I was one of the lucky ones who got an Xbox Series X on launch day, from Microsoft at MSRP. It arrived on November 10 and I was enamored both of the box and the shape of the console itself. After the Xbox one had been a boxy, boring, thing that was nicknamed "the VCR," the Series X has a cool obelisk shape, reminiscent of a PC mini-tower from the 90s but with only a disc drive and that glowing power gem on the top, and a cool vent up top. It's a handsome console that looks unobtrusive when horizontal and bold when kept vertically.

If I had a little disappointment before plugging the Xbox Series X in it was with the controller. Though it adds a capture button, a textured back, that funky geometric D-pad, and a few other minor details it is essentially the same as the Xbox One X controller. There's nothing wrong with that controller, and certainly this is not the first console to ship with a controller similar to its predecessor (Sony essentially kept the Dual Shock design for 3 consoles straight) it made the Series X feel a bit like an Xbox One X-2. Not a new generation but a stepwise upgrade to what came before. I plugged it in, set it up, and launched it to that old familiar Xbox One UI, and that feeling was only magnified. This wasn't trying to be an exciting new experience, it was just trying to be an Xbox One, but better.

And that's really what the Xbox Series X has been for me. 2 years later and I still use my old One X somewhat regularly in another room, and swapping between the two of them it's hard to tell them apart, at least when I'm not running some fancy new game that takes advantage of the extra horsepower or the SSD. The Xbox Series X feels comfortable but not distinctive. It has never had that "new console" smell like the Switch or the PS5, where a brand new UI and control set up promises you a whole new set of experiences. Instead it's more like upgrading your PC. You plug your stuff in, turn it on, and everything runs the same but better.

The Xbox Series X has also not done much to distinguish itself on the software front. That's not to say it doesn't have games; it has literally thousands of games from 4 generations of Xbox consoles. It has some of the greatest games of all time. Every Halo, every Gears, a selection of old XBLA games, cult classics like Otogi and Armed and Dangerous, just all kinds of crazy stuff. You can pop in your old Forza Horizon on Xbox 360 disc from 2012 and play your old save from that if you uploaded it to the cloud or you can play Elden Ring and the latest Call of Duty.

And it has a killer app in Game Pass. I have been running a Game Pass game club on these message boards this year and it's been great. I have played a ton of really fun games on that service, from Psychonauts 2, my game of the year last year, to Vampire Survivors, one of this year's biggest indie hits. Game Pass is awesome and a great reason to won an Xbox. My Xbox One was my most played Gen 8 console and the Series X is looking like it will be that for Gen 9, though I have been spending more time with PlayStation since a couple real life friends have taken to playing co-op with me on that platform.

What the Series X lacks is an identity. I've talked about all the great things on the platform, but almost all of that is true for the Xbox One X too. PlayStation 5 arguably has a similar problem, but it at least has a few exclusive games (I guess you can sort of count a few games like Scorn as consoles exclusives at least.) It also has a unique UI and controller. The PlayStation 5 feels distinct from the PS4, and the Xbox Series just...doesn't. It's like Microsoft finally fixed Xbox One and then decided to just go with what works after that.

And it does work. It's a good platform. Microsoft in general needs a lot more exclusives (last year was very strong with Forza Horizon and Halo but there's been basically nothing this year except a few timed indies) and it's unclear what their studios are doing, but even setting that aside there's more than enough to play. As a game machine it performs well, the UI is fine, everything works, there has never been a software drought if you include multiplats, it's a fine machine.

But for me every console I've owned to this point conjures unique and distinct memories of its UI and games, and the Xbox Series X feels exactly like my Xbox One X. It's like buying a new car of the same model as your old ones. There may be some new bells and whistles but driving it feels essentially familiar.

So I don't have that much to say about the Xbox Series X on its second anniversary. It's a good console. I use it a lot. I like how it looks. It needs some more exclusive software. That's about it.

The Xbox Series S is a bit more different being digital only and there being some concerns that its weakness is holding the generation back, but I don't think PS5 games look or play particularly better than the Xbox Series X games (including PS5 exclusives) so I don't really notice that if it's true. But I don't have one of those and can't comment on it.

Night Slashers is the first game I spent significant time with on my Switch in a while. I’m not sure why I hadn’t been feeling Nintendo’s little hybrid this year, but despite having some anticipation for Kirby and mild interest in Mario Strikers I just haven’t wasn’t playing it. But I have been on an inexplicable beat ‘em up kick lately and the idea of playing Night Slashers appealed to me just because it’s something different in the genre. There have quietly been a lot of ports of previously unavailable arcade games to the PS4 and Switch over the last five years, and Night Slashers is a game I picked up in 2018 and hadn’t really played much of. I sat down and finished it today and it is in some ways the quintessential arcade beat ‘em up. A game with no depth, not a ton of replay value, but enough flashy gore and cool theming to pull in a few quarters in 1993.

Night Slashers’ gameplay will be familiar to anyone who visited an arcade in the early 90s or who has dipped back into that era of video games. It’s a classic beat ‘em up with big sprites on a 2D background moving left, right, up, and down, and punching enemies in the face. The easiest comparison for Night Stalkers is probably to the Final Fight series, but there are literally dozens of games that adhere to this formula, though their popularity has waned significantly despite a recent mini-revival with games like Streets of Rage 4, Final Vendetta, and a number of indies.

So is Night Stalkers a great one of these? No. As I’ve said I’ve played a bunch of beat ‘em ups recently including spending some time with true classics like Streets of Rage and Final Fight and Night Stalkers can’t match those games in smoothness or pacing. Night Stalkers feels stiff, and has a somewhat limited move set. There are 3 selectable characters; a big slow guy with cybernetic arms, a fast lady, and a medium speed martial arts guy. They can all punch out a basic combo, jump, grab enemies by walking into them and then throw them, and unleash a screen blasting special move at the cost of some health. There is food to pick up that restores a depressingly small amount of health and a few weapons like knives that you can throw at enemies but cannot, as far as I can tell, hold on to like the pipes in Final Fight. The lack of long term weapons really reduces the game’s variety, though it tries to mix things up a tiny bit with a couple sections where your characters run and you fight pursuers, and two interstitial bonus games that are mildly amusing. It's not a bad game for the time but there's just not much to it and it gets repetitive and a little boring like most average beat 'em ups do.

The game looks great, with enemies consisting of rotting zombies and evil werewolves who all explode in showers of gore when killed. The first few stage backgrounds are really entertaining, full of dilapidated hospital wards, fog filled forests, and dark castles, but later levels unfortunately take you to more conventional locations like a cargo plane and a high tech lab. It’s not that these areas are awful, they’re just boring and in a game that’s almost entirely driven by its charm it’s a serious let down. It’s pretty fun to be able to use a wrestling DDT on the Grim Reaper but it’s less fun when you ae doing it in a freight elevator instead of some spooky temple or some trippy extra-dimensional location or hell itself (which you unfortunately never get to visit.) The music is pretty repetitive and the game hides its mechanical simplicity by being relatively short even for a beat ‘em up. It’s the kind of game that works well in an arcade where it can pull people in and get them to spend a few quarters for shock value alone, much like its predecessor Splatterhouse and, of course, its contemporary Mortal Kombat.

Unlike Splatterhouse, however, which had home ports and even home exclusive sequels, Night Slashers never got a home console port around the time of its release. It was made by Data East, which produced plenty of home ports of its arcade titles, so it’s not a matter of the game being made by an arcade only company or having rights issues. Instead I think it’s a matter of the era when it was made and the nature of the game itself.

Night Slashers came out in 1993, right as Virtua Fighter was ushering in the age of polygon graphics in the arcade. It was also a time when the beat ‘em up genre was already on the wane, especially on home consoles. In the back half of the 16-bit console period games were getting more complex and deeper while Night Slashers stayed stubbornly shallow and unevolved. If it had come home on Genesis or SNES it would have had to compromise the only thing it had going for it, its aesthetics, and by the time PlayStation and Saturn came around consumers just were not interested in these kinds of bare bones arcade conversions. While Nekketsu Oyako (Hot-Blooded Family) did come out as a launch game for the PlayStation in Japan it was never ported for the West, and the few beat ‘em ups that are remembered from the 32-bit era tended to have a lot more going on than something like Night Slashers, which didn’t have the depth or complexity of Guardian Heroes or the D&D collection on Saturn.

So Night Slashers faded away into obscurity (not that it was ever a huge hit) and was mostly forgotten outside a few Youtube retrospectives until it got this Switch release. It’s a decent port despite being released under the truly awful Johnny Turbo’s Arcade branding (the games themselves range from mediocre to quite good and the emulation and options are fine but the line’s branding just seems cheap and very cheesy). The ironic thing about Night Slashers is that despite being too old-fashioned for a port upon release it has aged surprisingly well. It was never about the gameplay and the art and aesthetics are still fun all these years later. It’s just the kind of game you play through once or twice and then maybe boot up on Halloween from time to time but don’t invest the kind of time in that would justify the amount that games used to cost. Now that it can be had as a download for under $10 it’s worth it. I really enjoy seeing games like this surface on modern systems. They scratch a very particular itch and while indies are trying to innovate in the genre and create new versions of the top tier games there isn’t anybody making new versions of this kind of schlock because if you’re going to invest in a new game why not try to make it actually good? Night Slashers isn’t really good but it’s a good time. I hope companies continue to re-release this kind of back catalog title so we can get official releases of not just the super popular classics we all remember but also the weird little experiments that made gaming in the 80s and 90s so interesting and fun.

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022.

Game: Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising

Game Type: 2D Metroidvania action RPG

Time Played: 20-25 hours

Completion level: All achievements earned

Approachability: High. It's light and breezy action with a very gentle difficulty curve.

Should You Try It?: If you have a fondness for the 32-bit era RPG aesthetic and lighthearted simple storytelling then absolutely yes.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an interesting game. It’s a sort of precursor game to a larger and more traditional JRPG that’s planned for release next year, but unlike many precursor games like Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon or The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit it is neither 8-bit in presentation or particularly short. Instead it takes the form of a 2D platformer style action RPG that tells the story of a young treasure hunter named CJ who comes to a mining town to explore some ruins that have been discovered and where adventurers are going to seek treasure and adventure, with a substantial kick back to the townsfolk for allowing them to find and take the valuable artifacts.

The basic gameplay is that of a standard melee focused Metroidvania, where you run and jump across the environment while slashing enemies with your weapons and slowly acquiring upgrades that let you get to places you couldn’t previously access. The focus here is more on combat than platforming and overall gameplay is relatively simple and not overly difficult, with a very generous difficulty level, and even bosses require only the most basic pattern recognition. The game adds a little bit of depth when you pick up some additional party members and are able to swap between them while attacking, opening up a combo system for massive damage and forcing you to manage health, equipment, and stats for multiple characters, but even then there’s not much to it.

What the game lacks in base complexity, though, it makes up for in frills and additional systems. Despite being a $15 precursor game for a larger project Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is positively bursting with side content. There’s a quest system based around collecting stamps for your adventurer card that sees you getting well over a hundred quests that range from collecting crafting components to killing certain monsters to finding specific fish in the fishing minigame to going to specific locations in a dungeon to fight an optional encounter. You do need to collect a certain number of stamps to advance past certain parts in the story but there are far more missions than are necessary to finish the game, and after you finish the hand-crafted missions the game will continue to randomly generate quests for you presumably forever. You will also build and upgrade shops to improve the town, buy, craft, and upgrade equipment, meals, and potions, and even buy and upgrade items you use to gather resources. It’s an extreme level of these kinds of frills for this type of game, almost rivaling something like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and while it can be a bit overwhelming and you end up spending too much time in town running errands and upgrading your characters’ armor and loadouts, it also serve to make the adventure feel bigger and more substantial than it would otherwise. The handful of dungeons in the game are reasonably big and diverse, but the quest and crafting systems give you reasons to go back and revisit them and make the game feel a bit more expansive and substantial than it really is, without feeling too much like unnecessary padding (though there definitely is a fair amount of that.)

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is meant to set up an upcoming game but it’s hard to say how successful it is at that without playing that game. CJ and her companions are supposed to make appearances in that game so it may be that a lot of seeds are planted here that will pay off there, but taken on its own merits Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising tells a competent but unremarkable story with fairly by the book cast of characters straight out of a lighthearted RPG from the 32-bit era. CJ is a plucky young adventurer with an optimistic can-do attitude and no fear even when things get pretty dire. The town includes characters like greedy, scheming, merchants and nervous elders who are hiding a powerful secret. You’ll meet a gruff and hardened mercenary who is an anthropomorphic kangaroo for some reason, a young woman forced into a position of authority after the disappearance of her father, and her henchman, the world’s laziest samurai. Is there an ancient evil hiding within these ruin that the adventurers are so happily plundering? Dear reader, if you can’t figure that out for yourself I don’t know how you found yourself on a website about video games. Even if the story is predictable at least the writing is mostly sharp and funny in a 90s way reminiscent of a toned down Working Designs type localization.

If I make Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising sound by the numbers that’s because it more or less is. It feels like it could be a modern remake of a Japanese game from the late 90s. While the graphics are very nice by modern indie standards and are at a fidelity level that the PlayStation and Saturn could never have hoped to match, the game has a look that recalls the style popular back then. Since the larger upcoming game is explicitly modeled after Suikoden it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the Suikoden series serves as an obvious inspiration for the characters and backgrounds. The music is also quite nice though it’s not at the absolute top notch of modern retro-inspired soundtracks like the aforementioned Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It’s pleasant enough while you’re playing but it won’t stick with you after.

And that’s a fair assessment of Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising as a whole. I played it when it came to Game Pass a couple of months ago and while I certainly remember it I can’t say that it left a huge impression. I liked it enough at the time to unlock every achievement, including doing things I usually don’t bother with like beating all the bosses in hard mode (you don’t have to replay the whole game to do that or I absolutely would not have) but I don’t think it will be in my top 5 games of the year and may not even break the top 10. It’s compulsively playable and goes down smooth but nothing about it really stands out strongly. That’s enough to make it quite a good game though. It does everything well with no major flaws and it feels polished and well-designed in a way that portends good things for the more ambitious follow up. For a game meant to whet one’s appetite it has a surprisingly large amount of content and a ton of depth to the town building and crafting aspect. It feels like a fully featured game that could sell for well over the $15 asking price, let alone the $0 I paid for it on Game Pass.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an easy recommendation for people who like Metroidvanias and 32-bit JRPGs. It’s maybe a bit too simple and easy in its main game play for its own good, but there’s plenty to do and see and it has a relaxed and pleasant feel that I think too few games of this style are willing to indulge in with such an emphasis on challenge in modern game design. If you’re in the mood for a breezy throwback with some modern touches it’s well worth your time.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING(out of 5):

Game Pass Gambols 1: The Pedestrian

Game Pass Gambols 2: Olija

Game Pass Gambols 3: Mighty Goose

Game Pass Gambols 4: Nobody Saves The World

Game Pass Gambols 5: Pupperazzi

Game Pass Gambols 6: Trek to Yomi

Game Pass Gambols 7: Citizen Sleeper

Gamepass Gambols 8: TMNT: Shredder's Revenge

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022.

Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge

Game Type: Throwback beat 'em up in the style of the old Konami TMNT games.

Time Played: About 3 hours

Completion level: Finished story mode with a friend.

Approachability: High. This was based on old arcade games appropriate for all skill levels and is an easy game that even a child could finish.

Should You Try It?: You already know if you want to play this. If you think you might like it then you almost certainly will. They made a good version of the game they tried to make.

I grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It is impossible to overstate how popular they were in the late 1980s and early 90s. Kids could not get enough of these four radical reptiles from the New York sewers. They were everywhere There was the cartoon show, the comic book, live action movies, action figures, incredible amounts of merchandise (I had TMNT bed sheets) and of course the video games. I had the infamously hard original NES game personally, and couldn’t get very far in it, but I also played the arcade game, the NES conversion of the arcade game, and the classic Turtles in Time at various points, and I absolutely loved them. I can still remember the awesomeness of throwing enemies into the screen, in a brazen breaking of the 4^th wall that videogames just did not do at that time, but that was perfectly in sync with what the turtles were all about. The Turtles games frequently managed to transcend the “licensed trash” category that was so common at the time and be legitimately great video games all on their merit, made even better by the popular license.

Flash forward to 2022 when my childhood is being resold to me carved up into pieces and 80s and 90s retro is all the rage across media (Biggest movie? Top Gun. Biggest song? Running Up That Hill.) There’s a new TMNT game in the style of the old arcade game and the pitch couldn’t be simpler. Get the people behind the awesome Streets of Rage 4 to make another one of those but this time with the Turtles. It would seem like a no brainer slam dunk…and it was. The game has gotten lots of attention, great review scores, a tie in with Pizza Hut for the physical version, and, of course, a deal to make it a day 1 release on Game Pass.

I knew I was going to play this game as soon as it was announced because how could I not and I ended up playing through the story on release day with my roommate. He played Donatello (always the best of the Turtles in video games because of his long reach) and I chose Leonardo because despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he’s the objectively dorkiest turtle he was always my favorite. The game has up to 6 player multiplayer at one time, online or off, and has 7 selectable characters, including the turtles, April O’Neill, Splinter, and a final character you unlock by finishing story mode (you can guess who it is if it hasn’t already been spoiled.) There are three selectable difficulties and we played on medium and never even came close to losing a level. This is not a challenging game and it’s designed to give you some beat ‘em up fun and nostalgic graphics and music more than to be a deep and meaningful experience. It’s a simple button masher even compared to Streets of Rage 4, which is not exactly the deepest or more difficult game.

In terms of gameplay this is a standard brawler. You have a light attack if you tap the attack button or a heavier one if you hold it down. You can throw enemies by walking into them and yes you can fling them into the screen should you so choose. You can jump (and of course do a jump kick), use a special move that relies on a meter you charge up by hitting enemies without being hit, and even have a rolling dodge that I believe gives you invincibility frames and really helps against bosses. There’s also the ability to taunt to build up super meter and you can give some of your health to other players or even revive them if they lose all their health (otherwise they will just respawn until they run out of lives, though neither my friend or I ever did.) There are several types of pizza you can pick up, including pizza that fully restores your health, pizza that fully restores everybody’s health, pizza that gives you unlimited super meter for 10 seconds, and pizza that makes you spin around like a top, damaging everyone you come into contact with. Sometimes the pizza is hidden in breakable objects in the level, which also sometimes have collectables. There’s no friendly fire, at least on the default settings.

It's all very standard, but it feels good to control. There are callbacks to prior games in the form of a couple forced scrolling levels where you ride hoveboards and fight enemies and dodge hazards just like in Turtles in Time. In general there are a ton of stage hazards in the game, from pits to fall into to lasers and electro beams, to retractable spikes in the floor. These can generally hurt both you and your foes, and in addition to the hazards there are stage interactions you can use to kill enemies by, for example, hitting a hydrant to send its nozzle cap flying across the screen, damaging any enemies in the game. These stage interactions help keep the game feeling at least somewhat fresh despite it featuring the typical monotony issues that plague beat ‘em ups, and the rather pedestrian enemy design. There’s some decent variety in the enemies including many types of foot clan soldiers with different kinds of weapons and lots of robots and mutants to fight, but they generally don’t require any kind of advanced tactics to handle and they kind of blend together after a while. Every level ends with a boss and these guys are mostly fun, with pretty much every enemy from the cartoon and prior video games making at least one appearance, though a few of them are kind of annoying and the difficulty varies wildly, with some later bosses being much easier than prior bosses. Baxter Stockman is particularly annoying because he hovers and it’s quite difficult to line up your strikes to actually hit him.

With 16 levels that clock in at a little under 10 minutes each the game has plenty of content for a beat ‘em up but not so much that it’s a chore to get through. I thought it wrapped up right as I was starting to get a little bored but before I totally lost interest, so I give it respect for its pacing. There are short unvoiced cut scenes between levels and the game tries to add replayability and depth with a challenge system that gives you 3 tasks per stage, along the lines of “don’t get hit” or “defeat 6 of one type of enemy with your super attack.” You also rescue friends of the Turtles along the way and they ask you to collect things in the levels. If you finish a collection you get bonus XP points, which you also get from killing enemies. When you level up you get some bonus like an additional super move (such as a super move jump kick), an additional bar for your super meter, some health, or, most valuable, an extra life added to your stock, which is replenished between levels. Each character has their own ending, though these are incredibly short single splash screens with some text and not exactly a huge reward.

As you can see the developers spent a lot of time trying to have their cake and eat it too with a simple accessible beat ‘em up with enough bells and whistles to give it some replay value and depth. They kind of succeeded but honestly this is a game that a lot of people will play once and move on. It has very bright and colorful graphics with good animation, mostly very good music with some very cheesy 90s tunes that perfectly fit the subject matter. It’s fun to play in a shallow, button mashy, way but it’s simpler and lighter than something like Streets of Rage 4, with its more deliberate pacing and heavier feeling hits. It’s a good time to breeze through with a buddy, but I don’t think there’s a lot that’s going to bring me back now that I’ve seen the levels and bosses and all the fun callbacks and nostalgia. Maybe I’ll boot it up to try some of the other characters and arcade mode, I’m not sure.

As a purchase the game’s relatively short length and light content might give me pause, but on Game Pass this is an easy pick up. It’s like a really good lost old arcade game but balanced to be fun and empowering rather than frustrating and quarter extracting. I can’t imagine anyone who this game would even slightly appeal to who wouldn’t get some fun out of it, and if you’re a fan of the Turtles, their games, or beat ‘em ups in general you’re going to want to play this at some point. It’s a solid multiplayer experience too and appropriate for players of all skill levels. They made the game they wanted to make and they did it well.

Still I can’t help but feel a little disappointed with Shredder’s Revenge for reasons I can’t really articulate. Maybe it’s the shallow story and lack of challenge. Maybe it’s just that I was expecting the same thrill I had as a kid playing TMNT games, which isn’t possible as a middle aged man playing a simple brawler. Maybe it’s just the game feels like a slightly ‘off’ cover tune of a favorite song. The game has a version of the TMNT cartoon theme and it’s well done but the scansion is slightly off and it bothered me a little bit. It felt wrong, even though objectively it was fine. I didn’t hate it but it wasn’t the thing I used to love. I kind of feel that way about the game as a whole. There’s nothing wrong with it and I had a good time, but it didn’t quite capture the magic of those old Konami arcade brawlers that inspired it. I haven’t played those games for a while but I plan on picking up the upcoming Cowabunga collection to see how they hold up. Maybe you really can’t go home again, or maybe this game is just suffering from the same effect as you feel when your parents move to a new house after you’ve left home. The new place may be fine and your parents are there with all the familiar stuff, but it’s just not the same as what you grew up with and it never quite feels right because of that. I’m not sure.

But maybe you won’t have these same issues. Objectively this is a fine game and a good Game Pass selection. I had fun with it, especially playing in multiplayer and reviving my friend before he lost a life or competing with him for most kills on the level. If you have a Game Pass subscription then it’s free to play, and at that price it’s hard not to recommend just to see all the stages and hear the all the music. It’s hard to say how it could have turned out better given the game they set out to make, and in the world of licensed games that’s high praise indeed.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING(out of 5):

Game Pass Gambols 1: The Pedestrian

Game Pass Gambols 2: Olija

Game Pass Gambols 3: Mighty Goose

Game Pass Gambols 4: Nobody Saves The World

Game Pass Gambols 5: Pupperazzi

Game Pass Gambols 6: Trek to Yomi

Game Pass Gambols 7: Citizen Sleeper

The concept of an "indie" game is pretty simple. It's a game that is self-published by a developer that is not part of another large corporation and so doesn't have big corporate funding behind it. It can also be expanded to include small scale "indie" publishers with limited staffs and budgets that don't really fund games but instead provide some basic help with distribution and marketing in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Sometimes it can be used to describe smaller games that have the small budget of an indie game even if they have major publishing behind them, especially if those games are made by studios that are not part of the publishers supporting them and are under their smaller scale publishing label, like EA's Unraveled series. I don't really think Unraveled is an indie but I at least understand when people use the term to talk about games like it.

Psychonauts 2 is a game that was published by Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world and the owner of a major video game platform. It was created by a Microsoft subsidiary, Double Fine. It clearly had a big budget, as you can tell from the level of polish, the number of assets, and the fact that they were able to spring for expensive indulgences like a Jack Black musical number.

This may not be an AAA game the size of Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed, but it's one step below that, and had more money behind it than probably 99% of the games that come out every year, and even more than 90% of the games that come out with a non-limited physical release. It almost certainly cost more than many 1st party Nintendo titles.

It's not an indie.

Now I understand that when it was first conceived it was by an independent Double Fine relying on crowd funding, and that's part of why it even came to PS4 in the first place (to satisfy the crowd funding obligations) but Double Fine was purchased by Microsoft 2 years before the game came out, and if you think that the version we got is anything like the version we would have gotten had that deal not gone through, you're wrong. Double Fine was sold in part so Psychonauts wouldn't have to be an indie game and could instead live up to the high budget image Tim Schafer had in his head.

And it worked! I loved Psychonauts 2. It was my favorite game of 2021! The budget was used wisely and the game is beautiful and hilarious and touching and wonderful. But it's not an indie.

I am very frustrated by the fact that the term indie has been made completely nonsensical in recent years. It's now a meaningless term that is just used to refer to any game that's slightly quirky or not an AAA title. This PlayStation indies sale also includes a bunch of games published by Deep Silver (a major publisher) and even developed and published by Sony itself, like the Patapon remasters. It has games like Darksiders III made by THQ Nordiq (not an indie) and games published by Devolver Digital (if you're big enough for an E3 style conference you are no longer an indie publisher.) It has the League of Legends spinoff made by Riot and a bunch of licensed stuff, some of which may actually be indie by some definitions but some of which is not.

People will say this doesn't matter and I'm just an old man shaking my fist at a cloud, but I think it does matter for 2 reasons.

1) Words should mean something in general if they are to be useful, otherwise they're just sounds.

2) More importantly, calling big games indie hurts visibility.

A big "indie" sale on PlayStation (one of the major platforms) is a great way for smaller games to get noticed and purchased. It's a chance for games that don't have the marketing budgets to compete with the big boys to have people look at their wares and check out something new. This is severely undermined when you throw a bunch of big games in there and force those smaller games to again compete with the big boys for attention and, more importantly, dollars. It's like having a screen reserved for "art" films at your theater and sometimes putting Marvel movies on it. It squeezes out the people you are claiming to help.

And while you can argue that on a digital store there is no "shelf space" issue, that's not true in a big sale. The PlayStation indies sale has over 1,300 games available, and it's not the only sale going on right now. People don't have limitless time to shop for video games. Even enthusiasts like me groan when they see over 50 pages to go through in order to check out what's on sale. We know that curation matters and this is the opposite of curation.

I love Psychonauts 2. It is probably in my top 10 games of all time. I think it's great that it's on PlayStation so more people can experience it and I am all for it being made more affordable, but it is in no way an indie. There are other sales going on now where it could be included. It hurts indies when a space is set aside for them and big games with huge marketing attention (Psychonauts 2 got a bunch of big awards attention, and even co-branding deals) get put alongside tiny projects with no money for marketing that may only be noticed in a sale like this.

The term Indie should have some kind of meaning to it.

I am somewhat obsessed with the Intellivision Amico and I’m genuinely sad that it looks like it will never come out. It was this beautifully misbegotten project that harkened back to the days of the CD-I and the Jaguar; badly thought-out systems that didn’t catch on, and didn’t deserve to, but built their own weird urban legends. I used to read about them in magazines, things like how there are 3 real Zelda games not made by Nintendo and they’re all kind of terrible. In these days of video games as big business, where companies are more risk averse than ever, the Amico was that rarest of treasures, a truly bad idea being put together by a small plucky team with a lot of heart and no viable business plan. Of course my enthusiasm dulled significantly when they raked in millions of dollars from unsophisticated investors on very bad terms, and when they sold thousands of copies of games for a system that is likely to never launch, but I remain as fascinated as I am repelled.

Fascinated enough to play Fox n Forests, a game being reworked as Finnigan Fox for the Amico, and now to spend $5.50 to buy Rigid Force Redux for PS4, which was slated to become Rigid Force Redux Enhanced for the now unlikely Amico launch. I should note that I never pre-ordered an Amico so my total financial investment in my Amico obsession is under $20, and I got two actual playable games for systems I own out of the bargain.

What is Rigid Force Redux, a frequently advertised marquee title for the Amico system that’s pushed as a family games machine where all games are casual friendly and fun for all ages? It’s an R-Type clone. A blatant R-Type clone. You control a ship and fly horizontally through a level shooting enemy ships and dodging bullets until you meet a big boss and destroy them. You pick up power ups that power up a ball-like structure on the front of your ship that you can reposition behind you (as well as fan out for a wider but less powerful shot) and other icons that change your main weapon (spread shot, ricochet shot, that kind of thing) or give you a subweapon like homing missiles or bombs. It draws on a few other games for its mechanics. You collect green energy traces that emerge from destroyed ships like the geoms that drop in Geometry Wars, and those charge a meter at the bottom of the screen. That meter can then power either a super shot or a little sword that destroys enemy bullets, like the sword in Radiant Silvergun. There are environmental hazards that push your ship up or down on the screen and blocks of ice you need to tunnel through with your laser like in Gradius. There’s a blue AI lady named Psye who looks kind of like Cortana and calls you a failure when you die.

If you’re like me you’re wondering at this point how they made an R-type clone that’s fun for the whole family, since R-type is not only a core gamer game, but a niche core gamer game, generally popular among fans of retro games and shmups but not exactly mainstream and accessible to the hundreds of millions of people who own a Switch, PS4, or Xbox. The answer, dear reader, is that they didn’t. Not at all.

I’m definitely on the casual side when it comes to shmups. I grew up with Gradius being one of my favorite NES carts, but I never beat it, and I’ve messed around with plenty of shmups since then but rarely get through the end unless I’ve got infinite credits, like in those Neo Geo arcade releases they put out over the last 5 or so years. I did beat Jamestown+, a trophy with a 14.5% attainment rate of the people who played that already niche title, so I think that I can rate myself as at least competent at the genre by normal person standards.

Rigid Force Redux is not the hardest shmup I’ve ever played, but it’s far from the easiest. Knowing that this was picked up as an important Amico title (it’s one of the 8 games selected to have physical products) I thought it would be a cake walk because it is on a system designed for young kids and people who find normal games are too difficult. The first stage is pretty simple (I died a couple times getting used to the controls and from hazards that aren’t obvious your first time through) but the second stage ramps up the difficulty to be actually challenging. I used up both my continues and didn’t even make it past the second boss my first time through (you start from the beginning of the current stage when you continue.) Around level 4 is where the game really cranks up the difficulty. It’s not ridiculously tough but I needed to play through the levels a few times to learn the tough spots and how to respond to them. It also has the Gradius issue that when you die you lose your power-ups so you start each fresh life in a weakened state and likely to die again. There are areas that you can easily breeze through while fully powered up that are very difficult with your default ship weapon. My biggest complaints with the game start with the fact that the difficulty swings so wildly when you die and lose your power-ups that areas are often either nearly impossible or so easy you barely have to touch the controller depending on whether you died to an earlier hazard. My second biggest complaint is that there are some areas where enemies or projectiles come at you from the background and it can be tough to tell when they’re in the background (and thus both invisible and unable to hurt you) or on your plane where you can interact with them. This doesn’t happen often but it’s very annoying, as is the fact that the visual design can sometimes be so busy that it’s hard to tell at a glance what is a wall and what is just a background object even on the level architecture. There are also a few very cheap places in the game where an enemy or hazard zooms on screen with no time for you to react if you don’t know it’s coming (so you will die there on your first time through the level almost no matter what.) Finally I think the fourth boss is way too hard. I had a lot of trouble with it, while the fifth and sixth/final bosses only took a few tries each.

Visually the game looks okay, but it’s very unimpressive for a game released in the last couple of years. It looks like an upscaled Wii game or an early XBLA title. It sort of reminds me of an old XBLA game called Omega Five, which I really liked, or the Soldner-X series from the PS3, though honestly I don’t think it’s as visually appealing as either of those examples. Omega Five in particular has much better use of color, lighting, and smoke effects. Meanwhile Rigid Force Redux has objects that should be circular but have obvious sides and corners, which is a telltale sign of a low polygon game. I wouldn’t say it’s ugly, just bland and Wii-like. I would even say that R-Type Final on the PS2 is more detailed, though obviously it’s not HD. I would also give the nod to R-Type Dimensions, which is a 2009 3D remake of R-Type 1 and 2 where you can switch the graphics between the HD 3D graphics and the originals with the press of a button.

The music and sound in Rigid Force Redux are fine. It has a decent though not particularly memorable soundtrack. It’s not unpleasant but it’s not up there with the many greats in the genre. Weapon fire and explosions are fine. Even your AI companion isn’t too annoying, though she’s a bit overly chatty in the tutorial and the (thankfully skippable) level intros. The story is just vague sci-fi nonsense. In fact there really isn’t much of a story at all; not-Cortana tends to just describe the various locations you go through like a bored tour guide telling you about local weather and the main industrial output of the area. It’s kind of odd in a game about a desperate space war, but if you’re playing shmups for the story I don’t know what to say to you except that you should find another genre.

I thought Fox n Forests didn’t make a lot of sense as an Amico game, because it’s a pretty demanding European-style platformer that would only really appeal to people nostalgic for early 90s Amiga titles. I would say the same for Rigid Force Redux, except even more so. Fox N Forests at least had an appealing animal mascot that kids might like. Or at least they might have if the game had come out in 1993. Rigid Force Redux is just a straight up R-Type clone for hard core gamers. The Amico was going to get an “Enhanced” version with a few changes, including multi-player, and perhaps some retooling to make it more approachable. The “Redux” version already has a bunch of these features, including increasing the number of credits you get per try as you spend more time with the game and letting you start the campaign on the last level you made it up to the boss in. But let’s say they gave the player unlimited credits, extra hit points (you get 2 on medium presently) and let them retain their weapons when they died and restart wherever they were when they used a credit. What you’d have is a very easy to finish R-Type clone that most people would breeze through in 45 minutes…and then? There’s a scoring-combo focused arcade mode and a boss rush, but like many shmups this game is designed to be tough and require you to learn the levels and persevere. That’s where the value and fun come in. There’s a reason that there’ no genre of super easy shmups that people can just breeze through. That’s not a thing that anyone wants. Rigid Force Redux has a 30% completion rate (including on Easy) on Xbox and 16.5% on PSN. And that’s among people who wanted to play an R-Type style game in the first place.

That’s the main issue of this game in relation to the Amico. It’s for a specific niche of the population and the people in that niche already have a way to play it. It’s not retro enough to appeal to retro enthusiasts, who are not looking for modern shmups with Wii-level graphics. It has nothing to appeal to kids and families, and has plenty of violence and ugly alien bosses to repel moms and youngsters. Core gamers might have a decent time like I did, but they already have plenty of platforms to play it on. They don’t need an Amico. I’m sure that if Tommy Tallarico were still talking about the Amico publicly he would say that they’re going to fix the game by making it way easier and maybe changing the music and some of the graphics, but Rigid Force Redux is already an updated version of the original Rigid Force Alpha, so I’m not sure how much you’re going to improve this game by futzing with it further.

I’m not here to run down Rigid Force Redux as an awful game. It’s not. It’s fine. A solid B-/C+ with a 71% on Metacritic. It would have been a good early PS3/XBLA downloadable title. Even as a PS4/XBone game it’s okay. I think the $16 asking price on PSN ($20 on Xbox and Switch) is too much, but that’s a matter of personal taste. What is less of a matter of personal taste is that this game does not mesh at all with the claimed strategy of the Amico. It’s too hard for moms (as Intellivision sees them) and kids, too modern for retro gamers, pretty violent with some grotesque alien enemies, and nowhere near good enough to buy a $300 games system to play, if you needed one to play it on, which you don’t. The counter arguments are that it would have been made into a great game before being released on Amico (How?) and that not every game on a system has to be great; there’s room for decent filler titles as long as they’re not shovelware. Rigid Force Redux is not shovelware. The problem with that argument, though, is that part of the Amico pitch is that it was going to offer a tightly controlled curated group of good to great games you couldn’t get anywhere else. Rigid Force Redux being a just decent game that’s available on every major platform and is also completely inappropriate for the target market shows that they were never going to meet that promise. And this is not just a random “filler” title. Both it and Fox n Forests (in the form of Finnigan Fox) were among the 8 games that Intellivision sold thousands of physical copies of in packs of 4 or 8 for $20 each. Other than the free pack-in games these were the most promoted titles in the lineup.

The Amico was selling underpowered hardware with a gimmick controller on the theory that it didn't matter because they were going to recapture the Wii market, but the actual software they promoted was either rehashes of forgotten games like Astrosmash and Shark Shark! or games already available elsewhere and considered mediocre. They claimed to be aiming at the family market but they just didn't have the goods.

You know who did? Nintendo. The Switch. That system launched with Snipperclips, 1-2-Switch, Bomberman and Fast RMX (a racing game that's much more accessible than something like Rigid Force Redux.) The Amico was just going for the Switch market but with gimmicky controllers instead of legitimately useful portability (and Nintendo's own gimmicky controllers) and without the software to back it up. It was never going to work. It would have been fun to actually watch it try, though. It kind of was anyway with how things ended up. I'm just sad for the people who invested millions of dollars on a project that never got off the ground.

Fuse is a very late 7^th gen 3^rd person shooter (May 28 2013) with a reputation for being aggressively bland. This reputation is well earned. How I came to play it in 2022 involves my own neurosis. I bought a copy of the game in 2014 when Microsoft was blowing out Xbox 360 games and I somehow lost it between then and this year, 2022. I discovered this when I was doing a survey of my remaining Xbox 360 physical games to figure out which ones I wanted to beat and which ones I either didn’t care about or had obtained in some other format (like with Far Cry 3, where I got a remastered copy for Xbox One as part of a season pass.) I couldn’t find my copy of Fuse no matter where I looked, and became frustrated to the point where I decided that it was better to spend the $20 to buy a new copy than to continue to fruitlessly search for it or deal with the constant compulsion to try and find it. This worked, and was probably a decent use of $20, but having bought the same version of the game twice I felt compelled to actually play it, rather than just replacing my missing unopened copy with another one. So I put it in my 360, hit the little power button, and…

Fuse isn’t a horrible game. From a design perspective it uses the tried and true Gears of War formula with just enough of a twist to make it feel distinct. From a technical perspective it’s actually a pretty impressive late 360 game. It’s not up there with the spectacular Grand Theft Auto V (how did they accomplish that wizardry?) but it looks good and the frame rate is surprisingly solid considering how much is going on in the game. This is a reasonably polished piece of software.

However that that technical proficiency is in service of a game that is uninspired in almost every respect. Fuse famously started as a goofier and more over the top game called Overstrike before the head honchos at EA ordered Insomniac to make the game more of a brown and grey military shooter, as was the style of the time, or at least had been the style a few years earlier. Insomniac dutifully toned everything down and the resulting game feels profoundly uninspired. The plot is a cliched story of a team of mercenaries who get drawn into a plot by a secret organization that, gasp, wants to destroy the world. There’s a dude who talks to you on the radio and gives you new objectives from time to time while filling in events happening off screen. There’s boring, strained, banter between the team members. One of the team members discovers that her father is involved with the evil organization and processes some daddy issues after he helps you. It’s all done at a reasonably professional level with decent voice acting and no clunky or overly cheese writing, but it comes off as seasoned professionals just putting in the work to get it over with rather than anything with a real creative vision behind it. Of the four main characters only Dalton, the amoral lunkhead, and Naya, the sexy spy girl, are memorable at all. Jacob, the black guy with a crossbow, appears to be the nominal leader of the team but has no personality beyond “intermittently cranky.” Izzy, the medic, seems to have no personality whatsoever.

The gameplay has a little more identity to it, but not in an entirely positive way. Beyond the standard third person cover shooter controls the ‘hook’ of the game is that each character has a special weapon. Dalton has an energy shield that can absorb bullets and return them to sender, as well as being able to detach shields to create cover. Allies can shoot through the shield, allowing them to attack from safety. Naya’s gun ‘paints’ enemies with energy which can build up until it explodes, killing them and setting off chain reactions of any other enemy who has also been painted as in the vicinity of the explosion. She can also cloak, which is required for certain segments where you need to sneak past cameras to disable them and can also be useful for thinning out enemies before starting a fire fight. Izzy’s gun crystalizes enemies, which can then be shattered either by her or another team member, and she can also throw med beacons that revive and/or heal teammates. Jacob has a crossbow that acts like a sniper rifle but can also embed bolts into walls. He can detonate the bolts stuck into walls or baddies in order to harm nearby enemies.

Naya is by far the most fun character to play because her chain reaction are pretty satisfying, as is cloaking up and stealth killing enemies. Jacob’s crossbow feels pretty generic but is probably the most effective weapon in the game, allowing you to kill enemies quickly and making even your missed shots effective. Izzy’s crystalizing gun looks cool but is functionally just a machine gun. Dalton’s shield is basically unusable in single player but seems like it would also be kind of boring in multiplayer because it's so passive and has a short range. Your characters can also carry a standard weapon like an assault rifle or sniper rifle and a sidearm, either a pistol or a submachine gun, so you aren’t totally defenseless when you run out of ammo for your special weapon, which will happen quite a bit because the enemies are all massive bullet sponges.

Fuse was clearly designed to be played in co-op and it shows. It’s not a very hard game in single player but it is exceedingly frustrating. In the second half of the game you will face massive swarms of enemies, all of whom soak up a lot of ammo, which is in limited supply. This will force you to switch characters regularly just to have something to shoot at the baddies, especially because the game fudges the ammo count for the AI controlled companions, so you can drain a character of ammo, switch to someone else, and come back to the first character during the same fight only to find they have miraculously found some extra ammo in one of their pockets somehow. Your characters are also very fragile and will go down but not out all the time. It is a pretty common experience to pop out of cover to aim at a bad guy only to have a sniper shoot you, locking you in a flinch animation, and then another sniper hit you, knocking you down but not out. Fortunately the AI is pretty good about reviving you, so this generally does not force you back to a check point, but you can’t switch characters while you’re down, and it’s not fun to spend 2-3 minutes of a 10 minute firefight crawling around waiting for a revive. AI characters will also go down pretty regularly, and they revive each other (or you can revive them.) It’s a mechanic that seems design to promote co-ordination and make Izzy’s beacon more useful, but it’s extremely annoying.

A lot about the game is irritating. The sheer number of enemies and the amount of damage they soak up can be exhausting. It’s not unmanageable but it makes every firefight in the back half of the game into a test of patience. One fight in the last chapter pits you against two of the game’s 10-foot tall robot suited minibosses and a limitless supply of fodder enemies and I ran out of ammo for all four characters, having to swap between them for the cheap ammo replenishment and getting knocked into down but not out probably 20 times. I never died on that checkpoint but I seriously considered quitting the game because it was just so tedious to slowly chip away at the bad guys. You can do more damage if you flank them but your AI companions neither take advantage of that nor assist you in attempting to do so. At least there’s a cool E-Swat like visual effect of the armor breaking apart and revealing the pilot as you whittle them down. The game also loves nothing more than having enemies grab you or one of your companions and initiate a struggle button mashing QTE, which results in a game over if you fail it and are killed. The most common type of game over is probably one of your companions falling victim to this so you need to make it a priority to free them, but of course you expose yourself to being grabbed by another of those enemies while you try to get to your companion. The most common type of game over I experienced was when all my characters were grabbed by these enemies and I wasn’t able to break free in time to help one of my companions, who will never break free on their own (though other characters will free them.) One type of these enemies are cloaked so by the time you spot them and start shooting it’s often too late to do anything to stop from getting grabbed, since they will happily walk right into a face full of assault rifle bullets just to grab you and start the dumb QTE.

The game also really offers no break from combat. The boss fights change things up a little bit, but they’re all just variations on the core gameplay without anything truly novel. There are cut scenes, of course, and some very basic Uncharted style climbing, but other than that it’s all combat and walking around the environment looking for worthless collectables. You can find bonus XP, always worth exactly 500 XP (later levels can take up to 30,000 to level and killing an enemy with your special weapon generally nets around 250, so these feel pretty insulting.) You can also find “Fuse credits” that can buy you team perks like 5% bonus health for all your characters, but these cost 10,000 for the first rank and 10,000 more for each additional rank (so to buy the second rank costs an additional 20,000) and you get 500 per collectable so, again, they feel pretty worthless. There are also intel objects that have flavor text or recordings, and you know what they’re like because you’ve played literally dozens of games with pick ups like this in the past. As for leveling your character, you only get one skill point (no other benefits) per level and most of the skills are pretty irrelevant (10% extra health is fine but not exciting) but a few of the skills are critical. Each character’s special skill, like Naya’s cloaking, is locked behind a pretty early part of the skill tree so you’ll want to level up each character to at least that point. AI controlled characters do gain XP from pickups you find and from completing objectives as a team, but not from enemy kills, so characters you don’t use much will always lag behind. There’s a late game ability called Fusion that makes you invincible and gives you unlimited ammo for your special weapon (which leaves it full after the effect wears off) but I only unlocked that for Naya, including the upgrade that revives all your companions and refills their ammo too, showing just how big the level differentials are. Fortunately after you unlock this ability the AI will trigger it, and also fudges the number on the gage, so if you can get it unlocked on all your companions it would likely alleviate many of the ammo woes.

I’ve written almost 2000 words here and I haven’t really gotten into the specifics of the plot, about a substance called Fuse that’s used to create the special weapons your characters use. That’s because it really adds nothing to the game. Ultimately the bad guys want to use the substance to create weapons of mass destruction that seem to function almost entirely like nukes, and massive robotic gunships that function like helicopters but with glowing weak spots. It’s such an unimaginative use of a sci fi premise that it adds almost nothing to the game. Whatever Insomniac wanted to do with this game EA forced it into the modern military shooter box and it just ends up terribly dull. The locations are all generic military bases of one sort or another, full of faceless soldiers and high tech facilities. This game may have led to Sunset Overdrive (similarly based around a powerful orange liquid), which is one of my favorite early 8^th generation games, and the contrast between them shows just what Insomniac was capable of when their creative vision was supported rather than shackled. Sunset Overdrive is an extremely memorable game that remains unique a decade after its release. Fuse was generic and boring upon release. In the last few years I’ve played both Binary Domain and Inversion to completion on original Xbox 360 hardware, so I’m not looking back at third person shooters from that time with rose colored glasses. Binary Domain is way better than the other games, but even Inversion has more to offer at this point. At least that game has a truly bonkers story that isn’t good but is at least impressively audacious, and its gravity powers are fun to use and give the gameplay more identity than Fuse has. The environments in that game are much more interesting too. Fuse has a couple short zero gravity sequences that reminded me of Inversion a bit, but the game does much less with it. Again and again Fuse chooses to approach each situation in the most generic and boring way possible. Heck, it even has one of the worst video game shotguns ever, meaning that basically every encounter is best taken at long range.

Fuse is a competently made game, so if you love third person cover shooters it’s not the worst choice out there. It’s nowhere near the trainwreck of something like Blood Knights or The First Templar, both games I have completed in the last year because I’m a stupid person who can’t manage his time. But there are so many better games available it’s just kind of pointless. You’re probably better off just replaying a game in the Gears of War or Uncharted series than bothering with this. You may already know those stories and levels, but trust me, you’ll feel like you’ve already played Fuse even if you haven’t. EA took the servers down last year, without warning, so it doesn’t even work as a co-op title anymore. All that’s left is the offline campaign. It’s not a miserable experience, just a very mediocre and kind of boring one. Play something else. Even Insomniac’s other lesser games like Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, are better than this. And that’s not a good game, but at least it’s pretty unique.

I beat Fuse on the medium difficulty setting but the achievement didn’t trigger because the game somehow recorded me as having beaten the last checkpoint on “easy.” This is a bug others have experienced and you can go back and replay the last bit and the final boss to get that Cheevo. I have zero temptation to do so. The last boss isn’t even that hard (he took me 3 tries) but the idea of playing more Fuse is absolutely exhausting. This game is every bit as bland and boring as you’ve heard.

Strider 2 is a weird little game. It’s a sequel to the arcade classic Strider, which really came into its own as an early Genesis title and also spawned a well regarded NES version that was a totally different game. That first Strider arcade game already had a sequel, called Strider II (roman numerals instead of numbers), which was made by US Gold and which Capcom disowned because, by most accounts, it was bad. Strider 2 came out in 1999 as an arcade game on a PlayStation based board and was ported to PS1 in 2000. It came with the original arcade Strider on a separate disc for some reason (it’s a tiny game in terms of memory and Strider 2 is quite short so it’s unclear why they couldn’t fit on one disc together) and the North American version was famously stamped wrong, with Strider 2 on the Strider 1 disc and Strider 1 on the Strider 2 disc. I remember getting it at the time and thinking I had a cool and possibly valuable misprint only to go online and find out they were all like that.

That’s right, this is a game I bought its original release because it was like $20 (I think it released at a higher but still budget price and got discounted at my local shop) and I was excited to play Strider 1, a game I’d neve owned but had seen at friends’ houses. Even then I found retro games on modern consoles irresistible. Strider 2 also got reasonably good reviews including an 8 from Gamespot.

I played through the game this evening just to see if I thought it still held up and I was surprised at how enjoyable it still is. It’s very much a game of its time and place, but in a cool and interesting way. It’s 2.5D with polygonal environments and some polygonal enemies but with Strider a 2D sprite and most of the enemies also being sprites. It’s a simple straight up action game that plays a lot like the original Strider but faster and with tighter control. You slash, jump, and wall-climb your way through 5 levels, with the first 3 being selectable right off the bat, a 4^th being selectable after you defeat one stage, and the last level available after you have beaten the first 4. The levels are broken up into about 6-7 short sections with a short load between each section, which take about a minute or so to complete and generally involve a short platforming segment, a boss fight, or both. That’s right, this game is incredibly short and I finished my run in under 40 minutes. There’s a 6^th stage unlockable by beating Strider 1 and saving your clear to a memory card, and you can also unlock an alternate character by beating Strider 2 and saving the clear, so there’s a little bit of replay value, but this is pretty much a straight arcade port with your focus being on getting a higher score and a better ranking (you are ranked after each stage and after completing the game.) You get limitless continues and start right where you left off including boss damage so anyone can spam credits to get through this thing if they want, which was unusual for PlayStation 1 arcade ports. They maybe did it because it was such a late release and a budget title so they didn’t think that value was as important.

What helped Strider 2 age so well is that they just aren’t making games like it anymore. The 2.5D look with sprites over polygons just doesn’t really exist anymore, especially with the low res and polygon 3D elements Strider 2 has. This kind of straight ahead action game is also extremely rare, with arcade style games these days focusing more on being tests pf skill than Strider’s combination of hectic action and spectacle. The shortness of the levels means they are packed full of set pieces and changes of pace (including flipped gravity and lots of boss battles) and the game never gets boring. Strider feels fantastic to control, with his wall climb and jump being very effective and his sword slash fast and spammy. You can stun lock some mini bosses if you find the right spot and that’s always fun. The game is fast paced and has great momentum as you charge forward leaping around on flying cars and fighting cyber mammoths in arctic bases.

I don’t really know why Capcom made Strider 2, but I suspect it was because the character gained popularity in the Marvel Vs. Capcom games and they wanted to capitalize by giving him his own game. They made a fun title but it was pretty outdated for an arcade game at that point (remember we’re talking post Naomi and after games like Soulcalibur were already available, and Strider 2 is based on PS1 hardware) and it was very short for a PlayStation game and released in the console’s waning days.

But these things make it a great release for a classic games selection. It’s a relatively rare game that goes for way too much online and is still fun to play for a hit of nostalgia while not requiring a big time commitment. It’s unique and different but features a character who is still relatively well known. It’s by Capcom and was a very late PSN release (coming to PS3 in 2014, after the release of the PS4) Because it came to PSN we know that Capcom has the rights for it, and Sony is already working with Capcom for PS+ os it’s very obtainable. Meanwhile it’s not clear how Capcom can monetize this game outside of the PS+ classics brand. They could include the Arcade game in their arcade collections, but it’s the inferior version to the PlayStation version because the PlayStation version has an extra level and some other goodies. Also I can’t imagine many people have arcade nostalgia for this. It can’t really be remastered because of its 2.5D nature and they wouldn’t bother with a remake of this, probably instead focusing on the more popular versions of Strider 1 or just making a new Strider game like they did with the reboot in 2014.

So this is a still fun game with no major rights issues and no clear path for monetization. It’s perfect for a classic games rental service. I personally wouldn’t care that much because I have it on PS3 (and I think I still have my physical version) but it’s the sort of thing I think people would like over games like Worms that have better versions available elsewhere and where the PS1 was never the best way to play.

Obviously the PlayStation has a lot of heavy hitters that have been released numerous times and are very well known, like Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid, and Croc 2: Legend of the Gobbos. I’m sure those games will come to the service eventually and some people who haven’t played them will have some fun, but I think most people who want to play those games have. Symphony of the Night is available on both PS4/5 and Xbox One/Series.

I still like PS1 games and I’m glad to see them made available on the newer PlayStations. I really hope Sony does well with its subscription service, both in terms of value provided and getting customers. Strider 2 scratched an itch that modern games just can’t, for me, and I think it would be great if it were easily accessible to more people.

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022.

Game: Citizen Sleeper

Game Type: Visual novel game with mechanics drawn from tabletop RPGs

Time Played: About 7 hours

Completion level: Rolled credits.

Approachability: Medium-low: It can be intimidating at first and many people won't 'get' it but it gets easier quickly and I think most people will be able to master it pretty quickly.

Should You Try It?: I wish you would. If you have any interest in visual novels this is probably my favorite example of the genre, and I think the writing is something special.

When I booted up Citizen Sleeper I planned to dip in long enough to get a sense for what it was like and then shut it off. It was billed as an RPG but the screen shots made it look like one of those weird indie games that tend to be opaque and hard as nails, with lots of unintuitive mechanics and even more jank.

I turned it off 6 hours later, having reached one of the potential endings but declining the finale to give me a chance to explore a few more of the potential ending paths. My first impressions had been wrong. The game’s mechanics had been relatively easy to pick up and ultimately unobtrusive, and they made way for the real star of the show.

The writing.

Citizen Sleeper can really best be categorized as a visual novel with some tabletop RPG elements. You play a “sleeper,” an android body controlled by a digital copy of a real person’s mind. They’re called sleepers because the real biological person is put into hibernation while this digital copy controls the artificial body and essentially acts as a serf for some megacorporation. The corporations do this because true AI is illegal but these copies of real people fall into a loophole and are allowed.

Your sleeper awakens on a space station after the ship they were on experienced some catastrophic event and was salvaged, leaving you as the only survivor. The station itself broke free of its original corporate control and exists as one of the few independent places where misfits and non-affiliated people can survive. Unfortunately you soon find out that your body is programmed to self-destruct if you do not feed it a specific drug manufactured by the corporation you belonged to, and the corporation has also planted a tracker in you that it plans to use to recover its property. You must find a way to survive and fit in on this station while maintaining both your autonomy and your life.

The mechanics of Citizen Sleeper seem complex at first but are relatively simple once you get the hang of them. At the beginning of each day you start with a certain number of dice with the numbers already rolled. You then go to various locations and engage in actions, such as taking a shift working as a waiter for a restaurant or scavenging for items. You assign a die to each action and the number of that die dictates the chances of a positive, neutral, or negative outcome. Positive actions generally give you a purely positive result, like earning a bunch of money or filling a large number of spots on a longer running task like gaining someone’s trust, which may take a large number of actions to complete as you fill up the meter over time. Neutral actions generally result in a less positive but still beneficial outcome, like gaining a smaller amount of currency but also using up some of your energy for the day (I’ll explain what that means a bit later), or filling in only one slot on the longer term project. Negative outcomes might have you earning no money, wasting a bunch of your daily energy, or even taking damage. Your chances of each of the 3 potential outcomes are determined by how high the dice roll assigned was. A 5 or 6 means you’re generally guaranteed a positive or neutral outcome, while a 1 might mean your best case is neutral and you are likely to get a negative outcome. There is also another type of action based around computer hacking, and there instead of using the dice to influence the odds of your outcome you have to use the particular dice shown to complete the action (so only a 1 will work for some hacking, 2 for others etc…) Often the best use for low dice rolls is this hacking, which can net you resources and money from dice rolls that would otherwise likely give you a negative outcome.

In addition to the dice mechanic your character also has stats, which can influence the dice rolls on certain types of actions (such as actions characterized under ‘engineering’ if you have points in engineering; each action is characterized as one of these types) by giving you one or two extra ‘point’ on the die you assign (so if you assign a 4 it will bump it up to a 5 or 6, etc…) or by giving you an additional benefit, such as a chance of restoring your energy or getting a chance of earning an extra resource on certain kinds of actions. You also have both energy and overall health. Energy depletes with many actions and can usually be restored by buying food to eat. Health is lost at the start of each day, and your health status determines how many dice you get for that day, with each downgrade in health status meaning you can take fewer actions per day. If your energy is fully depleted you will lose more health at the start of the day. Health can also be restored, but it takes more resources than energy. Likewise health can be lost if you get a negative outcome on an action, but that’s relatively rare.

If all this sounds head-swimmingly complex, it is a little daunting at first, but the system becomes relatively intuitive after about half an hour of play. Additionally the game seems like it will be fairly difficult but it’s really quite easy. After you complete a few goals and start assigning XP points to your perks you reach a point where you’re stable and can focus on longer term goals and storylines, and then when you’re overpowered that the game’s various meters and timers are barely an annoyance. The gameplay of Citizen Sleeper is fairly shallow but it soon recedes into the background so you can focus on the story.

Citizen Sleeper’s story manages to combine its larger philosophical questions about what it means to be alive and an individual with down to earth stories of people just trying to survive in a harsh world. It’s this balance that makes it special. You will meet well drawn characters like a food stall manager or a spaceyard laborer and his adopted daughter and your interactions with them will cause your character to wonder about who they are and what their place in this world is. I found basically all the characters interesting, with clear motivations and actions that made sense, which is a rarity in video game writing. I found myself thinking “I’ll just see how this storyline resolves and then take a break” only to found myself swept up in the next one, a pattern that carried me to the end of the game in one afternoon and evening. The prose itself can be a bit pretentious and longwinded, but the characters and scenarios are interesting enough to make that a minor quibble.

It's also notable how upbeat Citizen Sleeper is for a cyberpunk game. It’s a genre of fiction that’s usually focused on the dark corners of society, with its heroes cynical and hard-bitten and its villains menacing and powerful, with the endless resources of faceless corporations at their disposal. Citizen Sleeper features a lot of kind and genuinely helpful characters, and while the evil faceless megacorps are present they are not the focus of the storytelling and seem more like a reason why the people living in their shadow come together and hold on to the little bit of the galaxy they have carved out for themselves, even if it’s just a little restaurant on a backwater space station.

I don’t think Citizen Sleeper will be for everyone, but if you’re into the Cyberpunk genre and willing to give it a little while to adjust to the mechanics I think it’s definitely worth a play. I liked it much more than I expected to, and when I reached the end I was both satisfied with the journey and left wanting at least a little bit more. It’s a bit of a misfit game but I hope it finds an audience on Game Pass and I’d be interested in whatever this team does next. These kinds of offbeat indie games that eschew traditional genres and try something interesting and weird often don’t pull me in, but Citizen Sleeper did and it offered a unique experience even to someone who has been playing games for decades. It’s a reminder that there is as much beauty to be found in the cracks and crevices of the gaming space as there is in the rusting corners of an old space station where a broken robot from a destroyed ship can find a sense of community and build a life.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING(out of 5):

Game Pass Gambols 1: The Pedestrian

Game Pass Gambols 2: Olija

Game Pass Gambols 3: Mighty Goose

Game Pass Gambols 4: Nobody Saves The World

Game Pass Gambols 5: Pupperazzi

Game Pass Gambols 6: Trek to Yomi

I like to think of myself as a smart person but sometimes I am very very dumb.

I own all three major modern consoles, Xbox Series X, Switch, and PS5 and while Xbox has been my primary platform since the release of the first Xbox in 2001, I have generally split my gaming time at about 50% XBox, 30% PlayStation, 15% Nintendo, and 5% PC/portable. Those numbers change over time depending on what I happen to be playing and I have a tendency to favor one platform over another in a given period (so I might have a couple months where I finish 5 PlayStation games and don't play anything on Xbox) but over the course of the year things tend to fall into the percentages above.

Until this year. This year I've played almost entirely Xbox. Part of that has been my focus on playing Game Pass games, which is fine, but not all of it. I've played games that aren't on Game Pass (Rogue Legacy 2 is spectacular!), they've just almost all been on Xbox.

Why?

A stupid achievement streak.

The site Trueachievements.com has been around for a while. It tracks your achievements and creates a "true" score from them by factoring in how rare they are. It's kind of neat just as an overall achievement tracker that lets you get into your stats and see all kinds of information. One of the things it tracks are "streaks" of achievements, which is how many days in a row you've won at least one achievement. Generally my top streaks have been 20-40 days, interrupted when I go somewhere without my Xbox or am just too busy to play something,

My current streak is 236 days.

What happened? XCloud. I can now log into Xbox from my phone wherever I have a signal. While I don't really like to play Xbox games on my phone, it's easily good enough to tick off a simple cheevo, especially if I have it cued up. If I'm playing a game with XCloud support that has a super easy achievement (like for changing something in settings, or equipping a certain type of item) I just avoid triggering that during my playthrough and then if I have a day where I don't have time or ability to get on my Xbox I log in, tick off the cheevo, and log out in like 2 minutes. The streak continues.

None of this should matter at all, but what it means is that every day when I wake up and go through my mental checklist of things to do I include continuing the streak, and then if I find time to play something I want to keep going to build up the number of achievements in the streak and....I've pretty much only been playing Xbox as a result, even though there's stuff I want to play on my PS5 and even my Switch.

Of course there's nothing stopping me from logging on to Xbox, playing something until I hit one achievement, and then switching to some other device, and I've done some of that for sure. I've finished multiple PS5 games in the last 6 months so it's not like I haven't touched the thing. But generally it's been much more weighted towards Xbox. It has also been weighted towards Xbox games where I know I will get an achievement if I play for an hour or two, as opposed to some bigger games where you can go 10 hours between achievements. Both of these things are bad. Achievements should not be influencing what I play!

So why don't I just stop? I've stopped streaks before with much lower numbers because I didn't want to keep playing on one system.

236 days. This is the longest streak I'll ever have. It's over half a year! And because it's based on number of days there's no way to get around it. You need to log in and do something every day or it ends. It's meaningless and stupid and actively detrimental to my gameplay (not that I haven't enjoyed the XBox games I've played or it's really a chore, just that it's made me play stuff I wanted to play less than other options available) but it's so easy to just do one more day that I can't seem to help myself. And the longer it gets the less comfortable I am ending it because the more impossible it will be to ever break it.

I'm not really looking for solutions here, I'm just venting. I know how to solve this. Don't get an achievement for a day. Streak ends, nothing I can do, no harm done because this thing is completely meaningless, and the problem is solved. But every time I think I should do that I think of how cool it would be to get a whole year done, or to hit the 400 day mark. Or 500.

1000?

Like I said, I like to think of myself as smart, but all idiots do. Every stupid person thinks they're pretty bright. So yeah.

There is no external force pushing me to do this stupid thing. Nobody else knows about it (except you, dear reader, I guess). But I'm doing it. Even though I can easily stop. Even though I have nothing to gain. I'm doing it.

So yeah. I needed to vent. Feel free to share your own stupid decisions in this thread or, I guess, to try and shame me, though you can't possibly shame me more than I have already shamed myself.

At least some of those Game Pass games have been really good.