Well, here we are at the starting line of December, and I've procured two free months of Game Pass Ultimate in which to play through as many 2024 games for January's GOTY season as possible. Some strong candidates are presently available on the service, even if the most enticing games from this year—Ys X, Metaphor, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Unicorn Overlord, or UFO 50—are both absent from that library and, really, beyond my ability to finish in so short a period. Well, that's why my "GOTY (Adjusted)" series exists, I suppose: getting to everything I want to see at my own pace.

Speaking of pace, I may have overestimated how speedily I'll be able to get through some of these games, but then I don't really feel the need to rush through them as they arrive even with the limited duration of the subscription service. Better to luxuriate and go after those achievement sets rather than blitz through everything for the sake of... I don't even know what. Internet clout? Like I want, need, or am likely to earn any of that. My goal is to eventually have a list of ten games by some point in January, where we can calmly embrace the previous year's offerings in full absent all the background stress and responsibilities that accompany the holidays, but there's no real hurry for the time being. Man, this is basically how I approached every coursework assignment too come to think of it.

So! As per usual for Go! Go! GOTY!, I'm going to update this series sporadically across the next two months as games are done in lieu of my usual recurring features. The only other blogs will be the last two Indie Games of the Week for this year (and Game Pass is helping there too) along with the first five for 2025 in January. After that, I've got some real fun, dumb content ideas for the rest of the year that I hope you'll stick around for. Until then, keep an eye on this blog going forward—I almost wish I could get an RSS feed going, if I knew anything about how any of that works—and be sure to check out previous "Go! Go! GOTY!" seasons in the list below as well as the current entries in this series via the table just yonder. Happy holidays and/or GOTY cramming, everyone.

• 2014
• 2015
• 2016
• 2017
• 2019
• 2020/2021
• 2022

Game of the Month: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Grezzo/Nintendo, 2024)

Wasn't quite my intention to play through two Zeldas in one year (not that it's something to complain about) but I figured I should end 2024 having played at least one game that came out in 2024. You know, it being the style around here. I'm not the most zeitgeist-affected duder out there, as most newly released games are about as good as those from the past ten years albeit a whole lot more expensive, but I was tickled by the idea of playing the first Legend of Zelda game that actually has Zelda in the lead, provided we pretend the CD-i games don't exist and I think most would be amenable to that accord. A while back now I wrote a list that chronicled all the appearances of the Hylian princess in her namesake series and her role in those games, mostly as a way of tracking how her characterization as an elfin Princess Peach had grown from an endgame prize to be won to someone who occasionally gets to have some agency in her life before inevitably getting kidnapped by a burly bipedal beast with anger issues. This game, I feel, is the culmination of that long journey for validity.

Echoes of Wisdom has Zelda narrowly escape a series of weird purple rifts and meet with a fairy-adjacent being called Tri who lends her a wand capable of creating echoes of various objects and monsters, called "echoes". Given Zelda's relative pacifist nature (though she's been handy with bows and swords in past games) creating monsters to fight for you is an interesting new dynamic for the series, one that has you considering what best matches up with what as you clear out the foes harassing you or standing in the way of progress in the current dungeon. Most of the echo system is geared towards this collectible monster aspect, with the inanimate objects in the echo library being somewhat muted in comparison. Really, beyond a few useful traversal items like the trampoline or the double-utility of healing and bridge-building afforded by the various beds, it's likely any echo you create will be intended as a burly protector. In case you do want to go in swords swinging though, you eventually acquire a limited-duration power-up that has you adopt Link's weapon set, including his sword, shield, bow, and bombs (though the bombs come way too late, honestly): this Link buff (or bufflinks, as I probably won't call it again) is best used to apply a lot of damage to bosses, since they all do that thing where they're only vulnerable for a short period before going back to their usual pattern.

I quite like the echoes system, and not just because it doubles as a set of collectibles (since I'm real weird about those). As I said, it forces you to think about problems like enemies and some environmental puzzles from a direction the series hasn't really explored before, utilizing the various monster properties of aerial, aquatic, ranged, melee, elemental (fire/ice/lightning), damage immunities, and so on in a way that feels like a very trimmed-down version of what other "monster friend" series like Pokémon and MegaTen have done for years. I say that, but most of my strategies involve spawning a Darknut and letting it tank everything, only bringing out a shark or a bird for those foes the Darknut can't reach (yeah, yeah, I failed No Darknut November). Still, it's when you encounter a unique obstacle and spend some time experimenting with all the echoes that might work are where the game shines brightest; there are certainly stretches where you can proceed on auto-pilot, but the lateral thinking types are my favorite. In addition to echoes, the game also makes ample use (or expects you to) out of two less celebrated commands: one has you telekinetically moving objects around through an object "bond" formed with Tri, necessary for a lot of pressure plate puzzles, while the other has you revert control back to the creature or object you've targeted with a "reverse bond" and simply let it move you around instead. The latter's very useful for getting over gaps or tall walls with the right wall-climbing echo, so I made sure to always keep that function in the back of my mind.

What I didn't care for as much is how many features were carried over from the two big open-world games, and don't fit nearly as well here. Like how there's a whole bunch of ingredients you can find for making smoothies (damn, Jamba Juice has gotten as far as Hyrule?) that take up the bulk of the items you earn from finding caves off the beaten path or from completing mini-games, rather than stuff you might actually be excited about like heart pieces and upgrades. Though, you still get plenty of both of those: the latter take the form of "might gems", used to power up Link's gear, and finding them all with the help of a certain accessory becomes a late-game scavenger hunt to enjoy.

Last, I want to give a special shout-out to something Echoes—and the Zelda series more broadly—does oh so right, but maybe isn't praised for as much as it should be. That is, the preponderance of W.L.G., a.k.a. Weird Little Guys. Echoes has a doozy of a W.L.G. in the form of Stamp Guy, an otherwise anonymous twerp who went to the trouble of setting up stamp podia in the most inhospitable and inaccessible parts of Hyrule all in the hope that some magically-enhanced OCD traveler would be able to find them all and humor his long-winded stories about the origin for his love of stamps while also showing off his Tom of Finland-esque fanart of... himself. Functionally as a gameplay mechanic, this is just a way of rewarding players who use the game's traversal tools to get to all the remote, out-of-bounds areas the developers didn't really have a solid plan for when creating the world (and by "create" I mean "mostly just lifted wholesale from A Link to the Past"), but that the devs went the extra mile to center this off-piste exploration around a strange man in his special, custom-made Stamp Guy uniform is but one example of the Nintendo Touch™ that almost makes their games deserving of their permanently high price tags. (Rating: 5 Stars.)

Oh, and just for funzies, here's my deeply unimaginative list of Ten Most Used Echoes:

• Block o' Water. So damn useful to get anywhere. You can also create a big column and entice an annoying aerial enemy like a bird or bat to fly into it and they'll just instantly drown. Hours of fun.
• Darknut Lv. 3. Darknut supremacy! Kills anything in seconds, immune to most forms of damage. My heaviest hitter until I got the Lynel at the eleventh hour.
• Spark. The zappy ball things. Useful for a few electricity puzzles, but even more useful for getting past water currents and other obstacles of that nature using the "follow" command.
• Flying Tile. As long as where you're going to is level with where you are and there's nothing in the way, it's the quickest means of crossing wide gaps or lava lakes.
• Holmill. The mole. Kinda indispensable for a lot of buried treasure.
• Ignizol. An early source of fire, useful for so many situations.
• Trampoline. Best way of getting high up before the water block was available.
• Bombfish. Takes most of the game before you get bombs of your own so this little guy is invaluable for busting open blocked caves and such.
• Chompfin. Nothing beats ol' George in the water. (For my main aerial fighter, I cycled between various birds until I got the elemental Keese.)
• Zelda's Bed. Sometimes a gal just wants a nap in the middle of a dungeon. Honestly, this game makes it ridiculously easy to heal yourself.

Darling Indies and Other Gaming Tomfoolery

Ghostwire: Tokyo (Tango Gameworks, 2022)

I'd meant for this to be an October spookfest sort of occasion but Umineko sucked up that entire month, almost. Anyway, November's a scary enough time with the lack of daylight and everything, so here we are: my new favorite Tango Gameworks game. Now that's a company that has a bright future ahead of it with this kind of potential on display. Ghostwire: Tokyo sees a young man, Akito Izuki, crash his motorbike at the famously turbulent Shibuya Scramble Crossing while attempting to visit his comatose younger sister at the hospital. However, even though he suffered an apparently fatal collision, he's still having a better day than the rest of Shibuya's citizens after their souls are forcibly removed from their bodies by a massive paranormal event, leaving only piles of clothes behind. Akito is saved from this fate due to joining forces (though with some amount of initial conflict) with a spiritual medium and yokai hunter calling himself KK, who has since died and now wanders around as a spirit that possesses and heals Akito's damaged body. The two eventually decide to work together to save whomever they can, including Akito's sister, and defeat the twisted mastermind behind the event along with the hordes of hostile "Visitors" (each born from distinct negative emotions) that have appeared.

Ghostwire puts to mind something like Sunset Overdrive, in that it's taking a tried-and-true urban open-world blueprint and trying to find a new angle to it, long after most developers (besides maybe Ubisoft, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch) have abandoned the format for new horizons. In that respect, it feels both old and new: running around the empty Shibuya streets shooting (or ideally assassinating) spirits while hunting for however many map icon targets are in the area, using a combination of stealth, first-person combat, and fast-paced movement. The vast majority of the time, if you're a completionist like me at least, you're hopping around the place with the game's excellent aerial traversal looking for loose Shibuyan spirits, elusive but not necessarily hostile yokai like the shapeshifting Tanuki or the quick-moving Kamaitachi, finding KK's old case notes for a boost in skill points, or some kind of relic packed with backstories or historical lore about Shibuya and Japanese culture that some floating cat yokai merchant somewhere will pay out the snoot for. And then occasionally moving the story along or dropping into a spooky little side-quest instance like a haunted love hotel or the garbage-strewn home of a dead hoarder whose greediness turned him into an evil spirit (hey, what are they trying to say about their collectathon-loving audience?). Those instances are great fun too, hitting all the survival horror beats as you get startled by an errant can falling over or the entire world turning upside down, depending on how serious the local ghoulies are feeling that day.

What I will say about Ghostwire is that the combat isn't always amazing. You mostly rely on KK's elemental spirit wizardry which tends to resemble quick pistol fire (green/wind), wide shotgun blasts (blue/water), and penetrating rifles (red/fire). Each can be charged for a stronger type of shot—green gives you multiple homing shots, blue gives you larger spreads, red lets you drop AoE explosions to catch multiple foes at once—and you also have a bow, which functions like a quiet sniper rifle in much the same way it does in the Elder Scrolls series but has limited usage due to the relative scarcity of its arrows. In most cases, if you can catch enemies unawares and destroy them in one move, it's best to do so if only to avoid a drawn out fight with multiple opponents warping around and behind you while you're trying to line up shots. Fortunately, the game keeps throwing in new ways for you to do this: early on, you have to do the conventional sneaky, crouchy, "get behind while hoping they don't suddenly turn around while patrolling" approach, but later on you can use talismans to stun them for quick kills or get the drop on them from above. Using height to your advantage is a regular aspect of moving around the game's overworld, as you soon learn the trick to grapple up to where Tengu are hanging out on the roofs of buildings and from there can glide around and target isolated enemies down on street level. I love an open-world game that has fast and convenient traversal as well as a means of quickly stealth eliminating foes, so Ghostwire really scratched an itch.

Ghostwire's also a very attractive game, with a similar noir urban aesthetic to the rain-slick streets and kanji-filled neon signage found all across the Hong Kong-set world of Sleeping Dogs, and its faceless Visitor monster designs are suitably creepy in both the uncanny way they look and the way they move. The playful highschoolers without heads, for instance, or the near-invisible blobs that psychically throw garbage at you, or the truly terrifying kuchisake with their split mouths and giant scissors. It's a good menagerie that offer a fair variety of challenges and strategies in addition to scary ambushes, even if most of the time you only want to avoid a fight because it's too much of a hassle rather than being paralyzed by fear. I loved hunting around for relics—if you meet the right merchant that wants them, they'll conveniently add their approximate locations on the world map—and then reading their descriptions afterwards, and despite being the sort of game where you'd think there'd be a suspenseful ticking clock aspect I spent the majority of its runtime, as stated, just searching around for stuff to find across its massive cityscape. The highlight of the game is one I believe they added some months after its release: a sojourn through a middle school that is plagued by the spirit of Hanako-chan, a real-life (insofar it's a ghost story that people tell outside of just this game) murdering ghost that lives in school bathrooms. There's a particular anatomically-educational creature in that school that gave me no end of jumpscares.

I'll also give a brief shout out to another late free DLC addition: the "Spider's Thread" run-based mode which, despite not having much fondness for run-based games in general nor this game's combat challenges, actually proved compelling enough to finish in full for its associated achievements. What helps is a permanent progression aspect that lets you visit a hub area to power up between failed runs and in intervals after every three floors. The challenges for these floors aren't all combat-oriented either: some might be stealthy, or have you quickly move through a series of torii gates, or navigate an obstacle course, or else take part in a money-making mini-game if you're fortunate enough to encounter those special floors. Money and XP go a long way when powering up your character, and you'll eventually unlock an accessory that turns the game into iron man mode: you can only take a single hit, but that's true of enemies as well. Despite what sounds like a harsh penalty (you generally have way more health than your enemies) the one-hit, one-kill mode really speeds things along and trivializes boss fights—though it doesn't trivialize those annoying ghost monsters that float around taking potshots at you when you least expect it. One of the rare cases where a bonus free run-based mode actually made for a decent value add. (Rating: 4 Stars.)

Kirby and the Forgotten Land (HAL Laboratory, 2022)

Since I'd already dusted off my Switch for Echoes of Wisdom, I thought I'd spend Thanksgiving week joining my American friends in consuming everything in sight with Kirby's newest adventure, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I distinctly remember preparing to play Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards for 64 in 64 in early 2022 and getting stoked because it was the first ever 3D Kirby game, joining his pals Mario and Star Fox in entering a scary but exciting new dimension, only to discover that the game just had a few 3D flourishes but is otherwise a fairly standard 2D platformer, which was something I'd somehow never picked up on during the game's two decades and change of existing. I believe it was shortly after that the promotional press for Kirby and the Forgotten Land starting amping up, including the paraphrased tagline of "it's Kirby's first genuine 3D game". Now, I don't usually put a whole lot of stock in the concept of solipsism, except for those times where the rest of the universe seemingly only exists to make me feel like an idiot.

Anyway, that's no fault in our Hoshi no Kirby, who carries himself well in this for-real 3D game that sees him take his copy abilities and menagerie of bizarre opponents to a world eerily like our own, only absent any living humans who presumably built this entire civilization. Instead, all that remain are feral beasts, turning the game into the Kirby X Tokyo Jungle crossover we never knew we wanted. In addition to a small collection of copy abilities—twelve in total, including the single-use Crash and Sleep—there's also the much-advertised "Mouthful Mode", where Kirby is able to find compatibility with ancient machines and props by holding them in his enormous gullet as opposed to absorbing them entirely. This could include a VW Beetle, a vending machine, a traffic cone, or any number of surprising fixtures. Parts of the level are usually designed with either the usual copy abilities (if there's a Fire guy early on, expect there to be a lot of things to set aflame) or the Mouthful Mode, creating a more linear and curated sort of approach to 3D platforming that the Super Mario Galaxy subseries was best known for. Fortunately, Forgotten Land is every bit as inventive as those Mario games, providing many innovative challenges for you as well as an expert overall level of competent platformer gameplay.

However, there are aspects to Forgotten Land that are mystifying to me, especially from a well-experienced Nintendo subsidiary like HAL Labs. For one, each stage has optional challenges which contribute to saving the Waddle Dees (there are no Waddle Doos sadly; Beam did not make the copy ability cut) (though, ironically, Cutter did) and these might range from avoiding damage in a boss fight (always the worst) or completing a sequence of collectibles like a certain food item or destroying a set of crude wanted posters for Kirby, in addition to a number of Waddle Dees found in bonus areas or otherwise off the beaten path. However, those that involve a specific challenge have their details kept hidden from you: the only way to find out what they are is to either complete them inadvertently (if you get one item from a set of objects to find, the game reveals it then too) or finish the level and have one (but not all) of these bonus objectives revealed. It's a real transparent way to pad out the game's runtime, preying on the OCD collectathon types like myself to keep replaying these moderately long levels over and over to rescue all of Kirby's friends. You don't even have to be Dees nuts to want to recover them all too: there are explicit rewards back in the hub Waddle Dee village for rescuing so many, including useful services like healing and prize-offering mini-games and temporary power-ups (very useful for specific combat challenges). To add to this already anti-player practice (already bizarre in such a friendly series as Kirby) you cannot go back into a level to complete one of these rescue missions and then bug out with the "back to world map" option on the menu once you've earned it, because it refuses to save any of your progress unless you reach the end again. It also won't let you revert to a checkpoint if you're at the end of a stage and, say, take damage on a mini-boss fight that would void its related challenge. You have to either finish the stage and start over or abandon it and start over. It's made the last few hours I've spent with this game obnoxiously inflexible.

There are other aspects that have rubbed me the wrong way too. The wording on the temporary power-ups suggest they can be stacked, but what this actually means is that you can consume them all in town one after the other to stack up the timer rather than carry additional items with you, since the game limits you to only holding one at a time. Then, every world's boss fight starts with this slow, pointless walk to the boss arena to shave off a good half-minute of these precious power-up timers. There's a cute figurine collectible aspect—unlike the Dees and the cash you find everywhere, they don't serve a purpose beyond being something to waste surplus funds on—but if you intend to complete your collection be prepared to spend way too much money on gacha machines that regularly spit out dupes for the hell of it, which strikes me as entirely unnecessary if I'm not paying real currency for them. What does it add to the overall experience to waste hundreds of coins on repeats? As I said, some real boneheaded decisions went into Forgotten Land and they're completely at odds with both the parts of the game that are ingeniously fun and unexpected and the franchise's whole overall approachable and relaxed vibe of spending time with Kirby sucking up equally cute critters.

But yeah, beyond those annoyances it's a very respectable 3D platformer debut and a scenario where I'm glad Kirby decided to finally join the rest of us in the third dimension. That's not to say that I hope his 2D adventures suddenly cease: he's capable enough to support both varieties from here on out, as this game confirmed. I particularly appreciate the game's level design, its copious well-placed secrets and surprises, and the way it finds this bizarre tonal equilibrium in its aesthetic of a forlorn post-apocalyptic world juxtaposed against the sense of lightness and frivolity for which this series is celebrated. You wouldn't think picking through the desiccated ruins of a city block or a theme park could be so cheerful. The copy abilities and Mouthful Mode objects are very enjoyable to tinker around with and there's not a single case where I groaned at the prospect of having to work through another segment with any one of them: they all offered their unique charms and some creative challenges built around them with no exceptions. Well, except Sleep, but what are you gonna do? Kirby's gotta find time for a nap after eating several tons of snacks and beasts, as all my recently tryptophan-glutted peers can surely attest. (Rating: 4 Stars.)

The Rest

All right, enough of all these legitimate games, let's get down to brass hacks: the Super Mario 64: Randomizer is something I discussed in short last month but it's essentially exactly how it sounds. That is, a ROM hack that conveniently has built-in randomizer seed generation rather than the old conventional way to make randomizer hacks which had you upload a valid Mario 64 ROM to some website and download whatever it spits back at you (while making sure the place is authentic: don't fall for the same "put in your social security # and you'll get a unique Zelda seed that's tailor-made for you!" scam that I did... not fall for, I swear). There's some variations besides just "churn that sucka up" too, which this RetroAchievements set takes full advantage of for a distinct combination of different approaches and concomitant challenges. Most of the set has you getting the full 120 Stars on the "Extreme" setting, which didn't really come off as particularly extreme barring the occasional red coin or Star floating over lava. Others include speedrunning the game on "Sprint" mode (which eliminates the mechanic that kicks you out of a course once you have a Star) and my favorite, trying to earn 10 Stars (including at least one Red Coin Star) on "Green Demon" mode: a setting where a 1Up spawns as you start a course and chases you down, killing you instantly if it reaches you. That was fun but I don't imagine a full playthrough's going to be all that feasible, especially since you can't hope to outswim the thing. Other achievements involve tricks you can only do in a randomizer, like getting a Star ten seconds after entering a course (doable, but only if you're lucky with the spawn placements) or getting the 100-Coin Star in Tick-Tock Clock when the course is set on its 6 o'clock random speed setting (hence, a randomizer in a randomizer). Much easier set than I was dreading, honestly, and another super fun hack that RA helped me discover.

Since I'm all Mario'd out for the time being, I've spent the rest of my RA time in November working to convert some of my softcore achievements to hardcore ones. A minor distinction to those with any semblance of sanity, but hardcore achievements are those earned without save states or cheats: the RA site tracks those separately, so you can "cheat" all you want if you're just looking for a more relaxed achievement-hunting time but those weirdos (like me) who are sticklers for the rules can lord their "real" hardcore achievement sets over the rest of the plebes. Anyway, it's really just an excuse to replay some of the Picross NP series: a Jupiter-developed downloadable picross game released periodically via Nintendo Power, the SFC cart-writing kiosk service that was briefly a thing in game stores in Japan. There's eight episodes total and I switched to hardcore-only at some point around finishing the third of them, so now I've decided I want those first three to have the same fancy golden border around their icons that their siblings do because I have the brain worms.

Speaking of my debilitating addiction to picross, we should drop the newest Pictlogica: Final Fantasy check-in here. Oerba Dia Vanille (FFXIII), Umaro (FFVI), Kimahri (FFX), and Seifer Almasy (FFVIII) round out the latest additions to my menagerie, though the Memoria challenges to earn them are getting real taxing on this team I assembled. I might have to look into some alternative party builds if I want to survive the tougher challenges ahead, let alone the special EX battles that lets me recruit villain characters (FFXII's Vayne and FFVII's Sephiroth are the most recent two, and trying to complete their challenges has been rough going). Sticking with 3DS games, I'm finally done with BoxBoxBoy!'s long tail. The post-game content is about as long as the main game, or at least it felt that way given the challenge level, but after who knows how many months of chipping away at it across many five-minute breaks I've seen the end and earned myself an Empress costume for my trouble. Very interesting that the best reward for completing everything the game has to throw at you is some Queen Victoria drag cosplay.

WonderSwanning, Mega Driving, and Sixty-Forging Ahead

Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Ten) is the first of three finales this month, checking out another five WonderSwan games that caught my interest. I still have a few WS games left over that I might have to look at in some distant AHW revisit but I'll probably move onto something else next year. The Neo Geo Pocket perhaps, which was sort of a contemporaneous cousin to the WonderSwan given its similarly JP-heavy library of obscure oddities and alternative monochrome/color models. My favorite of this batch was the simple but addictive run-based action-RPG Dicing Knight Period (or just Dicing Knight.) that gives luck and RNG an even more central role than in its other run-based peers. Speaking of which, I also checked out Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon—part of the system's four launch game line-up, and easily the one that would eat up the most of your free time—as well as NanaOn-Sha's Vib Ribbon-adjacent Rhyme Rider Kerorican, the mobile Devil Dice port that is XI Little, and Namco Super Wars: the Namco IP crossover SRPG that would later inspire Namco X Capcom on PS2 and the Project X Zone games for 3DS. That feature really became so much more palatable once I'd eliminated the random selection process from the equation (though I'm sure that app will get its revenge in due course).

Mega Archive CD: Part XI has us process the last of the Sega CD/Mega-CD games released in 1993 and with it, puts a button on all the 16-bit Sega games from that year. I won't be jumping into 1994 right away, not without some further feature retooling, but I do plan on eventually discovering everything the system had to offer for as long as it was around. Trouble is, of the ~200 games released in 1994 only 40 of them were from Japan: I realize I come off as the weebiest weeb that ever weebed (see the anime section below for more evidence that'll build a case for an eventual intervention) by saying this but JP games are far more fascinating to me than whatever the west was producing on consoles at the time, which was predominantly sports games, racing games, and terrible licensed platformers and shooters based on cartoons or movies. A lack of quality and a lack of variety make them far less interesting to play, let alone read about, and the sheer apathy they inspired threatened to derail the 1993 output of Mega Archive more than once. Until I figure out an equitable way where I can just fast-forward through them to get to the next Sonic Team, Sega Falcom, or Treasure game faster I'll be sticking the series on hiatus. The Sega tapes will return someday though, I swear on this Sonic the Hedgehog-themed bible. (Tails 13:22 "And lo, the Hebrews implored upon their bespikéd prophet, "How are we to observe Yom Kippur, this most solemn of holy days?". "Gotta go fast," Sonic proclaimed in response, before moving at such mighty velocity that He parted the Red Sea.")

64 in 64: Episode 48 is, in a similar conclusiveness as the others this month, sees us bring down the curtains on its Nintendo 64-themed shenanigans. As much as I would... OK, no, as much as I would believe people might find it funny for me to cover and rank all 400-ish games on the system, I was running dry on those I had any enthusiasm about trying out (though I did include a small list of ten games that might potentially provide enough cause for a revival) and the feature would no doubt suffer if my verve for foggy and low-poly gaming dried up completely. 48 is a number linked to the series' pivotal "third act revelation" but more than that was how this last episode brought us up to 100 ranked games exactly, which struck me as a better moment than any to bring things to a close. Be sure to check Episode 48 out: Not only do we finally cover a Tony Hawk game (THPS3 to be exact, also the last official game to be released on the platform) and EA's Nuclear Strike but there's a few additional surprises to be found in the post-script. Your hint for the two games featured in the next episode is... oh, right, I forgot already.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Pepper Grinder (Ahr Ech, 2024)

Fresh batch of Indies, comin' through. Even though November's a shorter month, I managed to squeeze in five episodes of IGotW and they were, once again, a hard group from which to pick a single winner. I'll give it to Pepper Grinder (#398), which I just covered, due to its combination of enjoyably rapid dig-platforming and some inventive ideas for little set-pieces, as well as an aggressively cool personality. I recall the trailers really selling the idea of just speeding through the world one pile of dirt at a time and it really hearkens to earlier fast-paced platformers like Specter of Torment and The Messenger where they're able to move at a clip and feel great while doing so. I'll be giving those time trials a wide berth, however.

Rounding out the runners up, we have the Zeboyd mini-RPG Cthulhu Saves Christmas (#394) that riffs on their earlier Cthulhu Saves the World only with an apropos holiday theme. I chose to publish that review on November 1st because I'm a monster too. As with Zeboyd's other RPGs, it's a compact 16-bit throwback that maintains a "all killer, no filler" philosophy with its rapid character advancement and steady influx of new items and abilities to keep your strategies ever in flux. Prodigal (#395) is a Zeldersatz from Colorgrave that rubbed me the wrong way with its narrative choices but is otherwise a very serviceable Link's Awakening homage that has a much stronger focus on characters and story, to the extent that it gives you multiple romantic partners to pursue and a whole town of NPCs to befriend and assist. Just don't try to play your guy as someone happy to leave a childhood hometown full of bad memories and ornery jerks once his business there was concluded: the game evidently doesn't like that interpretation.

Next, we have Sheepo (#396) from Kyle Thompson. This anthro explormer anticipated his later and more ambitious game Islets (which I also reviewed recently), though its use of temporary shapeshifting as a factor in several instance puzzles certainly gives it a personality all of its own. Worth noting is the Eric Thompson soundtrack, which hits the right relaxed vibe for an explormer that explicitly avoids using violence against your enemies (especially as you're supposed to be a xenobiologist looking to preserve these species). Last, we have stellarNull's Anuchard (#397), an IRPG (that would be an Indonesian RPG) that's actually more like an action-adventure game that splits its time between dungeon-crawling and socializing, in a style structurally reminiscent of the Persona games. In practice though, it's another top-down Zeldersatz with its focus on environmental puzzles and real-time combat in its dungeons. Some imaginative worldbuilding and strong character work, which I suspect was influenced by Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and Mother 3, help prop up some occasionally satisfying if mostly unexceptional gameplay.

The Bonus Indie: Soul of Darkness (Gameloft, 2010)

Just a short one of these this month because the previous game sections got super long this time. Soul of Darkness is a platformer for Nintendo DS (originally for mobile) that, well, to say they took a leaf from Castlevania would be an understatement: it's more they took the whole dang tree. As Kale, professional vampire hunter and occasional garnish, the player must track down his missing paramour Lydia after she is abducted by the vampire Lord Ritter. This involves traipsing through a series of linear levels (so we're talking classic Castlevania here, not the later explormers) in pursuit, using a combination of a fire-enchanted sword and an ice-enchanted spear as well as a few shapeshift-enabling gemstones to progress through stages. It's a super streamlined version of the modern Castlevania experience, though graphically and musically you'd almost assume it was some spin-off that Konami left unattended on a USB in a Haunted House amusement park ride. A Castlevania with the numbers filed off, as it were.

Despite the general bootleg feeling to the game, though, it's not half bad. Controls well, the shapeshifting forms have some unique properties that makes them compelling to use in the short bursts you have them, and there's enough reason to go poking around for secrets and dead ends between health/mana gauge upgrades and some extra XP caches. To that effect, the game's pretty much like DMC insofar as its character development is concerned: you have health (green), mana (blue, which also regens on its own), and XP (purple) orbs and the last of those can be spent on making one of your two weapons stronger, either by enhancing its damage, extending its combo chain, or increasing its chance to crit which in addition to killing most enemies in one hit also boosts their drops. These purple orbs are everywhere: mostly inside breakable walls, another Castlevania touch, but also in large crystal formations and chests that you frequently have to go out of your way to find. One fun little idea is that you can visit these gothic shrines and it switches the game over to the DS camera, and then prompts you to take a picture of something. It then registers the RGB value of whatever was in the viewfinder: if the image is predominantly red that gets you XP, and likewise mana and health for blue and green respectively.

If you played those brief NES throwback spin-offs for Bloodstained you should already have some idea of what it's like to play Soul of Darkness. It's neat, but not particularly substantial or challenging (it has infinite continues, usually dropping you back at the start of the current room) and lasts about two hours even if you're scouring each level for upgrades and XP. There's only three bosses but they're all reasonably challenging, at least, with the centipede "earth dragon" being a highlight due to how it switches the arena back and forth from fire- to ice-based, necessitating a weapon switch. If you weren't looking for a 20-hour IGAvania but something more bite-sized and manageable and old-school, it's not a bad substitute. (Damn, I never found a natural way to fit a "Gameloft more like Ravenloft" goof in here. Maybe next time.)

The Weeb Weeview

Another trio of highlights, all discovered once the new anime season started mostly just from poking around to see what else seemed sufficiently engaging. So, if you're new to how I tend to pick out anime to watch, I'll go for the one or two super-hyped series from established studios that have a lot of buzz surrounding them on anitwitter (or anime skeeting, or whatever the Bluesky equivalent is) and then about ten trashy but enjoyably dumb shows (which frequently later appear on Mother's Basement's seasonal "Hottest Trash" rundowns) that I can stick on in the background while I eat meals. My palate, neither of them really, is not all that discerning. Even so, I like these three shows enough to give them some good word of mouth in addition to the good food of mouth that I've been chomping away at while watching them.

365 Days to the Wedding: Every anime season is lousy with romcoms—can you believe women watch anime too?—but I've found myself drawn more to the adult ones over the schoolyard ones, for hopefully obvious enough reasons. There's a lot more nuance and goal specificity to the romantic relationships between working adults and more factors that need to line up just right, euphemistically and otherwise, for that coupling to work. In this anime, two introverts with nerdy hobbies that provide all the satisfaction they need in their free time find themselves in a predicament when the travel agency they both work for has a dire need for an employee to relocate to its freezing and language-barrier-y Alaskan branch and will randomly pick from its unmarried staff to head there if a volunteer doesn't step forward within a year. So, being unmarried and at risk themselves, the female lead Rika Honjoji suggests to the male lead Takuya Ohara that they should fake an engagement and the romantic entanglement that led up to it.

You could probably guess how the rest of the season goes without much difficulty; or so I thought, but the show's going a little out of its way to present both the positives and negatives of marriage with its ancillary cast that has a sort of knowing, empathetic direction that hints towards that extra layer of nuance I mentioned before. For instance, they just had an episode where the pair's gentle giant coworker finally meets a woman he's serious about through their mutual appreciation of an idol group. However, it turns out she's a single mother and the guy's moment of hesitation about whether he's prepared for that level of responsibility is enough to douse that nascent flame, though as the episode ends with the single mom hovering over the "delete contact" button before changing her mind there's a suggestion that the flame is not necessarily out for good. It's a cute, wholesome show with no small amount of relationship drama and angst but largely works by focusing on adults working through this tricky romance stuff in an adult fashion, adultly. And nothing beyond PG-13, in case me saying "adult" all those times gave you other ideas.

Let This Grieving Soul Retire: Every so often, you get an anime which can be categorized as "lucky idiot" or "average joe is out of his depth". I reviewed one around this time last year called Tearmoon Empire, about a Marie Antoinette figure who loops back to several years before her inevitable execution and manages to convince everyone she's some genius-level statesman when she's just slightly less awful than she used to be and is working with a small amount of knowledge of what's to come. In Let This Grieving Soul Retire, the protagonist Krai Andrey is part of a group of daydreamer small town teens who all decide to seek their fortunes together in an adventurer party. Fast-forward a decade or so, and every member of that group is an absolute monster of their chosen class with Krai, who took on the leader role, now widely seen as a peerless strategist and charismatic commander of the original group and several other high-level parties that have since joined its growing clan, First Steps. Trouble is, he has no actual talent whatsoever and fully realizes it: he's been coasting on luck and a collection of "relic" gadgets with very conditional utility, and he knows it's only a matter of time until either everyone figures out he's a fraud and publicly tar-and-feather him or else put him up against cataclysmic monsters that only he and his absurdly high "tier" rating—assigned by the explorer guild, and largely built on the labor of others—is capable of defeating. Hence, he's looking to retire before any of that comes to pass.

Definite shades of the early seasons of Overlord here, as a normal dude is surrounded by highly competent (and highly dangerous, for various reasons) subordinates that regularly seek his guidance and prowess, though unlike everyone's favorite flustered lich Ainz Ooal Gown (which always sounded to me like something you sing at New Year's) the hero here can absolutely not walk the walk as well as he can talk the talk. Much of the show's humor naturally revolves around this inexplicable ability to keep the wool over everyone's eyes and the string of coincidences that serve to effectively prop up this veneer of being omniscient, even if he isn't trying all that hard to hide how unsuitable he is to lead the Grieving Souls—in fact, the name of the party and its creepy (and eyeless) demon masks were his attempt to invent something so edgy and cringeworthy that everyone in the party would veto both it and his leader role, only for them to love it instead—and the rest of its appeal falls on the shapely fanservice of Krai's thighsome thief disciple Tino and his many other admirers. Yes, it is a harem show too, but of the type where every love interest is borderline psychotic and a likely threat to his wellbeing if they ever find out he's been lying to them so it's not quite going for the usual wish fulfilment angle. It's not a smart show, but it is a fun show if farces are your thing.

You Are Ms. Servant: A woman seeks employment as a maid at a moderately well-off suburban home that presently just has the one occupant, a highschooler who is currently staying at his parents' previous house while he completes his education. Trouble is, the woman is a former assassin who is hopelessly naive about the normal world and household chores alike, though the dude is chill enough to hire her anyway seeing as she's in something of a bind. So begins a curious relationship, both romantic and maternal in parts, between an emotionless killer learning what it means to be human and a gregarious and infinitely patient everyteen who has no clue how he ended up in this situation.

I feel like I've seen this particular set-up before but I cannot for the life of me remember where. My best guess is that Yuki vaguely resembles, both physically and with her unusual combination of oblivious wholesomeness and bladed lethality, Spy X Family's Yor Forger. That she's equally lousy in the kitchen is just one of several other parallels also. I dunno, I think much of this anime is pretty contrived and kind of suggests (but also doesn't suggest, because this show is too nice) that the dude only said yes to all of this so he could have a hot onee-san around the house who habitually wears a maid uniform and calls him "master". And also that she might go back to killing people if he refused her. At least the animation's good? And as I said, it is a real cute show without being all bubbly and sugary about it.

Also, another monthly reminder to watch Dandadan. You wouldn't guess it from the elevator pitch of "a supernatural romcom where a dude has his dick and balls stolen by a ghost" but it's really turned out to have a whole range of comedic and emotional depth to what it's doing in addition to some darn fine animation. Darn da darn fine. Definite frontrunner for anime of the year (which is a list I could well be putting together for next month, even if I did skip most of 2024's prestige stuff for even more unchallenging single-cour isekai dreck).

Anyway, that's going to do it for another month. December's going to be a bit special, seeing as all my usual features have concluded and given what's on the horizon vis a vis a whole bunch of GOTY nonsense, so expect a bunch of quickfire review blogs as I feverishly catch up with as many games (that aren't 100+ hour RPGs) from this year as I can. Since we're still in weeb territory here, I also want to give a shout out to one of my favorite Vtubers who sadly just announced that she is graduating in a month or so: Hololive's Ceres Fauna. The happiest of trails to you, Funny Green Woman.

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 394: Cthulhu Saves Christmas
• Indie Game of the Week 395: Prodigal
• Indie Game of the Week 396: Sheepo
• Indie Game of the Week 397: Anuchard
• Indie Game of the Week 398: Pepper Grinder
• Mega Archive CD: Part XI
• Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Ten)
• 64 in 64: Episode 48

Well Vinny, I finally did it. I picked up Pepper Grinder. Ahr Ech's Pepper Grinder is a drillformer (OK, enough portmanteaus from me for a while) that has the titular adventurer Pepper run afoul of her pirate rival Mint who, despite being a breath of fresh air, immediately earns the heroine's contempt by appropriating her box of treasure and departing with it along with her army of teal-skinned "narlings". Pepper has one tool left at her disposal, however: her trusty mechanical handheld drill, Grinder, with which she's capable of digging through soft ground and defeating anything in her path. This simple plotline sets up a relatively short adventure through four worlds, each containing around five or six stages, as Pepper grinds her way (phrasing) over and/or through various obstacles and hazards, occasionally adopting other drill-powered machinery in the process.

The first thing I'll say about Pepper Grinder is that it's a whole lot of fun to just move through its levels with the sort of alacrity afforded by a drill that not only allows you to breach certain terrain but launches you out of it at a high velocity (especially if you remember to hit the dash before exiting) via which you can then enter another patch of incongruously floating dirt and continue onward and upward. You have full 360 degree movement with the drill which takes a little while to get used to given how sharp the turning cycles can be, but once you've found the right rhythm the levels tend to whizz by: fitting, as the game has a whole secondary time trial aspect where the feelings of challenge and speed reach their zenith. More on that later. In addition to the standard drill-based traversal there's also a whole lot of inventive set-pieces peppered, so to speak, throughout the game. I mentioned the drill-powered machinery before: this could include a minigun that fires as you drill, a snowmobile that flies over hills and plows through enemies, and even an unstoppable mech for one memorable section. These sequences tend to be much more action-oriented and less about the precision movement of hopping around patches of accessible terrain—which requires carefully exiting dirt mounds at the right angles, while perhaps also using the drill to hook onto grappling points that start appearing more often in the second-half of the game—and ably serve to vent a lot of the frustration that may have slowly built up trying to navigate the game's more finnicky sections.

Naturally in a platformer like this there's a whole bunch of collectibles to find too. Each course has five skull coins, similar to the Dragon/Green Coins of so many Super Mario games, and they tend to be well-hidden in areas that might need you to drill through a damaged-looking wall or take a detour to the edges of the screen. They're marked sequentially too, so you'll know if you missed one along with some idea of whereabouts in the stage it might be located, if you found the ones directly preceding and succeeding it. Stages also contain a whole lot of currency by way of gold pieces and gemstones, sometimes placed in lines around the course as a means of guiding you towards the correct path but just as frequently in remote areas or inside breakable objects. Both these item types are used to buy things at the curiosity shops that open up on the overworld maps of every area: you can spend the skull coins on cosmetic changes (Pepper has a number of different hair and cape palettes to choose from) or on the game's "sticker album", which lets you assemble your own action scenes through a set of scene pages and sprite stickers. The skull coins also let you buy a golden key, one per world, that opens up a bonus level that's a little tougher than the rest. Each world culminates in a tough boss fight that, given Pepper's relatively low amount of health, requires some careful pattern memorization if you hope to out-damage it. I should say, though, that you can buy (at some considerable expense) additional health pips prior to entering a level, though with the understanding that they'll only be around for the one attempt. They might not be all that helpful for regular courses but could be enough to give you the upper hand if a certain boss fight is giving you trouble.

Pepper Grinder can be a game of highs and lows depending on the current section, though fortunately leaning more frequently towards the former. Pepper's standard four pips of health drain pretty rapidly especially given the extremely low invulnerability time after hits, as you'll often get hurt twice by a trap or hazardous liquid before you're able to escape to a safe spot, and the checkpointing can get relatively sparse (as do the turnip-like healing items) as you get deeper into the game and the challenge level escalates to match. This, coupled with how tricky it can be to use the analog stick to accurately navigate through these small mounds of dirt that might have bombs or thorns in close proximity means you could find yourself spending a significant chunk of time just trying to get through specific sections of a level. I also had issues with fighting enemies, since it was never always obvious why I got hurt running into an enemy drill first except that occasionally the hitbox on their weapon managed to touch you before your drill touched them (this happens a lot if you try to drill down on an enemy from above). All of these difficulty problems come to an ugly head in the game's time trial mode—one necessary for 100% completion if not for just seeing the end of the game, since some of the collectibles can only be attained as prizes for hitting the silver and gold time targets—which not only requires you beat these levels via the most optimal route but to do so in a single attempt absent any checkpointing, which is getting to speedrunner-level difficult given the health scarcity. To be clear, playing through the game casually is just shy of a Super Meat Boy tier masocore experience, but the incredibly punitive time trials push things way beyond that: this is how the game adjusts for its svelte amount of content, I suspect.

Without concerning oneself with any aneurysm-invoking time trial horseshit though, Pepper Grinder is a game that never wears out its welcome, combining its appealing drill-enhanced precision platforming with a wonderful mix of speed and spectacle and unpredictability, akin to the Donkey Kong Country series and more specifically their two Donkey Kong Country Returns reboots. The times where you're blasting through packs of narlings with a gun or smushing them with a giant vehicle is a great means of breaking up the otherwise mentally-taxing precision sections which require more concentration as well as just being cathartic in general, and its dialogue-free, story-light arcade game sensibility lends itself well to the violent and stylish direction. It's a game that I worry will be lost in the crowd this year, especially given its wisp of a runtime in comparison to the huge AAA and JRPG timesinks that 2024 was notably strong about producing, but I think if Astro Bot, Nintendo World Championships, or Neon White from 2022 put you into the mood for fiendishly difficult competitive speedrunning (as they apparently did for half the Giant Bomb staff) then Pepper Grinder might be worth a look. And if, instead of all that, you just wanted an inventive 2D platformer that had you exclaiming "damn, that's cool" under your breath every fifteen minutes, Pepper Grinder can serve you well enough in that role too.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

It's another episode of Indie Game of the Week here to remind you all to look where you sit at a barbeque, or else you might get your anus charred. (Sorry, I had like a dozen different intro sentences sitting in my editor and somehow that was the best one?) Anyway, Anuchard. It's an action-RPG, or maybe just an action-adventure, from Indonesia's stellarNull. It tells the story of the Bellwielder: a mythical hero who wields a bell (no shit?) to restore the titular world of Anuchard from its current modest status as an island nation where people eke out a living with a limited number of resources to its past self where it once enjoyed all the boons of heaven and beyond due to the auspices of five "Guardians": governors of elemental forces worshipped as gods. However, even while the Bellwielders of the past were able to bring back the Guardians after humanity forsook them due to having easy lives where they wanted for nothing, as well as revive all those that go seeking for them in the dangerous and unpredictable Dungeon beneath the island, eventually the dream of Anuchard fades, a new Bellwielder arrives generations later, and the cycle perpetuates itself.

Anuchard reminded me, to my chagrin, that I never did get started on that Moon: RPG Remix Adventure remaster that I bought at some point, because to my untrained eye the aesthetic of Anuchard's painterly top-down world is remarkably similar, as are the uncommonly gangly characters of its world. There's also shades of Mother 3 to its story, as a small society of egalitarian farmers and laborers who trade what they need with one another are slowly but surely corrupted by a cushy lifestyle free of burden and embellished by all manner of wealth and wonders. The game sort of develops this plot in the background as it tasks you to delve into the dungeon, memento in hand, to rescue some previous visitor who now stands stationary as a soulless statue: their souls are still trapped down there, it turns out, and only you as the Bellwielder are capable of freeing them. The game's loop typically has you awaken to a new chapter, get your bearings, procure a new memento to take you to a specific dungeon where someone awaits, complete said dungeon instance that often bounces between environmental puzzles and self-contained arena-style combat encounters, save the disembodied spirit within after a boss or mini-boss fight, and then start the loop over the next day. These new NPCs might further the plot, add new features to the dungeoneering side by lending their support, offer a side-quest, or else add more flavor to the island's vox populi.

The gameplay of Anuchard is relatively basic and naturally revolves around that there bell that the Bellwielder is, uh, holding. It's shaped like a mace, and there's a real satisfying clunk it makes whenever it knocks seven (other) bells out of something, which uses a light attack that can be chained several times or a heavy attack that has two parts to it: a shoulder charge and a mighty whack that sends them flying, doing damage as they bounce off walls. The heavy attack actually takes some time to get used to, as it also operates as your evade roll: what this means is that the first half of it, which has a relatively short range, needs to connect to your target to damage it, as the second half turns into a roll that won't do anything besides help you escape harm. As such, you get used to aiming it up properly—the angle is often important, not just for bouncing enemies off multiple walls at once by going at them diagonally but also for the environmental puzzles that use the same mechanic—and not overestimating its range. The puzzles tend to involve knocking a gem bubble towards a switch of some kind, redirecting it while it's floating in the air as needed—the bubble will eventually burst after hitting three walls without the player's intervention, but there are cases where you can't reach it any more (it goes behind a wall or over a gap, say) so there's some foreplanning needed. They're not particularly tough puzzles though; about on par with other Zeldersatzes.

Beyond that, there's not a whole lot more to the game mechanically. The dungeons aren't complex enough to need maps (though they might've been useful for a couple of them) and while they do have resources worth finding for a town planning feature—that occasionally includes useful combat upgrades—those aren't too tough to find either. I generally found the combat unappealing due to how easily it can stun-lock you with certain enemies, especially if they get you trapped, while most encounters are over in seconds because you can do the same thing to them. Bosses tend to be a bit sponge-y if you don't bring in a food buff that increases light attack damage, with long stretches where you can't touch them unless you jump through enough hoops. There's also that heavy attack and its quirks to overcome which might lead to some early frustration.

A significant chunk of the game is set on the surface, where you complete tasks for your neighbors and set up the next memento-dungeon combo. The game shines more in these parts, as you check in with the expanding cast as you rescue ever more citizens from their petrification and observe the slow change in them that results from the return of the Guardians. The side-quests you can do up here tend to be somewhat fetch quest-y but often serve to introduce new lore and will invariably result in a new little decoration to put in your home, if that's the kind of sentimental feature you enjoy (I do; collecting these "souvenirs" was one of the more rewarding parts of Bully and The Outer Worlds, to name two examples). Sadly, the game suffers from a shaky localization, though one that feels very specifically ESL-impaired. Mostly tenses and plural forms that get messed up; I'm not familiar enough with Bahasa Indonesia to say for sure (my only exposure is from clips of Kureiji Ollie and Kobo Kanaeru) but maybe its grammar uses a different system for those. It wouldn't be much of an issue in any other action game but owing to Anuchard taking some talk-y, themes-y RPG/action-adventure types for its inspiration there's always plenty of dialogue and text to read, so having a less-than-ideal localization hurts its messaging and worldbuilding all the more.

I do still admire Anuchard's ambitious presentation and its confronting of heavier and headier subjects of greed and chasing unrealistic utopias while maintaining a compelling enough Zeldersatz dungeon-crawling core to prop everything else up. Once again, I can't help but regret that I didn't get to Moon before this so I could appreciate the parallels more (something for next year, I suppose). It ends on a pretty trippy and narratively bold note too, so even if playing the game was mostly a case of going through the motions there's enough happening in the periphery to make the journey worth the busywork. Sometimes the gameplay works to service the story rather than the usual other way around and I'm entirely fine with games like Anuchard that go that route, especially if they happen to take after some slightly more obtuse inspirations in the process.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

So here we are, at the end of a very long (or maybe it just felt that way) journey through the back-annals (phrasing) of the Nintendo 64 library in this, a feature in which I figured out a way where I only had to play this ancient trash for an hour. For as much as I kvetch, and kvetch I most certainly do, this feature's been a ton of fun to put together and it's introduced me to a few N64 games that I was inclined to spend even more time with once their related entries were written up and sent out across the ethernet to die. The N64 was not really as much of a hidden gem factory as I'd previously hoped, since most of the small and weird and wonderful types flooded to PlayStation with its cost-effective CD manufacturing, but it definitely had some underappreciated highlights that haven't yet found their way onto the Nintendo Switch Online service: one of the major reasons I chose to keep those popularity contest winners away from this whole shebang. Underdogs only—that's the policy around here.

This time around we have the usual Pre-Select and Random choices—both bangers to see us out in style, thankfully—and then I have a juicy post-script for you all where I get into the games I regret leaving out of the itinerary (plus another list of those I'm happy never caught the eye of the random picker app) along with some other musings. Before all that though, we'd better go through the rules of 64 in 64 one last time just in case someone decides to Benjamin Button this whole feature (sodriew ,uoy ot deepsdog):

• Two N64 games. Sixty-four minutes each. I chose one, the other was plucked from of a list of every N64 game that ever was that I subsequently fed into a computer. If Skynet starts humming the Buck Bumble theme when the nukes are dropping everywhere, well, I'm sorry, but we kinda deserve it.
• Each game, regardless of quality, gets the VIP treatment of four sequential progress reports, a history lesson, a frank and honest review of their longevity, and a little bit of me making some shit up about how likely it is to join NSO despite lacking the business or journalistic knowhow to support my delusions. Turns out you can just say anything you want on the internet, it's fantastic. (And by "fantastic" I mean that it's probably going to be what causes the end of the world?)
• There are games that are available on the Nintendo Switch Online service that need no further commendation or promotion on my part, so I've prohibited them from appearing on here. Do you need to know if Ocarina of Time or Star Fox 64 are any good? Of course not. Would it have been nice to play them instead of half the garbage I've covered so far? Absolutely. Mistakes were made.

What wouldn't be a mistake is checking out the grid below for all the past episodes of this feature, especially if you've skipped any. For more details on what was covered when, be sure to also consult the final ranking list found at the end too. I've been playing a lot of Echoes of Wisdom lately, so I've gotten pretty handy at making tables appear:

Nuclear Strike 64 (Random)

• Pacific Coast Power & Light / THQ
• 1999-11-30 (NA), 2000-03-03 (EU)
• =277th N64 Game Released

History: Nuclear Strike is the fifth and final game in Electronic Arts's Strike series of jingoistic helicopter sims in which the player is tasked to cross large environments full of enemy units and other hazards in order to complete a series of assignments, all the while restocking ammo, refilling their fuel tank, and repairing damage incurred via resource caches scattered around the map. Notable for their open-ended nature, most Strike games have the player completing these assignments in any order they wish or else scour the map on their own for targets of opportunity. Nuclear Strike is set in the fictional South East Asian nation of Indocine where the player is tasked with foiling the plans of the Kurtz-esque rebel warlord Colonel Beauford LeMonde with the assistance of native guerrillas and mercenaries.

Pacific Coast Power & Light, previously known as Don Traeger Productions and latterly as Locomotive Games, is a Santa Clara-based developer closely linked to THQ, this game's publisher. The two would later work together on another N64 game, Road Rash 64, which was also previously an EA property. THQ and EA were big rivals at the time so I'm not sure what negotiations ensued for THQ to produce EA games on N64 but evidently they hashed out something mutually beneficial. Pacific Coast Power & Light's N64 career only included this game and Road Rash 64 before they moved on to PlayStation for Jet Moto 3, but THQ was very busy on this platform having published a total of seventeen games (only two of which we've covered on here before: Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt and Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage).

Starting with the random choice this time just to shake things up a bit. I'm so relieved we didn't have to end this feature with more sports or some impenetrable shogi game, though at the same time that could've led to a potentially amusing "I quit!" tirade. I recall having a great time with the earlier games in this series, particularly Desert Strike and Jungle Strike, and how they pre-codified (along with GTA, of course) many of the mechanics and approaches of the open-world genre once it exploded in the generations to follow. Heck, I'm sure you could draw a straight line from a Strike game to MGSV, and not just because of how heavily helicopters tend to feature in both. Intrigued to see what 3D did to the usual formula of performing chopper-based odd jobs around an isometric map but given this series didn't persist beyond this game there's undoubtably cause for concern.

16 Minutes In

Yep, this is pretty much how I remember these games playing. Flying around a map, blowing up stuff, eventually getting on with the mission instead of being distracted by whatever might be over the next hill or river. Controls seem pretty straightforward too: quickly found my main gun and rockets (there's missiles too; I'm going to want to know how to fire those without necessarily firing them at thin air since I have so few), the Z-trigger and R-button are used for strafing which makes it much easier to avoid RPGs if not so much regular machine guns since they fire a lot faster, and all the winching resources and NPCs business is done automatically if you hover over them (with your craft's shadow there to help line it up) so I'm glad they kept that as is. Looks like the mission structure has become much more linear: I had three tasks to complete on this map and they all had to be done one after the other. Beyond that, though, there's plenty of red dots on my radar that I could go 'splode if I felt like it, and you can conveniently change your radar's little arrow pointer thing to home in on either the next mission objective or the nearest enemy/resource of a certain type instead. Good stuff so far, if fairly simple.

As to this starting map, the first mission is to eliminate an entire village that was housing an enemy informant (sure sounds like the kind of military operation you hear about in the news all too frequently these days) and then rescue a Tanya-esque guerrilla leader named Naja from an ambush trap, take her to an allied facility, and then escort a truck she's very slowly driving across the map while protecting it from a bunch of tanks that spawn in from nowhere. I imagine this will be the sort of mission variety I can expect from the rest of the game, though likely with much heavier resistance. I am wondering though if they kept the on-foot missions from Urban Strike (but I'm hoping they didn't).

32 Minutes In

Naturally, the second map is where the difficulty starts to ramp up. A lot of the missions here are time-sensitive: even if you're not seeing allied health bars slowly dip down on the HUD there's action happening all over the map whether you're there to witness it or not. The first mission of this more coastal region is to quickly eliminate a bunch of tanks and APCs rolling into town before they push the natives into the sea. That's followed by a mission where a quartet of gunboats are heading up-river to eliminate enemy encampments: here, you can just rely on the boats to take on most of the flak from the enemy cannons but they will occasionally need your help to remove jetties and other damaging obstacles. Clearing the path for all four of them means they can all converge on the most dangerous area: something that would be a real problem to deal with on your own. After that, and the stage of the process that I failed at as you can see above, is rescuing a bunch of NPC pilots from little prison areas. Unfortunately, they're guarded by these real nasty anti-air missile trucks that will quickly ruin your day if you don't ruin theirs first. Sort of a glass cannon situation where expediency is needed over caution: those things have insane range once they've locked in on you, so the only way to survive is to go full aggro with your explodiest ordnance.

There's precious few armor pick-ups on this map but I'm not certain if the radar only registers those that are out in the open. It could be that there's useful pick-ups inside enemy buildings if I felt like blowing up some random villages, but in addition to a war crime tribunal I'm also concerned about getting distracted since every mission is on a timer. Still, I have a better idea of what I'm supposed to be doing (and not doing) so I'm sure this second attempt will go much more smoothly: since the gunboats take a while to get to where they're going maybe I can use that downtime for some reconnaissance.

48 Minutes In

Map #2 went off without a hitch this time, though with plenty of winches. Largely due to considerably less goofing off involved on my part. I'd forgotten that they'd introduced alternative vehicles at some point in the series, and I noticed that one of the "friendly" targets you can choose as a waypoint target—there's mission targets, allied/resource targets, and non-essential enemy targets—was a hovercraft. The hovercraft was perfect for guiding those gunboats (except for the time I accidentally ran one over and destroyed it, whoops) and though its armor and weaponry was limited it meant less stress on the chopper once I'd switched back. Gonna have to remember to look around for other vehicles I can take over in these missions, as well as keep in mind they're probably going to be a bit less sturdy than my main ride.

After fighting both LeMonde's forces and my own ADHD to stay focused on the missions, I saved the POWs this time and that was the end of the map. The third map, which I've just started, involves incinerating three fortified villages (can't we just call them "encampments" or something less atrocity-y? I thought the military was full of euphemistic jargon) and abducting the enemy generals holed up inside. Since there's three to choose from I can take my time to check out the defenses and whittle them down at my own pace, dipping back to HQ for ammo and armor repair when needed. At least, that's the plan: the map just started and I'm going to bet that unpredictable chaos will ensue eventually. No more anti-air missile trucks, please.

64 Minutes In

This mission was an odd one, because what was strictly limited this time was your ammo rather than your health. The map is absolutely jam-packed with enemies but scant few of those were directly in the way of the mission's success. I had to restrain myself from flying into packs of red radar pings because the chances are I didn't need that heat nor could I afford to waste rockets on them. The ones I did need to take care of were the enemies surrounding the buildings the generals were in and those circling the POW camps: the POWs were not mission targets this time, but every one saved restored 200 of your armor (out of a max of 1500) and were the only way to repair any damage in this map. That ideally meant clearing out the POW camp defenses before hobbling over there in a near-death state hoping for some helpful rescuée to patch me up. Ditto, I found out, for the map's only two weapon caches: both were well-guarded, so I needed some firepower left in reserve to deal with them if I was going to safely restock (and you can absolutely destroy the ammo by mistake; I accidentally exploded some fuel drums earlier, though it feels like fuel isn't as vital in this game or maybe just not on the default normal difficulty).

Other tasks involved another escort mission as I got Naja to a jungle fortress base and then murdered anyone trying to enter the building to stop her. After that, it was destroying a convoy carrying LeMonde himself which is where most of the remaining ammo ended up going. So... he's dead now, right? Game over? Turns out that was just the first scenario: the second will start with recruiting a mercenary called Harding Cash (bit on the nose) and taking on local SEA crime lords before I guess LeMonde makes his big comeback. Either way, it's none of my business. Just the trio of maps for me today: three Strikes and I'm out.

How Well Has It Aged?: Striking While the Iron's Cold. It's still a perfectly fine game, even if the formula's starting to feel its age by 1997 (let alone 1999, when this port came out). Sadly, EA didn't think to pre-empt GTA3 and go super open-world with it; if anything, the linear mission structure makes it feel way more constricted and limited than its predecessors. There were other non-essential map objectives like roaming enemies but absolutely no reason to go after them, since the game doesn't have any kind of scoring or XP system that would incentivize players to go beyond beelining the mission targets and bugging out instanter. Bit of a disappointment considering the lineage and what would soon follow, but judged on its own merits and compared to other military vehicle sims on N64 I think you could do a lot worse.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Strike the Thought From Your Mind. For the N64 port specifically I'd say it was pretty unlikely, given the current status of THQ Nordic and the Embracer Group as a whole. More likely EA just decides to revamp all five in some nostalgia-bait remastered compilation, maybe with Nightdive's or Digital Eclipse's help, and that'd be the ideal option for any present-day Strike fans.

Retro Achievements Earned: 3 (of 36). Pretty basic set, as there's three to be earned from each of the twelve maps: one for completing it on normal difficulty, one for hard, and one for hard without losing a life.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (Pre-Select)

• Edge of Reality / Activision
• 2002-08-30 (NA)
• 388th N64 Game Released

History: The third game in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series of skateboarding sims is usually considered the best of the bunch (it's my second favorite after THPS4) due to a combination of more ambitious level design and the introduction of the revert maneuver, which could extend combos even beyond a quarterpipe/halfpipe trick where most would previously end, as well as general all-round improvements along with additional tricks, specials, and customization options. As before, each map has a variable set of missions that include constants like earning a high score or collecting a set of items within the game's strict time limit, while others would be unique to that particular area and its gaps and fixtures. Completing challenges unlocks new stages and you can even find XP tokens scattered around to level up the stats of your skater—either chosen from a selection of real-life pros and pop culture cameos or one you've custom-created. These stats would often be instrumental in completing tougher challenges, providing ample reason to backtrack for anything that was a little out of reach before.

Edge of Reality was an Austin-based developer that was responsible for all three THPS N64 ports on behalf of series publishers Activision, with Neversoft having developed the original PS1 games those ports are based on. Edge of Reality also did the port work for Monster Truck Madness 64 and Spider-Man, both of which were previously featured on here. They'd later go on to port Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect for PlayStation 3, so I've them to thank for those two platinum trophies. The company later had a few original games of their own, mostly based on licensed properties, and closed down as recently as 2018. We don't need to get into who Activision are, only to say that this is the second of their eleven published N64 games that we've featured (after Toy Story 2).

If you caught the final episode of Anyway, Here's WonderSwan last week you'll notice a pattern here: not only is THPS3 one of the few N64 games left in the pile of those I really wanted to play but it's also the very last game ever released on the Nintendo 64. In fact, its August 2002 release date comes three months after the console officially went out of production for the sake of focusing on the Nintendo GameCube, which had launched the previous autumn. THPS3 is available for GameCube too, on that note, where it probably presented a much more compelling choice for anyone looking to do some grabs and grinds on a Nintendo system. I'm real curious (in perhaps a morbid way) how a next-gen game could've trimmed itself down sufficiently to work on this old and busted hardware, though. Guess we'll find out.

16 Minutes In

Well, it might be some trite wordplay for a skateboarding game (when has that ever stopped me) but this first segment has been host to a whole lot of ups and downs. The ups are, of course, that this is THPS and I found myself right back in its groove of pulling off trick combos and taking some time for stage exploration as I feel out some of these requirements and specifically the ones I feel I'm capable of performing right now. The game runs well enough and there's even actual music rather than the lyric-less MIDIs I was dreading: it feels like this version of the OST is limited to the classic Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones, Brit legends Motörhead's Ace of Spades (which suffered quite a lot from the truncation process; I won't forget the joker, Lemmy, I swear it), your requisite whiny pop punk by way of Not the Same by Bodyjar, and about three hip-hop tracks I couldn't name. Of course, many of these tracks had to be mangled down into two-minute versions to match the time limit but they're more or less the same. More or less. The downs naturally include the N64's controls: it took forever to find the grind button (C-Up, same as lips) and that's usually my go-to for making big combos in a hurry once I find a good long rail and ideally a gap to earn for grinding across it in full. Instead, I've been relying on flips for the time being since the skater I chose (Elissa Steamer) had average stats across the board—no worries about dump stats while I get my skating legs back—but above-average "Air": it was enough to earn the first two high-score challenges on the inaugural stage (Foundry) though I'm a long way from the final 75,000 one as of right now.

Presently I'm planning to get as far as I can with the career mode, collecting as many of the stat point tokens as I can before moving onto the next stage. There's a lot of content missing here, including I think anything mercantile (maybe that came later), though the option to create-a-skater was there if I felt like it (no female characters in this version sadly, besides the pre-generated ones). It also has the in-game gap checklist for all those stage-specific environmental bonus modifiers, which was one of my favorite things to play with in THPS4 since it gave you all the time in the world to experiment and find them. With a decent Air stat I should be able to reach most of these stat tokens in the Foundry and start pouring them into both Air and Rail Balance both to give myself a shot at some high-scores and for further stat token acquisition. After that, I might figure out some specials and start going to town more.

32 Minutes In

Oof, that two-minute time limit continues to be a huge bummer and really the only issue I have with the first three THPS games. Just when I'm in a position to finally make it to one of the harder to reach areas the timer ends and I have to start over, with a unhealthily long load-in time to boot (which you wouldn't think would be a thing on N64, but it has ways of surprising you). That THPS4 did away with the time limit while reconfiguring some of the challenges that required it—you're still timed for the score challenges and the S.K.A.T.E. letters now needed to be collected in a single combo—was such a huge improvement it's almost impossible to go back to the way things used to be. That people resented THPS4 for eliminating the "purity" of that time limit remains to this day the keenest feeling of alienation I've had from my fellow video game skateboarding enthusiasts. However, THPS3 is still amazing fun despite that party-pooping "no more fun allowed" mechanic and even hobbled as I am with these controls things are starting to turn around 180° (or maybe 900°) for me. Just gotta recall that the revert/manuals are on the bumpers going forward, or else I'm not going to get those combo multipliers high enough.

I've collected three of the stat tokens for Foundry—the fourth and fifth elude me for now, though I know where they are at least—so for the next segment I'll be starting on the second stage, Los Angeles (which was the penultimate stage in the PS1 version, so that's worrisome).

48 Minutes In

Los Angeles is the one with a lot of high up electrical cables to grind across, so I'm glad I've been bumping up my Grind and Air stats for this. One irritating thing about this version of the game (or maybe this game in general) is that there doesn't appear to be a way to see what tricks you have assigned to what buttons while in a session. I gotta bounce out and check my skater stats to see what to do to make, say, a Cannonball happen (right and C-Right, turns out) before I can land the specific trick and gap combos these challenges are asking for. I'm frequently hopping back to the character customization to spend any stat points I might've found anyway so it's not really all that inconvenient, but it's like playing a fighter without being allowed to see your move list.

Otherwise, LA is a pretty straightforward area with some decent scoring zones for grinds and half-pipe tricks so I'll probably try to grab those high-score challenges next and maybe see if stage three (Rio de Janeiro) is one of those annoying competition stages before we're done here. Do those still have stat tokens? Because I'm going to have to upgrade my Speed at some point too: I keep sliding down these slanted grind rails before I can reach their end.

64 Minutes In

Man, I dunno if I've actually ever liked Blitzkrieg Bop. That whole repeating "ay, yo" bit can get old real fast when you've heard it a dozen times while trying to land a stupid wallride-to-grind trick. Anyway, LA is going well. Managed to get four of the stat tokens here and was about ready to start going after some score and trick-specific challenges but hit the end of the timer—the one for this series, not the in-game one—and that was that. I got this close to the secret video tape; it's real high up and requires me to grind across four different things from the roof of the starting building, in case anyone wondered why grinding up your grind stat is important.

A fine reminder of how much I enjoy this series on PlayStation consoles where the grind button is within easy reach instead of being one of the awkward C-buttons. If I had a main menu option to rebind the controls to put grinds and lips on the B-button then I'd be inclined to put this much higher up the ranking table. As it is, regardless of where it eventually lands, THPS3 is a darn good time and something I could easily play for hours if I didn't have to restrain myself for this feature. That said, I'd probably go seek out THPS4 on PS2/GameCube and check if it has any RetroAchievements sets I can go after, or else maybe just wait and see if that THPS 3+4 remaster ever materializes. Heck, I don't think I played any of the ones after 4, so if I can stomach some Jackass-lite Bam Margera horseshit I'm sure I'll find something to enjoy in those too. Well, at least THPS3 on N64 did its job of letting me recall how much THPS in general slaps, even if it's far from the version of this game that I'd recommend.

How Well Has It Aged?: It's Not the Same, It's Changed. This is another case like Mega Man 64 where it's an absolutely great game but this is not its best form. And since I'm trying to curate a list of the best N64 games (oh, was that what I was doing?) it seems disingenuous to rate highly a game that I've better memories of playing elsewhere. Even so, the original experience is still fairly intact here and it is one of those times where I walk away after an hour of a game still antsy to get back into once I'm done with this write-up. Wholehearted recommendation for the game itself, a more muted endorsement for this version in particular.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Do Forget the Joker. The ball's in Microsoft's court, I suppose, though I don't know if they'll have to negotiate with Embracer since THQ was behind the port. Sounds to me like a big ol' headache that none of the above needs or wants, especially as there's better options available and the choice to just remake the thing if MS can scrounge a good team together for it after Vicarious Visions got dissolved.

Retro Achievements Earned: 0 (out of 49). This is a pretty expert-level set, starting with three cheevos per stage (clearing all challenges, clearing all gaps, and setting a 1,000,000 point high-score) followed by a bunch of character-specific achievements where you have to land all their starting specials in one combo. Some ouchie stuff but no sweat for a THPS freak I'm sure, and I'm heartened that they at least don't involve the massive and unappealing time-sink that is finishing the game with every skater.

Final Ranking

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
2. Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
3. Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
4. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
5. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
6. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (Ep. 48)
7. Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
8. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
9. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
10. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
11. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
12. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
13. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
14. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
15. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
16. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
17. Worms Armageddon (Ep. 44)
18. The New Tetris (Ep. 42)
19. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
20. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
21. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (Ep. 46)
22. Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! (Ep. 41)
23. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Ep. 42)
24. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
25. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
26. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
27. Bust-A-Move '99 (Ep. 40)
28. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
29. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
30. Nuclear Strike 64 (Ep. 48)
31. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
32. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
33. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
34. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
35. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
36. Viewpoint 2064 (Ep. 45)
37. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
38. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
39. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
40. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
41. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
42. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
43. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
44. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
45. Gauntlet Legends (Ep. 39)
46. O.D.T. (Ep. 45)
47. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
48. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
49. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
50. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
51. Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Vol. 1 (Ep. 39)
52. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
53. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
54. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
55. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
56. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
57. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
58. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
59. Killer Instinct Gold (Ep. 47)
60. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
61. Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt (Ep. 43)
62. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
63. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
64. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
65. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
66. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
67. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
68. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
69. Mahjong 64 (Ep. 41)
70. Bass Rush (Ep. 46)
71. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
72. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
73. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
74. Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside (Ep. 47)
75. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
76. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
77. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
78. Starshot: Space Circus Fever (Ep. 43)
79. The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction (Ep. 44)
80. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
81. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
82. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
83. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
84. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
85. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
86. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
87. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
88. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
89. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
90. Yakouchuu II: Satsujin Kouro (Ep. 40)
91. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
92. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
93. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
94. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
95. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
96. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
97. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
98. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
99. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
100. Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)

Conclusion

That's our final list of 100 N64 games from the best and not-so-best that the NSO service has yet to claim (barring those that did get added some time after I covered them). I think if I were to start separating this into tiers in order to provide something of constructive value to retro gaming fans (heaven forfend), here's how I'm leaning:

• 1-25: Genuinely excellent games that have more or less held up beautifully. Not just highly-rated technical marvels of their era but those that still have something to offer the audiences of today.
• 26-40: I think this is the tier that some might call "guilty pleasures" or "problematic faves"—games with some amount of problems but still ones I'd happily go to bat for in some sort of argumentative podcast medium.
• 41-50: These ones I might be a little less quick to champion but they're still entirely OK (and in several cases, better than most would give them credit for).
• 51-77: This would be the mediocrity zone, full of promising games that missed the mark or competently made sports/racing games that I nonetheless had zero interest in playing after my hour with them was up.
• 78-87: These ones actively had some issues that made them hard to tolerate, let alone recommend, even if that issue was often just "it's super boring".
• 88-100: Poor old Yakouchuu II doesn't deserve to be here (its placement was purely based on how much I'd want to keep playing a visual novel I couldn't read), but the rest are actually terrible games that either fell apart in the process of getting ported over or likely weren't good in the first place. Games that prompted all sorts of interesting noises out of me the moment the random chooser worked its nefarious magic.

After pondering what was, let's ponder what could have been (why did I turn this whole finale into A Christmas Carol, I'll forever wonder):

The Ten Biggest Remainders

In the off-chance I kept this feature going another season, I did have some ideas for what I'd eventually like to cover. Some of these would've featured in earlier episodes were it not for one matter or another, while others definitely give a "scraping the bottom of the barrel" feeling that partly influenced my decision to end here on a nice and round 100 games processed. Here's ten of the candidates (in alphabetical order) I was seriously considering:

1. Carmageddon 64: I've heard the N64 version was a carwreck in more ways than one but I've always had a soft spot for these vehicular manslaughter sims. That soft spot being a pedestrian's unprotected flank.
2. Chameleon Twist (& 2): It wasn't the most polished platformer on the system but the tongue grappling system, as gross as it was, did make for some inventive challenges. I own the first game so I have nostalgic affection for it, as well as some curiosity about its follow-up, but I never got around to including either given there were plenty of other mascot 3D platformers to choose from.
3. Any game in the N64 Doraemon trilogy: I'm sure they're as super rudimentary and thrown together as any other licensed platformer but I was hoping to play at least one of these robot cat games. The license has its own fast-travel system built in with the Anywhere Door.
4. Hexen 64: The Hexen N64 port was a little less scuffed than its Duke Nukem and Quake ports, but maybe that's owing to the smaller profile of the Heretic franchise. I remember enjoying it back at the time, albeit without the experience of playing the PC original to compare it to.
5. Magical Tetris Challenge: Sure, 64 in 64 might've finally received that coveted Mike Minotti plug had I covered more Disney games with this feature, but the main regret for not covering this one is that it was the fourth and final Tetris game on the system (and how fitting is it that there's exactly four?). Would have been neat to rank them all to definitively see which was the best one.
6. Puyo Puyo Sun 64: If I ever got bored of Tetris (impossible), there were a couple of Puyo N64 ports I could've checked out too. This one saw a fan translation so it would've been my pick, had I been in the mood for some blob-stacking.
7. Robotron 64: I had this on my shortlist for a while but then that Midway Arcade compilation happened as a random pick, and since that had the original Robotron: 2084 it felt kinda weird to double up. Is there such a thing as too much Robotron, though?
8. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (& 2): Goes without saying, I suppose.
9. Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion: If I ever bring this series back in the distant future, the third Turok will almost certainly have joined its two older siblings on NSO by then. I have no experience with this one (unlike the first two) so it might've made for an enlightening subject to cover, were I to have any remaining patience for playing FPS games with a N64 controller.
10. Wonder Project J2: One of the other few fan-translated JP-only games, Wonder Project is a sequel to a SNES title where you instruct a living automaton how to act like a human and send it around solving problems. Always seemed pretty ambitious and it looks amazing too with that Ghibli-esque art direction.

The Ten Biggest Bullet Dodges

I'm not talking danmaku games—pour one out for Bangai-O, sorry I missed out on you too—I'm speaking specifically about the games I really did not want to see come up on the random pick list. Of course, this list of ten "please don't"s is not the same list that I started with—shit happens, as they say—but I kept an updated version enshrined at the bottom of the text document I use for this feature as a sort of talisman to ward off their evil presence. Might as well post it here too; these games can't hurt me any more after all. (I say all that, but I'd probably rather play most of these than a hyper generic sports sim.)

You could probably predict what's on here easily enough, if not actively rooting for them to appear in any of the previous episodes, but here we go regardless (in ascending order of how much I didn't want to play it):

1. Castlevania
2. Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko
3. Quest 64 / Holy Magic Century
4. Glover
5. South Park: Chef's Luv Shack
6. South Park
7. Earthworm Jim 3D
8. ClayFighter 63 1/3
9. John Romero's Daikatana
10. Superman

And that's going to do it for all these post-feature extras. Thanks again to all those that read and/or commented on (especially those who commented without reading; that takes guts) this feature over the years and I'm sure I won't stay away from the N64 for long. Hell, I'll probably boot up another Mario 64 hack for the achievements before the end of the month.

See ya around.

...

......

...OK, but what if we added in all those forbidden NSO games? What would that final list look like, were I to embark on the science involved? Excepting all those on NSO I'm unfamiliar with, that list might resemble something like this:

Super Final Ranking EX: Cheat Edition

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
3. Banjo-Kazooie
4. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
5. Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
6. Paper Mario
7. Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
8. Star Fox 64 / Lylat Wars
9. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
10. Mario Kart 64
11. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
12. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (Ep. 48)
13. GoldenEye 007
14. Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
15. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
16. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
17. Pilotwings 64
18. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
19. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
20. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
21. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
22. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
23. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
24. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
25. Yoshi's Story
26. Worms Armageddon (Ep. 44)
27. Dr. Mario 64
28. The New Tetris (Ep. 42)
29. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
30. F-Zero X
31. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
32. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (Ep. 46)
33. Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! (Ep. 41)
34. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Ep. 42)
35. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
36. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
37. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
38. Bust-A-Move '99 (Ep. 40)
39. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
40. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
41. Nuclear Strike 64 (Ep. 48)
42. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
43. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
44. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
45. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
46. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
47. Mario Golf
48. Viewpoint 2064 (Ep. 45)
49. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
50. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
51. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
52. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
53. Pokémon Stadium
54. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
55. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
56. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
57. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
58. Extreme-G
59. Gauntlet Legends (Ep. 39)
60. O.D.T. (Ep. 45)
61. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
62. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
63. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
64. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
65. Mario Party 3
66. Mario Party 2
67. Mario Party
68. Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Vol. 1 (Ep. 39)
69. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
70. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
71. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
72. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
73. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
74. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
75. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
76. Killer Instinct Gold (Ep. 47)
77. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
78. Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt (Ep. 43)
79. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
80. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
81. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
82. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
83. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
84. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
85. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
86. Mahjong 64 (Ep. 41)
87. Bass Rush (Ep. 46)
88. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
89. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
90. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
91. Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside (Ep. 47)
92. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
93. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
94. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
95. Starshot: Space Circus Fever (Ep. 43)
96. The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction (Ep. 44)
97. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
98. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
99. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
100. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
101. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
102. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
103. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
104. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
105. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
106. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
107. Yakouchuu II: Satsujin Kouro (Ep. 40)
108. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
109. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
110. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
111. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
112. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
113. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
114. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
115. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
116. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
117. Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)

Hey. Look. I promise this will be the last explormer review for 2024. Not that I'm practicing any self-restraint; I'm genuinely running out of the things. Maybe that's something to ask from Santa. This week's subliminal cry for help is Sheepo, the first (Steam-published) game from Kyle Thompson. He was the one behind semi-recent IGotW subject Islets (#373)... and will probably appear here again before too long with his most recent game, Crypt Custodian. I was very impressed with Islets—stylistically it had a real chill vibe thanks to its wonderful soundtrack (from Eric Thompson, who I assume is a relative and also did the music here) while mechanically it did some fascinating navigational stuff by having separate maps combine into a bigger one—so I've high hopes for this earlier effort, though with some degree of tempered expectations given most developers traditionally tend to improve with successive games.

The story of Sheepo sees the titular vaguely sheep-like thing Sheepo visit an alien planet in order to collect the eggs of endangered native fauna, all of which are guarded by massive "queen" members of their respective species. In addition to the important conservation work, each egg allows Sheepo to temporarily borrow the form of any creature of that type, all of whom offer some sort of traversal upgrade to Sheepo's default double-jumping and wall-jumping combo. The initial longbird, for instance, grants the power of flight for a few seconds while the burrowing spineworm provides access to an underground network of tunnels. Added to that are a set of hard-to-reach collectible feathers (real unfortunate Assassin's Creed II flashbacks there) that can figuratively and literally open some doors for you, albeit of the purely optional variety.

The game touts itself as a pacifistic game, as you have no means of attacking enemies (nor enemies to attack in most cases) and kinda have to trick the infrequent bosses into defeating themselves instead. That, plus the simple gradient-filled aesthetic and the chill ambient music really gives the impression that Thompson was inspired by the Indie developer Nifflas, who created many games in this same relaxed style such as Knytt Underground and NightSky (both of which I reviewed many moons ago). That we're starting to get into a generational thing with Indie game development is a pretty remarkable reminder that this tier of game development—at least in its current form, as those sold digitally through Steam or XBLA, rather than going even further back to shareware found on diskmags—are already close to a couple decades old. But hey, so many of them feel even older given their predilections for the classic 16-bit genres, so I'm not going to let myself dip into a whole spiel about the inexorable march of time again; we're all quite familiar with that song and dance already.

So I'll go back to praising Sheepo for already having a keen sense of how games like this ought to control, with a speedy and flowing approach to traversal right off that bat that would normally only come about after several hours of acquiring acrobatic upgrades, and yet every egg and its concomitant shapeshifting ability still has a meaningful effect on how much more of the world you can explore. It's certainly not a long game—as an inaugural commercial project for an Indie dev, it's often best to pace yourself with something small that can then go on to fund the next, bigger thing—but one that, like the best explormers, has some meaningful level design with a few surprises here and there as you learn more, contextually, about the sorry fate of this dying planet and meet its few remaining sapient lifeforms dancing in the ruins of their broken world. But, you know, more cheerful than that. I mean, just look at that Sheepo dude. That's someone who knows how to chill and doesn't get hung up on all the egg theft and expediting extinctions he might be doing. Good for that guy.

I'll go ahead and still say Islets is the better game, if only to reassure the developers that they're continuing to improve, but there's plenty about Sheepo that is worthy of merit beyond that it gave the devs the experience and confidence they needed to make its more ambitious successor. The application of the shapeshifting conceit shines in how most of those powers would break the game wide open if they didn't go away after a few seconds but as they are they work better in self-contained instance puzzles like flapping around a maze of spike walls or quickly burrowing through windy subterranean courses before the upgrade wears off and you end up buried alive (which is a little terrifying, not gonna lie). Its map is small but still feels intimidating to explore in full owing to how almost every screen involves a challenging platforming puzzle—I really hope to unlock a fast-travel system soon—and since I've always enjoyed Nifflas's games for their serene and unhurried vibes (if not necessarily an equally tranquil difficulty curve) I'm heartened to know he has fans in the same line of work. Sheepo's nothing too extraordinary or revolutionary as explormers go but it's a strong foundation for a developer that evidently was able to build on the lessons learned here.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

And here we are with the tenth and final part (yeah, right) of this furtive once-over of the Bandai WonderSwan: an also-Swan from an era just prior to the Game Boy Advance where there looked like, for just one brief shining moment, an opportunity for another company to get in on this whole lucrative portable market while Nintendo was distracted. Due to incorporating a randomizer aspect to this examination process I've played way more impenetrable anime tie-in games than I would've preferred but the system exists as this neat alternative reality Game Boy successor that never was. While there's definitely something about the WonderSwan that is very prototypical of what the GBA would later become given the similar tech levels, the system had a few innovative ideas all of its own: ideas like having certain games or certain levels within games be played vertically, a conceit Nintendo would only get around to exploring with its next portable, the Nintendo DS. Point being, I think it's easy to underappreciate a system that was only around for a couple years around the dawn of the millennium but there's plenty who could still argue it had left an important mark on the industry: I could be describing the WonderSwan or the Sega Dreamcast here, I recognize, and in my mind they inspire a similar sentiment of "what could've been with a little more third-party support and without an enormous and unsurpassable rival in the way".

That's enough retrospection; we have retro games to inspect. There are five final WonderSwan games to see this feature out and while most weren't quite what I was hoping for, I am glad to have used this final WonderSwan WonderSoapbox to slake my curiosity about them. And, as is the case for many other games I've covered on here too, I may just return to a few of them should a full fan translation ever transpire. As always, if you needed a firm idea of what's worth looking into on this misunderstood platform be sure to check the previous entries in the table just below and the ranking list all the way at the end down there.

Anyway, for the final time, here's WonderSwan:

#46: Rhyme Rider Kerorican

• Developer: NanaOn-Sha
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2000-12-09
• Inscrutability: Minor
• Selection Process: Curated. In fact, they all are for this episode. Guess I don't need this bulletpoint any more.
• Is This Anime?: ...I'll just go ahead and delete this one too.

Field Report: Rhyme Rider Kerorican is a rhythm game in which the titular character, an astronaut wearing a frog-shaped EVA suit, moves along a set path while avoiding obstacles and hitting enemies to the beat of the song. If the player correctly hits enough notes Kerorican will start flying, allowing her to skip several obstacles at once. There are four such courses, each based on a different track, and the player just needs to survive until the end. While not the only rhythm game on the platform (beatmania for WonderSwan is another, which we covered in Part Four) it's easily the most distinctive. Also, and this reference isn't going to play for most of you, but the game's titular character of a redheaded girl in a frog costume is super reminiscent of Hololive VTuber Kiara Takanashi (who frequently dresses as a frog) and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Had she played this before, somehow?

Probably didn't need me to tell you that NanaOn-Sha are the PaRappa the Rapper/Um Jammer Lammy/Vib Ribbon people going by that box art and the screenshots, with Rhyme Rider Kerorican being the company's fifth game after the three PS1 games above and their debut game Tunin'Glue for the Apple Pippin. Founded by musician and Psy.S co-founder Masaya Matsuura, NanaOn-Sha is popularly considered one of the first major video game developers to focus on music-based games in the home console space. Even if they're hard to go back to now (mostly due to emulation lag) PaRappa and Lammy were definitely favorites of mine as a new PlayStation owner towards the end of the 1990s in part because there really wasn't much out there that looked or played like them (I missed out on Vib Ribbon but I'd downloaded its soundtrack at some point in the early '00s; definitely a fixture on WinAmp for a while there).

Well, this is really just WonderSwan Vib Ribbon with a slightly more '60s funkadelic style. The most... well, saying "most distinctive feature" for a game like this might be hard to pin down, but what's perhaps noticeable enough right away is the slight isometric angle the game uses. That's not just a stylistic choice: the game is intended to be played while holding the WonderSwan diagonally (which is a first; usually it's horizontally or vertically) because the way the inputs work is that they rely on the upper left D-pad (the four "Y"s), the bottom left D-pad (the four "X"s), and the two face buttons on the bottom right (A and B): when the system is held diagonally in such a way that Kerorican's path is level, those clusters simply become left, down, and right respectively from the perspective of the screen. That configuration is normally intended to let you play vertically or horizontally but here each of those three clusters counts as a single button each: that is, every button in each cluster produces the same effect. Kerorican must defeat enemies in her way by pressing the appropriate button: early on, that's the A/B cluster for the blue armadillos that pop out of holes, the upper left Y cluster for the stacks of pointy fellahs, and the bottom left D-pad for the round guys with the whirling fists. Later courses start introducing foes where you have to hit two buttons simultaneously: Course 2, for example, has some sort of pot of rice on a playground roundabout that needs you to hit A and Y at the same time.

As always with NanaOn-Sha I run into an issue where I can't be sure if my sense of timing is off or the emulator introduces a tiny amount of lag that, while imperceptible in most games, makes all the difference in something like this where exact timing is crucial. Enemies are on the path in such an order where defeating them adds a musical sting to the track playing and you can usually judge by how the track is moving along when you need to add a note or two; yet the timing can be real tricky especially when there's two enemies in quick succession. You have a very generous health bar at least and you can even replenish it to some small degree by jumping up for candies flying overhead, yet the sheer volume of enemies in the third course (including a new dolphin-looking guy who needed an A + X combo) threw me off my timing too much for me to finish it. I think I would've had more fun with this game playing it on its native hardware where the question of whether or not I'm being screwed over by the emulation becomes moot, even for as short as it might end up being with only four courses. The music kinda slaps too.

Time Spent: 25 minutes.

#47: XI Little

• Developer: MBI
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2001-12-20
• Inscrutability: Minor

Field Report: XI, or [Sái] as the box art and title screen styles it, is a puzzle game involving rolling dice that was first released on PlayStation in 1998, where it was localized overseas as "Devil Dice". The idea is to rotate dice a certain number of times by running on top of them, and if their upwards-facing side is the same as those sitting adjacent then they'll take each other out and score you points. The tough part is doing so around all the dice on the field as more continually spawn in and in creating sufficiently large chains, which might require setting up dice placements ahead of time before you remove them all in one big combo. XI was co-developed by Sony as a PlayStation exclusive but I guess Bandai hashed it out with them to port it over to their handheld, which was smart because abstract puzzle games like this almost always tend to do better on portable systems.

This is where I'd go into the developers MBI and their background but I've no idea who they are. I was curious if they had some relation to Sony or to the PS1 game's original developers Shift, but if I had to guess they were some Bandai label that was never used again.

Man, XI is still cool. I'm not sure I'd have the juice to play it for hours on end but the mechanics are simple yet rewarding when you get stuff arranged just right. To get a little deeper into those scoring mechanics: in order to create a chain the number of dice has to match the number on the top. So you could easily create a bunch of twos and threes but setting up the fives and sixes is a little tougher. As there's a little time before a set completely disappears, you can keep adding onto it by rolling other dice with the same number adjacent to the fading ones to boost the score bonus. One thing you want to avoid is falling into the pit area, since your ability to move the dice around is a lot more limited on the ground rather than on top of the dice themselves: all you can do is push the dice, not rotate them. There's probably even more mechanics that I'm forgetting about, like what the deal is with "1" sides—you obviously can't combo them but sometimes all the 1s on the field will mysteriously take themselves out. Clearly there's more to learn here.

I tried Endless mode, managed to stay alive for half an hour before the entire field was filled with dice, and then realized I'd had my fill rather than go on to check out the other modes (though Puzzle was definitely tempting). For as enjoyable as games like this can be I've always found that a little goes a long way, which is partly why I feel like they work so well on the portable platform where you're probably only likely to get thirty minutes max before something else requires your attention or the break is over and you need to go back to work/school (and why I've never understood why RPGs are so popular on that format, since long uninterrupted sessions serve their sense of immersion better). Even with all the PS1's fancy dice polygons, XI Little proves that the format works just as well in this less visually impressive form since the core is what matters. It's what I tell my Tinder dates that don't immediately bolt, after all.

Time Spent: 30 minutes.

#48: Namco Super Wars

• Developer: Gantan
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2002-10-31
• Inscrutability: Major

Field Report: Ever since I first heard about it from browsing the internet in the mid-'00s, I've always been fascinated by the PS2 game Namco x Capcom: a company IP crossover game that—unlike Capcom's forays against SNK and Marvel—wasn't a fighter but rather a strategy RPG, which due to Final Fantasy Tactics, Vandal Hearts, and Disgaea had become extremely my thing at the time. Crossover strategy RPGs were nothing new of course—the WonderSwan alone has six Super Robot Wars games—but throwing together so many characters from both the long histories of Namco and Capcom felt like a great nerdy time of identifying who was from what while also getting in on all the fun tactical maneuvering and character development I attributed to the genre. It wasn't until the similarly-themed Project X Zone for 3DS and its localization many years later that I'd finally get a chance to play a game like that. Turns out Namco had been experimenting with the concept even before their Capcom mash-up: the first of their crossover strategy RPGs had been this one, Namco Super Wars, released about three years earlier.

Much like MBI, I have no idea who Gantan were but presumably they had some relationship with Namco if the latter were willing to give them the reins to this big celebration of the company's various IPs. The only other credits for them include Blaster Master: Enemy Below for GBC and The King of Fighters: Neowave for Arcade, in both cases as "programming support". Maybe they were a contractor with enough experience working on handhelds that Namco had faith in them to handle it, but I'm better off leaving it to the experts at GDRI (ideally those that can read Japanese far better than I) to figure out.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to say about this game after playing through its first scenario. It's your standard square-grid map strategy RPG that's probably a little too similar to Fire Emblem for my liking, as you move your characters around and attack enemies within reach while also ensuring you don't leave anyone where they can get wombo-combo'd by the enemy forces. Most characters have a selection of abilities to use, though some were grayed out for the entire battle which either means they have some very specific conditions to meet or I just wasn't powerful enough to use them yet. My OC protagonist, some DBZ-looking person with long hair and indeterminate gender (plenty of that going around in anime games), could attack enemies at a distance with ki blasts that were much more powerful than their up-close fisticuffs but had a limited pool of "SP" which drained whenever they attacked remotely, suggesting he/she was a good character to soften enemies up before your melee guys got in range where they could be counterattacked—better instead to have them land the finishing blow and not suffer any retribution. My other character in this fight was a very Marth-esque dude called Amuru (who I believe might be the dragon from Dragon Spirit, albeit not currently in his dragon form) and then we were joined in the second turn by Valkyrie from Legend of Valkyrie and her pointy-headed lizardman companion Xandra, who also got his own SNES game (Whirlo) at some point. Amuru and Valkyrie were pure melee as far as I could tell while Xandra had a ranged attack where he threw his trident.

The enemy units were all generic monsters that included some flying baboons that threw... let's call them rocks, some giants, and some goblin-looking dudes. If I had to guess they were probably all Legend of Valkyrie monsters given she turned up to help us with them. However, since the fight was preceded by almost ten minutes of dialogue I didn't feel the need to stick around afterwards for any post-battle discussion since I wouldn't be able to follow it anyway. I'm sure I'll recruit other characters and get a whole posse together to fight whatever apocalyptic menace is threatening the many worlds of the NamcoVerse—I'm holding out for some sort of Pac-Man Galactus, i.e. Gapactus—but my interest level isn't all that high without a translation. The multiple character-specific abilities and higher-than-average level of challenge right off the bat made this a slightly more engaging SRPG than most that I've played so far on WonderSwan, but I'm not going to be here for the long run without understanding what's going on especially seeing how much darn text there is to click through.

Time Spent: 15 minutes.

#49: Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon for WonderSwan

"Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon for WonderSwan"

• Developer: TOSE
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 1999-03-04
• Inscrutability: None (Translation)

Field Report: Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon for WonderSwan is a portable adaptation of the original Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon for PlayStation, which was first released in late 1997 and was the fourth game overall to carry Chunsoft's Mystery Dungeon label. The WonderSwan version retains most of the same mechanics but naturally downgrades the visuals and music; it otherwise offers the same near-endless procgen exploration as its console counterpart. The story sees a chocobo named Poulet and a moogle named Alta reach a new town that purports to have a dungeon filled with treasure. After getting tricked into entering it, the two set up shop in the town with Poulet doing most of the dungeoneering work: by finding certain items in the dungeon they can also help the townsfolk with their supply problems, which has them lending their support as well. Once entering a dungeon, Poulet cannot leave unless he defeats the boss or uses a Teleport Card (which become more common the deeper he goes). There's also some amount of progress retention if Poulet happens to get KOed while down there, giving him a better shot to reach the bottom on his next attempt.

I reserved slot 49 for a Square game for old time's sake, being that it's a square number and all, and this happens to be the first they ever licensed for the system (as well as their only non-Color game). It's also one of the four launch games I was able to determine, along with previous entries Gunpey, Densha de Go!, and Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden, so I'm glad I was able to check out all of them to see what sort of offerings early system adopters enjoyed (it's not a bad set in terms of variety at least). This would be the eighth Square game we've covered overall on here, which means I didn't get around to the last three: Final Fantasy II (no big loss), Romancing SaGa (ditto), and the original Front Mission. (Technically this isn't actually a Square release since it's a TOSE/Bandai joint but I imagine Square had to be involved on some level given all the chocobos and moogles involved.)

The Mystery Dungeon series tends to adopt new mechanics based on the IP universe they're currently inhabiting, such as the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games and their Pokémon capturing feature. That's the case here too, with combat using ATB gauges instead of simultaneous movement and an emphasis on magic usage as one of the few statistics that are preserved after a dungeon run: by continuing to use magic (via single-use tomes) the player levels their affinity with that spell, allowing them to do even more damage on subsequent uses. Otherwise, most run-based dungeon-crawler rules still apply: there's a map you can check, though it only fills out places you've seen from a tile away; there's potions and other consumables, though some remain unidentified until you either use a different item to identify them or you take the risk and use them directly; there's equipment, but it's all chocobo-shaped by way of saddles, talon extensions, and a collar (the last of those is more of an accessory, providing fewer stat bonuses but often some special benefit instead); and the player is almost always at the mercy of RNG as they trigger traps, get cursed by unidentified gear, or bump into ever tougher monsters with nasty status effects as they explore and descend. However, the game is generally more forgiving owing to its more child-friendly cutesy vibe: you can save before descending a staircase (as well as back in the hub) and you hold onto anything you had equipped if you should die, with the option to store anything you don't want to lose back in town.

The last of these Mystery Dungeon games I played was Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 on N64 (for my 64 in 64 feature) and just like back then there is a certain amount of ambivalence that comes from hitting my head against procgen for who-knows-how-many hours. I do appreciate that both the games mentioned allow you to salvage some amount of inventory even after getting wiped out, but these games start to feel endless pretty quickly and more so if you've just run into a big progress-wiping streak of bad luck. The whole "two steps forward one step back" phenomenon made manifest via game design. The RetroAchievement support for Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon does make it a little more attractive a prospect to hack away at, since it seems like an entirely attainable (if occasionally grindy) set, and having combat be based around ATBs where you have seconds to maneuver into a better spot and prepare for fights before those gauges completely fill up is a nice change to the instantaneous movement and combat of most games of this genre; one that can quickly catch you unawares if you're zooming around on auto-pilot to reach a corridor you left behind. The monochrome visuals, limited resolution, and simplified mechanics does make it feel a bit antiquated though, even for a 1999 game, so I'm not sure if I'll ever feel a burning need to return when there are many modern run-based games with much more going on. But if I was still a schoolkid in 1999 with my ever-present aversion to socializing and this card in my WonderSwan? You'd better believe I'd be sneaking in a couple of floors every recess.

Time Spent: 45 minutes.

#50: Dicing Knight Period

• Developer: Platine Dispositif
• Publisher: Qute
• Release Date: 2004-05-31
• Inscrutability: None (Translation)

Field Report: Dicing Knight Period, usually expressed as "Dicing Knight.", is an action-RPG with procgen dungeons (didn't quite mean to do two of these in a row, but oh well) in which a nameless heroine descends through monster-infested corridors slicing (and quite possibly dicing) through anything in her path. Think of it as Zelda or Ys top-down combat in a run-based dungeon-crawler model. Or I guess The Binding of Isaac, since that's basically what this is just with a more melee-focused bent and more anime girls.

So, he were are. Symbolically finishing this feature off with the very last licensed game ever released on the WonderSwan Color. Even if the GBA hadn't already killed the WonderSwan, the advent of the Nintendo DS—which released half a year after this game came out—would've done the trick, I'm sure. As with Judgement Silversword (the first game we ever covered on here), the publishers Qute are much more Indie tier than Bandai and the system's usual third-party contributors, having selected the WonderSwan to host a game development competition for which the prize was having your game become a professionally published product. Platine Dispositif is a one-person development studio that would later go on to make the Gundemonium series as well as several other low-budget doujins; I checked but I don't think any of them have been added to Steam yet (unless they're in their native Japanese; searching for something on there in kana isn't quite so easy).

Dicing Knight. is way weirder than I was anticipating but at the same time it's been relatively straightforward too. Every time you hit an enemy a die flies off them (another recurring theme this entry) and that determines the damage you did; there's a bit of a delay between the strike and the die rolling to a stop though, so I've found the best strategy is to go in for a couple hits, back off, and then approach again if it's still standing. You have both an attack and a defense button but there's nothing in the way of equipment changing that I've found yet: instead, most enemies drop single-use items that you can assign to the buttons on the Y-cluster. You can also simultaneously use an item while picking up another to replace it in the same slot. These items so far include floor keys (necessary to progress), drills (makes holes in walls for shortcuts), healing potions (self-explanatory), onigiri (ditto), some kind of dice predictor (lets you know what the next few rolls will be, I guess so you can hog all the high dice and let enemies hit you with the smaller ones), and a rabbit that supposedly makes me luckier. Since you have both health and hunger meters, with the latter constantly dropping unless you find the relatively rare onigiri, it seems the best policy here is to make a beeline to the stairs rather than stick around to explore the whole floor. The map is always fully revealed, so it's usually just a matter of finding the fastest route—or making your own.

A few other things I discovered while playing: the first dungeon ("Lindwurm") only has three floors while the next ("Shiningstar") has four, which also introduces tougher enemies, a blank map that now needs items to reveal, and "gate keys": additional keys needed to open gates between you and the exit. The reason for the last of those is to make the game harder by forcing you to sacrifice more of your item slots for these passive keys, since they're a pain to go farm if you just abandon them at first. You also acquire experience in dungeons that stays with you even if you get taken out, and by defeating bosses you earn lottery tickets which can then be exchanged for random orbs. These two features work in tandem: your level (aggregated across all dungeons, so you can go back and grind in earlier ones if you'd prefer) gives you orb slots that the lottery orbs then fit into. I got a purple one that increases my hunger meter, which I guess is better than nothing. The other notable feature of this game? This shit's hard, man. The first boss alone has three phases and is like a bullet hell match up (explicable, given the developer's later games and where the doujin scene was in general with the likes of Touhou) so I wasn't sure if it was something I could defeat this early on, especially as the next dungeon had already opened. If you die in a dungeon you can resume from the last floor you reached, so I was able to get in many attempts before it finally croaked.

Dicing Knight. is kinda neat for a small Indie thing, offering only a handful of gameplay options but balancing them in a way to make for a compelling grind towards the game's end-state. I can see a path to victory just by hacking away at these tough dungeons enough times, modifying my tactics between the right balance of offense and defense (definitely can't skimp on the latter, given how many enemies blast you on sight) while relying on some lucky item drops. Plus, if you keep resuming from your last floor you could probably brute force your way through the game eventually, though the downside to that is a lack of items: the floor is exactly as you left it, which might mean no enemies and no items to farm from them. After all, going into a boss fight with the single healing potion you always respawn with might not be enough. As I said before, though, I only have so much patience for procgen before the repetition gets too much, but Dicing Knight.'s little formula (and, again, having some degree of progress retention) does make it a better run-based game experience than most, for as rudimentary as it might be.

Time Spent: Just shy of an hour.

Final Ranking (For Now)

(* = Don't need fluent Japanese to enjoy this and/or it has a fan translation.)

1. O-Chan no Oekaki Logic (Ep 4)*
2. Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chousensha (Ep 5)*
3. Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (Ep 3)*
4. Puzzle Bobble (Ep 9)*
5. Dicing Knight Period (Ep 10)*
6. Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon for WonderSwan (Ep 10)*
7. Final Fantasy IV (Ep 9)
8. Final Fantasy (Ep 4)*
9. XI Little (Ep 10)*
10. Rhyme Rider Kerorican (Ep 10)*
11. Rainbow Islands: Putty's Party (Ep 4)*
12. Raku Jongg (Ep 9)*
13. Flash Koibito-Kun (Ep 1)*
14. Magical Drop for WonderSwan (Ep 1)*
15. Mr. Driller (Ep 9)*
16. Namco Super Wars (Ep 10)
17. Hataraku Chocobo (Ep 7)*
18. Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Ep 6)*
19. Slither Link (Ep 5)*
20. Gunpey (Ep 2)*
21. Judgement Silversword -Rebirth Edition- (Ep 1)*
22. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shito Ikusei (Ep 8)*
23. Makaimura for WonderSwan (Ep 6)*
24. Golden Axe (Ep 7)*
25. Side Pocket for WonderSwan (Ep 5)*
26. Battle Spirit: Digimon Frontier (Ep 8)*
27. Final Lap Special (Ep 2)*
28. Densha de Go! (Ep 2)
29. Gomoku Narabe & Reversi Touryuumon (Ep 3)*
30. Rockman EXE N1 Battle (Ep 8)
31. Kurupara! (Ep 6)*
32. Guilty Gear Petit (Ep 3)*
33. Hanjuku Hero: Aa, Sekaiyo Hanjukunare...! (Ep 5)
34. Blue Wing Blitz (Ep 3)
35. Makai Toushi SaGa (Ep 8)*
36. Wild Card (Ep 9)
37. Beatmania for WonderSwan (Ep 4)*
38. SD Gundam: Gashapon Senki -Episode One- (Ep 7)
39. Super Robot Taisen Compact for WonderSwan Color (Ep 3)
40. Inuyasha: Fuuun Emaki (Ep 1)
41. Chou Denki Card Battle: Youfu Makai (Ep 5)
42. Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? (Ep 2)
43. Shaman King: Mirai e no Ishi (Ep 6)
44. Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden (Ep 4)
45. Inuyasha: Kagome no Sengoku Nikki (Ep 7)
46. Sangokushi II (Ep 6)
47. Kyousouba Ikusei Simulation: Keiba (Ep 7)
48. Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! (Ep 2)
49. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Musha Densetsu (Ep 1)
50. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Kishi Densetsu (Ep 8)

Later this month, I intend to finally get started on my GOTY list by playing my first (serious) game from 2024: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. However, that doesn't mean I'll be putting away the many Zeldersatzes I still have in my Indie backlog out of concerns for repetition (I think I've played thirteen explormers so far this year?) so here we are with an interesting little game called Prodigal from American developers Colorgrave. Referencing the famous Biblical parable about the commiserate failson, Prodigal sees the protagonist return home to the frontier village of Vann's Point after receiving word that his adventuring parents have passed away: the protagonist originally left his home for untold reasons, taking a large amount of his family's money along with him, which creates a frosty atmosphere among much of the population that remembers him. Despite the negative atmosphere, the hero goes about helping his only remaining family member—his grandfather and local blacksmith Darrow, one of the few happy to see his return—as well as Darrow's passionate new apprentice Bolivar with their tasks as he rekindles his memories of the place and his friendships with his former childhood pals. Naturally, these tasks have him crossing the whole village and its outskirts from one dungeon to the next for various ores and other smithing necessities.

What I found interesting about Prodigal's presentation isn't that it's aping the Game Boy Zelda specifically (that would be Link's Awakening) but a specific optional narrative thread found within that game that is more or less treated like a comedic Easter egg: the idea that Link can, at any point, decide to rob the shopkeeper and take home an item that might be prohibitively expensive otherwise. In Zelda, this causes the player's inputted name to be changed irrevocably to THIEF: this has no bearing on how any of the NPCs treat you, just how they address you, but Prodigal seems to have taken that thought experiment of "what if everyone actually treated the hero like a vile thief and displayed varying levels of hostility towards him?". The game's surprisingly verbal for a Zeldersatz, with a bunch of NPCs to get to know (and in many cases, win back over after your original inauspicious exit) and even more optional worldbuilding lore to peruse such as this world's countries, geopolitical relations, and major religions. That verbosity also allows it to explore, in depth, themes like loss, ongoing resentment, long and aimless journeys to find oneself and one's purpose, picking up the pieces of the broken relationships with those left behind, and the hidden truths of this town and the unfortunate fate of its namesake founding family. You wouldn't think a game riffing on a Game Boy aesthetic could be this deep, but I've noticed that a few times before with games like Anodyne and Two Brothers that—for better or worse—tried to follow in the footsteps of Link's Awakening and its slightly more character-driven and surreal aspects.

Gameplay-wise, the game is a relatively straightforward Zeldersatz. It has the typical array of dungeons found across an overworld that requires keys and traversal items to access in full, and these dungeons tend to be relatively short and puzzle-heavy. You acquire four of said traversal items that quickly bind themselves to the four face buttons and never leave them: they're the only items you'll ever need, so there's no reason to go around switching items around in a menu. However, you can supplement them with two passive equipment slots (rings and boots, though I never found any of the former) and up to four buffs from paying vendors for food and potions: these might include double-health, more attack damage, or a free resurrect a la the fairies of Zelda, but they'll all go away if you should ever hit a game over state. You can eventually upgrade your traversal items, but again I never figured out how. Even so, the dungeons are short enough to not need them (nor maps) and the bosses are incredibly easy owing to how you can score multiple hits on them while they're in their temporary vulnerable states and usually finish them off in one or two cycles. This diminished challenge is, in turn, mitigated by how difficult it is to heal outside of your own bedroom: buff items can increase your max health but not recover it, besides the expensive revival item, and enemies and breakable items never drop hearts. You can recover a bit of health by finding the rare heart pieces (they look like heart-shaped ores in this, appropriate given most of the combat revolves around a miner's pick you find early on as a weapon) but otherwise your best bet is to warp out of a dungeon via the convenient teleporter system that connects the entrance to the room just before the boss and just hit the sack back home to rest up. A little inconvenient, but I guess they needed a means to give the game at least some challenge.

So, here's where I get into how the game consistently rubbed me the wrong way with its narrative choices. The first is in how much branching paths and other FOMO aspects are baked into the design: you can earn achievements and take on special dungeons/side-quests by choosing to marry one of the game's eligible bachelorettes, indicating a deep-seated desire to settle down in this town despite previously growing so tired with it that you felt the need to desert it. Already, it's interfering with the interiority I was developing with this otherwise silent cipher protagonist: it's clear he's back to make amends after disappointing his parents and the townsfolk, but there's no indication that he didn't find life on the road more rewarding or that he perhaps has a new family somewhere out in the world that he intends to return to once these matters with his parents and grandfather are dealt with. The idea that he's done a complete 180 and now wants to settle down in a town he once despised so much that he basically burned all his bridges on the way out reads as completely inscrutable. Second, the multiple paths suggests that the developers expected their players to want to play through the game an eye-watering ten times in total in order to see everything; however, the nature of Zelda games is that most of the satisfaction comes from solving the dungeon puzzles, which isn't the sort of feeling you can replicate in multiple playthroughs given puzzles traditionally can only be solved once. It's why that, outside of LTTP and Ocarina randomizers, I very rarely play the same Zelda game twice unless it's been more than a decade or two since the last playthrough (I'm about due for another The Wind Waker run actually; it's been over 20 years now. Hey, don't shoot the messenger).

Last and worst of all, there's a boss encounter that's one of those "defeat the darkness inside yourself" scenarios where you take on your own shadow clone. Rather than duke it out, it's a conversation of morality: your shadow, much like those in the Persona games, wants you to admit to your darkest impulses and to your failings as a son and as a former resident of this town. However, some of these questions are stuff like "don't you love this childhood friend character?", "do you want to stay in this town with these people you once abhorred?", "weren't you unhappy wandering the world?" and in order to beat the fight, you have to answer "yes" to all these questions in addition to the more obvious softballs like "you just came back for the money" or "you'd rather leave your grandpa and these people to their fates, right?". This completely tramples over the image I had of this character and the backstory I'd built up for him, since the game offers you no concrete details as to his desires otherwise, and if you get enough of these questions "wrong" you just instantly die and have to walk all the way back to this boss fight from the hub, absent any expensive buffs you may have had equipped. Just a really poor execution of an otherwise neat CRPG "help us define your character's motivation" role-playing moment—one that the game had been developing well enough with multiple yes/no prompts to NPC dialogue about your intentions to stick around. Vann's Point is full of bitter sourpusses and monster-filled dungeons; I'd been happy to get the heck out of there once I'd paid the proper respect to my dead folks (and returned their stolen cash, ideally, which the game does let you do).

In Prodigal's defense, I'll say that the 8-bit aesthetic is charming, the soundtrack occasionally disarming with its emotional resonance given its chirpy chiptune nature most of the time (Link's Awakening had some pretty nice tracks too, if I recall, so that's as good a way to do homage as any), and there's apparently quite a long tail of post-game dungeoneering to be done including a secret additional final boss. The game is filled with secrets in general also, similar to Undertale where the "real story" hidden beneath the main narrative is there for those patient and observant enough to dig around for it. The combat's fine if unexciting especially with the underwhelming bosses, the mostly Sokoban-esque puzzles tended to be a bit easy because there were many times where you could pull off tricks like standing just at an angle from a block in order to push it towards a direction you shouldn't have been able to otherwise, and I definitely respect the moxie involved in making a Game Boy Zelda homage mostly about reading books and dialogue. It's a game that crosses into many of my favorite game design territories for those of a more action-adventure bent, so I only wished I liked it more. Instead, it often evoked the same sort of side-eying distrustful antipathy that its townspeople exhibited towards this titular prodigal hero.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Well, here we are, the final Sega CD games of 1993 and the very last Mega Archive to cover that same year—something I started on back in 2021. Preliminary plans to cover 1994 are... well, demoralizing is probably the way I'd put it. My favorite part of exploring the libraries of older systems is seeing the way trends shift based on trailblazing headliners like Sonic the Hedgehog and how there's a whole hidden side to my favorite consoles that only their Japanese audiences saw. How many obscure beauties still lie behind that language barrier? Yet for as far into the console's lifespan as 1994 is, where you'd expect some real polished stuff from developers long since acquainted with the Mega Drive and Sega CD and what they're capable of handling, the vast majority of games from here on out are some real unexciting trash, to put it kindly. I guess there's value in that stuff too, going back to observing trends and who the big deals were that everyone felt the need to imitate, but if I could do a more curated feed of 1994 games—maybe giving the less compelling annual sports games and licensed dreck a mere footnote while gushing for whole paragraphs about a Treasure game or some neat MD RPG I'd never seen before like King Colossus—that would probably serve both myself and readers of the Mega Archive far better. Hate to turn this feature into a meritocratic process and declare that certain retro games are more important than others, but it'd be an important consideration for my sanity given how many more games 1994 has in store for this feature.

Of course, if I decide I just want to stick with the Sega CD alone from here on out that'd make for a much easier project. From my notes (seen in this delicious Mega Archive spreadsheet) there's only 103 more Sega CD and Mega CD releases to go before that system's official retirement in early 1996: just nine or ten more entries of this size would be enough for the remainder of that entire library. It would mean exposing myself to many more scratchy FMV games though, so I'll stick that on the "maybe pile" for future content ideas.

Speaking of scratchy FMV, let's take stock of this final batch of nine Sega CD games for 1993. With the exception of two Genesis "enhanced editions" and the inexplicable appearance of a Neo Geo SNK brawler almost everything here heavily relies on FMV for what it laughingly calls gameplay, giving you all the data you might need about whether or not anyone had figured out how to make CD gaming appealing yet (spoilers, they hadn't). Even so, this is our very last hurdle to complete Mega Archive '93 so let's just hold our noses and get stuck in:

Part X: CD95-CD103 (December '93)

CD95: Racing Aces

• Developer: Hammond & Leyland
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Racing
• Theme: Racing Aces Glid So That Diddy Kong Racing Could Soar
• Premise: Hop into the cockpit of your chosen WW1/WW2 plane and take on opponents in a race to the finish.
• Availability: Nope. If Sega published, I guess the license belongs to them? They already have a racing game series where Sonic and pals fly around in airplanes, so I don't think they'll see a need to revive this.
• Preservation: The first of our final batch of SCD games might also be its most interesting. Racing Aces takes after those other Genesis/Sega CD flight sims with their early attempts to create a polygonal 3D environment to fly around in and turns it instead into something like a kart racer, as you pilot around simple courses in multiple laps while availing yourself of power-ups like speed boosts, weapons, and repair modules to get the edge over your opponents, though with the drawback being that you have to ascend to grab many of these collectibles which in turn slows you down. There's a selection of genuine military aircraft to choose from, including old-fashioned WW1 planes like the Fokker (always love saying that) to modern fighters like the F-16. I'm guessing there's some kind of rubberbanding or weight class system in play here, since a biplane doesn't have a whole lot of hope of outperforming a twin-engine jet. Developers Hammond & Leyland are just the names of some vets that worked together on this one project and then went their separate ways afterwards: Hammond (there's actually two, Eric and Gregory; they're brothers) worked on a few LucasArts games prior to this and Robert Leyland was involved with the first two Star Controls, which were very different types of flying sim.
• Wiki Notes: A header image and a little bit of text clean-up.

CD96: Stellar-Fire

• Developer: Infinite Laser Dog
• Publisher: Dynamix
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Stellar 7
• Genre: First-Person Shooter
• Theme: The Interstellar War With the Draxon Drags On
• Premise: Pilot! We're sending you in to defeat the entire Draxon fleet on your own, despite the fact they've already conquered most of the galaxy. Also, you're not allowed to fly up and down. Godspeed.
• Availability: Nooope. Dynamix were bought by Sierra!Vivendi towards the end there so I guess their IPs are in the hands of Microsoft by way of the Activision-Blizzard merger. Probably not a high priority.
• Preservation: Dynamix had a pretty busy few years there in the early '90s, creating many of their most noteworthy games like The Adventures of Willy Beamish (a previous Mega Archive CD subject), The Incredible Machine, Betrayal at Krondor, and Rise of the Dragon, but one that must've meant a lot to the company's senior employees was a remake of Dynamix's very first game: the sci-fi tank sim Stellar 7, Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge, which was released on the 3DO close to the original game's tenth anniversary. For whatever reason, instead of a direct port, the Sega CD saw a modified version of that same remake with a few changed details (you're in a ship instead of a tank, but still stuck to horizontal movement regardless) but more or less the same action. Stellar-Fire saves its compulsory FMV for the opening cutscenes, as TV's Worf intones a lot of meaningful drivel about mankind's losing battle with the overwhelming Draxon forces as your two attractive squadmates immediately get killed off and leave you on your lonesome. Then the game starts and... well, it definitely feels like an up-rezzed version of a game from the early '80s. It's not terrible, sort of with that uncomplicated arcade vibe as you drive around (technically flying, but c'mon) a bunch of alien worlds trying to find crystals while shooting vague polygonal approximations of vehicles. This would be Dynamix's third Sega CD and the second to use their admittedly pretty cool Infinite Laser Dog label which would sadly be retired after this: Dynamix only has one more Sega CD game to go, 1994's Bouncers (not The Bouncer, alas), which did not use it.
• Wiki Notes: Skeleton page, so it needed everything.

CD97: Psychic Detective Series Vol. 4: Orgel

• Developer: DataWest
• Publisher: DataWest
• JP Release: 1993-12-10
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Psychic Detective Series
• Genre: Adventure
• Theme: Haunted Doll Watch, Beep Beep Beep
• Premise: The psychic detective, so-named for being psychic and a detective, is tasked once again to solve a spooky mystery after some weird lady's doll goes missing. You have better shit to do? Not really, not when you're going around calling yourself a psychic detective.
• Availability: It also came out on PC Engine CD-ROM and FM Towns if they're somehow more handy than a Mega CD.
• Preservation: It's the Psychic Detective series again! Whoo! Japan loves its detective adventure games (Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken having gotten the whole ball rolling on that genre) and the supernatural element just makes things more fun, since you can't ever discount the possibility a ghost did the murder with a ghost knife. Despite being the fourth game in the series, it's only the second to be released on Mega CD—after Vol. 3: Aya—as well as the last. Every preceding and succeeding game in the series besides those two would stay FM Towns exclusives. Not much to say about this one without some Japanese fluency because it's entirely menu- and dialogue-driven, though there is voiceover if you're better at hearing the language than reading it. Data West, no relation to Data East, is a prolific PC-based developer but these two Psychic Detective games are all we're going to see of them on this feature. They eventually departed the game industry and took the next left into developing SatNav systems instead, though reportedly they've recently become interested in producing (or at least re-licensing) games again.
• Wiki Notes: Text, images, releases.

CD98: Mansion of Hidden Souls / Yumemi Mystery Mansion / Yumemi Yakata no Monogatari

• Developer: System Sacom
• Publisher: Sega (JP/EU) / Vic Tokai (NA)
• JP Release: 1993-12-10 (as Yumemi Yakata no Monogatari)
• NA Release: February 1994 (as Mansion of Hidden Souls)
• EU Release: March 1994 (as Yumemi Mystery Mansion)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: First-Person Adventure
• Theme: These Souls Can't Be That Hidden If They Keep Coming Up and Talking to Me
• Premise: Jonathan chases his sister Samantha into a spooky mansion after she's distracted by a butterfly and now he must find her and escape before they become a lepidopterist's plaything. Nothing is more scary than a lepidopterist.
• Availability: It's on the Sega Genesis Mini 2. There's also a Saturn sequel with the same name but that one's apparently less good.
• Preservation: Mansion of Hidden Souls is an early champion, and one of the few to hail from Japan, of the FMV first-person puzzle-adventure format best typified by Cyan's Myst franchise. With the haunted house setting it's structurally and thematically close to Kenji Eno's D but with a bit more of a lighthearted vibe as you go around a big mansion looking for your sister while getting hassled by the spirits already trapped within, most of which would be grateful for the company of two new residents. In terms of its appeal, I'd say it's similar to that '70s House (Hausu) horror movie: there's some real camp VA performances and visuals here that makes it a game perfect for those who prefer not to take Halloween all that seriously (The 7th Guest is another great example). The alternative titles all essentially have the same meaning: the Japanese title translates to "The Story of the Illusionary Mansion", but it is weird that butterfly imagery features so heavily and the titles don't mention them at all. Tokyo-based PC game developers System Sacom only released one game each for the Mega Drive (Jennifer Capriati Tennis) and Sega CD but were a little more prominent on the Sega Saturn, if I ever get around to it.
• Wiki Notes: A very minor amount of clean-up.

CD99: Sengoku Denshou

• Developer: Dragnet / Kan's / SNK
• Publisher: Sammy
• JP Release: 1993-12-28
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Sengoku
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Sengoku the Polls if You Don't Want to Be Ruled By a Despotic Warlord
• Premise: A particularly shitty daimyo was defeated in the Warring States era (16th century) by a couple of elite samurai, and has resurrected in the modern age where only the descendants of said samurai can stop him.
• Availability: The original arcade game is part of the ACA Neo Geo range for Xbox One and Switch. Prior to that it was on Wii Virtual Console and some PS2-era compilations.
• Preservation: Sengoku Denshou, or simply Sengoku, was an arcade brawler SNK put out in the early '90s that would become a big hit on the Neo Geo and see multiple sequels. Its unusual theme where you go around with guns and swords in a post-apocalyptic modern city to defeat an army of samurai spirits is still right in line with SNK's usual interests and one of the big gimmicks of the game is that you could pick up orbs that grant you special weapons, as well as the ability to transform into stronger or faster forms. At this point in time was rare to see SNK ports given they had their own home system to champion, and rarer still when they had a hand in their development. This particular port was largely handled by contractors Dragnet (they also did the Caliber .50 port for Mega Drive) and Kan's (Densha de Go! EX for Saturn) so it's not clear what SNK contributed, besides the license. Still, outside of a Rising Zan there's very few places where you can see a cowboy shoot a samurai.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Box art and a release.

CD100: Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck

• Developer: Core Design
• Publisher: Virgin Interactive (NA) / Core Design (EU)
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: January 1994
• Franchise: Chuck Rock
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: How Much Son Could a Chuck Rock Chuck Before Social Services Got Involved? (90% sure I already did this joke format once before.)
• Premise: Chuck Rock evidently got rewarded well for rescuing his wife from the bad guy of the previous game, because a year later there's a kid in the picture. Good thing too, because someone needs to rescue Chuck Rock after he gets abducted by a business rival, and who better than a newborn infant?
• Availability: Nope. No idea who owns Core Design's non-Tomb Raider IPs. Rebellion? Maybe we can get a Sniper Elite: Prehistoric Edition where I can shoot a T.rex in the balls with a catapult.
• Preservation: The first of a couple of Genesis ex-pats, Chuck Rock II is of course one of the many prehistoric platformers available from the 16-bit era and not even the only one with a cavebaby in the lead (Hudson's Bonk reigns supreme in that field). That said, these Chuck Rock games have a few aces up their missing sleeves: the music's good and the puzzle mechanics around picking up and stacking boulders makes the platforming a little more elaborate than most of its neolithic peers. I'm far less familiar with this sequel but its many presentational enhancements, including the use of sprite-scaling, provide more evidence that the UK-based Core Design wanted to step things up as they entered the CD era and got ever closer to their destiny of putting a well-endowed adventuress in frequent peril. Also, the villain's name in this is Brick Jagger: that's not even a good Flintstones-level pun, since bricks weren't invented until 7,000 BC. Get it together, game designers. Gah!
• Wiki Notes: Mega Drive double-dip. Just some SCD releases.

CD101: NHL '94 / NHL Hockey '94

• Developer: High Score Productions
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993 (as NHL '94)
• EU Release: March 1994 (as NHL Hockey '94)
• Franchise: NHL Hockey
• Genre: Hockey
• Theme: Hockey
• Premise: Hockey
• Availability: NHL Hockey continues to see new games, with NHL '25 being the most recent as of writing. They're going to run into problems when it rolls back around to NHL '93 in 2093. Fortunately, none of us will be around to see it.
• Preservation: EA Sports's NHL Hockey is a reliably strong performer on Sega systems even if the sport itself is usually last among the big four in real life, and EA saw fit to bring at least one of them (purportedly the best) to the Sega CD so it could precede the gameplay with some grainy B-roll of those armored hockey types skating onto the rink to hit a tiny disc around for an hour. I guess while there wasn't a whole lot of reason to get this game again if you already had the Genesis original, it did make for a compelling purchase if you hadn't picked it up yet and were looking for some retroactive justification for buying a Sega CD at great expense. They didn't screw it up with crazy loading times or anything, at least. EA Sports only released this and Bill Walsh College Football (a prototypical NCAA Football) on Sega CD some time in 1993 and then a FIFA game the following summer, having presumably shifted their CD-ROM game development to the upcoming Saturn and PlayStation while continuing to produce annual games on cart for the core Genesis. Probably a smart distribution of resources.
• Wiki Notes: Mega Drive double-dip. SCD screenshots and box art. Minor release clean-up.

CD102: Dracula Unleashed

• Developer: ICOM Simulations / Viacom New Media
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: May 1994
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Adventure
• Theme: Tonight, I'm Going to Suck... at Reading Comprehension Puzzles
• Premise: Dracula has been defeated and Victorian London is at peace, or at least until co-slayer Quincey Morris is found dead (his head fell off) which raises the possibility of the Count's return, or possibly some kind of decapitating flu. Quincey's American brother Alexander is here to set things straight with some old-fashioned investigation.
• Availability: Nothing more recent than a 2002 DVD game adaptation, but then these classic FMV adventure games get remasters all the time. Not like you have licensing issues to worry about with an IP this old.
• Preservation: Dracula fever hit in the early 1990s with that Coppola movie adaptation of the original Stoker novel, and so adventure game veterans ICOM sought to jump on that Bramwagon with an original story that takes place after the events of said book. Created by the same team that put together the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective series, Dracula Unleashed features a combination of live-action FMV cutscenes and a whole bunch of pain-(and vampire-)staking investigation work as Alexander travels across various locales while perusing his notes and an ever-increasing hoard of clues. The FMV here does looks a bit cleaner than in the Sega CD Sherlock Holmes games but I'm not sure if I have the patience to play too much of it, even with the promise of sexy vampire ladies (that darn Lucy Westenra, always with the biting). The last thing I'll say is that when your Dracula game starts with O Fortuna instead of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor someone messed up somewhere. (The D in "D Minor" stands for Dracula, after all. That's a verifiable fact, you can find it on the internet.)
• Wiki Notes: Just some screenshots (with header) and minor edits.

CD103: Mad Dog McCree

• Developer: American Laser Games
• Publisher: American Laser Games
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Mad Dog McCree
• Genre: Light Gun Shooter
• Theme: The Violent Bandit, Mad Dog McCree, Has Already Defeated the Town's Sheriff, Courteous Dog McCallister, and You're Next
• Premise: A nameless stranger wanders into an equally anonymous Wild West town (some real dedication to worldbuilding here) and finds himself embroiled with some local trouble with the notorious titular rogue, whom has the mayor's daughter as his hostage.
• Availability: The most recent remaster was for PlayStation 3 in 2013.
• Preservation: We conclude the 1993 season of Mega Archive CD with one of the most famous (or maybe infamous) FMV light-gun games out there, Mad Dog McCree, which was first released to arcades in 1990 before eventually becoming a staple of almost any western-made console with a CD drive. The relative simplicity of the game coupled with the hammy performances of its cowboy cast made it a quick favorite for those looking for an arcade experience without a whole lot of investment required. Just shoot a few dudes, have the undertaker (not that one) make fun of you when you inevitably get shot by some tiny dude from a window, and just mosey on down to the OutRun cabinet or whatever else grabs your attention next. A harder sell as a full-price console release, of course, but American Laser Games did relatively well for itself on this platform regardless. No firm idea when in 1993 this came out on Sega CD but the developer would go on to port over Mad Dog's sequel Mad Dog II: The Legend of Curly's Gold* in 1994 along with the mechanically if not stylistically similar Crime Patrol and Who Shot Johnny Rock?. (*Remember to fact check this later.)
• Wiki Notes: Just some box art.

It's November 1st, y'all, which means the Christmas season is upon us. That's right, I'm one of those crazies that starts celebrating the moment the Halloween decorations go down, and by "celebrate" I mean "dread with every fiber of my being" as seasonal affective disorder descends upon us like a tidal wave of anti-depressant pill bottles. That's why Cthulhu Saves Christmas's idea of linking Christmas to horror—hardly the first time it's been done, and with good reason—always resonates with me and those plucky JRPG throwback developers Zeboyd Games are well primed to deliver a game that isn't afraid to say that Christmas kinda blows. Well, I don't know if that's actually the message, but it's my take away.

Zeboyd has a very particular way of going about their RPGs but they are invariably games in which every encounter presents a decent challenge and every new ability or piece of equipment makes a meaningful difference to your tactics going forward. Due to the truncation process—Zeboyd RPGs rarely go beyond 10 hours in length—it feels like playing one of those retro RPG remasters with a newly added fast-forward function, since you're getting all the killer of the 16-bit RPG archetype with far less of the filler. Combat is your standard turn-based affair with characters assigned a turn order based on their speed, using a combination of elemental and physical attacks along with status effects, heals, and other support skills. One regular status effect for the Cthulhu games in particular is the titular squid's ability to turn enemies insane: this changes their elemental weaknesses as well as make it so certain other status effects are more effective, but the newly gaga foes tend to hit harder as a drawback making it risky for bosses especially. The rest of your team, acquired automatically as the story continues, include a "snow maiden" magic-user, a debuffing witch (the Baba Yaga, no less), and the Teutonic gift- and punishment-bringer Belsnickel who is more of an all-rounder whose abilities can be customized for a preferred role to complete the ensemble. While it does persist with 16-bit-style random encounters there are various means to mitigate them: you can cancel the encounter trigger if you're quick enough to avoid any unnecessary fighting, or you can immediately manually trigger all the encounters available in the current dungeon one after the other to get them out of the way and let you explore at your leisure, with a bonus heap of XP awarded for finishing off the whole set.

One new mechanic that I don't think I've encountered before in these Zeboyd games, though it has been a while since I played Cthulhu Saves the World, is how your combat abilities are assigned. Most of your attacks are single-use and you need to defend to refresh them, however beyond the four you're able to assign before a battle starts you also have three "insanity slots" (Cthulhu likes his inscrutable lunacy) that are randomized at the start of battle and every time you hit the defend/refresh option. Some of these picks are exclusive to the insanity selection, meaning you might have a powerful ability that only occasionally makes itself available, while the rest are the abilities you chose not to assign to your four main slots. The effect of this is that you can still try out new skills if you're unsure about their utility and don't want to sacrifice one you already have equipped, as well as giving you a bit a procgen aspect to the current battle's strategy if you find yourself with some insanity picks that have very conditional uses—an example would be a buff that increases the odds of landing a status effect, since it wouldn't normally be as useful as a straight up physical attack or heal to warrant a spot in your regular line-up, but its presence in the insanity pick area might have you considering the other status effect debuffs you have available.

Since the holidays are all about spending time with family and friends, the half-hearted (by design, since we're goofing around) gimmick of Cthulhu Saves Christmas is that you can spend time between dungeons either hanging out with party members or at various Christmassy establishments like the mall, the post office, the movie theater, a cultist assembly hall (they're not as stoked to see Cthulhu as you'd hope), and the beach. There are more locations you can spend time in than you have time to do so, in true FOMO-fomenting Persona style, and each grants a specific weapon, armor, accessory, or item: you get told what they are but not what their effects might be, so it's usually best to aim for items (which you can reuse endlessly, but only once per battle) or equipment that you haven't switched out in a while. The game's also generous enough to leave treasure chests around its dungeons too so no one character tends to fall behind in their equipment, but this social sim aspect is a useful way to boost up any member that might be lagging. Plus, they're pretty funny as social link parodies go.

Unfortunately, for as polished as the game design might be in Zeboyd's RPGs the same can't necessarily be said for the stability. I was right at the end of one of the longer dungeons—you could tell because it had 15 random encounters on the ticker rather than the usual 10—and in the very last fight the game glitched out and made impossible to continue. Since the game refuses to auto-save for reasons as esoteric as the Great Old Ones themselves (maybe it goes against the Christmas spirit?), I lost around 30 minutes of not particularly engrossing progress after restarting from my last physical save at the very start of that same dungeon. There's absolutely zero reason why any of the above should apply to a game made this century, but here we are. Mistakes were made. Easy to forget that, for as slick as these games can be, Indies are frequently lacking in quality control at the end of the day (for fair enough reasons; they don't have huge piles of money to throw at QA divisions).

That annoying setback aside though, Cthulhu Saves Christmas is just as amusing and tactically intriguing as its brethren—whether they happen to involve Cthulhu or not—and I had a (mostly) good time plugging away at its well-considered encounters and its streamlined take on a Persona-style life-sim component. The fourth-wall-breaking humor is, as always, a subjective quality but I found myself appreciating a few of its more wiseacre goofs, especially where the irascible Elder Being and his already close physical resemblance to the Grinch is concerned as he continues to humbug his more festive companions' suggestions to get into the holiday spirit. As for me, I'm just grateful I have the option to not think about Christmas again for a while and instead be distracted by... oh, the US election. Ugh. Awesome.

Rating: 4 out of 5.