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The Conclusion of Go! Go! GOTY! 2024

While I'm not done with catch-up gaming for last year, not by a long shot, I think I can formally put together my GOTY list for 2024 (one of my first tasks when February arrives tomorrow) with fifteen pretty decent-to-great games I managed to pull from PC Game Pass and elsewhere. There's a whole bunch of real lengthy RPGs from last year that will require more than a month or two of cramming however, so don't think the list is anywhere near final quite yet. The thought of getting around to the sheer magnitude of RPGs released in 2024 alone is making me giddy especially as it was only a decade or so ago when that whole genre felt super depreciated by both the industry and its audience. Maybe we all just have more time on our hands given the outside world continues to be a nightmare.

We locked in four more 2024 games in January, each of which has more in-depth (but not too in-depth; I was on the clock after all) reviews that can be found via this "contents page" blog along with all the others from the previous month.

• Magical Delicacy (Review): The only G!G!GOTY! game I was unable to complete, due to pacing issues and a problem with the game where it kept needing to be reinstalled. It's rare for me to put an explormer down before it's over, such is my love for the things, but the ponderous nature of Magical Delicacy's take on the Atelier "find ingredients, cook 'em up, fulfil requests" format meant I was scouring the same handful of screens many times over and I could just see it taking way too long, given everything else I had planned for the month. I don't think it's a bad game and its deliberate nature might be more appealing to those fond of farming and resource-gathering games like Atelier, or maybe Stardew Valley and its Rune Factory antecedents, but they do have that nature of being on the languid and repetitive side.
• Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (Review): Someone put a bite-sized Soulslike on GP (rather than Remnant II, which looked to be a whole thing) so darn right I was going to give it a spin. Flintlock's got a cool, vaguely 18th century steampunk (but without the steam) setting that has a military sapper take on some evil gods and the hordes of undead at their command with her fox deity pal and a whole lot of gunpowder. There's much more in the way of platforming and traversal in this, similar to Another Crab's Treasure and its own stab at being a 3D platformer hybrid, and though most of it was very streamlined as is often the case with Indie takes on From's series it held my interest throughout and gave me plenty to do in its open-world environments. Lacking a bit of polish here and there (hitboxes doko?) but a pretty decent budget Souls experience for the most part.
• Hauntii (Review): Top-down collectathon with a really striking monochrome aesthetic and an eclectic jazz/orchestral/EDM soundtrack both. If you're in the mood for something a little more laid-back and breezy in the manner of an open-world action-adventure game this is the sort of thing where you can just let the style wash over you as you go around on autopilot collecting shiny objects and getting in a little bit of twin-stick shooter action.
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade II (Review): I don't think video games quite have their equivalent of Oscar bait yet but the Hellblades are close, since they're all about the cinematic experience and the strength of the central performances. Saga loses steam quickly in comparison to its predecessor, mostly because it has less to say and diminishing returns have set in for its bag of psychological tricks, but it still looks amazing and can really dial the spectacle up when it comes to its antagonistic Jotun and the methods you go to in order to bring them peace. The puzzle and combat gameplay, such as they are, really aren't worth writing about though (I did like how trippy the inversion puzzles were).

Other Game Pass-essments

In addition to all the 2024 stuff, I also managed to squeeze in a few smaller Game Pass games under the wire:

Lil Gator Game (MegaWobble, 2022)

This was just adorable. It's about a bored alligator kid who tries to get his older sister, now a college student, interested in playing one of the fantasy hero imagination games of their youth even though her workload keeps her glued to her laptop. The protagonist, who uses a hero sobriquet determined by the player, somehow manages to rope in the entire neighborhood of eccentric animal-people children to help set up an island-wide recreation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (renamed something less litigious, of course) with enemies and obstacles carved out of hastily scribbled-on cardboard covering the forests and hills of this adventuresome setting. Since we're doing the whole Zelda thing it also plays like BOTW as well, complete with stamina gauges while climbing and a glider for getting around quickly from high up, though does away completely with health or fail states or combat that isn't just chopping passive sheets of cardboard in half. In that sense, and in how it's a mostly open-world game that lets you tackle objectives in any order or just go poking around for adventure, it's much like A Short Hike in both its structure and laid-back attitude.

I'm a big sucker for 3D platformers and games with plenty of well-written jokes and silliness so Lil Gator Game was right in my wheelhouse, or maybe would be if I were considerably younger. I would say it's an ideal game, short of a Mario, to get younger players used to 3D movement and combat because there's absolutely nothing to dampen your day here. It is just mostly a big collectathon with some fetch quests thrown in but the game has some neat ideas and optional traversal tools, like one of those big sticky hands you can get from gachapon that's used here like a grappling hook, to provide plenty of activities to keep you busy. It's also just a deeply and sweetly nostalgic game about the ephemeralness of childhood and one little alligator's hopes to reconnect to an adult sibling that's becoming increasingly distant due to life priorities. There's a substance that's not necessarily reflected in the traditional sense as we think of video game content—being that it's Zelda with all the rough edges sanded off and an equipment set made out of arts and crafts materials—but I found it engaging enough. Plus, I didn't have to pour hundreds of for-real dollars into a slot machine to get the one animal-friend I wanted, so it already has a leg up on some other BOTW-inspired games I could name. (4 Stars.)

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer (Tendershoot, 2023)

Nominally created by the Edgelord Scourge of the Hypnospace Messageboard and #1 Seepage fan Zane Lofton, an NPC that made quite the impression in Tendershoot's earlier work Hypnospace Outlaw, Slayers X is a boomer shooter parody that taps into everything that made the late '90s an embarrassing time to be a teenager. As Zane Lofton (yes, it's a self-insert game), the last of the mystical X Slayers as well as super cool CEO and martial arts master, you must defeat the Psyko Sindikate after they kill Zane's mom, his mentor, and his fellow X Slayer and potential future girlfriend Steffanie (whose VA keenly understood the assignment and supplies some amazing "phoning it in" voice acting). Wielding the ancient art of the hackblood and the S-blade (a blade shaped like a big S), Zane takes the fight to the evil group across nine levels set in or around the suburbs of that famous hotbed for hi-tech global terrorist activity: Boise, Idaho.

It's really just Tendershoot extending their skit in the most apposite direction possible, invoking the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior and all those other deliciously tryhard FPS games of the late '90s that tried to out-cool Doom. It's actually not too bad either (that's the thing with parody games: deep down, they still need to be playable) with some novel ideas like a shotgun that fires shards of glass that you can easily restock by breaking every window you see, which is already a cool anti-hero thing to do. It's not so long either that all its jokes about X Slayers and sentient poop and "I got with your grandma!" taunts start to wear out their welcome, though it can have its annoyances like the very durable "warewolves" with their constant rocket attacks that will quickly annihilate your health meter unless you focus on eliminating them first. For a game that feels like it was designed by da share z0ne it's a solid enough throwback to the primeval era of the FPS genre on top of being an on-point piece of anti-nostalgia. (3 Stars.)

Maquette (Graceful Decay, 2021)

I really loved Superliminal and its puzzles based on perspective and scope, and since I dimly recalled Vinny (remember him?) playing this on a Quick Look (remember those?) showing off some similar mechanics I jumped at the chance to play it when I was scrolling through the Game Pass library. Maquette isn't so much about visual trickery as it is about the Droste effect: the idea of an image inside an identical larger version of that same image repeating infinitely outwards (or inwards). In Maquette, a central domed structure in each level houses a scale model of the surrounding environment that, were you to place an object or move something in that model, those changes would be reflected in the normal-sized surroundings (and the giant-sized surroundings that surround those). Through this, you could turn a tiny key into a person-sized one for a nearby person-sized lock or you could turn a box into a giant stepping stone to bridge a chasm.

The main issue with Maquette is that it can be maddeningly and punitively imprecise when things aren't lined up juuust right which might necessitate a whole lot of wandering back and forth to readjust things at the dome and its model-sized version of the level: this becomes especially egregious when you need to do something in the "giant" version of the current area given how much of a jog it can take to get from point A to point B when meters suddenly balloon into kilometers. It's also framed by this obnoxious love story between two self-obsessed people that you can tell is heading nowhere good from the snippets of their lives that are provided via disembodied voiceovers, and so when the relationships inevitably starts falling apart and the world starts falling apart alongside it (which, admittedly, made for some great visuals) it's hard to stay too invested. Like any empathetically reflected sense of hopelessness I'm meant to feel is instead replaced with a sort of relief, like when you know your two friends who hooked up probably made a mistake in doing so and will be better off apart and/or with other people after accompanying them to a few too many awkwardly passive-aggressive dinner parties, but of course are too tactful and too concerned for their happiness and/or pride to get involved (i.e. too much of a coward). It also has some annoying time trial achievements—yes, I'm still big on achievements here in 2025 of the Common Era—that do nothing if not emphasize the irksome accuracy problems you often run into when time is such a precious factor. Maquette is a "close but no cigar" for me: it certainly had plenty of potential with its mindbending visual effects and the puzzles that pertain to same but not quite the execution to do it justice. And I don't think I've ever heard a video game soundtrack that was less my whole deal. (3 Stars.)

Jusant (Wishfully, 2023)

Boy climbs rock. The end.

OK, so that was a tad reductive. There's far more nuance in Jusant than just that. Here's a second attempt:

Boy(?) climbs rock.

Fine, Jusant is an action-adventure game about ascending a rocky pillar in a world where most of the water has mysteriously evaporated, leaving the former seas and oceans completely barren. A small amount of people still eke out a living in places where water is still somewhat available but something needs to be done to bring the water back: hence the protagonist's quest to follow a series of myths about a piper able to revive shrines dotted around the Tower, which saw an exodus of its population after the titular catastrophic "Jusant" ("an ebbing tide" in French). In addition to some sturdy climbing gear, the MC is accompanied by a little adorable whale thing called a ballast through which the player can use echolocation to activate certain plants and creatures to assist in climbing the walls and ceilings of this impressive edifice. It's presented like your typical Ico-like for the most part: big on quiet moments, impressive sights, memorable encounters, and entirely free of dialogue to explain what's happening.

I appreciated a lot about what Jusant was doing, both in the artsy adventure game sense and for being one of those climbing-focused games that binds the two hands to your left and right triggers in much the same way Grow Up/Home did, though that climbing tech could get awkward on occasion. Sometimes not grabbing obvious and within-reach handholds for reasons unfathomable to lesser men like myself, or being oddly skittish about leaping off platforms (the protag would prefer you set up a carabiner first before leaping into the abyss, thank you), and it wasn't always obvious where to go next. Many times, there were dead ends or larger previously lived-in areas that may or may not contain collectibles—there's a lot, at least six different kinds—that would see you regularly backtracking a little to search for the telltale array of grippable rocks rising up a nearby wall. The game alleviates much of the tension of perilous mountain climbing, for better or worse, by having a cable system that is always in effect as well as three pitons you can use to make mini temporary checkpoints as you keep going ever upwards. It has heart and spirit, even if I didn't always see eye-to-eye with its interpretation of wall traversal—it's one thing to do the left-right-left-right routine when climbing up handhelds instead of just holding a direction, but to have the same system for climbing horizontally across a ledge or up a ladder just feels off—and I'll admit its cutscenes left an impression even if much of the game's impetus was left largely ambiguous and thus hard to get invested in. The little whale thing was cute though, so points for that (and for having a dedicated hug button for it). (4 Stars.)

Fingers Picrossed

I've also been busy with picross (because when am I ever not) having completing Oekaki Logic 2 for SFC as my January podcast game and thus completing (as far as I know) every nonogram title for that system. For the record, you have: the original Super Mario's Picross from Jupiter; the eight-part Picross NP episodic series from same; the two Oekaki Logic games from former Nintendo subsidiary Marigul Management; and the first O-chan no Oekaki Logic game from Sunsoft, featuring their Hebereke characters (most recently seen on Steam and elsewhere with Ufouria: The Saga 2). The Japanese PlayStation apparently has way more of them though, so I guess I'm not going to be done with numbers and grids for a while yet. For now, at least, I'm switching back to Mario 64 ROM hacks and maybe some other randomizers to give my brain a rest. I have a condition.

Speaking of having conditions (and picross), it's a brand new year but I'm still hacking away at Pictlogica. The battles are getting oppressively difficult now and I can't even manage half of the standard ones let alone the special high-difficulty EX ones. I did recruit everyone's favorite Griffith clone Sephiroth at some point though and am trying him out: I think his passive skill is broken (as in, doesn't work) since it's meant to raise my break gauge to max when the fight starts, which would be broken (as in, overpowered) if it actually did that. He's still a tough fighter though, with an absurdly high crit rate and a powerful limit break—Supernova, naturally—that not only does decent damage but also gives him a hefty buff for the next two rounds, perfect for finishing off slippery foes. In the most recent batch of new characters to recruit, the only ones I had any interest in were Agrias Oaks (from FFT) and Red XIII but those fights were, like most at this level, kind of on the tough side. Well, I can always just stick to the picross half of this game if need be. Just two zones left! Whee! See you in February!

Who Updated Their GOTY Lists? Ah Just Did!

Last update here is to bring up my GOTY (Adjusted) series, all (or some, if I'm being honest) of which I try to relitigate at the start of every new year. I finally have enough games for a worthy GOTY 2022 (Adjusted) and I've also gone on to update the 2020 (Adjusted) and 2021 (Adjusted) lists with some fresh(-ish) new challengers. In addition to those, I've updated the goliath that is my top 100 for GOTY 2017 (Adjusted)—and yes, I'm still adding new entries to it, pushing the old ones out into a post-script "runners-up" comment at the bottom—and I'm planning on even more inclusions later this year. After all, it's not known as one of the strongest years for game releases for nothin' even while it continues to disappear in the rearview mirror.

My goal for 2025 is to catch up with most of 2023's remaining "big deals" so I can have a decently hefty GOTY (Adjusted) for that by next January, in conjunction with (of course) as many of the highlights from last year too—see above for how that's going right now. Why do all this? I dunno, lists are fun. I have a spreadsheet of all this shit too if you don't believe me. Don't step to my data entry skillz.

Oh, and a new year means a whole new List of Shame. Check it out if you're curious what I'll be playing (and probably reviewing) the rest of this year.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Chants of Sennaar (Rundisc, 2023)

Been a whole month of Indie heroines, quite by coincidence: each of the five IGotW games this January were headlined by a woman... except for Chants of Sennaar, though the guy is deeply ensconced in robes the whole game so who even knows. Speaking of Chants of Sennaar (#402), it gets the gold prize this month due to my increasing love for puzzle-adventure games that heavily deal in logical abductive reasoning processes. Chants of Sennaar has you translating several alphabets through making comparisons and drawing conclusions from context—if all the NPCs on this floor greet you with the same first character, then it's probably "hello"—and makes great use of its level design to create environments to explore for hints as well as the usual mix of inventory items needed to progress. Real striking cel-shaded visuals too.

The runners-up are no slouches either, all earning my exceptionally rare "4 out of 5" rating for their near-excellence. Tchia (#401) is a New Caledonian-set open-world game that ribs quite a bit from Breath of the Wild (increasingly common scenario, I've noticed, though not without cause) that has its eponymous youngster retake her island home from a ravenous child-eating monster after it kidnaps her father, friends, and love interest. Tchia's an accessible and ambitious game with plenty going for it, not least of which a staggering number of cosmetic items to find, buy, or earn so you can stride across the tropics in style. Solar Ash (#403), similarly, has you traversing its trippy black hole world with rapid skating and platforming techniques as you take down various colossal foes in the hopes of reactivating a machine that will save your home world from an all-consuming "Ultravoid". Oozing with style and featuring the sort of balletic and precise action gameplay you'd expect from the makers of Hyper Light Drifter, it's a game that gave me some amount of frustration but still resulted in something memorably cool and engaging.

Return to Grace (#404) follows in its spacefaring and neon-drenched footsteps but rather than a twitch-action game is a much more sedate first-person adventure where you travel to the solar system's largest moon in the search for an advanced AI that once shepherded mankind to the stars but has long since laid dormant. A few investigation puzzles and some first-person traversal by way of balance beams and hopping across perilous gaps are the only real gameplay affectations: the rest is a narrative-focused stroll that raises questions about mankind's need for an omnipotent director and the sometimes overbearing role technology plays in all our lives. Again, a strong highly-stylistic aesthetic elevates some already decent narrative material. That last sentence is just as true for Planet of Lana (#405) as well, as you take after your abducted sister and the rest of your neighbors after a massive army of robots crash land on your planet and start tearing it apart. A cinematic 2D platformer in the style of Playdead's Limbo and Inside, albeit far more colorful with its hand-painted graphics, Lana and her new friend Mui travel across robot- and monster-infested forests, plains, deserts, and more to reach the abductors' mothership and find the missing townspeople: you might just need to stealth or puzzle your way past a few things first. An attractive and emotionally engaging game in part thanks to its keen grasp of narrative direction.

Mastering the Master System (Part One)

While I doubt I'll ever run out of Indie games in my backlog, and that's just accounting for the ones I have already and not the fifty more I'll add by the end of the year thus negating any ground I'll make up in the IGotW series, I am running out of those rule-breaking edge-cases I used to stash down here in their own separate little segments in these monthly rundowns. Instead, I'll embark on an even more ill-advised prospect: playing a bunch of Sega Master System games as efficiently as I am able. Sega's 8-bit system is roundly underappreciated pretty much everywhere outside of Europe and Brazil (where it thrived, somehow) but it saw some OK-to-decent games here and there. I'd put it in the same conversation as the HuCard TurboGrafx-16 or a WonderSwan, for sure. This is my way of giving lip service to the first video game console I ever personally owned (I got a SNES like two years later, don't worry) and also something of an apology to retro Sega fans for not continuing Mega Archive this year.

The goal here is to play Master System games fortunate enough to have been given RetroAchievements sets (feel free to add me if you're a fellow RetroReprobate) with an eye to completing as many of those achievements as possible. This might be a premature boast, however, as many SMS games have prohibitively high Retro Ratios (a score multiplier based on the set's difficulty and rarity; I've included them here for posterity's sake (which is my way of saying "so I can complain later that they were too hard")) and I imagine I won't get anywhere near a full sweep for most of them. Instead, I'm tentatively aiming for at least 64% (8 squared, but you knew that) as the average across all the games I'll cover on here. To make things harder and less pleasant, I'll be partially randomizing the selection process too. This ought to be fun, right? They have Sonic and Phantasy Star on that thing, I'm sure. And... like six Alex Kidd games. Oh no.

Time to start things off as legitimately as possible:

The Simpsons Trivia

• Type: Selected (Homebrew)
• Developer: StevePro Studios (available on itch.io!)
• Release Year: 2017

All right, fine, I just thought it'd be funny to begin with some zero-budget homebrew about The Simpsons minutiae rather than any of the usual suspects. Most of the questions refer to episodes that didn't even air while the Master System was active. No idea why this is on the RetroAchievement list but I wasn't about to let one of my few specialist subjects go to waste. As you might expect from the title, the game is a very no-frills selection of multiple choice questions regarding the nonpareil comedy TV show The Simpsons that are very loosely (arbitrarily in some cases) organized into the four difficulty categories of Easy, Medium, Hard, and Pro!. There's one achievement apiece for getting a perfect score on each combination of difficulty and quiz length (from 5, 10, 25, to 50 questions) plus an extra consolation prize for getting at least 80% or more on the 50-question mode.

There's typos aplenty and at least one factual error, possibly more, so I wouldn't say it was the most competently sourced trivia game but to its credit it did stump a superfan like me frequently enough. Questions like Homer's exact birth weight or the precise amount that Kirk van Houten pays his ex-wife Luann in alimony per month (I thought the gag was that Kirk was so pathetic that Luann paid him instead) felt incredibly esoteric since they're figures I'm not sure were ever mentioned on the show, but perhaps popped up as text in the background. (I may have cheated a few times by confirming my answers with Frinkiac but since it can only search by dialogue it has its limitations.)

Like any early console trivia game there are only so many questions stored in the memory so you can brute force it eventually even if you're not a superfan. I managed to get the full achievement set in just over an hour, so perhaps not the most taxing start to this little enterprise but I'm going to say it's still a strong first candidate if only because it reminded me how much I like The Simpsons (and that the bar for video games based on The Simpsons is distressingly low—the SMS also saw a port of Bart vs. the Space Mutants and you better believe I'm doing everything in my power to avoid playing it).

• Achievements: 20 (out of 20) / 100% / RR: x1.17

Sonic the Hedgehog

• Type: Selected
• Developer: Ancient
• Release Year: 1991

Partly to get something well-known and (moderately) well-regarded on the board and partly because there's a ton of Sonic games on here to get through, I figured we'd start on the ground floor of Sega's Most Famous Franchise (Funny Animals Division). If you're unfamiliar with the 8-bit Sonic games—which were released both here and on Game Gear—the deal was that Sega, rather than try to replicate the high-velocity level design of the original Mega Drive version in a compromised state, just created a whole new game from scratch through an intermediary developer that relied a little less on loop-de-loops and the like but still retained all the mechanics the SMS could handle. The result was that 8-bit Sonic felt more like a normal mascot platformer, for better or worse. Said intermediary developer happened to be Ancient, founded in 1990 by legendary Falcom composer Yuzo Koshiro, which later went on to develop MD Zeldersatz classic Beyond Oasis among several others. This Sonic game was their first project but despite the vintage they're still around: their Gotta Protectors was an XBLA joint and they're going to put out a throwback 16-bit shoot 'em up called Earthion sometime later this year.

The game itself is relatively short at eighteen stages, six of which are just boss fights. There's a few mechanics unique to this Sonic that invoked some vivid flashbacks, like how every act of every stage had exactly one 1-Up box somewhere in the level and it's a mini-collectathon of sorts to find them all, or that you can earn continues and lives in the "special" bonus levels (which are, as always, activated by finding at least 51 rings before hitting the end post) but not the Chaos Emeralds. Those are instead found in the core levels themselves, sometimes out the way or—in one case—in a pit of spikes that you need to rush over and get while you still have invincibility active from an earlier box power-up. The bosses are simple enough if not always easy to handle, owing to the fact you can never get safety rings before initiating them (but shields from earlier levels stay active), with some of the game's issues relating to hitbox detection and stuttering from having too many sprites on the screen (typical for 8-bit games made in the '90s, pushing the tech as hard as they can) being particularly apparent there.

I also remembered the Bridge level music, since it was theorized to be a riff that Michael Jackson wrote for Koshiro at some point which is why it then later appeared in a Janet Jackson song (Together Again; and here's the game VGM for comparison). Could just be coincidence also: MJ was a Sega fan and maybe she overheard it on a visit and accidentally brought the catchy melody into the track's composition. Stranger things have happened at Neverland Ranch, to put it mildly.

Back to the achievement set here: I'm going by number of achievements rather than points value because some of these are weighted incredibly harshly. For instance, this game has a single 100 point achievement (I rarely see them go that high) which is approximately a quarter of all the points the set is worth and it's a nightmare if you don't professionally speedrun this thing: all extra life boxes, all Emeralds, all eight special stages, and no deaths whatsoever. While I wasn't about to chase that, I did get half the achievements on a single run—including all the Emeralds, thanks to those residual memories—and went back for a couple of others on a second run. Probably won't be doing multiple full playthroughs from here on out, or even single full ones, but StH 8-bit is a pretty short and easy game if I'm being honest (barring a few boss fights catching you out).

• Achievements: 17 (of 23) / 73% / RR: x7.91

Space Harrier

• Type: Random
• Developer: Sega
• Release Year: 1986

Technically, I am already used to playing Space Harrier for achievements because it's sometimes a 100% requirement in Yakuza games but in those cases you're playing the best version, which is to say the arcade version. The Master System version, conversely, doesn't quite manage to keep up with all that super-scaler tech. You could say that tech is half the reason Sega created the Mega Drive. What you have instead is something that gets very choppy when rendering a bunch of sprites at once and, for some reason, they all have non-transparent frames around them so it looks like you're getting attacked by billboards.

If you're somehow not familiar with Space Harrier it is one of several Z-axis "super-scaler" shoot 'em ups that Sega put out in the mid-'80s like After Burner and Thunder Blade. It sees a "superhuman Earthling with psychic powers" take on a bunch of dragon monsters in what's frequently called the Fantasy Zone, but is presumably a different Fantasy Zone than the one that's in Fantasy Zone. I think Sega devs just liked saying "Fantasy Zone". It has a nice ring to it, I'll admit. The big danger isn't just the projectiles flying towards you but the stationary objects that you, instead, are flying towards at high velocity. When the scaling tech is smooth you can tell how close they are and can quickly get out of the way: in a case like this (or many other contemporary 8-bit versions) it scales so rapidly it's not quite as easy to register in time until it's suddenly grown three times bigger in a single frame. Each stage has a boss and almost all of them require you to keep shooting it while doing circles around the screen to avoid its homing shots.

The achievement set here is a nightmare. By default, this version of the game gives you two lives and no continues and there's no score-based extra life bonus unless it's so high I never met it. Since it's absurdly easy to hit something at the speeds this game goes at I would very rarely manage to get as far as Stage 3, and certainly no further. There are cheats you can input to give yourself some continues but I'm pretty sure they would void the achievements, which is counterintuitive for what we're doing here. If you notice the Retro Ratio below you can see that I wasn't the only one struggling with this game: it does in fact have the highest RR of all Master System games currently supported (in fact, second place is at a comparatively tame x31.98) so the random selector sure did choose to take things easy on me. Maybe it's for the best: I feel like I may have cheated a little dropping that Simpsons trivia game into the mix this early on. Well, with this disastrously low result we have something of a deficit to make up for in future entries—I can at least be gracious in acknowledging that it added a much needed smidge of drama to start things off with a bang.

• Achievements: 7 (of 28) / 25% / RR: x72.3 (whut)

I've appended a new spreadsheet to Mega Archive to track all these played Master System games for all my statistician nerd bros. Where's my standard deviants at? Seven-eighths of you know who you are.

Current Net Completion Rate: 66%

The Weeb Weeview

It's been a shounen supreme season between Solo Leveling and Sakamoto Days, but I've been picking around the other new offerings this season. As usual, we'll check in on that list I posted last time of shows I intended to check out and then get into some highlights. Might still add or remove shows on the watch cycle also, since this season feels kinda slim on the whole.

Before we start: One show I'm trying to catch up with is Apothecary Diaries, which just started its second season, and I'm about halfway through the first at present. Super watchable procedural crime show set in a fictional version of ancient China's Forbidden City—specifically the palace area reserved for the Emperor's concubines, the ladies-in-waiting and low-ranking servants that attend to them, and the eunuchs that guard them—that, despite all its levity, does not shy away from heavier themes of bullying, abuse, jealousy, murder, political infighting, and violence against women (often by women). Excellent characters too, especially the pragmatic MC Maomao with her intellectual curiosity and shrewdness along with a complete resistance to the pretty boy charms of her closest ally, the palace's manager and head investigator eunuch Jinshi. Compelling and entertaining stuff so far, hope to talk more about it once I'm all up to date with it.

• Solo Leveling Season 2: This show's just pure entertainment, if not necessarily a storytelling masterpiece. The animation's managed to get even better somehow and we're seeing Sung Jinwoo's characterization get ever less human and more, well, badass as he continues to carve up demons and monsters with his shadow army posse. We've seen some minor changes and departures from the source material already, mostly of the expediency kind, so I suspect we'll hurry onto Jeju Island as the big finale to this cour and then move into the... I'll leave it at "deeper lore stuff" next season as it heads gradually towards the manhwa's conclusion. Wouldn't be surprised if they wrap this up in four seasons, honestly, and given studio A-1 Pictures's lofty promises to keep improving animation quality as Jinwoo increases in levels it'd probably help them to have an end point on the horizon. Looking forward to a few upcoming battle scenes in particular for sure and checking out online reactions to same (yes, I've fallen down the YouTube Reactors hole. I do not recommend pursuing).
• Shangri-La Frontier Season 2 (second cour): Still great. No notes. OK, a few notes: People are sleeping on this thing and yet it's probably the best show for really getting into the power gamer mindset, almost to the point of being a sports anime, which is something most video game or MMO-based anime will tend to take a step back from in order to stay at least somewhat accessible to a non-gamer audience. The animation continues to be stellar too: the last arc ended with a fight against protag Sunraku's (NPC) nemesis of big-ass wolf Lycagon the Nightslayer and the absolute spectacle of his ally (and IRL stalker) Psyger-0's ultimate attack was something they probably blew at least six figures (or eight, I guess, since we're talking yen) to animate in full. The min-maxing stuff sometimes drifts into Yu-Gi-Oh "it's been five minutes since he started his attack and he's still explaining it" territory but it's all in good fun.
• Sakamoto Days: The show isn't quite the lavish (and possibly OTT) adaptation that Solo Leveling is getting but the core of the property—that despite having long retired to be a family man and has become at least fifty pounds heavier than in his heyday, the titular assassin is still as formidable as ever—is preserved through the show's balance of comedy and action, which it adapts with various animation styles. Kind of embodies that Mob Psycho sentiment (or Spy x Family) where, even if you're the peak of coolness in a world full of talented yet miserable people, you'll discover what matters most are the more down-to-earth joys like family and romance and good food and making happy memories. It's definitely a low-key entertaining show that hasn't gotten too serious yet despite being all about pro hitmen: the assassins so far have been jokers like a Domino's delivery guy who attacks with pizza cutters but I imagine the heavy hitters will arrive eventually to raise the stakes.
• I May Be a Guild Receptionist, but I'll Solo Any Boss to Clock Out On Time: What threw me for a moment was how the OP animation was way higher quality than the show's, like they brought in some ringers for just the little montage of clips from future episodes that tend to make up most OPs (which, in this case, won't actually appear because it's a different team of animators doing the show itself). The actual show isn't animated too badly either, mind; I'm getting spoiled on Solo Leveling's action scenes but they're solid enough here and, really, the comedy and cute (but endlessly frustrated, to the point of attempted homicide) heroine and her constantly thwarted attempts to escape compulsory overtime is the focus here. Japan really can't get enough of their black company parodies, huh.
• Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf!: Holy moley, they really made the female lead in this adorable. With a romance show like this I guess that mostly comes with the territory but they're going to come up with all sorts of excuses to squeeze Ms. Elf into a yukata or modern fashionable ensembles before too long. They already introduced the malt liquor-loving dragoness (who, of course, can become a human if she intends to enjoy the tiny portions served in 500ml bottles; in fact, she's a dead ringer for the shapeshifting dragon woman from Arifureta too) so that'll make for more ensemble wrinkles further down the line. Somehow only the second anime this season where someone from another world was bowled over by a Japanese toilet. Not the most sophisticated of shows but I'll take a Japanese tourism commercial aimed at fantasy races over most isekai.
• From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated!: Immediately delightful, as expected. That ED made me laugh out loud, as ridiculous as it was, so it seems the show creators have a keen idea of the type of comedy this property is all about. As I mentioned last month, the whole joke here isn't just that a middle-aged otaku father of an otaku daughter is reincarnated as an otome game villainess despite being mostly unfamiliar with that particular brand of fandom (or being a woman, for that matter) but that he's so unfailingly polite and empathetic that he keeps screwing up the moments where he's supposed to be mean and condescending to stay in-character. He still can't get any of the names straight either. It's the kind of show you just watch with a big smile on your face throughout.
• The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World: I really like that they're leaning into the iyashikei vibes of this (not dissimilar to Campfire Cooking in Another World) as said middle-aged guy shocks the quasi-medieval mercantile world with his crazy new invention of... the clothes peg (no, I get it, those things are basically magic). He's also busted out the heavy machinery with these latest episodes as he struggles to build his own pre-fab home just outside the city. Since I know the show's going to be going in some harem-adjacent directions soon enough—unlike most isekai MCs, he's not skittish about one-night stands—I'm bracing myself but for now I'm appreciating how low-key enjoyable the adaptation is so far. Last episode reminded me that there's another isekai protagonist in the same world who "invented" mayonnaise and defeated a dragon with it, so between that and fighting monsters with bulldozers it should give you some clue as to how seriously this show takes itself. Just wish the animation quality was a little better, that last episode was rough.

Next month: Everything else I'm watching, including a few I've been introduced to since the winter season started like Zenshu and Headhunted to Another World. More isekai. Can you even believe it? You can't, right?

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 401: Tchia
• Indie Game of the Week 402: Chants of Sennaar
• Indie Game of the Week 403: Solar Ash
• Indie Game of the Week 404: Return to Grace
• Indie Game of the Week 405: Planet of Lana
• Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Magical Delicacy
• Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
• Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Hauntii
• Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Senua's Saga: Hellblade II
• GOTY 2022 (Adjusted)
• List of Shame 2025: Twenty-Mortified