Feels like damn near everyone's planning to get as far through Cyberpunk as they can before it's time to nail down a 2020 list, but I'm putting it off until next year.
I'm not here to talk about 2020. That's what therapists are for.
However, I am here to talk to you about several games released in 2020 that perhaps slipped in under the radar, even during what was a relatively scant year for releases. It's all in the service of eventually constructing my own top-ten Games of the Year, of course, but it couldn't hurt to shine the spotlight on a few Indies and raise their profiles a little for others putting their lists together also. After all, we are getting ever closer to 2021 and the new horrors that await us there (we have some promising vaccines being tested and a way less crappy president though, so I'm all for a little optimism).
Giant Bomb's holding off on their GOTY deliberations until January, a decision that would make way too much sense even outside these current trying circumstances, so this will be a month-long series of Go! Go! GOTY! that'll terminate on December 31st with a final list of (at least) ten items. It'll come down to the wire, but it doesn't feel right to get into the GOTY spirit before the site does.
In case you missed the 2017 or 2019 iterations of Go! Go! GOTY!, here's a quick refresher on the rules:
Each game will receive a review upon completion, released sporadically across December as I complete them (or get sufficiently far) until I either run out of games or month.
All these games were released in 2020 on something, though a few may have debuted earlier on platforms I couldn't access.
If you've got any tips on some excellent freeware games released in 2020 (say, on Itch, Steam, or in browser form), I'd be happy to hear about them. Leave links/descriptions in the comments here so others can check them out too.
For the sake of that last bulletpoint, I'll put some big hints for the upcoming entries in this ongoing table of contents:
If I remove an item from the above list because it proved incompatible with my hardware or I simply didn't care to play it for more than five minutes, I'll discuss it here.
Valentina: Bought this platformer on Switch for 8p and, well, you get what you pay for. Shovelware of very little value, in other words, which is apparently an ongoing issue with the Switch eShop. Played with it a bit, but I'd be struggling to find anything about it worth writing about or, honestly, the motivation to finish it.
2021 EDIT: We're bringing this back for the 2021 season, happening now in 2022. It's a recession, gotta recycle everything:
Welcome back to the Mega Archive, slowly working its way through the holiday season of 28 years ago. November 1992 has proven to be a busy month, not least of which is because of what's arriving at incredible speed on the 24th; the anniversary for which I saw plastered all over Twitter a week ago. That would be Sonic 2sday, the North American release date of the second Sonic the Hedgehog game.
The rest of this entry's list might pale a little in comparison, but that's not to say that they don't also shine: we have some more Koei sims, including one that's far more contemporary than the rest; a couple of big names from the Amiga/Atari ST scene; the very first WWF game for the system; and... well, I guess there's the usual dire movie tie-ins and uninspired sports games too, but pobody's nerfect.
Talking of nerfect, here's a table of our past entries, which I'm evidently going to have to reorganize soon to make more space:
Premise: Are you ready for some football tonight? Yeah, me neither, but here it is regardless.
Availability: Maybe when 2093 rolls around there'll be a fad for ancient sports video games that won't need their year abbreviations modified. Otherwise, nope.
Preservation: Joe Cool graces the Mega Archive once again with this, the third in the longest running football franchise on the Genesis. Despite the turducken-chomping, telestrating EA goliath in their midst, Sega's still heavily invested in their own take on America's second-favorite pastime and its ongoing Montana endorsement, and their case is helped further by finally acquiring the NFL and NFLPA licenses (Joe's the only player the commentary ever mentions, however). We're also bringing back "Sports Talk": a label attached to Sega sports games that included an early, experimental form of live (if somewhat robotic) play-by-play commentary, making it feel like you were watching an episode of Monday Night Football while also playing it. As someone who doesn't know a P.A.T. from a R.P.O. from an A.C.L. tear, I couldn't tell you what kind of advancements and tweaks this edition saw compared to Joe Montana II Sports Talk Football (MA XIII) beyond the NFL's involvement but then significant modifications to the formula is not always the point of annualized sports series.
Premise: The Predator has found himself in LA with more armed targets than he can shake a human spinal cord at, and the cops have a hard enough time keeping the gangs under control without some near-invincible alien hunter gumming up the works. Plus it killed Bill Paxton, and that just won't do.
Availability: Given the mixed reception of the most recent Predator game to come out, I think we can go without our old friends the Yautja for a while.
Preservation: Not much to say about the game itself - like Alien³ (MA XXI) it took a violent and dark movie I was way too young to see when it first premiered and turned it into a brainless shooter, though in this case it uses the relatively rare top-down isometric perspective, with some chunky sprites and very NARC-like anti-drug messaging. Don't do drugs or the space monsters will get ya! Meanwhile, I spent a longer time than I anticipated figuring out who actually made this game. Turns out the antipodean Beam Software, who are often the culprits behind so-so licensed games, had a UK branch called Perfect 10 Productions who worked with a separate studio, Teeny Weeny Games (we Brits are notorious for bad company names), to produce the Genesis version. (Both studios would eventually merge to form Perfect Entertainment in the late '90s, which point-and-click fans might recognize as the developers behind the Discworld trilogy of graphic adventure games.) Meanwhile, the involvement of Krisalis Software (yet another UK developer) may only be limited to borrowing their proprietary Mega Drive sound engine, though a handful of sources insist they were connected enough to deserve a separate developer credit.
Premise: The Beast is Back! Feral hero Aarbron narrowly escaped a life of servitude at the end of the first game, but discovers his younger sister has since befallen the same fate. I guess it's time to punch some weird alien monsters in the dick again.
Availability: Unlike the first game, SotB 2 did not see a remake. Given the reception of that first remake I don't think it's likely to happen either.
Preservation: Welcome back to Shadow of the Beast, Amiga's favorite son. I've always held the belief that the first game's style - delivered by British conceptual artist and occasional album cover illustrator Roger Dean - did much of the heavy lifting with regards to its positive reputation, and that holds true for this sequel also. Most of the game involves running around and getting lost in the forest, dying over and over to the same bizarre pointy monsters and cavepeople as they wear down your health and patience alike as you desperately seek an exit. It might just be that it's an action game that demands a little more investment, perhaps a better map or more practice evading everything, but I could never summon the willpower required to get anywhere. Personally I've always found games with no invincibility periods after getting hit deeply obnoxious. Originally a Psygnosis game, Electronic Arts took it upon themselves to port it over to Genesis presumably because they had more experience with the platform (by 1993 Psygnosis will have been bought by Sony, and would have even less to do with Sega as a rival console maker). The most telling addition to the Genesis version is a large black bar added to the bottom of the screen to account for the Genesis's slightly taller resolution; that the developers chose to fill that space with a blank void rather than some helpful HUD info or maybe just a nice leftover Dean graphic perhaps says more than enough about the circumstances behind the port and how much money was put into it. What is a little bit of a dilemma for me is that this is one of a few Genesis games that would see a Sega CD port a little while later, and the differences between the two Sega platforms are significant enough to necessitate a separate listing. This project's going to take a lot longer if the same games keep popping up in both lists...
Premise: Luc Devereaux was killed in action in Vietnam, but finds himself revived as part of the US military's top-secret Universal Soldier program. Unfortunately, so was his bloodthirsty sergeant...
Availability: They were making Universal Soldier sequels up until 2012, but I don't think they garnered enough interest for video game adaptations.
Preservation: I'm still in awe at the audacity of this one. Rather than try to launch Turrican II on the Sega Genesis legit, which shouldn't have been an issue given the success of other big-name (in Europe anyway) Amiga ports, Ballistic (an Accolade subsidiary) chose instead to simply change all the graphics so it could be a Universal Soldier movie tie-in game. Thus, instead of a cyborg soldier protagonist grappling with memories of his former life while attempting to elude a psychopathic rival, he's now inexplicably fighting aliens on a distant planet. I'm not even the biggest Turrican fan, but I'd imagine there are American fans who would've preferred an unaltered version of that second game on their Sega Genesis: instead, this is the only version of the game they would ever receive on any platform. The Genesis did eventually get a Mega Drive-exclusive sequel called Mega Turrican though, thereby proving someone was interested in getting their knock-off Metroid on without needing a second-rate Van Damme movie unconvincingly plastered all over it.
Theme: Having Your Twitch and YouTube Channels Taken Away
Premise: Brother, are you ready to take on these 24-inch pythons in... wait, I should pretend to be one of the not-racist ones. Uh... Ooooh yeah!
Availability: There's been a new WWE game every year since this one released, give or take. I'm not saying any of them are good, but they're more up to date at least. I don't think anyone's ever pined for the "Acclaim era" of anything.
Preservation: Wrasslin! The Genesis has seen a scant few wrestling games here or there, but they tended to be Japan-exclusive fare like Thunder Pro or the joshi game Cutie Suzuki, or strange aberrations like Beast Wrestler. This would be the first Genesis game to be based on the world's most famous wrestling foundation, though certainly not the last. Oddly, though this game was developed for both Genesis and the SNES, there are significant differences between the two: not only are the rosters almost completely different (besides for mainstays Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, and "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase) but the Genesis opted to include unique finishers for each wrestler, which the SNES eschewed for a universally interchangeable moveset between its slightly larger cast. This, naturally, became one of those hotly contested "which version is better" argument starters, which I half-suspect was Acclaim's plan all along. After all, if you're a WWE fan who owns both consoles and these versions are that different, you'd better get both, right? Utah-based Sculptured Software developed this one, but the in-game credits also mention Acclaim's "The Black Team": this was during a time when all of Acclaim's internal divisions were color-based. We'll get further into this Power Rangers shit when we cover more Acclaim titles.
Theme: Avoiding the Temptation to Say "Revenue is Sky High!" at Shareholder Meetings
Premise: Ever wondered what the deal was with airline food? Well, now you're in charge of it, along with the airline itself.
Availability: There was a 1996 PS1/Saturn sequel but it never left Japan, and Koei's not touched Aerobiz since. I guess they're still trying to work out how to turn it into a Musou.
Preservation: Aerobiz sees our strategic friends at Koei branch out into something that isn't a historical war sim, instead putting players in charge of a major airline company as it moves through the second half of the 20th century. The game is careful to pay attention to world events during this time: you don't have to plan commercial flights across WW2 Europe, fortunately, but you do have to contend with Cold War trade tariffs and other scheduled national disasters and periods of economic depression, as well as more financially lucrative events like the Olympics. There's even options to invest in charter companies, eventually absorbing them into your airline empire, and dabble in peripheral businesses like shuttle buses and hotels. Aerobiz is perhaps the most famous of Koei's "Executive Series," certainly of the games that saw international releases, but this business sim brand also included the stock market, high street fashion, thoroughbred horseracing, and one SFC game about trying to be the best VHS company (big future there).
Theme: You Must Negotiate With Lu Bu For More Rice
Premise: Time to put on those yellow turbans and declare war on your neighbors, because China isn't going to unify itself. Well, unless you switch every player to CPU.
Availability: This is an iterative series, so you're best off with the most recent game to be localized. That would be Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV, released all the way back in February 2020 (in the before times).
Preservation: Along with Aerobiz this month, Koei also had this Mega Drive port of the third Sangokushi game, released over here as Romance of the Three Kingdoms III: Dragon of Destiny. We've already covered the previous (and first) game from this series to be released on Mega Drive, Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (MA XV), and this one's much the same but for a very slightly different selection of scenarios across the Three Kingdoms conflict and a graphical update. I joked about Yellow Turbans, but it turns out fighting through said rebellion which normally prologues every Dynasty Warriors game (and is therefore where most people quit) is a privilege exclusive to PC Engine CD owners of this game: the other versions (Mega Drive, SNES, PlayStation, and the PC-98 original) don't have it or any equivalent bonus campaigns. I guess that's the one to get then.
Premise: A hundred lemmings drop onto an island. Only one survives. You might need to do that level again.
Availability: It was available everywhere at the time and has seen a bunch of ports and remakes since. I think the most recent version is for iOS/Android.
Preservation: Lemmings is one of those games I'm always happy to talk about, but at the same time never quite sure why anyone would want to play a version that lacks mouse support. The precision and timing of the cursor movement in these stages is extremely tight, especially once you get to the "Taxing" and "Mayhem" difficulties, and I had a hard enough time with my Atari ST mouse summoning the rapid multi-tasking necessary to solve a lot of the later stages even after figuring out the puzzles - in some ways, it was good training for the PC RTS boom to come. To backtrack a little, Lemmings is the real-time puzzle game where you have to organize a group of dumb rodents by giving them tasks to perform: said task assignments are geared towards getting as many lemmings as possible to the exit door. The series went through a few iterations - the sequel introduced Lemming "tribes," each of whom had their own unique tasks to assign - but I've always liked the purity of the original most. Like many European-derived Genesis games, it was an Amiga/Atari ST success first, but unlike most this is a timeless and genuinely great game. Provided you have a mouse. (One thing I did discover about the Genesis version: it has a special stage featuring Sunsoft's Hebereke characters! The Hebereke franchise never even made it to the Sega Genesis (though it did see a few Saturn ports)!)
Premise: Sonic's back, and this time he's brought that annoying little hanger-on from the neighborhood who is five years younger than everyone else that you try to ditch at every opportunity.
Availability: Sega's going to make it very easy for you to buy Sonic 2. Try Steam.
Preservation: I think there's a case to be made for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 being the finest Genesis game ever made. I also think there's a case to be made against that notion, depending on the type of games you typically enjoy, though if you were to collate all the entries from a hundred Genesis fan top-ten lists Sonic 2 would still make the most appearances. (I don't think there's much of a case for Sonic 3 being better, even with the Sonic & Knuckles expansion.) Either way, Sonic 2 is and would remain the system's killer app for a while, engendering a ridiculous level of hype before its release due to the success of the original that it delivered upon with its new features: a stronger soundtrack, more dynamic level design, an intriguing bonus game that used a facsimile of 3D motion, and an asymmetric two-player mode suited for either an equally skilled partner (the invincible Tails is invaluable for boss fights) or a curious kid sibling alike. I'm one of those totally bogus reprobates who insists the foundation of Sonic's game design is flawed - these are games that simultaneously encourage speedrunning and careful exploration - but I'll admit to spending a lot of time enjoying Sonic 2 as a prepubescent, despite not actually owning a Mega Drive until well into my adulthood. In terms of development background, it's all very well-trodden territory at this point but what maybe goes unnoticed about Sonic 2 is how much Sega of America was involved in its creation, via its Sega Technical Institute development branch. Sonic's attitude and design have always felt like he's had one red-sneakered foot in both the US and Japan. (And if I can't use this feature to talk about Sonic's feet, then what good is it?)
Premise: Tennis, much like divorce, is a game played in courts where love means nothing. Makes for some good video games though.
Availability: I'm guessing there are tennis games with more recent stars and better physics/realism out there these days. (If you're looking to go the opposite direction that last Mario Tennis wasn't so bad, I've heard.)
Preservation: Sometimes I wonder if these sports games that hitch themselves to the flavor of the week - Andre Agassi was an underdog until he won Wimbledon in 1992, which happened six months before this game launched - had the foresight to pick a winner beforehand or waited until the last moment to complete all the parts of the game where the famous sportsperson would be mentioned, like the title screen. I found conflicting sources on who developed this game: Epyx or TecMagik. The former are the famous California Games devs which generally worked on Atari platforms, while TecMagik was a UK company that had made a few Master System ports before this. What cinched it for me was the involvement of Greg Omi as AAT's lead design and co-producer: Omi's best known for his work with Epyx, in particular Klax and the Atari Lynx hardware, before eventually moving to Naughty Dog to help create the engines used by several Crash Bandicoot games and the first Jak & Daxter. It's possible TecMagik, which is credited during the intro, was the publisher instead.
Plucking yet another of the many gratis explormers from the pile I received in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality unexpectedly led to playing one of the most intriguing and genuinely cool examples of this genre since, well, Timespinner, with which it shares a focus on timeline manipulation. However, where Timespinner felt like it was designed with a historian or anthropologist mindset - letting the player discover a whole planet's culture and background by travelling across both its past and present - Vision Soft Reset feels instead like it was designed by an engineer or scientist. The logistics of time-line manipulation and precognition play much more significant roles in the mechanics of the gameplay, at the expense of a more elaborate story or characters.
The protagonist, Oracle, belongs to an alien species capable of seeing into the future. However, her current larval state is practically defenseless; a weakness that has been addressed after she was placed in an exosuit of unknown origin that her human partner Wally recovered for her. Oracle finds herself drawn to the mysterious planet from whence her exosuit was found, hoping to find more answers behind how the suit functions and where the Chozo-esque advanced alien race that once lived there may have disappeared off to. However, soon after landing, she discovers that the most impressive of these ancient technological marvels - a protective shield around the planet's molten core that prevents it from exploding out of control - is on the fritz and the planet only has twenty minutes before it becomes an inhospitable ball of magma. Finding out why the shield is so close to failure and who is responsible for its condition is going to take more than twenty minutes, but Oracle's gift of precognition allows her to see every hypothetical journey she may take from the starting location - in essence, giving her all the time she needs.
Exploring the surface. The game's backdrops have a great deal of detail, but the foreground is a little more... copy/pastey?
With anything regarding time travel, there's a bit of an uphill climb both in explaining how it works and justifying where and why it shouldn't, let alone getting to the part where you're able to effectively control the flow of time to your advantage. The game is built on time loops, but because you're preserving the memory of the protagonist every time you go back - as stated, it's less that you experienced it all but more that Oracle future-remembered how she... will experience it all... sorta? - there's certain things you're allowed to retain: chiefly, information. The many functions of Oracle's exosuit are largely unknown to her at first, but by acquiring data on what the suit can do she can remember these abilities for future loops: these data chips includes the usual explormer upgrades such as a mid-air dash (also effective as a double-jump, since you can dash upwards too); wall-running; a Super Metroid-esque speed booster; and various weapon upgrades capable of destroying specific barriers as well as foes. Each upgrade not only serves to make more of the map accessible, but to make it easier (and, more importantly, faster) to traverse the areas to which you've already been for any inevitable backtracking. Conversely, there are certain "physical" power-ups - mostly boosts to your max health and max "vision," which I'll explain in just a moment - which will not stay with you, and will instead return to their original locations should you reverse time to before you picked them up. Whenever you start a fresh loop, there's some deliberation as to whether or not you should take a more "scenic route" to the next objective in order to grab these upgrades along the way; given there's a few time-sensitive barriers here and there, that's not always feasible.
Oracle's "vision" is based on her intrinsic ability to see a snippet of the immediate future, usually about a second or so in advance. This allows her to predict enemy attacks, which appear first as grey silhouettes before happening for real, and also rewind time in case she gets hit: the former is a free, always-active passive skill as long as you have some vision stat remaining, while the latter siphons your vision stock away until it eventually empties (though the game will regenerate the last 25% of the bar, to ensure you always have enough to warp back to an earlier checkpoint in case you hit one of the game's few oubliettes). Having a healthy reserve of vision is best appreciated during the game's little arenas, where you have to fight off a few waves of enemies, and the boss battles, both of which can be tough to survive if you aren't able to rewind a few unlucky blows given the physical fragility of the heroine. Vision is a versatile resource you'll be relying upon a lot, between the big fights and some tricky platforming, and its few max upgrades are perhaps even more valuable than the max health ones if you've heading somewhere new and untested.
A number of discoveries prompts a conversation with your friend Wally, often giving you an idea of where to go next. You can re-initiate these conversations at any time after you've had them once, which will probably feel a bit non-sequitur-ish to poor old Wally with his dumb linear perception of time. Pfft, humans.
If this all sounds overly difficult and complicated, it... well, it is. Difficult, at least, as the complexities of the time-looping become more natural the more you play it thanks in part to some excellent UI work. Vision Soft Reset does not pull its punches when it comes to its challenges, occasionally feeling like a Super Metroid romhack intentionally built for the experts in the speedrunning community. Several challenges in the game require some exceptionally close timing. One example are these vines that harden into indestructible obsidian beyond a certain point in the timeline: if you find them after the moment they hardened, they'll have a specific number of flowers blooming on them to indicate how long ago it happened. With this knowledge, you're then tasked to plot a course that will get you to where (and when) they're vulnerable as quickly as possible. Other cases include opening a boss door by playing music on a series of "tone totems": totems that have carved holes that play a certain tune when the wind blows through them, but are initially plugged up with stoppers. To open that door, you need to unplug all the right ones in time for a sufficiently strong gust of wind to pass through them all, which comes only once (as far as I know) fairly early during the twenty minute timeline. Reliably hitting these deadlines requires a certain amount of expertise with the upgrades you acquire, in particular the finicky wall-running - you can hop between walls, but you have to hit the adjacent wall at an upwards angle for it to maintain the run - and the game's shinesparking equivalent, which requires a significant run-up first and then an uninterrupted sprint across even terrain.
If I had any trouble getting my head around the time-travelling though, the game alleviated it with its clear-cut UI, menus, and visual aids. In particular, a "time tree" flowchart accessible in the pause menu that gives you a rundown of your current timeline compared to previous ones you've created and abandoned in the past (or, in the future... you know what I mean). Each timeline is updated whenever you hit a checkpoint, which creates a node on the timeline you can always warp back/forwards to, and each of these node icons relay useful information such as where the checkpoint was (each one has a unique symbol identifier) and how many physical upgrades you were carrying at the time. Better yet, each node also has a smaller version of the mini-map that draws a path of where you've been, letting you know in no uncertain terms what you've accomplished up to that moment in that particular alternative timeline. The game world is fortunately small enough and has enough variety between areas that you're never completely lost or unsure where to progress, though like with any explormer it doesn't hurt to take the occasional external note (the game map tracks where physical upgrades are though, at least, if you ever decide to make detours for them).
You can glean so much from the cost-effective way the 'time tree' is presented. The yellow border means I activated a power source that turns a bunch of machines on everywhere: initially, you switch these on to create moving platforms needed to make progress, but later you'll have enough upgrades to not require them any more and can skip the extra step to turn them on. If you don't want to squint at the icons, there's text along the top that gives you the same info.
There's a distinct risk that the above sounds like the scattershot ranting of a deranged mind, but Vision Soft Reset is far more approachable than I'm perhaps making it sound. It sets a uncommonly high challenge level as Indie explormers go, but a limited ability to rewind mistakes and preparing new routes that intersect with upgrades can mitigate it to some degree, as will the competent controls and the player's growing familiarity with the world and its layout as they explore. Graphically it's a little plain: the pixel artwork on smaller details is nicely intricate, but much of the wider landscape tends towards being featureless and barren. The soundtrack is suitably Metroid-y, though doesn't really stand out otherwise, and the plot is paper-thin and ends somewhat abruptly after the final boss battle. Even so, I think Vision Soft Reset is an ingenious, inspired take on a time-looping explormer that is worth checking out if you're a fan for any games of this genre that try to push the envelope in pure mechanical terms, especially if your favorites include either Timespinner or Axiom Verge.
I invite you all to go CDs nuts, as it's the return of the Mega Archive CD! 1992 saw an additional twenty-seven Sega/Mega-CD games, so I'm splitting them up into three groups of nine. (Multiplication tables, you haven't failed me yet.) After this batch we'll be all caught up with the Mega Archive, currently languishing in the November of 1992.
I won't repeat the entire spiel about the Sega CD's backstory: in short, it was a CD peripheral built during a time when all the major console developers were eyeing the optical media format and what it might mean for the future of game development, with Sega intending to get theirs out into the marketplace before SNES and Sony could finish up their prototype (though they needn't have rushed, in retrospect). I should, however, make the important historical note here that the Sega CD debuted in North America towards the end of the below timeframe. Not only did this immediately raise the peripheral's profile - Sega was a much bigger deal outside of Japan, at least in comparative sales figures - but it would also invite a great deal of international third-party support. We're seeing the calm before the storm with this entry, stopping just shy of the Sega CD's November launch date*.
* Little footnote here: Many internet sources say the Sega CD officially launched in North America on October 15th, while others suggest it was around November 9th so as to give developers enough time to assemble a decent library of launch titles to sell alongside it. From what I've been able to gather, both are correct: the October date was when the system was first shown off - "launched" in the press gala preview sense, giving the media their first look at the Sega CD in action - while the November date is when the system began appearing in retail stores.
Premise: Sega must've decided that maybe not everyone knew you could use your shiny new Mega CD as a stereo also, so they created (or commissioned, or were asked to be involved with) this CD of pop jams based on Sega BGM.
Availability: Can't see why they'd rerelease this, given they'd have to pay the artists again and no-one buys CDs any more. Might be a fun little addition to a hypothetical "Sega CD Mini" though.
Preservation: Welcome to the newest edition of "Should We Even Have a Wiki Page For This?" and the answer is "Yes! Probably!" - though this was promoted as a music CD first and foremost by BGM Victor, a recording label owned by Sony at the time, its first track is a data track. That is, there's Sega CD game data encoded on the disc, in this case a port of the 1985 Sega arcade game Teddy Boy Blues only now with CD audio and the option to use any of the songs on the disc as the BGM. (We've covered Teddy Boy Blues before (MA XIV), as it was part of the Game Toshokan range of downloadable games for the online Sega MegaNet service.) The songs on the disc are performed by J-Pop band B.B. Queens, who added lyrics and instrumentals to Mega Drive and Mega-CD music: it's all in English and is glorious, especially "Burnin' Love" (based on the After Burner theme, which I never pegged as romantic ballad material). Despite sporting Sonic on the cover, any Sonic connections are tenuous at best: there's one track on here ("Funky Brothers") that was originally meant for the unreleased arcade game SegaSonic Bros., which looked to be a Super Puzzle Fighter style game. (Someone uploaded the whole CD on YouTube, so have at it before Sega or Sony notice.)
Theme: That's Seriously The Name We're Going With For Our Mecha Anime?
Premise: College student Tomoru Shindo finds himself telepathically connected to a mechanical alien lifeform named Orgun, who warns him that the Earth will soon be destroyed by others of his race. If this all happened in 2020, I'd tell them to go right ahead.
Availability: I don't see a rerelease of this game ever happening for various licensing reasons, but like all forgotten anime mecha Orgun did eventually show up in the Super Robot Wars series. They've got this whole "Island of Misfit Mecha" going on over there.
Preservation: I had my mind blown by this game's developer screen - HOT-B is an acronym? For the enigmatic phrase "He is Over There, Because"? Or was that just some Detonator Orgun in-joke they sneaked in? Either way, HOT-B was given the reins to a CD-enhanced game adaptation of the mecha anime OVA series of the same name, and they chose to turn it into an adventure game. Of the usual menu-driven sort ("go here," "talk to that person") that were popular in Japan at the time. Naturally, I couldn't get too far into the text-heavy interface once the game started, but it had a typically dramatic anime intro with spoken dialogue and everything - an almost shot-for-shot recreation of the OVA's opening scenes. This would be HOT-B's only foray on the Sega CD, or indeed any CD-based platform seeing as they went bankrupt the following year. At least they went out with a bang from their detonating organ.
Premise: The evil Vizier Jaffar has locked up our street rat hero in the dungeon, and has given the Sultan's daughter a one hour ultimatum to either become Mrs. Jaffar or die. Watch out for loose tiles.
Availability: It's been ported and rereleased many times, most recently on XBLA, PSN, and iOS devices.
Preservation: Prince of Persia shouldn't need any introduction - Jordan Mechner's rotoscoped, acrobatic ode to 1,001 Arabian Nights and the swashbuckling movies of his youth was a mainstay on every platform that could run it since its debut on the Apple-II in 1989, and it's a minor miracle that it's taken this long to show up in the Mega Archive. It will also see a regular Genesis release from Tengen as well, so I'll have to figure out if I should include the game twice. Notoriously challenging with a great deal of trial and error, the appeal of Prince of Persia makes itself evident once you have everything down to muscle memory and are gliding through the platforming challenges and sword duels like a player possessed. The Sega CD version has the usual bonuses: redbook audio, an animated intro cutscene (Bits Lab is a Japanese developer, so it has an anime style; the Prince even has purple hair!), and a save system. The latter works the same way in does in other console versions: each "stage" of the game is individually recorded by their completion time, and it's very easy to hit the game-wide limit of an hour before you've reached the end. The goal instead is to replay stages to cut down these completion times until the whole thing is under the required limit, after which you get the good ending.
Premise: Save a heavily-digitized world from terrorism from within the cockpit of your own LX-3 Super Cobra attack chopper.
Availability: There was a recent (2009, which is not really all that recent any more) iOS port of the original LaserDisc game.
Preservation: It was only a matter of time until the LaserDisc games found their way onto the Sega CD, given the close proximity of the two types of optical media. Gameplay for these FMV games were typically limited to watching a video and hitting buttons when prompted; Dragon's Lair is perhaps the most famous example, though many followed. Most of the biggest Sega CD games would have a similar format, and we'll be seeing a lot more from the next entry onwards once American Sega CD development kicks in. Cobra Command was Data East's attempt on the idea back in 1984, presenting an exciting attack helicopter animated FMV movie that you'd (sorta) interact with by shooting enemy vehicles with a target reticle when they were in range while occasionally holding down a cardinal direction to avoid a collision; failure to do either in time would interrupt the video with a red screen and a "lose a life" prompt. Our old friends Wolf Team (this would be their fourth Mega-CD game) took port duties here, trying their best with the FMV despite being hampered by the Sega CD's limited capabilities: that is, poor video compression and a relatively small color palette. Still, because the FMV was based on an animation rather than live-action footage it fares better than most FMV games for the system. Cobra Command would eventually be bundled with another game of Wolf Team's, Sol-Feace, for the European Sega CD launch window of April 1993 (this bundle was not available outside of Europe, sadly).
Premise: Eight heroes are selected by the gods to protect the last heir of the royal Giplos family from the tyrannical usurper Bido. The player spends some time with all eight individually before they join together to take on Bido's forces and his dark god Dal.
Availability: Many ports, but no rereleases of which I'm aware.
Preservation: Burai's popped up in three different wiki projects so far - here, the SNES, and the PC Engine CD-ROM - and I still know next to nothing about it. Or didn't, until someone called Kurisu took it upon themselves to blog about all the Japanese-only RPGs for SFC and PCE, giving the English internet its first in-depth explanation on this obscurity. Burai is functionally built like the popular Dragon Quest IV, which begat a whole series of imitators (much like the first Dragon Quest did) that adopted its idea of a "scenario-based" RPG. That is, one that is broken up into smaller individual stories headlined by different protagonists that all unite for the second half of the game. You might recognize this set-up if you've played Octopath Traveler or that Romancing SaGa 3 Switch port in recent years - it's proven to be an enduring blueprint for RPG stories. There's a lot of history behind this game I never knew about, even if the game itself is a little rudimentary and controversial in some respects: chiefly, that the story was split into two games and some systems, like the SNES and Sega CD, only saw this first half. The continuation, Burai II: Yami Koutei no Gyakushuu, was a PC Engine CD exclusive, so any Sega or Nintendo players who wanted to know how the story ended would either have to find their way over to that platform or play the original PC version. (I'm going a little long here, but one last thing I should mention that Sega apparently reprogrammed this port themselves. It's not too different from the PCE CD version though.)
Premise: Blade Hunter, a private detective in 2053 Los Angeles, is called into action by the mayor to follow a series of grisly murders that might just involve a cultist scheme to revive an ancient dragon.
Availability: A DRM-free version of the PC game is available on GOG. Can't get more convenient than that.
Preservation: Wasn't expecting to see this on the list, especially since we're still a month away from the US Sega CD launch. Rise of the Dragon was created by Oregonian developers Dynamix, best known for their collaborations with Sierra making everything from flight sims (A-10 Tank Killer/Red Baron) to puzzle games (The Incredible Machine) to RPGs (Betrayal at Krondor). They also made three big point-and-click adventure PC games in the early 90s: Rise of the Dragon; The Adventures of Willy Beamish (which also saw a Sega CD port, so stay tuned); and Heart of China. However, like every other western game covered in this entry, this SCD port was handled by Japanese developers. In this case that would be Game Arts, another group like Wolf Team who have been hard at work on the Sega CD: their biggest game so far has been Lunar: The Silver Star. Rise of the Dragon cribs from a few narrative sources, but is primarily aiming for a vibe rather than any direct comparisons: it's a little bit Blade Runner, a little bit gumshoe pulp fiction, a little bit Shadowrun, and a little bit Lovecraft. It has a few uncommonly elaborate features like a monorail fast travel system and a generous time deadline to work towards with every action taking up so many hours, but is generally known (and celebrated, by some) for its deeply pulpy aesthetic and story. I've never played it, but I lived through it vicariously via an entertaining Retsupurae LP back in the day. The Sega CD port paradoxically feels both more advanced and retro: it has full voice acting, which the original lacked, but suffers from the Sega CD's pesky limited color palette which gave the game a persistent lime green tint that almost sorta works with the noir style, if you were to think of this setting as a grim futuristic corporate dystopia sponsored by Mountain Dew.
Publisher: Victor Musical Industries (JP/NA) / Sega (EU)
JP Release: 1992-09-25
NA Release: November 1992
EU Release: January 1994
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Platformer
Theme: Literal Mascot Platformer
Premise: Wonder Dog, a dog from space, is stashed in a spacecraft as a baby and sent to Earth to be raised in safety away from his imperiled home planet. It's not clear if his Earth name is Bark Kent, but I think you can assume.
Availability: You can try and find the Amiga version if the Sega CD proves too elusive, but I doubt this is coming back.
Preservation: I don't think I've seen this before, though I have seen the reverse many times vis-Ã -vis the NES collaborations between Atlus and LJN. Wonder Dog is a case where a UK company is given the task of creating a licensed game based on a (non-game) Japanese property: in this case, Wonder Dog, the one-time marketing mascot for Japanese recording label Victor Musical Industries (their third appearance today). The UK devs in question are Core Design, the future Tomb Raider creators, which we'll be seeing many more times on Mega Archive CD as they retrofit their Amiga/Atari ST library with various CD-ROM enhancements. For all the fuss, it's as generic as you might expect an also-run mascot platformer to be: the few novel features it has include a Kid Niki: Radical Ninja style rapid acceleration to make longer jumps but only if you have the space for a run-up (and don't bump into anything, which is very easy at high speeds) and a slow gliding descent that Wonder Dog can pull off due to his hat-wings (not unlike the Wing Cap in Super Mario Land 2, which was also released in the autumn of 1992). Actually, the most notable thing about Wonder Dog is the very Homer Simpson "D'oh" (sorry, "annoyed grunt") he makes when he gets hit.
Publisher: Micronet (JP) / Bignet USA (NA) / Sega (EU)
JP Release: 1992-10-23
NA Release: November 1992
EU Release: 1993
Franchise: Heavy Nova
Genre: Fighter
Theme: Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots
Premise: The Akirovians are back, being dicks to humanity for no discernable reason by sabotaging efforts to grow extraterrestrial food, which we need to figure out because we ravaged Earth's ecosystem. It's time to send those jerks packing with another series of giant robot fights. We're good at robots. Not so good at moving off fossil fuels though, I guess.
Availability: Nothing doing. Micronet abandoned game development entirely and got real jobs.
Preservation: Well, it didn't take long, but the Sega CD has its first sequel to another Sega CD game. Black Hole Assault (or Blackhole Assault, as our wiki has it) is Micronet's follow-up to their mech suit action game Heavy Nova (MA XV), which was one of the two Mega-CD launch games along with Sol-Feace. Like its predecessor, Black Hole Assault is about two cumbersome mechs very slowly taking each other down, though in this case they've streamlined a lot of dull loadout selection and platforming sections. One might argue that the pre-fight prep was the only thing setting Heavy Nova apart from the many unremarkable 16-bit fighters popping up in Street Fighter II's wake, but I still think the game's pacing is better off without it. It's still a tedious game though, and having a bunch of fancy anime cutscenes doesn't make it any more exciting to play.
Availability: Sega didn't even release this one in English, despite the Sega CD lacking for sports titles. If they didn't care enough then, it's not looking good 28 years later.
Preservation: Welcome back to Super League, Sega's own store-brand baseball series to compete with the likes of Namco's Famista. We covered Super League '91, the previous game in the series, via its American title Sports Talk Baseball (MA XII) a ways back and the first Super League (as Tommy Lasorda Baseball) in the very first edition (MA I). There's little new with Super League CD, despite moving up to the CD format. There's no FMV, the intro is barely animated but for a few seconds of rotoscoped imagery, and the only major difference between this and SL91 is that there's some jaunty redbook audio BGM playing throughout the game. Still, it seems like a competent enough baseball game with all the NPB licensed teams and players a fan of Japanese baseball could want, even if it's not much to look at. We'll see one more Super League CD game in 1993, by which time Sega will have found themselves a celebrity endorsement. That's about as exciting as baseball games ever tend to get.
I pencilled this playthrough in about a month ago, and since then two things have happened: the death of Sir Sean Connery, the original (movie) James Bond, and the news that IO Interactive of Hitman fame are working on a game adaptation of that same spy franchise. It's in both auspicious and inauspicious circumstances that I decided to boot up Yak & Co.'s superspy parody adventure game Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise, in this case for the Nintendo Switch. The choice of platform turned out to be an interesting one, if not necessarily the best one: as a game that uses the touchscreen medium on other systems, notably iOS and Android, it's one of the few games I've found to take advantage of the undocked Switch's touchscreen (there's also a cursor option, if you prefer to keep the system snug in its little cradle). This lead to a few user interface problems I'll discuss in more detail a little later.
Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise is what it sounds like: a point-and-click adventure game wrapped in a spy thriller façade. Specifically, it's one of those first-person adventure games that usually have a whole bunch of hidden object puzzles, ubiquitous on Steam and other digital platforms as the HOPA genre (and I've plenty of experience with those). Agent A lacks the hidden object scenes but has everything else: the Layton-style puzzles that might involve sliding blocks or spinning dials; codes and numbers to memorize (unless you have a notepad handy, virtual or otherwise); inventory puzzles that often focus around collecting a whole bunch of the same object to open one extremely secure receptacle somewhere else; and an unfortunate habit of concealing necessary areas through obfuscation, like putting something on the side of a building or edifice and hoping players know to click the side of said structures to pan the camera around to find it. The last of those makes the game's pacing a little uneven as a result, and the puzzles aren't really challenging but for that added wrinkle.
The game's art direction not only looks good, but the slightly minimalist style makes inventory items stick out all the more. Agent A doesn't require a whole lot of pixel hunting.
On the plus side, the game looks great, with an expressive angled Saul Bass-ian style to its environments that does a lot of the heavy lifting with regards to establishing the game's '60s-'70s superspy personality. Imagine the vibe of No One Lives Forever in a more cartoon style and you have the idea (other aesthetic comparisons that come to mind include that Marvelous Miss Take art thief game from a little while back, or Invisible, Inc. to an extent). The protagonist's inner-monologue when looking at objects or when providing running commentary on current events is ridiculous, and I'm not sure if the intent was to make a game a full comedy or if it's just hard to write adventure protagonist dialogue that isn't innately corny given everyone's fondness for the genre's screwball Sierra/LucasFilm roots. I didn't mind the script's direction either way though it had its share of whiffs, and that's coming from someone who regularly makes terrible goofs in Giant Bomb chat.
When the touchscreen interface is working, it's perfectly fine. I didn't even have too much trouble with some of the password input screens, even though they often put characters too close together in the in-game keyboards to be all that touchscreen friendly. One issue that kept cropping up was the uncommon decision - at least in my experience, though I don't play too many games on phones or tablets - to make it so pressing two fingers on the screen will cause you to backtrack to the previous screen, typically the one direction you can't access otherwise (because, in the first person view, it's behind you). All too often the game must've interpreted my meaty digits as two fingers combined like that one "special dialling wand" joke from The Simpsons, because unless I was tapping the screen gently I'd find myself reversing course while trying to access a panel or some such. It happened just often enough to be irritating, though not often enough that it made the game unplayable. I've not read any serious literature about the technical shortcomings of the Switch touchscreen - I imagine it's been downplayed this generation for a reason - so I can't say if it's a failing of the software or the hardware. Either way, a mouse or a touchscreen more suited for that purpose might be recommended; I'd argue perhaps a tablet over a smartphone though, as there's a lot of detail that might be easily missed on a smaller screen.
Honestly have no idea what's going on with the dialogue half the time. You're meant to be a suave superspy, but you sure don't ever sound like one.
Overall, I had a fine enough time with Agent A and would be happy to play any sequels, like the one it hints towards in a post-game teaser. There are puzzle adventure games just like it all over Steam, as previously stated, though few have Agent A's sense of style and I appreciated how intricate some of the puzzle rooms were - close but not quite to the level of the Victorian clockwork precision of Fireproof's The Room series - and I think its broader Get Smart comic personality is also ultimately a step up, if only for distinguishing the game from the crowd. (Now, if only these guys were given the Archer license and a few of that show's writers...)
Welcome back to the Mega Archive! We skipped another week, this time due to Giant Bomb XL charity streams and the careful moderation thereof, but now it's time to dig further into the November 1992 release catalogue of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. November 1992 was very dissimilar to the present November of course, as Democrats celebrate their candidate's electoral victory over a crappy one-term Republican President.
If you wanted an idea of what the Genesis release schedule looked at this point in time, this entry has nothing short of five licensed games: half the games we've covering this week are based on animated TV shows, movies, and - in one case - a fast food outlet. We also have another peripheral pack-in, another The Bitmap Brothers Amiga/ST port (to follow Xenon 2 from last time), another horizontal shoot 'em up, an isometric RPG classic, and an ominous portent of the upcoming dark and gritty '90s comic book fad. I'm excited to dig in.
Premise: Treasure hunter Nigel is tipped to the final resting place of the indescribably wealthy King Cole, who is presumed to be pretty old if not necessarily a merry soul, and with his new partner sets out to find it.
Availability: You can get it on Steam right now, or in the Sega Genesis Classics compilation for PS4/XB1/Switch. If you have the Sega Genesis Mini, it's on there too.
Preservation: I've tried to get into Landstalker a few times, yet despite being an action-RPG and an isometric game - both of which I have a fondness for - it's yet to click. What's odd is that I enjoyed its much more derided Dreamcast sequel, TimeStalkers, as well as Alundra, which was created by a few of the same developers. Either way, the Stalker series is the lesser - in terms of quantity and critical attention - of Climax's two big JRPG franchises that began on the Sega Mega Drive: the other of course being Shining, as in "Force" and "in the Darkness". Perhaps due to its lower profile, the Stalker series is also the more experimental of the two franchises, since after this and Lady Stalker - one of the few times Climax branched out to a Nintendo platform, in this case the SFC - the series got a little strange from Saturn's time-looping Dark Savior onwards.
Premise: Umbrella Corporation has... no, wait, let me start over. The planet Avalon has destroyed its own biosphere after years of biological warfare, rendering the planet an inhospitable petri dish. Survivors in bio-engineered bioships (sure saying "bio" a lot) scout ahead after many years in stasis to see if the planet can be reclaimed.
Availability: You can buy this on Steam or via the Sega Genesis Classics compilation for PS4/XB1/Switch.
Preservation: Sega probably felt it had been too long - almost a month! - since the Genesis was last graced with a shoot 'em up and put out Bio-Hazard Battle themselves, the latest in a noble line of gooey visceral shoot 'em ups in the vein (as it were) of Life Force and Abanox. BHB's most notable trait after its macabre visuals is the heavy bass synth soundtrack by veteran Sega sound engineer Shigeharu "Nasu" Isoda, who also directed the game. BHB's also one of a small number of shoot 'em ups I've encountered to make the environment just as much as an antagonist as the enemy waves; while you can't get damaged by touching the ceiling/floor like in Gradius, the game will speed up certain scrolling sequences to make it easier to get smushed between a wall and the edge of the screen.
Premise: The Joker's back to pull off his tricks, and maybe a boner or two, in Sunsoft's follow-up to their successful NES platformer. You're laughing. We get two Batman licensed games in two months, and you're laughing.
Availability: No rereleases. Given the source, I don't think we should expect one either.
Preservation: Turns out there's both a "Revenge of the Joker" and a "Return of the Joker". Take that, Star Wars! You only wish you had the Clown Prince of Crime involved in your silly space opera, or his famous VA Mark Hamill. First released on NES, Revenge (or Return, as it was on Nintendo's sanitized system) is both a sequel to Sunsoft's NES Batman and a spiritual sequel: that is, Return of the Joker has an iterative approach to its platforming that clearly ties the two games together, but is thematically based on the original comics rather than the Burton movie franchise. The license for Batman Returns was given to other developers, as we found out last entry with, well, Batman Returns (MA XXII). The obvious difference between Revenge (Genesis) and Return (NES) are the 16-bit graphics: small-time contract developers Ringler Studios were brought in to polish those up - we last saw them with Mario Lemieux Hockey (MA XIV), a game that local oaf Dan Ryckert decided needed to be ranked alongside all the Super Mario games in one of his recent stream challenges.
Premise: Higher For Hire is in financial trouble, so Baloo gets out of his plane - you know, the one thing that sets TaleSpin apart from its peers - to go hunting for the company's missing cargo on foot.
Availability: No rereleases, and seeing as this is a Disney product there's probably not going to be. There was a TaleSpin game in the Disney Afternoon Collection, but it wasn't this one (though that one was arguably better). Maybe wait for Kingdom Hearts IV?
Preservation: We've dabbled in these waters before, but Sega had a competing "Disneyland" to the NES/SNES "Disneyworld" where we'd see the same Disney properties get licensed for both systems but end up as very different games. Usually, at least; there was some overlap with Virgin Interactive's The Lion King and The Jungle Book games, and the Aladdin games for those respective consoles were so similar that it mostly came down to a matter of preference. Nintendo had the backing of Capcom for their Disney-fied adventures, so they were usually ahead; Sega, conversely, lent their version of the licenses to any reliable contract developer they could find, which made the Genesis Disney games a little more uneven. TaleSpin, based on the show of the same name from Disney's wildly successful Saturday morning/afternoon cartoon block (which also included Ducktales, Chip N' Dale: Rescue Rangers, and others), came to us courtesy of Interactive Designs: this generically named company has been featured only once before on here, with the similarly jungle-based cartoon license Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! (MA XXI).
Premise: The Greek gods ask a mortal warrior to help them solve the small issue of a coup led by a quartet of guardians. The mortal asks but for one reward: to become a god themselves.
Availability: Gods fans are in luck - it just got remastered for Steam, PS4, XB1, and Switch. Still a bit of an eyesore, but the modern gameplay tweaks were appreciated by its reviewers.
Preservation: Much to unpack here. This is the third game from The Bitmap Brothers to be ported to the Genesis - we only saw the previous two semi-recently, with Xenon 2: Megablast (MA XXII) and Speedball 2 (MA XV). However, they were not behind this particular port: that job went to fellow UK outfit Graftgold, which we'll be meeting again later this same episode of the Mega Archive. Like all of The Bitmap Brothers games during their peak in the early 90s, they drew upon a lot of talent external to the game industry: the music was composed by synth musician John Foxx (founder and former lead vocalist for Ultravox, of "Vienna" fame, though by that point Midge Ure had taken over) while the cover art was created by Simon Bisley, a 2000AD/DC Comics artist possibly best known outside the comic book world as the inspiration for Simon Pegg's character from Spaced. The game itself is something of an odd duck: while it looks like a mindless action-platformer, there's a cautiousness that gets ingrained in its players after they rush in and die too easily, with various inventory puzzles to wrap one's mind around. It also incorporates an early version of "adjustable difficulty" where enemies get smarter and hit harder if the player is doing too well (and vice versa). Being the impatient tyke I was back in 1991 when it debuted on Atari ST, I never got too far through it.
Premise: Kevin McCallister's been left home alone over the holidays and takes it upon himself to protect the entire neighborhood in this stakes-raising loose adaptation. Remembering being able to leave your home for Christmas vacation? Or for any other reason?
Availability: It wasn't and won't ever be rereleased, but you can probably get a copy for a few bucks on eBay. Just remember to keep the change, you filthy animal.
Preservation: This particular Home Alone tie-in was dropped to coincide with the December 1992 cinematic release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, oddly enough (which notoriously featured Donald Trump in a brief cameo, who would coincidentally also lose in New York along with many, many other states in the 2020 Presidential Election). I suppose it made sense to release a Home Alone game while the "Castle Doctrine for Babies" iron was briefly reignited (maybe while also tumbling towards Daniel Stern's head). I'm digressing because I don't think anyone could imagine a Home Alone game being all that good; though unlike the generic THQ platformer (for NES/SNES/GB) this version developed by Brian Rice, Inc. puts a correct amount of emphasis on Kevin's trap preparation and resourcefulness. It's more in the style of that NES Friday the 13th game, as half the struggle is getting over to the house currently in peril and saving the day before starting the loop over again. Get there too late, and the Wet Bandits will have completely emptied and subsequently flooded the house. That last part always seemed weirdly spiteful, though I guess it's better than the first draft screenplay's idea of "the Upper Decker Bandits".
Premise: Indy and his wacky dad Henry Sr. (R.I.P. Sean Connery, I swear I don't time these things) set out to stop the Nazis from claiming the Holy Grail, and with it the power of immortality.
Preservation: You know that any Last Crusade game that lets you play the movie's River Phoenix prologue as a fully adult Indiana Jones is going to be good. The first ludonarrative hurdle and they all just faceplant right over it. So, this is one of the two widespread video game adaptations of the 1989 movie that capped the original Indiana Jones trilogy, which on computers were conveniently subtitled "The Graphic Adventure" and "The Action Game" respectively: this game would be the unfortunate latter, which like most action games for home computers at the time is kinda not great. Tiertex, the developer behind almost all versions of "The Action Game", built the Genesis version from the ground up but it still suffers from the same boneheaded design decisions that made this and other versions an overly difficult, frustrating mess. How many platformers have you played where hitting the ceiling (even when it isn't spiked) will cause health loss? We'll be meeting with Indy again one last time on the Genesis in 1994, but... well, our situation won't have improved.
Premise: Mick and Mack return to clean up this filthy world of ours, protecting future generations from all the greasy Big Mac fatbergs and plastic cups and straws choking the oceans. Wait, who endorsed this game again?
Availability: Ironically, I think the majority of this game's copies are now stuffed in landfills.
Preservation: Told you we'd be seeing Graftgold again very soon. The UK-based devs had a memorably busy introduction to the Sega Mega Drive, putting out their first two games for it within the same month. They'll have one more (Europe-exclusive) release we'll get around to when (or if) we cover 1993. Since it isn't evident from the box art, Global Gladiators is a McDonald's licensed game and the follow-up to M.C. Kids, which was released earlier that same year for NES. Even though McDonald's contributes to more than their fair share of ecological disasters, Global Gladiators has an environmentalist theme that puts its diverse heroes in charge of saving the planet from pollution monsters and other toxic hazards. They do this with a slime-projecting gun unfortunately dubbed the "GooShooter." Despite the heavy-handed messaging and licensing grossness, Global Gladiators is still halfway decent: that's because it, along with fellow junk food mascot turned video game hero Cool Spot, was an early project of David Perry - the Virgin Interactive programmer that would later go on to form Shiny Entertainment and create Earthworm Jim. I think I still prefer the block-tossing platforming of M.C. Kids, but for a preachy hypocritical jeremiad that places the blame of environmental collapse squarely on private citizens who don't bother to sort their glass and plastics, Global Gladiators could've been far worse.
Theme: Plastic Instrument Games? Those Will Never Take Off
Premise: Are your kids are too busy playing on their damn video game box to take their piano lessons? What if I told you there was a way to combine the two, and all it would cost is a month's mortgage payment?
Availability: Unsurprisingly rare to find, especially copies that includes the pack-in keyboard peripheral (which is needed to play the game).
Preservation: The Miracle Piano Teaching System is something I've encountered before on the Giant Bomb wiki (via the SNES), but certainly not something I ever encountered in the wild as this 16-bit piano tutor video game never progressed beyond the United States. I imagine these long, chunky boxes took up real estate in Babbage's stores up and down the US in the early '90s, turning off any prospective buyer either because of the $500 price tag (adults) or by being an educational game full of stuffy classical music (kids). It has a few contemporary tracks in there too just from perusing the playlist, but it's mostly the stuff you'd expect from a piano teacher: Chopsticks, Ode to Joy, and so on. California-based educational game maker The Software Toolworks will only appear on our radar once here for the Mega Archive, but they'll show up a few more times on the Mega Archive CD once that returns. Elsewhere, they're celebrated (if that's the right word) for Mario is Missing! and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
Premise: Chakan, the Forever Man, has all the time in the universe but little patience left for living. His only means of earning a final death is to rid the mortal world of the evil forces that plague it.
Availability: No ports, no rereleases, no successors. Really more of a Chakan't these days.
Preservation: Sure, let's chat about The Forever Man for a spell. Created by cartoonist Robert A. Kraus, Chakan is a swordsman who was too awesome and cool to die, but has now lived so long that he suicidally rushes into peril to finally end his centuries-long existence in honorable battle. The video game adaptation was the last to be worked on by Recreational Brainware, which we last saw with Taz-Mania (MA XIX). Extended Play, a company created by many of the same people, existed just long enough to finish the development Brainware started on Chakan before it too dissolved and its founders went their separate ways. Notorious for its difficulty and dark, trippy visuals, Chakan left an impression on the many who rented it from Blockbuster but could never beat it. It had a few interesting ideas for mechanics too, including a potion mixing power-up system, a (then rare) double-jump, and a multidirectional swordfighting system where you held the attack button and moved in the angle you wanted to strike, which kinda made Chakan look like he was directing airport traffic. There's been a few unsuccessful attempts to revive Chakan since, most notably for the Dreamcast in 2001, but fans are still hoping a reboot will happen someday. (For way more detail on Chakan's development than you could ever want, check out this article on Sega-16.)
Something I've encountered a few times of late is the "non-RPG RPG Maker game": a case of a resourceful developer taking software meant to help in the creation of turn-based RPGs in the Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy mold, and instead dropping the combat element entirely to tell a conflict-free story with the occasional adventure game puzzle. This week's entry OneShot is such a game, presenting the tale of catperson Niko (their gender is deliberately ambiguous) as they carry a "sun" to its final destination in order to save a dying world with the help of the world's god.
While direct comparisons could be made with the likes of To the Moon and Rakuen, I think OneShot is atmospherically closest to Toby Fox's Undertale, largely due to how both games use their quiet moments both as a means of reflection for the characters - Niko talks to their god a lot, who happens to be you, the player - and to highlight the fleeting beauty of an otherwise dark and decrepit land. More so, though, is the way that both games appear to engage the player directly with some meta trickery, most of which I'm loath to discuss in detail to preserve the surprise. Suffice it to say, when the game recommends you play in windowed form, it's best to acquiesce because there's a lot you might miss just outside that window.
To circle back to the type of game this is, OneShot is entirely driven by its puzzles. Most of these involve the inventory in some way; you find items, helpfully given a sheen to distinguish them from the set dressing, and figure out where best to utilize them. This can often mean combining items in the inventory as well. The game is narratively broken up into regions, and these also serve to limit the amount of real estate you have to work with to solve puzzles; something I've referenced in the past as a player-friendly "compartmentalized" approach to adventure game puzzles (as opposed to many older cases, where the size of the world keeps growing and so too do the number of hotspots at your disposal until there's simply too many item/hotspot combinations to contemplate). OneShot will require the occasional "Layton puzzle" too, though these are few and far between. To invoke Undertale again, imagine the type of puzzles Papyrus would throw at you, only in this case they're halfway competent and might require some thought. Some are even baked in to the aforementioned meta trickery, though that's as much as I'll say about those.
These cutaway shots aren't too frequent, but always appreciated.
As you may have surmised, it's hard to talk about OneShot without spoiling a lot as so much is in the telling of the tale, but I can at least speak to the game's tone and emotional depth. Niko is a true innocent: a child who is dragged into this savior business involuntarily, and dreams only of returning to their village surrounded by wheat fields to see their mother again and eat her amazing pancakes. A lot of the game's emotional impact rides on the player's sympathy for their ward for this reason, especially as the game picks up in its intensity, and it's hard not to feel for Niko in particular with your many conversations and from slaking their own considerable curiosity (a quality I imagine is just purr for the course when it comes to feline hominids). Likewise, the denizens of the fading world the two of you are exploring are equally sympathetic, many trying to make the best of an increasingly dire situation and still greeting Niko with friendliness and a helping hand: partly because they recognize them as the world-saving "messiah", but also out of genuine kindness. For a game about the end of the world, it is endlessly wholesome and reaffirming about the value of life; it's no real surprise in retrospect that it was included in Itch's Racial Justice and Equality bundle from a few months back.
To bring back Undertale one last time, both games found excellent use in otherwise "minimal" pixel art. That's not to decry the art itself, which has a distinctive style in both games, but rather in the way that long stretches of the game have almost nothing to see, by design. By making use of empty space not just as a time-saving design measure but as an indication of the emptiness of their worlds, playing lugubrious synth in the background to evoke feelings of desolation and loneliness, they make effective use of their basic environments to tell these slightly downbeat stories. Conversely, the places filled with life - dwellings with living owners, for instance - are packed with little details about the person or people living there, in stark contrast to the great emptiness outdoors. You can learn a lot from each of the game's major NPCs just by looking around their rooms and reading item descriptions of the bric-a-brac lying around or posted on walls. I've always found that sort of environmental character building compelling, even if I often feel slightly weird about rifling through other people's stuff (an never more so when they're around to actually yell at you about it).
OneShot doesn't have as many moments of levity as Undertale, but it will occasionally marvel at the silliness of its own premise.
Ultimately, much of what makes OneShot special can't easily be conveyed in a review, and definitely not one taking pains to avoid spoilers. If you're acquainted with the world of narrative-driven adventure games made in RPG Maker via any of the several examples mentioned above then you might have some idea of what to expect in brief, though certainly not the full breadth of what OneShot has in store. I'd highly recommend trying it out for yourselves without reading any more about it, especially if you happen to have acquired it the same way I did.
I had to curtail my usual Tuesday rundowns of old-ass Genesis games this week due to being tied up (in a good way, but not in that kind of good way) by all the Giant Bomb Extra Life charity streaming last weekend. (Speaking of which, thanks to all those who got involved, either with your own streams or supporting others as donors and/or as an audience.) Instead, I've decided to write about a game that has almost completely absorbed my November thus far and may well continue to do so for a few more weeks at least: Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo's Nioh 2.
For those unfamiliar, Koei (back when it was still on its own) originally found its fame and fortune through a strategy simulation series named Nobunaga no Yabou, or Nobunaga's Ambition, which was set during the Japanese Sengoku era (1467-1615 by our calendar). While he was the nominal protagonist of the series, Nobunaga Oda was simply one of many playable daimyo, or feudal lords, vying for control of the Nihon archipelago. The Nioh games revisit the same conflict from the perspective of an agent with some connection to the Japanese otherworld of the yokai, which is invariably related to the human machinations behind the Sengoku conflict. Nioh 2 specifically has the protagonist be the unnamed product of the uncommon pairing of a human and a yokai, who finds him or herself involved with the years-long rise of the scrappy but shrewd rogue Tokichiro as he eventually becomes a certain major historical figure, all the while surreptitiously pursuing the mysterious villain behind his/her yokai mother's murder.
The Nioh games are quite flagrantly built upon the action-RPG blueprint established by FromSoftware's Souls franchise, though taken in some more oblique directions - as if the original series wasn't obtuse enough - to both better fit the themes of yokai powers and the warfare typical of feudal Japan, and to distinguish itself from Souls and its other imitators. The first Nioh, released 2017, burst out of the Torii gate with a host of new ideas and features as well as an entirely new format for the burgeoning "Soulslike" sub-genre, and it's assumed Nioh 2 expects a certain amount of familiarity from its players (though, it should be said, has an entirely unrelated plot) in that it took Nioh's template and added several extra layers of complexity and character development largely related to the protagonist's half-yokai heritage. The best comparison I could think to make is that Nioh is the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to Nioh 2's Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: by establishing a protagonist with a much stronger connection to the netherworld forces, and introducing mechanics that have them relying on the very powers they're fighting against, you create a more compelling diagram for character advancement and, arguably, a more intriguing personal story to boot.
For the sake of keeping things somewhat focused here, I want to talk about Nioh 2's many systems in brief to give you some idea of the complexity involved. As stated above, Nioh 2 takes all of Nioh's extant systems - its many weapon types with their own individual skill trees, the stance system, yokai mechanics, player revenants, ninja and onmyo jutsu, the many services available at the blacksmith, etc. - and layers on top several more regarding the player's unique connection to the yokai (to wit: acquiring and attuning Soul Cores, traversing the Dark Realm, and the Yokai Shift ability). I'll try to balance brevity with adequate expatiation as I go through this list of features, since my intent here is to demonstrate the broad learning curve and mechanical depth of the Nioh series without necessarily suggesting that it's all too much to internalize; after all, I'm managing it so far, and I'm an idiot. Demonstrably so!
(TL;DR: I'm about to get very geeky about Nioh's mechanics, in particular those that aren't shared with games of a similar format.)
1. The Mission Format
Arguably the biggest departure from the Souls franchise, which I'll be referring to a lot despite that being the number one video game critique faux pas, is that Nioh uses a mission-based structure where each of its "stages" exists in a bubble irrespective of the others. This runs counter to every other Soulslike, of course, which take place in one large contiguous world map barring the occasional "Painted World of Ariamis" situation where you're temporarily whisked off to a self-contained area. Nioh is further split into "main mission" stages, which are fairly large, and "side mission" stages which are either smaller unique areas or are greatly diminished versions of the main mission stages (usually with many previous areas now gated off and inaccessible). Once you've completed the main objective of the stage, usually a boss fight, you're free to exit back to the hub. The hub area is entirely menu-driven and includes a shrine, which also exist as checkpoints in stages and allow you to level up and change loadouts, as well as vendors, an index of yokai, major characters, and story synopses you can refer back to, a dojo for training and tutorials, and the mission-select map screen.
The mission-based structure gives Nioh a very different feeling of progression to the Souls series, for better and worse. Instead of making gradual progress across an immense world, discovering shortcuts back to earlier areas and working your way through alternative paths, a single Nioh 2 stage is a mostly linear affair (though handy backtracking shortcuts are still plentiful) that you never need to revisit unless you missed something important or end up in a different version of it in one of the side-missions. Where it becomes both a strength and a weakness is in how the game is built in such an episodic way that it's easier to place it aside for a longer hiatus; with Souls, you're always developing a mental map of your current understanding of the world, and trying to keep in mind half a dozen alternative paths you've abandoned either because you lacked a key item or because the enemies were too strong. The Souls games are thus harder to put down for extended periods, because so much of your continued progress relies on that kind of transitory information. In Nioh, however, each map is different or - in the case of side-mission revisits - have a completely different assortment of item and enemy placements that makes any prior geographical knowledge redundant.
We'll be making it clear as this list continues that you probably don't want to leave Nioh alone too long or else allow your familiarity with its mechanics to atrophy, which might spell disaster as the game's challenge level continues to rise, but it is overall more conducive towards choosing to play the game sporadically.
The third region of the game. I'd only completed the first main level (the red scrolls), and three new side-missions (black scrolls) and an "online mission" (blue scroll, and it doesn't have anything to do with online) showed up. Side-missions are a good means of boosting levels/equipment before the next main mission, and they'll also unlock all kinds of new stuff.
2. The Stances
Honestly, stances don't play as large a part in the combat as intimidated outsiders seem to believe, or at the very least they're not as hard to wrap one's mind around. There's something almost bewitching about the concern of being in "the wrong stance", or that your combat potential is diminished by eschewing the stance aspect completely for the sake of always being in the "neutral" mid-stance. I will say the latter works just fine if you really don't feel like screwing around with stances, but I think this system is better understood if you came to Nioh via Bloodborne (given Nioh 2 is still a PS4 exclusive as of writing, an audience overlap is probably more likely than not). In Bloodborne you have two "stances" based on the trick weapon system: any given weapon can be in a smaller, faster form or a larger, slower form, and there are mechanics for switching on the fly even in the middle of combos. The stances work the same way here: the high stance is slower but does more damage and usually has more reach (a lot of this is conditional to the weapon type you're using, incidentally), while low stance is usually the exact opposite. Low and high stance can also apply to where your opponent is situated: low stance is great for smaller enemies or those closer to the ground, like the "dweller" zombies that drop to all-fours, while high stance can involve a lot of overhead attacks that can catch flying enemies or those which have weak spots high above you (say, the gigantic One-Eyed Oni cyclopses).
(As if to help onboard the Bloodborne crowd, one of the new weapon types introduced to Nioh 2 is the Switchglaive: a weapon that should prove familiar to Bloodborne players in that it changes between three forms (via the three stances) of saw (low), saw-spear (mid), and scythe (high).)
Where stances arguably become more complex and more specific is in how each weapon skill tree has separate branches for skills that only apply to low, mid, or high stance. This changes the behavior of those stances in turn, as some become more effective for counter-attacks and others for evasion or blocking. High stance usually has some charge moves, which do even more damage in exchange for a period of build-up. And, again, this is all highly conditional to the weapon type you're using. Given that you're probably going to stick to just one or two weapon types - each one relies on a different stat to boost its damage output via weapon scaling, and there's little to be gained by raising all stats evenly - it's worth experimenting with all of them at first to see which ones you want to stick with. I mean, obviously I went with the aforementioned Bloodborne weapon, but there's a decent mix of common and exotic types to try, the latter including the tonfa and the hard-to-use-but-fun-to-master kusarigama.
A mid-battle pose, taken with the game's Photo Mode. Mid stance is perfectly adequate for humans or humanoid enemies like this skel-bro here, but the size and/or speed of the opponent might necessitate a stance shift.
3. Yokai and the Dark Realm
The above two are the big differences between Nioh and its competitors, and the expanded yokai mechanics are the big difference between Nioh and Nioh 2. All the enemies in this game can be roughly categorized into two groups: human and yokai. Human opponents fight like you'd expect them to, allowing for the fact that they have different weapons which have distinct attack animations, but the yokai are much more varied in their designs and their combat approaches. One major distinction between the two groups is that yokai cannot regenerate Ki (the game's equivalent of stamina) naturally, but can do so by creating "yokai realms" - circular AoEs of negative energy that recharges them and drops Ki restoration speed for humans - that the player can extinguish with a "Ki burst" (right-trigger the moment after swinging a weapon; it also boosts your Ki restoration rate if you get it perfect).
New to Nioh 2 are Dark Realm zones: areas where the "yokai realm" effect is active everywhere. Dark Realms can only be extinguished by defeating the yokai generating it; usually the largest and toughest one roaming around the area. Fortunately, as a half-yokai, the protagonist isn't entirely powerless, as they can fall back on their yokai nature to survive. These gifts include the Yokai Shift - this works like Devil May Cry's Devil Trigger or Yakuza's Ultimate Heat Mode, in that the protagonist is temporarily indestructible and has access to much stronger attacks but only for a limited duration - and Yokai Abilities, which has the protagonist summon a yokai for a single attack. The stat that governs this, anima, is typically restored after defeating yokai and acquiring their "Soul Cores" - which is also how you summon them - so you can rely on these skills a lot in yokai areas and especially in Dark Realm zones where it regenerates even faster. (I generally hold back on Yokai Shifts until the boss, however.)
It's certainly a lot to take in, more so if you're new to Nioh and have everything else on this list to consider, and it took several hours before I'd grown used to having these yokai powers at hand and could integrate them into my tactics along with items, jutsu (magic), and the stances and light/heavy attacks. Having them around has certainly made life easier though.
One last note about yokai: there are some fun ones that respond to gestures (emotes) and items, and it's worth finding out which ones those are. Make them happy, and they'll drop all their loot and leave without a fight.
Nioh's yokai are typically gnarly, a far cry from Level-5's cutesy Yo-Kai Watch designs. This Waira guy (not Wario; I made that mistake already) isn't even a boss, he just trundles through random dark corridors sometimes. For scale, he's about seven feet tall and twice that in length.
4. Soul Cores and Guardian Spirits
I mentioned Soul Cores above, and they're one of the many ways you can customize your protagonist. It starts with the Guardian Spirits: spectral protectors, usually shaped like animals, that accompany most of the game's major NPCs and will eventually follow you also (via "spirit division"). Each of these Guardians can equip two Soul Cores, which are sometimes left behind by dead yokai, and provide you with two yokai summon abilities in addition to a bunch of passive boosts not unlike those found on equipment. You can even fuse multiple Soul Cores of the same kind together to increase their effect. This is where the Aria of Sorrow comparison is most keenly applicable: by equipping the right souls to your particular playstyle, you can really get some mileage out of their Yokai Abilities and their passive boosts alike.
Something I've not tinkered around with much yet is how each Guardian Spirit has a class: Feral, Brute, and Phantom, which roughly correspond to three builds your character might have: the fast attacker with minimal armor that relies on dodging more than blocking; the heavy tank that is the exact opposite; and the bow/magic-user that prefers to keep their distance if at all possible. I've been sticking with Feral because that's been my style with Bloodborne and the previous Nioh, but Phantom seems compatible to what I've got going on here build-wise too so I might try one of those out.
Something I almost forgot to mention: player revenants! These bloodstains are much like the ones in Souls, in that they indicate where a player died. One big difference is that if you activate one, that player's ghost comes to life and tries to kill you. (You get PvP points and loot for beating it though!)
5. Jutsu
I completely overlooked Jutsu in Nioh 1 right up until the end of the game, whereupon I decided to go for all the weapon/jutsu specific trophies. Jutsu works like priest and mage magic in the Souls games, in that you have a finite pool of "spell picks" (Vancian magic strikes again!) that you prepare beforehand at shrines (the bonfire equivalent). Instead of holy and arcane magic, though, you have ninja and onmyo jutsu: ninja jutsu tends to involve a lot of projectiles, stealth, and poison/debuffs, while onmyo jutsu is mostly putting elemental damage on weapons or resistances on armor, though with a few magical projectiles too. However, both the ninja and onmyo skill trees are far more elaborate and offer many more customization options for players to use once you get deeper into them, and by increasing the power and capacity of your chosen jutsu type the player can use many jutsu skills simultaneously. It's perhaps better suited for multiplayer given the sheer volume of jutsu types can make practitioners dangerously unpredictable, but having that boon in the PvE single-player is still handy.
Since the Switchglaive uses the magic stat for damage scaling, which also determines the strength of onmyo magic, that's where my non-weapon character development has been focused. The various yokai types respond differently to each element, but I've been getting a lot of mileage out of lightning in particular. I'm now wielding lightning ranged magic and a lightning buff, with both water and "purify" (which has a flat bonus against all yokai types but does nothing against humans) as back-ups in case I'm fighting something lightning-resistant. Should be worth pointing out that, like Souls magic, the jutsu aren't something you can rely on as your sole damage output given how few of them you can have at any time. They exist more to complement your normal melee style, and best applied when you have a bit of distance or a moment of enemy recovery time to toss something out, like the rest of the consumables. Endlessly renewable consumables is the best way of framing them, I suppose.
The wildest thing I've found related to jutsu is that, because you need more item shortcuts to really make use of a full repertoire, you can actually add more item shortcut wheels by simply going deep into the game options menu and turning them on. I guess the game defaults to two (out of a possible four) to keep the shortcut function from being too cluttered? Suffice it to say, if you've ever played a Souls game, having four of those shortcut menus - each of which has four slots to correspond with the four D-pad directions - gives you quite a lot to work with. Provided you remember where you assigned your healing elixirs...
This is the skill tree for onmyo magic. Pretty elaborate, right? The game has twelve more skill trees just like it! Have fun!
6. Blacksmithery
This is already running long and I feel like I could be here all day with the blacksmith facilities, but it's worth emphasizing just how fully it takes advantage of the game's loot system (which follows the same rarity rules as a lot of loot RPGs, including how item rarity determines how many passive boosts a piece of equipment can hold at once). In short, then:
Buy/Sell: Self-explanatory. Selling might not always be the best option for your vendor trash though.
Forging: The reason you'd go to a blacksmith. By disassembling vendor trash into their core materials, you can use those materials to craft a randomly determined piece of equipment close to your current level, based on a specific "model" of a weapon or armor type (say, if you wanted a full suit of ninja clothes). Materials have rarity ratings also, and higher rarity materials mean a greater chance of the forged piece also being rare.
Soul Match: If you really have money to burn, you can soul match your current weapon to a second one of a higher level, transferring that level over at the cost of using up said secondary weapon. There's a few reasons you'd want to do this, but it can get prohibitively expensive if the item is rare.
Refashion: Despite "Fashion Souls" being a huge concern to many, very few Souls games actually let you change the look of your equipment thereby allowing you to turn your presently equipped mishmash of different armor sets into one cohesive style. Refashioning is a cheap way of making any piece of gear look like any other piece of gear, provided you've encountered it before. It also means you won't have to resort to holding onto a piece of crappy armor because you prefer how it looks on you.
Temper: One of my favorite buried menu options is tempering equipment, which essentially lets you burn one moderately rare material to change any piece of equipment's passive boost into a different one. If you're good for fire resistance or simply don't care about it, for instance, you can transform it into something else entirely - maybe a boost to HP or extra weapon damage. The material in question, umbracite, can easily be farmed from disassembling moderately rare vendor trash.
Remodel: This remains locked for most of the game, and is incredibly expensive to do, but will allow you to change the damage scaling of a weapon. That is, if your current weapon primarily uses the strength stat to determine damage, you can switch it to, say, skill or constitution instead. This is an excellent way to start branching out into other weapon types that maybe never had the scaling you wanted, and seems best suited for the end-, post-game, or NG+ runs.
Disassemble: Self-explanatory, and probably a better value proposition for rare vendor trash. The cheaper stuff you might as well hock, or give away to the Kodama (Kodama love free shit).
It's no overstatement to say that's much more you can do with your garbage beyond simply selling it, and I didn't even get into passive boosts that can be inherited or equipment set bonuses. Nioh 2 is, as it is with most everything else, pretty intense about its equipment micromanagement.
You can definitely spend some time in these menus, crafting weapons and then moving the special effects around. Sometimes it's best to just shrug and hope something cool drops in the next mission. We do all have lives to lead, after all.
7. Agyo and Ungyo
One last tidbit to send us off is the Agyo and Ungyo (two halves of the Buddhist concept of Nioh, or twin deva guardian statues, after which the game is named) system, which carries over from the first Nioh. These are simply two lists of in-game achievements that reward you with reputation once earned, and tend to involve killing a certain number of foes with a specific weapon, or with a specific element, or of a specific enemy type. The big earners tend to be challenges like defeating a boss without getting hit, or completing stages without dying or using the shrines to recover, or killing enemies with your bare hands, many of which become a lot easier if you return to the early game at a much higher experience level.
The benefit of earning reputation is that they unlock permanent passive boosts to that character's profile. It's not unlike the achievement system used by the later Borderlands games, but very easy to miss all the same. I think I had about twenty bonuses stacked up the first moment I remembered it existed.
Anyway, I've exhausted almost every topic relevant to my Nioh 2 playthrough (I didn't even touch the online features beyond player revenants, since most require PS+) but I'm not dismissing the possibility that there's even more features out there that I've either somehow ignored or haven't been unlocked yet. Nioh 2 is a very dense game, not just mechanically but also narratively as its story flits through several decades of history, but I think if you take the time to learn its nuances it can be something very rewarding. It occurs to me that something similar could be said for the Musou games that Koei Tecmo also makes, via its Omega Force subsidiary, but I'd prefer not to think too hard about that. I'd rather deal with the supernatural yokai horrors of this game than the existential horrors of being potentially curious enough to invest in the Dynasty Warriors series. Halloween was last month, c'mon now.
A stressful Indie puzzle game during a stressful election week may not seem like the brightest of ideas, but Wilmot's Warehouse - the organizational puzzle game from Hollow Ponds, the creators of Loot Rascals, and Richard Hogg (who was not created by Hollow Ponds just to be clear) - has proven to be the right kind of stressful; that is to say, that once I'm in that game I am fully focused on it and not, for instance, any results that might be slowly rolling in from Georgia or Pennsylvania like the world's slowest Katamari.
Wilmot's Warehouse is a deceptively simple game on first blush. I'm not talking aesthetically, since there's no deception there: the game has a minimalist style where the protagonist is just a box with a face and every piece of inventory is a similarly sized box with a crude or abstract graphic to distinguish them, which is the perfect kind of uncomplicated, denotative shorthand you'd need for a game like this. More that the rules of the game start plain but continue to adapt as you keep acquiring new types of stock. As the resident warehouse pusher (not a whole lot of other similarities to Sokoban beyond the thematic, fortunately) it is the player's job to organize the titular warehouse and deliver requested stock items to the staff at the reception window as quickly as possible. When you have a few dozen item types stashed away in your warehouse space, it's easy enough to keep track of where they all are and have them close at hand. When you pass a hundred types however, which might at any given moment have between one and twenty instances apiece, the logistics of keeping everything close and efficiently stored becomes much more of a pipe dream.
The brilliance of Wilmot's Warehouse is that whatever organizational style you choose, and whatever criteria you use to keep the stock items categorized, must continue to evolve as you "unlock" new merchandize. For instance, I've been keeping rows of inventory organized by color; if someone at the window asks for an item with a light purple background, for instance, I'm aware that I keep those items on the due western section of the warehouse (if imagining the entire space as a compass). However, I've gotten to the point where these rows have extended almost to the most southern end of the warehouse, which means travelling that much further to deliver orders. Likewise, some colors are more common than others - I have way more light blues than any other hue, for instance, which makes their demarcated zone of the warehouse far more cluttered - and some inventory types don't easily conform to a uniform color. Some, like a box with red, white, and navy blue stripes, don't really fit in with any of the color schemes - since there are very few white background types, I've been keeping them there just as a default.
The low-lighting that obscures anything that isn't close by is another complicating factor I figured could eventually be remedied with an upgrade, but seems to be a permanent aspect of the game's challenge.
The game's loop is split in such a way that there are frequent pauses to catch your breath. It plays in sets of three shifts: each shift starts with you ferrying the requested items to the counter, and you have ninety seconds to do so. After that, you have three minutes to take the freshly delivered shipments and sort them into your extant inventory in its current organizational format, moving blocks around in groups without unsettling any of the rows or columns of your pre-sorted stock. Whether you're ready or not, the staff show up to ask for more items, and this loop continues a total of three times until you get a "stock take": an infinite period of time to sort the warehouse before you press on with the next set of shifts. Between each shift you also have the opportunity to spend upgrade stars: these are earned from providing the more time-sensitive stock items first, and then a few more based on how quickly you can provide everything requested. Early upgrades are incredibly useful: the ability to carry more boxes at once; the ability to rotate what you're carrying to maneuver large groups easier; more space in the warehouse to work with; or a speed burst to get you around faster. Later ones then become handy but with caveats: a map that shows you the entire warehouse is only available in the top right of the area, which means you need a clear path to it and can't really rely on it when you're in the thick of things; a robot named Borky that can be assigned to move new deliveries to where identical instances are being stored, but if you're keeping things in neat rows it may not necessarily put items on the end but rather to the sides; or a pager that tells you what the staff at the window want before you move up there to see for yourself, but it won't tell you what the high-priority requests are and it's important you fulfill those first. The last few upgrades are useless: a timelapse of your playthrough thus far and an extremely expensive pair of dungarees that I'm not convinced will do anything besides change the look of my sprite. It's a system that offers vital boons early on, when you're still a little unconfident about your organizational chops, but isn't something you can rely on late in the game when the pressure is at its highest. Of course, by then, you won't really need the stars as badly as before.
How it started, etc. etc.. The right image is only at about 112/200 (56%) inventory types unlocked despite the eastern side being almost full, so it won't be an effective system for too much longer. My next plan is to create different sorting preferences depending on quantity: smaller groups can be placed closer to the middle because they won't be in the way as much. By 70% or 80% unlocked, I'm sure I'll need something different again...
I can't help but wonder if it was genius foreplanning or a touch of serendipity (good game design is usually a mix of both, given the amount of tweaking involved) that makes Wilmot's Warehouse that little bit more intense after every shift, as you're eventually forced to toss out old ways of thinking as untenable and scramble for a scheme that will suit the new reality. Even while you're in the midst of its timed three-shift gameplay loop, it's never incredibly demanding; it's only afterwards in the calm of the storm, when you have time to ruminate and double-guess yourself, that the game is at its most insidious. After all, it'll be during this stock taking time that you'll consider spending an hour moving boxes around for a new and improved "system" that the game will have its hooks in you deepest. Whether you decide to organize by color or by theme ("nautical" seems busy, as does "animals"; though where does that put sharks?) or decide on long rows of identical items or opt for generally squareish "zones", or decide whether to keep the warehouse's central north/south thoroughfare free to make it easier to move with large amounts of inventory or start filling it up because you're running out of space close to the window counter: these are all dilemmas you end up making early choices about and then later changing those choices on the regular. I figured I'd like this game because I have a real lizard brain when it comes to organizing and filing, but if anything I underestimated how well the game knows what it means to have that sort of mind and how best to screw with those that have it. Maybe "begrudingly respect" is a better way to describe how I feel about the game than "love", but either way I can't seem to put it down. Could be I just don't have a space cleared out for it yet.
Welcome back to the Mega Archive, which once again resumes after we took a little break for some Halloween festivities. I'm going to have to work on the next Mega Archive CD before too long and get that caught up, but until then we've still got (almost) the rest of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games released in October 1992 to process this entry.
The good news is that there weren't any new sports games released on the Genesis this month (which is odd, as Octobers are usually infested with them), but the bad news - or at least the "slightly less interesting to talk about" news - is that we're starting to see the first of the compilation packs. The rest include the usual mix of Amiga migrants (Amigrants?), shoot 'em ups, licensed games, and arcade conversions. Oh, and we also get into the peripheral biz a little bit and indulge our inner Austin Walkers with some mech anime. No big headliners this time, but there's some variety at least.
If you need to catch up with the Mega Archive, here's where we've been so far:
Premise: Burton's second Batman movie saw a whole bunch of video game adaptations, most of which came from Konami and were fun. The Genesis game was an exception.
Availability: How expensive could re-licensing a Sega game based on a Warner Bros. film based on a DC Comics franchise really be, anyway? Probably cheaper now that Warner owns DC, but even so. Just get Rocksteady to make a new one.
Preservation: I've honestly gained a lot more sympathy for the makers of these quickie licensed tie-ins after all the detailed reports of rampant crunch in the industry and the deleterious effects it has on the quality of the games and the quality of the lives of the people working on them alike. Though it's been spotlighted more often of late, it's been ubiquitous in the industry for decades and usually never more so than with games that have a multimedia synergy deadline to hit (Batman Returns came out July '92 and was still in theaters by late October which, like pumpkins, is pretty much the best time to invest in Tim Burton). So with that in mind, while I will say the five minutes I spent with this game was all I needed, having Sunsoft create an appealing baseline of "side-scrolling platformer/brawler where Batman can use his gadgets to avoid having to deal with anyone" for the 1989 Batman game was probably a balm to a lot of these licensed game developers. Also, I think this game is the beefiest the Caped Crusader has ever looked outside of a Rob Liefeld sketch.
Premise: In the future, interplanetary trade disputes are settled with giant rock 'em sock 'em robot fights. I suppose it'd be more fun to watch than Space Congress going through several months of Space Diplomatic Administration (though maybe not according to George Lucas).
Availability: A rerelease is not happening. I don't even know who owns RazorSoft's IPs these days. I'd like to think David Jaffe picked them up after recognizing a kindred spirit in middle-school edgelordery.
Preservation: Punk Development had long shut its doors and been reborn as Iguana Entertainment by the time RazorSoft put out this, the last of their collaborative works together. This wasn't quite the end of RazorSoft (as we'll discover shortly) but most of their output from here on out will be cheap arcade conversions rather than original IPs, developed with temporary contractors. Death Duel is... well, it's kinda like a crappier Battle Clash without the light-gun and with more gore. The developers made the bold choice to strictly limit your ammunition and force you to restock after every battle with what little earnings you made, which was what I thought was always missing from Battle Clash: having to stop mid-boss fight and start over because you ran out of lasers. RazorSoft's penchant for over-the-top violence is present and correct, as you literally tear your fleshy alien opponents apart limb from limb. The last hurrah from Sega of America's most grody associate.
Premise: Take control of one of the US military's light attack helicopters, or an extremely blocky facsimile, in this port of a PC 3D combat simulator from EA.
Availability: The ironic thing about EA's Origin service is that it doesn't feature much of their earlier games. Then again, I'm not sure how many folks now would buy a helicopter sim that makes SNES Star Fox look sleek.
Preservation: Much respect as always for any Genesis port of a 3D computer game that tries its best with its limited hardware. In 1990, a high-end IBM PC was just about capable of running LHX with a moderate framerate; a Sega Genesis has no chance, and slowdown is your persistent wingman throughout this game. Still, we're also talking about a period of time - pretty much the entire decade of the '90s, now I think about it - where the novelty of 3D graphics was so appealing that people were willing to overlook a lot. Just look at Final Fantasy VII. Or Stunt Race FX. Or... what else can I burn here... eh, regardless, I think this is serviceable enough even if it dips into molasses territory so often it has a toll pass, and it gives you your choice of light attack helicopter including two models I'm not sure were featured in other games.
Theme: That Hot "Proof of Concept Tech Demo" Energy
Premise: Totally unlike any other 16-bit light-guns which may or may not have had a six mini-game pack-in compilation, the Sega Menacer is here with six games that only work with the Sega Menacer (or maybe a mouse, depending on what you're playing it on).
Availability: I'd hazard a guess that there are more working Menacer 6-Game Cartridges out there than there are working Menacers, so there's probably more supply than demand.
Preservation: Look, Sega was in an arms race in the early '90s and if your enemy came out with a stupid looking bazooka light-gun you better believe you had to manufacture one too. Far as I can tell, Western Technologies worked on both this game and the Menacer light-gun peripheral itself: we last saw them with Art Alive (MA XIV), but they were renowned tech wizards who at one point brought the Vectrex console into the world with the funding of General Consumer Electric. I can't say the mini-games are all that awe-inspiring, but there's a little more thematic variety here than there was in Super Scope 6, even if the presentation is nowhere near as slick. As was the case with Art Alive, Western Technologies managed to convince the ToeJam & Earl people to let them borrow their characters: Earl (the orange one) is the protagonist of the pack's third mini-game, "Ready, Aim, Tomatoes!".
Premise: Megablast your way through the innards of weird alien planets in this attractive but tough Amiga/Atari ST shoot 'em up.
Availability: This is wild, but apparently a homebrew version was published for the Atari Jaguar in 2016. Its creator was given the consent to release it by one of the original developers. That's as recent a release as you're likely to get.
Preservation: I'd go through the usual Bitmap Brothers spiel here - top-notch presentations belied middling gameplay, yet they still rated highly in every Atari ST/Amiga magazine of the day - but I already exhausted that vein back when we covered Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (MA XV). Xenon 2 is closer to what I had in mind when I say these games can be too flashy for their own good, as it's a vertical scrolling shooter with huge detailed sprites set in levels that have enemies swooping in from every direction that you can easily collide into, and the combination of all three of those things on a system with a 320x224 resolution does not make for a good time. The Genesis port also mangles the title screen music, which was the only highlight on the computer versions, and the framerate's especially lousy. I covered the Atari ST Xenon II in more detail over here somewhere, but it's not a sequel I ever had a whole lot of affection for and this lackluster port really isn't helping its case.
Availability: Individually, Columns is available on Steam, Super Hang-On had an enhanced 3DS remaster (and the arcade version is playable in Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6), and World Cup Italia '90 is an ancient sports game no-one needs to play in 2020.
Preservation: The first of the Mega Games compilations, I recently learned that this series was only a thing in Europe excepting this inaugural set that eventually made its way to the States as "Triple Score." Europeans got several more of these Mega Games compilations over the following year, but this first one was intended as a console pack-in for late adopters since I guess Sega had underestimated the European market and it proved more lucrative than they anticipated. This set features Columns (MA III), the Super Hang-On port (MA I), and World Cup Italia '90 (it's supposed to be World Championship Soccer for the US release according to the box art, but they got World Cup Italia '90 too) (MA I) as a sample of what the Mega Drive could do.
Premise: Monsters have invaded the kingdom of Alurea and only a pair of heroic twins can save the day... Oh, one of them couldn't make it? Darn.
Availability: Showed up in a few Capcom compilations for PS2, Xbox, and PSP, but nothing past that.
Preservation: Also known as Mega Twins, depending on where you played it, Sega couldn't really retain that name for the Genesis port because it's only single-player; a conversion fumble that had cost Nintendo dearly with the SNES Final Fight port a few years back that Sega was quick to seize upon with their emphatically two-player Streets of Rage. Kind of odd to see the same error come back full circle to Sega, as while Chiki Chiki Boys is as much a platformer as it is a brawler the cooperative multiplayer aspect was a major aspect of its appeal. The original arcade game was by Capcom, but I guess Sega felt it was close enough to Westone's Wonder Boy series - which Sega had published - that they felt they had to port it over themselves. Gotta corner the market on those melon-headed boy heroes (except for Hudson's Bonk).
Premise: Vixen 357, which is not the username of a Tinder catfisher, has you unexpectedly field-testing the new VECTOR mech units after a sudden ambush by unknown foes.
Availability: Original cart only.
Preservation: Missed the Japanese-only Mega Drive games? Well, here's a deeply tactical strategy game with mecha for you by our good friends at Masaya. From its Wikipedia article, it sounds like some Front Mission plotting with Fire Emblem permadeath; the latter aspect, rather than allowing you to continue the game with those characters missing from cutscenes, simply hits you with a game over instead so you might have to play a little more defensively to keep the important named characters alive. Masaya also created the Langrisser/Warsong series so this is sort of game is entirely in their wheelhouse. It does have a fan translation for those interested in mecha strategy RPGs with anime cutscenes, and it sounded like we were close to also getting a localized physical version last year until those plans fell through.
Premise: Popular manga/anime Mobile Police Patlabor comes to the Mega Drive in this RPG from a Bandai subsidiary.
Availability: Original cart only. Outside of the '90s, the only place you're going to see Patlabor are in the Super Robot Wars crossovers.
Preservation: The mech games keep coming with this Patlabor tie-in RPG, apparently developed and published by the toyline's producers Ma-Ba (the result of a brief fusion dance by major US and Japanese toymakers Mattel and Bandai, originally established to sell Barbie dolls in Japan). Patlabor the manga/anime was about a near-future police division that used mech suits called labors to combat labor-related crimes, which were typically only used for industrial and construction work (hence "labor") and military purposes. I remember it was always a big deal in the show when a bad guy showed up in a sleek military labor that the heroes had little chance taking on face to face. Ma-Ba's an interesting anomaly we'll see with a handful more anime licensed games; it's weird, but I don't remember encountering Ma-Ba once while working on NES, SNES, or PC Engine pages despite a heavy Bandai presence on all three.
Theme: *KZZT* This is Nancy at Chase H.Q.. We've Got an Emergency Here!
Premise: What is the third game in the series, but is actually still just the first, Chase H.Q. II has a familiar batch of criminal scum to T-bone on a busy highway.
Availability: This "sequel" is Genesis cart only. If you want to drive into other cars at high speeds though, may I recommend the Burnout franchise?
Preservation: So yeah, this is once again the marketing geniuses working at early '90s Sega adding a "2" to every arcade conversion as if to say, "hey, this is more than just a home port with a few extra bells and whistles, it's a whole new game!" Why they couldn't just put "Mega" in front of everything like Nintendo was doing with its "Super" SNES ports I'll never know. This is really just original-flavor Chase H.Q. with the new feature of being able to choose between a number of vehicles, each with different settings of top speed and damage per hit. What's confusing, at least for wiki purposes, is that there are two other "Chase H.Q. II"s: the actual second game Chase H.Q. II: Special Criminal Investigation (maybe best known for having your partner shoot at dudes from the sunroof) and the arcade sequel Chase H.Q. II which appeared way later in 2007. I still gave it a new page on our wiki, but Taito's not making it easy for us data nerds.
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