#switch
#switch
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Compiling six shooters from developer Psikyo, Shooting Stars Bravo follows an evolution in their philosophy of creating shooters. Shooting Stars Bravo is split between two series: the mythical Japanese themed Sengoku Aces, and the colorful fantasy of the Gunbird series. Each series follows a similar trajectory, with a no-frills first entry, peaking at the second, then going to wildly different places with the third. They each get to that point in unique ways, with wildly varying results.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
The act of playing Shinobi is a performance. Each attempt is practice for the choreography. Every shuriken in the right place, every jump predetermined and every kill premeditated. The instant you throw a shuriken you know the fate of you and your enemy. Either they’re dead in the next second or–as is more often the case–you are.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
“A game ultimately based on capitalism”. That’s the way SEGA producer Yosuke Okunari described Fantasy Zone, in an interview on its 3DS remaster. Given its roots as an arcade game, that’s not too far from the truth. Amidst its cute aesthetics is a game not scared to play rough, to rob you of both your quarters and the in game currency you use to keep yourself capable of fighting back. The SEGA AGES release gives you ways to adjust how rough you want to play, but it’s still that same arcade game, and it’s gonna make you work. Instead it finds an interesting new way to rebalance the game: creating generational wealth.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Everything in Straimium is a little off. What initially presented as a regular rogue-lite shooter became something more curious as I realized how obscured its details were. Each screen is a miniature ecosystem, with flickers of life within its biomechanical interiors. Enemies, constructed with sparse pixel counts, swarm you as you enter new areas, while bosses and NPCs dominate the space with elaborate detail. Powerups appear only as symbols, leaving me to figure out their effects only through experimentation. All of this is obscured with a haze of color and visual effects, blending foreground and background, and having me wonder which parts of its ecosystem are hostile to you.
But as I began to parse its visuals and understand its small eccentricities, I came to another realization: under all its obtuseness Straimium Immortaly is a deeply average game.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Old School Musical had me thinking a lot about what makes a rhythm game enjoyable to me. On the surface it seems like an easy slam dunk–take the aesthetics of old videogames, mash them together into a narrative and turn it into a musical you play along to. But the end result ends up a little incoherent. It draws on many sources for its homages, and does a reasonable job of replicating them, but it never finds a coherent direction, mixing aesthetics haphazardly, and scoring the scenes with tracker style music that brings to mind the European PC scene more than the console and arcade games it pays homage to.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
NG Dev seem set on single handedly changing my mind about the Euroshooter. Born of the European PC scene, the genre is notorious for tossing away all the arcade conventions that STG fanatics appreciate, instead rooting itself in the demoscene mentality and using the shooter as a medium to flex their technical prowess and deliver overwhelming sights and sounds.
Gunlord X inherits every one of these problems. Touchy, ambiguous, and honestly a bit sloppy at points, Gunlord X carries all the hallmarks of the European PC shooter, despite its origins as a posthumous Dreamcast and Neo Geo game. In spite of that, it remains enjoyable throughout, making a case for a more relaxed take on the genre.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
It must have been hour two before I met my demise the first time. An unavoidable bad ending where my character, Haruaki, was mauled with no choices you could make to escape it. Turns out death is the only way to make progress. By dying and returning to the beginning, Haruaki gains new knowledge he can use to avoid his fate next time. Several more hours in and I’ve only unlocked a few other choices, and the true game has only just begun. The game’s first “good” ending is a melancholy one, and has Haruaki searching for a new path that will give him more agency in influence the story’s events.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Sydney Hunter wastes no time diving into every adventurer trope, then immediately lampshading them. The titular Indiana Jones imitator drops right into an ancient temple, meets the native people, and sets out to prevent an ancient curse from stopping the progress of time itself. Sydney doesn’t understand the local language, so the first stop is to pick up an ancient artifact to let you understand them. Sort of. Turns out they understand you, and the whole ancient artifact thing is just a bit of fun they were having with you. They even point out that “Mayan” is incorrect, as the people themselves are called the Maya.
