Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Air Master Burst]

Personally I prefer the original Dark Forces the best, but that's mostly because Jedi were always kinda boring to me.

[BIL]

Neon Inferno's announcement trailer has dropped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tXBjDu ... nkanahalli

Contra x Wild Guns gameplay in a cyberpunk dystopia? Sign me the fuck up.

Gonna be rad.

The quality of the SNES Star Wars games are inverted from the movies (ROTJ > SW > ESB).

Stage designs are decent for the most part. The main problem is that the games were fundamentally designed around HP attrition, which was implemented as a cop-out for careless enemy layouts and built-in movement latency.

This is much less of a factor in SROTJ, because you're given more tools (like Chewbacca's elegant i-frame Haggar spin), so that one might actually be possible to beat without taking damage.

Haha, I thought I remembered someone describing a similar, marginal progression in the trilogy. Was gonna go looking for the post.

Never played any of them myself, beyond a ~15min tryout of the first, ages back. I did get the impression it was archetypally EuroShumpy. Charismatic, but decidedly janky on fundamentals.

[EDIT] Here's a good run of SSW's Jedi difficulty by bubufubu, played about as cleanly as the game allows.

Also, I just did a comparison of the jumps in SSW and Contra Spirits. In Spirits, the jump is active on the third frame after the button press. In SSW, it's the sixteenth frame.
(The jumping sprite appears on the fifteenth frame, but it isn't higher than the standing sprite yet.)

God damn. Good posting, marked for index.

The natively-laggiest game I've personally encountered is the Jaleco Mega System version of Aicom's The Lord Of King / The Astyanax. MAME has it at like... I wanna say 9f before animation starts, for walking, attacking, jumping, and bombing alike. Even the Coin-In and Start buttons have quite a bit of lag. (number might be lower, or even higher... definitely up there though)

This was the game that taught me 1) I notice stuff around 5f, and 2) it's not always a gamekiller, depending on genre. STGs are always hardest-hit, with their reliance on pinpoint-precise 8way movement, typically paired to 1HKOs. Lordy's less comfy that it should be, but being an archetypally heavy-handling Rastanesque, it's still quite playable. I'd almost wonder if at least some of the lag was deliberate, but then there's that [start] and [coin] situation, dohoho.

[Sumez]

Personally I prefer the original Dark Forces the best, but that's mostly because Jedi were always kinda boring to me.

The best parts of Jedi Knight all happen before you get your lightsaber. The jedi stuff really only comes at the end (and in multiplayer), but I do think the finale is really cool. Has a bit of an indiana jones kinda vibe to it

[Ex_Mosquito]

Here is run I made recently of the MD Shadow Dancer on hardest with no dog/shuriken/magic. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be! The routing for melee no magic/dog is super precise, more than I thought it would be when I started learning it. Most of my runs ended from the slowdown and dropped inputs, it gets pretty bad at times when you CLEARLY pressed the button but the slowdown eats the input and you die, it’s pretty frustrating. I had to employ a double-tapping SF2 style input to make sure my attack/jump came out on the heavier sections. Apart from that, what a game. One of my fav MD games for sure.




https://youtu.be/CPWTeHMhp8A?si=XS8gPhxixpOGq3o2

[BIL]

God damn, now there is a masterclass in ninja sidescrolling form. Superlatively done, Mosquito-sama! I always knew that cart harboured some fathomless depths, befitting the credits' nod to AC Shinobi & Shadow Dancer's teams! Marked for index.

Love the picture quality btw... I'm forever partial to that auld magazine scan look, it's like a Mean Machines page in motion.

[Ex_Mosquito]

Heya, cheers Bil Yeah I thought it was neat that they thanked the AC developers of the other Shinobi games. I also like that they included an easy cheat for level select for practice purposes, a must for effective routing efficiency.

Hah yeah that’s why I like filming the screen for that exact reason, to get the effect of the old C&VG and Mean Machines screenshots.I get weird compression artefacts in the background using an old IPhone unfortunately. I used to drool over those screenshots as a kid. I still have a complete collection of Mean Machines for that reason

[BloodHawk]

Came across this game "Iron Meat" on xitter, looks pretty cool. Very Contra-like. Might be worth checking out. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1157740/Iron_Meat/

I think someone else mentioned it on here in another thread!

I just picked up Iron Meat on GOG and I have to admit it's pretty damn fun so far. I have only played enough to clear normal difficulty though, which with the number of lives they give you wasn't too hard. I don't consider myself that great at these games and I only had to retry a few stages twice. If you are a seasoned vet of run and guns I would start on hard difficulty.

I love the graphics and the soundtrack (I actually ended up buying the OST separately on Steam). The pacing is well done too. Looking forward to knocking it out on hard.

As for gripes, a couple minor nitpicks then one other thing of note. Occasionally the explosions masked enemy shots/projectiles, and on one of the stages towards the end it was a little difficult at first to determine foreground/background and what platforms you could walk on. Obviously though once you played through it once you figure out which is which.

The one big thing though that I didn't see in the game was an outright "Arcade Mode", which I think would benefit this game greatly. Currently, your number of lives resets on every level (the number is based on the difficulty selected I believe), so there really is no option to go through all the stages with one stock of lives. That's unfortunate, as if you were to clear all of the stages efficiently in order I think it wouldn't be more than an hour.

As it's set up now, the main draw is to clear stages to earn XP and unlock skins. Once hard difficulty is cleared I don't know if there is going to be a lot of incentive to keep playing unless you are an achievement hunter or want to unlock everything. We will see...

[Sima Tuna]

I just picked up Iron Meat on GOG and I have to admit it's pretty damn fun so far. I have only played enough to clear normal difficulty though, which with the number of lives they give you wasn't too hard. I don't consider myself that great at these games and I only had to retry a few stages twice. If you are a seasoned vet of run and guns I would start on hard difficulty.

I love the graphics and the soundtrack (I actually ended up buying the OST separately on Steam). The pacing is well done too. Looking forward to knocking it out on hard.

As for gripes, a couple minor nitpicks then one other thing of note. Occasionally the explosions masked enemy shots/projectiles, and on one of the stages towards the end it was a little difficult at first to determine foreground/background and what platforms you could walk on. Obviously though once you played through it once you figure out which is which.

The one big thing though that I didn't see in the game was an outright "Arcade Mode", which I think would benefit this game greatly. Currently, your number of lives resets on every level (the number is based on the difficulty selected I believe), so there really is no option to go through all the stages with one stock of lives. That's unfortunate, as if you were to clear all of the stages efficiently in order I think it wouldn't be more than an hour.

All of the highlighted sound like pretty big problems to me. I often encounter this kind of design from these nu-arcade "retro" games. Not that old games didn't have issues with visual clutter at times, but the lives resetting seems like a case of a dev not understanding arcade play. Sometimes I think there should be a requirement for an action game dev, that if you want to make an action game you need to first 1cc an action game. Any action game. But it needs to be a 1cc. Because the process of getting a 1cc teaches the player a lot about why arcade/retro games do specific things. Foreground/background visual noise is extremely common with modern nu-retro titles. Color blending is another issue I encounter all the time. Projectile colors that are too similar to background/foreground colors cause bullets to blend and become invisible. Sometimes background and foreground elements are too busy and cause visual overload, which is often combined with small projectiles for an eyestrain nightmare. Foreground objects covering projectiles-again, extremely common.

Needing to memo eyestrain out of the equation isn't good game design imo.

I don't know what the thought process is behind the regenerating lives system.

[Sumez]

the lives resetting seems like a case of a dev not understanding arcade play.

*OR* it's an attempt at making arcade play more palatable to a wider audience.
Huntdown does the same thing for its arcade mode. I didn't like that game much, but I appreciate its approach. It's a good way to both avoid the mainstream impression of your game being "too short", while also making arcade-style single-segment challenges viable.
Though I don't know how long the stages are in Iron Meat. If it's just 2-3 minute affairs it's of course too small to really segment.

Needing to memo eyestrain out of the equation isn't good game design imo.

Someone tell Shinobu Yagawa this

[Steven]

Foreground/background visual noise is extremely common with modern nu-retro titles. Color blending is another issue I encounter all the time. Projectile colors that are too similar to background/foreground colors cause bullets to blend and become invisible. Sometimes background and foreground elements are too busy and cause visual overload, which is often combined with small projectiles for an eyestrain nightmare. Foreground objects covering projectiles-again, extremely common.

Needing to memo eyestrain out of the equation isn't good game design imo.

You should tell all of this to the guys that made Cygni lol. Not that they listened when I told them.

[it290]

*OR* it's an attempt at making arcade play more palatable to a wider audience.
Huntdown does the same thing for its arcade mode. I didn't like that game much, but I appreciate its approach. It's a good way to both avoid the mainstream impression of your game being "too short", while also making arcade-style single-segment challenges viable.
Though I don't know how long the stages are in Iron Meat. If it's just 2-3 minute affairs it's of course too small to really segment.

Huntdown does do this for its arcade mode, but any lives lost will dock your score, meaning that if you are playing for score, you need to 1lc all stages within each gang, plus rack up significant combo bonuses, melee bonuses, dual-weapon bonuses etc in order to score well—the skill ceiling is really quite high. Each gang takes about 15-20min to play through, which is the length of a shortish arcade game and I feel like represents a decent challenge. I think the game would be kind of frustrating to play for score if you were expected to play the whole arcade mode in one sitting, since you'd be looking at over an hour to do so and a single mistake can tank your run and force you to reset. That may not be too different length-wise from doing a 2-ALL on a lot of shmups, but Huntdown is a lot more rigid in its scoring and I think having a score attack mode that lengthy would hurt the game.

[Sumez]

I think the game would be kind of frustrating to play for score if you were expected to play the whole arcade mode in one sitting, since you'd be looking at over an hour to do so and a single mistake can tank your run and force you to reset.

This is exactly why I'm advocating for this approach in modern arcade style games. I don't think it's bad to segment your game into multiple smaller arcade challenges.

[Air Master Burst]

I think the game would be kind of frustrating to play for score if you were expected to play the whole arcade mode in one sitting, since you'd be looking at over an hour to do so and a single mistake can tank your run and force you to reset.

This is exactly why I'm advocating for this approach in modern arcade style games. I don't think it's bad to segment your game into multiple smaller arcade challenges.

I love Huntdown, but even I can admit there's some serious padding going on there. It would be a better game at half the length. It's also too easy, although I haven't tried playing it for score.

"Arcade style" means a proper 1CC that doesn't take all fucking day. Preferably only using 2 buttons. Huntdown is dope as hell, but I'd never call it "arcade style." Huntdown plays like the watered-down but more user-friendly home port of an even better arcade game that I wish existed.

ETA: if Huntdown had enough ideas or variety to sustain so many large stages it would be different, but the enemy patterns and stage design are both pretty basic compared to something like a Contra or Metal Slug. I don't think there are even any random enemy spawns to keep players sharp. Perhaps most damning of all, there's only a single boss every few levels and no real sub-bosses to speak of. I enjoyed the shit out of my time with Huntdown but it's a bloated home console style release down to its very bones.

[velo]

the lives resetting seems like a case of a dev not understanding arcade play.

*OR* it's an attempt at making arcade play more palatable to a wider audience.

First time I encountered "Lives Reset" was Streets of Rage 4's story mode and it's something that should've happened some 40 years ago. It depends a little on how a particular game handles checkpoints, but for most games with infinite continues there's not much reason NOT to do it. You can get the same effect in NES Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania by suiciding when you reach a new level until you continue and get a new full stock of lives. Handing out a restock preemptively just takes out that extra step. No problem as long as there's a 1cc in there somewhere (either a separate mode or some other recognition of not dying). In SoR4's case it arguably makes a with-continues clear harder than the old games, because continues send you back to the stage start. It's a nice middle ground between 1cc and credit-feeding that encourages you to learn the game.

[it290]

ETA: if Huntdown had enough ideas or variety to sustain so many large stages it would be different, but the enemy patterns and stage design are both pretty basic compared to something like a Contra or Metal Slug. I don't think there are even any random enemy spawns to keep players sharp. Perhaps most damning of all, there's only a single boss every few levels and no real sub-bosses to speak of. I enjoyed the shit out of my time with Huntdown but it's a bloated home console style release down to its very bones.

Random mobs would be really detrimental for score attack since the entire thing is built around kill combos. I don't really get the boss comment either—there are 20 in total and you face one every 3 minutes or so. You're saying 'one every few levels,' but every single level has one, I think what you're defining as a level here is really a checkpoint of which there are 3 or so per level.

[Air Master Burst]

there are 20 in total and you face one every 3 minutes or so.

That's a pretty low density for my taste, but I guess every game can't be Contra.

You may have a point about random mobs and scoring, I haven't really played for score much. It would definitely make a non-scoring playthrough more fun, though!

[BloodHawk]

I spent some more time on Iron Meat and finally cleared all of the stages on hard, which was a significant ramp up in difficulty from normal. They designed hard difficulty pretty well in that they changed more than just lowering your number of lives, such as the number of enemies, their shot speed/frequency, and changing up the boss patterns. I am sure there is more but those are some of the things that I recall off the top of my head. I think it took me about 5 to 6 hours to learn and work through the stages this time (at least 2 hours was just on one stage, more on that later), where on Normal difficulty it only took a little over an hour.

Now that I was paying more attention to the time it took to clear the stages, I think I may have been too aggressive with my comment earlier about it taking less than an hour to clear all of them in order. There are 9 stages, and if you are methodical at all (you have to on Hard) each stage is around the 8-10 minute range, so it's somewhere in between an hour and fifteen to an hour and a half to clear in one sitting. That doesn't sound too long, but the stage designs are pretty intense with very little downtime, so I found myself getting mentally exhausted quicker than when I am usually learning a shmup. I am starting to see why they didn't include an Arcade Mode from the start. Speaking of that though, there is already a thread on the Steam Forums asking for and Arcade Mode and the developer said he liked the idea and would "pass that on to the publisher", so we will see if that leads to anything.

The biggest negative that stood out while playing on a difficulty that was pushing my limits was stage 5 (the sky stage). This stage can burn in hell. The stage takes place outside of a huge ship at low altitude where you are going on platforms below, beside, and on top of it. All with a burning city passing by quickly in the background. Across all other stages, the bullet visibility isn't that bad, and there are very few issues. But this particular stage's bullet visibility is straight up terrible in some areas. A lot of the enemies shots in this stage are bright yellowish/orange which sounds great and easy to see, especially with this game's dark color palette. However, the burning city in the scrolling background is filled with windows with flames coming out of them that not only are similar in color, their size and speed scrolling across the screen is similar to some of the enemy shots as well. My mental "peripheral vision radar" would never pick up those shots so I ended up dying to them a lot. This is weird because I don't remember it being that bad on Normal difficulty, so I think it may have something to do with a change in the number/position of the enemies, the speed of their shots, and me not being as preoccupied with other enemies.

Despite that stage, I still definitely enjoyed it and am glad that I picked it up though.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

[Power Blade's] controls are good, incredibly good in fact, almost to a fault.

Replayed it recently. To add to this, the game has context controls, something that's nearly unheard of in NES games. On standard flat terrain, holding down to crouch and then pressing forward will cause you to start running again. There's no crouch running and you can't throw boomerangs diagonally or straight down if there's no room to. However, if crouch at a ledge where there's obviously space to throw boomerangs, holding down+forward will not move you and instead lets you throw boomerangs. If you hold down+forward while running you will not automatically crouch when you hit a ledge or anything, so if your dpad isn't super precise diagonals won't interfere with movement. It's an alarmingly great set of controls.

Even if it's fairly easy, I love the game. The level design's great, the fact that it's often got some side passages or outright non-linearity to it's neat too (you can return to a level to collect a power suit you left behind if you need one later). The only thing Expert seems to change is making the time limit a 1/3 of what it was, so if you spent too long in a level security I guess hunts you down and murders you instantly? It's quite strict, the normal time limit is plenty to explore and beat the boss or simply leave the level if you want whereas Expert's time limit does not give you much spare time to dawdle and it's often best to leave the level which recharges the time limit. Explore the level to find the contact and the energy tank, run like hell to the beginning, and then run to the boss. I guess if you played Normal recently and remember the layout then it's not so strict? :p

[Blinge]

I've been playing through Kirby Super Star (SNES)

man, what a wild ride. I had no idea this game would be so fun.
I'd slept on that fat pink fuck because it looks so childish, but i'm having a blast.

Also you can tell how much of this stuff made it into the smash bros series, some of the movement effects, the moves, the way you and your clone can interact.
not to mention more obvious stuff like the music and abilities.

I didn't expect a search-action feast like the Great Cave Offensive to be lurking in there.
Playing Metaknight's revenge now and i'll be damned if this portrait doesn't look like a birru emote



and it if isn't one yet, well, my gift to you sir
Edit: the more I see it i'm sure birru does actually use this already haha

[BIL]

Wonderful game, was actually introduced to it by this thread! Many thanks, will put to scandalous use.

[Sumez]

Even if it's fairly easy, I love the game. The level design's great, the fact that it's often got some side passages or outright non-linearity to it's neat too

Play my hack :3

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5240/

[Blinge]

Wonderful game, was actually introduced to it by this thread! Many thanks, will put to scandalous use.

[Lander]

Hell yeah dude, Super Star is one of the best games on the SNES the series' crown jewel, I'd argue; the abilities wouldn't be that good and in-depth again until Super Star Ultra on DS. That one's worth a look for the extra episodes, though replaces some of the original's lovely sprite backgrounds with uninsiring CGI, so isn't totally definitive.

When you're done, TerminalMontage's Something About... lampoons are a hoot.

The Wii, 3DS, and Switch games are also good - not quite so all-in on character action until Star Allies, but with some great endgame escalations that exemplify the Kirby Lore Is Linear And Easy To Understand meme.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I tried Power Blade 2 a long time ago, never got through it, couldn't remember why, tried it again, guess it was because it's thoroughly awful. Levels are cramped as all hell, and it repeatedly rips off Mega Man thematically in ways that are incredibly clumsy. The constant unlocking doors, the earnable powers you can accidentally miss (which will actually render the level unwinnable if you miss them, particularly Wetsuit and Rocket), the lack of non-linearity in the levels, the fact that sequence breaking isn't a thing (level 4 is awful to do without the Wetsuit from level 2), the reliance on powers to get through levels you have to get item drops first to fuel, the entire last level where you have to walk in lava, have a million segments inspired by the worst part of Mega Man 3 (the forced Rush Jet part), have a boss rush followed by a final boss that's an utter joke to beat...

Power Blade 2's level design absolutely sucks. It's unfun.

Compared to the first Power Blade, whose levels were fun to explore, this is a cramped, convoluted mess. The positioning of spikes is also downright cruel at times, and as Sumez has said in the past, every single autoscroller segment is either a chore or awful. The bosses also feel rather terrible in general, like they demand the use of the level's suit to deal with them. Many levels also pretty much require the use of a suit for the piercing attack to hit through terrain and avoid enemies that would otherwise result in forced hits. Or block them with the Patriot Suit. Blegh.

Then there's Power Blazer, Power Blade 1's original incarnation which is heavily inspired by Mega Man in its chubby lil protagonist's aesthetic (who hides his face in terror when he ducks and can't jump nearly as well as Nova) as well as aspects of level and enemy design. But mechanically it sucks as it takes forever for your weapon not to have godawful range, and collision detection on basic things like grabbing ladders is a mess. Seriously, climbing every ladder up takes like 4 or 5 jumps to grab the stupid thing, grabbing ladders is broken in this version. The main weapon takes forever to power up, and if your boomerang becomes red from grabbing a P icon, it gains the ability to pierce, becoming quite potent... until you accidentally grab an N which DEPOWERS it back to a non piercing version. Why is this even here? The map screen is also silly, there's no indicator what levels you beat; trying to re-enter a level you beat simply plays a buzzing noise. It's not worth playing what amounts to a jank demo build of Power Blade except briefly as a curiosity.

Power Blade is by far the best out of the three. Unfortunate that one out of three attempts only ended up truly succeeding. The only complaint I can level at the first game is it's on the easy side, and I want more. Also, you can only throw boomerangs horizontally when holding a ladder, and picking Sector 1 as your first level makes things a lot tougher as the first enemies you meet are tricky with a short ranged boomerang. Fortunately you can do levels in any order; Sector 6 is my starting level I'd recommend. Sector 3 is arguably the hardest as all those jumps across 3 block wide pits are very tough and have minimal room for error.

Play my hack :3

Looking forward to it.

[Sumez]

I tried Power Blade 2 a long time ago, never got through it, couldn't remember why, tried it again, guess it was because it's thoroughly awful.

This is the harsh truth that people who shelled out for expensive cartridges don't want to admit.
I have the nice clamshell CIB Famicom version which, though a lot cheaper than the US release still isn't particularly cheap. It's a nice collection piece, but it's not a good game.

Probably some of the worst autoscrollers I've ever experienced in any video game. And this is from the people who made Shadow of the Ninja huh.

Play my hack :3

Looking forward to it.

I really do think it addresses most of your "this could have been better" points with the game, because I had the same. While the controls are smooth and fun, the overpowered nature of the boomerangs just makes the game way too easy.
Btw I heard someone report that the game freezes on the door to the final boss. If this happens to you, please drop a savestate here and I'll fix it.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Play my hack :3

Tried it, the quality of life improvements to things like ladder dropping and text speed increase is nice. Making e-tanks into extra lives also seems fine, e-tanks felt a bit like overkill. I'm not sold on all the gameplay changes though. The knockback addition feels fine, but the boss designs I'm not sure are tight enough to accommodate the more unforgiving damage I think (Sector 1 and Sector 2 bosses give you no real time to react to shots or jumping over them; they're incredibly hard unless you come in with 4 grenades, full health, maybe a power suit active and go nuts on them). The boomerang changes also don't sit well with me. If the Power Suit's too OP make it so getting hit while wearing it still causes 4 or 2 points of damage, but it's all too easy to take a hit from something like those orange things that spawn 5 at a time suddenly spawning on you and lose it. If you manage to get into a boss room with it you still rip bosses apart as the DPS is much higher and you have a period of invulnerability when you enter the boss room to go berserk on em.

The change I'm least fond of is being limited to one boomerang. There's a reason why stuff like Quick Boomerang in MM2 and Knight Crush in MM6 let you throw multiple or Shadow Blade in MM3 kept it short range and spammable on hit, because it's agonizing throwing one diagonally while jumping then having to wait for it to fly past your head and back to you. And it does this in Power Blade regardless of if it's diagonally up or down. If the boomerang fails to hit a wall, it'll fly around your head briefly before coming back. You also can no longer throw them at close range at all for more concentrated hits, because by the time the first one makes it back your meter's recharged. Try hitting those big mouths that fire blue balls out, it's awkward actually getting under one and hitting them whereas before you just get under them and toss away. It's actually better for several bosses to avoid the star items because you can deal multiple hits with a close range boomerang, but then it turns into an avoid the powerups game if you want your boomerang to stay close to home, which isn't fun to play! Limiting it to two boomerangs I think might be a better compromise here; I'd be onboard with "everything does 4 damage" more if missed shots weren't so punishing. Can't Nova hold a boomerang in each hand at least? :p

The issue with multiple boomerangs is a non-issue when Power Suit is active though as the power blade disappears before your meter has recharged a noteworthy amount, allowing for rapid close range attacks as necessary. But this requires dedicated no damage knowledge of the stages, making this hack more of hardcore arrange mode than a true rebalance I think. Being limited to one boomerang at a time makes it feel kinda like a good Power Blazer, so if that's what you were going for I guess that makes sense.

The problem is exemplified by the grey hopping enemies at the top of the screen when you enter Section 3. They take two hits from a pull power boomerang without the suit to kill. If you only have one and your shot goes past them, they'll hit you before the boomerang comes back. They need less health in this hack if you're sticking to one boomerang at a time. Normally, you can jump and throw multiple boomerangs out as you advance, which takes care of them safely as they'll inevitably get hit twice before they can fly into you at high speed.

[BIL]

Good posting, indexed!

Power Blazer is perhaps the only game with a player character I found too ugly to stand. WTF? Looks like Rokkuman in the thick of his fifth divorce. Spandex ain't gonna work, waistline's shot - gotta trade it in for tracky bottoms and a vest. Brother man was too depressed to even cut his hair. Boxart is fugly too, and not even on-model, so I left it alone for the time being.

OG Dorakyurahimesama Kinuyo Yamashita's thumping OST was by far the biggest draw. God Damn.

From what I understand it's the same in the NES incarnation though, so not exactly a USP. Actually, its burning vigour kinda bounces off Depression Man! ...you could make a really cool game where the poor prick gets closer to fighting trim with each boss taken down.

[Steven]

Jedi Power Battles is coming back... perhaps it's finally time to retire my PS1 copy, provided that the new PC version isn't broken. The PS1 version is already super glitchy, so I can only imagine what Aspyr will do to this thing after the disastrous launch of their unnecessary Battlefront 1 + 2 thing a while ago, which became one of the ten lowest rated games on Steam immediately upon launch. That must have been difficult, as there is quite a lot of garbage on Steam.

[Stevens]

Birru said - and search action ala Metroid.

Wonderful.

Nine Sols.

I have been waffling on this game for months now. Sekiro (just about 300 hours) combat, hand drawn art, with a cat?
Traditionally I have had issues getting into 2d souls - Salt and Sanctuary, Moon Scars, Death's Gambit, Ender Lillies, Cyber Shadow. All games I either finished once and never went back to or games I never even bothered finishing. It has put me off from trying other stuff like Blasphemous. I've also traditionally had issues with cutesy graphics.

I bought the game with the knowledge that it might fall to the same fate as the games I mentioned above. How wrong I was.

Honestly - five hours in and this might be my game of the year. Are you looking for more Sekiro that isn't Sekiro? This is it. Everything just feels like it is supposed to. The combat is so damn good.

There is also a dark/mature story hidden under the cutesy graphics.

[BIL]

Glad to see Konami beltscroller Metamorphic Force get its home debut on ACA last week, even if I've not had the time to play it. Been blasting its surpassingly good OST in the meantime. Same flyer artist as Surprise Attack, I believe?

Bloody RAWR

Birru said - and search action ala Metroid.

Wonderful.

Nine Sols.

Always happy to see the front page get some love.

Having been doing more watching than playing lately, I tuned into 空谷碑路, a JP player I enjoy who was streaming SNK 40th Anniversary. Out of commiseration, I suppose! SNK40th is decidedly scuffed. Bit of Psycho Soldier (YEAAA), bit of Search And Rescue (AWW YEAAA), bit of Ikari III (NAWWW).

Despite my best efforts, I bounce hard off the arcade version of Ikari III. All the high-level replays I've seen are nonstop jumpkicking, which jives with its stablemate Datsugoku. I dunno how viable it is to deviate from that, to enjoy the rest of the movesets. Both have undeniable charisma, though! While their FC versions are mightily improved, the same fiery inspiration as contemporary Guevara, the authentic 80s action brutality of the coinops lures me back occasionally.

Anyway, I think often of Herr Herzog's musing from his doc Grizzly Man, on the inexplicable magic of cinema verite. Sometimes the universe just hands you amazing scenes! And so the stream gifted one of scrolling action's definitive Exploding Barrel Scenes.

This clip was MADE FO ME (◎w◎;)