ice hockey season starts.

470: Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition / Street Fighter II' Plus

• Developer: Capcom
• Publisher: Capcom (NA/JP) / Sega (EU)
• JP Release: 1993-09-28
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: 1993-10-29
• Franchise: Street Fighter
• Genre: Fighter, Street
• Theme: Guile's
• Premise: When travelling the world it's important to explore the local cultures, sample the local cuisines, and beat up the local brawlers. And also have an announcer guy with you to yell out the name of the country when the plane touches down.
• Availability: If you just want to play some dang ol' Street Fighter there are plenty of options. Might I suggest SF6?
• Preservation: I'm not going to talk about what Street Fighter II is, everyone already knows. Instead, I'll talk about Street Fighter II on Mega Drive. Wild as it is to believe, but this "extra bells 'n' whistles" edition of everyone's public disturbance simulator was actually the first SF game to be released on any Sega console, not just the MD. Legend has it that Sega delayed the original MD port Capcom was working on, which would've been for the standard Champion Edition (that's the second of five SF2s, for anyone not following), to incorporate all the SF2 Turbo (that's the third one) additions so they could compete with the SNES port of that same iteration. Sega were keenly aware back then that if you just waited a few months a better version of SF2 would inevitably show up. (Speaking of which, in about nine months we're going to see Super Street Fighter II make its way onto the Mega Drive too. Blink with this franchise, and you'll be two versions behind wondering where this Bruce Lee clone came from.) On another surprising note, this is actually the first MD game Capcom developed themselves; there'd been many Capcom arcade games ported over but those were all done by Sega internally.
• Wiki Notes: Due to the weird history of Street Fighter II on consoles, this was a double-dip but not a SNES one. Rather, it's for the more-than-just-slightly scuffed Japan-exclusive PC Engine version that only saw an international release when it reappeared on Wii VC some fifteen years later. Woe betide anyone buying that thinking it was the arcade original.

It's your weekly serving of Indie Games, and for this occasion we have yet another emotional puzzle-platformer. Whee. I only just covered Evergate a little while back but these particular types of games sprout like weeds. Well, perhaps that's too ungenerous an analogy; there's a reason I keep playing these things, after all, and the way they tend to weave storytelling with apposite game mechanics continues to be a rich vein for game designers and authors alike. Speaking of whom, Lost: Words: Beyond the Page has been graced with a script by Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of Terry and an established talent in the field of game authorship having written the story for the Tomb Raider reboots among others, and concerns a young girl named Isabelle "Izzy" Cooke who has aspirations to become a writer. She pursues this passion by starting a journal as well as her own fantasy novel, both of which she contributes to on a regular basis. However, when her beloved scholarly grandmother suffers a stroke and Izzy's world takes a turn for the bleak and uncertain, her feelings of self-doubt, sadness, and grief start filtering through the autobiographical chronicles of her life and the fantasy narrative she's in the process of spinning.

Naturally, most of the gameplay takes place in the world of the fantasy novel, where the player-named heroine is chosen as the new guardian of the protective fireflies that keep her treehouse village safe. A sudden attack by a dragon causes the fireflies to scatter and the village to be burned to the ground, and the vengeful guardian runs off in pursuit of the dragon and fireflies alike. As the guardian, the heroine is blessed with "word magic"—the ability to change reality by invoking a small number of words like "rise" or "break"—and much of the simple gameplay involves using the right words at the right spots while doing the usual running and jumping 2D platformer business. Izzy's interstitial diary entries operate on a similar basis: you jump between words written on the page, sometimes manipulating them with a cursor-like helper to create the new sentence-platforms necessary to reach the next entry.

The game is very clearly built with a younger audience in mind. Izzy's travails with her family problems, and how it's reflected in her novel, are written with an empathetic approach that would perhaps best benefit any younger players perhaps faced with a similar upheaval to their lives. Izzy talks like a typical pre-teen: precocious and mercurial, prone to speaking her mind about her family members and circumstances but generally a good-natured kid with an insatiable curiosity about the world. That this curiosity was largely fostered by her grandmother makes her condition all the harder for Izzy to bear, so don't expect this to be a game with a lot of cheerful moments. That said, the goal is about working through the grieving process and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel through both the eyes of Izzy and her heroine both, so it's ultimately pretty hopeful despite its darker moments.

The "young audience" conjecture is also corroborated by the gameplay's overall simplicity: there's no harsh challenges, deep ruminations, or tight timing required with any of its platforming or puzzles, and you only ever have access to a half-dozen commands at most which definitely keeps it erring towards the easy. It can sometimes be a little ambiguous about which skill to use—"rise," for instance, will raise platforms to lift you up while "repair" will fix things like bridges and lifts; even though in many cases either command would feasibly work if, say, there's a broken platform lying on the ground, there's usually only one that will—it's unlikely to stymie you for long. Finding all the collectibles, if that's your thing, is a little tougher but not if you're paying close enough attention. The game very rarely hides anything from you, after all. It's also extremely linear, but that's to be expected with a narrative-heavy game.

The game's central story is a bittersweet affair that adroitly weaves itself around its tale of Izzy and the tale-within-a-tale of a girl chasing an angry dragon to the ends of the Earth, making it evident how Izzy's real-world feelings of hopelessness and despair are seeping into her otherwise benign story about magical words and fireflies, and is definitely the game's highlight. The gameplay, meanwhile, just comes off as a little too basic, though the interactive diary entries do have some imaginative moments (it's kinda too bad I recently completed Psychonauts 2, which did something similar with the "walking inside a book" idea but with a higher budget). The presentation's also excellent, the game's use of bright colors and orchestral music elevating the fantasy story and is expertly subverted when all color seems to drain from Izzy's world due to her depression. There's also the fact that this game has a heart a mile wide, so it's hard to be too critical of its faults; it may sound like I'm making excuses, but sometimes a game just has to be good enough mechanically to prop up the story it's telling rather than the usual inverse with the AAA blockbusters of old. That's certainly been true with Indie games and its influx of storytellers wishing to engage with this relatively inchoate narrative medium and the unique, reader-immersive directions it can take those stories in. I can't help but think of this game as very cute, using a term I hope doesn't come off as condescending (maybe "wholesome" instead?), so even if the core was sort of paper-thin there's much to commend it—especially to any precocious or creatively-minded child relatives in your vicinity.

Rating: 4 out of 5.