Welcome ST besties to my Atari party as we once again plumb the depths of the Atari ST's crypt for, I dunno, skeletons. This analogy got pretty dark real quick. I'd do the usual pre-amble bit but I'll be starting a weeks-long daily series in just a few ticks and I need to save all my primo material for that. You know, food I've been eating (surf and turf! It was my stepsisters' birthday), games I'm looking at but not actually playing yet because I have this whole Steam daily series to work on (Fallout 4!) and wiki projects I've been progressing (PC Engine library of 1989! This one here's a shoot 'em up featuring one of those gyroids from Animal Crossing!). It's all a rich tapestry for sure, but let's press on.

Seconds Out

It occurs to me that I've been whitewashing the Atari ST's past of late. When starting ST-urday, I wanted to do the mostly-unknown platform a solid and really show off what was best about owning an Atari ST: its status as an affordable, accessible proto-PC on the cutting edge of the 16-bit generation. The ST's strengths were always in its mouse-and-keyboard driven games: point-and-click graphic adventures from Sierra, LucasFilm and ICOM Simulations; RPGs from Silmarils, FTL Games and SSI; strategy games from Gremlin Graphics, Bullfrog and MicroProse. What I've been skipping over is the vast amount of crap, most of it either shoddy Arcade ports or attempts to emulate popular action console games of the era with limited success. The many "The Great Giana Sisters"es of the Atari ST library. We've looked at the ports before now - the Double Dragon double-bill was eye-opening, to say the least - but let's look at one of those imitators.

Seconds Out is a 1988 boxing game from the small UK studio Tynesoft, a company named for the river that runs through the northeast of England. As will become evident quickly from the following screenshots, it's biting the steez of Nintendo's Punch-Out!!. Downright gnawing on it, even. The original Arcade version, mind, not the better-known NES game that was once endorsed by Kid Dynamite himself (who is now solving mysteries on an animated Adult Swim show that I've been meaning to check out). The Arcade version introduced mainstays like Bald Bull, but rather than having a tiny Mac at the bottom of the screen, the Arcade version had a regular-sized Mac presented in wireframe so the player could clearly see the expressive, well-animated and eccentric opponents in front. That's also what Seconds Out is going for.

Still, if making a game that's a bit like another game is a crime, then half the industry's getting thrown in the chokey. No, Seconds Out's chief offense is that it's terrible. The designers only got as far as "we should copy this Nintendo boxing game" without realizing how integral aspects like dodging or blocking or finding and exploiting weaknesses in the opponent is to the overall experience. Seconds Out, in comparison, is more of a button-spammy mess. It's one case in a great many where Atari ST owners were presented a sub-par clone of something popular and highly acclaimed on a different system, and snapped it up without checking it over to see if it was a lemon first. Of course, you can get burned the other way around too: the Super Nintendo versions of Theme Park and Worms are, well, not quite the games their PC versions were.

There's a lot to defend on the Atari ST but its action games are inexcusable, at least for the most part. It was capable of some really nice-looking and well-playing Arcade ports, Taito games especially, and there were a handful of platformers and shoot 'em ups unique to the Amiga/ST that were almost as good as anything the NES had to offer. The majority were like the above, however: superficial MS-Paint lookalikes with barely any of the substance of the games they aped. Still, it's too bad I couldn't get past the headbutting guy; I'm sure the later boxers get even weirder.

(Back to the ST-urday ST-orehouse.)

Greetings all Rocket Colleagues and Downwell-wishers, to this year's Go! Go! GOTY!: A late-year daily feature from yours truly as I madly try to fit in as many 2015 games left sitting in my backlog before the inevitable GOTY deliberations occur. Through a combination of magnanimous sources and financially-irresponsible decisions, I've just this week amassed a fair number of 2015 games to explore before a point sometime close to Xmas when I will once again start drawing JC Denton behind a lectern, giving out pretend awards to vaguely recognizable stickpeople. As is my wont.

Enough about that Mento guy, though: Go! Go! GOTY! is more about letting others in on what they may have missed this year, as a fair number of the games on this list are real radar-dodgers. (I have to double-check them all to make sure they were actually 2015 releases.) So if you're curious about a specific game I'm looking into, be sure to stop by and see if it's worth your time. I'll be linking to the site's own Quick Looks for each of the games featured, if you need a refresher and/or a second opinion.

I'll be using the same rules as this year's May Mastery:

• I'll try to finish every game I start, unless they really don't agree with me or they aren't the sort of games with completion states.
• After three consecutive days of updates for one game I'll move onto another, regardless of how close I am to beating it. I'll keep working on those as I play through the others, but unless something drastically changes in the late-game I'll have no doubt said everything I needed to after three updates.
• I'll be stopping around December 20th so I can write up a GOTY rundown before the Holidays start. I'm hoping to hit around ten extra 2015 games before that mark.

The purpose of this particular blog right here is to consolidate all the Go! Go! GOTY! entries made so far into one convenient table, updated every time a new one goes up. Here's the contents page thus far:

Welcome, all and pre-Sunday sundry, to another episode of ST-urday. I usually fill this top part with ramblings about what I've been up to this week, but I've really not been up to much. I've been intending to play the presently final Ratchet & Clank game in its series (that would be Ratchet & Clank Nexus) as something to fill the gap between now and December 1st, upon which date I intend to relaunch Go! Go! GOTY! and bash through as many unplayed 2015 games as possible. It's presently a meager list of three - The Suikoden-sorta comedic RPG Citizens of Earth, the cute but deadly action-platformer throwback Castle in the Darkness and the amusing graphic adventure game The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (really enjoyed the first) - but I'm hoping to add to it when the Thanksgiving Steam sales start sometime next week. I received some birthday Steam vouchers that have been burning a hole in my digital wallet, and I have my eye on more than a handful of possibilities: Axiom Verge, Titan Souls, Ori and the Blind Forest, The Magic Circle, The Beginner's Guide, Divinity: Original Sin (though that might wait until I have a current-gen console), Life is Strange, Rebel Galaxy, Technobabylon, Cradle, SOMA, and so many more. 2015 was definitely a good year for Indies.

Needless to say though, my GOTY list will be interesting without any PS4/XB1 console games (or their PC equivalents, which are a forlorn hope on this system) on it. We're talking a Wii U game and a bunch of Steam Indies at the moment. Maybe I'll get to shine a spotlight on a few smaller titles that were otherwise overshadowed by the big releases of this year. The alternative is to focus less on new releases and just rate the games I finally got around to in 2015, which include a lot of fantastic games like Yakuza 3, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Burnout Paradise, Shantae: Risky's Revenge and a whole bunch of other stuff I should've played years ago.

On the Giant Bomb Wiki front, I'm happy to announce that I completed my last project: sprucing up the game pages for the infamous kitty-litter tray that was the Atari Jaguar. Most of the work had already been done long before I started - largely by a user named xdgx, who did most of their work around the inception of the wiki in 2008 - but there were a few skeleton pages and header images to fix up. My present stopgap project is to go back and revamp all the NES/Famicom pages from 1983-1985, some of which I created or added to but years before I started getting serious about the wiki. There's various style issues with those pages and, of course, the ever-present (non)issue of them not having header images. After that it'll be some time working on the early PC Engine library and then, finally, the launch of Wiki Project Super '95. That's another 400+ page project that won't be done overnight, to say the least.

Drakkhen

I was apprehensive about covering this one. As with Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, which I looked at on ST-urday a little while ago, it's a continental European RPG that didn't feel like playing ball (or couldn't, due to licensing issues) with the various games building on the D&D ruleset and decided to go its own way. Drakkhen might be one of the least intuitive RPGs out there, but it's also packed with a deep amount of lore, some clever ideas, a very efficient if chaotic combat system and a lot of mysteries that would be more fun to explore and solve if the interface hadn't already created so many extra question marks to deal with on top of that. It's like trying to solve a murder case with the QWOP guy: you want to puzzle out the whodunnit, but first you have to puzzle out, like, basic movement. Drakkhen was definitely a game that continually bamboozled a younger me, even if I eventually figured a lot of it out. The controls, at least.

Drakkhen was developed by Infogrames, back when they were a moderately-sized French developer who, like their contemporaries Delphine Software and Silmarils, would often take a lot of risks on high-concept ideas. Nowadays, of course, they're playing it safe to a fault trying to relaunch numerous Atari properties as Atari SA to varying degrees of critical disdain. (Whatever did happen to that weird Asteroids base management reboot?) Drakkhen was a minor hit for them, and was fortunate enough to see a Japanese-developed SNES conversion from Kemco-Seika that confused and frustrated an entirely different audience of players.

To succinctly summarize the story of the game: The last great dragon is slain by a particularly foolhardy knight, plunging the world into a post-magical apocalypse, as the Dragon Gods were the ones responsible for the creation of the world and left their scions, the great dragons, as custodians of its magical power. The various peoples of this world have been dependent on magic over technology, since one was a lot easier to figure out than the other, that the sudden lack of it had some unfortunate repercussions. A boat-load of pilgrims were swept off course when their wind magic suddenly ceased, leading them to a hidden land full of half-human/half-dragon folk named Drakkhen. The Drakkhen have an ancient prophecy that dictates that they will conquer the planet and exterminate the humans once they are no longer protected by magic. The humans that are in the land of Drakkhen, however, discover that their magic is working again. It's up to a small band of adventurers to prevent the spread of the Drakkhen forces and possibly restore the world's magic in the process.

Drakkhen's one of those games where half the reward is in figuring it out. It's brutally unfair, even if you know how the game's systems work, and the UI leaves a lot to be desired. It's fairly singular in its genre though, and that went a long way back then when every other CRPG was either Wizardry-inspired dungeon-crawler or a D&D Gold Box turn-based strategy game.

There are also precious few games as intimidating as Drakkhen. A game where you get attacked by enormous panther heads by bumping into gravestones, or colossal flying space caterpillars by having the temerity to look up while walking around at night. The land of Drakkhen really isn't for the faint of heart. Maybe that's why it appealed to so many; there's definitely something to challenging the insurmountable. Or maybe people just liked it because it looked incredible for 1989 and had a wide range of novel features they hadn't seen before. Or maybe because it has giant dragons with laserbeam eyes, who knows? That last one alone was probably enough for tiny baby Mento.

(Back to the ST-urday ST-orehouse.)

Welcome once again to the Comic Commish: a monthly feature wherein I reward the generosity of those who have bequeathed me video game gifts with pictorial evidence of my appreciation of their presents. Maybe even throw in a joke or two, if I'm feeling up to it.

Previous examples of my paying it forward, albeit to a far lesser degree than the original act of magnanimity, can be seen here: Harvester - Long Live the Queen -Luftrausers - Papers, Please - NiGHTS Into Dreams - Syberia - Freedom Planet - STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl - Back to the Future: The Game.

Undertale

Undertale, this month's Comic Commish subject, is something of a coup for me. I've been wanting to play this one since I first heard of it, as not only is it an RPG heavily inspired by SNES games (which, really, are a dime a dozen) but one that has a subversive streak a mile wide. That can refer to its meta humor, but also to its myriad mechanical and coventional subversions as well. There's also been a few other "deconstructions" of its type that I've been meaning to play, such as Lisa and O.F.F. and, really, EarthBound and Mother 3 as well, which were heavy inspirations to all of the above.

I've played more video games than I've watched movies, seen TV shows or read books, though it's a fairly close race with all four (well, okay, except for books. I'm not as literate as I make myself out to be. Which still isn't very). While I'd be loathe to call myself a "hardcore gamer", since that label has all sorts of unfortunate obsessive and defensive connotations attached to it, it does mean that I've become more selective and less forgiving of tedium in the medium as that total has grown. A game that can genuinely surprise me, or make me laugh, or make me think new thoughts about the way games are made or what they generally ask of us, is not only rare but coveted. Undertale's one of those.

I intend to go into greater detail as part a spoiler-filled "post-script" area beneath the core of this month's Comic Commish. I have a lot I want to say about this game after having completed it, but I also don't want to ruin the game's many surprises for anyone who has yet to reach the game's conclusion (or one of its conclusions, I suppose) themselves.

However, for the sake of the Comic Commish itself - the part where I write a bunch of jokey captions underneath screenshots from the game and finish with a comic strip of my own creation - there will be zero spoilers for the game's story or events after the tutorial areas. The intent here is to demonstrate what the game is, hint at its depth and intelligence and maybe reach Sans and Papyrus because Sans and Papyrus are the best.

Before I start getting too deep into the game's core, Undertale is a game I'd recommend first and foremost because it respects the player's intelligence. It respects that you're familiar enough with the conventions of the JRPG and of video games in general to constantly flip them on their head in order to surprise you, respects that you'll approach each of its bizarre little scenarios and seek out as much of its hidden jokes and subtle plot details with an open-mind, and it respects that you'll want to find your own way through the monsters and obstacles it's laid out before you, either through compassion or through violence. It respects it enough that it'll alter the playthrough and subsequent playthroughs to reflect your approach, changing how future NPCs interact with you.

Like the Zeboyd JRPG parodies, it can at times stick a little too closely to the hoary conventions it aims to subvert especially early on and during the mid-game, but if you were to play this game you'd be playing it to discover the next classic goof, the next big subversion, the next small character moment or the next diabolically tough boss fight, hooked the whole while. It doesn't pull its punches, either emotionally or in how challenging its combat can become, and it's game that really deserves to be played first-hand rather than via an LP. Possibly multiple times. It's the first game to elicit this sort of response from me since the equally bizarre and wonderful NieR, though Undertale is fortunately not nearly as grindy.

That's all I can really say within this non-spoilerish part. Well, except this:

Part Two: More Words in Spoiler Block City

And now - as a special treat for those of you who don't care for spoilers too much and want to know just how endearingly strange this game can be - here's a selection of screenshots I took while playing, utterly devoid of context. Enjoy:

Gallery

Hello there, all you ST fans and SEO victims looking for online blackjack. This turned out to be an inauspicious week, to put it mildly. French developers tend to pop up almost as frequently as UK companies do for this feature, and at least one of today's game is of French origin, so I felt it prudent to say something regarding the presently-ongoing kerfuffle over in Paris. Stay strong, and stay safe, mon amis. I realize a goofy little blog about a decades-dead computer system that was briefly big in Europe is hardly the place for contemporary news (especially the contemporary part), but I've been informed that the best thing to do is acknowledge it, condemn it and continue on as we always have.

On a lighter note, I've gotten pretty far into Toby Fox's Undertale. I won't hope to match the eloquence of Austin Walker's review, so rather than a proper review I'll be writing a sort of two-part article on it a little later: the first half will be the usual screenshot-focused Comic Commish that doesn't leave the tutorial area so I can designate it as a "non-spoiler"(ish) space to discuss the game's mechanics and themes in general, and then I intend to expound on the whole game further in a "post-script" text-heavy second half once I've beaten it and have the full picture to work from. It's a game that inspires a lot of introspective discussion on the conventions of the JRPG genre and the necessity of conflict in video games, to put it in essay terms. I'm hoping the final article won't be too essay-like, though. I hate essays. All those words.

Demo Derby Gamma: Blackjack Edition

Since we've reached episode twenty-one of ST-urday, I'm loosely basing this Demo Derby's coverdisk selection method around the number 21. I once again called upon mainstays ST Action and ST Format: ST Action #21 debuted in January of 1990, while ST Format #21 was published in April of 1991. Two games each, seven screenshots apiece. (Yes, I realize that totals 28 rather than 21, but what's a session of Blackjack without going hopelessly bust a few times?)

For the sake of variety, I also looked into a few other ST coverdisk magazines: the only other English-language ones I could find with coverdisks for their 21st issue included Zero, a precursor to the ribald, joke-y PC Zone (which would give a young Charlie Brooker his start). Zero was apparently pulled from shelves for a time after putting a risque strip poker game on one of its coverdisks. Alas, that was not the 21st coverdisk (and I really don't need a repeat of the Lady Sword incident regardless); instead, the 21st had a demo of Mindscape's Knightmare, which we already covered on the final day of the Estival ST Festival, and Robotz, which appeared on Demo Derby Beta. I also investigated ST Review, which is even more focused on technical/production programs for ST than ST Format. Their 21st coverdisk was entirely application-based, and it's hard to get any of that to work properly in an emulator.

Switchblade II

Gremlin Graphics appears once again on this feature, like a tiny hairy man on the wing of an airplane to whom you cannot stop paying attention. 1991's Switchblade II, the sequel to Switchblade (doy), was yet another by-product of Europe's affinity for the 1989 Capcom hit Strider, which was adapted for the European home computer market shortly after its initial Arcade release.

Switchblade II has its bionic hero, Hiro, fight across side-scrolling 2D stages set in some dark, apocalyptic future filled with mechanical animals and a whole bunch of metal crates. (Don't even get me started on how short its start-to-crate score is...) It's not a bad game from what I can tell playing this short demo, but like the ill-fated Strider II/Strider Returns from UK devs Tiertex, it's a far cry from the Capcom classic that inspired it.

But hey, did Strider Hiryu ever have a robotic cannon arm? I didn't think so. Take that, Capcom! Maybe you should've thought of giving one of your classic characters a robot gun arm to... oh.

Prehistorik

The late 80s/early 90s saw a wave of caveman platformers for reasons that - like the time period setting itself - are largely lost to history. Core Design's Chuck Rock, Hudson's Bonk and Data East's Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja to name but a few. Oddly, they seemed to die off just before Jurassic Park came along, so either that's some crummy timing for all the barely evolved loinskin heroes out there, or it meant that the game done changed by the idea that we can combine dinosaurs - the real reason anyone would want to set their game in prehistory, despite the inherent anachronism of pitting cavepeople against them - with people holding guns and/or Jeff Goldblum without worrying about including ugly, hairy, half-naked neanderthals for thematic consistency.

Prehistorik was French developers Titus Interactive's contribution to this neolithic overcrowding, and despite its characteristically cartoonish Gallic presentation it's a far more realistic take on early mankind's fight to stay alive in a less than civil time. The bearded caveman hero of Prehistorik is looking for food across its various regions, hunting the wildlife and scavenging for meat, fruit, milk and martinis. Only the bare necessities for survival. It's not quite the same as Adventure Island, where the constant intake of food kept the possibly-diabetic Master Higgins alive, but rather the player explores a level for as much food as they can find and bugs out of there before a time limit expires. The more food they find, the bigger the score bonus, though it won't mean a thing if they can't survive the dangers and escape in time.

I'd imagine more people are familiar with the later games in this series, where it eventually broadened from being exclusive to European computers to globally-released Game Boy and Super Nintendo games. To this day, it's probably Titus' most recognizable franchise. Either that or that Xbox RoboCop game that almost drove Alex Navarro insane.

Moonshine Racers

Ah, the American South, as seen through a European filter colored by far too many Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard reruns. Where every Sheriff is overweight and kind of a jerk, and every good old boy is busy trying to move possibly fatal contraband liquor without the Sheriff's knowhow. Divorced from this element, Moonshine Racers is a fairly generic racing game in the style of OutRun or Rad Racer with their low "behind the car" perspectives that allows the player to see the upcoming course as they rush to meet it. It takes a page from Chase HQ's book, only switching the player's role from law enforcement to criminal and forcing them to not only beat the timer but keep ahead of the authorities. Well, authority. It's just Fat Sam the Sheriff, really.

Moonshine Racers is the product of Millennium Interactive, who we've encountered twice now in ST-urday: Kid Gloves and Yolanda: The Ultimate Challenge, from Demo Derby Beta. I apologize profusely to those of you living in the southern United States.

Gods

I did want to get around to Gods eventually, and doing this short demo version is perfect because I don't particularly care for the game, despite it being yet another incredible-looking The Bitmap Brothers joint. After Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine, both of which are presently available on Steam, Gods might have the highest profile of the remaining games in their library, having been released on both the Genesis and the Super Nintendo: a fairly unusual occurrence for a UK-developed game.

With Gods, The Bitmap Brothers brought out the usual assortment of non-video game talent to help out with the presentation: Simon Bisley, a talented comic artist and the inspiration for Simon Pegg's character from Spaced, designed the game's box art while John Foxx, originally of Ultravox and credited as Nation XII here, composed the catchy - but fairly incongruous to Ancient Greek gods - synth music: Check out this trippy theme music.

The demo doesn't have music, but it does show off some of the game's unusual features. The most touted of which at the time was how the game will configure its own difficulty to match the player's skill, spawning fewer enemies when they're taking too much damage and the inverse when the player's doing too well. It's a take on a universal, adaptable difficulty level that I've never really seen performed satisfactorily, even when it was tackled by the more modern Max Payne 2. There's something frustrating about being lulled into a false sense of superiority and having it ripped from you by an unnaturally difficult ambush, not to mention that feeling of being condescended to when the game "goes easy on you" because you're sucking so bad. Gods can be a bit on the obtuse side too, as so many Amiga/ST games seem to be, and the movement of your burly hero is sluggish as heck. Like I said, not really a fan.

That about wraps up another Demo Derby edition of ST-urday. I wonder if I shouldn't do a little more legwork next time and find some particularly noteworthy coverdisk exclusives to highlight, rather than follow the site's blueprint of a Demo Derby and fully exhaust a single disk's content before moving on. I'll think of something.

Until then. we'll have another six weeks of one-offs to look forward to. See you then.

(Back to the ST-urday ST-orehouse.)

The Yakuza series is one of those video game titans that I adore but have to take at a measured pace. While each game has around 30 hours of "main story" to get through, the vast amount of side-content tends to put each of my playthroughs somewhere in the triple figures. It's not entirely unlike a Bethesda game in that regard, or a particularly expansive open-world game like GTAV. As such, while I make bold claims to be an avowed fan of Sega's Yakuza series and its self-serious tales of honor and respect between members of Japan's criminal underworld juxtaposed with uniquely Japanese quirkiness and absurdly cartoonish brawling, I've only managed to get as far as the third game. Fans in the west are anticipating the imminent release of the fifth game, while Japanese-speakers are on tenterhooks for the sixth game early next year, so it does genuinely feel like I'll never catch up. It's not an entirely unwelcome feeling either, as I discussed in the intro for a recent installment of ST-urday.

I could articulate what it is about Yakuza, and Yakuza 3 in particular, that I find so mesmerizing and immersive to the extent that I can walk away with 104 hours logged in and still have content to return to should I so desire, but it'd mean deconstructing every element of the game and putting it back together to convey fully my admiration for this series.

So that's what I'm going to do. Because I'm secretly a hack writer (don't tell anyone), I've superficially framed this comprehensive piece-by-piece examination of Yakuza 3 as a sort of tourist guide to the game's ever-present fictional setting of Kamurocho: which is, as far as I can tell through photographic evidence, an almost perfect recreation of Tokyo's real-life red light district Kabukicho in the city's Shinjuku ward.

Come to Tokyo's colorful and exciting red-light district Kamurocho, and...

...Watch a rich narrative unfold before your very eyes

With the advent of GTAIV and peripheral games like Red Dead Redemption, the chief narrative focus of Rockstar's more recent games have been to follow a very traditional, movie-like rendition of the genres they're attached to. They're overly serious, concerned more with character development and quiet moments than the silly, over-the-top farcical stories that Rockstar previously portrayed. I want to say this is in some small part due to the influence of Yakuza, who has been banging this particular taiko since its inception back in 2005. Each Yakuza brings with it a somber tale concerning the intimidating Kazuma Kiryu, the Dragon of Dojima, and his former associates the Tojo Clan, a coalition of powerful Yakuza families that is regularly threatened to the point of dissolution by some sort internal or external strife. Kazuma wants to live a peaceful life away from the Yakuza lifestyle after some disillusionment that followed a ten-year stint in prison, but his code of honor prohibits him from walking away from his adoptive Tojo Clan and the few members of that association he still calls "brother". Often, the villains of the piece are gunning for him in particular, both as the one-time proxy chairman of the Tojo Clan and as a legend of the criminal world.

Invariably, Kazuma is forced to return to Kamurocho, the crime-ridden seat of the Tojo Clan, and finds himself working with his underworld friends there - host club owners, mob doctors, undercover cops, etc. - to piece together whatever new enigmatic threat has targeted the Tojo Clan, himself and/or his closest allies. There's a certain degree of formulaicness to this approach that is entirely germane to the pulpy crime fiction it emulates, creating these little satisfying plots that ticks off an invisible checklist of genre mainstays: brash, young Yakuzas making exaggerated and boisterous displays of dominance to an entirely unimpressed Kazuma; small character scenes with the various innocents that Kazuma wishes to protect in order to establish their importance to him and to inform/rationalize his motivations; escalation as foreign powers come into play (Yakuza 3 has both the American CIA and Chinese Triads in crucial roles); a deeper and far-reaching conspiracy that unfolds as the plot thickens; a few tragic deaths; a lot of "what it means to be a man" type of talk; and, invariably, an epic shirtless fight between Kiryu and a rival Yakuza of equal strength with their enormous and symbolically meaningful back tattoos given special prominence by the camera work. It's entertainingly schlocky in the same way the aforementioned Rockstar games are: appealing stories that adhere closely to the tenets of the genre fiction to which they belong, generally opting for earnest fidelity over post-modern, sarcastic subversions.

That's as far as I can get into Yakuza 3's plot without spoiling large chunks of it, but while each game's stories are always different the pacing and tone is inevitably the same. They'll often play off the events of previous games too, but so far every new Yakuza game has provided the option to watch an abridged version of the prior games' events to get new players quickly up to speed. Yakuza 3 also has the benevolence to include a flowchart that keeps you informed of all the major characters, their role in the story thus far, their group affiliations and their relationships between each other so that the game can ratchet up the complexity of its web of deceit without ever losing the player in its strands.

...Get embroiled in altercations with one of Kamurocho's many friendly inhabitants

The cornerstone of any Yakuza game is its combat, which works as a modern interpretation of something like Technos Japan's Double Dragon or River City Ransom: upon triggering a fight while walking the streets of Kamurocho (or Ryukyu, the game's stand-in for Okinawa Island and Kazuma's present home), the screen subtly transitions, random encounter style, to a portion of the same street with a number of opponents, a barricade of cheering onlookers and any number of objects lying around that can be employed as improvised weaponry. Combatants have health bars and names, like any traditional brawler, and the player is free to employ a range of combination attacks and showy finishers to quickly eliminate their aggressors.

The game has a tremendous amount of versatility to offset just how many of these "random encounter" fights you're likely to bump into, especially if you're pursuing the game's many "substories", or side-missions. Kazuma has a weak and a strong attack: the weak attacks are best chained together for sustained damage with a strong attack to conclude the combo. There's also a button that performs the grab move which recontextualizes the three commands: weak attacks will now hit the grabbed opponent without releasing Kazuma's grasp, heavy attacks will send them flying but loose the grip and hitting grab again will cause Kazuma to throw the opponent in the direction held. The final face button is used for "swaying": an evasive slide that will put Kazuma out of danger and can allow him to side-step around opponents to their vulnerable sides and back. The left trigger blocks frontal attacks while the right trigger puts Kazuma in a fighting stance that effectively allows him to lock onto a particular opponent. Those are the basics.

Where the combat shines brightest, however, is in its HEAT gauge mechanics. As with any modern fighter, Kazuma will build a gauge with successive hits that allows him to unleash special attacks once it's filled to a certain point. HEAT actions are the collective name for these specials, and can run the gamut from contextual terrain takedowns like the brutal environmental finishers of Sleeping Dogs, to wrestling moves, merciless stomps to the face, counter-attacks and unique finishers attached to a number of weapons Kazuma can use, from swords and bats to items as innocuous (but still painful) as pliers, store signs, bottle crates and sections of rope.

Yet the HEAT actions are all a showy exterior for what gradually develops into a very in-depth combat engine. It's not quite the dizzyingly inscrutable arrays of gauges and techniques of an Arc System Works fighter, but the game will slowly introduce more effective means of fighting the opponents beyond standard combo chains and letting loose with an heavy object once the HEAT gauge has maxed out. I particularly appreciated Yakuza 3's reversal system: a sort of time-sensitive pre-emptive counter to enemy attacks that work similarly to the combat in Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham games or Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed but without the overt prompts. By hitting the grab button at the moment of an enemy's attack, Kazuma uses their momentum to pull them forward and knee them in the abdomen; a lightning-fast reversal that never gets old. Even trickier is the Tiger Drop Reversal, which is a devastating low punch that ducks under the incoming attack to send the opponent flying. The game rewards such tricky-to-master moves with larger HEAT gauge boosts, allowing the player to take advantage of the HEAT state sooner and more frequently. As well as unlocking HEAT actions, simply being in a state of HEAT - represented by a fiery blue or red aura - has all sorts of benefits, from a reduced chance of being knocked down to, eventually, a sort of immortality.

Tied indelibly to the combat is the game's levelling system, which doesn't so much automatically reward Kazuma with occasional stat boosts but allows the player to assign "stocks" of earned experience to any of four attributes: Soul, which boosts the HEAT gauge; Body, which boosts health and Kazuma's defensive skills; Technique, which unlocks new attacks and skills; and Essence, which unlocks new HEAT actions. As each attribute is increased, the amount of stock required for the next is increased in turn. The game informs the player whenever a new upgrade is within reach based on their present level of experience, but the player can always opt to hold onto what they have to boost a higher level attribute later instead. It's a progression system as versatile as the combat itself.

...Visit numerous parlors for diversions that take a lifetime to master

When I last wrote about Yakuza, it was to wax poetic (and maybe be just a little querulous) about Yakuza 2's Mahjong mini-game. Mahjong is a deeply layered and strategic gambling game beloved across the Far East which is only exacerbated in difficulty by a Byzantine scoring system which subtly changes from region to region. As such it's not a particularly easy game to glean to begin with, and Yakuza 2 had a specific substory that required you win a game with the odds stacked against you and three CPU opponents that, given that they were explicitly portrayed as tile hustlers, seemed to cheat every other round.

For whatever reason, Sega made the now-notorious decision to remove the mahjong and shogi from Yakuza 3's English localization, as well as a number of other conspicuous exclusions. The mahjong and shogi parlors are still extant, as the locations themselves are related to other substories that have nothing to do with the games they supposedly host, but it was one of many odd player-unfriendly excisions that even the Bombcast remarked on with some incredulity (which also spawned the legendary "Pizza Hut George Foreman Sonic the Hedgehog" skit from Jeff). Yakuza's second biggest draw after its combat is its verisimilitude to everyday urban Japanese living, and removing many aspects that had been around in prior games was seen as a betrayal by the franchise's stalwart western fans.

That said, there's still quite the number of mini-games and activities that the player can pursue, and they factor into the game's most intensely frustrating and difficult completionist trophy, which tasks the player to complete each mini-game at a prohibitively high level of skill.

Yakuza 3's big addition in this particular regard is a self-contained golf game, filled with the standard accoutrements of any virtual simulation of the sport of kings. There's wind, topography considerations, multi-step power gauges to hit and various clubs to choose between. The game only has the single nine-hole course in Ryukyu to enjoy, but it takes some mastery to get decent enough at it for the sub-0 game you need to complete in order to unlock a related substory. The aforementioned mini-game mastery trophy demands you score -5, which is a little more exacting for a nine-hole game.

There's also the standard batting cages, where precisely calling shots is an important as the timing behind them; the bowling alley, which like GTA IV has a trophy for scoring a turkey, or three strikes in a row; darts and pool in a number of the game's drinking establishments; Karaoke, which is a good place to bring a date; and the Club Sega Arcades, which has the infuriating UFO Catcher machines and the bizarre deconstruction of modern horizontal shoot 'em ups, Boxcelios. Boxcelios superficially resembles that recent Steam shoot 'em up Astebreed, but the opponents are all Rez-like abstract stacks of grey boxes, one of which is a glowing weak point. The goal of the game is to quickly destroy each of these enemy block ships by one-shotting them in their weak point and moving onto the next before a brief game-wide timer counts down to zero. It's as frantic and fast-paced as any shoot 'em up, but saves on a lot of artistic assets that would otherwise be overkill for such a minor part of the game.

...Drop in on our gambling dens and try not to lose your shirt playing a dozen Hanafuda variants

Of course, there's also the darker, sleazier side of side-activities, and that's the gambling. As a corollary to the previous section, it's interesting to note that none of the gambling mini-games were scrapped along with mahjong and shogi, despite being every bit as obscure and specifically far eastern. If I were to tell you that could play cee-lo, cho-han, koi-koi and oicho-kabu in Yakuza 3, would any of that even register? Maybe that comes off slightly more mean-spirited than I meant it to, but I didn't know one thing from another when trying any of the above games.

A quick Cliff's notes version, just so we're up to speed: Cee-lo is a dice game with three dice where you're trying to get certain Yahtzee-esque combinations for points, the best being four-five-six, three of the same number or a total that is higher than the banker's roll. Cho-han is the archetypal Japanese dice gambling game, seen in various samurai movies and old Japan-centric video games for decades: the banker rolls two dice and asks people to call odds or evens. Correct calls win money, incorrect ones lose money. Koi-Koi, Japanese for "come on", is a game that uses hanafuda cards and plays on going double or nothing every turn. Likewise, oicho-kabu ("eight-nine") uses hanafuda cards (or a variant, kabufuda) in a card game that is similar to baccarat where you have to ensure that the total value of the cards in your hand, excluding multiples of ten, is an eight or a nine.

You also have the standard roulette, poker and blackjack of course. There are separate trophies for scoring big on the obscure dice/card games above and one for the classic casino staples, but it's all mostly luck. Well, mostly. Y'see, there are a handful of "lucky" items that fudges the game's percent chance of certain outcomes, such as earning a twenty-one in blackjack or the green double-zero of roulette. Though it's not a guarantee, the idea is that you bet big on a remote outcome and use the item to make it happen. I generally avoid any non-exploitable gambling mini-game in RPGs, so I didn't check to see if the bouncers of these gambling dens would throw me out of the establishment for using forbidden luck magic. That'd be one hell of an incident to explain to the cops, though.

...Try to find the secret underworld Coliseum, where warriors from all over the world fight for your amusement

Kamurocho's darker half is Purgatory: an opulent underground haven run by the information broker Kage ("shadow", though his original Japanese name is Hanaya, which means "florist". No idea why the localization team changed it from one slightly sinister Japanese sobriquet to another) with its own casino and Coliseum. The Coliseum is the chief place of interest, as it allows Kazuma to fight against a number of opponents in specially configured arenas. Not only does it present new challenges for a player much more focused on the combat than the story, but it's also handy for late-game grinding if you're a few XP stocks away from another upgrade. Yakuza 3 introduces a tag team system, where you find and recruit partners around Kamurocho - most of them are arena combatants you have to defeat in the Coliseum first - and team up against other duos. I frequently chose to fight alongside a rather transparent Bruce Lee ersatz, because who wouldn't?

The Coliseum is a good test of ability because it strips you of your consumables and items of equipment, some of which can genuinely remove all challenge from the game with their OP status, and each bout involves three consecutive fights with only minor health recoveries in-between. I didn't spend quite so long on the Coliseum this time around - to hit full completion status, you need to have fought every opponent and won at least once - but if anything draws me back to that game it'll be finishing off what remains of its roster of would-be Kumite combatants.

...Avail yourself of the many fine (and real) consumables from top-class restaurants and conbinis

I talked about the verisimilitude of Yakuza's setting, which digitally recreates a real-life urban sprawl of convenience stores ("conbinis"), Michelin-star restaurants, flashy attractions, quiet bars and dubious dens of depravity, and key to all this is the game's insistence on real-life product names. Far from being mere product placement - there's so much from so many distributors that I can't imagine Yakuza sees a dime for including, say, C.C. Lemon in its virtual conbinis - the effect is the feeling that you're actually in Japan, walking down the street for a Japanese citrus drink frequently advertized by The Simpsons.

While I doubt the restaurants are named for real-life establishments, they offer the sort of elaborate menus you'd expect to peruse in similar locales. There's a place for Korean barbeque, gourmet sushi, quality ramen, an ersatz McDonalds, ice cream and sorbet parlors, a pricey tourist-trap teppan-yaki joint and an elegant café styled on Alpine cuisine. There's also the Matsuya, which is a real-life restaurant that sponsors the Yakuza series and largely serves bowls of curry, soup and meat dishes.

Similar to the conbinis, the game's number of classy bars serve actual alcohol, and each comes with a little stock quote about the drink's history. While it can seem like sponsor pandering ("unlimited anime!"), it's done in such a way that it feels like you're getting the sales pitch from the bartender after ordering a bottle as if you were a connoisseur. There's a range of both native and foreign brands of spirits, such as Yamazaki, Hokuto, Hibiki, Laphroaig, The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Jack Daniel's, Beefeater, and Early Time. As well as providing color to Kamurocho's nightlife, being drunk can also unlock unique HEAT actions (like a hurricanrana!) and increases the chances of a random scuffle. It also makes you way less accurate at darts and pool, so drink responsibly.

...Encounter all sorts of eccentric personalities, helping them out with their troubles

The substories are the meat of any given Yakuza game, though many essentially amount to a bunch of punks or low-level yakuza trying to swindle Kazuma or some bystander and getting their asses beat. They can be quite amusing though, and this is where I feel the previously stated comparison to modern Rockstar games, with its dichotomy between po-faced plots and goofy asides, is at its keenest. Yakuza 3 has 101 substories in total (down from the Japanese release's 122), and while most follow the formula of "bump into guy on the street, fight some hoodlums at the end", there's a number with some deeper narrative aspects at work. It's why they're referred to as "substories" by the game's documentation than the standard, far more mechanical-sounding "side-missions" or "side-quests".

Of note are five substories that are closely linked to side-players in the story. One involves helping Kazuma's undercover cop informant turned journalist Makoto Date into wooing the comely bartender at New Serena; another involves Date's new boss, a career journalist who is troubled by his rash reporting of a murder six years ago which you help to set straight; another concerns the host club managers that befriended Kazuma two games ago; two more involve Kazuma's companion Rikiya, a level-headed young yakuza he meets in Okinawa, as he finishes his viper back tattoo and encounters his childhood sweetheart all grown up as one of Kamurocho's many exotic dancers. These substories are worth pursuing because they give some extra development to characters that are essential to the plot but aren't given a whole lot of time in that busy plot to really shine.

Other side-missions involve dating hostesses (more on them later), teaching tricks to the dog at Kazuma's orphanage, running down a frequent dine-and-dasher, and recruiting a group of bodyguards for one of the casinos Seven Samurai-style by finding and fighting each of them. There's also substories attached to each of the mini-games, usually requiring that you do well enough at those games to trigger the substory. Substories take a lot of your time if you allow them to, and many are quite grindy and dull fetch-quests, but a few are the source of the game's more enjoyable moments.

...Meet glamorous hostesses and curry their favor with gifts and compliments

Yakuza 3's localization also removed the various hostess clubs, which previously involved sitting down with glamorous working girls and plying them with drinks, gifts and saying the right things in conversations in order to get them to fall for you. Instead, they skip ahead to the post-club dates in which Kazuma takes them out for a night on the town before resolving some minor strife in their lives and earning their everlasting adoration (and, it's implied, an hour or so in a love hotel). Honestly, this was probably the one exclusion that I was completely okay about, since a lot of Yakuza 2's hostess seduction took far too long and was kind of creepy besides. Creepy in that date simulation fantasy sense where, were you to learn beforehand everything they were into and pick the right options on a multiple choice menu, you could have any woman you wanted eating out of the palm of your hand.

Whenever I see a scenario like that I think back to that montage in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray's character is trying to engineer the perfect date with Andie McDowell's character and never quite getting the magic right, despite gradually picking up on everything she likes and dislikes through dozens of iterations of the same evening. That she even remonstrates with him after overhearing his mental checklist of the correct things to say to her on the next cycle, hitting him with the withering "Is this what love is for you?", meant that this sort of memorization-focused, points-based dating sim format never sat right with me thereafter. Like showing up outside of her window with a boombox, there's a lot of romantic gestures in media that are anything but in the real world.

...become the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass by training with our martial arts masters

The game's adamant about not giving you every combat skill too soon, as it's often essential for the player to master the basics before moving up to the advanced techniques. With that in mind, the game gates off advanced moves in two ways: the formerly mentioned XP-based progression system, and the game's handful of masters. Masters will teach Kazuma new moves, but they have to be sought out and usually won't appear until later chapters. Learning from these masters unlocks new skills, but generally require that Kazuma perform a difficult activity (or just busywork) beforehand to make sure he's ready.

Komaki, Kazuma's long-time martial arts mentor, is the one that teaches him reversals and a particularly powerful finisher that can only be pulled off after a successful reversal. Yonashiro is an odd gentleman in a straw hat that teaches Kazuma how to use exotic weapons like nunchakus, tonfa sticks and kali sticks. Mack is a foreign photographer and champion runner who challenges Kazuma to catch him in the game's new "battle chases", which aren't quite as annoying as they sound. Mack is also the one who teaches Kazuma how to blog on the internet about amusing scenarios he sees, which in turn unlocks new HEAT Actions and fighting techniques. There's also a handful of texts and DVDs the player can buy which inspire additional moves. None of these are essential, of course, and Kazuma is well prepared for any combat scenario he encounters with his default combos and finishers alone, but it doesn't hurt to add a bit of variety to one's repertoire.

The oddest of the masters is Dr. Minamida, a Doc Brown expy and former game programmer who has built a virtual reality Arcade machine to test Kazuma's fighting prowess. Kazuma can enter the virtual world of the machine and fight previous bosses recalled from the depths of his mind, all of which have some additional wrinkle like multiple mirror clones, enhanced speed or an odd case where you and the virtual boss will sometimes switch places. Kazuma's last opponent is a shadow version of himself: a near-perfect martial artist that requires that the player has mastered the game's advanced moveset, since regular attacks won't work. Beating each of these fights unlocks new passive and active skills, as with any master, but they're far harder to earn.

...make full use of Kamurocho's many convenient coin lockers and their easily misplaced keys

The requisite collectible-hunt of any given Yakuza game are the coin locker keys, fifty of which have once again been spread across Kamurocho (and another fifty in Ryukyu). Yakuza 3 makes this particular ubiquitous side-quest more challenging by implementing the game's first-person view (R3) to look around for keys arbitrarily hanging on lampposts, trees and on top of A/C units. The prizes you get for bringing the keys back to their matching lockers can include some very valuable gear, especially for the early game, but it's mostly for scavenger hunt enthusiasts and collectible diehards. I can't get enough of them, personally, though I'll admit to using a guide this time around: as with previous games, there's a lot of keys that can't be accessed until later on in the story when certain locations open up, and you have no idea which ones.

...have an eventful encounter with the most powerful and deadly assassin in the world, Jo Amon

Another Yakuza fixture, the Amons are an utterly ruthless assassin family that carries a grudge against Kazuma for not only defeating them, but refusing to kill them afterwards. The Amons are a scary bunch, equating defeat with death and polishing their death-dealing skills to an unnatural sheen. They are, inevitably, the most difficult opponent in the game and the "bonus" for completing every substory. Being the wuss that I am, I gathered as many post-game trinkets as I could find and cheesed the poor ultra assassin to death, but he's there as a test for any player who feels they have mastered the game.

Yakuza shares a lot of DNA with JRPGs, beyond simply the . The concept of the superboss - the ultimate opponent that awaits any player bold (or obdurate) enough to pass every challenge the game can throw at them - is something indelible to the JRPG as well. Jo Amon, with his gun kata and twin lightsabers (oh, you didn't think this game could get this stupid? Were you paying attention?) is every bit that concept.

...share a moment with everyone's favorite post-game bonus clown Bob Utsunomiya

For the final section, I just want to give a shout-out to my irascible post-game clown homie Bob Utsunomiya who has, since the very first Yakuza, been the one to dispense special powerful items for hitting certain quotas within the game. These quotas are things like eating every item of food in the game, completing every substory, utilizing every HEAT action at least once, facing every opponent in the Coliseum, mastering every mini-game, etc. Though a man of few words, the items he gives you are so overpowered they might as well be cheats for particularly meticulous players.

The way I eventually beat Jo Amon? By accepting the War God Amulet from Bob after completing all the HEAT actions, allowing me to perform HEAT actions at any time regardless of the HEAT gauge. Boy howdy, does that do terrible things to the game's fragile difficulty curve.

The Bit at the End

Yakuza 3, despite the crude hatchet job, is every bit the benchmark game that its predecessors were, and I'm glad to have finally carved out some time to add it to my library of played games. It did mean that I didn't have the time for two or three much smaller games in its stead, but I've still got two more months left in this year to hammer out some pressing 2015 bangers. That said, it looks like Undertale's next up. Stick around for my thoughts on that neo-retro Indie darling at some point in the near future, and thanks for reading.

Hey gang, quick episode this week as I'm knee-deep in moderating the 75+ hours of charity streaming chaos happening on and around the site. Today's game is really another like Kid Gloves, where the only significant about it is its sentimental value to myself. Still, why write these things without giving them a personal edge?

Elsewhere and elsewise, I'm happy to report that after 104 hours (according to the game over screen), I've finally slain a long-standing "pile of shame" entry: Yakuza 3. I'm now fully prepared for 2011's Yakuza 4, the imminent English language release of Yakuza 5 and whenever Yakuza 6 is localized after its JP release next year. So, basically I'm never finishing this series. Bamco's Tales is another such case: I'm planning on going through Graces F soon, but even once that's done I'll be at least three games (four if you count Hearts R) behind the soon-to-be-released Tales of Berseria. Any single Tales or Yakuza game takes so much time to get through, an issue exacerbated by my completionist tendencies, that I doubt I'll ever catch up or run out of games from either series to play. Having missing entries in a series I adore used to bother me so much when I was younger, but these days it's almost comforting: that knowledge that if I ever have the inclination to play another game of that type, there'll always be a new one waiting for me. I think that epiphany hit me once the IGAvanias dried up, after being spoiled with a new one almost every year for so long. Makes me wish I had the forethought to save one for a rainy day, but maybe that's what Bloodstained can be.

Now that Yakuza's done, I think I'll concentrate on smaller 2015 games for GOTY purposes until I finally snap and get a damned PS4 already. Undertale would be the most pressing item on that shortlist, given how frequently people seem to mention it. Anything else can hopefully wait for the big Steam holiday sale.

Black Lamp

Black Lamp is a side-scrolling platformer/action game published on the Atari ST in 1988 by Firebird, a UK company that frequently took on projects from smaller teams, often taking a classic 8-bit game and sprucing it up for the 16-bit Amiga/ST - this was the case for their ST versions of Elite and The Sentinel. In this case, it also means that there's no obvious developer here: most places don't seem to have any name for the developer, just the people who actually made it who appear on the title screen (see below). It's been a recent phenomenon in the Indie world where people are just using their real names in lieu of company names, like Christine Love (though she only recently started using the Love Conquers All Games label to ship her games under), but it's possible it goes even further back. We'll see the 16-bit version today, but Black Lamp first appeared in the 8-bit home computer era: the C64, the ZX Spectrum and the Atari 400/800. I'd post the music, but they're just MIDI renditions of Elizabethan Serenade and Greensleeves. (Except for the C64 version, which gets this sweet SID track from Contradiction designer and erstwhile VGM maestro Tim Follin, because of course it does. Damn you, @buzz_clik! You win the ST/C64 soundtrack game once again!)

Black Lamp tells the tale of Jolly Jack the Jester, who is the lone defender of a massive raid on his kingdom. Equipped with a powerful amulet that acts as both his means of offense and defense, Jack has to recover the protective magical lamps that keep the kingdom safe and repel the horde of creatures that have invaded. Jack's hoping this act of heroism is enough to convince the king to let Jack marry the fair Princess Grizelda. (Grizelda isn't a particular "fair" name though, no offense to any Grizeldas out there. It's like a gritty Zelda. Not that we need to give Nintendo that idea.) The most striking aspect of the game was its open-world approach: you're free to explore in any direction, and having a set of collectibles to find in order to progress the game meant fully exploring each room of its huge maze-like kingdom for required McGuffins and useful power-ups.

I said this was a low key game this week, and it won't take a whole of explanation, but even revisiting it years later expecting the worse, I'm surprised how well Black Lamp has held up. The most maligned aspect of it - the controls - actually feel deliberate in a way that it almost feels like a positive. There's a certain clunkiness to how it works: Jack walks very slowly, and you have to turn around in two increments because of the way the game's foreground/background traversal works. It'd be a frustrating slog in most cases, but it works with the game's odd emphasis on aspects you'd normally not emphasize in a colorful, noisy platformer. I'm speaking cryptically because I intend to demonstrate what I mean with the screenshots below, but you'll hopefully see what I'm talking about in just a moment.

That's Black Lamp in a nutshell. Sort of difficult and weirdly unresponsive, but I hope you get that it was going for something a little different and methodical. Jack takes hits from enemies like a champ, so the deliberate platforming aspects are far more integral to success than trying to shoot everything. Open-world game design was still fairly novel for action games in 1988 too.

I'm just glad it lived up to my memories of it: that's an ever-present concern whenever I create a new ST-urday based on a game I loved as a kid.

(Back to the ST-urday ST-orehouse.)

Happy Halloween, everyboogey! Though it was not my intent to do a Halloween special for this feature, having the day in question land on a Saturday this year has tied my hands in that regard. I've actually already covered what I consider to be the most genuinely terrifying Atari ST game - that would be Dungeon Master, which puts on a clinic in setting a suspenseful and nerve-wracking atmosphere where anything could be skulking around the next dark corner - but there are still plenty of, let's say, overtly Halloween-themed titles to choose from.

As for the future, blogging plans for next month still involve an earlier-than-usual Comic Commish for recent Indie darling Undertale, as well as something comprehensive on Yakuza 3 once I've torn myself from the vast number of substories and the bowling, baseball and darts mini-games to actually complete the story. I'm elsewise poring over what remains of this year's Pile of Shame to clear some space for the hundred or so must-play games released this year that'll be added to it in 2016. Should be a good month either way: GBEast now has simultaneous Super Castlevania IV, Life is Strange and Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh playthroughs going, and I'd be stoked to see any of them continue.

Because I don't really have a space for it elsewhere, I'll go into a few of my recent mini Wiki Projects too. After Super '94 and sprucing up all the FDS pages, I've been catching up with the list of games recently featured on my favorite Japanese TV show GameCenter CX as well as those Atari ST games covered by this feature, ST-urday. I mean, I link to those pages every time I write a new one of these, so those links might as well actually lead to something useful. My newest project is to ensure we have a full page with all the necessary data for every game released for the doomed Atari Jaguar; a project which, I'm starting to realize, might be taking one's Atari affection too far. Still, it's a relatively brisk project at around ~80 total releases - I'm still working out where the more recent homebrews on reproduction carts fit in; or why they exist at all for that matter - so it's something to tide me over until I head back to the PC Engine or delve into the immense pile of Eastern and Western shovelware released for the Super Nintendo in 1995. Busy, busy.

Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus

Tonight I'm going to suck! Your blood! Those thrice-accursed Millennials might be in the dark about one-time macabre movie night hostess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, a.k.a. the charming Cassandra Peterson, but during the 80s and early 90s she was one of those cultural icons that popped up everywhere. (And I do mean everywhere.) Instantly recognizable by her 60s gothic villainess ensemble - an enormous beehive haircut, vampish black gown and elaborate pale make-up - Elvira had the sort of marketable countenance that, like Mr. T, Urkel, Hulk Hogan and various other one-note "character performers", her managers could stamp onto every piece of merchandise in the 80s for the sake of a quick buck. That fame also led to the release of three video games in the early 90s, the most interesting of which is what we're looking at here.

Elvira had a fairly generic licensed platformer that we don't need to go too deeply into, other than to say it was branded "Elvira: The Arcade Game" back when "Arcade" simply meant any computer game that involved jumping and shooting things rather than browsing menus with the mouse and keyboard. Far more inviting are the two Elvira games from HorrorSoft. HorrorSoft is a division of Adventure Soft, the UK point-and-click developers that would later create Simon the Sorcerer, and while they were built to incorporate her name and likeness, they didn't really have a whole lot in common with their eponymous (almost said titular, almost) horror hostess. At least, the first game didn't: Set in a medieval castle that Elvira supposedly inherited only to run afoul of the monstrous minions of her powerful witch ancestor, it was a poor fit for the quick-witted and contemporary personality who's more about been resting on a chaise lounge in some LA studio quipping about the horrors of the middle ages than actually living them. The sequel we're covering today is based in and around a much more natural setting for Elvira: a 90s movie studio pumping out schlock horror by the bargain-barrel-load. Elvira's once again been captured, this time by the demonic three-headed dog of Ancient Greek legend, and the player (as her present boyfriend) needs to find a way to rescue her before the sacrificial ritual at midnight.

Both Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus share a hybrid style of adventure game and RPG dungeon-crawler gameplay, mixing together the likes of inventory-based puzzles and number-heavy turn-based combat to various degrees of success. With the exception of Superhero League of Hoboken, however, it's a fairly unique combination and the games purportedly did well by fans of both genres. I guess we'll see for ourselves...

I didn't show off too much of the horror parts of Elvira, alas, but you got a glimpse of it with that security guard's corpse which - though the static screenshot diminished the effect somewhat - was hovering indistinctly in the darkness before suddenly lurching forward in true jumpscare fashion. If you'd like to see more of the game, I'd recommend checking out TheCRPGAddict's thorough appraisal of it - it's part CRPG, so it's within his purview. Until then, see you all next week for something that probably won't be Guy Fawkes-related.

Unpleasant dreams, everyone. Mwahahahaha-*cough* ugh, swallowed my mwahaha.

(Back to the ST-urday ST-orehouse.)

Super Mario Maker's an odd game to quantify in terms of content. The game does come with its own set of levels, but a lot of them are very brief and seem intended to highlight specific ideas with which to inspire creators. Nintendo was clearly going all in on the hope that an enthusiastic community would go about creating the vast majority of the game's content for them; something even Media Molecule was apprehensive about when developing the community-driven LittleBigPlanet and its surprisingly long built-in campaign. Of course, the chief difference here is that while LittleBigPlanet's platforming mechanics left a lot to be desired, the four Mario game "models" currently supported by Mario Maker's toolset are some of the most mechanically proficient platformers ever created.

Take it from a guy who has been working on a number of NES and SNES pages here on the Giant Bomb wiki (do I talk about the wiki too much? I feel like I talk about the wiki too much), but the many, many Mario imitators rarely got close to the sort of divine but elusive platforming precision that Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World presented. Many of the hack developers that filled the NES/SNES with risible licensed games took one look at Mario and saw a goofy guy with funny clothes playing around in an abstractly bizarre cartoonish world - but the attempts to base their own games on such a rote, superficial reading of the appeal of Mario led to unfortunate cases like Wayne's World, Home Improvement, Family Dog, and no end of terrible licensed dreck that have since been consigned to oblivion and/or AVGN fuel.

Anyhoo, this is all in aid of trying to explain why Nintendo was absolutely vindicated in just throwing together a bunch of rudimentary tools, a handful of necessary Mario mainstays that editors could plonk down anywhere and a few of the Mario games' more memorable settings and expecting their diminishing audience of long-suffering Wii U owners to fill the game with so much free downloadable community content that they could get away with installing a mode where you play through sixteen randomly chosen user-generated stages and almost assuredly get something different every time. That feels extremely ballsy to me, but Nintendo didn't get to where they are without taking a lot of big, often dumb risks and emerging from them relatively unscathed.

All this pre-amble leads to what I, and I'd have to assume almost everyone, enjoy most about Super Mario Maker: finding the levels of friends and followed internet personalities, playing their creations and leaving a sarcastic message to them on MiiVerse. I've taken it to an extra meta level below, where I play through the "Marioeuvre" of a number of semi-famous Mario Maker creators and judge their body of work. Maybe some armchair psychological evaluation too, even though I'm dangerously unqualified to do so and some of it will no doubt border on passive-aggressiveness borne from their more challenging levels. I have a lot of Mario Maker-induced aggression to work out, it appears. With Dan Ryckert especially. Let's begin:

The Giant Bomb Community

I adore our community. We've had some rough spots and rougher spats of late, but while I believe the staff and the moderation team have helped mold the Duder Collective into one of the finest internet gaming communities on the internet, a lot of that has been on the community itself: choosing not to take any bullshit, taking it easy on the memes and hosting and welcoming a wide range of talented folk who create all manner of GB-related artwork and videos in their off-time, even if some of it ends up being horrifying. Yet, there's still a darkness within this pack of game-lovin' fools. That darkness was manifested in our combined efforts to create two of the most frustrating, trap-laden and just malicious Mario Maker stages that have no internal consistency or connecting tissue beyond the infliction of pain.

The Giant Bomb Community has so far created two levels, via the Giant Bomb Makes Mario livestreams and the "final say" judiciousness of Dan, Jeff and Drew. There was an implicit undercurrent that these levels would be foisted upon former GB newshound and current YouTube celebrity (and something about being a "Kotak" reporter?) Patrick "Scoops" Klepek, and so the community and the GB crew were anxious to add as many "fuck you" traps to the level as possible. As such, unless you were there for the level's creation or have since seen the archive, the levels are packed with pitfalls that you'd have to be prescient to avoid. For all our well-meaning submissions and clever ideas (using the POW block as a door step is still inspired, and I've used it myself), we recreated Cat Mario. Almost entirely because we all have fond memories of watching Patrick playing said Mario hack and almost tearing his impressively large hair out. Kudos, everyone.

I will say that, having been present for the creation of both levels, it's a lot easier once you know where all the mines are buried. The second stage is tougher than the first - naturally, since escalation is always a thing - but neither are in the realm of impossibility. It's another testament to just how sharp the physics and controls are for any Mario that you look at something like the precarious ice blocks floating over the abyss in the second community level and nail those jumps the first time, simply because everything reacts just like it should. Even so, with 1.25% and 0.61% completion respectively, we didn't build those things to be pushovers.

• The Giant Bomb Level 1: F829-0000-0066-E98B
• The Giant Bomb Level 2: 1F31-0000-0094-CC9D

"Dirty" Dan Ryckert

Oh, Dan. It should come to no surprise to anyone who hasn't actually seen Dan's Mario Maker levels that, while he started with the best intentions with some "traditionally" difficult Mario levels, his natural competitiveness and heel persona took over at some point to create levels that follow the same philosophy ofl meanness as the above community efforts.

Perilous Pits and Castle Keepyourtail are rocking sub-5% completion rates, but neither is absurdly difficult. Neither's particularly laden with unforeseeable pitfalls either - the aforementioned "fuck you" traps - relying instead on skill and understanding the game's mechanics. I was able to beat both within four or five attempts, which makes them the perfect level of difficulty for the game's Expert-level 100-Mario Challenge mode. Wood Zeppelin, meanwhile, is Dan's attempt at what may well have been a mid-game airship level for Super Mario Bros. 3: less difficult than his other stages but the right level of challenge for the original game. Ladder to Floor 2 is Dan's first requisite attempt a puzzle level: these things are fun to plan out, I've found, and seem almost as ubiquitous in the 100-Mario Challenge lottery as the clever but pointless "automatic" stages and "run along and the stage recreates music" stages.

After helping to bring the community levels into being, Dan's creations start to take on the vindictive, troll-y forms you'd expect. Mario's Jailbreak is a cute themed level with some misdirection, but Yoshi's Many Sacrifices and Spikeshoe Plains are far more malicious with plenty of "how was I supposed to know that?" instances packed into them. The Yoshi stage requires a lot of leaping off Yoshi to reach areas of the screen you are unable to see until you get up there, while Spikeshoe Plains requires an unnerving amount of precision and backtracking with a Kuribo's shoe. Both stages currently boast a <0.5% completion percentage: the sort of thing you'd instantly skip while playing the 100-Mario Challenge but might, with enough time and effort, eventually conquer. These two seem more overtly created to test Patrick, but of course that adversarial relationship would come to a head with the following: The Ryckoning.

I haven't beaten The Ryckoning. I simply don't have the patience for it. I consider myself a fairly decent Mario player, having been firmly attached to every new Mario game for the past twenty-five years as they were released, but I simply lack the motivation to complete that one. I've realized that the "0.1-0.2" range is about where I tap out; levels that would not be permitted in an official Mario game, even as a post-game hard mode bonus. Not even in The Lost Levels. But then, The Ryckoning was never meant to test me. It was meant to test Patrick; to all but humiliate him by filling the stage with his hated music blocks and all the rope-a-dope one-way traps and tricks Dan could muster. I know how to beat it, but having to go across those blocks both ways carrying galoombas and P-switches and POW blocks is something only a crazy (but still admirable, if it's for the sake of charity) person would want to dedicate more time to beyond the five minutes it takes to reach the inevitable "fuck all this" appraisal.

• Castle Keepyourtail: 6C17-0000-0034-CFC3
• Wood Zeppelin: 6D98-0000-003B-0CAC
• Mario's Jailbreak: 1A3C-0000-006F-6DD7
• Spikeshoe Plains: 6E3C-0000-008D-C11F
• The Ryckoning: 861E-0000-009C-8913

Jeff Gerstmann

Jeff once proclaimed during one of the Giant Bomb Creates Mario streams that, unlike Dan, he only creates "nice levels". His first level Day One Fun is breezy and seems to have been thrown together to test out the tools for the sake of review, but his next two, Fish Riders and Quick Castle, are a little more elaborate. Going by the deaths and low completion percentage of Fish Riders, it doesn't seem as if too many people realized that they were supposed to make a fish appear a little earlier in the level and use it to cross the big gap that spells out "FISH" in coins. Quick Castle, meanwhile, is a short but brutal gauntlet through a SMB1 castle that could well be a Lost Levels holdover. Block Party's another gauntlet of moderate difficulty - the platforming's easy but there's enough enemies roaming around to complicate things - and Citizen Kane appears to be an elaborate joke on the famed hyperbolic statement.

Jeff's most recent levels, Walk a Bigger Eight and I Hate This Party, betray a turn in Jeff's level design. A turn for the evil. They don't quite hit the depths of Dan's trolling, but both feature a number of GB Community Level tricks that Jeff wanted to explore in a slightly less chaotic setting. Both still have their share of BS moments, however, like a leap of faith (more like a drop of faith) in I Hate This Party and Walk a Bigger Eight's number of deathtrap doors and misdirection. I hate to say it, but we're partially to blame for these levels. I Hate This Party's rocking a sub-5% completion rate, largely because of the awkwardness of Weird Mushroom Mario, while Walk a Bigger Eight has a Ryckertian 1.75% as of writing. Give them a shot if you need something to segue into the tougher community levels.

Also, how weird is it that Jeff hasn't made any Super Mario World levels yet, considering it's his oft-mentioned favorite? Maybe he considers them too sacrosanct to mess with.

• Fish Riders: 9F6A-0000-001C-E745
• Quick Castle: 1C35-0000-0022-92DC
• Block Party: F0B3-0000-0022-D6C1
• Walk a Bigger Eight: A3D9-0000-009C-D845
• I Hate This Party: B4A5-0000-00C8-9D56

Ross O'Donovan

Ross is many things: an animator, a voice actor, an Australian and part of the Game Grumps menagerie of YouTube LPers. He's also one of the most highly rated users on Super Mario Maker, in part due to his internet renown. First and foremost, pertinent to the levels he's created, he's a self-proclaimed sadist. I suspect he means in the gentler prank-loving, "watching people squirm" kind of way, but his stages - which were the centerpiece for an ongoing Game Grumps series with the irascible Arin Hanson and the impossibly chill Dan Avidan - evenly split their time between horrifically difficult sequences and cruel deathtraps. I'm more a fairweather fan of the Grumps, cherry-picking whatever LP series strike my fancy (they have one going right now with creepy-crawly sim Deadly Creatures that's been made better by how frequently surprised they are at its quality, though I suspect they'll move on soon), but the Mario Maker episodes have been oodles of fun because of the not-entirely-fabricated animosity the hosts share with their co-worker as a result of his creations.

Half of Ross's levels are goofing around and not particularly remarkable, but - as with Dan - it's when he finds a couple of patsies in the form in his alleged friends and their ongoing Mario Maker coverage that the gloves come off and he starts twisting the knife (yeah, I know, metaphors and the mixing thereof). Companion Spring and You Are A Monster are his most notorious, though Boss Rush also stymied the Grumps for a long time. Compared to those nightmares, such cute novelties such as Pac-Mario (you can already imagine what that stage looks like) and Very Simple (and very deceptive) don't even feel like they came from the same person.

I've beaten all of Ross's stages except Boss Rush and his most recent project: an even harder sequel to Companion Spring that currently enjoys a 0.03% completion rate, which is one of the smallest I've seen outside of Panga's notorious Bomb Voyage. Knowing Ross, he's installed some kind of hidden power-up or path to help him beat the stage so it could be uploaded and leave his audience scratching their heads. He is a butt.

• Pac-Mario: C70D-0000-002E-6128
• You Are A Monster: 0D6C-0000-0049-8B08
• Boss Rush: 41DA-0000-008A-CD13
• Very Simple: FE40-0000-008B-0790
• Companion Spring 2: Bounce Back: FF25-0000-009E-6508

Griffin McElroy

Known variously as the sweet baby brother of the MBMBaM advice podcast, the malevolent Dungeon Master of The Adventure Zone D&D podcast, as Chad the Talking Dog (briefly) and as a video producer over at Polygon, Griffin's general philosophy with Mario Maker levels is to not take the whole exercise particularly seriously. Though his most recent stages demonstrate a depth of creativity, most of them are goofs and practical jokes. As you'll see a little later, I'm pretty much on the same airship with my stages.

Is This What You Want From Me is the epitome of "meta Griffin": a level which is essentially one long passive-aggressive message to users wanting something slightly easier than his intimidating debut effort (and yet more Klepek bait) Hypercube.

Speaking of Hypercube, it's not a good idea to go into that thing without knowing what the trick is. Make no mistake, it's quite the trick: it involves a bug in the game itself that allowed him to conceal two of those blocks that become coins when you hit a P-Switch with regular old indestructible blocks, making the stage literally impossible to complete until you'd found it. It's not even obvious in the editor. Once the secret was out, the win/fail ratio suddenly went from nothing to something, but after three or four wasted Super Mario Maker Mornings from Klepek the damage had already been done.

While Super Fun Auto-Play Level and Stop Limiting My Art, Fascists are goofs, Catch You on the Flipside, Journey of the Springboard and Cannonball Hall are genuinely inventive levels. As an admirer of going into a lot of effort for the sake of a doofy gag and of the more puzzle-focused levels I've seen on Super Mario Maker, he's worth following for ample amounts of both. (And for goshsakes, listen to MBMBaM and The Adventure Zone already.)

• Hypercube: B2A3-0000-00AB-C911
• Cannonball Hall: 8E0C-0000-00B5-790A
• Is This What You Want From Me?: D9D0-0000-00BA-869D
• Journey of the Springboard: 7273-0000-00C7-7AAF
• Catch You on the Flipside: 1535-0000-00C7-AEA7

Mento

Well, if I've discovered anything about myself after tinkering around with the Mario Maker tools, is that my attention span is utter garbage. I've created two levels I'm sort of proud of, and two others which were a test and a dumb pun respectively, but I'm in that prideful situation that I also embody with my video game writing where I'm trying to avoid learning from smarter people in order to maintain a unique perspective and avoid inadvertently biting their steez, as it were.

However, there is something to be said from taking cues from people who have been doing things longer than you have or are naturally more gifted with the medium, so I'd recommend anyone actually considering making their own levels to take their lessons where they can from whatever the game randomly spits out for the 100-Mario Challenge. (To perhaps a lesser extent also, the GB community and the creators above.)

I'll leave you with three more level codes: my own. See what you think, and recommend me some good levels from GBers and elsewhere. I've been meaning to check out the big showcase thread we have on the forums, but... well, like I said, I don't want to step on anyone's toes. I already ripped off the "POW block as steps" bit from the Giant Bomb Makes Mario streams.

• White Blöoper Cult: F7E7-0000-00C5-1BEC
• Super Marrario: 621C-0000-00C4-8F64
• Boo Fort T. Justice: 0367-0000-00C4-E04E

I'm looking at the number of games that have been released or will be released for the Autumn of this year and the immensity of it still astounds me. It's no secret that my present list of beaten games, which is a literal list on this website, is packed with many games from last year and depressingly few from this one: that's partly for financial reasons, sure, but we're also living in an age where there's so many notable and play-worthy games from various different markets that I can't see myself stopping this eternal game of catch-up any time soon. I'd either have to raise my standards even further, which I'd hate doing for fear of missing some niche game that hits me just right rather than the perfectly satisfactory games that everyone seems to rate highly, or figure out how to forego sleep. Let's hope the future has an answer to the latter - because make no mistake, after October 21st we're officially finally there.

While my Yakuza 3 playthrough chugs along swimmingly - the story's presently taken a backseat to substory exploration, including a rather tricky golf game and an episode in a batting cage; two Japan-friendly sports I'm not particularly proficient at - I'm also happy to have received the kind gift of Undertale days before I was to cave in and purchase it myself. That'll be a Comic Commish for next month which, uncharacteristically given my "wait until the last second to do anything" approach that has served me well since middle school, I'll be knocking out as soon as November begins. I was also surprised to learn that XSEED's localization of Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter is hitting PSN, Steam and GOG days after this ST-urday goes up, so that'll be another to add to my long list of long but (allegedly) fantastic RPGs to check out alongside Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, Witcher 3 and, to pre-suppose its quality, Fallout 4.

It's a good time to be an RPG fan, that's for sure. A good time to be a fan of anything, really, with how busy this year's been.

Xenon

Conversely, I'm not such a big fan of shoot 'em ups. The genre never grabbed me as a kid: I was terrible at them and I guess I never nutted up and gave one the rote memorization the genre frequently requires. You can do well in certain games on skill and quick reactions alone, but shoot 'em ups and fighters always demanded a little bit more effort before they could evolve from a fun way to waste five minutes to a lifelong passion.

Xenon is a vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up from The Bitmap Brothers: we've encountered these image format frères before with ST-urday #006's Cadaver. Xenon is actually their first game, published as far back as January 1988 according to their own website. That's almost a year before the Japanese release of the Mega Drive and only four months after NEC's PC Engine: considered the earliest of the 16-bit systems. As you'll see below, while there's not a whole lot of visual variation, it's a striking-looking game. The Bitmap Brothers and their in-house artist Dan Malone would eventually become renowned for their incredible presentations, often overshadowing the competent but unremarkable gameplay of their games. Credit too goes to David Whittaker's music, which hits the right level of blip-bloopy tension and excitement: Stage 1, Stage 2.

Xenon's very much a sum of its parts; those parts being inspiration clawed from various different extant shoot 'em ups of some repute. The most apparent of these would be Namco's 1982 game Xevious, thought to be the father of vertically-scrolling shoot 'em ups but also known for its variation of ground-based and air-based enemies which required different weapons to defeat. There's elements of vertical run-and-guns Jackal and Commando too, and of Konami's Gradius. Xenon was the first shoot 'em up I think I ever owned, so a lot of these inspirational sources were lost on me at the time. Shmup fans will probably recognize a few more below, if they haven't already stopped reading as soon as I said "shmup".

Xenon's the only shoot 'em up I spent a lot of time with as an ST-owning kid. It wasn't the only shoot 'em up I owned at the time - the system was swamped with them, thanks to the relative ease of programming them and their popularity in the Arcades - but the visuals and sound went a long way to get me hooked on trying to stay alive. Plus, I always appreciated having a health bar and intermittent health boosts to keep my little croissant-shaped tank ticking. The Bitmap Brothers wouldn't be done with Xenon, however...

Xenon 2: Megablast

Xenon 2: Megablast was The Bitmap Brothers' follow-up to Xenon, released the following year in 1989. It marked one of the earliest cases of a recurring The Bitmap Brothers' tactic of "downgrading" a popular song as their game's MIDI opening theme track. In this case, it was Bomb the Bass's 1988 hip-hop/dance track Megablast, also the origin of the game's subtitle. Later The Bitmap Brothers games would also employ "collaborations" like this with the world of popular music. (You can listen to the Xenon 2 version here.) The original track is, in turn, inspired by and references John Carpenter's theme music for his movie Assault on Precinct 13, in case the hook sounded familiar.

Another curious bit of trivia is that this game was coded by The Assembly Line. We've met these guys before too, back with Demo Derby Alpha's Helter Skelter. Xenon 2 also had the privilege of being released for the Sega Master System, Sega Genesis and Nintendo Game Boy, expanding its reach beyond what most Atari ST/Amiga games could manage. I've no idea who created that box art, but it sure is something.

Xenon 2 definitely got something of a graphical boost, and it was equally well-regarded by the press of the day, but it didn't click with me like the first one did. It lost the tank mode, for one thing, and despite the more complex visuals it didn't seem to variate the enemy patterns a whole lot. Whereas Xenon was almost all turrets and auto-tracking ground enemies, Xenon 2 had a nasty case of the Galaga swoopers. (If your Galaga swoopers persist for over eight hours...) With so many enemies flying in from the sides of the screen and far more real-estate given to your ship's sprite, it was hard to anticipate collisions in time. The game also had a mean streak a mile-wide: I couldn't say for sure whether Xenon 2 was harder than the first - it not only had generous checkpointing for when you lost a life, but also let you restart at those checkpoints after using a continue - but the fact that I couldn't reach anything resembling a boss below should give you a sign of how easy it is to stay alive in this game.

Xenon 2 is one of those games that wowed reviewers at release but has clearly been hit with the poor aging fairy due to its emphasis on style over substance. It does have a handful of interesting ideas for the genre, like selling undesirable power-ups to put towards more desired ones and being able to reverse the scrolling to fix for errors, but having all those enemies flying into your enormous slow ship becomes maddening after a while. Still, how many games have I covered so far have Master System and Game Boy adaptations?

(Back to the ST-urday ST-orehouse.)